Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England [1 ed.] 9781317099390, 9781472462244, 2015015399, 9781315594316

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Introduction Maternal Devices and Desires in Early Modern Romance
Part I Managing Maternity
1 While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s“goodly storie” of Chrysogone
2 Deferred Motherhood in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene
3 “She made her courtiers learned”: Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth
4 “As like Hermione as is her picture”: The Shadow of Incest in The Winter’s Tale
5 Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfigurations
6 “It hath happened all as I would have had it”: Maternal Desires in Shakespearean Romance
Part II Voicing Maternity
7 Forcible Love: Performing Maternity in Renaissance Romance
8 “Thus did he make her breeding his only business and employment”: Absent Mothers and Male Mentors in Margaret Cavendish’s Romances
9 The Maternal Rejection of Romance
Afterword Untellable Tales
Index

Citation preview

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska, The University of Mary Washington, USA and Abby Zanger The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. For more than a decade now, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World has served as a forum for presenting fresh ideas and original approaches to the field. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope, this Ashgate series strives to reach beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. We welcome proposals for both single-author volumes and edited collections which expand and develop this continually evolving field of study. Titles in the series include: Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World Sisters, Brothers and Others Edited by Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood Edited by Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts Edited by Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford Education and Women in the Early Modern Hispanic World Elizabeth Teresa Howe Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World Edited by Anne J. Cruz and Rosilie Hernández Gender and Song in Early Modern England Edited by Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Edited by Karen Bamford Mount Allison University, Canada Naomi J. Miller Smith College, USA

First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Karen Bamford, Naomi J. Miller and the contributors 2015 Karen Bamford and Naomi J. Miller have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Maternity and romance narratives in early modern England / edited by Karen Bamford and Naomi J. Miller. pages cm. – (Women and gender in the early modern world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1–4724–6224–4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Romances, English—History and criticism. 3. Motherhood in literature. I. Bamford, Karen, editor. II. Miller, Naomi J., 1960– editor. PR428.R65M38 2015 820.9’003–dc23 2015015399 ISBN 9781472462244 (hbk) ISBN 9781315594316 (ebk)

For our mothers, experts in maternal practice, and lovers of romance narratives: Iris June Bamford (1926–) and Nobuko Ishii (1929–2006)

This page has been left blank intentionally

Contents List of Figures   Acknowledgments   Notes on Contributors   Introduction: Maternal Devices and Desires in Early Modern Romance   Karen Bamford

ix xi xiii 1

Part I  Managing Maternity 1

While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s “goodly storie” of Chrysogone Susan C. Staub

13

2

Deferred Motherhood in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene   Anne-Marie Strohman

33

3

“She made her courtiers learned”: Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth   Richard Wood

49



“As like Hermione as is her picture”: The Shadow of Incest in The Winter’s Tale   Diane Purkiss

75

5

Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfigurations   Maria Del Sapio Garbero

6

“It hath happened all as I would have had it”: Maternal Desires in Shakespearean Romance   Karen Bamford

4



93

119

Part II  Voicing Maternity 7

Forcible Love: Performing Maternity in Renaissance Romance   137 Naomi J. Miller

viii

8

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England



“Thus did he make her breeding his only business and employment”: Absent Mothers and Male Mentors in Margaret Cavendish’s Romances   Marianne Micros

9

The Maternal Rejection of Romance   Julie A. Eckerle

155 175

Afterword:Untellable Tales   Clare R. Kinney

193

Index  

205

List of Figures 1.1

Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, a description of the body of man. Engraved title page. Wellcome Library, London.  

18

1.2

Illustration of a woman in utero: “Dissection to expose child in the womb,” The midwives book. Or the whole art of midwifery discovered. Directing childbearing women how to behave themselves. Wellcome Library, London.  

19

5.1

Giulio Romano, Portrait of Margherita Paleologo, c.1531. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.  

98

5.2

Giulio Romano, Madonna di Monteluce. Courtesy of Musei Vaticani, Rome.  

101

This page has been left blank intentionally

Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank the Wellcome Library, London, for permission to reprint the images in Chapter 1; the Musei Vaticani and the Royal Collection Trust for permission to reprint the illustrations in Chapter 5; and the Internet Shakespeare Editions for the cover image. We are most grateful to Erika Gaffney, our commissioning editor, for her support and encouragement of this volume from its inception; the editorial and production staff at Ashgate, especially Celia Barlow, for all their help; and Christopher Hicklin for his expert work on the Index. We are also indebted to Clare R. Kinney and Anne-Marie Strohman for editorial assistance above and beyond the call of duty. Karen Bamford would like to thank Mount Allison University for its support of her research, especially the opportunity to attend a writer’s retreat in November 2014. She is grateful to her co-editor, Naomi J. Miller, for generously sharing her expertise in both early modern maternity and romance narratives, and for her unfailing critical judgment. Naomi Miller would like to thank her colleagues at Smith College, who have supported and encouraged her continuing work on maternal matters in early modern England. She extends particular appreciation to her fellow participants, both faculty and students, in the 2012–13 Smith College Kahn Institute, Mothers and Others: Reproduction, Representation, and the Body Politic, which offered space, time, and opportunity for many exchanges on constructions of maternity. Her deepest thanks go to her co-editor, Karen Bamford, whose perceptive editorial eye enabled all the chapters in the volume to achieve additional depth as well as clarity, and whose patient diligence and persistence brought the process of compiling the volume from conception through its final labor pains to birth. As the chapters in the volume attest, maternity, although laborious, can yet be rewarding.

Karen Bamford, Mount Allison University Naomi J. Miller, Smith College

This page has been left blank intentionally

Notes on Contributors Karen Bamford is Professor of English at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada, and author of Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage (2000). With Alexander Leggatt, she co-edited Approaches to Teaching English Renaissance Drama (2002); with Mary Ellen Lamb, Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts (2008); and with Ric Knowles, Shakespeare’s Comedies of Love: Essays in Honour of Alexander Leggatt (2008). Julie A. Eckerle is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota Morris and the author of Romancing the Self: A Study of Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing (2013). With Michelle M. Dowd, she co-edited Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (2007). Maria Del Sapio Garbero is Professor of English Literature at Roma Tre University, Italy. She is the author of Il bene ritrovato. Le figlie di Shakespeare dal King Lear ai romances (2005), and the editor of Identity, Otherness and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome (2009) and La traduzione di Amleto nella cultura europea (2002). She is also co-editor of Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome (2010). Clare R. Kinney is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She has published widely on literature of the English Renaissance, including articles on Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney, and Mary Wroth; she has also crossed periods to publish on medieval as well as early modern romance. She is the author of Strategies of Poetic Narrative: Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Eliot (1992), and editor of Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700, Vol. 4, Mary Wroth (2009). Marianne Micros has recently retired from her position as Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Ontario. She has published articles on several Renaissance authors, including Spenser, Wroth, Milton, and Cavendish, as well as two books of poetry. Naomi J. Miller is Professor of English and the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College, and author of Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (1997), and editor of Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults (2002). With Gary Waller she has co-edited Reading Mary Wroth (1991), and with Naomi Yavneh, Maternal Measures: Caregiving in the Early Modern Period (2000), Sibling Relations in

xiv

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

the Early Modern Period (2006), and Gender and Constructions of Childhood in the Early Modern World (2011). Diane Purkiss is Fellow and Professor of English at Keble College, Oxford. She has written several books on aspects of Renaissance culture, including The Witch in History: Early Modern and Late Twentieth-Century Representations (1996), Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories (2000), Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War (2005), and The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006). Susan C. Staub is Professor of English at Appalachian State University, North Carolina. She is the author of Nature’s Cruel Stepdames: Representations of Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England (2005) and editor of The Literary Mother: Essays on Representations of Maternity and Child Care (2007). She has also published several articles on early modern motherhood, and is currently at work on a book on gender and land in Shakespeare. Anne-Marie Strohman is an independent scholar based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her doctorate in Renaissance Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Richard Wood is Associate Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of articles on Sir Philip Sidney in the Sidney Journal and Early Modern Literary Studies, and an essay on the Earl of Essex in Essex: The Cultural Impact of an Elizabethan Courtier (2013), edited by Lisa Hopkins and Annaliese Connolly. He has also published essays on Mary Sidney and Shakespeare.

Introduction

Maternal Devices and Desires in Early Modern Romance Karen Bamford

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. Shakespeare, All’s Well that Ends Well 4.3.69–70

It is now more than 30 years since the feminist “rewriting” of the Renaissance1 provoked renewed scholarly interest in early modern motherhood. We have learned much about maternity, both as it was lived and as it was represented in early modern England: about women’s experience of childbirth and lactation; about mothers as authors and educators, latter-day saints and murderers; about maternal authority and its limits.2 The picture that emerges, not surprisingly, is full of contradictions: maternity was a site of both power and oppression for early modern women. Most females became mothers and a cycle of pregnancy, birth and lactation defined their adult lives (King 2); since nursing provided a natural curb on fertility, “the choice for wives during their teeming years in pre-industrial England was an infant in the womb or at the breast” (McLaren 46). Childbirth, inevitably painful and dangerous, was a source of profound anxiety as well as potential happiness.3 According to the dominant Christian culture, it involved “shame, sorrow and chastisement; yet under Christ the woman’s labor was part of a covenant of sanctification, mercy and eternal conflict” (Cressy 17). As mothers, women enjoyed limited power over their children’s nurture, education, and at an elite level, marriage arrangements (Ezell 20–32). However, while some women,  See, for example, the landmark anthologies of feminist scholarship: The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (1980), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (1985), and Rewriting the Renaissance: Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (1986). 2  See especially the essays gathered in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England, Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England. For childbirth and lactation, see also Cressy 15–94, and McLaren; for infanticide and its representations, see also Dolan, Dangerous Familiars 121–70; Martin 155–201; Staub, “Early Modern Medea”; and Walker. 3  See King 4–5. Analyzing the treatment of maternity in the diaries of Stuart women, Kouffman observes that “fear of bereavement, and resignation towards it, are the hallmarks of the maternal spiritual diary” (171). 1

2

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

like Dorothy Leigh, author of The Mother’s Blessing (1616), used their position as mothers to justify transgressing “the usual way of women” (Leigh 4), maternal authority was inherently problematic in a strongly patriarchal society.4 Indeed, Frances Dolan finds a “fascination with, and hostility towards, maternal power in early modern English culture,” a fascination expressed in “attempts to understand and control, even repudiate it” (“Marian Devotion” 283). Thus, as Christy Luckyj has argued, the figure of the good Mother, who perpetuates patriarchal hierarchies, competed in early modern England with the figure of the demonic Mother, who represents the threat of disorder posed by maternal power (114). Such binary stereotypes of maternity had a wide currency in poetry, fiction, and drama as well as in the religious pamphlets Luckyj analyses. In The Faerie Queene the pious Charissa, giving suck to her “happie brood” of babies while she instructs the Knight in righteousness (Spenser I.x.32.2), may serve as a convenient emblem of the good Mother; while the horrific monster Error, with a thousand young “sucking upon her poisonous dugs” (Spenser 1.i.15.6), powerfully embodies the demonic Mother—a monster whom the Knight must slay in his initiating act of heroism.5 This volume seeks to participate in the scholarly investigation of maternity in early modern England by focusing on romance narratives in various forms: not motherhood as it was actually lived, but as it was figured in the world of romance by authors ranging from Edmund Spenser to Margaret Cavendish. Our focus is prompted in part by the traditional association between romance and women, both as readers of fiction and as tellers of “old wives’ tales,”6 as well as the tendency of romance plots, with their emphasis on the family and its reproduction, to make “a large place for women” (Brewer, “Nature of Romance” 24). Indeed, in a richly suggestive essay on gender and genre in Shakespeare’s tragicomedies, Helen Wilcox has proposed that the tragicomedy itself may be characterized as a maternal form; the play might usefully be seen as the ultimate maternal body. … motherhood in early modern England consisted of many paradoxes, relating to chastity and fertility, absence and presence, life-giving and life-threatening qualities. Thus it is entirely apt that maternity should epitomize the paradoxical complexity of the tragi-comic mix of these

4  For maternal authority in the period and the anxiety it provoked, see Dolan, “Marian Devotion;” Dunworth, especially 14–15, and ch. 6 and 7; Rose; Schwarz; Moncrief and McPherson 9, and the essays in Performing Maternity. 5  For a resistant reading of Spenser on the maternal body, however, see Krier’s discussion of The Faerie Queene IV (202–33). For monstrous mothers in “the long eighteenth century” see Francus, especially 25–45. 6  For the link between women and romance see Lamb, Gender and Authorship; Lamb and Wayne 9–10; Newcomb; Hackett, especially 1–19; and Eckerle, “Urania’s Example.” For women and oral traditions see Fox 173–97; Warner, especially 12–65; Lamb, “Introduction”; and the essays gathered in Oral Traditions and Gender.

Introduction

3

plays and exemplify a genre which brings both death and new life into its cycle of action. (137)

Although Wilcox refers here to specifically Shakespearean tragicomedy (both the problem plays and the late plays), her observation may be applied to romance more widely: for, as Northrop Frye argues, symbolic rebirth is the goal of the romance plot (Anatomy of Criticism 187–92). The maternal body thus seems an apt metaphor for a mode as inclusive as romance, a mode that, according to Beer, “offers comedy” while “it includes suffering”; that “celebrates—by the processes of its art as much as by the individual stories—fecundity … and survival” (29). Spenser’s Charissa, who figures as a spiritual mother for the reborn Knight at the crisis of his journey,7 may thus also serve as an emblem for this profoundly maternal aspect of romance. Yet if maternity is deeply encoded in the structure of romance, it does not mean that mothers themselves flourish in its plots. As Wilcox acknowledges, motherhood is “deeply ambivalent” in the plays she discusses (134), and Helen Hackett concurs: “Not only is maternity [in these plays] associated with death as much as life; but the physical reality of mothers is often excluded, by death or distance, while the associations of maternity with intense emotions and potent forces are appropriated to patriarchal figures” (155). Although romance as a genre is notoriously difficult to define,8 several critics agree that wish-fulfilment is at its heart: as Gillian Beer observes succinctly, “romance remakes the world in the image of desire” (79).9 Romance narratives—plots in which the outcomes we desire triumph over the outcomes we fear—provide insight into the anxieties and fantasies of the culture in which they circulate. This volume thus invites readers to consider what early modern romance makes of maternity: in these worlds remade “in the image of desire,” what do mothers look like? How do they figure? Are they, as Brewer’s analysis of romance plots would suggest (“Nature of Romance” 38), primarily limited to the role of antagonist or obstacle—the wicked stepmother, the engulfing seductress—which the protagonist (male or female) must circumvent to achieve a happy ending? Are they more than breeders of future heroes (Hackett 68–9)? Is motherhood compatible with heroism? The remarkable appearance of women as authors of romances (Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish) in early modern England also prompts us to ask if mothers matter differently in their plots than in those written by men (Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney). And if, in Beer’s words, romance “remakes the world in the image of desire,” we may also ask, whose 7  In a note to The Faerie Queene I.x.29, Hamilton observes that “the reborn Knight is the child to whom Charissa has [just] given birth.” 8  Saunders acknowledges that “the genre of romance is impossible adequately to define” (1–2), but nevertheless provides a useful and concise discussion of it in her Introduction to A Companion to Romance. 9  Brewer (Symbolic Stories 58) and Frye (Natural Perspective 115) make similar observations.

4

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

desire? Are the desires that shape the happy endings of romance narratives ever those of mothers, or are they, according to the rule of a patriarchal tradition reaching back to Odysseus, always those of fathers? A Mingled Yarn: Maternal Purification, Containment, and Transformation The essays in this volume follow the “mingled yarn” of maternity through the fabric of Renaissance romance: the first group addresses works by male authors, sharing a concern with the management of maternity through strategies of purification and containment; the second group attends primarily to women’s voices, analyzing transformations of maternity across a range of genres and occasions. Managing Maternity We begin with two essays on The Faerie Queene which both bear witness to the “fear of, fascination with, and hostility toward maternal power” that Dolan discerns as features of early modern English culture (“Marian Devotion” 283). In “While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s ‘goodly storie’ of Chrysogone,” Susan C. Staub focuses on a key episode in Book 3, canto 6—the “straunge accident” (5) by which the virgin Chrysogone conceives and gives birth to twins while wandering alone in a wild forest. Staub shows how Spenser participates in a culture which viewed both land and the maternal body as resources to be husbanded and managed by their male owners. A type of Virgin Mary, Chrysogone conceives the babies miraculously, impregnated by the sun’s beams as she sleeps. While this passive, asexual conception clearly works to allay anxieties about a female sexuality commonly seen as “aggressive, grotesque, and resistant to control” (23), the specter of maternal power remains disturbing. As Staub argues, Spenser imposes figurative control on the female body in the Garden of Adonis which immediately follows the story of Chrysogone: double-walled and gated, the garden “provides a consoling space where the land as maternal body can be manipulated” (28). Spenser’s anatomical and botanical metaphors reinforce patriarchal control over “a mysterious female space” and thus manage maternal power (29). The issue of anxiety about maternal agency is also at the heart of Anne-Marie Strohman’s essay: in her discussion of “Deferred Motherhood in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” Strohman considers Britomart as a transitional figure moving from maidenhood to maternity but never arriving. Why, Strohman asks, does Spenser continually delay Britomart’s maternity? Generic conventions and narrative exigencies, she contends, are insufficient to explain this deferral: rather, Strohman argues, it reflects larger cultural anxieties about maternal power. The autonomy Britomart enjoys in her disguise as a knight is, she suggests, more acceptable to Spenser (and his readers) than the female-identified power of maternity; the mere “idea of Britomart as a mother, the possibility of her being a mother, is less threatening than the presence of her mothering body within the text” (44). Although

Introduction

5

the Garden of Adonis celebrates fecundity, it is paradoxically a motherless place, where the maternal body is not required for generation. “Spenser’s discomfort with the maternal body and cultural anxiety about maternal authority,” Strohman concludes, make it impossible for Britomart’s destiny to be fulfilled in the narrative present of the poem: forever caged in transition, “Britomart is all potential” (46). Richard Wood’s essay—“ ‘She made her courtiers learned’: Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame, Elizabeth”—analyzes the way Sidney refashioned the popular trope of “cruel step-dame” to confirm his position as a sophisticated counselor to his monarch. Through the figure of Helen of Corinth, introduced into the revised Arcadia, Sidney portrays Elizabeth as an ideal surrogate mother to her people, one who makes “her courtiers learned.” Employing his own education deftly to acknowledge Elizabeth’s, Sidney engages with his monarch “in an exercise of mutual fashioning” (64), both in the Arcadia and in his “Letter to Queen Elizabeth.” By reshaping the conventional figure of the surrogate mother into the image of the ideal learned prince, Wood argues, Sidney was able indirectly and safely to advise Elizabeth. While early feminist analyses of The Winter’s Tale celebrated the regenerative power of Hermione’s maternity,10 later assessments have emphasized the purgative effect of her ordeal. Thus for Mary Beth Rose (1991) the resurrected Hermione, wrinkled with age, embodies “Hamlet’s (and Leontes’s) dream of a mother with ‘tame’ and ‘humble’ blood” (307), and for Janet Adelman (1992) the recovery of the idealized mother in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale is achieved at the cost of her “chastening purgation” (193).11 We offer two essays that approach the issues of maternity and the purification of the family plot in this play from different directions, between them offering a fascinating diptych of fresh perspectives on The Winter’s Tale. Diane Purkiss’s “‘As like Hermione as is her picture’: The Shadow of Incest in The Winter’s Tale” links the play to the popular realm of ballad and folktales, exploring the stories of infanticide and incest that operate as shadow plots in The Winter’s Tale. In Shakespeare’s primary source, Greene’s Pandosto, the king conceives an incestuous passion for the girl he fails to recognize as his daughter; Perdita’s survival threatens a similar outcome in Shakespeare’s play, but Hermione’s extraordinary resurrection ensures that Leontes is safely reattached to an appropriate partner. As Purkiss argues, the play’s evasion of incest, like its evasion of infanticide, is a sign, the sign of absolution for Leontes’s grave sins. Nevertheless, Purkiss finds ambiguity in the play’s miraculous ending: Hermione’s silence in response to Leontes leaves her significance in doubt. The play, she concludes, “seems to exist to excise, burn, dash and otherwise excoriate the other and more terrible possibilities that it cannot help suggesting” (89).

10

 See, for example, analyses by Neely (1978) and Berggren (1980).  For a contrasting views, see Krier ch. 8, and Olchowy’s discussion of the play as “religious romance” in relation to the Corpus Christi tradition and the doctrine of “incarnational” motherhood (147). 11

6

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

By contrast, in “Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfigurations,” Maria Del Sapio Garbero directs our attention to the way the maternal bodies in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale trouble the male gaze. Developing Adelman’s observation that “safety depends on the excision of the sexual female body,” she traces a pattern of purgative metamorphosis in which childbirth is followed by the maternal “death,” concealment, and finally resuscitation through the “art” of a physician (Cerimon in Pericles) or artist (Giulio Romano in The Winter’s Tale). Thaisa and Hermione regain the integrity and sanctity of virginity through their ordeals so that, purged of their sexuality, they can perform their assigned role “in the final purification of the family plot” (107). Del Sapio Garbero links this pattern to traditional narratives and images of the Dormitio Virginis, and in particular to the work of the “rare Italian master” (Winter’s Tale 5.2.87–8), Giulio Romano. In the final essay in this group, “‘It hath happened all as I would have had it’: Maternal Desires in Shakespearean Romance,” I consider the relationship between wish fulfilment, age and gender in the bard’s comic plots. While the desires of fathers dominate in Pericles, Cymbeline and The Tempest, it is a mother’s desire that is pre-eminently gratified in the conclusion of The Winter’s Tale, where Hermione returns for her daughter, not for her husband. Such maternal wish fulfilment, anomalous in the overwhelmingly patriarchal romance tradition, is, I argue, anticipated by Shakespeare in All’s Well that Ends Well, in which the Countess gains, loses and finally recovers a daughter. Both plays culminate in the gratification of a mother’s longing for her daughter; both may be appropriately called “maternal” romances. Voicing Maternity Our second group of essays begins with Naomi J. Miller’s “Forcible Love: Performing Maternity in Renaissance Romance,” an analysis of maternal figures in plays by Elizabeth Cary and Mary Wroth. As Miller demonstrates, Cary and Wroth challenge maternal stereotypes perpetuated in male-authored romances. While Sidney’s Arcadia and Shakespeare’s late plays typically represent mothers—whether evil, like Gynecia, Cecropia, and Cymbeline’s Queen, or idealized, like Hermione—in terms of their actual or potential threat to patriarchal authority, Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam offers a spectrum of maternity: the play’s three mothers “find speaking positions for themselves apart from masculine conceptions of their roles” (144). Similarly Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory features two mothers—one a goddess, and one a widow—who “speak with complex and forcible voices” (150): remarkably, no fathers share the stage in this romance, and the happy ending of the play involves a mother-daughter reunion, unconstrained by patriarchal control. Miller concludes that “love’s victory” represents the victory of maternal authority, a triumph that effectively enlarges the scope of romance traditions. In “‘Thus did he make her breeding his only business and employment’: Absent Mothers and Male Mentors in Margaret Cavendish’s Romances,” Marianne Micros

Introduction

7

analyses a radical transformation of the mother figure: in the absence of biological mothers, males become—in Sara Ruddick’s phrase— “agents of maternal practices” (97). Childless herself, Margaret Cavendish in her writing displays “a negative attitude to mothers and mothering” and “a disgust of the maternal body” (160). Like many folktale heroines, the protagonists of Cavendish’s “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity” are orphans. Lacking biological parents to protect them, both nevertheless find male guardians, mentors who nurture and educate them, while “any women who nurture or give advice are harmful, greedy, or inadequate” (164). In “The Contract,” Deletia’s uncle gives her an unconventional (male) education that empowers her to plead successfully in court for the husband of her choice. In “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity,” Miseria (Affectionata/Travellia), disguised as a boy, is adopted by an “emotional, nurturing, and devoted” sea captain (169). Educated as a male, the protagonist escapes the confines of her sex and triumphs in the public world, becoming a Viceregent. As Micros argues, in these romances Cavendish challenges the gendering of specific parental roles, showing that “maternity is not what should define women, and that male mentorship” can benefit women (155). Finally we turn from the way motherhood was figured in romance, to the way romance was perceived by mothers: as Julie A. Eckerle shows, when early modern women transitioned from maidenhood to motherhood, they typically turned against the romance genre. In “The Maternal Rejection of Romance,” Eckerle considers maternal attitudes to romance narratives in a wide range of sources. Analyzing men’s representations of exemplary female reading (the spiritually edifying), women’s own life-writing, and the rare instances of maternal storytellers in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Eckerle demonstrates the ambivalence of early modern women to romance: while they may have read and enjoyed it, when they assumed the roles of mothers educating their children, they accepted their culture’s pervasive condemnation of the genre. In early modern England, Eckerle concludes, “romance and motherhood were, for all intents and purposes, inimical endeavors; and becoming a mother in this period thus entailed … an uncompromising rejection of romance” (186). Collectively the essays in this volume invite reflection on the uses to which Renaissance culture put maternal stereotypes (the virgin mother, the cruel stepdame), as well as the powerful fears and desires that mothers evoke, assuage and sometimes express in the fantasy world of romance. Certainly the yarn is mingled: mothers suffer, die, return from the dead, purified and purifying (Hermione and Thaisa); sometimes their power is contained (Chrisogone and Britomart); sometimes, as in Cavendish’s romances, it is assumed by nurturing men; and sometimes, as in Wroth’s play, the desires of the mother coincide with those of the protagonist, and in such maternal romances the happy ending is her own. Maternity as a topos in Renaissance romance, like romance as a genre, is an apparently inexhaustible field of inquiry. Shakespeare’s Hermione—evocative, powerful, at once familiar and strange—may stand as an image of both topos and

8

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

genre. We offer these essays in the hope that readers will be provoked to look again at motherhood in Renaissance romance and find it strange. Bibliography Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Beer, Gillian. The Romance. London: Methuen, 1970. Print. Berggren, Paula S. “The Woman’s Part: Female Sexuality as Power in Shakespeare’s Plays.” The Woman’s Part 17–34. Brewer, Derek. “The Nature of Romance.” Poetica 9 (1978): 9–48. Print. ———. Symbolic Stories: Traditional Narratives of the Family Drama in English Literature. Cambridge: Brewer, 1980. Print. A Companion to Romance from Classical to Contemporary. Ed. Corinne Saunders. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Print. Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Dolan, Frances E. Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550–1700. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Print. ———. “Marian Devotion and Maternal Authority in Seventeenth-Century England.” Maternal Measures 282–92. Dunworth, Felicity. Mothers and Meaning on the Early Modern Stage. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2010. Print. Eckerle, Julie A. “Urania’s Example: The Female Storyteller in Early Modern Romance.” Oral Traditions and Gender 25–39. Ezell, Margaret J. M. The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987. Print. Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print. Francus, Marilyn. Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Print. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Print. ———. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Harcourt, 1965. Print. Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print. King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Print. Kouffman, Avra. “Maternity and Child Loss in Stuart Women’s Diaries.” Performing Maternity 171–82.

Introduction

9

Krier, Theresa M. Birth Passages: Maternity and Nostalgia, Antiquity to Shakespeare. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. Print. Lamb, Mary Ellen. Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. Print. ———. Introduction. Oral Traditions and Gender xv–xxv. ——— and Valerie Wayne. “Introduction: Into the Forest.” Staging Early Modern Romance. Ed. Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne. New York: Routledge, 2009. 1–20. Print. Leigh, Dorothy. The Mother’s Blessing. Ed. Betty S. Travitsky. Burlington: Ashgate, 2001. Print. The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works. Series 1: Printed Writings 1560–1640, Part 2. Volume 8: Mothers’ Advice Books. Luckyj, Christina. “Disciplining the Mother in Seventeenth-Century English Puritanism.” Performing Maternity 101–14. Martin, Randall. Women, Murder and Equity in Early Modern England. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period. Ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh. Burlington: Ashgate, 2000. Print. McLaren, Dorothy. “Marital Fertility and Lactation 1570–1720.” Women in English Society 1500–1800. Ed. Mary Prior. London: Methuen, 1985. 22–46. Print. Moncrief, Kathryn M. and Kathryn R. McPherson. “Embodied and Enacted: Performances of Maternity in Early Modern England.” Performing Maternity 1–13. Neely, Carol Thomas “Women and Issue in The Winter’s Tale.” Philological Quarterly 57 (1978): 181–94. Print. Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. “Gendering Prose Romance in Renaissance England.” Companion to Romance 121–39. ———. “Prose Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing. Ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 272–86. Print. Olchowy, Gloria. “The Issue of the Corpus Christi Cycles, or ‘Religious Romance’ in The Winter’s Tale.” Staging Early Modern Romance. Ed. Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne. New York: Routledge, 2009. 145–62. Print. Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts. Ed. Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. Print. Performing Maternity in Early Modern England. Ed. Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson. Burlington: Ashgate, 2007. Print. Rewriting the Reniassance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. Print. Rose, Mary Beth. “Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance.” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 291–314. Print.

10

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Ruddick, Sara. “Maternal Thinking.” Maternal Theory: Essential Readings. Ed. Andrea O’Reilly. Toronto: Demeter Press, 2007. 96–113. Print. Saunders, Corinne. Introduction. Companion to Romance 1–9. Schwarz, Kathryn. “Mother Love: Clichés and Amazons in Early Modern England.” Maternal Measures 293–305. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 1997. Print. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. London: Longman, 1977. Print. Staub, Susan C. “Early Modern Medea: Representations of Child Murder in the Street Literature of Seventeenth-Century London.” Maternal Measures 333–47. Walker, Garthine. “‘Demons in female form’: Representations of Women and Gender in Murder Pamphlets of the late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries.” Writing and the English Renaissance. Ed. William Zander and Suzanne Trill. London: Longman, 1996. 123–39. Print. Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairytales and Their Tellers. London: Chatto, 1994. Print. Wilcox, Helen. “Gender and Genre in Shakespeare’s Tragicomedies.” Reclamations of Shakespeare. Ed. A. J. Hoenselaars. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 129–38. Print. Studies in Literature 15. The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neeley. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980. Print. Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren. Ed. Valerie Fildes. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. Women in English Society 1500–1800. Ed. Mary Prior. London: Methuen, 1985. Print.

Part I Managing Maternity

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 1

While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s “goodly storie” of Chrysogone Susan C. Staub In Religio Medici, Sir Thomas Browne longs for a “world without this triviall and vulgar way of coition.” Wishing that “we might procreate like trees, without conjunction,” he characterizes sex as “the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life”; there is nothing, he almost shudders, “that will more deject [a man’s] coold imagination, when hee shall consider what an odde and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed” (67). Browne is not alone among early modern writers in his queasiness about sex, and by extension, about human reproduction.1 Labeling her “the Rib and crooked piece of man” (67), Browne’s “notion of woman is … limited to her procreative function,” according to Daniela Havenstein (qtd. in Swann 146). Thus in his desire for generation “without conjunction,” he seeks to bypass the fleshly maternal body. In The Faerie Queene, on the other hand, Spenser is preoccupied with reproduction, and he fills his epic with images of impregnation, pregnancy, and birth.2 Yet he, like Browne, sometimes seems uneasy—if not repulsed—by the process, as several scholars have argued.3 In fact, his central myth of generation, that “wide wombe of the world” (III.vi.36.6) that is the Garden of Adonis, seems to anticipate Browne as he envisions a place where human reproduction to some extent replicates the life cycle of plants. But in a poem chiefly concerned with dynastic succession and the complications brought about by Elizabeth’s rejection of the maternal role, Spenser can hardly avoid such issues. As such, maternity, whether menacing or nurturing, almost haunts the poem, the work becoming, in the words of David Lee Miller, “a symbolic womb for the reproduction of an imperial ideology” (224).

1  I realize that this passage is controversial and that not all scholars read it as serious. But throughout Religio Medici, Browne is fascinated with nonsexual reproduction, particularly with the germination of seeds and spontaneous generation. As Swann argues, he idealizes “botanical generation” (139), seeing it as the form of reproduction that “most nearly replicates the process by which God’s Idea of human beings first became flesh” (145). 2  Many of these images are connected with the way Spenser is developing a theory of imagination and masculine poetic power, but they are beyond the scope of this chapter. I am interested more particularly in the way he depicts biological reproduction. On poetic creation and theories of reproduction, see Spiller. 3  Craig argues that the poem “as a whole suggests a fastidious distaste for procreation” (16). See also Miller.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

14

Book 3 is particularly focused on maternity, especially on gestation and parturition; in many ways this section of the epic might take as its title the subtitle of the first English gynecological manual, Thomas Raynalde’s The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book (1545).4 Although it also has its share of cloying, perverse mothers, Spenser includes apparently affirming depictions of maternity in this book as well—from Venus’s search for the lost Cupid, to the impregnation of Chrysogone and birth of Belphoebe and Amoret, to Britomart, the mother of the Briton race, and finally to the Garden of Adonis, the poem’s mythic description of fertility and regeneration, a space that has been sometimes read as a privileged site of feminine reproductive power (Quilligan 191–4). Maternity is the matrix of this book, so to speak; “All flows from, to, and through the mother,” to borrow the words of Jonathan Goldberg (5). We can argue that the same held true for all early modern women since their identity and biological function were conflated in the term “mother,” a name for both the woman who produces and/or nurtures the child and the uterus. Yet despite the book’s interest in the wonders of the fecund female body, it, like other writings from the period, presents a vexed characterization of reproduction. This chapter considers how cultural ideas about maternity in discourse from two emerging disciplines, medicine and to a lesser extent, garden theory, provide insight into Spenser’s treatment of the maternal body in one episode: the birth of Belphoebe and Amoret. In looking at this scene, I link these two types of knowledge because I am struck with how often gynecological texts borrow from botany and vice versa. The maternal body is a garden, just as England and Elizabeth are. Looking at gynecological and gardening manuals from the period, I hope to contextualize this scene, showing how it works together with other epistemologies to assure masculine control and authority over the maternal body. These two types of writings stem at least in part from the same impulse: to understand and tame an unruly feminine wilderness. In Spenser’s “goodly storie,” Chrysogone bears the twins by “straunge accident,” (III.vi.5.1–2) when on a sunny summer’s day, after bathing her breasts “with roses red, and violets blew, / And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew”—“the boyling heat t’allay” (III.vi.6.8–9, 7)—she lies down upon the grass and falls asleep. As she sleeps, sunbeams play upon her body, caressing her skin, evaporating the water droplets from her bath, and finally piercing “her wombe, where they embayd / With so sweet sence and secret power vnspide, / That in her pregnant flesh they shortly fructified” (III.vi.7.5–9). The interaction of heat  The book was first published in 1540 and was translated from the Latin De Partu Hominis by Richard Jonas. The subtitle did not appear until the 1545 edition of the book, attributed on the title page to “Thomas Raynalde, Physician.” It is in this edition that the book becomes more than just a translation of Eucharus Rösslin’s Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives. Actually, The Birth of Mankind was a translation of a translation, as Hobby shows in her interesting introduction to her recent edition of the work. Hobby uses the 1560 text because this was the most stable edition for the next 100 years (xviii—xix). I use Hobby’s edition throughout. 4

While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s “goodly storie” of Chrysogone

15

and moisture depicted in the scene coincides with the theory of bodily humors still prevalent in the period which held that men were hot and dry (and therefore stronger and livelier, the shaping presence analogous to the sun) and women were cold and moist (weaker and more sluggish, the material to be vivified in the soil).5 At once mystical and sensual, the event is portrayed in broadly positive terms: “celestiall grace,” “wondrously,” “sweet” and “sweetest,” “sacred,” “miraculous.” In this seemingly idyllic scene, conception is figured on the landscape, Chrysogone the land that will sprout beautiful flowers after taking in the energy and nutrients provided by the sun.6 She becomes what Jonathan Sawday calls a “hortus anatomicus,” that is, “a natural landscape endowed with fertile corporeality” (219). But there is something disquieting in Spenser’s depiction, both in what it includes and what it omits. The figuration of woman as landscape is traditional, and horticultural analogies abound in explanations of reproduction. Galen likens the womb to the earth, as does Paracelsus (Breur 328). Eucharius Rösslin’s influential and much translated midwifery book, The Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives, cultivates the analogy, likening the woman’s body to a garden both in his title and his prologue: “The name of this book is / The pregnant woman’s garden of Roses / In which you dig and pluck the herbs / Which have body, life / and soul on earth” (Arons 36). (The change from a generalized earth to a garden is important, and I shall return to the idea of the maternal body as garden later in this chapter.) Early modern medical manuals everywhere pick up on this analogy: “The earth unto all seeds is as a mother and nurse, containing, clipping and embracing them in her womb, feeding and fostering them, as the mother doth the child in her belly or matrix,” says Raynalde (186). Raynalde further compares conception to the sowing of corn and other seeds, explaining, As ye may evidently see in the sowing of corn and all other manner of seed; so that there be, in all manner of generation, three principal parts concurrent to the same: the sower, the seed sown, and the receptacle or place receiving and containing the seed. If there be fault in any of these, then shall there never be due generation, unto such time as the fault be removed or amended. (186)

Helkiah Crooke likewise calls the womb “a fertil field” in his Mikrokosmographia (1615), explaining that human seeds are like the seeds of plants, their potential not activated “vnlesse they be sown and as it were buried in the fruitfull Field or Garden of Nature, the wombe of the woman” (271; Crooke’s text provides an  Paster develops this theory much more fully in The Body Embarrassed.  Harvey has also noted that conception in Book 3 is “displaced” on the landscape: “Spenser translates human conception into landscape, first in his placement of Chrysogone in the forest and his depiction of her body as a natural topography, and most tellingly, in his displacement of human sexuality and generation into the Garden of Adonis” (“Pleasure’s Oblivion” 59–60). 5 6

16

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

especially provocative gloss on The Faerie Queene because Mikrokosmographia is so informed by Spenser’s poem. As Elizabeth D. Harvey convincingly illustrates, Crooke “‘incorporates’ The Faerie Queene in quotation and allusion throughout his vernacular anatomical treatise” [“Pleasure’s Oblivion” 55]).7 So ingrained is the trope that the title page to Mikrokosmographia portrays the female figure on the earth seemingly planted among the sprigs of grass that sprout around her; the male figure, flayed as if for scientific analysis, floats abstractly in the air. This analogy is even more vividly portrayed in gynecological manuals such as The Compleat Midwifes Practice (1656) and Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book (1671) that illustrate the fetus as a flower blossoming from the mother’s uterus. Such agricultural metaphors liken the female body to land tilled and tended by men: “when popular medical books made women’s reproductive bodies into agrarian fields, they were playing on at least two social facts. First, labouring men plowed these fields, making women the passive ground upon which men acted. Second, men of somewhat higher status owned that land, making women’s reproductive bodies equivalent to property owned by men” (Fissell 203). Even Sharp, who frequently challenges commonplace tropes, uses the analogy: “Man in the act of procreation is the agent and tiller and sower of the ground, woman is the patient or ground to be tilled” (32). In other places, where writers seek to explain why conception does not occur, the womb becomes a kind of hostile country—Scythia or Germany, for example, where the weather is too cold or wet for the seed to fructify (Raynalde 189). The masculine control of the fertile female land gets troped in other ways as well; at the beginning of his description of the organs of generation, Crooke compares the womb to a camp or a battlefield, images of land that more directly suggest conquest. In yet another configuration, Raynalde likens the development of the fetus in the womb to the transmutation of metals in the earth (45). Other botanical analogies were used as well. Menstruation is “the flowers,” and in Crooke, the hymen is “the flower of virginity” and “the cup of a little rose halfe blowne when the bearded leaues are taken away” (235). Garden manuals reverse the trope, constructing the land as a female body fertilized and controlled by the shaping power of the male gardener. The gardener is the “Maister of the earth, turning sterrillitie and barraineness into fruitfulness and increase,” in the words of Gervase Markham (A3r). The idea that the man holds procreative power over the maternalized earth recurs in this literature. Hugh Plat in Floraes Paradise (1608), for example, praises the “true and philosophicall Husbandman” as “hee that knoweth how to lay his fallows truly; wherby they may become pregnant from the heauens, and draw abundantly that celestiall and generatiue vertue into the Matrix of the Earth” (8–9). Similarly, Markham speaks of the “almost infinite” power of the gardener, who through his “industry” and brainpower begets and brings forth heretofore unimagined “new garments and imbroadery for the earth” (110). Such discourse minimizes maternal power, 7  See Harvey, “Pleasure’s Oblivion” and “Sensational Bodies,” for a full discussion of Crooke’s debt to Spenser.

While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s “goodly storie” of Chrysogone

17

coinciding as it does with embryological theory that limited the woman’s contribution in gestation to gross matter. The comparison suggests that both the land and the maternal body are resources to be husbanded and managed by their male owners. (Figures 1.1 and 1.2 below) Despite its connection to traditional rhetoric, the Chrysogone scene is infinitely rich and has been variously interpreted: as a harmonious melding of Christian and classical elements, with Chrysogone’s pregnancy classified as a “happy predicament” (Quitslund 198); as a “natural miracle” with Chrysogone as a “Great Mother” (Goldberg 16–17); as “the embodiment of the Platonic idea” of virtue which is “the true genealogy of Christian virginity and marriage” (Roche 108); and as an allegory of the “basic forces essential to generation in human beings” (Broaddus 61), to provide a few examples on the positive side. More negatively, scholars read it as “politely periphras[ing] solar rape” (Berger 99); as a “fantas[y] of origin that struggle[s] unsuccessfully to minimize or even altogether to exclude the contamination of maternity” (Craig 16); and as part of a broader indictment of the womb as “a place where life emerges out of rot” (Miller 250). While these disparate interpretations might at first seem incompatible, in fact, they reflect the double view of the maternal body evident not just in Spenser’s poem but in popular conceptions of maternity from the period. As Spenser continues his story, Chrysogone awakens, frightened to see “her belly so vpblone” (III.vi.9.8). Here, as if Titan’s rape of her were not enough, Chrysogone seems unable to comprehend what has happened to her (“Yet wist she nought thereof,” 7), and she flees into the wilderness in “shame and foule disgrace” (III.vi.10.1). Despite the fact that Chrysogone seems hardly present in this episode—she sleeps through it, after all—and Spenser here grants her very little subjectivity, curiously, she feels shame and the need to hide. Although the poet assures the reader of her guiltlessness (with a kind of ambiguity similar to that with which Shakespeare denies Lucrece’s guilt), he nonetheless describes the babies as an “unwieldy burden” (10.4) and depicts her escaping what he characterizes as sadness and oppression by falling asleep: “There a sad cloud of sleepe her ouerkest, / And seized euery sence with sorrow sore opprest” (III. vi.10.8–9).8 And just as she conceives unaware, so she gives birth unaware, her predicament assuaged by the assurance that “She bore without paine, that she conceiu’d / Without pleasure” (III.vi.27.2–3). Finally, after all she has endured, Diana and Venus appear and kidnap her babies while she sleeps, though Spenser presents the taking of the twins as a kind of protective sisterly empathy: “At last they both agreed, her seeming grieu’d / Out of her heauie swowne not to awake, / But from her louing side the tender babes to take” (III.vi.27.7–9) . At this point, she experiences narrative death, disappearing from the poem after the birth of the  Although the OED defines “burden” as “That which is borne in the wombe, a child,” its first definition is “load” and it notes that the word is used figuratively to connote sin and shame. Interestingly for my discussion, it also defines “burden” as “What is borne by the soil; produce, crop.” 8

18

Figure 1.1

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, a description of the body of man. Engraved title page. Wellcome Library, London.

While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s “goodly storie” of Chrysogone

Figure 1.2

Illustration of a woman in utero: “Dissection to expose child in the womb,” The midwives book. Or the whole art of midwifery discovered. Directing childbearing women how to behave themselves. Wellcome Library, London.

19

20

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

twins, her grief at the loss of her children anticipated but never shown since she never awakens from her sleep. The function of this scene, as Thomas Roche has shown, is to distinguish the birth of Belphoebe, Spenser’s type for Elizabeth, as singular and miraculous, even divine. In characterizing Belphoebe’s birth as “of the wombe of the Morning dew” (III.vi.3.1), Spenser echoes The Book of Common Prayer’s translation of Psalm 110:3, a verse that was usually held to refer to the Incarnation of Christ (105–6). With this analogue to the Incarnation, Chrysogone is thus connected with Mary, who, “alone of all her sex”9 was uncontaminated by the taint of sexuality. Herself the product of an immaculate conception, Mary is completely removed from lust and sin. As Valerie Wayne has explained, “The burden of Eve is lifted from women by Mary’s motherhood, and ‘the seed of woman’ … acquires a redemptive role … the birth of Christ becomes the single, miraculous instance when the woman’s seed is the only human contribution to procreation” (60). Likewise, Chrysogone’s mother, whose name Amphisa means “double nature,” seems to have conceived asexually. By linking Belphoebe’s conception to Elizabeth’s, Spenser effectively answers Catholic polemic that Elizabeth was illegitimate, the “child of an incestuous, monstrous, carnal union” (Hackett 141–2). Spenser evokes the Mariological body in other ways as well. Artistic representations from the period frequently symbolized the Annunciation as sunbeams shining on Mary.10 While the sun in gynecological and garden manuals is the masculine life-giving principle of heat, in the Nativity stories, the sun is God, as it frequently is in Spenser. And Mary, too, was conventionally figured as a landscape, a hortus conclusus or enclosed garden, suggesting her sealed, intact body; more rarely she is figured as “uncultivated earth” (Ellington 68). And like Chrysogone, traditionally Mary was held to feel neither pleasure in conception nor pain when giving birth, both symptoms of a postlapsarian sexuality.11 Pain in childbirth served as punishment for Eve’s sin, a sin in which all women as daughters of Eve were implicated, with Mary the lone exception. That Chrysogone sleeps provides an additional link to the Virgin Mary, whose death was often interpreted as a kind of sleep. In her chapter in this volume Maria Del Sapio Garbero compares the apparent deaths and resurrections of the mothers 9  I borrow here the title of Warner’s important history of the Virgin Mary, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1983). Virginal motherhood occurs in other mythologies as well, most notably in the goddesses Astarte and Ashkeroth, but those goddesses are associated with promiscuity (Carroll 7). 10  See, for example, Annunciation paintings by Fra Angelico, Crivelli, Botticelli, and Van Eyck, to name just a few. Fissell notes that in one of the York cycle plays about the Annunciation, the stage direction calls for three beams of light to be shined on Mary’s body (22). 11  Although traditionally Mary felt no pleasure in the conception, some versions of the Annunciation do portray her delight. Fissell notes the example of an East Anglian play in which Mary exclaims, “I cannot telle what joy, what blysse, Now I fele in my body!” (22).

While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s “goodly storie” of Chrysogone

21

in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale to various narratives of the death of Mary, positing that these deaths create a liminal space and time that allows Shakespeare to transform and purge the maternal body, in a sense revirgining it. Connecting these episodes to narratives depicting the assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven after her death, she explains that Mary’s death was likewise portrayed as a miraculous transitional time, as a kind of sleep. The interpretation of Mary’s death as sleep confirms the unique purity and incorruptibility of her body; it was not subject to the decay—and hence death—of other human bodies (108–11). In Spenser’s description of Chrysogone’s impregnation, sleep provides a similar liminal space that serves at once to sanctify her physical body at the same time that it desexualizes it. Yet recent work by Mary Fissell suggests that even the Virgin Mary’s maternal body was a contested site in Protestant England. Mary’s importance had diminished with the Reformation, and her role in Christ’s conception was debated in ways similar to the way the mother’s role in gestation was debated. One of the key postReformation controversies concerned how much substance Christ took from Mary: those who sought to minimize or negate her importance depicted the Incarnation as light passing through glass, the light merely piercing the glass but taking nothing from it. Another analogy likened Mary to an empty saffron bag; Christ as the saffron might color the bag that contained him, but the bag, Mary, contributes nothing to him (Fissell 25, 35–7). Such theories are consistent with Aristotle’s belief that the womb was a passive receptacle, merely an incubator for male seed, a belief that still held some currency at the time of the poem.12 Thus while the connection of Chrysogone with Mary may serve to make the birth of Belphoebe and Amoret miraculous, it does very little to valorize her maternal body. (Lauren Silberman even reads it as parodic [43].) Similarly, Spenser’s elision of the birth in this scene and his almost total erasure of her agency constitutes Chrysogone, too, as little more than a container. Paradoxically, the almost complete omission of the material effects of conception and pregnancy constructs Chrysogone as a disembodied womb.13 Seemingly, Chrysogone’s only reason to exist in the text is to give birth, her situation reminiscent of the female cadaver on the famous title page of Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, where all attention seems to be

12  Aristotle’s version was not the only explanation of conception during the period and most of the writers I cite here seem to be more influenced by Galen and Hippocrates, who held that both male and female seed were necessary for conception, even in some writers’ view that the woman contributed more to the fetus than the man. 13  Actually, in this respect, Chrysogone differs from Mary, whose material body was often an important part of worship of her. Not only was her womb celebrated as a blessed site, but her breasts and milk were granted mystical significance. She was often depicted nursing the Christ child, and women sought her help with their own pregnancies. Although the Reformation limited Mary’s role in the female life cycle, her body was an important part of earlier worship. For a developed account of this aspect of Mary, see Fissell.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

22

focused on the anatomized womb but where the authority of the male anatomist is really the subject. Chrysogone’s asexual impregnation would seem to evade some of the commonplace anxieties about the maternal body, but does it? The removal of pain continues the miracle of the birth and distances Chrysogone from the sin of Eve, but the lack of pleasure seems more complex when read alongside medical manuals. While the insistence that she feels no sexual pleasure serves to chasten her, to assure that she is innocently pure and that her body remains intact and inviolate, I wonder if it might not serve another purpose. In most medical accounts, women could not conceive unless they had reached orgasm, a theory that had shocking repercussions when rape was redefined in the period as a crime against the woman rather than a property crime. Although the shift towards “female self-determination” was by no means absolute, after the passage of a 1597 statute, “assent” became a consideration in the legal definition of rape, a change that Marion Wynne-Davies argues “tacitly accepts that the crime committed is against the corporeal person of the woman” (130–31). Once consent became a consideration in rape trials, a woman who became pregnant after she was raped was usually considered complicit in the act: “for a woman cannot conceive with child, except she do consent,” according to Michael Dalton (248).14 Some commentators challenged the idea that true rape could not result in pregnancy, hedging the issue altogether by arguing “that the weakness of female flesh enabled a woman to refuse rational consent to the act of sex, but still find it pleasurable enough to conceive” (Gowing 91). Thus female desire often seems a doubleedged sword in the period. Most accounts of sex allow—even insist upon— female pleasure, which seems to function as consolation for the pain the woman suffers in childbirth. As Raynalde explains, “For ye shall hear some women, in time of their travail, moved through great pain and intolerable anguish, forswear and vow themselves, never to company with a man again. Yet after the pangs be passed, within a short while, for entire love to their husbands, and singular natural delight between man and woman, they forget the sorrow passed and that that is to come” (51). Pleasure in Raynalde’s estimation is crucial to the continuance of the human race. Mutual sexual pleasure is also a fundamental component of a healthy 14

 Walker explains, “[C]onception was legally accepted as proof of consent, according to the widely held theory that generation occurred from the mixing in the womb of a male and a female seed emitted at orgasm. In the context of illicit or forced sex, pregnancy imprinted guilt upon women’s bodies” (60). Then, as now, attitudes towards rape were complex. Despite the passage of statutes in 1555 and 1597 that seemed to consider rape as a violation against the woman rather than as a kind of theft, old attitudes retained considerable currency, and practice often differed from law. In 1616 John Bullokar defined rape as “a violent ravishing of a woman against her will,” yet as late as 1632, T.E. still records the older sense, noting that there are “two kindes of Rape”: “when a woman is enforced violently to sustaine the furie of brutish concupiscence” and more simply, the removal of the woman from the household (Catty 13). Curiously, conviction rates became less likely once consent became an issue, according to Nazife Bashar (Catty 14).

While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s “goodly storie” of Chrysogone

23

marriage: a husband and wife should “mutually delight each in other,” “yielding that due benevolence one to another which is warranted and sanctified by God’s word” (Gouge 158). But even when such enjoyment is deemed significant, it is often represented in ambivalent terms: Crooke describes it as “a sting or rage of pleasure” (199) and a “straunge and violent kinde of delight” (238, emphasis mine), word choices that hardly seem ringing endorsements. Crooke further characterizes sexual pleasure as a corrective to the distastefulness and obscenity of sex, and perhaps more damningly, he suggests that it seduces men away from their innately “divine natures” (199). Even more disconcerting for an assessment of Chrysogone are those places where lack of pleasure gets interpreted as whorishness; citing Hippocrates, Crooke argues that when the woman is “impure,” possessing a “grosse body,” she may “conceyue without pleasure, or any sence of titillation at all” (295). Thus Spenser’s decision to put Chrysogone to sleep may help to evade these ambiguities—though not completely because of the way the uterus itself was often constructed in the period. Some medical explanations of female coital pleasure tend to dissociate such feelings from the woman herself, projecting emotion and agency onto the womb, which comes to possess a remarkable autonomy in these accounts. As such, we get descriptions of conception that portray the womb “skipping as if it were for joy,” meeting “her Husband’s Sperm, graciously and freely receiv[ing] the same.” An amazingly receptive little hostess, the feminized womb welcomes the sperm into her “innermost Cavity or Closet, and withal bedew[s] and sprinkle[s] it with her own sperm … powered forth in that pang of Pleasure, that so by the commixture of both, Conception may arise” (Riverius, qtd. in Fletcher 57). (The word “bedew” to describe female arousal recurs in several of these manuals, perhaps complicating Spenser’s “Morning dew” even further.) Although Crooke refutes the notion that the womb is an animal—“we must vnderstand,” he cautions, “that the womb is not like a gadding creature that moueth out of one place into another”—he nonetheless describes the ligatures that hold it in the body as “bridles,” and likens its movement to that of a storm tossed ship (224). He depicts the womb eagerly running “downward to meete” the semen in conception, contacting and embracing “the seede strictly on euery side” (251). But just as it might welcome the seed, the womb might also reject it, resulting in sterility. These ideas are further expressed in theories that insist that the womb is attracted or repulsed by smells. Despite protests to the contrary in Crooke’s somewhat more enlightened account, then, the womb does seem to enjoy a life of its own. Even Raynalde, who extols the marvels of the female body—repeatedly using the words “miracle,” “divine,” and “wonder” in his descriptions—grants the womb its own agency: during intercourse the “womb port do naturally open itself, attracting, drawing and sucking into the womb the seed, by a vehement and natural desire” (37). While discourse from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constructed the womb and female sexuality as passive, early modern theory viewed female sexuality as aggressive, grotesque, and resistant to control. Thus Chrysogone’s passivity and sleep may serve to allay the threat of the castrating maternal body, but this threat is merely postponed,

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

24

especially if we accept Silberman’s interpretation of the boar lurking beneath the Mount of Venus in the Garden of Adonis episode as an image of the vagina dentata (48).15 Sleep lulls the reader into discounting maternal power for the moment, but it does not completely remove it. The fact that Chrysogone sleeps is to me the most troubling aspect of the entire scene, removing as it does any consent or even awareness on her part. Perhaps sleep here serves the additional effect of protecting the fetuses she gestates from the shaping power of maternal thoughts. Gynecological texts from the period almost always posit a sympathy between the womb and other parts of the body, a relationship that is somewhat benevolently described as “consent.” (Crooke characterizes it as “wonderfull consent,” 252.) But so great is the partnership between the mind and the womb that the mother’s thoughts were held to influence the developing fetus. As a result, a wayward imagination could cause the birth of a deformed child—one with rabbit ears, a harelip, or even a ruff-like neck. Spenser plays with the concept of the maternal imagination throughout The Faerie Queene, most notably with Errour, whose doctrinal misunderstandings spawn a thousand deformed monsters, and when Britomart “conceives” Artegall by looking in the mirror. For Crooke, in fact, sexual arousal itself seems a kind of awakening of the womb apart from the woman’s consciousness. Interestingly for an interpretation of this scene, he describes women’s seed itself as initially “sleepy” and “drowsie,” but when it is awakened or “raised vp, by the heat of the man’s seed” it catches fire like “raked Cinders into a lucent flame” (262–3). Chrysogone’s lack of awareness is also consistent with Crooke’s depiction of orgasm as forgetfulness, a trancelike state that Elizabeth D. Harvey calls “a mechanism of displacement, an ecstatic lethargy,” that “functions like Freud’s screen memory” (“Pleasure’s Oblivion” 59). Katherine Eggert similarly suggests that Chrysogone’s sleep may be read “not as a denial of sexual pleasure, but as a surfeit of it,” after the brief moment of rapture she experiences as nature caresses her body after her bath (8). Sleep is a dangerous condition in the Faerie Queene—as Red Crosse’s experience at Archimago’s house warns—and though crucial for the health of the body, immoderate sleep or sleep at inappropriate times was considered a sign of moral weakness in writings of the period. Crooke seems to associate it with the innate physical weakness of women, contending that women’s tendency to sleep more than men accounts for their need to menstruate. Because they are more sedentary, women accumulate more blood and nutrients than they expend; menstruation serves as a monthly purgation of that excess (260). (Bathing also contributes to the accumulation of blood.) Associated with death, nightmares, 15

 Spenser evokes the idea of castration in this scene in other ways as well, first through Venus’s intrusion on Diana bathing, a scene which undoubtedly recalls the dismemberment of Actaeon and that intervenes in his narrative of Belphoebe’s birth. Chrysogone’s bath thus takes on additional resonances when we recall it after reading Diana’s bath. On this point, see Quilligan (191–2) and Berger.

While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s “goodly storie” of Chrysogone

25

even bestiality, sleep must be carefully monitored and must occur only at night, except in the old or sick. As the physician Andrea Du Laurens prescribes, “Let euery man watch well ouer himself, that he use no sleepe at noone. … It is good (saith Hippocrates) to sleep onely in the night, and to keepe waking in the daytime. Sleeping at nooneday is very dangerous, and maketh all the body heauvie and blowneup” (qtd. in Estok 24). Oh, that Chrysogone had heeded that advice! On its surface, the birth scene here seems to be a communal female event, with Diana and Venus playing the role of divine midwives or gossips. (It is not quite clear in this scene if the birth has already taken place when they appear or if they assist in the birth.) Uncontained—“saluage” and “wilde,” in Spenser’s terms—the forest is figured female, as I have already argued. And, “far from all men’s view” (vi.6.6), this isolated, feminine setting seems at first to replicate the exclusively female space of the birthing chamber. And yet there is something distinctively voyeuristic about this scene, a feeling exacerbated by the emphasis on secrets—Chrysogone’s “secret power vnspide” (vi.7.8)—that further connects it with medical manuals from the period. Women’s reproductive organs had long been characterized as “secrets,” a term that, along with its connotations of mystery and danger, suggests something that should be protected, but also something that could be revealed. Medical texts, because they expose those “secrets,” are characteristically voyeuristic, and sometimes titillating. As Monica Green explains in her discussion of medieval manuals, “The adoption of the title secrets of women did not enshroud women’s bodies with a protective barrier to the male gaze; rather, it rendered women’s bodies open for intellectual scrutiny in ways that, quite understandably, may have left certain observers open to concern that medical discourse had more power to harm women than to help them” (7). When medical tracts expose these secrets they seek to control women’s bodies by displaying what many feel should be concealed, a transgression they are quick to defend. Some secrets are perhaps best kept hidden went the argument; after all, nature itself cloaked women’s reproductive organs by placing them inside the body (Harvey, “Sensational Bodies” 303). For this reason, some writers refuse to examine the female body, arguing that “by lifting up the vayle of Natures secrets, in womens shapes, [they] should commit more indecencie agaynst the office of Decorum, then yeld needfull instruction to the profite of the common sort” (John Banister, The Historie of Man, 1578, qtd. in Harvey, “Sensational Bodies” 303). Others choose to reveal what nature has hidden but are cautious in their presentation: “I have endeavoured to be as private and retired, in expressing all the passages in this kind as possible I could,” Guillemeau insists in Child-birth, or the Happy Deliverie of Women (3). Raynalde too worries that some might think it “a slander” to “set forth the secrets and privities of women” such that “every boy and knave” might read “them as openly as the tales of Robin Hood, etc.” (22). Nonetheless, he decides that the benefit of teaching women about their bodies far outweighs the danger. Such contradictory impulses toward the female body—on the one hand, the insistence on exposure and on the other, the need for privacy—are everywhere present in this type of literature. Traditional ideas that construct the “female body’s material

26

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

expressiveness” as “excessive” and “shameful” (Paster 25) further contribute to this reticence, a viewpoint that helps explain Chrysogone’s shame when she momentarily awakens and discovers her pregnancy. The concomitant inclination towards secrecy and revelation is evident in this scene and throughout The Faerie Queene when Spenser repeatedly occludes female genitalia. But curiously, such reticence seems only to call attention to the maternal body. More importantly for my argument, in these books male writers invade the private, female space of childbirth—first by publishing information on women’s bodies for anyone to read, and second, when they imagine their books actually present in the birthing space and thus substitute the writer’s authority for the midwife’s own, their books “supply[ing] the room and place of a good midwife,” in Raynalde’s estimation (21). In such figurations the book serves as a metonym for the male physician who will encroach more fully into the birthing space in the later seventeenth century. The shift to anatomical knowledge that Raynalde’s and Crooke’s texts presage is marked by a preoccupation with “ocular inspection,” in the words of William Harvey, an impulse that sought to turn the power of the scientific gaze onto the previously closed or hidden secrets of the female body. These writings attempt to reconstruct the female body through tropes of male vision and knowledge. At the same time, by exposing the female body, they seek to control its rebellious nature, at least metaphorically (Parker 87). The image in Spenser’s description that most suggests the unchecked fertility of the maternal body—and the one that perhaps provokes the most scholarly disagreement—is the comparison of the birth of Belphoebe and Amoret to the infinite creatures that arise from the mud after the flood of the Nile: “So after Nilus inundation, / Infinite shapes of creatures men do fynd, / Informed in the mud, on which the Sunne hath shynd” (III.vi.8.7–9). By evoking the elemental fecundity of the Nile, Spenser emphasizes the spontaneous natural abundance of a prelapsarian world in which Belphoebe’s birth, free from the “freshly slime” of other births, participates. This image at once suggests the wonder and abundance of the maternal earth and at the same time its passivity as it is acted upon by the heating power of the sun. Simultaneously, this analogy also recalls the repugnance of Errour’s brood, which Spenser also associates with the mud, slime and ooze of the Nile, prompting David Lee Miller’s assessment that “Spenser’s most positive images of the feminine are organized by a scheme that apprehends femininity apart from the masculine origin as an object of nausea” (250). In her chapter in this collection, Anne-Marie Strohman argues that it is precisely this apprehension about the physical aspects of maternity that accounts for the narrative deferral of Britomart’s destined motherhood. By delaying her maternity, Spenser dissociates Britomart from the other grotesque female bodies in the poem. In this scene, likewise, he at once emphasizes Chrysogone’s marvelous fecundity, idealizing and celebrating it, while at the same time marginalizing “the physical aspects of motherhood” (43), a maneuver that seems consistent with the text’s tendency to expunge fleshly human generation.

While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s “goodly storie” of Chrysogone

27

Placed in the context of gynecological writings, Chrysogone’s pregnancy is consistent with theories of reproduction that assert the influence of heat and humidity on conception. But in its slimy spontaneity it also points to the variety of ways early modern writers imagined reproduction taking place, as they seek to explain, for instance, women’s self-generation of mola or mooncalves from the mingling of excess female seed and menstrual fluid.16 As The Expert Midwife (1637) contends, “[Lascivious women], conceiving little seed from their husbands, dry by nature, by the desire of the Matrix, doe stirre up copious seed of their owne, which augmented with the flowers, by heat of the Matrix, is congealed together, and by the defect and want of mans seed, the proper worke-man and contriver of it, doth grow together into such a lump” (139). As a kind of spontaneous generation separate from male intervention, such reproduction is monstrous. No matter what, pregnancy remains both mystified and troubling. Despite all the details that erase maternal power in this scene—the rape, the lack of desire, the sleep, the slime of the Nile—that power persists. Spenser continues (and complicates) his exploration of the maternal body in the Garden of Adonis, which immediately follows this scene, but where he encloses the maternal body, “girt in with two walls on either side,” and with “double gates” (III.vi.31.2–5). Although the Garden of Adonis is a female space, because it is a garden it is part of a “wider cultural experience,” “a site where,” John Dixon Hunt argues, “human beings discover and realize whole patterns of belief, authority, and social structure” (xiii). For this reason, as I close I would like to turn briefly to garden theory, another kind of discourse developing in this period and one that resonates with many of the ideas I have been exploring in this chapter. Placed within the cultural context of the garden, I argue, Spenser is able to impose that “proper worke-man or contriver” onto the female body (even if he insists that no gardener presides over this space). Garden writers share many of the concerns of medical handbooks and echo Spenser’s language in their emphasis on pleasure and secrecy. They, too, find pleasure troubling, and their discomfort stems at least in part from conventional associations of the garden with the fertile female body. While extolled as “delectable” and “delightful,” making “all our sences swimme in pleasure,” the pleasurable aspect of the garden must always be counterbalanced with its utility (Lawson 56). John Gerard, for instance, posits the transformative power of beautiful flowers, which, he says, “do bring to a liberall and gentlemanly minde, the remembrance of honestie, comelinesse, and all kindes of vertues.” “For it would be,” he continues, “an vnseemely and filthie thing, … for him, that doth looke vpon and handle faire and beautifull things, and who frequenteth and is conuersant in faire and beautifull places, to haue his minde not faire, but filthie and deformed” (698–9). The erotic pleasures of the garden are thus potentially dangerous, all 16  The connotation of Egypt as erotic, foreign and promiscuous also adds to the complexity of this image. Crooke notes the commonplace view of Egyptian women as lascivious (237).

28

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

the more so given their connection with the wanton sexuality that occurred in Eden. As a way of ordering and policing this excess fecundity, writers emphasize the importance of cultivating the landscape, particularly by lopping and pruning, activities that take on an almost moral urgency: “Man himselfe lefte to himselfe, growes from his heavenly and spirituall generation, and becommeth beastly, yea devilish to his owne kinde, unlesse he be regenerate. No marvaille then, if trees make their shootes, and put their sprayes disorderly. And truely (if I were worthy to iudge) there is not a mischiefe that breedeth greater and more generall harme to all the Orchard … than the want of the skilfull dressing of trees,” Lawson contends (32–3). And yet they repeatedly eroticize the garden, titillating their readers with promises of secret knowledge and rare information. Thomas Hill, the author of the first garden manual in English, repeatedly uses the word “secret” in his works, as do other writers. Knowing those secrets ensures that the garden will be fruitful and productive. Just as the secret knowledge in gynecological manuals grants the male reader authority over the female body so here it gives the gentleman gardener authority over the feminine land. What both types of writing share, then, is a kind of discourse of control. I think it is also significant that both garden and medical writers defend their choice to write in English, what medical writers invariably refer to as the “maternal” or “mother” language. While medical writers worry about the acceptability of writing in English, they nonetheless insist that writing in their native language will serve as a “commodity” and a “profit” to all readers “in this noble realm of England” (Raynalde 21). Garden writers likewise posit that writing in English is a fundamental part of national identity. As Markham explains, “when … I beheld that every man was dumbe to speak anything of the Husbandry of our own kingdom, I could not but imagine it a work most acceptable to men, and most profitable to the kingdome, to set down the true manner and nature of our right English Husbandry” (A1v). In what Wendy Wall calls “the new business of Englishing print,” these vernacular texts illustrate the importance of publication for the “preservation and dissemination of the nation’s distinctive qualities” (770–72). These texts, then, participate with Spenser in the fashioning of the English gentleman. And to some extent, they do so on the body of the woman. As concepts of land use and ownership changed in the period, more individual gentlemen owned gardens, and that ownership conferred power and authority on them. Since the land was figured as female, the emphasis on the importance of walls and gates (a further collapsing of the two types of space, body and landscape, is suggested by the fact that “gate” is the term gynecological manuals often use for the vagina) allows them to contain nature’s fertility, and by extension, the grotesque pregnant body that Spenser repeatedly elides but that is ever present in its absence. The garden thus provides a consoling space where the land as maternal body can be manipulated. Read in this context, Browne’s desire to “procreate like trees” no longer seems so outlandish. Looking at his “goodly storie” of Chrysogone in conjunction with vernacular writings from the period reveals just how fully Spenser engages with cultural ideas

While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s “goodly storie” of Chrysogone

29

about maternity, ideas that suggest the complex intersection between maternity and changing notions of gender, authorship and nationhood. By figuring conception on the landscape, Spenser presents pregnancy, the height of female power, as wondrous and divine much as gynecological texts do, but he also imposes a masculine shaping force on it. Just as the land must be husbanded—its secrets revealed, its fertility checked—so too, the maternal body must be managed. The anatomical and botanical tropes serve to reinforce patriarchal control over a mysterious female space, and like garden and gynecological manuals, this scene has masculine authority as its subtext. Bibliography Arons, Wendy, trans. When Midwifery Became the Male Physician’s Province: The Sixteenth Century Handbook: The Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994. Print. Berger, Harry. “Actaeon at the Hinder Gate: The Stag Party in Spenser’s Gardens of Adonis.” Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature. Eds. Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. 91–119. Print. Breur, Horst. “Theories of Generation in Shakespeare.” Journal of European Studies 20 (1990): 325–42. Print. Broaddus, James W. Spenser’s Allegory of Love: Social Vision in Books III, IV, and V of The Faerie Queene. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1995. Print. Browne, Thomas. Religio Medici and Other Works. Ed. L. C. Martin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964. Print. Carroll, Michael P. The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. Print. Catty, Jocelyn. Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England: Unbridled Speech. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999. Print. Compleat Midwifes Practice. 1656. EEBO. Web. March 8, 2011. Craig, Joanne. “All Flesh Doth Frailtie Breed: Mothers and Children in The Faerie Queene.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 42.1 (2000): 16–32. Academic Search Complete. Web. March 8, 2011. Crooke, Helkiah. Mikrokosmographia: a description of the body of man. 1615. EEBO. Web. March 8, 2011. Dalton, Michael. The Country Justice: Conteyning the Practise of the Justice of the Peace Out of their Sessions. 1618. EEBO. Web. March 8, 2011. Eggert, Katherine. “Spenser’s Ravishment: Rape and Rapture in The Faerie Queene.” Representations 70 (2000): 1–26. JSTOR Archive. Web. March 8, 2011 Ellington, Donna Spivey. From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Washington, DC: Catholic U of America P, 2001. Print.

30

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Estok, Simon C. “The Ecocritical Unconscious: Early Modern Sleep as ‘GoBetween.’” Foreign Literature Studies 30.5 (2008): 20–29. Print. Fissell, Mary E. Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Print. Fletcher, Anthony. Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Print. Gerard, John. The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. 1597. EEBO. Web. March 8, 2011. Goldberg, Jonathan. “The Mothers in Book III of The Faerie Queene.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 17.1 (1975): 5–26. Print. Gouge, William. Of Domesticall Duties. 1622. Norwood, NJ: Johnson, 1976. Print. The English Experience, Its Record in Early Printed Books Published in Facsimile, no. 803. Gowing, Laura. Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in SeventeenthCentury England. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Print. Green, Monica. “From ‘Diseases of Women’ to ‘Secrets of Women’: The Transformation of Gynecological Literature in the Later Middle Ages. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.1 (2000): 5–39. Project Muse. Web. March 8, 2011. Guillemeau, James. Child-birth or the Happy Deliverie of Women. 1612. EEBO. March 8, 2011. Hackett, Helen. Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Print. Harvey, Elizabeth D. “Sensational Bodies, Consenting Organs: Helkiah Crooke’s Incorporation of Spenser.” Spenser Studies 18 (2003): 295–314. Print. ———. “Pleasure’s Oblivion: Displacements of Generation in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.” Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe’s Legacies. Ed. Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams. New York: Routledge, 2004. 53–64. Print Hill, Thomas. The Proffitable Arte of Gardening. 1563. EEBO. Web. March 8, 2011. Hobby, Elaine. Introduction. The Birth of Mankind, Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book. Ed. Elaine Hobby. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. xv–xxxix. Print. Hunt, John Dixon. Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in Renaissance Imagination 1600–1750. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996. E-book. Web. March 8, 2011. Lawson, William. A New Orchard and Garden. 1618. EEBO. Web. March 8, 2011. Markham, Gervase. The English Husbandman. 1613. EEBO. Web. March 8, 2011. Miller, David Lee. The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988. Print. Parker, Patricia. “Fantasies of ‘Race’ and ‘Gender’: Africa, Othello and Bringing to Light.” Women, “Race” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker. New York: Routledge, 1994. 84–100. Print.

While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s “goodly storie” of Chrysogone

31

Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Print. Plat, Hugh. Floraes Paradise, Beautified and adorned with sundry sorts of delicate fruites and flowers.1608. EEBO. Web. March 8, 2011. Quilligan, Maureen. Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. Print. Quitslund, Jon A. Spenser’s Supreme Fiction: Platonic Natural Philosophy and The Faerie Queene. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. Print. Raynalde, Thomas. The Birth of Mankind, Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book. Ed. Elaine Hobby. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. Print. Roche, Thomas P., Jr. The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964. Print. Rueff, Jakob. The Expert Midwife, or an Excellent and Most Necessary Treatise of the Generation and Birth of Man. 1637. EEBO. Web. March 8, 2011. Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print. Sharp, Jane. The Midwives Book, or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered. Ed. Elaine Hobby. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print. Silberman, Lauren. Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Print. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. Harlow, England: Longman, 2001. Print. Spiller, Elizabeth A. “Poetic Parthenogenesis and Spenser’s Idea of Creation in The Faerie Queene.” SEL 41.1 (2000): 63–79. Project Muse. Web. 8 Mar. 2011. Swann, Marjorie. “‘Procreate Like Trees’: Generation and Society in Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici.” Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Lisa J. Kiser. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2008. 137–54. Print. Vesalius, Andreas. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543). Historical Anatomies on the Web. National Library of Medicine.Web. March 8, 2011. Walker, Garthine. Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print. Wall, Wendy. “Renaissance National Husbandry: Gervase Markham and the Publication of England.” Sixteenth Century Journal 27.3 (1996): 767–85. JSTOR. Web. 8 Mar. 2011. Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Vintage, 1983. Print. Wayne, Valerie. “Advice for Women from Mothers and Patriarchs.” Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700. Ed. Helen Wilcox. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. 56–79. Print. Wynne-Davies, Marion. “‘The Swallowing Womb’: Consumed and Consuming Women in Titus Andronicus.” The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Ed. Valerie Wayne. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. 129–51. Print.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 2

Deferred Motherhood in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Anne-Marie Strohman The central characters in romance narratives are most often young men and women transitioning from youth to adulthood, from the care of their parents to the loving embrace of a spouse. The narratives depend on obstructions and frustrations that delay the union of young lovers, and almost always these impediments to marriage are overcome. The Faerie Queene is full of such characters, particularly in Books III and IV, but most couples in the poem remain unmarried: their unions are continually deferred. Susan C. Fox asserts that “all the important lovers are left separated when Book VI ends,” and calls the “dangling states” of the lovers “allegorical disaster” (28).1 Whether or not Spenser intended to bring all the lovers together in his projected Book XII at the court of Gloriana for a great wedding feast, as Fox proposes, the poem as it exists is more concerned with deferral than with union. Among all the “dangling” lovers, Britomart is an exceptional example. Many critics treat Britomart’s deferred ending as a romance narrative convention,2 and describe her goal as marriage. Humphrey Tonkin claims that Britomart’s journey is “obviously a quest for marriage and womanhood” (412). Margaret Thickstun suggests, “Her quest is not so much virtue oriented as marriage oriented” (43). Examining the deferral of Britomart’s “end,” Mary Frances Fahey notes that Spenser “hold[s] the marriage of Britomart and Artegall in abeyance” (55). While Britomart is destined to be married to Artegall, I argue that the goal of her adventure is motherhood, based on the specific emphases of Merlin’s prophecy, and that this focus on motherhood makes her a unique case for deferral. I would like to consider what effect her future maternity has on her transition from maidenhood and why Spenser continually defers her motherhood.

1  Joanne Craig mentions that contrary to C. S. Lewis’s assertion that The Faerie Queene is a celebration of married love, the text only contains three marriages: the Thames and Medway, Florimell and Marinell, and Amoret and Scudamor, whose marriage isn’t consummated (16). Critics point out various couples’ deferred endings in Book III and in the poem as a whole: Amoret and Scudamor, Arthur and Gloriana, Florimell and Marinell, Una and Red Cross Knight, Guyon and Medina, Calidore and Pastorella. See Fox 28, for example. 2  Patricia Parker focuses on The Faerie Queene’s deferred endings in Chapter 2 of her Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode, but she is more concerned with the pattern and effects of deferral as generic requirement rather than particular reasons for it.

34

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Few critics have examined motherhood in The Faerie Queene, and those that do consider mother figures as well as literal mothers. Goldberg’s 1975 article provides a psychoanalytic reading of Book III which argues that Britomart, Florimell, and Amoret all must accept psychologically their role as mothers. Goldberg sees Britomart as mothering other figures within the poem, pronounces her the “Great Mother of the English” (18), and argues that her initiation into maternity begins as she journeys to Merlin’s cave and ends in the House of Busyrane. More recently, Joanne Craig considers mother-child relationships in the poem. She argues that Spenser’s handling of origin stories reveals a deep anxiety about female sexuality and that the poet attempts to replace biological generation with a male-centered artistic creation. She mentions Britomart only in contrast to Belphoebe and as the means for Marinell to escape his overbearing mother. Neither of these critics links Britomart’s motherhood to the concept of delay. Deferral for Britomart is essentially connected to the fact that her future is motherhood. Merlin prophesies that she will marry Artegall, bear his child, and be the mother of a long line of descendants that culminates in Elizabeth’s rule. The common construction of women’s roles—maid, wife, widow—signals a cultural elision of “wife” and “mother,” but both cultural practice and Spenser himself establish distinctions between the two. By examining cultural norms for women’s transitions and for women’s roles, we can explore how Spenser distinguishes Britomart. Merlin also prophesies that Britomart will remain a transitional figure—a knight—until her baby is born and her husband subsequently dies. The knightly disguise she dons to protect her in her search for Artegall will become her habitual attire signaling her continued transitional state. In this chapter I will argue that Britomart’s deferral is exceptional because of Merlin’s prophecy and because her transition to marriage is deferred in uncommon ways, that we can examine maternity as its own category, and that Britomart’s maternity is deferred because of a pervading cultural discomfort with the maternal body and maternal authority that exists within The Faerie Queene itself. Britomart’s encounter with Merlin explains her movement from the stage of youth under parental care to married adulthood, but this transition for Britomart will not be concluded until she is a mother. Merlin prophesies, “For so must all things excellent begin”—in pain, her lovesickness—“And eke enrooted deepe must be that Tree, / Whose big embodied braunches shall not lin, / Till they to heavens hight forth stretched bee. / For from thy wombe a famous Progenee / Shall spring” (III.iii.22.1–6). Britomart has seen an image of the knight Artegall in Merlin’s magic mirror and fallen in love. Her nurse Glauce has brought her to Merlin that they might find out how to cure Britomart’s lovesickness. Instead of providing a cure, he assures Britomart that her vision of Artegall was “the streight course of hevenly destiny, / Led with eternall providence” (III.iii.24.3–4), and she should “by all dew meanes [her] destiny fulfill” (III.iii.24.9). Merlin specifies, however, that her destiny is not simply marriage, but motherhood—the “famous Progenee” she will bear. The prophecy emphasizes the importance of Britomart’s motherhood in the following 20 stanzas, which detail the lineage from her child through the ages

Deferred Motherhood in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

35

to Elizabeth, the “royall virgin” (III.iii.49.6). Later in the poem, Glauce, comforting the lovesick Britomart, reminds her not that she will find Artegall, but that one day she will bear children: “Through hope of those, which Merlin had her told / Should of her name and nation be chiefe, / And fetch their being from the sacred mould / Of her immortall wombe, to be in heaven enrold” (III.iv.11.6–9). Britomart must become a wife to fulfill the prophecy (and ensure legitimacy), but love and marriage are only supporting elements of her maternal destiny. This most important stage—her maternity—is continually deferred within the text. Britomart’s destiny depends on her finding Artegall, but even once she finds him, he must continue on his quest without her. Their union is delayed again after she rescues him from Radigund, leaving her still in her transitional state. Finally, Britomart drops out of the poem in Book V after rescuing Artegall from Radigund. We can’t know if her prophecy would be fulfilled if Spenser had continued the poem, but we can explore why and how Britomart’s end is deferred within the text as it stands. By keeping Britomart from fulfilling her destiny, Spenser effectively traps her in a transitional state between being under the care of parents and being under the care of a husband. Romance narratives center on this condition for young men and women. Young men are depicted as knights, pursuing glory and fame, gaining the wealth and social connections they need to be able to move successfully to householdership (Celovsky 215–17). Often, the young women of romance narratives have left their parents’ care and wander through the woods, a liminal place and time of life that puts them in peril of losing life or its socially constructed equivalent, chastity. Both knights and maidens are at risk for getting stuck in their respective states. Though Britomart functions within the text as both maiden and knight, and she is at risk of the same dangers other characters face, she withstands those threats and conquers them. Britomart enters the poem as a young man in transition: a knight errant. The language at the beginning of Book III assumes that she is a male knight: “They [Guyon and Arthur] spide a knight, that towards pricked faire, and him beside an aged Squire there rode” (III.i.4.2–3, emphasis mine). Britomart’s sex is revealed to the reader within a few stanzas, but only after she has unseated Guyon with her enchanted spear. Through this act she exhibits a phallic power that establishes her as an active knight. She doesn’t just appear as a knight; she functions as a knight. The narrator addresses Guyon, suggesting that his shame would be even greater if he knew “That of a single damzell [he was] met / On equall plaine, and there so hard beset; / Even the famous Britomart it was … ” (III.i.8.4–6). This introduction to Britomart categorizes her as a knight—the “famous Britomart”—and as a woman—“a single damzell.” She functions as a male knight, though the narrator continues to use the pronoun “she” in the following stanzas. Linguistically speaking, she is an “in between” figure, both knight and woman, revealed and hidden. The narrator articulates this double identity in Red Cross Knight’s assessment of Britomart: “Faire Lady

36

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

she him seemd, like Lady drest, / But fairest knight alive, when armed was her brest” (III.ii.4.8–9). For Britomart, dressing as a knight is a means of self-protection. Because “all Britanie doth burne in armes bright,” disguising herself in “feigned armes” protects her from those that would “empeach” her “passage” (III.iii.52–3). Glauce’s suggestion of the knight and squire disguises is described as a “bold devise” “conceived” in “foolhardy wit,” but this foolish plan is the crux of Book III, providing Britomart with the identity of a “mayd Martiall” (III.iii.53.9).3 Though Glauce suggests and argues for the disguise, Britomart herself chooses to follow through and orders Glauce “her Maides attire / To turne into a massy habergeon” (III.iii.57.7–8). Britomart knowingly enters the transitional male stage between youth and householder so that she may range through the forest without the need for flight and to “inspire” a “stout courage” (III.iii.57.4); however, the disguise introduces risks for her overall project. Risks for a knight may be internal or external. First, in a knight’s transition from youth to householder, he may fall prey to a particular love for the life of errancy which distracts him from his quest, or may turn the elements of knightly pursuits into goals in themselves. This misplaced love can take many forms: a thirst for fame and glory, a desire to hoard wealth, a wish to maintain chivalric status, or an inclination to preserve homosocial relationships as primary (Celovsky 218–23). Though Britomart finds Artegall eventually, she does fall prey to some of these temptations for a time. Distracted from her search for Artegall, she fights the Giant Ollyphant to protect an unknown young man (Scudamor) (III.xi.3–6). Britomart then journeys to save Amoret from Busirane (III.xi–xii), a valiant and successful effort, but not part of her initial quest. Though defending the helpless is an honorable pursuit and can gain her fame and glory, her diversion to Busirane’s house hinders her from completing her mission, especially in the 1596 version where, after Britomart and Amoret escape from Busirane, they must seek Scudamor and Glauce. Of course, though these episodes don’t directly help Britomart find Artegall, they are necessary for her allegorical and psychological development. They are necessary to Spenser’s task, not Britomart’s. Second, in addition to these internal distractions, knights also may become trapped in their transitional states by external forces: the most dangerous ones infantilize or emasculate them. For example, though Marinell’s mother promotes his knightly activity, she forbids him from love because Proteus prophesies that Marinell will be wounded by a woman. Though Marinell has amassed great wealth and honor with his mother’s encouragement, he cannot transition to householder status because he is isolated from female companionship (Celovsky 229–30). After Marinell is wounded by Britomart, Cymoent takes him to a protective cave and mourns over him. Her actions don’t allow Marinell to separate from her enough to complete his transition. In another example, when Radigund captures Artegall, 3  Schwarz points out that “Allegorically, Britomart’s armor is not a disguise at all, but a realization of symbolically impenetrable virtue” (160).

Deferred Motherhood in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

37

she emasculates him by dressing him as a woman and giving him womanly tasks, limits his physical movement by imprisoning him, and endangers his psychological health by placing him in her thrall. Both the imprisonment and her treatment of him restrict his ability to move beyond knighthood. Britomart, however, escapes these infantilizing forces. First, she has no mother in the text. Spenser provides no explanation for her mother’s absence, but Britomart’s association with only a father places her squarely in the patrilineal succession that is her destiny.4 He does assign a substitute mother in Glauce, Britomart’s nurse, but Glauce separates Britomart from her home and aids her toward her destiny rather than limiting her physical or psychological movement. Second, Britomart is never captured. She triumphs over Malecasta, Busirane, Radigund, and others, and though she is often in danger, she is never at the mercy of her enemies for long. She is protected primarily by her magic spear; her employment of masculinity that never wavers (that is its magic) preserves her from external forces that might delay her quest. The moments when she is emasculated merely reveal her female identity, which presents its own risks, as we shall see. Though Britomart is initially introduced as a male, chronologically her transition into knighthood begins after she is already a female transitional figure. The “out of order” narrative foregrounds Britomart’s quest, promoting an affinity with Books I and II, but the first flashback indicates that this is a book quite different from the first two—a book where cycles and refigurations work alongside a linear quest.5 In the scene preceding Merlin’s prophecy and in the prophecy scene itself, Britomart is isolated from her family of origin, separated from the protective care of her father, and moving toward marriage as she sees Artegall’s image in the magic mirror. Britomart finds Merlin’s “mirrhour fayre” in her father’s closet. Though her father is never present in the poem, the text suggests Britomart’s relationship with her father: “For nothing he from her reserv’d apart, / Being his onely daughter and his hayre” (III.ii.22.3–4). 6 Britomart has complete access to her father’s private world, and he values her. As she gazes into the mirror, she is at a point that encapsulates her transition: she is in her father’s closet gazing at her future husband. The men cannot both exist fully for her in the same space. In order to become a wife, she must leave the space defined by paternal control to move outward toward her husband. As Britomart leaves her home, she is completely severed from her family of origin, transitioning from maid to wife.

4

 Gregerson calls her a “daughter of patriarchy” (12).  See Tonkin on linear/cyclical structure. For Britomart, this structure hints that the “end” of her quest is not the whole story. See also Berger, “The Structure of Merlin’s Chronicle.” 6  Britomart’s father is also mentioned in the context of Glauce’s fears that he will castigate her for Britomart’s lovesickness: “great care she took, and greater feare, / Least that it should her turne to fowle repriefe, / And sore reproch, when so her father deare / Should of his dearest daughters hard misfortune heare” (III.iii.5.6–9). 5

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

38

Britomart’s nurse Glauce appears to stand in for Britomart’s parents, but her words and actions continue to distance Britomart from her family and move her more fully into a transitional state. First, Glauce separates Britomart from her home by suggesting that they seek out Merlin—the maker of the mirror—after Glauce fails to cure Britomart’s lovesickness. They travel dressed up “in straunge / And base attyre, that none might them bewray” (III.iii.7.1–2). Britomart, then, is separated from her father physically by her journey and separated from her identity as a royal daughter by her disguise. Entering Merlin’s cave further isolates her because it is an unearthly place, “low underneath the ground, / In a deepe delve, farre from the vew of day, / That of no living wight he [Merlin] mote be found” (III.iii.7.6–8). Even though the cave can be interpreted as a protective womb-like space, it isolates Britomart from her family (and it serves as a prison for Merlin).7 Though Glauce is attempting to fulfill her role as Britomart’s protector, she makes Britomart vulnerable by separating her from her family home, a physical separation that furthers the emotional separation from her family of origin her lovesickness signals. In romance narratives, young women in transition—not under the protection of parents or of a spouse—are especially vulnerable to external threats, particularly threats to their chastity. For example, Florimell is chased by the Foster “Breathing out beastly lust her to defile” (III.i.17.3), and Arthur and Guyon chase after her, purportedly to save her but really because they are drawn to her beauty (III.i.17–18). Florimell is also threatened by the witch’s son when she seeks help at their cottage; he feels “No love, but brutish lust” (III.vii.15.9, vii.14–19). In contrast, Belphoebe is the one woman not in transition, and thus not sexually vulnerable; she is a chaste huntress raised by Diana, and she attacks Braggodocchio and Trompart when Braggodocchio attempts to embrace her (II.iii.34–46). Joanne Craig claims that the young women’s “virtue exposes them to threats of violation or violation itself” (22).8 It is not just being a young woman alone in the woods that puts one at risk; it is being a chaste maid alone in the woods that is dangerous. But Spenser also explores the possibility that an internal threat to chastity—a maiden’s own lust—might keep a young woman from becoming a wife. Amoret’s experience in Lust’s cave serves as particularly apt example because the sexual threat is personified, and the text indicates that the threat may be internal or external. As William Oram suggests, a literal reading can present Amoret as “blameless,” but attention to allegory complicates the reading, suggesting that Lust is an “internal enemy,” that Amoret is “not intemperate” but “is nonetheless incontinent” (45). While Britomart sleeps, Amoret is captured by a “wilde and salvage man,” identified in the argument as Lust, who has an appearance quite like male genitalia, and whose long hair and ivy belt signal his identity (IV.vii.4).9 7

 See Stephens on caves as both protection and prison (524).  See also Stephens 528. 9  Anderson describes “genital” Lust as a “bisexual, hence hermaphroditic, figure” (87). See also Oram 42. 8

Deferred Motherhood in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

39

When Amoret regains consciousness in Lust’s pitch-black cave, another woman there, Aemylia, explains that Lust lives “on the spoile” of women’s “bodies chast”: “He with his shamefull lust doth first deflowre, / And afterwards themselves doth cruelly devoure” (IV.vii.12.5–9). Lust’s goal is not just sexual conquest, but psychic destruction. When Lust re-enters the cave, Amoret runs, and Lust gives chase. It is easy to read Lust here as external male lust, capturing and pursuing, and it is a proper reading—Oram’s “literal” reading. But Lust can also be read as emanating from Amoret’s own psyche—she is subect to her own lust. That Amoret shares the cave with Aemylia is instructive. Aemylia’s capture is clearly her own doing: she purposes to meet her lover in the woods and instead Lust is there. There are differences between the two women, but at the very least, Amoret has the potential to be Aemylia. She even has the potential to become the old woman who willingly substitutes her body for Amoret’s when Lust takes his pleasure. In light of day, the woman is revealed as an old hag, female sexual corruption personified.10 In Spenser’s telling, Amoret emerges wounded but whole (Scudamour accepts her as his virgin bride) (Stephens 528); she has escaped Lust’s devouring. Reading this scene allegorically reveals the possibility that internal lust might imperil a woman’s chastity, and thus keep her from transitioning “whole” to the role of wife. In her disguise as a male knight, Britomart ranges through the forest safe from the external sexual threats11 that may keep women from completing their transition from maid to wife, though she is still vulnerable when her disguise is removed or fails (Anderson 80). Spenser reveals Britomart’s vulnerability in the first canto in the Castle Joyeous where Malecasta (her name can mean “badly chaste”) rules as the Lady of Delight (III.i.31). Britomart refuses to be disarmed within the castle until night, and she defends herself from Malecasta’s advances even when the Lady of Delight sneaks into Britomart’s bed. When Malecasta’s cry alerts the house, those who run in see “the warlike Mayd / All in her snowwhite smocke, with locks unbownd, / Threatning the point of her avenging blade” (III.i.63.6–8).12 Even though Britomart and Red Cross Knight fight off the threatening crowd, Gardante—the looker—wounds her, though slightly. His look becomes a metaphorical arrow, “Which forth he sent with felonous despight, / And fell intent against the virgin sheene: / The mortall steele stayd not, till it was seene / To gore her side, yet was the wound not deepe, / But lightly rased her soft silken skin” (III.i.65.3–7). As in the Lust episode, the look may be external, or it may be read as Britomart’s look—the gaze into the mirror that caused her pain (Silberman 33). Britomart then is vulnerable, but she remains chaste, suffering only a minor

10  Stephens notes that within the female community of the cave, Amoret is grateful to the old woman rather than horrified at her wickedness, but when the old woman exits the cave into the male world, she is seen as corrupt (537–8). See also Oram 44. 11  See Berry 161. 12  Quilligan points to the comic elements surrounding Spenser’s reveal of Britomart as sexually attractive (though as a man) (164).

40

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

wound from lust, which threatens not just to defer her marriage and motherhood, but to derail it altogether. As Spenser relates the story of Britomart’s entry into knighthood, he emphasizes her transitional state and establishes her real destiny: motherhood. In this double state of transitioning female and transitioning male, Britomart still faces multiple threats, many of which could hinder her from fulfilling her destiny. She is vulnerable to sexual threat as an isolated female when her disguise is removed, and she is vulnerable to the temptations facing an errant knight, which might keep her from completing her initial quest. She also faces an unknown future as a mother—though her destiny is sure, the practical world of motherhood remains mysterious and possibly dangerous. Perhaps a greater threat is that her motherhood might be deferred or permanently thwarted. The tension in the poem derives from the clarity of Merlin’s prophecy and the constant threat that Britomart or her circumstances might hamper its fulfillment. Lorena Henry argues that Merlin’s prophecy is a biblical one rather than a classical oracular one. A classical prophecy will be fulfilled because of the actions one takes to prevent it (e.g., Marinell), while a biblical one invites the subject to participate in it and aid in its fulfillment.13 Merlin clarifies this point: “the fates are firme … / Yet ought mens good endevours them confirme, / And guide the heavenly causes to their constant terme” (III.iii.25.6, 8–9). The prophecy will be fulfilled, and Britomart must be complicit in her pursuit of maternity. In considering Britomart as a mother, we must examine how she fits into the cultural categories of womanhood: maid, wife, and widow. These commonplace stages defined women’s lives in terms of their relationships with men. One might suggest that women’s lives be defined instead by biological transitions—menarche, pregnancy, menopause—but in their study of early modern women, Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford reject these stages anchored in the female body as markers because they found “no women who conceptualized their lives in those terms” (77). Wifedom and motherhood were treated as one stage. The primary role of a woman in marriage was to bear children (26, 67): woman was, according to Purchas in 1619, “a House builded for Generation and Gestation” (qtd. in Mendelson and Crawford 67). For Britomart, however, Merlin’s prophecy defines her life in terms of motherhood, with wifedom being the required precursor, not the main event. Though early modern cultural constructions established the monolithic wife/ mother category as dominant, in practice and in cultural mythology marriage and motherhood were not always intertwined. Not all women had children. According to Mendelson and Crawford, “Scripture declared that to be a barren wife was one of the greatest misfortunes which could befall a woman” (67). Additionally, many women had children out of wedlock (148–9). Spenser explores this particular separation of marriage and motherhood in the figures of Chrysogone 13  Merlin’s prophecy recalls the Annunciation: he tells a young maid that she will bear a son (though through more conventional means than Mary).

Deferred Motherhood in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

41

and Cymoent, for instance—examples of mothers who conceive without present fathers or husbands. Chrysogone becomes impregnated while sleeping by “sunnebeames bright” that preserve “her chaste bodie,” and is not aware of giving birth to Amoret and Belphoebe (III.vi.7, 26). Cymoent is sleeping when she conceives Marinell with Dumarin, but she does know with whom she has conceived (III. iv.19).14 Both women experience motherhood outside of proper cultural norms. Their stories indicate that even within The Faerie Queene there are fissures in the traditional categories of womanhood, breaks that are present culturally as well.15 In addition to single motherhood, even though marriage and motherhood were lumped together in Renaissance culture, childbirth within marriage was a distinct rite of passage (Mendelson and Crawford 153). One marker of this new stage was the practice of “churching,” a celebration of a woman’s return to the spiritual community and to everyday life after childbirth (Cressy 197). Churching publicly acknowledged a woman’s status as a mother and her experience of birth as she gave thanks for her survival (Mendelson and Crawford 154; Cressy 208–15). Therefore, though the primary cultural categories did not classify motherhood as a separate stage of female adulthood, cultural practice suggests space to recognize motherhood (within marriage) as a discrete stage within the category of “wife.” Spenser, I argue, does the same with Britomart: Merlin’s prophecy gives the greatest importance to motherhood, signaling it as a separate stage from her becoming a wife. Interestingly, her motherhood will occur contemporaneously with her widowhood: “Long time ye both in armes shall beare great sway, / Till thy wombes burden thee from them do call / And his [Artegall’s] last fate him from thee take away” (III.iii.28.5–7). Artegall will die as his baby is born, and she will become the sole parent of the future king. Within the text of The Faerie Queene, Britomart’s motherhood is deferred, as is her marriage and her widowhood; Spenser leaves all this in its potential stage, as prophecy. The reasons for this deferral can be found within the poem itself. As a romance, The Faerie Queene (especially Book III) is characterized by deferral. Patricia Parker defines “romance” “as a form which simultaneously quests for and postpones a particular end, objective, or object” (4), and The Faerie Queene, she points out, “leaves its most important endings open” (77), Britomart’s marriage and motherhood among them. In Book III, though the 1590 version does reunite Scudamor and Amoret in a happy ending, the poem leaves our protagonist in her transitional state. And that transitional state is extended in the 1596 version, along with Amoret and Scudamor’s continued separation. Similarly, Arthur and Gloriana’s union (and actual meeting) is deferred, and Una and Red Cross Knight 14  Satyrane’s mother and Agape both conceive their children when they are raped (Craig 22). For a detailed analysis of Chrysogone’s birth in the context of Renaissance medical and gardening texts, see Susan C. Staub’s chapter in this collection. 15  Craig considers these origin stories revelations of “deep anxiety about women’s sexuality”: “a series of fantasies of origin that struggle unsuccessfully to minimize or even altogether to exclude the contamination of maternity” (16).

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

42

also part after their engagement, as do Calidore and Pastorella. Though romance often relies on a plot that brings the protagonists together and then separates them or invokes obstacles to their unions, the genre also relies on “happy endings” where frustrated waiting is fulfilled. Britomart and Artegall, however, never have their happy ending in the narrative present of the poem, only in prophecy. In addition, Merlin prophesies the delay of Britomart’s destiny, as we have seen, so she stands apart as an exceptional case of deferral. From a narrative perspective, even once Britomart accomplishes her quest in Book IV, she can’t keep Artegall from his quest by forcing his transition to householdership before he has reached his goal and learned the lessons of Book V. In both instances where Britomart and Artegall are together in the poem—after they fight in Satyrane’s tournament and agree to marry (IV.vi.40–47), and when Britomart rescues Artegall from Radigund (V.vii.43–5)—they separate. Celovsky argues that this kind of separation is necessary to retaining knightly status: “Because chivalric status (like youthful status) depends upon minimizing relations with women, marital bliss and martial occupation have an uneasy relationship throughout the poem” (221). Artegall must, therefore, part from his bride to pursue his own knightly adventure. This narrative requirement explains a certain amount of deferral—delaying Britomart’s marriage and motherhood into Book V makes sense—but even then the text does not provide a satisfying conclusion. One could make the argument that Britomart’s motherhood is deferred because of her allegorical identification as Chastity. Since she embodies Chastity, the argument goes, she must remain chaste throughout the poem; thus she cannot marry Artegall during the poem, and cannot of course engage in the sexual relations necessary to procreate. Such a reading would rely on the twentiethcentury conception of chastity as merely abstension from intercourse and on an assumption that Britomart is Chastity, rather than a person characterized by chastity (Rose 80). However, if we see Britomart as embodying the spectrum of chastity, “passing from the virginity of youth to the chaste married love of maturity,” as Thomas Roche asserts (103),16 and on which critics concur, the issue becomes somewhat more complicated. Chaste love implies an unsullied love for Artegall, which could include marriage, sex, and children: “trew in love, as Turtle to her make” (III.xi.2.9). To read Britomart allegorically, then, doesn’t fully explain why her marriage and motherhood are deferred. In fact, a full vision of chaste love might very well include marriage and motherhood. Generic, narrative, and allegorical explanations, then, cannot fully account for the deferral of Britomart’s “ending.” To explain this deferral, we need only return to Merlin’s prophecy and its focus on her “immortal womb,” for it is her 16

 Mary Villeponteaux asserts Spenser depicts chastity as “originating in a warrior’s force and culminating in a wife’s fruitfulness” (60). See Frye on Spenser’s definitions (and re-definitions) of Chastity in relation to Elizabeth’s self-representation (Elizabeth I 114–20) and sixteenth-century definitions of virginity (“Of Chastity” 50). See also Quilligan 136, Thickstun 39, and Yearling 137, 143.

Deferred Motherhood in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

43

destiny as mother that is key. Despite Merlin’s emphasis on maternity, the poem reveals discomfort with the maternal body and anxiety about maternal power. These two factors more fully explain Britomart’s deferral and emphasize the potential she embodies. Maternal bodies can be found in The Faerie Queene, but they are primarily in the context of idealized birth sequences or stories that marginalize maternal experiences of pregnancy and birth. Amoret and Belphoebe’s origin story focuses on Chrysogone’s miraculous maternity, one devoid of consciousness. The chaste faerie maid falls asleep in the woods, is impregnated by the beams of the sun—either a miraculous conception (Roche 106), or a glorified rape (Cavanagh 83)17—and gives birth without pain or waking, at which point Venus and Diana take away her twin girls. This stage of life determined by bodily experience is, for her, divorced from the experience itself: “Unwares she them conceiv’d, unwares she bore: / She bore withouten paine, that she conceived / Withouten pleasure” (III.vi.27).18 This fecundity resident in the body but not consciously engaged in marginalizes the physical aspects of motherhood. Further, her motherhood is limited to biological function: the goddesses take her daughters away from her so that she does not experience motherhood in any sense (though she is conscious of her pregnancy and the social shame associated with bearing fatherless children [III.vi.10]). The telling of Chrysogone’s story points to a discomfort with the physical experience of motherhood and suggests another reason for deferring Britomart’s motherhood: deferral keeps her from becoming a grotesque maternal body, like Error or the uncovered Duessa, and keeps her fertility latent. While The Faerie Queene depicts sex, procreative unions are rare.19 The description of the Garden of Adonis expresses an ease with the physical body, particularly in its descriptions of sex within the Garden; however, sex here is quite separate from generation and associated solely with pleasure. In spite of Time, the narrator tells us, the Garden is blissful: “sweete love gentle fits emongst them throwes, / Without fell rancor, or fond gealousie; / Franckly each paramour his leman knowes, / Each bird his mate” (III.vi.41). The description of Venus enjoying the hidden Adonis on the Mount similarly focuses on sexual pleasure separate from generation. Venus goes to the mountain “often to enjoy / Her deare Adonis joyous company, / And reape sweet pleasure of the wanton boy” (III. vi.46.1–3), and Adonis “liveth in eternall blis, / Joying his goddesse, and of her enjoyd” (III.vi.48.1–2). The acceptance of the physical body and of sex in the 17

 See Staub’s chapter in this collection for more critical responses to the conception scene. 18  Roche terms this “Incarnational imagery” and suggests that Chrysogone’s painless labor is “a direct contradiction of God’s curse on Eve” (109). His reading focuses on the relevance of this origin story for Amoret and Belphoebe, but doesn’t consider its relevance for Chrysogone as a mother. 19  Craig asserts, “The Faerie Queene as a whole suggests a fastidious distaste for procreation” (16).

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

44

Garden corresponds with the absence of the maternal body there: the Garden is a place of pleasure without pain, sex without childbirth. As Joanne Craig notes, Chrysogone’s birth story introduces the Garden of Adonis: “The extension of her story to the Garden also extends the fantasy of procreation without volition or consciousness by making the life cycles of plants a model or type of human reproduction” (19). Though we can read the Garden itself as a maternal body—an enclosed place of potential fecundity, one that Staub reads as circumscribed by masculine power—the poem focuses attention on non-human reproduction, hiding or erasing mothers in the flesh. Britomart’s body throughout The Faerie Queene is markedly similar to a man’s, which separates her further from the maternal body. Though she wears female armor, she is often mistaken for a man. As Judith Anderson suggests, for a Renaissance reader, armor whether designed for a man or a woman would signal maleness (76). More often than not, when Britomart’s sex is revealed, she is “unhelmeted” or unmasked rather than completely divested of her armor (79, 84, 89). Her body itself is masked, placing it at a remove from maternity and emphasizing her potential for childbearing as an abstract concept tucked in a mystical prophecy rather than a reality. As Christine Coch points out, maternity is the time when a woman’s body is most clearly differentiated from a man’s (142). Somehow the idea of Britomart as a mother, the possibility of her being a mother, is less threatening than the presence of her mothering body within the text. Although the text obscures female fecundity, it foregrounds mother-child relationships, and these relationships reveal anxiety about maternal authority. Mothers within The Faerie Queene rarely appear with husbands. Even if parentage is important, the primary family relationships are between mothers and children, rather than husbands and wives, or fathers and children.20 We’ve seen Chrysogone, who has no contact with her children and no husband, and Cymoent, who has little contact with Dumarin, but loves her son Marinell to excess. As Satyrane’s mother searches for her wandering husband in the forest, she is raped by a lusty Satyr and conceives Satyrane (I.vi.21–3). “Evil” mothers such as Error (I.i.15–26), Corceca (I.iii.13–14, 22–3), and the witch who hosts Florimell (III. vii.8ff) all appear without male counterparts. There are few fathers in the text, though enough appear in backstories to contest any implication that fathers are not necessary—they at least need to be present for conception (except, of course, for Chrysogone). This absence of fathers provides Spenser with many opportunities to explore mothers who have sole authority over their children, amplifying the power mothers had within the Renaissance household. As we’ve seen with Cymoent, maternal authority may become an infantilizing force. In the Renaissance, the description of the “new mother” sanctioned women’s dominion over her children within the home and enabled a corresponding anxiety surrounding mothers’ roles. Janet Adelman points out cultural anxieties about maternal power in Renaissance England that begin at a child’s birth. She argues 20

 Goldberg makes this claim for Book III (5).

Deferred Motherhood in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

45

that because of high maternal and infant mortality rates, and because of the great control mothers and nurses had over infant/child well-being and health, mothers were powerful figures in children’s lives both for good and for ill (Adelman 4–6). As Betty Travitsky describes the new mother, her primary responsibility was the physical and spiritual health of her children—for girls for an extended time and for boys until they were seven and fathers took charge of their education (64; Crawford 13).21 For Renaissance readers, the transmission of good traits and character to children was physical as well as biological and educational. It was commonly believed that a mother or wet-nurse “transmitted her own good qualities to her offspring by her breeding of the child in her womb, and by her nursing at her own breasts” (Mendelson and Crawford 29, 67). But the image of the lactation necessary for passing on a mother’s virtues to her child, invokes the “grotesque” maternal body, tainted by both sex and birth. Within The Faerie Queene, maternal power weighs oppressively on older children—young men and women who are meant to transition between youth and adulthood. Marinell’s mother Cymoent, as we have seen, secures wealth for her son from her father (III.iv.21.7–22.9), encourages him in his knightly valor—she “fostred [him] up, till he became / A might man at armes, and mickle fame / Did get through great adventures by him donne” (III.iv.20–21)—and in essence forbids him to marry (III.iv.26). Critics describe Cymoent as stifling and oppressing (Goldberg 9–10; Celovsky 230; Craig 22), an example of a mother whose love for her son extends so far that it proves ill for him. Though she saves him from death by begging the help of Tryphon, “the seagods surgeon” (III.iv.43.7–9; IV.xi.6.5–7), her protective actions reveal a power over Marinell’s behavior and decisions. Similarly, the relationship between the witch and her son is one of overt and misused authority. Goldberg sees them as “a demonic version of mother and son,” though the son is able to separate from his mother and transfer his affections to Florimell, in a “grotesque parody of the liberation of the male from the overwhelming mother” (13). These mothers exert control over their sons that infantilizes them. The boundary of permissible maternal authority is overstepped within the poem, indicating the possibility of unruly mothers, especially for women with no direct male oversight. Mothering without fathers in The Faerie Queene raises the specter of the widow. Though none of the mothers we have looked at are actually widows (that we know of), the culturally sanctioned version of single motherhood was widowhood, which prompted its own set of cultural anxieties. Widows were depicted negatively, “as ugly old crones or as greedy and sexually rapacious women looking for their next husbands” (Wiesner-Hanks 94). Widows were also feared because a widow had “virtually unlimited control over the interests of any minor children born within the marriage, enabling her to make financial and matrimonial decisions on their 21  As Julie A. Eckerle argues in her chapter in this collection, mothers took the spiritual education of their children seriously, often shunning the reading of romance when they became wives and mothers.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

46

behalf” (Chamberlain 7). This anxiety of maternal power in widows applies to Britomart’s future, since she will become a mother and a widow simultaneously. Only by deferring Britomart’s destiny can Spenser avoid both the maternal body and the anxiety of maternal authority. Because Britomart’s deferral is unique within the text, this reading does not reveal much about other women’s transitions. But it does tell us that the potential for female rule through motherhood and widowhood requires a particular kind of deferral, one that keeps the possibility for the future open, but one that keeps the messiness of birth and maternal authority outside the text. Spenser may be shying away from making Britomart too different from Elizabeth I. While Britomart doesn’t directly represent Elizabeth, she does champion “Elizabeth’s signature virtue, chastity” (Villeponteaux 60). For Elizabeth chastity did result in virginity because of her unmarried state. To extend Britomart’s chastity into married love, though the poem describes the process and has prepared Britomart for it, would be to make Britomart less representative of the particular expression of Elizabeth’s chastity. Early in her reign Elizabeth describes herself as married to the realm and as mother of England, metaphors that enhance her connection to the maternal Britomart and contrast starkly with her virginity.22 Elizabeth’s virginity and her insistence on metaphorical motherhood exposed another articulation of maternal anxiety: the lack of an heir. Ty Buckman argues that the succession question plays a role in the deferral of Arthur and Gloriana’s meeting (125), and I think it likely that the lack of a successor for Elizabeth plays a role here too. In his prophecy, Merlin traces the lineage from Britomart to Elizabeth, and then lapses into a stupefied trance (we suspect he is having some sort of vision that he cannot articulate). Britomart’s motherhood amounts to the same thing—unutterable and unknowable except in its broadest outlines. Britomart, then, is stuck in transition. She is moving toward marriage, motherhood, and widowhood, yet she is still a maid. She is not hindered by factors that traditionally hamper young men and women, and her disguise and prowess bring her close to her destiny—but not all the way. In the absence of satisfactory generic, narrative, or allegorical reasons to explain the deferral of Britomart’s end, we must look no further than the prophecy itself for an explanation: motherhood. Spenser’s discomfort with the maternal body and cultural anxiety about maternal authority, particularly framed by widowhood, combine to make it impossible for Britomart’s destiny to be fulfilled in the narrative present of the poem. By virtue of the prophecy, she is all—maid, wife, widow, and mother—yet none.23 Britomart is all potential.

22

 See Coch for Elizabeth’s use of maternal metaphors.  Stephens makes this point about Amoret (541).

23

Deferred Motherhood in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

47

Bibliography Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Anderson, Judith H. “Britomart’s Armor in Spenser’s Faerie Queene: Reopening Cultural Matters of Gender and Figuration.” English Literary Renaissance 39.1 (2009): 74–96. Print. Berger, Harry, Jr. “The Structure of Merlin’s Chronicle in The Faerie Queene III.” SEL 9.1 (1969): 39–51. Print. Berry, Phillipa. Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen. London: Routledge, 1989. Print. Buckman, Ty. “‘Just Time Expired’: Succession Anxieties and the Wandering Suitor in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.” Spenser Studies 17 (2003): 107–32. Print. Cavanagh, Sheila T. Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Print. Celovsky, Lisa. “Early Modern Masculinities and The Faerie Queene.” English Literary Renaissance 35.2 (2005): 210–47. Print. Chamberlain, Stephanie. “The Demonization of Sidney’s Cecropia: Erasing Legal Identity.” Quidditas 23 (2002): 5–20. Print. Coch, Christine. “‘Mother of My Contreye’: Elizabeth I and Tudor Constructions of Motherhood.” English Literary Renaissance 26 (1996): 423–50. Print. Craig, Joanne. “‘All Flesh Doth Frailtie Breed’: Mothers and Children in The Faerie Queene.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 42.1 (2000): 16–32. Print. Crawford, Patricia. “The Construction and Experience of Maternity in SeventeenthCentury England.” Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren. Ed. Valerie Fildes. New York: Routledge, 1990. 3–38. Print. Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Fahey, Mary Frances. “Allegorical Dismemberment and Rescue in Book III of The Faerie Queene.” Comparative Literature Studies 35 (1998): 49–71. Print. Fox, Susan C. “Eterne in Mutabilitie: Spenser’s Darkening Vision.” Eterne in Mutabilitie: The Unity of The Faerie Queene: Essays Published in Memory of David Philoon Harding, 1914–1970. Ed. Kenneth J. Atchity and Eugene M. Walsh. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1972. 20–41. Print. Frye, Susan. Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print. ———. “Of Chastity and Violence: Elizabeth I and Edmund Spenser in the House of Busirane.” Signs 20.1 (1994): 49–78. Print. Goldberg, Jonathan. “The Mothers in Book III of The Faerie Queene.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 17.1 (1975): 5–26. Print. Gregerson, Linda. The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.

48

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Henry, Lorna. “Guiding Heavenly Causes: Faithfulness, Fate and Prophecy in The Faerie Queene.” Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way. Ed. Daniel W. Doerkson and Christopher Hodgkins. U of Delaware P, 2004. 50–72. Print. Mendelson, Sara and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England: 1550–1720. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1998. Print. Oram, William A. “Elizabethan Fact and Spenserian Fiction.” Spenser Studies 4 (1983): 33–47. Print. Parker, Patricia. Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979. Print. Quilligan, Maureen. Incest and Agency in Elizabeth’s England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. Print. Roche, Thomas P., Jr. The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964. Print. Rose, Mark. Heroic Love: Studies in Sidney and Spenser. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968. Print. Schwarz, Kathryn. Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. Print. Silberman, Lauren. Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Print. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. New York: Longman, 1977. Print. Stephens, Dorothy. “Into Other Arms: Amoret’s Evasion.” ELH 58 (1991): 523–44. Print. Thickstun, Margaret Olofson. Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Print. Tonkin, Humphrey. “Spenser’s Garden of Adonis and Britomart’s Quest.” PMLA 88.3 (May 1973): 408–17. Print. Travitsky, Betty S. “Child Murder in English Renaissance Life and Drama.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1983): 63–84. Print. Villeponteaux, Mary. “Displacing Feminine Authority in The Faerie Queene.” SEL 35 (1995): 53–67. Print. Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print. Yearling, Rebecca. “Florimell’s Girdle: Reconfiguring Chastity in The Faerie Queene.” Spenser Studies 20 (2005): 137–44. Print.

Chapter 3

“She made her courtiers learned”: Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth Richard Wood

During the period that he was writing and revising his prose romance, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Sir Philip Sidney would have been aware of the danger inherent in daring to counsel Elizabeth on politically sensitive issues such as her proposed marriage to the Duke of Anjou. John Stubbs, in his notorious pamphlet on the queen’s proposed marriage, The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf Whereinto England is Like to be Swallowed, misjudged the queen’s readiness to be counselled by an ordinary private citizen, and had his right hand struck off as punishment for his error. Sidney sought to counsel Elizabeth himself, in both direct correspondence and in his literary works; but, as the nephew of the prominent and influential courtier, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, he was no ordinary citizen; and it is unlikely that the queen would even have countenanced imposing the same penalty on him for what was superficially a similar offence. Sidney does appear, however, to have jeopardized his prospects as an ambitious courtier by seeking to counsel the monarch on her proposed marriage from without the usual bounds of court counsel. The degree to which Sidney actually damaged his political career in doing so is a point of scholarly contention; and one interesting aspect of the debate on this subject is that an examination of the different versions of the Arcadia—or, more particularly, Sidney’s employment of the familiar rhetorical trope of parental surrogacy within these texts—suggests that he revised his romance in order to rescue or, at least, maintain his standing with Elizabeth. Sidney counselled his monarch directly in his “Letter to Queen Elizabeth, Touching her Marriage with Monsieur,” and indirectly in the Arcadia, but he avoided the incendiary language employed by Stubbs. Elizabeth, the self-styled mother to the nation, was often associated, by her critics, with the archetypal figure of the cruel stepmother, and Stubbs participated in the same discourse of disorderly surrogate parenthood seen in other works seeking to challenge Elizabeth’s rule. Indeed, the royal proclamation denouncing Stubbs’s pamphlet described the queen as having been “grievously offended” that the author neglected to credit her with the necessary “motherly or princely care” (Proclamation 449). In both Arcadias, Old and New, Sidney also employs the figure of the cruel stepmother—in the story of Amasis and his stepmother from the “Second Eclogues” of the Old Arcadia, and in the story of Plangus and his stepmother, Andromana, from Book II of the New Arcadia—but, in the revised work, probably written when “the Anjou affair

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

50

had blown over” (Berry 182), he obviates any potential offence to Elizabeth by constructing a parallel figure of beneficent surrogacy: Queen Helen of Corinth. Indeed, for Sidney, Queen Helen, in contrast to the negative images of female rule in the Arcadia, and particularly with respect to her beloved, Amphialus, represents the potential for a mutually generative relationship between monarch and courtierpoet. So, rather than being the brief compliment to Elizabeth noted by David Norbrook (106), the figure of Helen may symbolize Sidney’s attempt to preserve his own position; this conception of the relationship between queen and subject also, arguably, provided a model for the Countess of Pembroke and Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville in their subsequent respective roles as literary patron and courtier. Sidney’s use of the figure of the stepmother in the Arcadia, especially if the romance is seen as a consiliary text, can be seen in the milieu, described separately by Jacqueline Vanhoutte and Katherine Eggert, in which male courtiers during Elizabeth’s reign assumed powers ordinarily beyond their status. In her article, “Elizabeth I as Stepmother,” Vanhoutte demonstrates the significance of “tropes of surrogacy,” found in literary and non-literary texts produced under Elizabeth’s reign, for advancing “this process of political enfranchisement” (315). In Eggert’s analysis, the occasion of queenship, “the conjunction of femininity and authority,” is “a site for reconfiguring the hierarchical monarch-subject relation itself” (13). According to Vanhoutte, “[b]y playing gender against class hierarchies, Tudor male subjects were able to arrogate to themselves unprecedented powers.” In this context, a self-appointed male counsellor of the monarch, such as Sidney, would often attempt, through acts of counsel, “to compensate for his monarch’s feminine weakness”; hence, the “self-fashioning of Tudor statesmen led to an erosion of royal authority” (315).1 The same diminution in royal power might be implied by Sidney’s “Letter to Queen Elizabeth” and his employment of the trope of disorderly surrogate parenthood in the Arcadias. Nevertheless, as I shall show, in the revised Arcadia in particular, but in his other works as well, Sidney conceives of a mutually beneficial reconfiguration of the monarch-subject relation: a reciprocal fashioning of one by the other in the proper, learned virtues of prince and courtier, respectively, which strengthens rather than undermines royal power. To discuss fashioning is inevitably to invoke the work of Stephen Greenblatt, whose book Renaissance Self-Fashioning, though itself silent on Sidney, has encouraged other authors, such as Alan Hager and Edward Berry, to examine Sidney’s life and work for evidence of the same process. Berry restricts his study to the narrower topic of Sidney’s “self-representations”—eschewing Greenblatt’s broader topic of the “fashioning of human identity” in favor of the “artful process” of its representation—and finds a range of personae in Sidney’s works through which the author expresses “an anxiety about a loss of self, a psychological dissolution” (x–xi). Of greatest interest for this study are the chapters that Berry devotes to the Old and New Arcadias. Understandably, Berry’s main focus is on the character of the shepherd Philisides, the character most closely associated  Vanhoutte draws on McLaren’s influential Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I.

1

Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth

51

with Philip Sidney himself. The obvious resemblance of their names, the “poetic persona” created from the author’s name, as Jean Robertson notes, “by adding a Greek termination to the first elements of his names,” prompts the reader to recognize “the customary pose of the poet introduced into his own pastoral poem” (Commentary 430). Philisides plays a prominent part in the Old Arcadia, but this cannot be said of the revised romance. In the three (incomplete) books of Sidney’s revision, Philisides appears only once: he is unmistakably the shepherd-turned-knight in the tournament held to celebrate the anniversary of Queen Andromana’s wedding, which forms part of Pyrocles’s retrospective narrative in Book II. This single brief appearance by Sidney’s hitherto fictional persona has the hallmarks of a parting cameo for the author in this particular guise.2 Nonetheless, Sidney transfers certain attributes from Philisides to a new character, Amphialus, who, in Berry’s reading, is “the dark side of Sidney’s self-representations … given full rein and yet dissociated from Sidney himself” (178). Hager finds “ironic purpose in Sidney’s personae even, as in the case of Arcadia’s Amphialus … when Sidney pictures tragic dissolution.” Even though Hager sees Amphialus as a figure of “comic self-destruction,” he concedes that Sidney’s “hero” “remains a candidate for the amorous conversion Sidney’s incomplete narrative seems to guarantee” (9–10). Building on Berry’s and Hager’s somewhat tentative identifications of Sidney with the character Amphialus, I will show that this apparently “dark” self-representation, when coupled with Queen Helen of Corinth, is in fact an instance of the poet introduced into his own work with more positive connotations than have hitherto been noticed; and that Sidney might well have intended a stronger, less ironic, association between the character and himself than Hager and Berry allow. While Sidney was writing the first version of the Arcadia at Wilton, the home of his sister, it is likely that she was pregnant with her first child. Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, gave birth to William Herbert, later third

2  The associations between Philisides and Sidney’s own biography proliferate. The shepherd-knight’s impresa—“a sheep marked with pitch, with this word: ‘Spotted to be known’” (New Arcadia 255)—closely resembles the device which Abraham Fraunce describes and attributes to Sidney in the manuscript, Symbolicae Philosophiae, likely to have been offered to Robert Sidney shortly after Philip’s death (see Skretkowicz, “‘A More Lively Monument’”). Moreover, the lady, the “star” for whose affections Philisides is jousting in the New Arcadia (255), has been associated with “Stella” from Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, which is famously presumed to be at least partially based on Sidney’s own relationship, of whatever significance, with Penelope, Lady Rich (née Devereux) (see Skretkowicz, General Introduction xiv–xvi). The possibility that Philisides’s opponent, Lelius, represents one of Sidney’s real-life tiltyard opponents, either Sir Henry Lee or Edward Dyer, has also provoked scholarly conjecture. For the evidence in favor of such attributions see Hanford and Watson, and Yates. For a more judicious response to this evidence, see Skretkowicz, General Introduction xiv–xv, and “‘A More Lively Monument’” 196.

52

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Earl of Pembroke, on April 8, 1580 (Osborn 504; Hannay 50).3 The countess’s pregnancy might have informed her brother’s composition of the prefatory letter dedicating the romance to her, dwelling as it does on the subject of parenthood: For my part, in very truth (as the cruel fathers among the Greeks were wont to do to the babes they would not foster) I could well find in my heart to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness this child [the Arcadia] which I am loath to father. But you desired me to do it, and your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment. Now it is done only for you, only to you; if you keep it to yourself, or to such friends who will weigh errors in the balance of goodwill, I hope, for the father’s sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities. … But his chief safety shall be the not walking abroad; and his chief protection the bearing the livery of your name which (if much goodwill do not deceive me) is worthy to be a sanctuary for a greater offender. (Old Arcadia 3)

The dedication is evidence of the close personal relationship between Sidney and his sister, and emphasizes their joint roles in the creation and future care of his literary issue; the countess is clearly figured as a surrogate parent for Sidney’s literary offspring; and she is clearly a sympathetic parent, most unlike the archetypal figure of the cruel stepmother found in other contemporary literature; and, as such, provides an alternative context for Sidney’s use of the trope of surrogacy in both Arcadias.4 Sidney alludes to the countess having “desired” him to write the romance, and he envisages her keeping it to herself “or to such friends who will weigh errors in the balance of goodwill.” As Katharine Eisaman Maus observes, “the fate of the child-work depends here not upon the authority of the ‘cruel’ father-writer but on the compassionate female reader” (188). Sidney’s generous female readership is also evident in the Old Arcadia’s well-known narrative address to the “fair ladies” (27 et passim).5 Elsewhere in the dedication, Sidney attests to his sister’s close supervision of the text’s composition: “being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done” (3). After Sidney’s death in 1586, from the wounds he received in battle at Zutphen in the Low Countries, the countess became her brother’s primary literary executor, supervising the publication of his works and completing the translation of the Psalms that he had begun. The Sidney Psalms also betray signs of close collaboration between brother and sister, and as Hannay observes, though the countess “completed the Psalmes as a memorial to 3  Jean Robertson concludes that Sidney began writing the Arcadia “soon after his return from his embassy to Germany in June 1577,” and that the first draft was completed by 1581 (xv). 4  The prefatory letter was published in the first edition of the Arcadia (1590) and retained for subsequent editions. 5  For a discussion of Sidney’s female audience see Lamb 72–114.

Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth

53

her brother,” “through him she found her voice” (89; Alexander 85–6, 92–4). As well as in the Psalms themselves, the countess showed her own poetic ability in the two poems added to one of the manuscripts of the Psalms: the Tixall manuscript.6 In the poem addressed to Sidney, “To the Angel Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney,” she echoes the dedication of the Arcadia (“only for you, only to you”) in a reciprocal dedication of the Psalms to her brother: “To thee, pure sprite, to thee alone’s addressed / This coupled work, by double interest thine” (lines 1–2, Selected Works 159). In the same poem, the countess likens the writing of the Psalms to the erection of buildings, using words—“raised by thy blest hand” (l. 3)—that also echo the language of child-rearing; and she imagines the coupling of their (hers and Sidney’s) Muses in language which is, as Gavin Alexander says, “hard not to read … as sexual” (123). The mutually generative relationship seen here, between brother and sister, is echoed in the relationship that Sidney wished to foster between monarch and courtier-poet. Sidney’s own writings, both literary and non-literary (including the Arcadia and the “Letter to Queen Elizabeth, Touching her Marriage with Monsieur”), were often written with his monarch as a directly or indirectly implied audience. Indeed, H. R. Woudhuysen observes that the scribe of the Cambridge University manuscript of the New Arcadia (“the unique copy”) “employed a fair amount of quite attractive gold decoration” in its preparation; and Woudhuysen wonders, on the basis of its unusual “decoration and ornamentation,” whether “Sidney was planning to present this copy of the New Arcadia in its unfinished form to someone.” For Woudhuysen, “the Queen would be an obvious candidate for such a gift” (349, 355).7 In this context, and given Sidney’s use of the trope of surrogacy to refer to his female readership, it is not unreasonable to posit Elizabeth as a putative surrogate parent for the “child-work,” the Arcadia. As such, the queen would be, in effect, occupying a similar role to that occupied by the Countess of Pembroke in relation to the Arcadia; but, whether Elizabeth could be seen as a similarly compassionate parent-reader would depend on her disposition towards the child-work and its father-writer. In addition, by substituting (mutatis mutandis) the queen for the countess in the role of a female surrogate, Sidney could be said, in Vanhoutte’s terms, to be highlighting Elizabeth’s femininity in order to play gender against class hierarchies and arrogate to himself the power to counsel the monarch. Such a strategy would have been associated with its own perils, especially given the queen’s attitude to attempts to counsel her from without the bounds of official court counsel. It is not surprising to find, therefore, that Sidney was careful in the use of his rhetorical and literary powers, whether he was approaching Elizabeth directly or indirectly. And the fact that he seems to have 6

 For the details of this manuscript, its circulation and reception, see the introduction to Selected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert 35–6. For the Sidney Psalms themselves, see The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney. 7  For the details of the manuscript in question—Cambridge University Library: MS Kk. 1 5 (2)—see Skretkowicz, Textual Introduction lv.

54

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

envisaged, in the characters of Helen and Amphialus, a reciprocal relationship, founded on shared learned virtues, between queen and subject (not unlike that between his sister and himself) could have elicited compassion from his royal reader. Indeed, in my reading, Sidney conceives of the queen as a sympathetic surrogate at the level of both human identity and the representation of that identity, as both his monarch and her fictional counterpart, Helen of Corinth. As has often been noted, Elizabeth portrayed herself as mother to her nation (Frye 54–5; Coch). In 1559, responding to Sir Thomas Gargrave, the Speaker of the House of Commons, who articulated the nation’s wish that she marry and “bring forth Children” (qtd. in Coch 134), Elizabeth allowed for such possibilities, but, vowed, for the time being, to remain “a virgin” and “a good mother of my country” (Elizabeth I 58). This expedient portrayal of herself as a good mother was challenged, by those of Elizabeth’s subjects who wished to challenge her, through, among other means, allusions to the almost universally negative figure of the stepmother. With reference to William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and John Lyly’s Endymion, Vanhoutte notes the existence of “a common frame of reference in which the term ‘stepdame’ bears agreed-upon negative connotations” in late Elizabethan literature (317). Theseus in Shakespeare’s play bemoans “how slow / This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires / Like to a step-dame or a dowager / Long withering out a young man’s revenue” (1.1.3–6). In Endymion, the moon goddess, Cynthia, apparently sensitive to the same accusation, declares herself to be “no stepmother” (5.4.303). Both of these literary references allude to the real queen. As Louis Montrose observes, in The Subject of Elizabeth, the “makers of later Elizabethan pageantry and poetry kept busy turning out panegyrical identifications of Elizabeth with Diana, the virgin goddess of the hunt, or with Cynthia, the Artemisian moon goddess,” and the plays’ audiences would have made an immediate connection between such an allusion and their monarch (92–3). In Shakespeare’s play, the waning moon suggests an aging Elizabeth, resembling a too-long-lived surrogate mother who frustrates her stepson’s ambitions. This is an instance of the “theme of mundus senescit,” which Montrose associates with “the disenchantment of the old Queen’s subjects,” who were wishing for a new moon to rise, for a royal successor (241). Lyly’s Cynthia is understandably keen to reject any such suggestion. When, in Astrophil and Stella, Sidney has his poet-speaker say, “Invention, nature’s child, fled step-dame study’s blows” (1, line 10), he too is participating in the perpetuation of the stereotype of the cruel stepmother also familiar in contemporary domestic manuals. William Gouge, in his Of Domesticall Duties (1622), and Robert Cleaver, in A Godlie Forme of Householde Governnement (1600), regard most stepmothers as exhibiting unkindness towards their charges, the former going as far as to justify any disobedience this may provoke in the children (Gouge 409; Cleaver 242). As Vanhoutte recognizes, “transferred analogically to the political realm,” such attitudes would amount to the justification of rebellion. At the very least, the “possibility of contingency and transformation” in the governance of the state was put in play (323, 325). Indeed, Elizabeth

Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth

55

highlighted the political application of such domestic conflict herself when, in 1569, she advised the French ambassador that “she had taken great pains to be more than a good mother to the Queen of Scots,” but warned that “she who uses and plots against her mother, deserves nothing other than a wicked stepmother” (Levin 59–60). In the case of Sidney’s sonnet, it is the “study” of other poets’ work, other poems in the poetic tradition, that is personified as a “step-dame” attempting to administer corporal punishment to the child (poetic “invention”), who is the natural offspring of “nature.” Although there is no direct political inference to be drawn from this analogy to compare with the waning moon alluded to by Shakespeare and Lyly, on closer examination Sidney’s introduction of the image of the wicked stepmother into his sonnet sequence is suggestive.8 As Vanhoutte notes, “[g]iven the associations of mothers with nature and stepmothers with culture, to frame the relationship between monarch and subject in terms of the relationship between stepmother and her surrogate child is also to intimate that this relationship is a social contract, not a natural given” (325). Sidney’s “stepdame study” and “invention, nature’s child” reflect this same dichotomy between culture and nature; though the paradoxical relationship between nature and artifice inherent in this sonnet, and the sequence as a whole, adds a further level of complexity to its use in this context. If one considers Sidney’s other uses of the image of parental surrogacy, in the more obviously politically-interested Arcadia, the potential significance of such cultural and political images becomes more evident. Moreover, in the New Arcadia, Sidney figures Elizabeth as a mother to her nation whose good governance promotes a culture based on learning, chastity and a hard-earned peace. As Linda Shenk notes Elizabeth came to the throne at a time when “women were considered to be intellectually deficient, morally frail, and tyrannically whimsical” (5). John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558) was one of several publications to promulgate the idea that female monarchs were necessarily tyrannous by virtue of their sex alone.9 This view is clearly at play in the equation of unstable monarchy with the disorderly management of domestic affairs by stepmothers. According to Shenk, early in Elizabeth’s reign, authors such as Roger Ascham and John Aylmer sought “to disassociate [the] queen from these stereotypes,” and defend her sovereignty, in part, “by highlighting her learning” (5–6). Aylmer went as far as to assume the voice of God and ask, can not I make a woman to be a good ruler ouer you, and a mete minister for me? … is that rare learning, that singulare modestie, that heauenly clemencie,  Mazzola reads Astrophil and Stella in the context of Sidney’s relationship with Elizabeth, suggesting “that Stella’s mother and Stella herself are two aspects of Sidney’s Queen, one nurturing force who threatens the poet with disfavor, the other a generally unresponsive reader with her own powers to hate, or to write” (133). 9  See also Goodman 52–3. 8

56

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England that christiane constancie, that loue of religion, that excellent wysdom with many more of my graces, nothing in your sight? (sig. I2r)

Nevertheless, such negative ideas persisted, and were in evidence again when some of Elizabeth’s subjects, including Sidney in his “Letter to Queen Elizabeth,” sought to dissuade her from marrying Francis, Duke of Anjou. As part of the denigration of female rule in his Monstrous Regiment, John Knox portrayed women as displaying a “couetousnes … like the goulf of hell, that is, insaciable” (25). The title of John Stubbs’s tirade against the proposed marriage to Anjou, The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf Whereinto England is Like to be Swallowed (1579), employs the same misogynist rhetoric. Moreover, Stubbs participates in the same discourse of disorderly surrogate parenthood seen in other works seeking to challenge Elizabeth’s rule. Stubbs raises the prospect of England’s queen— “a naturall mother” to her nation—being supplanted by “some cruel and proud governour” (C7v). Although he does not equate Elizabeth, or her substitute, Anjou, with a cruel stepmother directly, his characterization of those who support her marriage to Anjou as “unkind mothers” makes the implication plain: These men haue lyke vnkind mothers, put (as it vvere) theyr owne child, the church of England to be noursed of a french enemy and friend to Rome, and novv very kindly they take in both armes the church of fraunce, and giue it a priuy deadly nipp, vnder colour of offering it their teates, vvherein is nought but vvind if not poyson. (B2v)

This simile of surrogate parenthood, the English child with the French mother and the French child in the arms of the English mother, is explicitly directed at Elizabeth’s male counsellors, but Stubbs’s implied target, as elsewhere in the piece, is Elizabeth: she must continue to give suck to the child to whom she is the natural mother: England (Vanhoutte 332–4). Needless to say, Elizabeth showed scant mercy in response. Stubbs’s right hand was struck off as punishment, and the royal proclamation denouncing his pamphlet described the queen as having been “grievously offended” that the author neglected to credit her with the necessary “motherly or princely care” (Proclamation 449). This dissension (and his misogyny) notwithstanding, Stubbs also transgressed in another manner that was highlighted in the same proclamation. He misjudged Elizabeth’s readiness to be counselled by an ordinary private citizen. In The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf, Stubbs justifies his intervention by invoking “necessitie” and his own status as “a true Englishman” and “a sworne liegeman to hir Maiestie”: I should haue bene afrayd to haue spoken thus much, had not the streight of this necessitie driuen me and my words ben the words not of a busie body, speaking at all aduentures: but of a true Englishman, a sworne liegeman to hir Maiestie, gathering these necessary consequences by theyr reasonable causes. (F3v)

Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth

57

He appears to have been confident in his receiving a fair hearing, but the proclamation makes it clear why his intervention could not be sanctioned. From the royal perspective, Stubbs’s pamphlet was “offering to every most meanest person of judgment by these kind of popular libels authority to argue and determine in every blind corner at their several wills of the affairs of public estate” (Proclamation 449). As Natalie Mears speculates, “his mistake” might have been “due to Elizabeth’s often, but perhaps rhetorical, courting of ‘popularity,’” but there appears to have been no possibility of Stubbs mitigating the consequences of such an error (650). Stubbs’s case provides an interesting contrast to Sidney’s attempt—in his “Letter to Queen Elizabeth, Touching her Marriage with Monsieur”—to counsel the monarch, also from without the usual bounds of court counsel. Although Sidney was never in danger of receiving the punishment meted out to Stubbs, he does appear to have endangered his standing at court. Like Shakespeare and Lyly, who employed the image of the waning moon, Sidney was not averse to the use of cosmological metaphors himself. In his letter, circulated in manuscript in 1579, or 1580 at the latest, Sidney saw the queen’s proposed marriage to the Catholic Francis, Duke of Anjou, as a means for settling the succession that would, on the contrary, put England’s continuing Protestant settlement in danger. For Sidney, the queen’s attempt to divert her subjects’ eyes from “the rising sun” raised “the dreadful expectation of a divided company of stars” (53–4). This moment in the reign of Elizabeth was of great importance to Sidney and his circle, as suggested by his authorship of a letter that might have been perceived as, at best, disloyal. As Blair Worden notes, “Sidney was a junior politician in his mid-twenties,” for whom the queen “had a certain fondness,” but also a degree of mistrust (41).10 Indeed, Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville remarked, in his “A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney” (completed under the reign of James I), that a “judicious reader” might “ask whether it were not an error—and a dangerous one—for Sir Philip, being neither magistrate nor counsellor, to oppose himself against his sovereign’s pleasure” (37). Significantly, however, Sidney avoided the pitfalls highlighted by Stubbs. He addressed Elizabeth in terms that emphasized her learning and wisdom, thus, I contend, obviating any danger to which he might have been exposed.11 Greville, in answering his own question as to whether Sidney’s letter was an error, argues that [Sidney’s] worth, truth, favour and sincerity of heart—together with his real manner of proceeding in it—were his privileges, because this gentleman’s course in this great business was not by murmur among equals or inferiors to detract from princes, or by mutinous kind of bemoaning error to stir up ill affections in 10

 For a useful account of “Sidney’s Loyalties” and the background to the ambivalent relationship between him and his queen, see Worden’s chapter of that title (41–57). 11  Quilligan asserts that, purely in terms of gender, the queen had “no traditional rights” to choose whom she should marry, and that Sidney “had many rights … as a sexual male” (179).

58

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England their minds whose best thoughts could do him no good, but by due address of his humble reasons to the Queen herself, to whom the appeal was proper. (37)

Greville’s justification sets Sidney’s “appeal” above that which might have been made by the “most meanest person of judgment” (of the royal proclamation against Stubbs), it being from a “gentleman,” and praises it for properly addressing the queen herself, rather than being published “among equals or inferiors.” Moreover, as Mears argues, Sidney’s letter, unlike Stubbs’s pamphlet, was “rooted in the traditions of noble counsel (both humanist-classical … and feudal-baronial)” and demonstrated an understanding that “counsel was advisory,” not “a necessary element of queenship” as Stubbs implied in The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf (Mears 646–7). In the first words of the letter, Sidney acknowledges Elizabeth’s ability to judge “the nature of the thing done,” such that “[i]t were folly to hope with laying on better colours to make it more acceptable” (46). Greville’s account echoes Sidney’s in its admiration for Elizabeth’s “spirit of anointed greatness, as created to reign equally over frail and strong—more desirous to find ways to fashion her people than colours or causes to punish them” (37). Besides Greville’s belated contribution to Elizabethan panegyric, of particular interest here is the notion that Elizabeth would wish “to fashion her people.” As well as acknowledging the queen’s learning and judgment in the hope of a fair hearing, Sidney would, no doubt, have wished to be judged as a well-fashioned subject of the queen, displaying, in his letter, the proper courtly virtues himself. In his letter to Elizabeth, Sidney writes that he “will in simple and direct terms (as hoping they shall only come to your merciful eyes) set down the overflowing of my mind in this most important matter: importing, as I think, the continuance of your safety, and as I know, the joys of my life” (46). He is entrusting the product of his own studies to Elizabeth much as he delivers the “many many fancies” of his fiction, which would otherwise “have grown a monster,” to his sister’s care (Old Arcadia 3). Implicit in this configuration of the monarch-subject relation, besides their joint “safety,” is the mutual fashioning of one by the other in the proper, learned virtues of prince and courtier, respectively. In Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism, Robert E. Stillman notes that Sidney’s letter retained its popularity among his writings … long after the polemical occasion for which it was designed … in no small part because of the startling contrast between its mode and matter of argumentation and Stubbs’s inept, impractical and out-of-court fulminations. (25)

For Stillman, Sidney “provided his English contemporaries … with a means of speaking truth to power” founded on a “newly fashionable” political language he shared with, and acquired from, an international, learned circle of his co-religionists that included his French mentor, Hubert Languet. It is, in Stillman’s assessment, Sidney’s peculiar education that enabled him to “command respect at court,” and also why, in the same critic’s opinion, he “escaped Stubbs’s fate” (25–6).

Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth

59

Something akin to this new, sophisticated political rhetoric is also evident in the Arcadia, where Sidney also claims for himself the right to counsel the monarch. By imbuing Elizabeth with the virtues he values in himself as a courtier-poet, what Aylmer termed her “rare learning” and “excellent wisdom,” he enters into what he hopes will prove a jointly beneficial bond with the mother of his nation. Sidney invokes the image of the “wicked stepmother” in both the Old and New Arcadias. The queen’s own use of domestic imagery to define her political role, and the subsequent employment of similar figures by her subjects to interrogate her rule, provide a particularly poignant context for the use to which Sidney puts the image of surrogate parenthood himself. In the Old Arcadia, Sidney uses the trope of surrogacy unalloyed, and, therefore participates in a discourse so clearly associated with the perceived descent of the queen’s star at the time. As such, he may well have been particularly keen to see this version “kept to” his sister or “to such friends who will weigh errors in the balance of goodwill” (Old Arcadia 3), and not printed, as the revised version was in different forms after his death. In the New Arcadia, in the character of Helen, he provides a positive counterpoint to the figure of the step-dame, thus developing a more sophisticated consiliary rhetoric than that employed by some of his contemporaries. The example of parental surrogacy in the first version of the romance occurs in the “Second Eclogues.” In the relevant passage, an Arcadian named Histor relates one of four stories about the heroic adventures of the princes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, in Asia and Africa, which took place prior to their arrival in Arcadia, where they are now in the process of wooing the Arcadian princesses, Philoclea and Pamela, respectively. Ostensibly told to gain the esteem of the princesses for “the worthy acts of those two worthies,” the tale in question raises several questions about “queenship, surrogate motherhood, political tyranny, and dynastic disruption” (Old Arcadia 158; Vanhoutte 327). In what appears to be a reworking of the classical story of Phaedra’s seduction of her stepson, Hippolytus, Histor tells “of a strange chance fell to [Pyrocles and Musidorus] in Egypt,” where they rescued “a young man, well apparelled and handsomely proportioned” from death at “the hands of four murdering villains.”12 The young man, Thermuthis, relates his own story to the princes, that “he was a servant and of nearest credit to Amasis, son and heir to Sesostris, king of Egypt,” and that both Amasis and he were very alike in appearance. Moreover, Amasis’s young stepmother (the king’s new wife), had turned the ordinary course of stepmother’s hate to so unbridled a love towards her husband’s son Amasis that neither the name of a father in him, of a husband

12

 Phaedra is the wife of the king of Athens, Theseus, who is, in the usual telling of the story, accused of trying to seduce her stepson, Hippolytus, and once rejected turns Theseus against his son. Versions of the story occur in classical texts often translated in early modern England, including Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Phaedra is maligned for the “stepdames craft” that leads to Hippolytus’s death (194).

60

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England in her, nor of a mother and son between themselves, could keep her back from disorderly seeking that of Amasis which is a wickedness to accept. (156)

Amasis, “already pledged to Artaxia, queen of Persia,” rejected his stepmother’s advances, which had the effect of altering “all her affection to a most revengeful hatred.” In this frame of mind, she seduced Thermuthis and persuaded him to attempt to kill the king in the guise of Amasis, such that, once the attempt had been averted, the king ordered the execution of his own son. This decision was colored by the stepmother having accused “Amasis to his father as having sought to defile his bed; which opinion being something gotten in, though not fully imprinted in Sesostris’s head.” It was the stepmother who had employed the “four murdering villains” to commit the murder, prevented by the princes, of the fleeing, royallyappareled Thermuthis (156–7). Amasis, “brought by force out of his lodging,” and “newly being come out of his sleep, and with his amazedness rather condemning himself than otherwise,” is brought before his father. Sesostris then, “neither taking pains to examine the matter to the uttermost, nor so much as to hear what Amasis could say in a matter by many circumstances easy enough to have been refelled [disproved],” had his son put in an uncrewed ship on the Red Sea, “to be left to the wind’s discretion.” Predictably, the princes arrive in time to rescue Amasis too, and father and son, as well as lord and servant, are duly reconciled: Thermuthis being pardoned in reflection of “the fault the king himself had done to run so hastily in the condemning his only son in a cause might both by Thermuthis’s absence and many other ways have been proved contrary.” The stepmother, on learning all this, killed herself (157–8). It is significant that Sesostris is portrayed as “neither taking pains to examine the matter to the uttermost,” nor giving his son a fair hearing, and that this leads to “the fault the king himself had done to run so hastily in the condemning his only son.” Moreover, but for the intervention of Pyrocles and Musidorus, the son would have died through the actions of the wife, who, as Vanhoutte observes, “replaces the husband as the decision-maker” (327) and substitutes a “well apparelled and handsomely proportioned,” though eminently suggestible, look-alike for the true heir to the throne.13 Importantly for this chapter, which centers on the counselling of Elizabeth about her proposed marriage to Anjou, this episode has at its heart the issue of princely policy, pointedly related to a royal marriage. What is more, the overturning of the natural order here has a parallel in the main plot of Sidney’s

13  Vanhoutte notes that A Midsummer Night’s Dream—“through Titania’s inordinate attachment to her foster son,” “the intimations of Hippolytus’ birth at the end of the play,” or the words spoken by Theseus (a future husband to Phaedra) at the beginning—“evokes Phaedra repeatedly.” She suggests that Sidney and Shakespeare seem to have been “struck” by “the disastrous effect of the stepmother’s ‘insaciable’ passion on normal patterns of patriarchal inheritance and dynastic succession” in the Phaedra story (326–8).

Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth

61

romance.14 Given the typical Sidneian interlacing of the images from one episode with those from another, it is no surprise to find a parallel between Basilius (significantly, the central figure of authority in the whole romance) and Sesostris.15 Basilius, the ruler of Arcadia, relinquishes the governance of his kingdom and removes his family (including his daughters, Philoclea and Pamela) and inner court to a secret pastoral location to avoid the dire consequences of a prophecy from the oracle at Delphi. Inevitably, his ill-advised actions backfire. Both Basilius and his wife become disastrously romantically involved with Pyrocles, who is disguised as an Amazon warrior, and their collective actions threaten to topple the state. Basilius’s fault, as with that of Sesostris, is one of substitution, of surrogacy. Basilius hands the reins of his government over to his friend, Philanax, whereas Sesostris defers to the malign judgments of his wife; Basilius mistakes his daughter’s suitor, Pyrocles, for a woman with whom he might replace his wife, while the Egyptian king confuses a superficially legitimate impostor for his real son, endangering the life of his heir and the welfare of his nation. Sesostris may also be said to mistake an unfaithful wife for a true one, subjecting his son to the blows of a cruel step-dame. Although these parallels are in keeping with Sidney’s method, there are, as is also typical of Sidney, crucial differences between the two scenarios, the most obvious being Philanax’s unimpeachable wisdom and the fact that he has the surrogacy thrust upon him. In the chain of relationships in the Egyptian episode, the figure of the son stands out as having at least as much significance as the stepmother. Indeed, it is their relationship, that between queen and stepson, that is the basis of the story’s narrative. The chain of substitutions in Sidney’s adaptation of the Phaedra myth are, for Vanhoutte, a result of the “initial substitution—of the natural mother by an unnatural stepmother,” and, as such, she reads Sidney’s text as one of several contemporary uses of the trope of surrogacy to challenge the queen (327). The relationship between queen and stepson is also reminiscent of that suggested by Sidney’s role in the entertainment (possibly also written by him), performed for Elizabeth in Whitsun week, 1581. Here, Sidney was one of “four foster children of Desire,” where, as Duncan-Jones notes, “‘Desire’ was as much political as amorous, figuring the eager dependency of courtiers on the Queen’s favour” (Goldwell 299–300; Duncan-Jones 8–9). On the basis of this same association, as well as Sidney’s “quasi-familial, quasi-legal connection to Elizabeth” through his father’s position as Lord Deputy Governor of Ireland and his uncle the Earl of Leicester’s position as Elizabeth’s favorite, Mazzola styles Sidney as the queen’s “stepson” (138, 147). 14  With reference to the “events” involving the Egyptian king, Stillman notes that “[t]he warning contained in these events for Basilius and his family is obvious” (Sidney’s Poetic Justice 128). 15  Stillman’s book on Sidney’s Old Arcadia and its eclogues, Sidney’s Poetic Justice, illustrates the complexity of the author’s method of relating one episode to another for poetic and philosophical ends.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

62

Sidney’s revisions of his first version of the Arcadia, which “might have begun,” according to Victor Skretkowicz, “as early as 1582 and continued into 1584” (General Introduction xvii), were made in the period following the height of the debate around the queen’s proposed marriage to Anjou. For Sidney, the aftermath of this debate involved withdrawal from court and temporary residence with his sister in her home at Wilton. It is unclear whether this was an expedient act on his part or a move dictated by Elizabeth. The editors of the Oxford collection, Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, in their introduction to Sidney’s letter, found that there was “no contemporary evidence that the Queen in any sense banished Sidney.” They refer to Greville’s assertion that Sidney “kept his access to her Majesty as before,” and to the letter Sidney wrote to the Earl of Leicester on August 2, 1580 to excuse his absence from court because of a cold, the effects of which had stopped his speech. The same letter attests to the belief that Sidney was absent from court during that year due to his parlous financial state (Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney 34; Greville 38; Correspondence 990–91). Steven May, writing in 1990, argued, partly on the basis of the recent discovery of two classes of documents in the Public Record Office in London, that Sidney retained his standing with Elizabeth from 1577 until his death, their relationship being punctuated with “significant marks of her esteem” (266). The “tradition,” as Duncan-Jones terms it, that Sidney retreated or was banished from court as a consequence of his “Letter to Queen Elizabeth” is supported by the evidence of contemporary sensitivity to the dissemination of “state papers” described by Beal in his analysis of the relatively recently discovered manuscript of Sidney’s letter that was owned by Alexander Dicsone. Dicsone was a double agent, who was “accepted into the circle of Leicester … as well as his nephew Sidney, and had access to the kind of political materials which then circulated within the relatively confined purview of the Court;” he later confessed to having “always … been totally loyal to the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots” and to having passed sensitive papers, including Sidney’s “Letter to Queen Elizabeth,” to the former French Ambassador Guillaume de L’Aubespine (Beal, “Philip Sidney’s Letter” 32, 23).16 Whichever was the case, Sidney’s revisions, which formed what is now known as the New Arcadia, introduced a number of new characters to the story of Basilius’s court, one of which is a favorable portrait of Elizabeth. In what has been characterized as a turn towards “violence and imprisonment rather than delight,” reflecting “Sidney’s frustration at enforced inactivity,” the revised Arcadia contains long episodes of captivity, siege, and battle (Norbrook 106). It is my contention that certain features of the revised romance, including the portrait of Elizabeth, also suggest a new strategy employed by its author to improve or

16

 For further discussion of the possibilities surrounding Sidney’s absence from court, including Sidney’s infamous “tennis-court quarrel” with Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, see Duncan-Jones 163–7. For a comprehensive discussion of the circulation of Sidney’s “Letter to Queen Elizabeth,” see ch. 4 of Beal’s In Praise of Scribes.

Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth

63

restore his standing with the queen, whatever the reason behind his absence from her court. In the New Arcadia, Sidney does not eschew the trope of disorderly surrogate parenthood.The story of Amasis and his stepmother is transformed into the story of Plangus and his stepmother Andromana, which is a considerably longer and more convoluted tale than its counterpart in the Old Arcadia, and, unlike Sidney’s original story, it intersects with the main plot of the romance. It is in the tournament held to celebrate the anniversary of Queen Andromana’s wedding that the shepherd-knight—clearly identifiable as Sidney’s self-representation, Philisides—appears. The figure of Queen Andromana (literally “man-mad”) of Iberia is a particularly evocative example of the lustful and murderous stepmother seen in Sidney’s original text and elsewhere. But on this occasion there is added significance in the descriptions of Andromana and the tournament held in her honor. The Iberian jousts are, as Berry notes, a clear allusion to “the custom at the Elizabethan court of honoring Elizabeth’s Accesssion Day, November 17, with jousts” (174). This parallel is made even more suggestive when one considers the appearance of Andromana herself: her “exceeding red hair with small eyes did, like ill companions, disgrace the other assembly of most commendable beauties” (95). As Berry observes, “Sidney’s own queen … had reddish hair when she was young, and when she was old she wore what Neale calls ‘a great reddish-coloured wig’” (175).17 Philisides, one of Andromana’s subjects, jousts for the Iberian side against the Corinthians, who joust in the service of Helen, Queen of Corinth. Sidney, by placing his self-representation in the service of a figure such as Andromana, with a resemblance to Elizabeth, in the context of a thinly-veiled Elizabethan tourney, is clearly participating—through the figure of the evil stepmother—in the contemporary discourse that associated Elizabeth with disorderly government. As such, he would seem to be in danger of causing even greater offence than might have been generated by his “Letter to Queen Elizabeth.” Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, this particular image of surrogacy should be considered in the broader context of the revised Arcadia, and more particularly with respect to the other side in Andromana’s tournament, the Corinthians. In the major new episodes added to the revised text, another wicked mother, Cecropia, Basilius’s ambitious sister-in-law, attempts—through rebellion, enforced marriage of her natural son, Amphialus, to one or other of Basilius’s daughters, imprisonment and torture—to achieve the throne of Arcadia. Allegorical readings of the figure of Cecropia as Elizabeth do not abound. No doubt because of Cecropia’s irredeemable wickedness, even a severely frustrated Sidney would have stopped short of imagining his queen in this light. Rather, Cecropia has been likened to Mary, Queen of Scots, a figure of hate in Elizabeth’s court until her execution on the queen’s orders in 1587 (Worden 173–6). Interestingly, Cecropia’s son, Amphialus, is described as “an excellent son of an evil mother” (New Arcadia 317). Moreover, his excellence is particularly valued by one of Sidney’s 17

 See Neale 28, 356.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

64

characters, another addition to the revised romance, Helen, Queen of Corinth, who unmistakably resembles Queen Elizabeth (Worden 16). Significantly, Helen of Corinth’s “government” is described as “such as hath been no less beautiful to men’s judgements than her beauty to the eyesight”; “she made her people (by peace) warlike, her courtiers (by sports) learned, her ladies (by love) chaste; for, by continual martial exercises without blood, she made them perfect in that bloody art” (253). This passage concludes with a reference to Helen as Diana that leaves the reader in no doubt as to the intended analogy: “it seemed that court to have been the marriage place of love and virtue, and that herself was a Diana apparelled in the garments of Venus” (254). Helen bears an unrequited love for Amphialus, and when he is apparently fatally wounded in his mother’s rebellion, it seems that Helen, with the help of her “excellent surgeon,” will bring him back, as it were, from the dead (New Arcadia 445).18 As the primary curator of Amphialus’s excellence, Helen would seem to be set to use her capacity for making “her people” (“her courtiers” and “her ladies”) to fashion him anew. This ability for the queen to fashion her people is key to understanding Sidney’s analogous relationship with Elizabeth, portrayed here as the queen who makes “her courtiers learned.” Sidney appears to be using his own education to acknowledge the queen’s learning, and to be participating in an exercise of mutual fashioning between courtier-poet and monarch. The poet’s share in this reciprocal arrangement is famously advocated in An Apology, where Sidney declares that the poet “worketh not only to make a Cyrus … but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses” (101). Cyrus was the putative founder of the Persian monarchy and the subject of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, believed to have been written “to teach a king his duties” (Shepherd 157–8). What fate Sidney intended for Amphialus and Helen cannot be known for certain. However, there is a strong linguistic association between the two characters, which may indicate what he had in mind for them. “Amphialus” is a name with a classical Greek origin, recorded in Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott’s A Greek-English Lexicon as ἀμφίᾰλος (73). As Liddell and Scott attest, it appears in Homer’s Odyssey as a constant epithet of Ithaca, in the formula, ἀμφιάλῳ Ἰθάκῃ. Here, it means “sea-girt” (I. 386, 395). Even more interestingly for the context of the New Arcadia, Liddell and Scott cite its use in Pindar’s Odes, where it is associated with Corinth and the Isthmian games: ἀμφιάλοισι Ποτειδᾶνος τεθμοῖσιν (“[In] Poseidon’s sea-girt festivals”) (“Olympian XIII,” l. 41). This and the Homeric epithet have their later Latin equivalent, also associated with Corinth: bimaris Corinthus (“Corinth, between two seas”), which can be found in, among other places, Horace’s Odes (I. vii. 2–3) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (V.407). This echoes A. C. Hamilton’s translation of “Amphialus” as “between two seas” (139).19 18

 Helen’s surgeon’s extraordinary skill is first demonstrated in his transformation of Parthenia’s appearance (New Arcadia 45). 19  For Pindar’s Greek see the Perseus Digital Library: http://www.perseus.tufts. edu. The relevant passage from Ovid (bimari gens orta Corintho) is translated by Arthur

Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth

65

In Book I of the New Arcadia, Musidorus (in the guise of Palladius) visits the Isthmus of Corinth in search of Pyrocles (known during this episode as Daiphantus). The narrator records that he “passed through Achaia and Sicyonia to the Corinthians, proud of their two seas, to learn whether by the strait of that isthmus it were possible to know of his [Daiphantus’s] passage” (67–8). Sidney, who was clearly aware of Corinth’s position between two bodies of water, is also likely, as a well-known reader of Horace, to have recognized the association between its Latin epithet and its Greek antecedent, and, therefore, the philological connection between Helen of Corinth and Amphialus. As such, it seems that the destinies of these two characters are entwined. Amphialus, who is decidedly less than virtuous, might be considered an unlikely character to represent Sidney in his own text. Nevertheless, there are grounds on which to make this association, not least the transference of certain attributes to Amphialus from the most notable of Sidney’s self-representations, Philisides. The appearance of Philisides in the New Arcadia, in Andromana’s tournament, is actually short-lived, occupying 44 lines in the Oxford edition; and the subsequent displacement of Philisides by Amphialus is signaled by the assignment of the poem in which Philisides’s origins in Samothea are narrated from the shepherd himself to Amphialus, for whom the poem is a vain fantasy of a pastoral idyll wrapped in a dream: Methought—nay, sure, I was—I was in fairest wood Of Samothea land, a land which whilom stood An honour to the world (while honour was their end, And while their line of years they did in virtue spend); But there I was, and there my calmy thoughts I fed On nature’s sweet repast, as healthful senses led. (347)

A suggestive aspect of this transposition is that Philisides’s original dream in the Old Arcadia, a vision of Mira, is, as Berry notes, “a vision that juxtaposes amorous passion and political estrangement … a figure for [Sidney’s] relationship with Elizabeth” (179). In the New Arcadia, Amphialus believes his own dream of Mira is really about Basilius’s daughter, Philoclea, thus seemingly erasing the allusion to Sidney’s queen. However, attentive readers would quickly recognize that Amphialus’s true place is beside Helen, whose credentials as a figure for the author’s relationship with his monarch are undeniable. And if that were not sufficient proof of Amphialus’s status as one of Sidney’s politically significant personae, there are even further grounds on which to make the association between Sidney and Amphialus. Firstly, the song of lamentation sung at Amphialus’s apparent demise, in Book III, characterizes him as “the shepherd high / Who most the silly shepherd’s pipe did prize” (446), which might be said of a loftier version Golding as “folke of Corinth with the double Seas” (The. xv. Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso 63 [misprinted as “64”]).

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

66

of Philisides, Sidney’s alter ego in the Old Arcadia. And secondly, as Kenneth Myrick notes, Amphialus undoubtedly bears in some particulars a striking resemblance to Sidney himself. They are alike in courtesy, in energetic leadership, in courage and skill in tourney, perhaps in melancholy. Each, until he reached manhood, was heir to his uncle, Basilius and Leicester respectively; and each had his hopes of inheritance cut off by his uncle’s marriage, though Leicester’s son, unlike the princesses of Arcadia, died in infancy. (237–8)

Of course, it is not necessary for all the particulars of Amphialus’s story to mirror Sidney’s life for the parallel to be instructive. Sidney would not have described his own mother as “a woman of a haughty heart” (61), as Amphialus does; nor would he have likened her in any way to Cecropia. Myrick speculates that “a Freudian critic could argue that Amphialus represents the author as he might have been, had he not suppressed one side of his nature” (238). It is clear, however, that Sidney dramatizes a transfer, from Philisides to Amphialus, of the primary literary representation of himself in his own work. Indeed, rather than suppressing his dark side, one might say that Sidney wished to be thought as “excellent” as Helen thought Amphialus. By replacing Philisides with Amphialus, I suggest, Sidney is initiating a new mode of consiliary address, which, in the ruined figure of Amphialus, acknowledges the exhaustion of previous discourses, including the hackneyed trope of the vicious step-dame.20 The juxtaposition of Helen and Andromana, as alternative visions of queenship, presents the choice in stark terms; but the indirect means by which the right choice is made—by which Amphialus, Sidney’s new self-representation, finds his true home—was no doubt a necessary precaution. The indirect method by which such convictions are discerned would seem to reflect the necessary mode of literary practice during Elizabeth’s reign. As Maureen Quilligan puts it, with regard to Sidney’s attempts to counsel Elizabeth, “poetry itself—the apologetic, defensive practice of it—may be yet another strategy against the queen, its best protection being its indirection” (180). Andrew Hadfield, in Literature, Politics and National Identity, draws attention to the “anxiety regarding the form of public/national political participation and representation” evident in the Old and New Arcadias. With reference to the figure of the “poor painter,” who loses both hands in the rebellion of the revised text (New Arcadia 282), Hadfield suggests that “the painter without hands resembles a gagged Sidney whose aesthetic work has been mutilated.” Based on the conjecture that Sidney’s revisions were, in part, influenced by state censorship, Hadfield’s argument suggests that, despite 20

 Kinney places Amphialus at the center of a critique of Elizabethan knightly romance in which Helen, “a virgin queen whose public mythology is akin to that of Elizabeth Tudor,” reclaims “a thoroughly problematized, morally exhausted, and practically moribund version of chivalric romance” (50).

Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth

67

their different rhetorical approaches and fates, Sidney and Stubbs were subject to similar political strictures (165–8).21 Nevertheless, Sidney’s reconfiguration of the “hierarchical monarch-subject relation,” is, in its very terms of engagement, a ray of hope. Sidney posits a monarch-subject relationship that is analogous to the relationship between himself and his sister, figured in the prefatory letter to the Arcadia. As such, even in terms of the trope of surrogacy, Elizabeth would, like the countess, have the necessary virtues to care for Sidney’s child-work. Such a configuration presents a view of the plight of poets and poetry that is considerably more optimistic than that in An Apology, where Sidney wonders “why England (the mother of excellent minds) should be grown so hard a stepmother to poets” (131). Indeed, Sidney, elsewhere in the same text, propounds his belief that “of all sciences … is our poet the monarch” (113). His objective in the New Arcadia would appear to be to improve the lot of poets by entering a mutually beneficial pact with the mother of the English nation; and he seems to have passed this vision on to his friend Fulke Greville. The relationship between a courtier-poet and the monarch, in particular, has often been characterized as mutually generative: each “makes” the other.22 Greville, in his “A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney,” interrogates the relationship between authors, particularly courtiers like himself and Sidney, and their monarchs. Greville’s Jacobean text, ostensibly a justification of the life of a prominent Elizabethan, has significance for reading relationships from both reigns. Indeed, as Elizabeth A. Spiller argues, Greville challenges King James’s conception of himself as a “monarch-poet,” “maker” and a “nourish father” to the Church and nation by privileging Sidney’s version of the poet-monarch in An Apology over that presented by the king, primarily in the Basilikon Doron (435–6).23 As such, Greville valorizes the mutually fashioning relationship between Elizabeth and her subjects, especially the poets.24 The ways, according to Spiller, in which James becomes a “maker,” in effect, as a sacred king, “an analogue to the divine Maker” (Stillman, Philip Sidney ix), are as follows: 21  See also Hadfield, “Sidney’s ‘poor painter’.” For Sidney and censorship, see Patterson 32–51. 22  For a discussion of this mutuality, see Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject.” 23  In the Basilikon Doron, James tells his son to be “a louing nourish-father to the Church” (24) and act as “communis parens” to his people (32); this advice follows that given in Isaiah 49.23 (from the “King James” Bible of 1611): “And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queenes thy nursing mothers” (both the Basilikon Doron and Isaiah are quoted in Spiller 438). 24  As Spiller points out, “Greville’s analysis relies upon dominant Elizabethan aesthetic theories of the relationship between poets and the state,” in which “poets … depicted a reciprocal relationship in which Elizabeth [a poet in her own right, often figured as a poet by other poets, and through ‘her living example’] ‘made’ their poetry, even as they could help ‘make’ her through the images they created” (436–7). For a helpful overview of Elizabeth as an author within the Elizabethan writing culture, see Bell.

68

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England he exercises authority and benevolence over his subjects for the increase of land and its people. As a royal father, he produces offspring who in turn ensure the succession not just of his family and line, but of all England. As a patron, he confers titles and honors creating new gentlemen of his court favorites. Finally, James becomes a “makar” when he authors his son [Henry] by writing the Basilikon Doron. (436)

For Greville, James’s conception of the poet-monarch pales beside the “more natural and productive form of art” embodied by Sidney’s life (437). Greville’s emphasis is on the poet, the life of his friend as the ideal template, rather than on the poetry: “the life itself of true worth did (by way of example) far exceed the picture of it in any moral precepts” (3). Greville contrasts Sidney’s “intent [in the Arcadia] … to turn the barren philosophy precepts into pregnant images of life” with his (Sidney’s) death-bed realization (in Greville’s interpretation) that his works were mere imperfect “shadows” deserving of “no other legacy but the fire” (10–11).25 Nevertheless, the point still stands: Sidney is a model to his queen, as she is to him. Adapting Sidney’s employment in An Apology of “procreative language,” which defines “the means by which the poet can create his readers” (including royal ones), Greville portrays his friend as a “king-‘maker’” (Spiller 445). This characterization is authorized by Sidney’s statement, in An Apology, that the poet “worketh not only to make a Cyrus … but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses” (101). Greville makes it clear that Elizabeth (unlike James) recognizes her responsibility for “fashioning” her subjects: she is “more desirous to find ways to fashion her people than colours or causes to punish them” (37). This lesson is one of the main lessons that Greville draws from Sidney’s attempt to counsel his monarch through the “Letter” (Spiller 449). As I noted earlier, there were significant aspects of the Countess of Pembroke’s literary practice which had their inspiration and precedent in Sidney’s own method, whether it was in the Psalms themselves or the poems from the Tixall manuscript. Indeed, in an echo of Sidney’s consiliary role, one of the Tixall poems is addressed to the queen. The poem “Even Now That Care” dedicates the Psalms to Elizabeth, and was probably appended to the copy intended for presentation to Elizabeth on the occasion of the queen’s planned visit to Wilton in 1599. It is a poem of both praise and admonition. The countess compliments the queen on her learning, both implicitly, through the breadth of the poem’s scholarly allusions, and explicitly: “But knowing more thy grace, abler thy mind” (l. 12, Selected Works 159). There are also lines praising the flourishing of the arts in England during Elizabeth’s reign which make the queen’s co-creative role, with the artists themselves, explicit: “For in our work what bring we but thine own? / What English is, by many names is thine” (lines 41–2). Nevertheless, the countess does not forget her brother, even here. The admonitory aspects of this poem dwell on Elizabeth’s 25  Sidney’s request to destroy his works is a gesture with a classical precedent: Virgil also asked for the Aeneid to be destroyed (see Buxton 246).

Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth

69

failure, in the countess’s eyes, to heed the advice of Sidney and his political allies (chiefly the Earl of Leicester, the countess and Sidney’s uncle), who had, in earlier decades, wished the queen were more active in defense of the Protestant cause, in England and on the continent.26 By alluding to her brother’s incomplete work, both literary and political, the countess reminds Elizabeth of her past (and present) responsibilities: the queen is the one “On whom in chief dependeth to dispose / What Europe acts in these most active times” (lines 7–8).27 Ironically, Sidney’s death, fighting for the Protestant cause in Europe, came as a result of the queen’s conceding the need for a more active policy in defense of their religion. His obvious influence over his friend and sister notwithstanding, the Elizabethan Sidney, in the theories of An Apology for Poetry, but also in his literary practice in the Arcadia, conceived of a more ambitious role for his poetry and prose than his friend Fulke Greville could conceive of under the reign of James I. Sidney believed that by employing the rhetorical and literary devices of his advanced learning he could speak truth to power, both directly and indirectly. He recognized the danger in presuming to counsel the monarch on sensitive issues such as her proposed marriage, but also understood the reciprocal relationship between poet and monarch, in which each “makes” the other. This allowed him, by replacing the figure of the archetypal step-dame with that of the learned prince, to indirectly advise Elizabeth. Elizabeth, as the metaphorical mother to the nation, was often associated, by her critics, with cruel parental surrogacy. However, she was figured by Sidney as a more beneficent figure, who, in the guise of Helen of Corinth, made her courtiers learned. Sidney employs a sophisticated literary strategy, taking existing discursive practices and adapting them to new textual and political contexts. His example inspired the Countess of Pembroke in her continuing roles as patron and unofficial counsellor to Elizabeth, and helped Fulke Greville formulate his role under a new sovereign. Regardless of who was actually on the throne, Sidney’s self-representations retained their power to fashion the identity of the monarch. Bibliography Alexander, Gavin. Writing after Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.

26  Hannay sees most of the countess’s literary projects, after Sidney’s death, as continuations of the forward Protestant cause (16). Alexander questions the logic of Hannay’s religio-political readings, which, he contends, depend “too much on supposition.” He nevertheless concedes that the “strongest evidence of political intent” can be seen in “Even Now That Care” (105–7). 27  Hannay notes the significance of the word “active” in line 8, which was code (in the countess’s circle) for “busy in the Protestant cause” (90).

70

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Aylmer, John. An harborowe for faithfull and trewe subiectes agaynst the late blowne blaste, concerninge the gouernment of wemen. 1559. EEBO. Web. September 16, 2011. Beal, Peter. In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in SeventeenthCentury England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. Print. ———. “Philip Sidney’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth and that ‘False Knave’ Alexander Dicsone.” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 11 (2002): 1–51. Print. Bell, Ilona. Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Print. Berry, Edward. The Making of Sir Philip Sidney. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998. Print. Buxton, John. Elizabethan Taste. 1963. London: Macmillan, 1966. Print. Cleaver, Robert. A Godlie Forme of Householde Governnement: for the Ordering of Private Families, according to the direction of God’s Word. 1600. EEBO. Web. September 16, 2011. Coch, Christine. “‘Mother of My Country’: Elizabeth I and Tudor Constructions of Motherhood.” The Mysteries of Elizabeth I: Selections from English Literary Renaissance. Ed. Kirby Farrell and Kathleen Swaim. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2003. 134–61. Print. The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney. Vol. 1. Ed. Roger Kuin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Print. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991. Print. Eggert, Katherine. Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Print. Elizabeth I, Queen. Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. Print. Frye, Susan. Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print. Goldwell, Henry. “A brief declaration of the shows performed before the Queen’s Majesty and the French Ambassadors” (1581). Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, Including Astrophil and Stella. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. 229–310. Print. Goodman, Christopher. How Superior Powers Ought to Be Obeyed. Geneva, 1558. EEBO. Web. September 16, 2011. Gouge, William. Of Domesticall Duties. 1622. EEBO. Web. September 16, 2011. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Print. Greville, Fulke. “A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney.” The Prose Works of Fulke Greville. Ed. John Gouws. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Print. Hadfield, Andrew. Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print.

Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth

71

———. “Sidney’s ‘poor painter’ and John Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf.” Sidney Journal 15.2 (1997): 45–8. Print. Hager, Alan. Dazzling Images: The Masks of Sir Philip Sidney. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1991. Print. Hamilton, A. C. Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of His Life and Works. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. Print. Hanford, James Holly and Sara Ruth Watson. “Personal Allegory in the Arcadia: Philisides and Lelius.” Modern Philology 32.1 (1934): 1–10. Print. Hannay, Margaret P. Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Print. Homer. The Odyssey. Vol. 1. Trans. A. T. Murray. 1919. London: Heinemann, 1976. Print. Loeb Classical Library. Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus). The Odes of Horace. Trans. James Michie. 1967. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Print. Kinney, Clare R. “Chivalry Unmasked: Courtly Spectacle and Abuses of Romance in Sidney’s New Arcadia.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 35.1 (1995): 35–52. Print. Knox, John. The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Geneva, 1558. EEBO. Web. September 16, 2011. Lamb, Mary Ellen. Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. Print. Levin, Carole. “All the Queen’s Children: Elizabeth I and the Meanings of Motherhood.” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 30.1 (2004): 57–76. Print. Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. 5th ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1863. Print. Lyly, John. Endymion. Ed. David Bevington. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Print. Revels Plays. Maus, Katharine Eisaman. “A Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body.” Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Ed. James Grantham Turner. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.182–209. Print. May, Steven. “Sir Philip Sidney and Queen Elizabeth.” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 2 (1990): 257–68. Print. Mazzola, Elizabeth. “‘Natural’ Boys and ‘Hard’ Stepmothers: Sidney and Elizabeth.”Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England. Ed. Corinne S. Abate. Burlington: Ashgate, 2003. 131–49. Print. McLaren, A. N. Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print. Mears, Natalie. “Counsel, Public Debate, and Queenship: John Stubbs’s The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf, 1579.” The Historical Journal 44.3 (2001): 629–50. Print. Montrose, Louis Adrian. The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Print.

72

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

———. “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text.” Literary Theory/ Renaissance Texts. Ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. 303–40. Print. Myrick, Kenneth Orne. Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1935. Print. Neale, J. E. Queen Elizabeth I. 1934. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957. Print. Norbrook, David. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge, 1984. Print. Osborn, James M. Young Philip Sidney: 1572–1577. New Haven: Yale UP, 1972. Print. Ovid. Trans. Arthur Golding. The. xv. Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis. 1567. EEBO. Web. September 16, 2011. ———. Metamorphoses. Books I–VIII. Trans. Frank Justus Miller; rev. G.P. Goold. 3rd ed. 1977. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004. Print. Loeb Classical Library. Patterson, Annabel M. Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1984. Print. Pindar. The Odes of Pindar. Trans. C. M. Bowra. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Print. Proclamation 642, “Denouncing Stubbs’s Book, The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf.” Tudor Royal Proclamations. Ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969. 445–9. Print. Quilligan, Maureen. “Sidney and His Queen.” The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture. Ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. 171–96. Print. Robertson, Jean. Commentary. Sir Philip Sidney. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia). Ed. Jean Robertson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. xv–xli. Print. ———. General Introduction. Sir Philip Sidney. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia). Ed. Jean Robertson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. xv–xli. Print. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Complete Works. Ed. Stanley Wells et al. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 2005. 401–23. Print. Shenk, Linda. The Image of Elizabeth I in Politics and Poetry. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Print. Shepherd, Geoffrey. Notes. Philip Sidney. An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy. Ed. Geoffrey Shepherd. 1965. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1973. 143–237. Print. Sidney, Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia). Ed. Jean Robertson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. Print. ———. An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy. Ed. Geoffrey Shepherd.1965. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1973. Print.

Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and Step-dame Elizabeth

73

———. “A Letter Written by Sir Philip Sidney to Queen Elizabeth, Touching her Marriage with Monsieur.” Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. 46–57. Print. ———. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia). Ed. Victor Skretkowicz. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Print. Sidney Herbert, Mary, Countess of Pembroke. Selected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005. Print. The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney. Ed. Hannibal Hamlin et al. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print. Skretkowicz, Victor. General Introduction. Philip Sidney. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia). Ed. Victor Skretkowicz. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. xiii–lii. Print. ———. Textual Introduction. Philip Sidney. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia). Ed. Victor Skretkowicz. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. liii–lxxxii. Print. ——— “‘A More Lively Monument’: Philisides in Arcadia.” Sir Philip Sidney’s Achievements. Ed. M. J. B. Allen et al. New York: AMS, 1990. 194–200. Print. Spiller, Elizabeth A. “The Counsel of Fulke Greville: Transforming the Jacobean ‘Nourish Father’ through Sidney’s ‘Nursing Father.’” Studies in Philology 97.4 (2000): 433–53. Print. Stillman, Robert E. Sidney's Poetic Justice: The Old Arcadia, Its Eclogues, and Renaissance Pastoral Traditions. London: Associated UP, 1986. Print. ———. Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. Print. Stubbs, John. The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf Whereinto England is Like to be Swallowed. 1579. EEBO. Web. September 16, 2011. Vanhoutte, Jacqueline. “Elizabeth I as Stepmother.” English Literary Renaissance 39.2 (2009): 315–35. Print. Worden, Blair. The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Print. Woudhuysen, H. R. Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Print. Yates, Frances A. “Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20.1/2 (1957): 4–25. Print.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 4

“As like Hermione as is her picture”: The Shadow of Incest in The Winter’s Tale Diane Purkiss

A whole other set of stories might be shadowing the action if we enter the drama through Leontes’s imagination, an imagination flagged as a study of paranoia, irrational fears and even terrors that are never fully realized. The primal imagination of the sophisticated man is a surprise, perhaps especially a surprise to the character himself. Shakespeare here takes the amazing risk of creating a man who doesn’t know himself. Inside him is a kind of cultural unconscious made up of despised and discarded rags and scraps of culture, of the kind usually made the repository of old wives—and mothers. The whole play is about the arrival of narratives from that (cultural) imagination, narratives which have no other basis, shadow narratives which make no sense to anyone but Leontes, who manages with their help to make his life into the stuff of his worst nightmares, winter’s tales never told and never made real that tilt his life to an unbearable series of injustices. Mamillius’s untold tale is symbolic of the whole play, and gives the whole play its name. He never tells it: mamillius A sad tale’s best for winter. I have one Of sprites and goblins. hermione Let’s have that, good sir. Come on, sit down, come on, and do your best To fright me with your sprites. You’re powerful at it. mamillius There was a man— hermione Nay, come sit down, then on. mamillius [sitting] Dwelt by a churchyard. —I will tell it softly, Yon crickets shall not hear it. 1 hermione Come on, then, and give’t me in mine ear. (2.1.27–34)

He is interrupted by his father, but it may be, too, that he has been whispering it into the ear of Hermione, who credits him with its power. Yet it is very truly a mother’s tale, told by a son.2 Other untold tales keep half-appearing in like manner: “Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale” (5.3.117–18); and “This news  All Shakespeare quotations are from The Norton Shakespeare.  For mothers and sons, see Bishop and Partee.

1 2

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

76

which is called true is so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion” (5.2.25–6); and “Like an old tale still, which will have matter to rehearse, though credit be asleep and not an ear open. He was torn to pieces with a bear” (5.2.55–7). Yet these “old tales” are flagged as unreliable and incredible even as they come true. Why then should Leontes doubt his own stories? What do the audience make of this succession of part-told tales and paranoid imaginings based on other, never-told tales? The probative action often verifies the most unexpected imaginings, so that we are asked to engage with terrible stories the play prompts us to consider, terrible possibilities from the same narrative spaces. Leontes’s nightmare “tales” are a sharp reminder that all happy endings carry in themselves the terrible shadow of what did not quite happen. As the audience engages in diegesis, reading “ahead,” eagerly to try to guess what will happen, their apprehensions are stirred by the beginnings of very ominous narratives which do not in the end come to fulfilment. What Leontes’s tortured narratives and actions also call to mind most often are the stories told in ballads. The audience would have been able to hear the shadowy stories of what does not happen. For the purposes of this paper, I want to focus on just one of the nightmare worlds which Leontes evades by a hair’s breadth, the world of incest. The whole play turns away—or rather, brakes and skids away with an audible squeal of tires—from the incestuous desires usually triggered when the child becomes unknown to or unrecognized by the father, mother, or sibling. I’ve argued in the past that the theme of the lost girl plays with and is enriched by numberless untold folktales in which the orphaned girl acquires magical powers which restore her family (“Fractious”). In a similar way, the plot of The Winter’s Tale shimmers with the possibility of incestuous desires, stories which would have been familiar to its audiences from ballads, and yet those desires are never fully actualized. Rather, the audience is free to speculate about the possibilities of what follows upon child abandonment and the failure to recognize the daughter when the mother has been lost. We do not have to travel far from Shakespeare to find this plot in full. In Robert Greene’s Pandosto, the queen—Bellaria—dies, and she remains dead. The king meets his daughter Fawnia, and is overwhelmed by passion for her: “Pandosto contrarie to his aged yeares began to be somewhat tickled with the beauty of Fawnia, in so much that hee could take no rest, but cast in his old head a thousand new devises” (48). He woos Fawnia, unaware that she is his daughter, and tries to propose to her. Eventually her true identity is revealed, but his deadly recollection “(… that contrarie to the lawe of nature he had lusted after his owne Daughter) moved with these desperate thoughts, he fell into a melancholie fit, and to close up the Comedie with a Tragicall stratageme, he slewe himselfe” (56).3 3

 Apart from Greene’s own text, there was also French dramatist Alexandre Hardy’s play Pandoste, around 1625. The play has been lost, like the untold tales, but we know of it because what does survive is Laurent Mahelot’s sketches of its scenery, examples of décor simultané, in which a single stage set served for all of a play’s scenes. This is an

The Shadow of Incest in The Winter’s Tale

77

Shakespeare goes to extraordinary lengths—or to the lengths of the extraordinary—to avoid this scenario. The plot’s evasion of incest, like its evasion of infanticide, is a sign, the sign of Leontes’s absolution for his grave sins. But Shakespeare has to go to extremes to make this abrupt turn away, to dismiss the shadow of what might have been. It requires a death, the death of the child Mamillius, and it requires a miraculous resurrection, a miracle statue. It is, in other words, the reason for Hermione’s remarkable and magical survival, for in folktales the father’s incestuous longings are triggered by the mother’s death and the daughter as her reincarnation.4 So the living statue of Hermione is a displacement of this plot of the revived wife in new guise as the daughter, and thus brings that plot to an acceptable conclusion. At first it seems that the only way for the play to avoid the incest plot is infanticide by the father. As Frances Dolan has noted, the play on possibilities of extremes begins with the chance that Leontes will actually kill his infant daughter (Dangerous Familiars 166). Leontes far outdoes Lady Macbeth in this scene. She speaks of violently killing a baby, but that baby is only imaginary. Leontes orders that a real baby who is lying in front of him should be thrown on the fire, a baby who the audience knows is his daughter: Thou, traitor, hast set on thy wife to this. My child? Away with’t! Even thou, that hast A heart so tender o’er it, take it hence And see it instantly consumed with fire. (2.3.131–4)

The act of burning is one with which he has already threatened Paulina: leontes Once

more, take her hence. unworthy and unnatural lord Can do no more. leontes I’ll ha’ thee burnt. paulina I care not. It is an heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in’t. (2.3.112–16) paulina A most

Here, the fire partakes of the spooky ontology of Leontes’s imagination; Paulina does not mean that the fire would not burn a heretic, but that a martyr makes the

apt metaphor for the way the narrative appears layered because it forces the audience to consider multiple possibilities while then compelling them to choose a single one. As well, there were Francis Sabie’s poems that paraphrased the plot: The Fishermans Tale: Of the famous Actes, Life, and Loue of Cassander, a Grecian Knight, 1595, and Flora’s Fortune. The second part and finishing of the Fisher-mans Tale, 1595. 4  See, for example, the tales collected by D. L. Ashliman.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

78

fire something other than a foretaste of hell. In reminding the audience of the Marian burnings, Paulina ensures that they appreciate the symbolism. The symbol of death by burning was a complex one for Shakespeare’s audience, who could have read Leontes’s clear intentions against the likely outcome. For Shakespeare’s audience, burning would have recalled the Marian martyrs they had read about in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, but also the burning of women for crimes of “petty treason,” or husband-murder.5 As Gaston Bachelard notes, this illustrates the metaphoricity of fire as bodily heat, and hence as (unruly) sexuality; love is also understood as a fire, a painful fire.6 So for Leontes to want to burn the baby already half-hints at a possible wish to kindle a fire in her, and to erase her identity in order to do so. Indeed, Leontes seeks a more and more comprehensive erasure of the baby’s identity, overtly to blot out the shame of bastardy, but perhaps also to punish his wife vicariously. The audience might also have thought of Robert Southwell’s poem “The Burning Babe,” which translates the crucifixion into the disturbing image of the incarnation of Christ as incineration. The speaker is shivering in the snow of winter when he is surprised by sudden heat: A pretty babe all burninge bright did in the ayre appeare Who scorched with excessive heate, such floodes of teares did shed As though his floodes should quench his flames, which with his teares were fedd Alas quoth he but newly borne in fiery heates I frye Yet none approach to warme their hartes or feele my fire but I.

Here, the lost baby of the wilderness is Jesus Christ. So will I melt into a bath to washe them in my bloode. With this he vanisht out of sight and swiftly shronke awaye, And straight I called unto mynde, that it was Christmas daye. (14)

Sinful mankind is to be washed in a bath of dissolved baby, a grisly image. Leontes’s fantasy of throwing the girl-baby he disowns into the fire brings together the idea of complete erasure and exculpation, the symbolic destruction of the treacherous and adulterous wife, and the sexualized sin of touching fire, interchangeable with the incest taboo. Burning the baby would consummate and fix his reading of her as his to erase, though not his to raise. Such acts of erasure aim to destroy inheritance; Leontes’s fantasy parallels the burning of the wife for petty treason, of the heretic for his heresy, and above all the grisly castration of the traitor on the scaffold and the burning of his genitals before him, symbolically 5

 Gaston Bachelard shows us that purification in pain is metaphorically central to death by burning. 6  All points here are the result of discussions with Danielle Yardy; my grateful thanks to her.

The Shadow of Incest in The Winter’s Tale

79

ensuring that not only he but his entire line is blotted out. Technically, Hermione is guilty of petty treason in committing adultery. On May 9, 1726, Catherine Hayes was brought to the Tyburn gallows, where she was bound to a stake with iron chains, and the faggots, which had been placed around her feet, were lit. The executioner passed a cord around her neck and attempted to strangle Catherine before the flames could reach her. But on this occasion the prisoner was denied this modicum of mercy. The flames burned too quickly, and according to The Daily Journal, the executioner threw the timber not onto the fire but at the prisoner in an effort to end her misery and silence her cries. In this he apparently succeeded, as one of the pieces of timber he threw broke her skull, and “her brains came plentifully out.” It took another three hours for the body of Catherine Hayes to be reduced to ashes (Lockwood 31–2). The kind of tale told here would have been familiar to Shakespeare and his audience. It is notable that while all insist that Catherine’s body is burned, there is no intent to cause her any pain. The purpose of the burning is not pain, but the erasure of her rebellious body. The notion of the wiping out of treason as spousal betrayal is a constant. In her article “Tracking the Petty Traitor Across Genres,” Frances Dolan lists the many sources for the burning of wives convicted of “petty treason,” husband-murder.7 This would ensure the audience’s familiarity with this motif of burning. It begins to seem possible that, as king, Leontes is enacting upon the body of the baby the punishment he has been unable to carry out upon his wife’s body, the punishment for petty treason. Adultery in a queen was treason. Shakespeare, who had been working on the reign of Henry VIII and the figure of Anne Boleyn for All Is True, knew that Anne had been forced to petition the king for execution by beheading; her conviction would have allowed burning. While women found guilty of treason—grand or petty—were burnt at the stake, men were hanged, drawn and quartered. Hanged until nearly dead—in a manner paralleling the near-strangulation or actual strangulation of women sentenced to be burned—men were then cut down and “drawn”: first disemboweled, and then castrated. The entrails were then burned before the man’s face. Then the man was cut into quarters and beheaded, so his parts could be sent to the four corners of England as a warning to others.8 Strangulation implies that the erasure begins with the voice and the breath. Strangulation is also symbolic decapitation. The identity of the condemned man is removed in pieces; first the clothes, stripped, then the social role as the condemned is dragged on a hurdle and pelted with garbage, and finally the brains and voice are erased, last to go before the genitals, which are burned before the victim’s gaze, a reminder of what has gone, and a visible erasure of posterity (Abbott 225ff; Klemp; Yetter). So for male traitors, the method of execution also involved burning. The whole process of hanging, drawing and quartering was to rip away identity piece by piece 7  These include the case of Mrs. Thomas Beaste, Mrs. Browne, Margaret FerneSeede, Mrs. James, and Anne Wallen, as well as that of Alice Arden. 8  On this ritual see McKenzie and Royer.

80

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

until there was nothing left, not even memory or inheritance. Part of being convicted for treason was an attainder, whereby the traitor’s heirs were cut off from inheriting the estate. This was symbolized in the execution process by the castration of the victim and the burning of his entrails before his eyes, an act which Sir Edward Coke said was to “show his issue was disinherited with corruption of blood” (Bellamy 202–4). The blood of the traitor was therefore portrayed as corrupt and in need of burning. Like the fires lit for St John’s Day, designed to purify the air so that London should not be overwhelmed by plague in the “Dog Days” of July and August, the fire of drawing was designed to cleanse the body of the nation (Hutton 311–12). Just as the baby’s burning enacts on its body the sins of the mother, thus erasing the mother, so the attainting and castration remove paternity. With maternity and paternity both symbolically excised, at least in Leontes’s imagination, the baby is freed—dangerously freed—to be one day desired. The underlying idea in such executions is that the punishment both repeats and inverts the nature of the crime. This is especially clear in the Henrician punishment for poisoners by boiling: The preamble of the statute of Henry VIII (which made poisoning treason) in 1531 recites that one Richard Roose (or Coke), a cook, by putting poison in some food intended for the household of the bishop of Rochester and for the poor of the parish of Lambeth, killed a man and woman. He was found guilty of treason and sentenced to be boiled to death without benefit of clergy. He was publicly boiled at Smithfield. In the same year a maid-servant for poisoning her mistress was boiled at King’s Lynn. (“Boiling”)9

So the condemned boiled in their pots, having wronged the alchemy of cooking by brewing up poison. At the same time, boiling is also a form of dissolution. Leontes has witches on the brain. He has already accused Paulina of witchcraft, and threatened to burn her. Now he revises one of the witchiest speeches of Lady Macbeth, who says: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this. (Macbeth 1.7.56–9)

The closeness to Lady Macbeth’s speech on resolution is striking. Leontes declares: If thou refuse And wilt encounter with my wrath, say so. 9  The Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London has an account of a case at Smithfield, in which a man was fastened to a chain and let down into boiling water several times until he was dead (Henry VIII, 13th year).

The Shadow of Incest in The Winter’s Tale

81

The bastard brains with these my proper hands Shall I dash out. Go, take it to the fire. (2.3.138–41)

In Leontes’s version, the emphasis falls on the word ‘bastard’; the brains of a bastard are contrasted with the “proper,” self-same hands, the hands with unproblematic identity. Like Lady Macbeth’s, Leontes’s crime remains a crime of vehement speech, a thought-crime; he does not actually do it. But Lady Macbeth’s infanticidal fantasy is subjunctive—“I would,” meaning that she would do this if it became necessary to do it in order to keep her oath—while Leontes’s fantasy is in the future tense, and not a mere supposing—“I shall,” meaning the fully weighted threat of what he will do if his servant refuses to obey him. What alters the meanings still more is the presence of a real baby, a particular baby. Lady Macbeth’s threat is hypothetical, but Leontes is making a real threat against a real child. And he uses the language of murder more consistently than Lady Macbeth; she lapses at one point and designates the baby’s sex, “his boneless gums,” but Leontes designates the sex of the infant with the more clinical “female bastard”: the words rub off on one another, bastard delegitimizing female and vice versa. Till then, the brains are themselves bastard, not even accompanied by the baby body. There was a war, a holy war, between brain and heart as these lines were written. Medical science had come to understand that the brain was the seat of thought and feeling, but Western culture had invested in the heart. The brain was secular, and increasingly, the heart was sacred, as Scott Manning Stevens has demonstrated (26–83). Even in 2015, few love songs declare, “Baby, I give you my brain.” As William Slights has shown in his book The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, scientific reassessments were often correlated with callousness. And there is something especially maternal about the heart, because of Jacques Guillemeau’s notion that breast milk owes its whiteness and purity to the heart-fire of maternal love. Drawn up from the womb by that fire, the impure blood of the mother is redeemed in the warmth of her feelings.10 So in both speeches, Leontes’s as much as Lady Macbeth’s, the femininity of maternal love is brutally excised as the baby’s body is understood and assessed without the participation of that heart. Just as Lady Macbeth renounces the maternal breast, so Leontes has physically pushed it aside from the baby, freeing him to dash out its brains. In reducing the baby to a set of vulnerable brains, both speakers reduce themselves to brains without hearts, too. Such beings are monstrous prodigies in Julius Caesar, monstrous in part because their protean nature as metaphors leads directly to Caesar’s omened death; when he hears that “they could not find a heart within the beast,” he offers an interpretation about masculinity and courage, reading “heart” as a sign for bravery: The gods do this in shame of cowardice. Caesar should be a beast without a heart 10

 See also Trubowitz.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

82

If he should stay at home today for fear. No, Caesar shall not. (2. 2.41–4)

The whole point of omens is their inarticulacy. They are useless because the mind can do little with them. To see “a beast without a heart” is for Caesar a threat to his reputation for courage; if he shrinks from the Capitol, his cowardice, his lack of heart, will be laid bare to the sight of all. Caesar is making a kind of pun on the word cor. But the heartless beasts are actually the conspirators, out to destroy legitimacy because they lack heart, mercy or compassion. The body only seems readable; it is as polyvalent and mysterious as any other system of signs. What were of course far more common in the monsterology of Shakespeare’s time were beasts without heads, babies born headless, and they signified the state’s lack of control over the wriggling body of the people (Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics 163–85). In making the baby into a monster, Leontes offers to re-place her as the prodigious sign of transgression that he seeks. We demand that the body is readable for many reasons, but one is that the legitimacy of inheritance demands that we distinguish between proper hands and improper bastards. Just as we know that Caesar is misreading the signs, so we know Leontes too is wrong. But does he want to be wrong? We could summarize events as Leontes’s effort to prepare the story to create the greatest likelihood of father-daughter incest in the future. Finally, Leontes—balked of baking or boiling the baby and apparently reluctant to dash the brains out—settles for a less direct form of erasure. This alternative method of erasure involves wiping the person’s body off the map, and for this Leontes seeks the baby’s exposure. To be exposed, and to be devoured by wild beasts is also to be wiped away (Halliday). Leontes is here running a risk that only kingship enables him to run; as Frances Dolan has pointed out, only unmarried women’s murder of their newborns was criminalized (Dangerous Familiars 123).11 The sensational literature of the seventeenth century presented mothers who committed infanticide as murdering monsters, “unnatural mothers,” “nature’s cruel step-dames.” But in an important study, Laura Gowing shows that even women who abandoned or even drowned their unwanted children sought to give them an appropriate burial. Because our minds are dominated by fairytales, we can carelessly overlook the added suffering that Leontes heaps on his wife and child by exposing the baby naked to the elements. Many mothers actually kept the child’s body by them, in a ghoulish parody of lying in state. Often kept in chests or boxes in which the serving woman could keep her only personal and private items, the hidden babies were a possession, not abandoned or lost. Even when they were lost, there was something balladic at stake when they were rediscovered. Gowing reports this moving tale: Isabel Nicholson went out of the house and this informer and Mabel 11

 On bodies at crossroads, see MacDonald and Murphy 44–8.

The Shadow of Incest in The Winter’s Tale

83

Munckhouse accompanied her down the field to a little bog and there she sought it, Mabel Munckhouse putting down her finger in the bog cried out that she felt a frog but Isabel replied that it was her bonny babby and she took it by the arm washed [it] lapped it in a cloth, carried it to her mistress’s house, and laid it on the table. And being desired by them to declare who was the father, she replied that she had sworn never to confess it, for she was sure to die and enough to suffer.

Gowing reads this as a story about the reclamation of the maternal identity Isabel has denied. “It is not a three-day-old corpse that the women recover from the bog, but ‘her bonny babby.’”12 It is, however, also a story that suggests the use of ballads in thinking (Belsey 22–4), for there are many about infanticide in which the dead children rise up and accuse the murderous mother; her gentling words of affection have no impact on them. In “The Cruel Mother,” the dead baby reproaches the mother: She’s howket a grave by the light o the moon, And there she’s buried her sweet babe in. As she was going to the church, She saw a sweet babe in the porch. “O sweet babe, and thou were mine, I wad cleed thee in the silk so fine.” “O mother dear, when I was thine, You did na prove to me sae kind.” (Child, No. 20B)

(It is notable that in this version the burial is done under cover of night.) In the light of “The Cruel Mother,” the mother’s affectionate response to the baby in Gowing’s story is not a restoration, but a chance for her secret crime to be exposed. Similarly, the murderous mothers of “The Babes in the Wood,” and the original folktale which led to “Hansel and Gretel” kill in secret: the wood is the setting for their misdeeds, just as it is for the infanticide of the ballads. When Leontes commands this form of murder, he specifically states that the location is to be “remote” and “desert”: there thou leave it, Without more mercy, to it[s] own protection And favour of the climate. As by strange fortune It came to us, I do in justice charge thee, On thy soul’s peril and thy body’s torture, That thou commend it strangely to some place Where chance may nurse or end it. (2.3.177–83) 12  66 PRO, ASSI 45 11/2/3, information of Henry Jackson, Newcastle upon Tyne, 3 Sept. 1675; 67 PRO, ASSI 45 8/1/81, information of Ann Porter, Hawkesdale, Cumb.,13 May 1666, cited by Gowing113, nn 66 and 67.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

84

Antigonus imagines predators, though he also imagines them reduced to kindness: Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens To be thy nurses. Wolves and bears, they say, Casting their savageness aside, have done Like offices of pity. (2.3.186–9)

And of the baby, he says “Poor thing, condemned to loss” (2.3.192). This is both clear and ambiguous. The baby is condemned to undergo the loss of others, but also the manner of its condemnation is to be itself lost, and therefore the only kind of reprieve there can be is the refinding of it by its mother. It’s at this point that the audience will begin to think about the possibilities of incest, because any folktale context predicts that the baby’s reprieve from the father’s wrath also predicts her survival. And the shadow alternative play which is created by folktale is sustained too by the ballad literature, which is both a topic of the play and an unacknowledged source for what doesn’t happen in it. The existence of early versions of many key ballad texts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings allows us cautiously to infer that The Winter’s Tale is informed by ballad narratives and their treatment. Recently, Catherine Belsey has argued for the influence of ballads on ghosts in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s familiarity with ballad and folktale has been well-known for centuries, though new historicism when elevated to a too-rigorous straitjacket often worked as a taboo on his creative reuse of older materials.13 Here, as elsewhere, the narrative of the infant abandoned in the wilderness as especially at risk for incest crosses over kinds of literature whose separation we like to maintain; not only the characters in fairytales and ballads, but also Oedipus, are made the prey of incest by exposure. So survival in a wilderness, with a mother dead, is predictive of the menace of incest, though noone explicitly says the word in The Winter’s Tale. The play then goes to some lengths—indeed, has already gone to some lengths—to set up such a possibility and then to erase or run a line through that possibility. What I mean by this is that the commonest kind of incest plot is brother-sister incest. Ballads are usually about brother-sister incest, and this is the commonest kind of incest in ballads. In writing on incest in the ballad “Leesome Brand,” Ruth Perry stresses the way the relation between brother and sister is narcissistic: This brother and sister are two parts of one whole; they could not be closer. Their bodies belong together as intimately as a fetal child within its mother’s womb. They are made for each other in the way they are presented in the ballad, siblings with the same father, interchangeable and identical so far as the description goes, except that one is male and one is female. The problem is that the sister’s body 13

 In addition to Belsey, see Latham; Wimberley 226; Halliwell; and Dyer.

The Shadow of Incest in The Winter’s Tale

85

shows the evidence of their congress and they both seem to understand that she must be made to disappear. (Perry 172)14

Perry’s comments on incest are bound to make us think not only of the shadowy alternative Winter’s Tale that doesn’t happen, but that haunts the play that does happen, but also of the place of twins in the romantic comedies, perhaps most of all the twins Viola and Sebastian, each of whom “loses” the other in a fashion that places both at risk of the kind of misrecognition that dogs the ballads. But in The Winter’s Tale this shadow narrative has even deeper roots for the characters. Polixenes himself says: We were as twinned lambs that did frisk i’th’ sun, And bleat the one at th’other. What we changed Was innocence for innocence. We knew not The doctrine of ill-doing. (1.2.69–72)

So Polixenes is twinned with Leontes, and by saying he is exactly like him, he implies an often-noted homoeroticism, but also links himself and his son Florizel with Leontes. What might have been real incest here becomes merely metaphorical, but perhaps is no less troubling for that. The threat of such a thing is wiped out by Mamillius’s death; indeed it requires his death. But it is still shadowed or very faintly imaged in the figure of Florizel, who is the son of the man accused of fathering Perdita. Perdita, the “lost bastard,” is matched with a man who is metaphorically her exact equivalent, even her brother—and especially her brother in her father’s error-prone imaginings. There is another way the incest plot can play out, and that is the loss of continuity of the child in the eyes of her family. The brother who goes away to sea, or the sister who is exposed and thus lost: this kind of lost child is vital to the incest ballads. In Robert Edwards’s 1630 “Sheath and Knife,” the infant girl lives and is given up to a wet nurse. The repeated second line, “The sun gois to under the wood,” evokes the hour of sunset, the hour that daylight ceases and darkness covers all, like the hour before death. It evokes both a simple sunset and the crucifixion, the loss of light from the world, but without light, there can be no secure identification.15 Few ballads are concerned with father-daughter incest of the kind which troubled Greene’s prose text, but those that describe mother-son incest describe it in terms so evasive as to constitute pre-texts for The Winter’s Tale’s own studied 14

 On narcissistic incest, see the discussion in Mitchell, 58–82.  A full list of Child Ballads concerning incest would include “Lizie Wan” (51), “The Bonny Hind” (50), “The King’s Dochter Lady Jean” (52), “Babylon, or The Bonnie Banks of Fordie” (14), “Rose the Red and White Lily” (103), “Brown Robyn’s Confession” (57, mother-son incest), and “Edward” (13); the last of these implies both mother-son incest and possible parricide and filicide too. 15

86

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

evasions. Narratively the brother-sister ballads and the mother-son ballads contain common motifs, including the motif of deer hunting, pregnancy and imminent delivery of a child who may not be legitimately fathered, the violent murder of the woman concerned, or her loss of reproductivity, and remorse. All these motifs occur in “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard,” which is apparently a straightforward ballad about the suspicion and performance of adultery, but which is haloed by the possibility of incest. A song of this title was entered into the Stationer’s Register in 1630, so it was apparently well-known in the early seventeenth century. “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard” is connected with brother-sister incest ballads and with Hermione in The Winter’s Tale through the motif of imminent birth: “Are onie o my castles brunt?” he says, “Or onie my towrs won? Or is my gay ladie broucht to bed, Of a dochter or a son?” “There is nane o your castles brunt, Nor nane o your towrs won; Nor is your gay ladie broucht to bed, Of a dochter or a son. But Little Musgrave, that gay young man, Is in bed wi your ladie,”

And thus through the theme of the expulsion of the fruits of incest, Then she has kissd his bluidy cheeks, “It’s oure and oure again,”

Moreover, the manner of her death is distantly like Hermione’s loss of Mamillius: He cut her paps from off her brest; Great pitty it was to see That some drops of this ladie’s heart’s blood Ran trickling downe her knee. (Child, No. 81)

The terrible mutilation here is a literal extirpation of the maternal body, that milky body which Lady Macbeth can only control through the destruction of the infant. Here too, her repudiation of her own milk “for gall” shows how violence must turn against the mother and her ability to nourish a baby. We can perhaps relate this to the death of storytelling Mamillius, whose name makes him sound like a physical aspect of his mother. All the same motifs are found in The Winter’s Tale, but bent around by acts of grace and salvation so strenuous they almost qualify as miracles. If the ballad tradition shows that the plot of father-daughter incest can sometimes be covered by brother-sister incest, such incest is often brutally

The Shadow of Incest in The Winter’s Tale

87

unmasked in fairytales, such as “Doralice,” by Giovanni Francesco Straparola, whose collection was first published in Italy between 1550 and 1553, and in English translation: the soul of Tebaldo was assailed by a strange and diabolical temptation to take to wife his daughter Doralice, and for many days he lived tossed about between yea and nay. At last, overcome by the strength of this devilish intent, and fired by the beauty of the maiden, he one day called her to him and said, ‘Doralice, my daughter, while your mother was yet alive, but fast nearing the end of her days, she besought me never to take to wife any woman whose finger would not fit the ring she herself always wore in her lifetime, and I swore by my head that I would observe this last request of hers. Wherefore, when I felt the time was come for me to wed anew, I made trial of many maidens, but not one could I find who could wear your mother’s ring, except yourself. Therefore I have decided to take you for my wife, for thus I shall satisfy my own desire without violating the promise I made to your mother.’ (Ashliman, No. 1)16

While fairytales such as “The She-Bear,” by Giambattista Basile, make fatherdaughter incest an overt subject, this overtness is based on knowing: Now it is said that once upon a time there lived a king of Roccaspra, who had a wife who for beauty, grace, and comeliness exceeded all other women. Truly she was the mother of beauty, but this beautiful being, at the full time of her life, fell from the steed of health, and broke the threads of life. But before the candle of life was finally put out, she called her husband, and said, “I know well, that you have loved me with excessive love, therefore show me a proof of your love and give me a promise that you will never marry, unless you meet one beautiful as I have been; and if you will not so promise, I will leave you a curse, and I will hate you even in the other world.” (Ashliman, No. 2)

It is exactly this folktale type, widespread across the whole of Europe and known in England as “Catskin” or “The Princess and the Golden Cow,” that is gestured at in The Winter’s Tale. All these tales fit the following summary description: 1. A dying woman extracts from her husband the promise that he will remarry only if he can find a woman that fits a certain description, most usually one based on close resemblance to the dying woman herself. 2. After a period of mourning, the widower discovers that only his daughter meets the condition set, and he asks her to marry him. 3. The daughter is revolted, and asks for a number of seemingly impossible gifts. He meets all her demands. 4. The girl disguises herself, and runs away. 16

 On “Doralice,” see also Bottigheimer 86, 123.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

88

5. She abandons her station as princess and works as a maid in the house of another man. 6. She makes a series of appearances at a dress ball. 7. A prince falls in love with the heroine in her beautiful attire. He discovers that the beautiful woman is a servant, and he marries her. We might add an eighth: 8. The girl is reunited with her father at the end; this can be a scene of forgiveness or of renewed hostility.17 In some versions of the story, the incest motif that sets the plot into motion is suppressed, with a different conflict being given between father and daughter (King Lear comes strongly to mind). In The Winter’s Tale, the crucial, though usually unnoticed moment is the one when Leontes is made to promise to marry “unless another / As like Hermione as is her picture” (5.1.74–5). The implication is that he is making the same promise as the king in “Donkeyskin,” vowing not to marry unless he can find someone who is as beautiful as his wife. This is an act of unknowing, induced by Paulina. When Perdita reappears and Leontes exclaims at her beauty, we might feel a chilly wind of narrative possibility. We don’t trust Leontes and his passions. Even repentance seems capricious. So when he says I’d beg your precious mistress, Which he counts but a trifle. (5.1.222–3)

Paulina rebukes him: Not a month Fore your queen died she was more worth such gazes Than what you look on now. (5.1.224–6)

So Paulina actually reminds Leontes of the daughter’s likeness to the mother. And he responds: I thought of her Even in these looks I made. (5.1.226–7)

So here is the shadow narrative, apparently about to take center stage. The audience might well hold its breath. It is hinted at again when Leontes hails Florizel as a kind of lost son, a replacement for the lost Mamillius. But all this is eloquently managed away—even massaged away—by the statue scene. In the play, the spread of time allows for slower redemption. Leontes is 17

 For the Aarne-Thompson summary, see Ashliman’s notes and also Pilinovsky.

The Shadow of Incest in The Winter’s Tale

89

given what the adulterous and incestuous kings and lords always say they want: his wife alive again. Despite the fact that Paulina has to warn Leontes not to make a mess of it again, the menace of incest is swept aside by the miracle of the statue. The mother’s absence is the vital factor that allows incest to occur. With her back in place, both father-daughter incest and brother-sister incest are “straightened out,” struck through and erased, in the (re)formation of the two heterosexual couples, a re-formation contingent on the mother’s revival. Yet that miracle remains fundamentally incredible as a response to anything—Leontes’s fears, his desires, his longings, his repentance, the narrative, our expectations and desires and longings. The incest we juuuust escape still seems the natural outcome, even the inevitable outcome, and a tragedy with a welter of blood and dead babies the natural, the fallen. Goodness, Shakespeare tells us, is always improbable, always requires acts which do not make “sense.” Yet the revived mother is not the same, and her acceptance is contingent on the rejection of the more exact replication of her youthful self in her daughter: “she was as tender / As infancy and grace,” Leontes muses (5.3.26–7, my emphasis). The past tense obviously bespeaks his belief that Hermione is dead, but it also places tenderness, infancy and grace firmly in the past. And at once he notes a change: But yet, Paulina, Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing So agèd as this seems. (5.3.27–9)

The metrical awkwardness of the line is itself a wrinkle; it is two syllables too long, and the stress pattern stumbles with dramatic efficacy over “not so much,” a hesitation, a loss of the elegant compliment of poetry in prose. He does accept her, but accepts her as the same, then marks her difference by seeing her as a wife he is about to take, as if the action had hitherto concerned his quest for one. She for her part says as little to this as Isabella does in Measure for Measure, and with similar ambiguity. Instead, she greets her daughter, and announces that she has “preserved [her]self to see the issue,” meaning to see the recovered Perdita. Her lack of response puts the miracle of her presence in question: is she the long-desired perfect wife, or does her silence conceal further disruptions to the patrilineal descent with constitutes identity? The answer is never given. But the play seems to exist to excise, burn, dash and otherwise excoriate the other and more terrible possibilities that it cannot help suggesting. Bibliography Abbott, Geoffrey. The Book of Execution: An Encyclopedia of Methods of Judicial Execution. London: Headline, 1995. Print.

90

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Ashliman, D. L., ed. The Father Who Wanted to Marry His Daughter: Folktales of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Type 510B. Web. July 8, 2013. http://www.pitt. edu/~dash/type0510b.html Bachelard, Gaston. The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Alan C. M. Ross. London: Quartet, 1987. Print. Bellamy, John. The Tudor Law of Treason. London: Routledge, 1979. Print. Belsey, Catherine. “Shakespeare’s Sad Tale for Winter: Hamlet and the Tradition of Fireside Ghost Stories.” Shakespeare Quarterly 61 (2010): 1–27. Print. Bishop, T. G. Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print. “Boiling.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 1911. Web. July 10, 2013. Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002. Print. Child, Francis James. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Web. July 8, 2013. The Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London. Ed. John Gough Nichols. London: Camden Society, 1852. Web. February 6, 2015. . Dolan, Frances E. Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Print. ———. “Tracking the Petty Traitor across Genres.” Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800. Ed. Patricia Fumerton, Anita Guerrini, and Kris McAbee. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. 149–71. Print. Dyer, T. F. Thiselton. Folk Lore of Shakespeare. London: Griffith and Farran, 1883. Print. Gowing, Laura. “Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England.” Past and Present 156 (1997): 87–115. Print. Greene, Robert. Pandosto. 1588. Print. Guillemeau, Jacques. Child-birth or, The happy deliuerie of vvomen. 1612. Print. Halliday, Robert. “Wayside Graves and Crossroad Burials.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 84 (1995): 113–18. Print. Halliwell, James Orchard, ed. Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. London: Shakespeare Society, 1845. Print. Hutton, Ronald. Stations of the Sun. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. Klemp, P. J. “‘I have been bred upon the Theater of death, and have learned that part’: The Execution Ritual during the English Revolution.” Seventeenth Century 26 (2011): 323–45. Print. Latham, M. W. The Elizabethan Fairies, the Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare. New York: Columbia UP, 1930. Print. Lockwood, Matthew. “From Treason to Homicide: Changing Conceptions of the Law of Petty Treason in Early Modern England.” The Journal of Legal History 34 (2013): 31–49. Print. MacDonald, Michael and Terence R. Murphy. Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.

The Shadow of Incest in The Winter’s Tale

91

McKenzie, Andrea. Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675–1775. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007. Print. Mitchell, Juliet. Siblings: Sex and Violence. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Print. Partee, Morriss Henry. Childhood in Shakespeare’s Plays. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Print. Perry, Ruth. “Brother Trouble: Murder and Incest in Scottish Ballads.” Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300–1900. Ed. Christopher H. Johnson and David Warren Sabean. Oxford: Berghahn, 2011. 167–87. Print. Pilinovsky, Helen. “Donkeyskin, Deerskin, Allerleirauh: The Reality of the Fairy Tale.” Web, February 6, 2015. < http://endicottstudio.typepad.com/articleslist/ donkeyskin-deerskin-allerleirauh-the-reality-of-the-fairy-tale-by-helenpilinovsky.html>. Purkiss, Diane. Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print. ———. “Fractious: Teenage Girls’ Tales in and out of Shakespeare.” Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts. Ed. Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 57–71. Print. Royer, Katherine. “The Body in Parts: Reading the Execution Ritual in Late Medieval England.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 29 (2003): 319–39. Print. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2008. Print. Slights, William W. E. The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. Southwell, Robert. Collected Poems. Ed. Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney. Manchester: Carcanet, 2007. Print. Stevens, Scott Manning. “Sacred Heart and Secular Brain.” The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. Ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio. New York: Routledge, 1997. 263–83. Print. Symonds, Deborah. Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1992. Print. Trubowitz, Rachel. “‘But Blood Whitened’: Nursing Mothers and Others in Early Modern Britain.” Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. 82–101. Print. Wimberley, Lowry Charles. Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1928. Print. Yetter, Leigh, ed. Public Execution in England, 1573–1868. Pt.1. Vol. 1. London: Pickering, 2009. Print.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 5

Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfigurations Maria Del Sapio Garbero

In Shakespeare’s late plays, romance thrives to a large extent on a Raphael-like liturgy of death and resurrection. Twice in these plays—in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale—a mother dies in order to reappear, together with her daughter, as an agent of reconciliation. In both plays death is problematically related to childbirth and the obscure or uncanny side of pregnancy. What kind of metamorphosis does the mother undergo in the interval which takes her from death to life again so that she may acquire the virtue she needs to perform such a cathartic task? And how is this plot specific to romance? In this chapter I want to speculate on the presumptive deadly status of mothers in Shakespeare’s romances: their mid-state, or better their transition from one state—and place— to another. As part of my argument I will explore the ways Renaissance visual art and theory, medicine, and divinity combined to influence this cathartic/ purgational representation of the maternal; and how this representation worked on both the sanitization of Shakespeare’s late family plots and the Bard’s recovery of female “grace” as the lost grace of representation. As Fletcher states in the prefatory address to the reader he wrote for The Faithful Shepherdess, “tragie-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie” (Beaumont and Fletcher 497). Life, as verging on death, and yet avoiding death: one could hardly envisage a better synthesis of the generic “not quite” status of romance. In fact, bodies as well as the genre itself are held as if in suspension, with death rather symbolically exploited as a mid state, a transitus by means of which characters reappear revisioned and transfigured. In Shakespeare’s late plays, this is achieved mainly through what I would term the catastrophic role of women. Pregnant mothers and their “issues” precipitate a series of events which are both related to death and, contrastingly, to a cathartic return to life. Suffice it to mention the recurrent motifs of shipwreck, vagrancy, concealment, absence, purging, and awakening. Adopting a gender and psychoanalytical perspective, Janet Adelman has insightfully highlighted the relationship between tragedy and romance in Shakespeare’s works in terms of a male psychic dependence on a sexualized maternal body: an “unweeded garden” (Hamlet) in need of the discipline which can heal the disquieting male “fantasies of maternal origin” (1992). Contemporary women’s studies have variously substantiated the assertion that “the concept of the maternal is central to the narrative principles of Shakespeare’s late plays” (Hackett,

94

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Women and Romance Fiction 155). For Helen Wilcox, maternity with its “lifethreatening and life-giving qualities … epitomize[s] the paradoxical complexity of the tragic/comic mix in these plays” (137). For Helen Hackett, “maternity in the late plays can be considered not merely in terms of the presence or absence of maternal characters, but as a metaphor for their distinctive kind of narrative.” “Maternal metaphors are used for narrative itself,” she writes. But she also brings to the fore the fact that romance—with its marvellous, if boundless narrative— is culturally constructed as feminine by a male authorship (“Gracious be the issue” 29 et passim). My approach stems from the premise that acts of seeing, and their problematization, take center stage in Shakespeare’s late plays. In fact, Shakespeare’s late dramatic art is teeming with encroaching hallucinatory objects and final redemptive visions, whether they be seen by the characters within the play or by ourselves as beholders of the play, or both. Take Leontes’s sight, invaded by the contaminating, spider-like vision of Hermione’s pregnant body in The Winter’s Tale, and then in its second part Paulina’s awe-inducing spectacle of Hermione’s body returning from the realm of the dead with its restored and restoring “grace.” Or think also of the cooperative role played by Gower—a figure for an omniscient narrator in Pericles—in ekphrastically performing the task of accompanying our “judgement of the eye” (1.41) as beholders of the play, and also in narratively foregrounding (or distancing) the contaminated gaze of his hero as he travels from the confused incestuous scenario of Antioch to the last apparition of a purified maternal body in the reordering scenario of Ephesus. In The Tempest the spectacle of the maternal is likewise in the hand of a male puppeteer who manipulates other people’s sight. Like the sun, Prospero seems to be the source of every vision and of every form of reflection and specularization in the ocular economy of his island. Accordingly, as I have written elsewhere (“Troubled Metaphors” 58–9; Il bene ritrovato 229–65), the feminine either disappears in Prospero’s mirror of selfspecularity (see Miranda: the father’s daughter), or is represented as the negative of Prospero’s own image (see Sycorax: the abject mother). Drawing on this thematization of sight, I intend to address the elusive further field of meanings produced by visual knowledge in Shakespeare’s later art. More precisely, I want to explore the ways in which the female body affects, “infects,” and finally clarifies the male gaze through a redeeming, masculine and empowering “good” mimesis. But was there a Renaissance visual model which could accommodate both the “not quite,” or tragicomic status of romance, and this double-minded narrative of the maternal? I will try to answer this question by invoking Nietzsche’s powerful reading of Raphael’s Transfiguration and the painting’s fractured perspective, which he foregrounds: In his Transfiguration, the lower half, with the possessed boy, the despairing bearers, the helpless, terrified disciples, shows to us the reflection of eternal primordial pain, the sole basis of the world: the “appearance” here is the counterappearance of eternal Contradiction, the father of things. Out of this appearance

Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfiguration

95

then arises, like an ambrosial vapour, a visionlike new world of appearances, of which those wrapt in the first appearance see nothing—a radiant floating in purest bliss and painless Contemplation beaming from wide-open eyes. Here there is presented to our view, in the highest symbolism of art, that Apollonian world of beauty and its substratum, the terrible wisdom of Silenus, and we comprehend, by intuition, their necessary interdependence. (39–40)

Nietzsche’s genealogical lens, with which he interprets Raphael’s painting, helps us envisage the complex paradigm that can preside over romance modes of understanding/representing the world, modes which he traces back, archaeologically, to a layered Apollonian ideal, capable of keeping together two opposite spheres and forms of knowledge or art: the annihilating vision of horror and what he calls the “naïve” if freeing illusion of dreams.1 I will be back with more on this in my last paragraph, to underline how Shakespeare elicits a similar reading of his “old tale[s]”; tales “which will have matter to rehearse, though credit be asleep and not an ear open” (Winter’s Tale 5.2.62–4). My purpose, however, is to show how it is by means of the pivotal role assigned by the playwright to the maternal body as a site of a multilayered set of meanings that such a relationship between horror and dream is dealt with in his late plays. Let us recall then that Raphael had also authored an Assumption-Coronation of the Virgin, now at the Vatican museum together with his most famous Transfiguration. This can provide a more direct path in discovering the role Giulio Romano may have played in Shakespeare’s (bipartite) tales of maternal transfigurations. Shakespeare at the Court of the Gonzaga (and the Popes) Tracking Giulio Romano, “that rare” and only “Master” (Winter’s Tale 5.2.97) to be mentioned by Shakespeare in his plays,2 one is led to Federico Gonzaga’s court at Mantua, a court renowned for its unique art collection. Mantua was also famous for being Baldassarre Castiglione’s birthplace, a touchstone of the courtly Italian milieu which inspired his Il libro del cortegiano (1528). Federico’s art collection was started when Giulio Romano arrived from Rome in 1524, thanks to the good offices of Castiglione, who was the Gonzaga’s ambassador to the 1

 For an insightful comment on the double action of Raphael’s tableau and the sense of discontinuity highlighted by Nietzsche’s ekphrasis, see Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, 87–106. 2  Although much commented upon, this is a reference which is still easily argued away as “pointless” in the wake of Northrop Frye (191), or outright erroneous, and all in all as lacking any major specific relevance apart from that of providing a hold for contrasting theater with “idealised” art (Meek 169). See, however, Barkan, “Living Sculpture” 652–63, and “Making Pictures Speak” 326–51; and Salingar 1–18.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

96

court of Pope Clement at that time. As an ambassador, a former friend of Raphael and Giulio himself, Castiglione used all the means at his disposal, according to Vasari, to secure the services of the man who was “celebrated as the best artist in Italy after the death of Raphael” (The Lives of the Artists 366). Giulio Romano— Raphael’s best pupil and his assistant in many of his works—would remain in Mantua for the rest of his life to serve as a court painter and an architect for the many fabbriche launched by the Gonzaga (including the Palazzo Te, which he designed and lavishly decorated with mythological frescoes). But he also worked as an ordinatore (consultant) of the galleria (Luzio 28–86, 239 et passim), an office that he maintained until his premature death in 1546, and which may have played a part in inspiring Paulina’s gallery in Shakespeare’s play.3 Among those who had preceded Giulio as court painter in the previous century was Mantegna, and among those who succeeded him in the office of ordinatore in the early years of the new century was Rubens. Indeed, by the time the Gonzaga’s gallery was deemed complete by Federico’s successors in 1611–12, the Mantuan court had become a sought-after place for the best artists in Italy and Europe. Titian, Rubens, and other Flemish painters sojourned and worked there. Others, Raphael, Leonardo, Tintoretto, were present with their masterpieces. However, it was mainly during and thanks to the Giulio Romano period that the splendor of the Mantuan court achieved widespread fame in Europe where knowledge of its palaces and works of art (especially those of the Palazzo Te) circulated through prints, often taken from drawings by Giulio Romano himself, who excelled in most of the skills linked to the three arts of design—architecture, sculpture, and painting—mentioned in his tomb epitaph, as attested to by Vasari and later biographers (see D’Arco 132ff). Shakespeare claimed a place in this outstanding list of Italian and European artists when, taking us by surprise in his Winter’s Tale, and through a crucial visual episode of his Sicilian play, he chose to conjure up the artist who had authored the wonders of one of the most dazzling Italian courts and officiated the marriage of the arts. No: Shakespeare’s mention of the artist was not “pointless” (Frye 191), I want to argue. Also, the playwright might have shared much more of that “rare Italian Master” with his courtly audience at Whitehall than is commonly thought of. In fact, Paulina’s key to the “gallery” allowed the audience to participate in a well-established Mantuan-English transaction—only slightly jeopardized by the Reformation—which included goods as precious as art, horses, and tutors. The powerful Henry VIII loved to receive Mantuan pedigree horses from the Italian Dukes for his tournaments (Luzio 63–5), and Elizabeth had learned her remarkable Italian from a relative of The Courtier’s author, Giovanni Battista Castiglione, her

 In his Introduction to The Winter’s Tale (56 and 221–2), Orgel suggests viewing Paulina’s gallery in the context of “the Jacobean passion for collecting, and for collecting Italian art in particular,” but he goes no further in exploring either the relation between collecting and the gallery of the Gonzaga, or the role played by Giulio in this respect. 3

Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfiguration

97

tutor since she was 11, and later “the most highly placed Italian in the Elizabethan court” (Wyatt 187). In this intense cultural transaction, I would like to point out, art and the empowering Italian aesthetic discourse on art played the role of a “rare” and most coveted item. “[P]repare / To see the life as lively mock’d as ever / Still sleep mock’d death: behold, and say ’tis well” (5.3.18–20), Paulina announces to Leontes and the group of gentlemen who are visiting her gallery in her “removed house” (5.2.106). Then, as per implied stage directions, she “draws a curtain, and reveals Hermione standing like a statue.” Dramatically, and with a single gesture, Shakespeare endorsed the interconnection, or kinship, between theater and the visual arts at a moment in which his theater was undergoing a visual turn influenced by the early seventeenth-century fortune of the Stuart masque. As a matter of fact, he was outplaying it with a metatheatrical scene aiming at incorporating into romance the sophistication of continental art theory coming from such works as Alberti’s De Pictura, Vasari’s Lives, Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, or Lomazzo’s A Tracte containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, Carvinge, and Buldinge. Aptly, the unveiling of the statue, as Shakespeare conceives it, draws the awe-stricken male beholders toward a speculation on the wonders of fictive truth, a “civile conversazione” seemingly modeled on the discourse on art that his aristocratic audience might find proposed as a self-fashioning and enabling practice in Castiglione’s Courtier, where, intriguingly, it is alike dramatized as a convivial dispute presided over by women: Elisabetta Gonzaga and her witty waiting gentlewoman, Emilia Pia. Suggestively, such a mimed, if not divinatory, rite of possession materialized between 1628 and 1632 when Charles I, taking advantage of the Gonzaga’s declared bankruptcy, purchased a large part of their art collection. Other masterpieces continued to arrive through European art dealers during the reign of Charles II. Most interestingly for the purposes of this chapter, is the fact that among the Stuart’s acquisitions were a considerable number of works by Giulio, and one painting in particular which I see as relevant both to the anagnorisis of the maternal engineered by Paulina (The Winter’s Tale) or Cerimon (Pericles), and the tragicomic form of Shakespeare’s romances. This was the portrait of a lady—first erroneously listed as Parmigianino’s (Luzio 178) or also as Raphael’s work and later acknowledged as Giulio Romano’s—in which one sees a woman4 sitting in front of the viewer while at her back, theatrically, a maidservant “draws a curtain, and reveals” the arrival of a veiled female guest attended by two other faintly discernible female figures (see Figure 5.1 below). What is represented here, in this moment of inchoate events, is the naked act of showing –showing, or theater as such—narration being suspended in the expectancy of something to be revealed. What is the relationship between the woman sitting in the forefront of the canvas and the events enveloped, as if in a state of pregnancy, 4  This woman was first identified as Isabella d’Este and more recently as Margherita Paleologo, Federico Gonzaga’s wife (Whitaker and Clayton 136–8).

98

Figure 5.1

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Giulio Romano, Portrait of Margherita Paleologo, c.1531. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.

Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfiguration

99

in the apparition of the mysterious woman at her back? Something has happened, we imagine, which is here obstructed, or carried forth and staged as part of an “unborn event,” we might say, drawing on the maternal trope used by Gower in Shakespeare’s Pericles as he retrieves and re-launches the action of the play (4.45). Something is about to happen: a denouement precipitated by the appearance of the veiled woman, which for the time being is foretold visually by means of denial. As in Prospero’s masque, the beholder is asked to be “all eyes” (Tempest 4.1.59). But also, as in Pericles, the spectator is asked to wait, ekphrastically, for the enactment of Gower’s promise: “What’s dumb in show, I’ll plain with speech” (3.14). For a moment we experience the spectacularization of pure wonder, with narrative as much elicited as drastically withheld: the stuff of romance. For a moment we are left with the apparition of female figures who are as much present as in need of an unveiling process of interpretation in order that they can be “performed”—that is perfected, re-visioned, and possessed as “grace”’ by a male gaze: the “artistic” condition of the female characters and maternal figures in Shakespeare’s late plays. Indeed, as Shakespeare seems to make clear in The Winter’s Tale, this involves the magic of art, the transfiguring process and illusionism of representation which, as a playwright, he deems appropriate to evoke through the visual art of Giulio Romano; a man famous for his artistry in devising theatrical spaces and trompe-l’œils that the Elizabethans might find celebrated in the very first pages of Vasari’s life devoted to him, in which he is praised for his work on the construction of the Villa Madama in Rome: Accomodating himself to the qualities of the site [ … ] Giulio designed a semicircular façade for the front, like a theatre, dividing it into niches and windows of the Ionic order [ … ]. Giulio painted many pictures in the rooms elsewhere, and especially beyond the first vestibule, in a very beautiful loggia he decorated with large and small niches on every side in which there are a great many antiques statues [ … ] along with many other extremely beautiful statues. (The Lives of the Artists 360–61)

Indeed, to the eyes of Vasari’s European readers, Giulio excelled in delusive architectures and “painted” statues: “he also painted a building that curves around like an amphitheater and contains statues of such beauty and composition that none the better could be seen” (365), Vasari wrote. By which he meant to underline that Giulio excelled in the art of making true—through perspective and the lights and shadows (i lumi e le ombre) of painting—the three-dimensionality of sculpture and architecture.5 Did Shakespeare have such crafty Renaissance cooperation among the arts in mind when he referred to Giulio Romano—not

5

 Vasari had not yet been translated at that time. But a conversational discussion of this topic, which was part of the Renaissance debate on imitation, and hence the rivalry or cooperation among the arts (paragone), could be easily found in English in the first book of Castiglione’s Courtier translated by Hoby.

100

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

erroneously—as a sculptor, and when he produced his own gallery and his competing re-animated female statue? As Leonard Barkan has remarked, “Theater is England’s lively pictorial culture, the answer, the compensation, the supplément in the face of all the painting, sculpture, and art theory that was so famously alive in the European civilizations that Elizabethans dreamed about” (“Making Pictures Speak” 331 and 338). I couldn’t agree more. However, what I am personally interested in exploring is the role Giulio Romano, and through him Italian art theory, may have played in relation to the gender-coded issues of Shakespeare’s late plays, and more precisely the playwright’s much longed-for reappropriation of a fulfilling image of the maternal, which I propose to see as forcefully indebted to a diffuse Medieval and Renaissance maternal figurative subject—the Dormitio Virginis—a theme subsumed in that of the assumption of the Virgin Mary in the context of religious belief and iconography. Giulio Romano himself, still in Rome at that time, contributed to the subject, as Vasari reminds us (a fact that critics, at least to my knowledge, have so far largely failed to notice), with a large panel, the Assumption of Our Lady (c. 1525), now known as the Madonna di Monteluce; a painting originally commissioned to Raphael, which Romano inherited and completed with the help of Francesco Penni (see Figure 5.2). As I mean to show in this chapter, this painting (now in the Vatican Museum in a room next to the one in which the two above-mentioned paintings by Raphael are exhibited) is no less relevant than the Margherita Paleologo portrait in respect to the interaction between Shakespeare’s late theater and Italian visual culture. Might Shakespeare actually have encountered the work of Giulio Romano, and his Assumption of Mary in particular? As seductive as such a thought may be, I do not think it is interesting to be exhaustive on this question, even though Shakespeare’s awareness of Romano’s art (and Italian art theory) may certainly be supposed, as I have shown, on the basis of a considerable number of elements, not all of them relatable to a single painting in particular. What I am most concerned with in this chapter is the way Shakespeare’s romance topic of maternal rejection and reconciliation intersects with an epochal transfigurative Marian myth and the way it was worked out in Renaissance visual arts. For it provides a theme and a frame which are structurally evocative of the binary maternal motives of absence and presence, concealment and apparition, infection and redemption, death and rebirth or resurrection, and hence of the very tragicomic pattern of Shakespeare’s late plays. It is in such a context of a searched transcending mimesis that the namedropping of Giulio Romano cannot be understood as simply coincidental. “Her dead likeness”: Visioning and Re-visioning the Infective Body Both in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, the knowledge of the female figure we perceive through the male protagonists has an immediate sensory quality. It

Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfiguration

Figure 5.2

101

Giulio Romano, Madonna di Monteluce. Courtesy of Musei Vaticani, Rome.

affects their gaze at the outset of the play like a tempest which is physically damaging to the eye, only to be recovered, through an experience of separation, death, and resurrection, as an image of worship which is intended to be, similarly, physically restorative to their obsessed eye. In this sense the imagemaking process or representation of the maternal in these two plays seems to

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

102

interact in complex ways with both the Marian iconography of transalpine visual arts and the heated debate over the questionable visual content of religious faith and the deceptive role of images which marks the passage from Catholicism to Protestantism in early modern Northern Europe;6 a controversy forcefully kindled by Luther’s precept—“Do not look for Christ with your eyes but put your eyes in your ears”—and carried forth by Calvin and such works as the Tudor Homily against Peril of Idolatry (Clark 161 and 161–203). Antiochus’s daughter at the opening of Pericles, the female figure which incestuously combines the familial roles of daughter, wife, and mother, affects her suitors through the eyes as delusive idols would do. “See, where she comes, apparell’d like the spring” (1.1.13, my emphasis) says Pericles, in ekphrastic mode, on the Princess’s apparition as a mute, though seductive, Flora-like image. Not unlike Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale, the Princess engages the beholder as if he were in front of a work of art, an object to be interpreted which, however, is capable of seducing into a world of misleading forms of “likeness” with reality. “Her face a book of praises, where is read / Nothing but curious pleasures … .” (1.1.16–17), continues Pericles. In reply the king promptly counters his words, by saying: “Before thee stands this fair Hesperides, / … Her face, like heaven, enticeth thee to view / Her countless glory, which desert must gain; / And which, without desert because thine eye / Presume to reach, all the whole heap must die” (1.1.28–34, my emphasis). Advisedly, the astute Antiochus maintains the linguistic expression of his own ekphrasis on the deadly visual plane of “likeness”—a slippery and dangerous plane all along the play. But so it is also in The Winter’s Tale. In both plays, in fact, likeness depends on controversial acts of seeing—a dazzled, anxious, or erroneous form of perception, which emerges in moments of heightened dramatic relevance. Indeed, they are part of a more general problematization in these plays of the relationship between original and copies, whether they be fathers and children, bodies and statues, life and art. The female body, and more specifically the maternal body, seems to be the site where all these issues are grounded. As for Leontes in front of Hermione’s pregnant body, the capacity to properly see—that is, to unravel and grasp—the secret of that enveloping and promiscuous body, is a measure of the protagonist’s capacity to define his own identity and authenticity. Similarly, Pericles’s eyes are soon given center stage in the perception of the Princess. She is fantasized first as a dazzling idol (fittingly doomed as such to be withered by lightning), then (after his silent reading of the riddle) as the cipher of a primal endogamous form of abjection. The delusive image of Flora is thus soon replaced by an utterly horrific and damaging “likeness”—the uroboric and incestuous circle of the viper provided by 6

 I do not enter here into the precise cultural incidence of the English attack on Marian devotion and the destruction of religious imagery. This point is extensively dealt with by Vanita in the utterly different framework of her essay “Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII.”

Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfiguration

103

the riddle: an abrasive image for Pericles, which leaves him with “sore eyes” as a dust storm would. Nevertheless, as if obliquely complicit with great Antiochus’s sin (one might invoke Freud’s reticence in this regard, which he adopts in defense of fathers in his seduction theory), he decides that that image will remain dumb—an unspoken, if internalized form of knowledge which he likens by inversion to that of a “blind mole,” crushed under overwhelming weight (1.1.92–103). More than fear, it is this wounding and contaminating form of knowledge, one which accounts for the related ocular image of the “dull-ey’d melancholy”—his “sad companion” from now on (1.2.3)—that swells the sails of Pericles’s ship; the ship that following a sanitizing Western course, will take him away from the archaic and incestuous Eastern scenario of Antioch. Alas, not precisely, or not immediately! For, this initiatory knowledge, which seems to have been left behind the keel of Pericles’s swift ship, will continue to inhabit the jolting depths of sea, plot, and bodies—all of them governed, as is convenient in a romance, by the fortuitousness of chance and the tempest. Unleashed by the tempest, such knowledge surfaces as an obscure menace of contamination, on the night of his wife’s delivery onboard his ship. Safety depends on “the excision of the sexual female body,” Janet Adelman has argued. This is superstitiously known by the sailors when they insist that the dead body of Thaisa, still warm with the humors of childbirth, be thrown overboard. But in the world of Shakespeare’s romances, unlike that of his tragedies, this is the beginning of a cure achieved “by splitting and dispersing the female body,” that is, by separating the roles which appeared as “dangerously compacted in [Antiochus’s daughter] and [by assigning] them to discrete persons.” Mother, daughter (and father) “are violently put asunder, each to be desexualized and reborn purified” (Adelman 196).7 I want to draw upon the psychic scenario so finely highlighted by Adelman, of a “repeated cycle of doing and undoing” (196), returns and repetitions of the action within the same play, or of Shakespeare with respect to his other plays, to underline how this pattern is one with Shakespeare’s purgative method of representation of the female body in his romances; and with the ways in which this gradually tends towards the recovery of the “grace” of a good system of likeness: a good mimesis. But “grace” for mothers, I also want to argue—one of the most recurrent terms in The Winter’s Tale—results from of a discipline which, as in the Aristotelian double paradigm of catharsis, is tantamount to a physiological expulsive stage. Hardly mentioned in connection with Aristotle’s definition of tragedy (Poetics), the genre with which catharsis has come to be generally associated in the realm of aesthetics and of literary studies, the term is used frequently in his works on biology, De generatione animalium, De partibus animalium. Here it is grounded in physiology and it occurs in connection with natural physiological functions of expulsion of what is in excess (menstrual blood or the ejaculation of semen) or bad (McCumber 7  See Barber and Wheeler (282–99 and 310–34) for a psychoanalytic reading of the Catholic resonances which permeate such a search for a redeemed family plot.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

104

57). Seen in this light, it is just as appropriate that the re-visioned representation of the maternal body in Shakespeare’s romances should be framed by a pervading medical register of language. In the world of Shakespeare’s romances, purging begins with a childbirth which is deadly for the mothers (or so it seems). It continues with a period of concealment of their presumptive dead bodies—a sort of quarantine that corresponds to a black hole, a void of representation—after which they are resuscitated or reshaped by the “art” of a physician (Cerimon in Pericles) or artist (Giulio Romano in The Winter’s Tale), dried up of their swelling and turgid body, as an image of “lawful” worship. In Pericles childbirth is a catastrophic event conveniently narrated and shown as an accelerating agency. The audience has hardly got a glimpse of the fertile and rejoicing image of Thaisa, inserted in the brief dumb show at the beginning of the third act (“enter THAISA with child, with LYCHORIDA, a nurse”), when this image is soon disappointingly disrupted by the frightening outbreak of the sea tempest during which childbirth takes place. In absentia, Pericles has no eyes for it: childbirth was an exclusively female business at that time, as we will better learn in the subsequent Winter’s Tale (and from a fast-growing scholarship on early modern bodies).8 But we experience it through Pericles’s inner, if obscure, male reaction to it. “The lady shrieks,” as the sea “disgorges” its tempest in Gower’s narrative of the event, “and well-a-near / Does fall in travail with her fear” (3.46–52). Then, in the performance of this same scene, we hear Thaisa’s cries assaulting her husband’s ears on the upper deck with an uproar which he comments upon in analogy with the concomitant hell of a racket rising from the womb of the sea; an utterly overwhelming turmoil which he just wants to stop—to fetter or at least make swifter so that it may end soon—with his invocation to both male and female gods: O, still Thy deaf’ning, dreadful thunders; gently quench Thy nimble sulphurous flashes! O, how, Lychorida, How does my queen? Thou stormiest venomously; Will thou spit all thyself? The seaman’s whistle Is as whisper in the ear of death, Unheard. Lychorida!—Lucina, O Divinest patroness, and midwife gentle To those that cry by night, convey thy deity Aboard our dancing boat; make swift the pangs Of my queen’s travails! (3.1.4–14)

One might say that the sea tempest, with its “dancing boat,” replicates the dynamism of Thaisa’s parturient body according to a culturally available analogy between the woman’s womb—anatomically conceived of in contemporary 8

 See A.Wilson; Paster; R.Wilson; Miller and Yavneh; Bicks; Fissell.

Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfiguration

105

medical discourse as a floating body part—and a ship on the verge of breaking its moorings. The simile was provided by James I’s physician, Helkiah Crooke, in his Mikrocosmographia (1615), a compendium of early modern European anatomy, when he illustrated the anchoring function performed in this regard by the womb’s “ligaments”: These Ligaments are wouen fometimes with fleshy Fibres (whereupon Vefalius and Archangelus haue named them Muscles) by whose helpe they being distributed into either part of it, the wombe is held stedfast. These Ligaments although they be strong, yet are they some-what loose or laxe and softe, so that in no part there are found so laxe ligaments, the reason is, that they might better be extended with the wombe, and follow it also in the motions without dilacerations; for the wombe when it is filled is large and wide, but afterward is contracted into the quantity of a Peare or a halfe-peny purse. These Ligaments also, as Hippocrates and Plato in Timeo haue written, like to Bridles do hold in the wombe which yet notwithstanding rideth as a moored Ship in a Tempest between her Anchors [ … ] (223).9

What of women’s privities during childbirth could not be visible to the male gaze, unless it were in anatomical treatises intended for the learned, was conveyed by a displaced catastrophic imagery which produces specific psychological sense in Shakespeare’s play. “[T]hou that hast / Upon the winds command, bind them in brass, / Having call’d them from the deep!” (3.1.2–4), cries Pericles to the god. Soon after Thaisa’s delivery of her infant, complying even too quickly with the sailors’ superstition about inauspicious dead bodies, it is Pericles himself who will perform, with an Ophelia-like maimed rite, the task of encaging her body, and her parturient corporeal winds,10 in a well “caulked and bitumed” coffin (3. 1.70–71), drowning it hastily—taking a moment only to deodorize it with spices and make it recognizable with a “passport” (3.2.68)—into the depths of the sea. Where, meaningfully—as in the case of Ophelia’s watery death—Thaisa is figured as lying on the filth of the waters’ muddy bed, “in the ooze,” in an inextricable and returning association between filthiness and the female body, whether innocent or not: A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear; No light, no fire: th’unfriendly elements 9  The disfunctions of the “floating” belly were typically illustrated by E. Jorden in A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother, 1603. 10  Women were said to release “divers winds and vapours” during childbirth (see Paster 190). Women’s reproductive bodies, the critic argues, were constructed as “dangerously open” (181), in early modern humoral medicine. Significantly the “immodesties of birth” were counterbalanced by “birthing rituals designed to offer concealment and enclosure” (189–90).

106

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England Forgot thee utterly; nor have I time To give thee hallow’d to thy grave, but straight Must cast thee, scarcely coffin’d, in the ooze; (3.1.56–60)

A sea tempest for Pericles, childbirth is experienced at a distance in the same catastrophic mode as an earthquake by the inhabitants of Ephesus (“Our lodgings, standing upon the sea, / Shook as th’earth did quake,” 3.2.15–16), the place towards which Thaisa undertakes her strange journey by coffin, and on whose shore she is tossed as a “wreck” (3.2.49–51): a submerged female journey of purification, a Transitus symbolically akin to that of the Virgin Mary (see below 108–11), which we should see as parallel and essential to Pericles’s visible sea-faring—its unseen and mute support. “It smells most sweetly in my sense,” says the physician Cerimon at the opening of Thaisa’s chest (3.2.61), as he undertakes “to restore” her body by making use of his secret knowledge “of the disturbances that / Nature works, and of her cures” (3.2.37–8 and 30–45). Nevertheless, Thaisa’s purging has begun with childbirth itself and the relevant cleansing and enclosing practices of the postpartum effluent body which the play significantly evokes. Tellingly, even though the rite has been hasty and maimed, before being closed in a coffin, Thaisa’s body has been “Clothed in cloths of state; balmed and entreasured / With full bags of spices!” (3.2.67–8). As Gail Kern Paster has so well explained, if pregnancy in contemporary medical discourse was conceptualized as a state of disease, birth was its moment of crisis and cure. She quotes from Guillemeau’s Child-birth for this notion: “The greatest disease that women can have, is that of the nine Moneths, the Crisis and cure whereof consists in their safe deliverie.” “Birth,” Paster continues, “was called a ‘great evacuation,’ a great emptying-out, which not only configured the baby as excretory product but … construed birth as a violent purgation not unlike the purges central to humoral therapy” (182). The “cure” is extreme in Shakespeare’s late plays. Whatever the cause, “safe deliverie” is tantamount to death for the mothers of Pericles and The Winter’s Tale: a final eradication of the site of disease and infection which is all the more meaningful for being grounded in a temporary state of death. For, what the maternal body recovers during this suspensive state of death—the state by means of which Shakespeare dramatically articulates and amplifies the cloistering or disciplining role performed by the culturally prescribed postpartum lying-in month (see on this Paster 185–97 and Bicks 166–77)—is the integrity and sanctity of a virgin mother. Thus Hermione’s ghost appears to Antigonus in The Winter’s Tale —“in pure white robes, / Like very sanctity” (3.3.22–3)—once she has been cruelly snatched away from both her parturient bed (“her child-bed privilege,” 3.2.103) and her baby. As for the dead Thaisa in Pericles, by the time she has completed her transitus towards Ephesus, she has recovered the intactness of her body: the necessary supplément, one might say, of the resurrecting liturgy officiated by Cerimon. It is no coincidence that Thaisa is imagined as having no memory of childbirth, an expedient forgetfulness for the role of votaress in Diana’s temple

Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfiguration

107

she is about to assume: “That I was shipp’d at sea / I well remember, even on my eaning time; / But whether there deliver’d, by the holy gods / I cannot rightly say” (3.4.4–7). Thus she enacts the fantasy of a desexualized body, a woman without a womb, unwittingly freed of those “disturbances” so disquietingly medicalized in contemporary constructions of women’s reproductive bodies: [T]he wombe of it selfe changeth not much his place, but is drawne by other parts. Yet sometimes what with the waight of the Infant, what with the difficulty and violence of the birth, the ligaments are so relaxed that the bottome of the wombe falleth downward into the lappe: sometimes also the necke is turned and it hangeth forth of the priuities like a yarde betwixt their thighs, that it must be taken by the Chyrurgion, or fall of it selfe when the ligaments are putrified [ … ] For it is not to be doubted (say diuerse both Greekes and Arabians, beside some experience also of our owne times) but that a woman may liue without a wombe, because there is no necessity of it for the preseruation of the particular or indiuidual nature, but onely for the propagation of the kinde. (Crooke 225)

Crucial for the continuation of the lineage, Shakespeare’s mothers seem to necessitate such a chirurgical or mnemonic loss of parts of themselves—a “discipline of shame,” we might say borrowing from Gail Kern Paster11—in order that they may perform the role they are assigned in the final purification of the family plot. What we should note at this point, is that Pericles is not the jealous Leontes of The Winter’s Tale; he does not initiate state proceedings against the female body, nor is he a tyrant. The tragedy is created by Fortune. Nevertheless, Pericles is placed in a position where he must officiate at the same rite which sentences the maternal to death; a rite which reveals itself to be all the more forcefully embedded in myth and culture (see Hughes 12–18; Irigaray “The Bodily Encounter” 34–46), for being so far removed from the protagonist’s intentions. But when Shakespeare comes to The Winter’s Tale he tries his best to make explicit the link between the constitutive contaminating quality of the maternal body and the king’s mounting homicidal fury. He does so by letting the queen’s pregnant body invade the stage at the very opening of the play and by attributing to her king a jealousy devoid of obvious motivations, thus isolating his character’s vision and problematizing to the extreme the question of his disturbed and distortive gaze. Indeed, under the lens of Leontes’s anxious gaze, Hermione’s source of pride—“Grace”—is violently disrupted (see 1.2.99–105). Her body becomes an open and destabilizing body, a “pond” with open “gates,” invaded as well as invasive, through the eyes, of his inner self (1.2.190–207). “My life stands in the level of your dreams,” says Hermione during the trial the king has brought against her (3.2.82). As I have suggested elsewhere 11  On the womb as both a threatening and a shameful body part see Paster 175. On the biblical construction of the woman in childbed as one of the contaminating types of abjection see Kristeva 112–14.

108

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

(“A Spider in the Eye” 151–3; Il bene ritrovato 141–2), we might imagine the haunting unresting figure of the Hermione we meet in the first part of the play by invoking the supportiveness of a proto-baroque Madonna of the Michaelangelesque school: a Madonna like the one we find in Pontormo’s Deposition. As if floating in its aerial space, and intermingling with other bodies, this is the very opposite of the reassuring Hermione who reappears (“as tender / As infancy and grace” [5.3.26–7]), at the end of the play, reshaped according to the disciplined contours of a still statue by Giulio Romano, an artist belonging to the Raphaelesque school (and as such well trained in graceful Raphael-like Madonnas). In the first part of the play, Hermione’s imagined adultery is indeed a nightmarish adulterating quality, or an altering “matter” (1.1.34), which sweeps away the clarity of the male pastoral setting of the play with the hallucinatory form of a “predominant” body (1.2.202), variously resonating in the king’s invectives as an intermingling body part (1.2.109–19), an open and inviting hand, or palm (1.2.101–26), an unfortified belly (1.2.204–7), until it is finally arrested, or better sentenced, with “that she’s big with” (2.1.60–61): her newborn baby. Childbirth is not a festive event in Shakespeare’s romances. It is an expulsion by means of which the maternal body dies to itself, namely to its nourishing organs and liquids, to be reshaped according to what Karen Bamford, in her introduction to this book, has underlined as the desires of the fathers. Such a violent arresting or freezing of its vitality seems to be essential to a sustainable imaging of the maternal and the attainment of a good transcending mimesis: the attainment of “her dead likeness,” in Paulina’s apt if ironic contrivance of Hermione’s return as a statue (5.3.15). “I like your silence and wonder,” she adds in drawing her curtain, “it the more shows off / Your wonder: but yet speak; first, you my liege./ Comes it not something near?” (5.3.21–3). “Near,” but never “identical,” one is tempted to add. In between, there is the suspensive stage of death and concealment, which is crucial, in defining the condition of resurrection and reapparition for Shakespeare’s mothers. The practice of the confinement and churching of women after childbirth has been variously explored by critics to suggest the pattern according to which Shakespeare devises his sanctified return of mothers in his late plays (see for all Paster 272–3 and Bicks 166–77). In foregrounding the post-Reformation inflections of such a ritual in the playwright’s times, Caroline Bicks has also interestingly brought to the fore the complex ways in which Ephesus, a site of ancient and hybridized forms of devotion, might relate—via the figure of a multifaceted Diana—to a reconceptualized maternal body as both sacred and sexual. I would rather turn to the Marian undercurrent of Shakespeare’s “resuscitated” mothers, as the story (or “romance”) which can shed light, I argue, on both Ephesus, as an ancient compound of pagan and Christian worship, and the transfiguring commitment of Renaissance Italian art—a tangible concern for Shakespeare in his late years as he shows by his mention of Giulio Romano. Ephesus, in fact, on whose shore Thaisa is tossed in her coffin to remain cloistered in the temple of Diana until her final reapparition at the end of the play, conveyed more than it

Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfiguration

109

did simply as the site of the pagan goddess. According to one of the many ancient Christian traditions regarding the end of Mary’s life, none of them with scriptural foundation, Ephesus was also the place where Mary died and was assumed into Heaven. Specialists in the Ancient Church and the Dormitio Virginis issue (also called Transitus) inform us that this belief (which differs from the mainstream account of Mary’s death in Jerusalem) originated in the early Christian tradition of the apostle John’s mission to Ephesus, and in a conjecture that Mary may have accompanied him, following “Christ’s instructions from the cross to his mother and the ‘Beloved Disciple,’ ‘Woman here is your son,’ etc.” (Shoemaker 75). But even if one chooses not to follow this tradition, Ephesus remains important, in my view, in relation to the end of Mary’s life. According to one of the versions of “The Assumption of our Lady” narrated in The Golden Legend, the best-selling late medieval collection of saints’ lives, St. John was preaching at Ephesus when he learned of Mary’s approaching death: “And it happed as S. John the Evangelist preached in Ephesus, the heaven suddenly thundered, and a white cloud took him up and brought him tofore the gate of the blessed Virgin Mary” (235–6). One cannot avoid noticing that the signs of the Heavens are as ominous for the far off inhabitants of Ephesus on the night of Thaisa’s deadly childbirth. Moreover, Cerimon as well as Paulina in Shakespeare’s plays seems to be invested with the same solicitous and careful role of the apostles in relation to Mary’s body during its passing and resurrection: “And after, the holy body was wounden and wrapped in a clean sudary, and was laid upon the bed, and lamps burnt full bright about her. Ointments gave a great and fragrant odour, the louings and praisings of angels resounded. And the apostles and other that were there sang divine songs” (266). Such a cure of Mary’s dead body—contrastingly resonating in Shakespeare’s uncompleted or outraged rites—had been given the status of the proper funeral rite (with linen, candles, sacred chants, ointments) by medieval and Renaissance iconography, especially in Mantegna’s Dormitio Virginis (presently housed in the Prado museum). Most significantly in relation to Shakespeare’s resuscitated maternal bodies, however, is the fact that Ephesus, and precisely the church dedicated to Mary, was the place where the third ecumenical council was held in 431; the council, that is, connected with the establishment of the veneration of Mary as God’s mother (Theotokos), an important step in the emerging conundrum of whether or not “the Virgin’s body and soul [were] only temporarily separated, after which … like her son [Mary was] resurrected and taken bodily into the heaven” (Shoemaker 3). As attested to by the accounts reported in The Golden Legend, the versions that made their way into popular belief easily conflated the two traditions. They related that upon Mary’s death, “the soul issued out of the body and fled up in the arms of her son” (238). But also that on the third day, after Mary’s body had been washed to blinding whiteness by three maidens, and “honourably” taken to the grave by the apostles, which they covered with “flowers of roses, that was the company of martyrs, and with lilies of the valley, that was the company of angels, of confessors

110

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

and virgins” (238), the Saviour came to resuscitate his mother and save her body from corruption: And the Saviour spake and said: Arise up, haste thee, my culver or dove, tabernacle of glory, vessel of life, temple celestial, and like as thou never feltest conceiving by none atouchment, thou shalt not suffer in the sepulchre no corruption of body. And anon the soul came again to the body of Mary, and issued gloriously out of the tomb, and thus was received in the heavenly chamber, and a great company of angels with her. (241)

In between Mary’s transitus from life to death and resurrection, the apostles will have to protect the Virgin’s body (and grave) against the sacrilegious assaults of people instigated by the high priests, who want to “burn the body of her that bare this traitor” (240) (a hint of no little account in relation to Leontes’ invectives during the trial against Hermione and towards Paulina’s protective role). And then the apostles bare Mary unto the monument and sat by it, like as our Lord had commanded, and at the third day Jesu Christ came with a great multitude of angels and saluted them, and said: Peace be with you. And they answered: God, glory be to thee which only makest the great miracles and marvels. And our Lord said to the apostles: What is now your advice that I ought now to do to my mother of honour and of grace? Sire, it seemeth to us thy servants that like as thou hast vanquished the death and reignest world without end, that thou raise also the body of thy mother and set it on thy right side in perdurability. And he granted it. (241)

What I think is worth noting is that in 1527, at the eve of the Reformation in England, The Golden Legend (first printed in 1483) had reached its ninth edition. In an epoch of disrupted images and reformed memories, an acquaintance of Shakespeare’s audience with the ancient Marian narratives of the Dormitio Virginis, passed down for centuries as a recurrent homiletic subject and a familiar image, may have charged the playwright’s casting of his mothers as dead and resurrected bodies with pre-Reformist religious connotations. Also, the Dormition tales laid bare motifs as important as those of menaced funeral rites, of empty graves, and concealing monuments and temples, increasingly haunting topics in Shakespeare’s late plays, and especially in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale. But what in general concerns us here in relation to the end of Mary’s life, is the tendency in these ancient narratives to interpret her death as a state of sleep— an affirmation of the incorruptibility (“perdurability”) of her body, a powerful if residual and controversial symbolism in the early modern reconceptualization of women’s bodies.12 12  For an analysis of how the Marian imagery bore on the construction of the myth of Elizabeth, see Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen.

Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfiguration

111

What is also important in relation to Shakespeare is the romance mode that characterizes these ancient Marian narratives. As recent criticism has shown, the link between Catholicism and Shakespeare’s predilection for romance cannot be underrated (see Richmond 16–17), especially, I argue, if we take into account the relation between Shakespeare’s resurrected mothers and the legendary nature of the apocryphal Dormitio Virginis theme. “Reverend appearer, no: / I threw her overboard with these very arms,” cries Pericles upon Thaisa’s re-apparition at Ephesus in Diana’s temple. “Look to the lady,” Cerimon continues, “Early one blustering morn this lady was / Thrown upon this shore. I op’d the coffin, / Found there rich jewels; recover’d her, and plac’d her / Here in Diana’s temple” (5.3.17–25). As if in charge of a sacred representation, in front of a group of believers, Cerimon unfolds the tale of Thaisa’s last transitus from death to her awakening as that of a body to be “plac’d” in a temple: a holy body. Similarly, Paulina stages her coup de theâtre—the awakening of the statue— in the form of a miracle played in a “chapel:” Music, awake her; strike! ‘Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach; Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come! I’ll fill your grave up: stir, nay, come away: Bequeath to death your numbness; for from him Dear life redeems you. You perceive she stirs. (5.3.98–103)

The music, the awakening, the wonder of the beholders, the empty grave: these are all elements which seem to be exploiting Marian assumptionist resonances, with the extra metatheatrical awareness on the part of Paulina (and Shakespeare) of enacting an event which changes place with an ancient fable-like story or stories: “That she is living, / Were it told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale” (5.3.115–17). Renaissance artists had repeatedly represented this story by splitting the space of the canvas into two halves, by placing Mary’s assumpted and crowned body in the upper part, flanked by angel musicians (Raphael) or bearing garlands of flowers (Giulio Romano), and by depicting Mary’s empty grave (or Mary’s dead body assisted by the Apostles) in the lower part. The empty grave is lavishly filled up with flowers in Giulio Romano’s Assumption of Our Lady or Madonna of Monteluce (see Figure 5.2)—a motif cherished by Shakespeare—and theatrically surrounded by a ring of awe-stricken apostles, their eyes and hands convulsively interrogating the empty grave as they turn up towards the assumpted body. In Shakespeare’s own tragicomic secularized diptych—the two halves severed by a long temporal divide—we find a strikingly similar way of representing awe and mirth in front of the miraculous return of those who were thought to be dead: “There might you have beheld one joy crown another, so and in such a manner that it seemed sorrow wept to take leave of them, for their joy waded in tears. There was casting up of eyes, holding up of hands, with countenance of such distraction, that they were to be known by garment, not by favour” (5.2.44–50).

112

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Leontes will have to wait 16 years for the moment when he himself, purged of his evil humours by mourning and loss, will be restored to a sanitized gaze by means of a redeeming vision of the female body. That, however, will be the job of persons who proverbially never tell the truth: the job of a woman, Paulina, who loves magic, art, and theatre; the dubitable job of an artist, Giulio Romano, praised by Vasari in his lives for the uttermost form of deception, that of making people seem more real than life. The animated “stone” of Hermione descending from its/her niche and moving forward, in a straight line, towards the centric point established by Leontes’s eyes (during Paulina’s ritualized “staging” of the event), is mimetic art made flesh. The statue is so “[m]asterly done” by its assumed Italian author, Giulio Romano, that “[t]he very life seems warm upon her lip” (5.3.65–6), observes Polixenes. And Leontes exclaims: “What fine chisel / could ever yet cut breath?” (5.3.78–9). Hermione’s “dead likeness” (5.3.15) is now endowed with the conciliating proportion and quality which can reintegrate Leontes in his sovereign gaze. The Queen is true to life, and yet ideal (“as tender / As infancy and grace” [5.3.26–7]). But as we are alerted, in the course of the protracted disquisition on “good” mimesis which accompanies the spectacularized reanimation, and with which Shakespeare decides to conclude his play, perfect resemblance, or seeing right, doesn’t mean avoiding artifice, or being deceived. “The fixure of her eye has motion in’t, / As we are mock’d with art” (5.3.67–8), says Leontes. If intended as a gift for the old penitent king, Hermione’s resurrection as a reassuring Madonna (“as tender / As infancy and grace”) is, as it is staged by Shakespeare, one more illusionism.13 The Late Dream of the Naïve Artist Shakespeare’s tragedies and his romances are linked, I believe, by the same relation of “reciprocal necessity” that in his Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche noticed between the terrible wisdom of Silenus and desirable Apollonian clarity. The relation is an impulse towards harmonious fusion with the surrounding world which, as in Homer, says Nietzsche, responds to the tragedy of primordial pain through a particular form of “naïveté.” But for the Greeks, “naïveté” is born of the will; it is a struggle, in Nietzsche’s words, a rose slowly budding from thorny bushes. It is the will to be transfigured, to glorify oneself, “and, as a monument of its victory, Homer, the naïve artist, stands before us” (37). Like Nietzsche’s “naïve” artist, when Shakespeare wrote the mythologizing and fable-like narrations of his late plays, he was well aware that he was dreaming. Like the naïve artist, Shakespeare seems to be saying: “it is a dream, I will dream on!” (Nietzsche 38). In the same way—one need only think of the meta-theatrical 13  I strongly differ here from Barkan’s idea (“Living Sculptures”) that Hermione’s coming alive replaces art with nature. In my view, the animated statue only replaces plastic or pictorial arts with the more ubiquitous delusive art of theater.

Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfiguration

113

quality of the romances—he distances himself from his own freeing illusion to contemplate it, thus turning it advisedly into a mode of knowledge. The same awareness characterizes the intent. “The purchase is to make men glorious” (1.9): such is the promise made at the very beginning of Pericles—a sort of blueprint for the romances that will follow—by Gower, the revived “naïve” singer of an ancient story sung for “latter times / When wit’s more ripe”(1.11–12). The freeing illusion borne by an ideal daughter figure and by the resurrection of mothers does not, however, make knowledge naïve. It only partially removes the horror afflicting the male imagination of the tragedies, pushing it towards a mythical and primeval territory. Or, rather, opening up what I would call a crosseyed perspective, somewhat like the dually minded scheme Nietzsche invites us to observe in Raphael’s Transfiguration—one of his “immortal naïve artists.” In his ekphrasis of the painter’s work, as we have seen, through a twofold philosophical and artistic perspective, Nietzsche allows us to grasp, in a very concrete way, the two fundamental forms of knowledge that interact in the tragicomic, and far from simple, framework of romance. But what I believe is also important in Nietzsche’s vision of the Apollonian art, is the nautical metaphor through which the philosopher comments on the god’s embodiment of a contemplative view of life: “he shows us, with sublime attitudes, how the entire world of torment is necessary, that thereby the individual may be impelled to realise the redeeming vision, and then, sunk in contemplation thereof, quietly sit in his fluctuating barque, in the midst of the sea” (40). Indeed, Nietzsche’s nautical metaphor is as essential in helping us understand the ways in which the “freeing illusion” depends on its marine, abysmal and precarious backdrop: the sea, the fluid and risky element, in which Shakespeare places the first and last of his romance heroes—Pericles and Prospero—so that they may literally and metaphorically learn the difficult art of survival. However, starting from Pericles, what is constantly fluid and insidious in his romances is the scenario of familial bodies, primarily the maternal body—alternatively loved, hated, withered, killed, drowned, erased, redeemed, transfigured, but never entire and identical with itself. Indeed, as one might put it borrowing from Luce Irigaray, the condition of the maternal in Shakespeare’s romances is that of a body constantly kept in a state of death but never dying. “A mourning veil into which you endlessly transfigure me so as to make yourself immortal. Dwelling in death without ever dying, I keep for you the dream” (Marine Lover 28). One might observe that Pericles and Leontes—the two penitent kings of Shakespeare’s romances—are rewarded with both the image and the flesh of their resuscitated and transfigured loved ones. However, the way this is staged in The Winter’s Tale shows that this is the playwright’s last trick, whether this be viewed, as has been suggested, as Shakespeare’s way of celebrating the force of theater over the frozen medium of plastic arts, implying also the “greater triumph of life” over art (Barkan, “Living Sculptures” 661–4); or, as I would suggest, the enactment of a male craving for a fulfilling if unattainable perfect mimesis of the female

114

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

body; a craving as old as the story of the great Alexander’s beloved Campaspe given as a present to her painter Apelle. Shakespeare’s contemporaries could find the anecdote reported both in Vasari’s Proem to his Lives and in Castiglione’s Courtier. Thus in The Courtier translated by Hoby: it is read that Alexander loved highlye Appelles of Ephesus, and somuch, that after he had made him draw out a woman of his, naked, whom he loved most deerly, and understandinge that this good peincter, for her marveylous beauty, was most fervently in love with her, with out any more a do, he bestowed her upon him. Truely a woorthy liberalitye of Alexander, not to geve onelye treasures and states, but also his owne affections and desires, and a token of very great love towarde Apelles, not regarding (to please him with all) the displeasure of the woman that he highly loved, who it is to be thought was sore agreved to chaunge so great a king for a peincter. (67)

Bibliography Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays. Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Barber, C. L. “‘Thou that Beget’st Him that Did Thee Beget’: Transformation in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 59–67. Print. ———, and Richard P. Wheeler. The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. Print. Barkan, Leonard, “Living Sculptures: Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter’s Tale.” English Language History 48.4 (1981): 639–67. Print. ———. “Making Pictures Speak: Renaissance Art, Elizabethan Literature, Modern Scholarship.” Renaissance Quarterly 48.2 (1995): 326–51. Print. Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher. The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976. Print. Bicks, Caroline. Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Print. Castiglione, Baldassarre. The Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio [ … ] done into Englyshe by Thomas Hoby. London, 1561. Transcribed by R.S. Bear, University of Oregon, 1997. Web. 23 Mar. 2005. < http://darkwing.uoregon. edu/%7Erbear/courtier/courtier.html>. ———. Il cortegiano del Conte Baldassar Castiglione. Venezia, 1573. Print. Clark, Stuart. Vanities of the Eye. Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. Crooke, Helkiah. Mikrocosmographia. A Description of the Body of Man. London, 1615. Print.

Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfiguration

115

D’Arco, Carlo. Istoria della vita e delle opere di Giulio Pippi Romano. Con tavole. Mantova, 1842. Print. Del Sapio Garbero, Maria. Il bene ritrovato. Le figlie di Shakespeare dal King Lear ai romances. Roma: Bulzoni, 2005. Print. ———. “A Spider in the Eye/I: The Hallucinatory Staging of the Self in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.” Solo Performances: Staging the Early Modern Self in England. Ed. Ute Berns. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. 133–55. Print. ———. “Troubled Metaphors: Shakespeare and the Renaissance Anatomy of the Eye.” The Renaissance and the Dialogue Between Science, Art, and Literature. Ed. Klaus Bergdolt and Manfred Pfister. xxvii Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011. 43–70. Print. Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissance-forschung 27. Fissell, Mary E. Vernacular Bodies. The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896a). Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. 3. London: Hogarth, 1961. 191–221. Print. ———. “On Femininity” (1933). Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. 23. London: Hogarth, 1961. 112–35. Print. Frye, Northrop. “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale; A Casebook. Ed. Kenneth Muir. London: Macmillan, 1968. 184–97. Print. The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints. Compiled by Jacobus de Voragine. 1275. 1st ed. 1470. Trans. William Caxton.1483. Ed. F.S. Ellis. 1900. New York: AMS, 1973. Print. Temple Classics. Hackett, Helen. Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen. London: MacMillan, 1995. Print. ———. “‘Gracious be the issue’: Maternity and Narrative in Shakespeare’s Late Plays.” Shakespeare’s Late Plays. New Readings. Ed. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. 25–39. Print. ———. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print. Hughes, Ted. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. London: Faber, 1993. Print. Irigaray, Luce. “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother.” The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Blackwell: Oxford, 1991. 34–46. Print. ———. Marine Lover of Friederich Nietzsche. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Print. Jorden, Edward. A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother. 1603. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror:An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Print. Lomazzo, Giovanni. A Tracte containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, Carvinge, and Buldinge. Trans. Richard Haydocke. 1598. Amsterdam: Capo, 1969. Print.

116

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Luzio, Alessandro. La Galleria dei Gonzaga venduta all’Inghilterra nel 1627–28 (con i documenti degli archivi di Mantova e Londra). Milano: Cogliati, 1913. Print. McCumber, John. “Aristotelian Catharsis and the Purgation of Woman.” Diacritics 4 (1988): 53–67. Print. Meek, Richard. Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Print. Melchiori, Giorgio. Introduzione. W. Shakespeare. I drammi romanzeschi. Milano: Mondadori, 1981. xxxvii–xlviii. Print. Miller, Naomi J. and Naomi Yavneh, eds. Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy, or Hellenism and Pessimism. Trans. W. H. Haussmann. London: Allen & Unwin, 1909. Print. Orgel, Stephen. Introduction. The Winter’s Tale. 1996. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 1–83. Print. Oxford Shakespeare. ———. Introduction. The Tempest. Oxford: OUP, 1987. 1–87. Print. Oxford Shakespeare. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Print. Richmond, Velma Bourgois. Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance. New York: Continuum, 2000. Print. Salingar, Leo. Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Print. Serpieri, Alessandro. Introduzione. Pericles. Milano: Garzanti, 1991. XXXVIII–LI. Print. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Ed. Kenneth Muir. 1972. London: Routledge, 1991. Print. Arden Shakespeare. ———. Pericles. Ed. F. D. Hoeniger. 1963. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Arden Shakespeare. ———. The Tempest. Ed. F. Kermode. 1954. London: Routledge, 1990. Print. Arden Shakespeare. ———. The Winter’s Tale. Ed. J. H. P. Pafford. London: Routledge, 1991. Print. Arden Shakespeare. Shapiro, Gary. Archaeologies of Vision. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print. Shoemaker, Stephen J. Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption. 2002. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print. Vanita, Ruth. “Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII.” Studies in English Literature 2 (2000): 311–37. Print. Vasari, Giorgio. Delle vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori et architettori. Scritte da M. Giorgio Vasari pittore et architetto Aretino. Di nuovo dal medesimo riviste et ampliate. 1568. Ed. Carlo Ludovico Raggianti. Vol. 1. Milano: Rizzoli, 1949. Print. ———. The Lives of the Artists. Trans. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfiguration

117

Whitaker, Lucy and Martin Clayton. The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection. London: Royal Collection Publications, 2007. Wilcox, Helen. “Gender and genre in Shakespeare’s tragicomedies.” Reclamations of Shakespeare. Ed. A.J. Hoenselaars. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 129–38. Print. Wilson, Adrian. “The Ceremony of Childbirth and its Interpretation.” Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England. Ed.Valerie Fildes. London: Routledge, 1990. 68–107. Print. Wilson, Richard. “Observations on English Bodies: Licensing Maternity in Shakespeare’s Late Plays.” Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property and Culture in Early Modern England. Ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. 121–50. Print. Wyatt, Michael. The Italian Encounter with Tudor England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 6

“It hath happened all as I would have had it”: Maternal Desires in Shakespearean Romance Karen Bamford

In the world of romance, as Shakespeare’s Gower memorably tells us, “wishes fall out as they’re willed” (Pericles 22.16).1 Echoing Gower’s gnomic utterance, Northrop Frye describes romance as the “nearest of all literary forms to the wishfulfilment dream” (Anatomy of Criticism 186). Similarly Derek Brewer locates the essence of romance in “a fantasy story … in which quest and conflict culminate in a happy ending … ” (“The Nature of Romance” 46). Romance does not imitate life; it reshapes it to bring us, in Frye’s words, “the world we want,” a world in which “reality is what is created by human desire” (Natural Perspective 116, 115). From a feminist perspective, however, it is clear that the “human desire” that has shaped romance narratives in the western tradition has typically been male, and in family romances—narratives in which families are separated and reunited2—the wishes of fathers, not mothers, have dominated. Thus in The Odyssey, the ancient “fountainhead” of romance (Reardon 6), the hero returns home, as if from the dead, after a 20-year absence to recover an heroic son, a chaste wife and a devoted father. His mother, who has died of grief at his absence, is irrelevant to the happy ending.3 In the biblical story of Joseph (Gen. 37–47) the hero is providentially reunited with his brothers and father in Egypt;4 his mother, now deceased, has no part in the felicity. What matters finally is that Israel (Jacob) recovers the son he  This and all citations of Shakespeare are from The Norton Shakespeare.  According to Louden, “a miraculous return from apparent death, and reunion with family, is at the core of romance” (58). 3  The specifically patriarchal pleasures of The Odyssey are clear in the final book, which highlights the gratification of the hero’s father, “the old commander” (24.409). Rejuvenated by Athena to fight beside Odysseus and Telemachus against their enemies, Laertes calls out “in deep delight, / ‘What a day for me, dear gods! What joy— / my son and grandson vying over courage!’” (24.566–8).With supernatural strength Laertes strikes the first blow in the battle, followed by Odysseus and Telemachus: the union of the three generations of men in martial valor is evidently the happiest possible ending for the family. 4  Many biblical scholars have commented on the strong literary quality of the Joseph narrative; indeed, Arnold believes it originally “stood alone as an independent self-contained short story, which has been broken apart, especially at its conclusion (Gen. 46–50) and adapted as the final portion of the book of Genesis” (315). In his monograph on the Joseph story, Redford categorizes it as a “Märchen-Novelle” that “partakes of the timelessness of 1 2

120

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

had believed dead: “Now let me die,” he declares to the weeping Joseph, “since I have seen thy face, because thou art yet alive” (Gen. 46: 30; King James Version). In Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story—“the apogee of ancient romance” (Heiserman 186)—the heroine is lost and recovered not only by her biological father, but by three surrogate fathers as well;5 although she also recovers her birth mother, the narrative emphasis is overwhelmingly on father-daughter bonds. The Latin romance of Apollonius of Tyre—the ultimate source of Shakespeare’s Pericles—is structured around contrasting father-daughter pairs, and reaches its climax when the hero is reunited with his daughter: “You are my daughter Tarsia,” he cries, “my one and only hope and the light of my eyes. I have been mourning you and your mother for fourteen years. Now I shall die happy, for my hope has been brought back to life and restored to me” (The Story of Apollonius 767). Although Apollonius subsequently recovers his wife as well, the narrative’s emphasis is again overwhelmingly on the father-daughter reunion.6 In short, the outcomes of these stories are shaped according to paternal desires, and when a mother is present for the happy ending her pleasure is clearly subordinate to that of the father.7 “Romance,” as Bruce Louden observes, “remains a remarkably conservative or stable narrative organization over the millennia” (60). From antiquity through the early modern period it is a strongly patriarchal form in which, generally speaking, fathers get what they want; mothers, not so much. When we turn to the festive groups who gather at the end of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies—many of them rooted in romance narratives8—it is not surprising to find that mothers are largely absent. Indeed, Mary Beth Rose has argued that “the harmonious, stable, the Märchen and the ‘real world’ of the Novella” (67). For a detailed discussion of the story as romance see Louden, who compares it closely with the Odyssey (57–102). 5  Chariclea’s surrogate fathers include: Charicles, priest of Apollo; Calasiris, an Egyptian prophet; and Sisimithres, an Ethiopean gymnosophist. At the climax of the novel she is reunited with her biological father, King Hydaspes, as well as with Charicles and Sisimithres. 6  The recovery of the hero’s wife, narrated in a few sentences, is perfunctory compared with the extended scene of the father-daughter recognition. The mother-daughter reunion is even briefer, and mediated by Apollonius. “Where is my daughter?” asks the (nameless) wife. “He showed Tarsia to her and said, ‘Look, here she is’” (The Story of Apollonius 770). 7  I have argued this point elsewhere in somewhat different terms: see “Romance, Recognition and Revenge” 145–6. 8  Shakespeare’s preference for “moldy” tales—as Jonson termed Pericles (“Ode to Himself ” 21)—is evident throughout his career, not just in the late plays: The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida are variously rooted in romance narratives, often mediated through Italian novelle, while The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor draw on folk narratives. Although Love’s Labour’s Lost has no strong narrative connection with specific romance sources, R. S. White links it persuasively with romance conventions (35–9).

Maternal Desires in Shakespearean Romance

121

wished-for society” represented at the conclusion of Shakespearean comedy is specifically “based upon the sacrifice of the mother’s desire” (303). Within the limits of Shakespeare’s “dramatic and sexual discourses,” Rose declares, maternal desire and agency, conceived solely in terms of the private domain, can be represented visibly (corporeally) only as dangerous, subordinate, or peripheral in relation to public, adult life. The possible dramatic stories generated by these constructions of meaning are all versions of the oedipal plot, where, in relation to the hero, the best mother is an absent or dead mother … . (307)

While Rose’s thesis may be true for some of Shakespeare’s comedies, I would like to qualify her account of maternal desire by emphasizing the difference between most of the earlier comedies—those, that is, up to and including Twelfth Night (c. 1601)9—and the later tragi-comedies (romances); and by situating “the mother’s desire” in the general context of wish-fulfilment—that is, by asking whose desires are satisfied by the comic endings. I will argue that, in short, the desires of mothers (like those of fathers) matter more in Shakespearean romance than in the earlier comedies, and that in its treatment of maternal desire All’s Well that Ends Well (c. 1604–05) anticipates Pericles (c. 1607–08) and especially The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609), since in all three plays a mother’s desire for reunion with her child is gratified. I propose, moreover, that in The Winter’s Tale and All’s Well the gratification of that desire is so central to the happy endings that both plays may be understood as specifically maternal romances, and thus, as rare exceptions to the rule of primary paternal gratification, worthy of note. While Shakespeare’s early comedies end happily for the young lovers whose courtships are central to the plots, the wishes of their parents are largely irrelevant in the fifth act. If parents matter at all in these plays, they generally do so as blocking figures. Until the King of France inopportunely dies offstage, the eight lovers in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594–95) pursue their desires in an improbable state of independence from their families: when they make their pledges in Act 5, only the bereaved Princess (now Queen) of France mentions any obligation to kin. Clearly this is a dramatic fantasy: historians tell us that marriage contracts were generally shaped by family expectations, and the pressure of these expectations would be greatest among the elite classes who dominate Shakespeare’s comedies.10 However, it is a fantasy that Shakespeare repeats in Twelfth Night where none of the lovers need to negotiate their families’ consent for their matches. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1590–91) Proteus and Julia have fathers who are shed easily and early; Silvia’s father, the Duke, is a greater threat to the comic outcome,  Here and throughout I use the dates given in The Norton Shakespeare (3377–88) for the “probable composition” of Shakespeare’s plays. In no case does the exact date of composition matter to my argument: I provide the probable dates only for convenience and as a rough guide to the order of Shakespeare’s comedies. 10  See, for example, Mendelson and Crawford 112. 9

122

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

but he capitulates suddenly 32 lines before the play ends. In The Taming of the Shrew (1592), Baptista’s plans are foiled by Bianca and Lucentio, just as in The Merchant of Venice (1596–97) Shylock is duped by Jessica and Lorenzo. (Portia’s dead father functions as a ghostly blocking figure through the terms of his will.) Of the six lovers married at the end of Midsummers Night’s Dream (1594–96), only one (Hermia) has a theatrically present parent, and his objections to her match are brusquely overruled in Act 4. “What talk we of fathers when there is such as man as Orlando?”, demands Rosalind (AYL 3.4.33–4); and although the Duke is reunited with his daughter at her betrothal, we experience the ending of As You Like It (1599–1600) as happy primarily for the young lovers. Similarly, although Hero’s father and uncle have a beneficent role in Much Ado about Nothing (1598), the comic energy at the conclusion is vested in the marriage of Beatrice and Benedict, and Hero’s resurrection to Claudio. In sum, the wishes of parents are generally irrelevant to these endings; when parents do appear, they are almost exclusively male and, following the model of New Comedy, usually function as obstacles to be overcome. There are two exceptions to this pattern. In The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597–98), where Shakespeare yokes the gulling of Falstaff to a courtship subplot, Anne Page has, remarkably, a mother as well as a father to evade as she chooses her suitor; but here the mother simply duplicates the conventional paternal role as obstacle. The more significant exception is The Comedy of Errors (1592–94) where the principal action of mistaken identity is framed by the father’s quest for his lost son and slave (1.1.124–36) along with the son’s quest for his mother and his brother (1.2.35–40), and the satisfaction of these quests in Act 5. The significance of this exception for my purposes lies in its romance roots: as is well known, Shakespeare added the figure of the Abbess, the lost and recovered mother, to his Plautine source; and he derived this plot strand from the Apollonius romance.11 It is the Abbess, not her husband, or either of their sons, who voices the joy of the reunion, and she does so in imagery of childbirth: Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail Of you, my sons, and till this present hour My heavy burden ne’er deliverèd. The Duke, my husband, and my children both, And you the calendars of their nativity, Go to a gossips’ feast, and joy with me. After so long grief, such festivity! (5.1.402–8)

Like The Comedy of Errors, and in contrast to the rest of the earlier comedies, Shakespeare’s romances foreground the desires of the older generation. In the revelations that crown Cymbeline (1609–10) the reconciliation of Innogen and 11  For a discussion of Shakespeare’s use of the Apollonius romance in The Comedy of Errors, see Charles Whitworth’s introduction to the Oxford edition (27–37).

Maternal Desires in Shakespearean Romance

123

Posthumous is overshadowed by the king’s ecstatic recovery of his three children: like the Abbess, and like Pericles (21.19), Cymbeline uses the metaphor of childbirth when he is reunited with his adult offspring: “O, what am I? / A mother to the birth of three? Ne’er mother / Rejoiced deliverance more” (5.6.369–71). Ferdinand and Miranda are happily betrothed, but the plot of The Tempest (1611) preeminently gratifies Prospero’s wishes. The reunion of Pericles and Marina may restore the latter to her true identity, but it restores her father to life, and their joint reunion with Thaisa fills out the family romance; Marina’s betrothal to Lysimachus is a minor detail. Similarly, while Perdita’s courtship is much more significant than Marina’s, in Act 5 of The Winter’s Tale her betrothal is dramatically subordinate to the gratification of her parents’ wishes. In The Winter’s Tale, as in Pericles, Shakespeare follows the pattern of the Apollonius romance in which the father first recovers his lost daughter before both are reunited with the wife/mother they presumed dead. Remarkably, however, in the later play Shakespeare reverses the emphasis: in Pericles, as in the Apollonius romance itself, the father-daughter reunion provides the emotional climax. By contrast, Shakespeare does not even show us Leontes’s discovery of Perdita’s identity. He saves the audience’s emotion for Hermione’s resurrection, and I propose that it is specifically the reunion between mother and daughter, not husband and wife, which is climactic: here the gratification of the mother’s wishes trumps that of the father/husband’s. As Carol Thomas Neely observes, “the reunion with Leontes is not the final, or perhaps even the central one for Hermione, who, after all, had never rejected Leontes. Her own renewal is completed only when she speaks to Perdita … ” (86). Certainly this extraordinarily rich scene admits diverse readings: thus Frye, for example, who declares that the off-stage father-daughter recognition scene is “clearly being subordinated” to “the meeting of Leontes with Hermione” (Myth of Deliverance 57), does not even mention the reunion of Hermione with Perdita.12 By contrast, Stephen Orgel argues that “the restoration of the Perdita” as heir to the kingdom, rather than the reunion of husband and wife, is “the crucial element” (78) in the play’s ending: “The fact that so many audiences and critics since the eighteenth century have seen this ending as profoundly satisfactory,” Orgel continues, “says much for the tenacity of patriarchal assumptions as the subtext to aesthetic judgments. Once the crucial loss 12  Similarly William Carroll (212–25) writes at length and with brilliance on “the great statue scene” (213) but does not address the mother-daughter reunion. See too the illuminating discussions of this scene by R. S. White (153–7) and Charles Frey (154–65), which also overlook Hermione’s recovery of Perdita. Derek Traversi does acknowledge the reunion of Hermione and Perdita, but for him it is of secondary importance: “With Leontes and Hermione finally embraced, to the wonder of those who surround them, it only remains for the play to be rounded off by the gesture, also typical of these comedies, by which the family unity is finally restored, and in which the father bestows his blessing” (183). Curiously Traversi does not acknowledge that in this play it is the mother, not the father, who bestows the blessing.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

124

is restored, everything returns to its proper place … What is restored, finally, in this quintessentially Jacobean drama, is royal authority” (79). I suggest, however, that many audiences have found the ending “profoundly satisfying” not because royal authority is restored but because a daughter is restored to the mother from whom she was taken at birth. Indeed, in his performance history of the play Dennis Bartholomeusz remarks upon the extraordinary theatrical power of the motherdaughter reunion: “Critics,” he observes, “do not stress the importance of this moment enough, but in the theatre it can be almost unbearably moving … ” (234).13 Crucially, Hermione says nothing to Leontes in this final scene. Shakespeare scripts her gesture of forgiveness through the words of the watching Polixenes (“She embraces him” [5.3.112]) and Camillo (“She hangs about his neck” [113]), but there is no verbal assurance from Hermione. Disturbed by her silence, Camillo demands speech as well as motion from the statue (“If she pertain to life, let her speak too” [114]), a demand seconded by Polixenes (“Ay, and make it manifest where she has lived, / Or how stol’n from the dead” [115–16]). In response Paulina first directs Perdita “to interpose” (“Kneel, / And pray your mother’s blessing” [120–21]) and then Hermione to turn. It is not, however, until Paulina has recapitulated the good news—“Our Perdita is found” (122)—that Hermione fully returns to life, blessing her kneeling daughter: You gods, look down, And from your sacred vials pour your graces Upon my daughter’s head. —Tell me, mine own, Where hast thou been preserved? Where lived? How found Thy father’s court? For thou shalt hear that I, Knowing by Paulina that the oracle Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserved Myself to see the issue. (5.3.122–9)14 13

 See for example Thomas Campbell’s account of Mrs. Siddons’s performance in John Philip Kemble’s productions (1802 and 1807): “This statue scene has hardly its parallel for enchantment even in Shakespeare’s theatre … the heart of everyone who saw her when she burst from the semblance of a sculpture into motion, and embraced her daughter, Perdita, must throb and glow at the recollection” (Life of Mrs. Siddons, qtd. in Bartholomeusz 61). Similarly, according to Bartholomeusz, in the 1976 production at Stratford-upon-Avon (directed by John Barton and Trevor Nunn), although Hermione’s “reunion with Leontes was movingly austere … more moving was the union with Perdita” (224–5). Reviewing the BBC’s film version (directed by Jane Howell, 1981), Kenneth S. Rothwell observed that as “Hermione stirs, there is a sense of wonder, of the miraculous, sealed by the moving reunion of mother and daughter” (401). 14  Mary Beth Rose interprets Hermione’s silence to Leontes and her speech to Perdita as a sign that Hermione is purged of female desire: “This act, along with her wrinkles, which signify that she is beyond the age of fertility, renders Hermione unthreatening. She reenters the world reassuringly, embodying Hamlet’s (and Leontes’s) dream of a mother with ‘tame’ and ‘humble’ blood” (307). I would argue that her words to Perdita suggest

Maternal Desires in Shakespearean Romance

125

These are Hermione’s only words in this scene, and her only account of the last 16 years. Shakespeare refuses “to make it manifest where she has lived, or how stol’n from the dead,” but if we accept Hermione’s statement, then we must accept that she has chosen to live—actively “preserved” herself when death would have been easier—only in the hope of seeing her daughter again.15 The possibility of reconciliation with her husband was not sufficient to motivate her self-preservation: what she wanted was her daughter. She returns from her presumed death only because Perdita is found. As Janet Adelman persuasively argues, once Hermione is alive, she remains outside the sphere of Leontes’s omnipotence; though she answers his desire with her embrace, she then turns away from him, turns toward Perdita, insisting on her own agency, her own version of her story … . [Through this turning away,] Shakespeare marks and validates Hermione’s separateness as the source of her value … and he simultaneously opens up a space for the female narrative—specifically the mother-daughter narrative—his work has thus far suppressed. (234)

The mother-daughter narrative that Shakespeare evokes most obviously here is that of Demeter/Ceres and Persephone/Proserpina: a maternal romance in which the goddess first loses her daughter to Death and then after a lengthy search finally recovers her from the underworld. However, in Hermione’s quasi-supernatural resurrection, Shakespeare also evokes the ancient and widespread folktale motif of the mother who returns from the dead to nurture her daughter;16 a motif that speaks both to a child’s desire for a mother strong enough to defeat death, and a mother’s desire to do so. not her compliance with Leontes’s desires but her independence of them: she lives for her daughter, not her husband. See too Bishop, who notes the “emphasis on Hermione’s longing for her daughter” in this final scene (173); Dunworth, who stresses “Hermione’s determination to see her daughter” (211); and Krier, whose “hopeful” reading of the play (238) celebrates “Hermione’s amazing strength to own her appetite—for she has chosen to live this way over sixteen years on the oracle’s riddling, subjunctive gesture toward the possibility of her daughter’s survival” (246). 15  In his trenchant comments on this scene, Coghill puts the case for the traditional reading, focused on Leontes, at its most extreme: he ignores Perdita completely, and denies Hermione any agency in her return: “It is a play about a crisis in the life of Leontes, not of Hermione, and her restoration to him (it is not a ‘resurrection’) is something that happens not to her, but to him” (212). Neely, by contrast, in her feminist revision of the play emphasizes Hermione’s agency: “To achieve this joyous alliance with the processes of time, Hermione is willing to wait out the sixteen years, to accept wrinkles, and to risk a reunion with Leontes” (87). 16  Motif E323, “Dead mother’s friendly return,” in Thompson’s Motif-Index of FolkLiterature. The motif appears frequently in “Cinderella” stories (sub-type 510A in Uther’s classification of folktales): see Warner ch. 3; and Garry and Langlois 184–5.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

126

Like the Abbess in The Comedy of Errors, the resurrected Hermione is Shakespeare’s addition to his main source: in Greene’s Pandosto the Queen does not live to recover her daughter. In allowing Hermione to regain Perdita Shakespeare, in Adelman’s words, “opens up a space” for the mother-daughter narrative. It is not, however, a space unprecedented in the canon of his work. I propose that we may find it less obviously but nevertheless powerfully present in All’s Well that Ends Well, where Shakespeare also added a fifth-act mother and daughter reunion to his narrative source. Textual scholars have recently argued for a date after 1606 for this play.17 “The re-dating is important,” Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith contend, “because it makes All’s Well not a misfit problem play but an early ‘late romance’” (13). As they also note, “literary critics have long recognized the connection between All’s Well and the other late romances” (13). I would like to add what I believe to be further evidence for considering All’s Well as “an early ‘late romance’”: that is, the motif of maternal gratification which links this play to The Winter’s Tale. Although from Bertram’s point of view the play’s resolution may be problematic—he finds himself remarried to the wife he never wanted—from that of his mother it presents a very happy ending indeed: her only son is restored to her and she gets the daughter she (apparently) always wanted, a daughter visibly pregnant with her grandchild.18 (That this is the only one of Shakespeare’s comedies to represent a family’s three generations in the concluding stage image emphasizes the satisfaction of the grandmother.) In contrast to its primary source in Boccaccio’s story of Giletta of Narbonne (III.9), in which the hero’s mother is wholly absent, Shakespeare’s play makes the bond between heroine and her mother-in-law at once central to the plot and a source of mutual solace. Even more remarkably, the Countess favors Helen’s marriage to her son. I would like to underline the astonishing singularity of the Countess in this respect. In her authorization of Helen’s marriage, she is unlike any other widowed mother I know of in the drama of the period. In a body of texts replete with venal, corrupt and dangerous widows who, like the Queen in Cymbeline, typically plot to advance the interests of their biological children, the Countess stands alone. Moreover, her benevolence runs counter to the conventional representation of both stepmothers or foster-mothers and mothers-in-law (figures that frequently blur in

17

 Maguire and Smith summarize the opinions in favor of a date after 1606 (13). Following traditional dates and categories, Fuller excludes All’s Well that Ends Well from his 2004 discussion of “Shakespeare’s Romances,” but McMullan includes it in his 2009 essay on Shakespeare’s “late plays.” 18  Helen’s pregnancy must be visible to prove her satisfaction of Bertram’s demands. Since Diana tells us Helen can feel the baby kick—an important sign of successful conception—the pregnancy must be at least in its fifth month. Productions, like the Globe Theatre’s (directed by John Dove, 2011), in which Helen is not visibly pregnant in Act 5 diminish the wonder of the play’s conclusion.

Maternal Desires in Shakespearean Romance

127

folktales),19 and the Countess occupies both those roles in relation to Helen. The hostility of stepmothers to their stepchildren, proverbial since antiquity,20 appears frequently in early modern texts. Sidney famously calls upon it in Astrophil and Stella 1: “Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Studie’s blows” (165; line10);21 and when Lucy Hutchinson recounts the story of her mother’s childhood, she alludes to this tradition of hostile stepmothers: Her father and mother died when she was not above five years of age, and yet at her nurse’s, from whence she was carried to be brought up in the house of the Lord Grandison … an honourable and excellent person, but married to a lady so jealous of him, and so ill-natured in her jealous fits to anything that was related to him, that her cruelties to my mother exceeded the stories of stepmothers. (10)

Shakespeare himself contributed to such “stories of stepmothers” in Pericles, where Dionyza attempts to have Marina murdered; and in Cymbeline where Innogen justly complains of her “step-dame false” (1.6.1).22 The gendered hostility of a mother to her son’s wife was also traditional.23 The second part of the “Sleeping Beauty” story, which dates at least from the fourteenth century, focuses on the mother-in-law’s cruelty to the heroine and her children.24 Perhaps even more pertinently, in Apuleius’s tale of Cupid and Psyche, translated into English in 1566, the heroine is persecuted relentlessly by the hero’s jealous and vengeful mother, Venus. Shakespeare certainly knew this story (it is one of the sources for A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and, as I have argued elsewhere (“Foreign Affairs”), it informs All’s Well where Helen, like Psyche, undertakes a penitential journey to win back her husband. Thus Shakespeare’s decision to 19  As Marina Warner points out, “in English usage, ‘mother-in-law’ meant stepmother until the mid-nineteenth century, while the term ‘daughter-in-law’ was used for stepdaughters as well” (218). 20  See Watson’s study which includes an appendix of ancient stepmother myths (“The Murderous Stepmother,’ and “The [perversely] Amorous Stepmother,” 223-–38). 21  For Sidney’s use of the step-dame figure in relation to Queen Elizabeth, see Richard Wood’s essay in this volume. 22  “Of cruel relatives in folktales the stepmother appears more often than any other,” observes Stith Thompson (The Folktale 116). See Motif S31 in Thompson’s Motif Index for a list of tales that include cruel stepmothers. 23  See Warner ch.14 for the close relationship between the figures of the persecuting mother-in-law and the wicked stepmother in fairytales. 24  Perrault’s “La belle au bois dormant” (first published 1697) includes the motif of the cruel mother-in-law. Although in Basile’s Neapolitan version of the story, “Sun, Moon and Talia” (Pentamerone, published 1634–36) it is the jealous wife of the heroine’s rapist/ lover who persecutes the girl, in Calvino’s Calabrian version, “Sleeping Beauty and Her Children” (first published in 1896), the antagonist, as in Perrault, is the mother-in-law. Calvino observes that this tale, representative of Italian “Sleeping Beauty” stories, is “one of the cruelest of all Italian folktales” (744).

128

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

depart from known narrative models and overturn the stereotype of the cruel mother-in-law is all the more striking. Finally, the Countess’s satisfaction in Bertram’s marriage to Helen flies in the face of historical probability. As the dowager Countess she would have excellent reasons to discourage any match between her son and “a poor physician’s daughter,” as Bertram contemptuously describes Helen when the King orders their marriage (2.3.111). Economic, social and political concerns generally governed marriage arrangements at this level of the aristocracy. As Helen correctly sums up the case, “Twere all one / That I should love a bright particular star / And think to wed it, he is so above me” (1.1.80–82); and when the Countess forces her to confess her passion, Helen reasonably fears her anger. In Apuleius when the wretched Psyche is dragged before Venus, the goddess cries sarcastically, “Bee you assured, I will handle you like a daughter,” before ordering the girl to be whipped (263–4; bk.6, sec.9). Even though the Countess has begun her interrogation by assuring Helen that she is indeed a mother to her, her asperity is such that the audience, like Helen, does not know if she will prove a Venus to her or not. Insisting on a full confession, the Countess accuses Helen in terms that imply a religious authority over her: “Only sin / And hellish obstinacy tie thy tongue,” she declares. “Speak, is’t so?” [that is, do you love my son?] If it be so you have wound a goodly clew; If it be not, forswear’t. Howe’er, I charge thee, As heaven shall work in me for thine avail, To tell me truly. (1.3.165–9)

Anticipating the Countess’s anger, Helen pleads with her to “be not offended” (196); denies that she follows Bertram with any “presumptuous suit”; and attempts to forestall the punitive jealousy that Psyche’s love for Cupid provokes in Venus: “My dearest madam,” she begs, “Let not your hate encounter with my love / For loving where you do” (191–2). Representing herself as hopeless in her love, doomed, like Psyche, to endless labors of love, she wins the Countess’s sympathy, and the promise of material and emotional support: Why, Helen, thou shalt have my leave and love, Means and attendants, and my loving greetings To those of mine in court. I’ll stay at home And pray God’s blessing into thy attempt. Be gone tomorrow, and be sure of this: What I can help thee to, thou shalt not miss. (238–43)

Thus the Countess becomes, in effect, a kind of fairy godmother, providing Helen as Cinderella with “means and attendants” for a trip to court and a chance

Maternal Desires in Shakespearean Romance

129

at the prince’s hand.25 Paradoxically, in overturning the stereotype of the cruel stepmother/mother-in-law, Shakespeare created a situation as fantastic as the healing of the King or the bed-trick itself. In winning the Countess’s support, Helen has already performed her first miracle. If, like the independence of family bonds enjoyed by most of the lovers in the early comedies, the heroine’s adoption and authorization by her stepmother/ mother-in-law in All’s Well is also a fantasy, it may be a specifically female fantasy. Like the Cinderella story, it speaks to a young woman’s desire for a “fairy godmother” who recognizes her hidden worth from the beginning and supports her quest for recognition and the marriage she desires. More remarkably perhaps, it speaks to an older woman’s desire for a daughter in whom she finds a younger version of herself (“Even so it was with me when I was young,” muses the Countess [1.3.112]): adoption fantasies work both ways. The Countess’s affection for Helen, evident in 1.1, confirmed in 1.3 with the confession scene, becomes clearer with each of her subsequent appearances. Thus in 2.2 the Countess sends the Clown to court with a letter: “give Helen this,” she says, “And urge her to a present answer back. / Commend me to my kinsmen and my son” (2.2.53–5). While she is content merely to send greetings to Bertram, she engages Helen in an eager correspondence. In 2.4 Helen, accompanied by the Clown, enters reading the letter: “My mother greets me kindly,” she says, and asks the Clown, “is she well?” The line confirms the warmth of their relationship, underscored by Helen’s choice of the term “mother,” now hers by right of marriage as well as adoption. 25  Maguire and Smith object to: “the play’s recent sentimentalized stage history, which has conditioned us to see [the Countess] as a fairy godmother figure. One thinks of Peggy Ashcroft (RSC, directed by Trevor Nunn in 1981), Judi Dench (RSC, directed by Greg Doran in 2003) and most recently (and obviously) Clare Higgins in Marianne Elliott’s modern fairy tale at the National Theatre in 2009. In Elliott’s production, the ending of the play offered an exquisitely tender relationship, a couple reunited after a marathon journey— the couple in question being not the husband and wife but the daughter-in-law and motherin-law. Such attractive productions conceal the essentially bawd-like activities of both the Countess and, later, of the Widow, mother to Diana (who are at times reminiscent more of the pragmatic mothers of Castiza in The Revenger’s Tragedy or Frank Gullman in A Mad World My Masters than of Cinderella’s fairy godmother).” (14) However, fairy godmothers in folk tales are nothing if not pragmatic: in Perrault’s “Peau d’ane” (“Donkeyskin”), a tale closely related to “Cinderella,” when the heroine has to evade her father’s demand for an incestuous marriage, her fairy godmother coolly instructs her to bargain with him, first for a series of splendid dresses, and then for the skin of his magic donkey. The tactic succeeds in that the donkeyskin allows the girl to escape in disguise, and the dresses ultimately enable her to win an appropriate marriage partner. My point is that the practical support offered Helen by the Countess, the Widow and Diana is wholly in keeping with the folktale roots of the play: like the heroine of “The Search for the Lost Husband” folktales (ATU 425B in Uther’s revision of the Aarne-Thompson system), Helen is aided in her quest for her husband by three female helpers (Bamford, “Foreign Affairs” 64).

130

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

When the Countess, also accompanied by the Clown, enters in 3.2, she holds a letter (from Bertram) and the stage image links her with Helen (old countess/ young countess). Her candid words reveal now what she withheld from Helen (and Shakespeare withheld from us) in 1.3: she has wanted Helen as her daughter-inlaw all along: “It hath happened all as I would have had it, save that he comes not along with her” (3.2.1–2). Significantly, in this letter Bertram informs his mother of his broken marriage in terms that stress Helen’s relationship with her: “I have sent you a daughter-in-law … ”, he declares. Her response is to confirm her bond with Helen and impulsively cancel her bond with Bertram: “He was my son, / But I do wash his name out of my blood, / And thou are all my child” (66–8).26 When we see her again in 3.4 the Countess is stricken with grief by Helen’s departure, and begs her Steward to write to Bertram: “My greatest grief, / Though little he do feel it, set down sharply … Which of them both/ Is dearest to me, I have no skill in sense / To make distinction … My heart is heavy, and mine age is weak; / Grief would have tears, and sorrow bids me speak” (32–42). After this supreme testament of her love for Helen, the Countess is absent from the play until the final scene. However, her enabling role as Helen’s mother is assumed by the Widow of Florence; just as the Countess facilitated the wedding, the Widow enables the bedding. And just as she did with the Countess, Helen wins this Widow’s trust and love. Shakespeare emphasizes the affective bond between the women. In contrast to the source in Boccaccio, where the relationship between the heroine and the Florentine women ends with the bed-trick, in Shakespeare’s play they travel back to France together. Both Widow and daughter testify to the affection which binds them to Helen: “Gentle madam,” says the widow, “You never had a servant to whose trust / Your business was more welcome” (4.4.13–16). And Diana declares, “Let death and honesty / Go with your impositions, I am yours / Upon your will to suffer” (4.4.28–30). In the final scene the Widow brings Helen on stage, the living answer to the riddles Diana has spun, and again effectively enables the reunion of husband and wife; she also reunites Helen with the Countess. The tentativeness of the marriage may be felt in Helen’s address to Bertram (she calls him respectfully “my good lord” [5.3.303, 306], but not affectionately “my dear lord”), as well as in her question to Bertram: “Will you be mine, now you are doubly won?” (5.3.311). By contrast, the strength of the bond between Helen and the Countess is emphasized by Helen’s loving address and her poignant exclamation: “O my dear mother, do I see you living?” (5.3.316). The question indicates that the grief of separation was mutual and that, if Helen was believed dead, she in turn had feared the death of the Countess in her absence—a fear made plausible by Shakespeare’s 26  As Naomi Miller noted in her comments on this chapter, in choosing to side with Helen over Bertram, the Countess strikingly anticipates Dorothy Leigh’s declaration in The Mother’s Blessing, in which she privileges her affinity with her potential future daughtersin-law over her present relation to her sons: “but this I assure you, that if you get wives that be godly, and you love them, you shall not need to forsake me; whereas if you have wives that you love not, I am sure I will forsake you” (57).

Maternal Desires in Shakespearean Romance

131

emphasis on her advanced age (she is “Old Lady” in the Folio’s speech prefixes for this scene). Here, as in the later romances, the specter of mortality is conjured up to be overcome in the embrace of the reunited family, and as in the ending of The Winter’s Tale it is specifically maternal desire that is most fully satisfied. If most of Shakespeare’s plays show us a society in which patriarchy is perpetuated by what Gayle Rubin calls “the traffic in women” through marriage, here, uniquely in his canon, we catch a glimpse of the inverse: a society in which links between women are formed through the traffic in men. Bertram functions as the tie by which Countess retains Helen, and Helen the Countess; and ironically Bertram also becomes the tie which connects Helen with Diana and the Widow. In the conclusion of All’s Well That Ends Well, as in the earlier Comedy of Errors and the later Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare highlights maternity: in all three cases he adds a mother-child reunion, and he makes the satisfaction of maternal desire central to what Rose calls the “harmonious, stable wished-for society” represented on stage at the play’s end.27 Certainly, as Rose contends, these plays are socially conservative in their treatment of maternity: like Thaisa in Pericles, the Abbess, the Countess and Hermione are cloistered figures, chaste, prayerful and patient, allied with the power of providence. However, “the triumph of time” in these plays is the triumph of maternal desire, a triumph most significant in The Winter’s Tale where Hermione preserves herself for 16 years solely to see her daughter; and in All’s Well where the Countess is a widow, whose desire for reunion with Helen is all her own, not simply an echo of a husband’s. The difference between these two maternal romances and the patriarchal romance narratives inherited from antiquity and still prominent in Early Modern England is in one sense small: as Louden reminds us, romance “remains a remarkably conservative or stable narrative organization” (60), and in these plays as in so many other romances—like The Odyssey, the biblical story of Joseph, The Ethiopian Story, The Story of Apollonius, Cymbeline, Pericles and The Tempest—missing offspring return miraculously from apparent death to the embrace of their families. But the difference is also profound: in All’s Well that Ends Well and The Winter’s Tale, to an extent unparalleled in Shakespeare’s canon, the wishes of mothers finally matter more than the wishes of fathers. Bibliography Arnold, Bill T. Genesis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print. New Cambridge Bible Commentary. Apuleius, Lucius. The Golden Ass. Trans. W. Adlington. 1566. Rev. S. Gaselee. 1915. London: Heinemann, 1947. Print. Loeb Classical Library. 27  Noting the “profoundly maternal working of the tragicomic narrative process,” Wilcox observes that “a restored mother/child relationship, and particularly mother/ daughter, is frequently the crowning glory of the comic ending” (135).

132

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Bamford, Karen. “Foreign Affairs: The Search for the Lost Husband in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well.” Early Theatre 8.2: 57–72. Print. ———. “Romance, Recognition and Revenge in Marie Clements’s The Unnatural and Accidental Women.” Theatre Research in Canada/ Récherches Théatrales au Canada 31.2 (2010): 143–63. Print. Bartholomeuz, Dennis. The Winter’s Tale in Performance in England and America 1611–1976. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. Print. Basile, Giambattista. “Sun, Moon and Talia.” The Pentamerone. Vol. 2. 1636. Trans. Benedetto Croce. Ed. N. M Penzer. London: Bodley Head, 1932. 29–33. Print. Bishop, T. G. Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Trans. G. H. McWilliam. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Print. Brewer, Derek. “The Nature of Romance.” Poetica 9 (1978): 9–48. Print. Calvino, Italo. Italian Folktales.Trans. George R. Martin. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Print. Carroll, William C. The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. Print. Coghill, Nevill. “Six Points of Stage-Craft.” Muir 198–213. Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Ed. B. P. Reardon. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. Print. Dunworth, Felicity. Mothers and Meaning on the Early Modern Stage. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2010. Print. Frey, Charles. Shakespeare’s Vast Romance: A Study of The Winter’s Tale. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1980. Print. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Print. ———. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Harcourt, 1965. Print. ———. The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1983. Print. Fuller, David. “Shakespeare’s Romances.” A Companion to Romance 160–76. Garry, Jane and Janet L. Langlois. “Ghosts and Other Revenants: Motifs E200–E599.” Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature: A Handbook. Ed. Jane Garry and Hasan El-Shamy. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2005. 181–7. Print. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. “Cinderella.” The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Trans. and ed. Jack Zipes. New York: Bantam, 1987. 86–92. Print. Heiserman, Arthur. The Novel before the Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977. Print. Heliodorus. An Ethiopian Story. Trans. J. R. Morgan. Collected Ancient Greek Novels 349–588. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. London: Penguin, 1997. Print.

Maternal Desires in Shakespearean Romance

133

Hutchinson, Lucy. Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. Ed. N. H. Keeble. London: Dent, 1995. Print. Everyman Library. Jonson, Ben. “Ode to Himself.” The New Inn. Ed. Michael Hattaway. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. 204–9. Print. Revels Plays. Krier, Theresa M. Birth Passages: Maternity and Nostalgia, Antiquity to Shakespeare. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. Print. Leigh, Dorothy. The Mothers Blessing. 1616. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Print. Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works I, Pt. 2, Vol. 8. Louden, Bruce. Homer’s Odyssey and the Near East. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. Maguire, Laurie and Emma Smith. “Many Hands: A New Shakespeare Collaboration?” Times Literary Supplement 20 Apr. 2012:13–15. Print. McMullan, Gordon. “What is a ‘Late Play’”? The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Last Plays. Ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 5–17. Print. Mendelson, Sara and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. Print. Muir, Kenneth, ed. Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale. London: MacMillan, 1968. Print. Neely, Carol Thomas. “Women and Issue in The Winter’s Tale.” William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1987. 75–88. Print. Orgel, Stephen. Introduction. The Winter’s Tale. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. 1–83. Print. Oxford Shakespeare. Perrault, Charles. “La belle au bois dormant.” Contes. Ed. Gilbert Rouger. Paris: Garnier, 1967. 90–107. Print. ———. “Peau d’ane.” Contes. Ed. Gilbert Rouger. Paris: Garnier, 1967. 51–75. Print. Reardon, Bryan P. The Form of Greek Romance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Print. Redford, Donald B. A Study of the Biblical Story of Joseph (Genesis 37–50). Leiden: Brill, 1970. Print. Rose, Mary Beth. “Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance.” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 291–314. Print. Rothwell, Kenneth S. “‘The Shakespeare Plays’: Hamlet and the Five Plays of Season Three.” Shakespeare Quarterly 2 (1981): 395–401. Print. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna Reiter. New York: Monthly Review, 1975. 157–210. Print. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 1997. Print.

134

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Sidney, Philip. Astrophil and Stella. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. 163–237. Print. The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre. Trans. Gerald N. Sandy. Collected Ancient Greek Novels 736–72. Thompson, Stith. The Folktale. New York: Holt, 1946. Print. ———. Motif Index of Folk Literature. 6 vols. Rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955–8. Print. Traversi, Derek. “The Final Scenes.” Muir 159–83. Uther, Hans-Jörg. The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, Based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. Part I: Animal Tales, Tales of Magic, Religious Tales, and Realistic Tales, with an Introduction. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2004. Print. FF Communications No. 284. Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde. London: Chatto, 1994. Print. Watson, Patricia A. Ancient Stepmothers: Myth, Misogyny and Reality. Leiden: Brill, 1994. Print. White, R.S. Let Wonder Seem Familiar: Endings in Shakespeare’s Romance Vision. London: Athlone, 1985. Print. Whitworth, Charles. Introduction. The Comedy of Errors. Ed. Whitworth. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.1–79. Print. Oxford Shakespeare. Wilcox, Helen. “Gender and Genre in Shakespeare’s Tragicomedies.” Reclamations of Shakespeare. Ed. A. J. Hoenselaars. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 129–38. Print. Studies in Literature 15.

Part II Voicing Maternity

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 7

Forcible Love: Performing Maternity in Renaissance Romance Naomi J. Miller

Early modern mothers’ advice books attest to the avowed intensity of love between mothers and children: Elizabeth Grymeston advises her son in 1604 that “there is no love so forcible as the love of an affectionate mother to her natural child” (102), while Dorothy Leigh affirms in 1616 that “every man knows that the love of a mother to her children is hardly contained within the bounds of reason” (293). Male fears regarding “forcible” maternal love, which goes “beyond the bounds of reason,” mark representations of mothers in Sidney’s Arcadia as well as Shakespeare’s romances, including Hermione in The Winter’s Tale and even Sycorax in The Tempest. Shakespeare himself invokes the power of performative maternity in Sonnet 143, when he pleads with his beloved to “play the mother’s part: kiss me, be kind” (12). Even as Shakespeare’s sonnets tap into early modern conceptions of maternal roles and responsibilities, powers and fears, while exploring how conflicts between authority and sexuality frame the progress of desire,1 so his late plays can be seen to situate the “forcible love” of performative maternity within a romance frame, in order to deflect or defuse the power of maternal authority that has the potential to subvert patriarchal ends. The very notion of “forcible love,” as articulated by both Grymeston and Leigh, conveys connotations of force and even violence that suggest some of the dangers and difficulties of performing maternity in the early modern world, where mother-love might require force to achieve its ends, “beyond the bounds of reason,” even as the mother herself might feel forced to perform her love in a manner not of her choosing. Reading the multiple meanings of “forcible love,” then, can illuminate how on the one hand, mother-love can’t be stopped, while on the other hand it can’t be helped. The present essay brings multiple cultural constructions of performative maternity to bear upon a reading of Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory in order to consider how a female-authored dramatic romance can utilize the language of maternity not so much to dislocate the authority of the patriarch so repeatedly reinscribed by male-authored romances, as to redraw the boundaries of romance

1

 See Miller, “Playing ‘the mother’s part.’”

138

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

narrative that frame the patriarch’s power.2 By viewing Love’s Victory through the lens not only of male-authored romance traditions, but also of other femaleauthored constructions of maternity, from the mothers’ advice book citations at the start of this essay to Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, I hope to consider what happens when the “forcible love” associated with “playing the mother’s part” in early modern romance becomes a matter for others than solely mothers. Within the scope of this essay, I have chosen to focus upon Wroth’s play, Love’s Victory, rather than her prose romance, The Countesse of Mountgomerie’s Urania, because I am particularly interested in considering the performative nature of maternity, which shapes the trajectory of the play more singularly than any single example of maternity shapes the voluminous narrative of the prose romance.3 In Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, Kathryn Moncrief and Kathryn McPherson argue persuasively that the performative nature of maternity, as both embodied and enacted in early modern England, offers a potent site of imagination and contest, where dramatists, pamphleteers, practitioners and diarists “reinvent maternal roles through the process of performance” (4) at the same time as they reinscribe cultural ideas about maternity. The essays in Moncrief and McPherson’s volume consider a range of treatments of maternal authority, maternal suffering, and maternal erasure, which demonstrate that “male playwrights, women pamphleteers, male educators and preachers and women diarists, all struggled with questions of maternal agency, as well as efforts to manipulate, suppress or reclaim it” (13). The rare examples of treatments of maternity produced by female playwrights, in the cases of Elizabeth Cary and Mary Wroth, suggest that the limits of maternal agency can challenge the romance assumptions perpetuated by a patriarchal hierarchy predicated on heterosexual couplings. Indeed, Shakespeare’s invocation of the performative nature of “the mother’s part” in Sonnet 143 associates the power and unpredictability of sexual authority with a maternal agent of desire, underscoring a simultaneous capacity for narcissism and nurture, sustenance and destruction that coincides with the ambivalence of the speaker’s desires. Along those lines, as evidenced in the examples of Grymeston and Leigh, early modern maternity exhibits the potential to authorize “forcible love” beyond the bounds of reason. Moreover, David Fuller’s observation that Shakespeare’s romances “embody their significances fully only in performance … as theatrical ‘happenings’” (168) suggests why, when maternity is situated within the dramatic romance tradition, its performative nature might be heightened. At the same time, Lori Humphrey Newcomb observes that the association of Renaissance romance with women necessitates consideration of the highly contradictory nature 2  See Staging Early Modern Romance for extended consideration of the continuities between three forms of romance: “the prose fictions that early moderns referred to as romances, the dramatic romances staged in England during the 1570s and 1580s, and Shakespeare’s late plays” (1). 3  For detailed consideration of constructions of maternity in the Urania, see Miller, Changing the Subject, esp. 98–108.

Forcible Love: Performing Maternity in Renaissance Romance

139

of the genre’s “gendered meanings.”4 By focusing on the performative nature of maternity in dramatic romance, this essay aims to consider the gendered meanings of both the genre of romance and the subject of maternity. Before attending directly to the dramatic romance of Love’s Victory, I would like to frame my consideration of the play’s performative maternity with reference to constructions of maternity in the Sidney family circle that constituted a community for Wroth’s own upbringing. Letters from Wroth’s father, Robert Sidney, to his wife Barbara, during his many absences abroad throughout Mary’s childhood, indicate some concern about forcible maternal love, potentially beyond the bounds of reason, when he tells Barbara that “a better and more carefull mother there is not, then you are; and indeed I doe not feare anything so much as your to much fondness” (italics mine; April 20, 1596). Praising his wife’s maternal care, Robert yet questions the intensity of maternal affection upon which author-mothers such as Elizabeth Grymeston and Dorothy Leigh base the authority of their voices. Growing up “in the nurcery among women” to use another phrase from Robert Sidney’s letters (“To Barbara Sidney” April 20, 1597), Mary Wroth learned to speak with her father in “his” language, even while beginning to grant women voices of their own in her works. In one of the few surviving letters in Mary Wroth’s own hand, written in 1614 after the death of her husband, urging her father to protect the interests of her son from her brothers-in-law, she reminds him that “itt is now your part to bee his Father being left both ways in blood, and charge unto you,” and signs herself “My Lordships most obedient daughter.” In this instance, Mary Wroth invokes the paternal authority of her father to support her own performance of maternity as a widow. Interestingly, Wroth writes her mother’s voice into the conclusion of her letter to her father, explicitly mentioning that her mother has “commanded” her to “deliuer thus much” in her place. In fact, the family dynamic that emerges in much of the Sidney correspondence for this period reflects a frequently absent father, abroad or at court, with a firm and constant mother holding both family and household together in her husband’s absence.5 Shifting from the influence of Robert Sidney to that of Wroth’s uncle, Philip Sidney, in examining the shaping forces upon Love’s Victory, it is useful to consider the resonances linking prose and dramatic romance.6 Given the considerable 4  “Gendering Prose Romance in Renaissance England” 122. Although she doesn’t discuss Love’s Victory, Newcomb points out that Wroth’s prose romance, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (1621) was the first example of a romance “of, by, and for the ladies” (126). For more consideration of male-authored romances, see Newcomb’s Reading Popular Romance. 5  See Hannay for a detailed picture of the relationship between Mary Wroth and her mother, Barbara Sidney. 6  See Newcomb’s introduction to Reading Popular Romance where she argues, particularly in the case of Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale, that “cultural appropriation should always be read as a reciprocal process” (14).

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

140

connections between Sidney’s Arcadia and Wroth’s Urania, I would argue that Philip Sidney’s constructions of maternity in the Arcadia can certainly be brought to bear upon Wroth’s rendition of performative maternity in Love’s Victory. The central female characters in the Old Arcadia are introduced in the context of their social containment by the male head of the family, when Gynecia appears with her daughters in the protective custody ordered by Basilius. Almost immediately, the issue of “to much fondness” arises in inverted terms that undercut the reliability of maternal authority, when Gynecia sets herself against her own daughter, vowing that she will not allow Philoclea to supplant her in “Cleophila’s” affections: “the life I have given thee, ungrateful Philoclea, I will sooner with these hands bereave thee of than my birth shall glory she hath bereaved me of my desires.”7 Gynecia’s bondage to passion transforms the familial bond between mother and daughter into an occasion for conflict rather than nurturance. Soon, Gynecia comes to perceive the domestic hierarchy itself in inverted terms: “The growing of her daughter seemed the decay of herself. The blessings of a mother turned to the curses of a competitor” (OA 122). Unable to govern her desire for the crossdressed Cleophila/Pyrocles, Gynecia cannot maintain her maternal authority over her daughters. When Gynecia comes to trial at the conclusion of the Old Arcadia, she further defines herself as the inversion of each of her social and familial roles, culminating in the role of mother: “I am the subject that have killed my prince. I am the wife that have murdered my husband. I am a degenerate woman, an undoer of this country, a shame of my children” (OA 382). No longer willing to claim the title of “mother,” Gynecia names herself “shame” instead, and submits to the objectifying discipline of Euarchus’s patriarchal authority, from which she is released only by the resurrection of the original patriarch, Basilius. Sidney expands upon his representation of maternity as a threat to patriarchal authority with the figure of Cecropia in the New Arcadia, whose “to much fondness” for her son, Amphialus, works directly to undermine Basilius’s governorship of the community. Only Gynecia, in fact, is able to recognize Cecropia’s hand in the intrusion of a lion and bear into the pastorals,8 and her maternal warning to Pamela and Philoclea prepares them for their later persecution by their aunt. Cecropia’s maternity, even more than Gynecia’s, works malignantly in inverse proportion to the heroism of her offspring. Thus Amphialus is described as “being (like a rose out of a brier) an excellent sonne of an evill mother” (NA 363). In Sidney’s configuration of familial relations, successful masculinity must be distinguished from its origin in the mother’s body. At the same time, the objectification of the woman’s body in his text is underscored by a piece of advice fashioned to represent the mother’s perspective, when Cecropia encourages her son to renew his suit to Philoclea by urging him to “know thy selfe a man, and shew thy selfe a man: and  Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) 92. Subsequent references to this text will be cited as OA. 8  Philip Sidney, Vol. 1 of The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney (1590 text of the New Arcadia), 125, hereafter cited as NA by page number in the text. 7

Forcible Love: Performing Maternity in Renaissance Romance

141

(beleeve me upon my word) a woman is a woman” (NA 453). Of course in the case of Amphialus’s rival, Zelmane, a “woman” is not a woman when she is a man, and thus Cecropia’s pronouncements on gender difference prove not only misguided, but useless. Mothers such as Gynecia and Cecropia serve in both versions of the Arcadia less to signify maternal power than to reify, through their very failings, the forces of fatherly authority that they unsuccessfully attempt to displace.9 In other popular male-authored prose romances of the period, from Montemayor’s Diana and d’Urfé’s Astrée to Lodge’s Rosalynde and Greene’s Pandosto, mothers tend either to be absent or subsumed under the more general appellation of “parents,” who are most notable for attempting to block the romantic pairings of the younger generation.10 Among the early modern prose romances, only Mary Wroth’s Urania situates maternity as a generative force in shaping female identity in particular. Urania’s opening lament over her lack of knowledge of her family origins offers an opportunity for Wroth to locate the mother as an originary figure for self-knowledge. After initially mourning the absence of parents whose identities could stabilize her own, Urania particularizes her lament to the absence of the mother: “‘Miserable Urania, worse art thou now then these thy Lambs; for they know their dams, while thou liue unknown of any.’”11 While the capacious prose romance form provides Wroth occasion for extended representations of maternity, the condensed form of her dramatic romance, which will be discussed in due course, yields a focused rendition of performative maternity with no father(s) present at all. Akin to the mothers in the Arcadia, mothers in Shakespeare’s late romances consistently operate as figures whose very existence, whether visibly present (Hermione) or conspicuously absent (Sycorax), can function to challenge or undermine patriarchal authority. Recent critical attention to these romances has highlighted the often simultaneously destructive and delimited powers of maternity, which can be either cordoned off from patriarchal authority or subsumed by the patriarch himself. Michelle Ephraim, for example, argues that The Winter’s Tale “evokes contemporary ambivalence about the pregnant woman’s ability to deceive her husband, whether through mental or physical device” (51), while Donna 9  Interestingly, Gynecia’s name is reclaimed by a female author a few decades later in a defense of maternity during the pamphlet controversy over gender roles, when Constantia Munda critiques Joseph Swetnam’s lack of respect for all men’s maternal point of origin by celebrating the “forces of Gynaecia,” which deserve “reverence” (250, 254). 10  See Mentz for analysis of the “rivalry between page and stage” in the case of Lodge’s Rosalynde and Shakespeare’s As You Like It in particular. Mentz refers to Wroth as participating in a “second round of post-Sidneian romance” (87) without reference to Love’s Victory. 11  Wroth, Urania 1. Citations from Urania will refer by page number to the 1621 edition. Modern editions are available from the Renaissance English Text Society, as The First and Second Parts of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania by Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine Roberts (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1995) and completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller (Tempe Arizona: RETS and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999).

142

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Woodford observes, also regarding The Winter’s Tale, that “by taking from women the influential role of nursing and nurturing children, the play circumscribes women’s power, creating instead a fantasy of an exclusively male form of nurture and influence” (195). Examining constructions of maternity in The Tempest, Suzanne Penuel maintains that the play “eventually resuscitates the discourse of the mother within the figure of the father,” by conflating “the gendered figures of the witch and the magician” (116). Shakespeare’s late romances can be recognized to configure maternity specifically in relation to the power of the patriarch. In many instances, the potential authority of absent mothers is deflected upon their daughters, whose physical resemblance to their mothers only underscores their lack of concomitant standing in the domestic hierarchy, allowing them ultimately to comfort their fathers without challenging the parameters of paternal authority. Cymbeline, named for the king, father, and head of the domestic hierarchy, seems, for example, initially to erase mothers only to reinscribe the power of their absence. While Cymbeline’s queen serves as an evil-stepmother-figure to Imogen and Posthumus, who have both lost their own mothers, the very concept of “mother” becomes a kind of touchstone that serves to reveal the emotional and psychological states of the lead characters throughout the play. Imogen’s initial gift of her mother’s diamond to Posthumus as a pledge of faithful, chaste love prepares the ground for Posthumus’s diatribe against the female sex, and most particularly against women as mothers, when he believes Imogen to be false: Is there no way for men to be, but women Must be half-workers? We are all bastards, And that most venerable man, which I Did call my father, was I know not where When I was stamp’d. Some coiner with his tools Made me a counterfeit: yet my mother seem’d The Dian of that time: so doth my wife The nonpareil of this. (2.4.153–60)

Conjoining his mother and his wife, Posthumus attacks “the woman’s part” (2.4.172) within himself and within all men, who cannot escape the curse of being born of woman. Imogen, on the other hand, even while adopting a “man’s part” in her disguise, reclaims the role of “mother” as a regenerative force, asserting that “hardness ever /Of hardiness is mother” (3.6.21–2). With the death of the evil queen at the end of the play and the restoration of the king’s sons, however, the patriarchy undergoes a regenerative transformation in which Cymbeline can claim to be “a mother to the birth of three” (5.5.370), thus effectively reinforcing his position as head of state and family by appropriating any remaining power of “the mother’s part” for the father.12 Whether despised or praised, then, the woman’s 12  For a psychoanalytic discussion of masculine appropriation of maternal power in Shakespeare, see Adelman’s analysis of the figure of Duncan (94).

Forcible Love: Performing Maternity in Renaissance Romance

143

part in Cymbeline is finally defined not only by men, but through men as well, so that the presence or absence of real mothers bears an increasingly redundant relation to the play’s discourses of maternity.13 The Winter’s Tale, on the other hand, opens not with a wicked stepmother but with a queen and mother whose visibly pregnant state signifies maternity incarnate. Leontes’s recurring anxiety that his son, Mamillius—whose very name connotes life-sustaining mother’s milk—is more linked to his mother than to the world of male bonding represented by his father, has its counterpart in Robert Sidney’s concern that his son be removed from his mother’s immediate sphere of authority “in the nurcery among women.” Threatened by the blatant sexuality embodied (literally) in Hermione’s pregnancy, Leontes in effect finds her guilty of “to much fondness,” with the result that his anxieties about his son are displaced onto Polixenes as an alternative object of his wife’s affections. In retaliation, Leontes strikes directly at Hermione’s identity as a mother by commanding that her children be taken from her. The play’s attention to maternity resurfaces at the conclusion, where it is first and foremost as a mother that Hermione is released from her statuesque immobility, confiding to her daughter that she “preserv’d” herself explicitly “to see the issue” of the oracle’s promise that her child was alive (5.3.127–8). This restoration of the mother-daughter bond comes literally second, however, to Leontes’s own reunion with his daughter, and the play closes with Leontes silencing the most vocal mother-figure in his court (“O, peace, Paulina!” [5.3.135]) and getting the last word. At the close of this dramatic romance, fatherly authority reigns supreme. Distilling the significance of maternity in the romance tradition, Helen Hackett observes that while the “concept of the maternal” operates as a central narrative principle in Shakespeare’s romances (particularly in the examples of Pericles, Cymbeline, and Prospero), maternity is often used “to express heightened emotions felt by the central male protagonist and authority-figure” (Women and Romance Fiction 155). Considering the conjunction of maternity and narrative in Shakespeare’s late plays, Hackett usefully questions “whether identification with the maternal role by male protagonists serves to venerate the maternal or to repress it” (“‘Gracious be the issue’” 26). Among Shakespeare’s plays, only The Winter’s Tale, maintains Hackett, links maternity explicitly with romance narrative, “in its celebration of old wives and their tales” (Women and Romance Fiction 158). Turning to female-authored dramas of performative maternity, however, it becomes clear that mothers’ stories can be a matter not just of old wives and their tales, but of domestic authority and familial power. In the plays authored by Elizabeth Cary and Mary Wroth, while powerful maternity comes with a price, it finds expression in more than one voice, defining a range of speaking positions not for the patriarch, but for the simultaneous subjection and subjectivity of mothers. While Shakespeare might have defined “the mother’s part” in Sonnet 13  Considering notions of identity rather than maternity, Wall-Randall draws connections between Cymbeline and Wroth’s Urania.

144

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

143 as a matter of kisses and kindness, both Cary and Wroth overturn the maternal stereotypes perpetuated in male-authored dramatic romances. In what follows, I explore the extent to which Cary and Wroth offer complex representations of playing “the mother’s part” that intersect with the assertive proclamations of early modern mothers’ advice books, and represent a spectrum of ambivalence and autonomy associated with “forcible” maternal love, both within and beyond the male-centered boundaries of traditional romance. Elizabeth Cary likely composed The Tragedy of Mariam in the early 1600s, not long after Mary Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, published her brother Philip’s Arcadia as a narrative amalgam of the Old and the New Arcadia, and in the same decade that Shakespeare is believed to have composed his late romances. By contrast to the singularly vilified or, sometimes, idealized mothers in the romances of Sidney and Shakespeare, Cary’s drama represents a spectrum of maternity, exposing conflict and competition that mark mothers’ “forcible” attempts to advance their differing positions in relation to patriarchal authority. While the speeches of the mothers in Mariam cannot dislocate the centrality of the male ruler, they consistently work to redraw the boundaries of authority that frame the patriarch’s power. Interestingly, it is when the feminized margins of domestic authority in Mariam function as a place for argument that the forceful voices of the play’s mothers resonate most clearly across the social constraints intended to produce their silence.14 By contrast to her source, Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews, Cary develops the characters not only of Mariam, but also of Mariam’s mother, Alexandra, and Mariam’s maternal rival, Doris, who was Herod’s first wife. While Josephus positions the female characters primarily in relation to Herod, Cary’s mothers find speaking positions for themselves apart from masculine conceptions of their roles. Throughout The Tragedy of Mariam, it is in fact not the male patriarchs who recognize the discursive significance of maternity, but rather the mothers themselves, whose voices function in counterpoint to the voices of those female characters whose speech is directed primarily, and erotically, toward the men—whether the sexually dynamic Salome or the sexually passive Graphina. Whereas the male characters treat motherhood as a physical state that bears witness to their own sexual potency, the play’s mothers claim maternity as a condition for speech, directed most specifically not toward their husbands and male lovers, but rather toward each other. Mariam,

14  For more extensive consideration of connections between Cary’s play and her source, as well as her own familial history, see my article, “Domestic Politics in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613).” While incorporating a number of the conclusions about Cary’s representations of maternity first expressed in this article, the present essay focuses less upon Cary’s sources than on how Cary’s play can be brought to bear upon Wroth’s dramatic romance.

Forcible Love: Performing Maternity in Renaissance Romance

145

Doris, and Alexandra at once engage and compete with one another primarily as maternal agents rather than as objects of male desire.15 Over the course of the play, the mothers in Mariam begin to redraw the boundaries of social authority that frame the patriarch’s power, so as to establish speaking positions for themselves not already overdetermined by their roles as receptacles for masculine desire. The double-edged potential of maternal discourse emerges at the start of the play in Cary’s representation of the interaction between Mariam and her mother, Alexandra. The first exchange between Mariam and her mother, for example, is a combative discussion where Alexandra attacks Mariam for mourning “the tyrant’s end,” and urges her to cast off Herod’s patriarchal authority (1.2.80ff). Indeed, it is with the united voice of a mother and a daughter that Alexandra curses Herod for the deaths of Mariam’s brother, Aristobolus, and grandfather, Hircanus. Moreover, Alexandra’s speech underscores how her own ambitions for her daughter, whom she believes could have outmatched Cleopatra in becoming the bride of Antony and “empress of aspiring Rome” (1.2.199), were foiled by Herod’s aggressively preemptive wedding to Mariam, in effect registering the loss of both her children to Herod, the one through marriage as surely as the other through death. Meanwhile, Mariam’s defense of Herod arises from her own identity as a mother who appreciates Herod’s decision to take her children as his heirs rather than those of Doris, his former wife (Miller, “Domestic Politics” 363ff). Even as the opening of the play sets two mothers in conflict, so the closing scene consists of another conflict of performative maternity, with Doris cursing Mariam and her offspring. When Doris confronts Mariam before her execution, Cary represents their interaction as a striking standoff not simply between two competing wives, but more compellingly between two rival mothers, more concerned for the fate of their children than for their own positions (4.8.586–624). Throughout Cary’s play, the discursive combat between the mothers, fostered by the patriarch, works to isolate their voices, placing them in opposition to one another without a collective discourse of maternity. And yet the swelling dissonance of maternal voices in the play offers a fitting counterpoint to the diminishing authority of Herod’s singular voice, which finally can achieve definition only in relation to the absent presence of the dead Mariam (5.1.258). Competing on the margins of social authority, but accorded voices of their own not represented in Josephus’s Antiquities, the “forcible” mothers in The Tragedy of Mariam define a space for female discourse that displaces the significance of spousal relations in the play. And as Newcomb observes about the endings of Shakespeare’s late romances, the “feminine-maternal source” of narrative can receive “a qualified new life as the performative, even when that dynamic is denied by the closing words of the plays’ own heroes” (“Sources of Romance” 29).

15  For further discussion of the competing dynamics of maternity in the play, see Miller, “Domestic Politics.”

146

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

The competing maternal voices in Elizabeth Cary’s play, as well as the assertive proclamations of the mothers’ advice books, offer a wider range of “forcible” representations against which to read Mary Wroth’s narratives of performative maternity in Love’s Victory than do the mothers in male-authored romances alone. In particular, the emphasis placed in female-authored texts upon the power of mothers’ voices, rather than simply their bodies, to sustain or to subvert their children’s positions as speaking subjects suggests how the generative capacity of mothers can extend beyond the womb to shape the stories of their offspring. As Elizabeth Clinton maintained in The Countes of Lincolnes Nurserie (1622), the womb is only the starting point for a mother’s responsibility to “Beare children, that is, not only to Beare them in the wombe, and to bring them forth, but also to Beare them on their knee, in their armes, and at their breasts: for this Bearing a little before is called nourishing and bringing up” (152). Childbirth is only the beginning of maternal responsibilities and authority. Mary Wroth’s play, Love’s Victory, features two mother-figures, whose alternately destructive or generative control over story-making, in the literal absence of fathers, compels the protagonists to rewrite the narratives that shape their paths. By contrast to the renditions of mothers in the male-authored romances discussed earlier, where maternity can be used to express heightened emotions felt by the male patriarch (Penuel), or where the discourse of the mother can be resuscitated within the figure of the father (Hackett, “‘Gracious be the issue’”), Love’s Victory represents the potentially destructive consequences of placing mothers into fathers’ roles. Resuscitating the discourse of the father in the figure of the mother, Love’s Victory offers a new romance paradigm, where performing maternity requires the construction of alternative narratives that redraw the patriarchal boundaries of the genre. While Elizabeth Cary’s play is a tragedy that depicts the destructive effects of patriarchal authority upon maternal agency, forcing mothers into competitive conflict for domestic security, Mary Wroth’s play is a romance where the mother’s will both can and must be distinguished from the law of the father in order for maternal authority to achieve victory in its own right. Wroth’s dramatic romance opens with the voice of the mother implicated in its title: Venus, goddess of Love. Venus complains to her son, Cupid, in language resonant of pregnancy, that “mercy to those ungrateful breeds neglect, / Then let us grow our greatness to respect” (1.1.3–4). When misdirected maternal mercy “breeds” ungrateful offspring, the “greatness” of the goddess must be “grown,” signaling a threatening capacity to consume her progeny with “heavenly power” that “cannot their strength, but even themselves, devour” (1.1.6). The first motherfigure in the play thus forcibly exercises her considerable maternal authority in order to assure the recognition of that authority among the play’s lovers, who are cast in child-like relation to her. Cupid’s opening promise to his mother that the lovers will be “caught by Cupid’s net”16 promises a story with the same name 16  Interestingly, in the court scandal that erupted with the publication of Wroth’s prose romance in 1621, John Chamberlain criticized Wroth for taking liberties with her words,

Forcible Love: Performing Maternity in Renaissance Romance

147

as the play itself (“let this be called ‘Love’s Victory’”), generated by Venus’s commands (1.1.34, 38). Venus’s maternal relation not simply of “fondness” for, but more strikingly of authority over, Cupid in particular is underscored in their conversations, with Cupid repeatedly enquiring: “Like you this, mother?” and Venus replying: “Son, I like this well” (1.1.327). With no corresponding fatherfigure, a forcible mother’s discourse governs the direction of the dramatic narrative. Venus appears through much of the play to be concerned with causing the lovers to suffer, not unlike such romance fathers as Polixenes and Prospero, who exhibit the pressing need to have their authority recognized. However, as a mother who is not also a wife, Wroth’s Venus proves less subject to the discursive instability that marks the conjunctions of those roles in Cary’s play. Instead, her maternal authority can appear threatening as well as liberating, constraining as well as nurturing, without becoming discontinuous. In some ways, the forcible and domineering maternity of Wroth’s Venus can be linked more closely not only to Sidney’s Cecropia, but also to Cary’s Alexandra, constantly preoccupied with her own power and authority, rather than to most of the mothers subsumed by patriarchal authority in Shakespeare’s late romances. The most significant difference from Wroth’s forebears lies in the fact that there are no fathers in Love’s Victory to share the stage. Moreover, by contrast to male-authored depictions of Venus that emphasize the physicality of her sensual female body—as, for example, Shakespeare’s popular Venus and Adonis—the authority of Wroth’s Venus emerges through her discourse, rather than through a blazon of naked body parts. The very range of her powers indeed serves to effect an expansion in traditionally conceived romance notions of the discursive capability of maternal figures. The other maternal figure in the play is the widowed mother of Musella, given no name but “Mother to Musella” in the dramatis personae, so that she is defined solely by her role as the only mother other than Venus in the play. The relation between Musella and her mother initially recalls the conflicts between lovers and overbearing parents in the romances of Montemayor and d’Urfé, Sidney and Shakespeare. However, although in generic terms Wroth’s play bears some resemblances to the pastoral tragicomedies of Tasso, Guarini, Daniel, and Fletcher, Wroth’s attention to the role of the mother distinguishes her play from theirs.17 Rather than depicting the father-daughter conflicts so repeatedly reinscribed in male-authored romances, Wroth represents a mother-daughter bond, in a family in which the father is dead and there is no son. That domestic configuration in itself diverges from those in the romances of Sidney and Shakespeare, where the father invariably has the last word. The mother-daughter bond in Wroth’s play is and observed that “she thinks she daunces in a net” (for Chamberlain’s quote, see “To Sir Dudley Carleton,” March 9, 1622, in The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2: 427). For a thoughtful analysis of the gendered implications of female authorship and authority, see Wall, especially 279–83. 17  See Lewalski for extensive analysis of the connections between Wroth’s play and the pastoral tragicomedies of Tasso, Guarini, Daniel, and Fletcher.

148

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

threatened, however, by fatherly authority from beyond the grave, when Musella’s mother betrothes her daughter to a country bumpkin named Rustic, according to her late husband’s instructions but against Musella’s will. When Musella’s friend, Simeana, urges her to express her hatred of Rustic to her mother, Musella replies: “Alas, I’ve urged her, till that she with teares / Did vowe, and grieve she could nott mend my state / Agreed on by my father’s will which bears / Sway in her brest, and duty in mee” (5.1.11–14). Bound by the father’s will, Musella and her mother find themselves forced to enact a story not of their own making. Musella’s mother is no insensitive tyrant, but rather a woman bound by the strictures of a marriage not completely unlike that of Mary Wroth’s own mother, Barbara, whose husband could write her that “for the boies yew must resolue to let me haue my wil” (Robert Sidney, Letter, April 20, 1596). The difference is that in Mary Wroth’s family, the “father’s will” pertained more directly to “the boies” than the girls, and Barbara Sidney maintained her ties with her daughters whether her husband was present or absent. Mary Wroth, herself, however, was well-acquainted, both through her own experience of widowhood and that of friends such as Anne Clifford, with the privations that the deceased “father’s will” could impose upon the children, quite beyond the powers of a widowed mother to redress.18 Although set within a mythic romance frame, the simultaneous suffering of mother and daughter within Wroth’s play shifts the narrative focus beyond the traditional boundaries of romance, which ultimately reify patriarchy, to expose the inequities of a contemporary patriarchal system in which, on a social level distinct from the mythic maternal authority of Venus, a daughter might not be able to benefit from “mother’s advice” after all. Musella’s grief, constrained by her mother’s will, is bodied forth in an emotional pregnancy of sorts, where her inability to give birth to words of sorrow produces a metaphorical gestation of sorrow: “Sometimes I fain would speak, then straight forbear, / Knowing it most unfit; thus woe I bear” (3.2.77–8). Similarly, in Wroth’s sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, pregnancy leads to miscarriage, within a lyric inscription of the body’s betrayal of its own fertility, which comes to represent the female speaker’s recognition of the precarious relation between desire and language: “Faulce hope, which feeds butt to destroy, and spill / What itt first breeds; unaturall to the birth / Of thine owne wombe; conceaving butt to kill” (P40, Sonnet 35, l3). In Love’s Victory, Venus herself employs the language of pregnancy to lament that success in love diminishes her authority, so that “easy winning breeds us more neglect” (3.3.13). And Musella advises her friend Simeana that “base jealousy … breedeth nothing but self-misery” (4.1.264). In the imaginatively fertile world of the female characters in the play, misery can be self-generating. And when a mother performs not her own will but the will of the father, the arc of romance veers toward tragedy for all.

18  See Miller, Changing the Subject (74–6) for additional discussion of analogues between Anne Clifford’s circumstances and those of Mary Wroth.

Forcible Love: Performing Maternity in Renaissance Romance

149

In Musella’s case, her inability to “govern but my mother’s will” intersects with her own willed choice to accept Rustic’s offer of marriage against her better judgment (5.1.53, 69–72), so that only her friend Silvesta can help her to escape the betrothal by providing Musella and Philisses with a potion that causes their deaths.19 When Silvesta attributes Musella’s fate to “her mother grown her foe, and death her friend” (5.5.72), Musella’s mother responds by accepting all the blame, and hoping that “Death alone, my friend, / Shall me release” (5.5.137–8). As the will of the father, compounded by the lying speeches of the villain Arcas, extends beyond death to constrain the lives of mother and daughter, both look to death itself to serve as the friend that each can no longer be to the other. The news of Musella’s and Philisses’s mutual deaths is preceded by an account of the lowing of a cow, appropriate to the pastoral setting, which causes one of the characters to ask “had she not lost her calf?,” followed by the revelation that the lowing came not from loss but from nursing, so that “while she lowed the youngling sucked her dam” (5.5.44). This image of maternal nurturance requiring assistance—“and so might hurt her, whereat she did cry, / And for your help did low so bitterly”—foreshadows the pain of Musella’s mother upon learning of the death of her daughter, whom male-authored circumstances, from the will of the father to the false stories of the male villain, have prevented her from effectively nurturing (5.5.45–6). At the climax of the romance, after the lovers are revived from death by the priests of Venus, mother and daughter find not only their bond restored, but also their shared discourse renewed. While Musella’s mother had disavowed the ability to express her “true grief … by words” (5.5.120–21), registering instead the pain caused by Arcas’s false speech about her daughter’s alleged “wanton” behavior (5.5.128), her daughter’s “rebirth” allows her to speak directly to Musella: Joy, now as great as was my former woe, Shuts up my speech from speaking what I owe To all but mine, for mine I joy you are, And love, and bliss, maintain you from all care. Pardon my fault, enjoy and blessed be, And children and their children’s children see. (5.7.77–82)

Even as Hermione, restored to Perdita, speaks only to her daughter—“Tell me, mine own, / Where hast thou been preserv’d?” (5.3.123–4)—so Musella’s mother 19  Whereas readers of Wroth’s play might expect that the potion only mimics death along the lines of the Friar’s potion in Romeo and Juliet, Wroth enacts a radical departure from the mode of dramatic romance when Silvesta offers her friends not the illusion of death, but death itself, without any expectation of resurrection, and accepts her own resulting sentence of death as just. The lovers’ final resurrection, then, by the power of Venus, becomes even more unexpected and dramatically satisfying than Hermione’s “resurrection” from only apparent death in Shakespeare’s romance.

150

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

addresses only her beloved daughter: “for mine I joy you are / and love.” Yet while Shakespeare cuts off Hermione’s speech to her daughter and does not include that daughter’s reply, concluding instead with the pronouncements of the king and father, Wroth puts into words the fruition of a mother’s blessing in motherhood itself: “And children, and their children’s children see.” Significantly, Musella’s reply to her mother is a concomitant request for forgiveness and expression of affection: “Pardon me first, who have your sorrow wrought, / Then take our thanks whose good your care hath brought” (5.7.83–6). Repairing the destruction wrought by the will of the father, Musella recognizes and affirms her mother’s “care” from the start. Multiplying the generativity of maternity, Wroth’s Philisses addresses his beloved Musella’s mother as “Mother, for so your gift makes me you call” (5.7.87), in thanking her for her blessing. Rather than reproduce the paternal appropriation or erasure of the mother’s part that marks the behavior of romance father-figures from Sidney’s Basilius to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Wroth locates a sufficiency of parental authority in a female figure. Initially disparaged by the other characters, Musella’s mother finally receives honor from all for her enduring love for her daughter. At the same time, Silvesta reminds the lovers that “Venus the praise must have, whose love to you / Made her descend on earth, and your cares view” (5.7.93–4). As the ultimate maternal authority figure in the play, Venus pronounces sentence upon the villain, Arcas, and accepts the acclaim for her “victory” (5.7.160). Freed of the constraints of dead father and male villain, the characters celebrate the love of mothers. “Love’s Victory,” then, signifies not only the happy couplings of the male and female characters, but the finally enduring authority of the loving mothers as well. Admittedly, the mothers in Love’s Victory share with the mothers in Mariam the capacity to inflict suffering as well as to extend protection to those in their charge. But unlike the romance mother-figures in Sidney’s Arcadia or Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, who tend to resemble the idealized or demonized mothers of the pamphlet eulogies and condemnations, the mother-figures constructed by Cary and Wroth speak with complex and forcible voices whose range reconstructs the diminished performances of maternity in male-authored romances, to offer, instead, a glimpse of mothers, however flawed, with the status of speaking subjects. Ultimately, in Love’s Victory, the destructive potential of a human father’s will is deflected by an even more powerful mother, the goddess Venus, “whose love to you / Made her descend on earth, and your cares view” (5.7.93–4). Rather than dislocating the authority of the patriarch so repeatedly represented by maleauthored romances, Mary Wroth redraws the boundaries of domestic authority that frame the patriarch’s power, so that a daughter can find a future not proscribed by the father’s literal will as reproduced by the mother, and a mother can affirm her bond with her daughter outside the scope of her husband’s control after all. In Love’s Victory, Musella is reborn to a double maternal blessing, through Venus’s magical protection from death as well as her own mother’s wish for her to experience fertile maternity, enjoining her to “enjoy, and blessed be, / And children and their

Forcible Love: Performing Maternity in Renaissance Romance

151

children’s children see” (5.7.81–2). Performing “forcible love,” the mothers in Mary Wroth’s dramatic romance achieve “love’s victory” both within and beyond the patriarchally-inflected scope of romance traditions. Bibliography Adelman, Janet. “‘Born of Woman’: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth.” Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance. Ed. Marjorie Garber. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Print. Cary, Elizabeth. The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry. Ed. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Print. Chamberlain, John. The Letters of John Chamberlain. Ed. Norman Egbert McClure. 2 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939. Print. Clinton, Elizabeth. The Countess of Lincoln’s Nursery. 1622. Women Writers in Renaissance England. Ed. Randall Martin. London: Longman, 1997. Print. Ephraim, Michelle. “Hermione’s Suspicious Body: Adultery and Superfetation in The Winter’s Tale.” Performing Maternity 45–58. Fuller, David. “Shakespeare’s Romances.” A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary. Ed. Corinne Saunders. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 160–76. Print Grymeston, Elizabeth. Miscellanea, Meditations, Memoratives. 1604. Women Writers in Renaissance England. Ed. Randall Martin. London: Longman, 1997. 100–16. Print. Hackett, Helen. “‘Gracious be the issue’: Maternity and Narrative in Shakespeare’s Late Plays.” Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings. Ed. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. 25–39. Print. ———. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print. Hannay, Margaret. Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth. Burlington: Ashgate, 2010. Print. Lamb, Mary Ellen and Valerie Wayne. “Introduction: Into the Forest.” Staging Early Modern Romance 1–20. Leigh, Dorothy. The Mother’s Blessing. 1616. Daughters, Wives and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500–1640. Ed. Joan Larsen Klein. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992. 291–302. Print. Lewalski, Barbara K. “Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory and Pastoral Tragicomedy.” Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England. Ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991. 88–108. Print. Mentz, Steve. “‘A Note Beyond Your Reach’: Prose Romance’s Rivalry with Elizabethan Drama.” Staging Early Modern Romance 75–90. Miller, Naomi. Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1996. Print.

152

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

———. “Domestic Politics in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613),” SEL: Studies in English Literature 37.2 (1997): 353–69. Print. ———. “Playing ‘the mother’s part’: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Early Modern Codes of Maternity.” Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays. Ed. James Schiffer. New York: Garland, 1999. 347–67. Print. Moncrief, Kathryn M. and Kathryn R. McPherson. “Embodied and Enacted: Performances of Maternity in Early Modern England.” Performing Maternity 1–13. Munda, Constantia. The Worming of a mad Dog; or, a sop for Cerberus, the Jailor of Hell (1617). Half-Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640. Ed. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985. 244–63. Print. Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. “Gendering Prose Romance in Renaissance England.” A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary. Ed. Corinne Saunders. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 121–39. Print. ———. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Print. ———. “The Sources of Romance, the Generation of Story, and the Patterns of Pericles Tales.” Staging Early Modern Romance 21–46. Penuel, Suzanne. “Male Mothering and The Tempest.” Performing Maternity 115–27. Performing Maternity in Early Modern England. Ed. Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson. Burlington: Ashgate, 2007. Print. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Sonnets and Poems. Ed. Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Print. Oxford Shakespeare. ———. Cymbeline. Ed. J. M. Nosworthy. 1955. London: Methuen, 1980. Print. Arden Shakespeare. ———. The Winter’s Tale. Ed. J. H. P. Pafford. 1963. London: Methuen, 2000. Print. Arden Shakespeare. Sidney, Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia). The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney. Ed. Albert Feuillerat. Vol. 1. 1912. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969. Print. ———. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia). Ed. Jean Robertson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. Print. Sidney, Robert. Letter to Barbara Sidney. April 20, 1596. De L’Isle MS U1475, Z53/49. ———. Letter to Barbara Sidney. April 20, 1597. De L’Isle MS U1475, C81/97. Staging Early Modern Romance. Ed. Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print. Wall, Wendy. “Dancing in a Net: The Problems of Female Authorship.” The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. 279–340. Print. Wall-Randall, Sarah. “Reading the Book of the Self in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Wroth’s Urania.” Staging Early Modern Romance 107–21.

Forcible Love: Performing Maternity in Renaissance Romance

153

Woodford, Donna. “Nursing and Influence in Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale.” Performing Maternity 183–95. Wroth, Mary. Letter to Robert Sidney. October 17, 1614. De L’Isle MS U1475, C52. ———. Love’s Victory. Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents. Ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies. London: Routledge, 1996. 91–126. Print. ———. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983. 85–145. Print. ———. Urania. 1621. Print.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 8

“Thus did he make her breeding his only business and employment”: Absent Mothers and Male Mentors in Margaret Cavendish’s Romances 1

Marianne Micros

Margaret Cavendish’s dramatic and prose romances feature strong women seeking both love and agency in turbulent worlds. The protagonists of “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity,” 2 like the heroines of many folktales, do not have mothers to guide them through the maturation process. However, both of these young women acquire male guardians who nurture and educate them in ways that prepare them for activities beyond the domestic ones. In selecting male figures as caregivers for her heroines, Cavendish not only questions gender roles, but also suggests that maternal behavior is not limited to women, that maternity is not what should define women, and that male mentorship could be beneficial to a woman’s education. Cavendish is also exposing the social and patriarchal restrictions on women’s roles in courtship and marriage, the financial component of arranged marriages, the rigidity of the class structure, and the hierarchical political and social system. She removes women from the domestic sphere (and from their mothers), demonstrating the results when men educate women. In “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity,” the heroine obtains two objects to help her ward off threats to her virginity: a pistol and a “bladder of poison” (57). Though she intends to shoot herself rather than lose her virginity, she shoots the Prince instead; later, she does take the poison but is healed by the Prince’s aunt. These two objects can be seen as metaphors of ways that young women might prevent the violation of their bodies and approach the world: an aggressive, masculine method (the phallic pistol), which may be directed at oneself, or at the feared male rapist; and a feminine, rather masochistic method (the yonic bladder—filled with poison). These metaphors show two extreme solutions—both false extremes, however, especially at a time when male and female roles are in question. Pistol and poison are not the only options and are unsatisfactory choices for any woman who 1

 Cavendish, “The Contract” 6.  Both romances were published in Natures Pictures drawn by Fancy’s Pencil to the Life in 1656. 2

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

156

wishes to find fulfillment in a companionate marriage and loving partnership. In these two romances male mentors train the women to be assertive and not passive. Deletia, in “The Contract,” relies on less violent methods to fulfill her desires, having been educated by her uncle in intellectual pursuits. Travellia (formerly Miseria), in “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity,” is taught by her adopted father the proper use of a pistol: to kill enemies and not oneself. A young woman’s education regarding her chastity and her preparation for womanhood was of utmost importance during this time period.3 Both Deletia and Travellia are nurtured and educated by men who prepare them for their future roles, but the two romances suggest two different types of education for women, two different types of male parenting. In “The Contract,” the heroine is trained by her uncle to use her mind, voice, and language, as well as to dress for success in attracting men—her education then combines masculine and feminine pursuits but does not include activities requiring physical strength. She uses rhetoric as her weapon but does so in order to win the man she desires. In “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity,” the heroine shoots the man who wishes to rob her of her virginity, and whom she later loves, shoots and kills the head priest of the Cannibal nation (after her adopted father teaches her to use a pistol accurately), fights in battles, and throughout most of the work passes as a young man. The two romances, published in the same volume, thus suggest different paths that women can take for self-protection and for self-fulfillment. Both Deletia and Travellia begin as passive young women who are marketed to men. Travellia, as Miseria, shoots the prince and poisons herself in order to avoid losing her virginity, while Deletia follows her uncle’s directions (“Sir, said she, my duty shall observe all your commands” [11]). Both Deletia and Travellia grow in independence and eventually take active roles in their own marriage arrangements; however, they take agency in very different ways, each influenced by the education she received from her male guardian. Cavendish, then, is employing the genre of romance in important and groundbreaking ways, as she creates heroines who perform in public spaces in order to take control of their own lives. Despite her forays into the romance genre, Cavendish protested that romances were not suitable for women to read—or that they must be approached with caution. She writes in “To the Reader,” in Natures Pictures, “I never read a Romancy Book throughout in all my life, I mean such as I take to be Romances, wherein little is writ which ought to be practised, but rather shunned as foolish Amorosities, and desperate Follies, not noble Loves discreet Vertues, and true Valour” (c2r and c2b, np). Both Deletia and Miseria are forbidden to read, or they object to 3

 As both romances demonstrate, there was a double standard regarding sexuality: a woman had to retain her chastity if she were to have any hope of becoming a respected and respectable wife. A young man could engage in transgressive sexual behavior and still be considered an acceptable match for a young virgin—as long as he shed his wild ways when he became a mature married man.

Absent Mothers and Male Mentors in Margaret Cavendish’s Romances

157

reading, romances. Nevertheless, as Helen Hackett points out, “Cavendish is interested in romance in so far as it gives her heroines scope for adventure and self-determination” (186). Cavendish’s romances signal a transitional phase in the evolution of the romance genre, as it became more centered on women and love. Romance was already in a state of flux, as writers like Spenser and Sidney blended the motifs of medieval romance with epic, pastoral, and other genres; the ancient Greek romances, rediscovered in the sixteenth century (Fuchs 66), were a strong influence on the developing genre, as were the writings of Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Sidney, Lyly, Greene, Nashe, and, of course Shakespeare, who, as Hackett discusses (ch. 9), borrowed from the Greek romances, as well as from Renaissance prose romances, motifs such as cross-dressing and “the idea of romance as a feminine genre” (140)—characteristics also employed by Cavendish. In fact, Cavendish admired Shakespeare for his portrayal of women, writing in her Sociable Letter 123 that “one would think that he had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman” (177). We know, as well, that Cavendish was aware of Mary Wroth’s Urania, the first female-authored romance written in English, for she alludes to Lord Denny’s satirical poem to Wroth in the dedicatory letter to her husband that precedes Sociable Letters (38) and mentions it, in her prefaces to Poems and Fancies, in the epistle “to all Noble, and Worthy LADIES” (A3r-v; also quoted by Greenstadt 137–8). She may very well have been influenced by Wroth’s strong female protagonists and emphasis on love. “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity,” especially, borrows many conventions from earlier forms of romance—sea journeys, pirates and shipwrecks, battles with various enemies, the heroine’s male disguise, erotic temptation, the refusal of sexual intercourse, and the final union of the male and female protagonists in marriage. Though magic is not present in Cavendish’s romances, the characters’ actions and the scenarios are often unrealistic. However, as in romance novels today, these stories are secular and rooted in a real world in which women face moral dilemmas regarding the conflicts between their expected social behavior and their personal emotions, between their desires and the obstacles they face in uniting with the objects of their desires. Cavendish’s romances, in fact, have much in common with today’s Harlequin and other popular romance novels, in which “the main narrative strategy is the postponement of the union between the lovers” and the focus is “primarily on the heroine’s gradual, often reluctant, realization of her love for a superficially antagonistic hero” (Fuchs 126). The heroines of these two romances by Margaret Cavendish fall in love with men who have betrayed them or who attempt to seduce them into sexual intercourse. Deletia pursues marriage to the Duke, who has married someone else; Travellia flees the Prince, who tried to seduce her in the bordello. As in most romances, including our contemporary romance novels, Cavendish’s stories end with marriage but Cavendish, as Nancy Weitz discusses in relation to “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity,” moves “ambiguously in and out

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

158

of moral categories” (150) in her approach to chastity and to the question of a woman’s innocence or culpability (154). Part of Cavendish’s purpose may have been to encourage women to make their own decisions regarding their future lives. At a time when women, especially aristocratic women, were subject to marriages arranged by their families, Cavendish creates women who make their own choices, though they encounter difficulties in making their wishes realities.4 In these two romances, Cavendish shows what might happen if women were educated by men in what were considered masculine pursuits. Cavendish’s heroines resemble not only the protagonists of our contemporary romance novels, but also the heroines of folktales of female maturation, in that they are on liminal journeys to womanhood and marriage. The subliminal message of these folktales is the preparation for sexual relations within marriage, as well as the preservation of virginity beforehand. Folktale heroines are often orphans who are mistreated or neglected. Cavendish’s heroines have also been orphaned: Deletia has found protection and nurturing from the aunt and uncle who adopted her, while Miseria is left on her own and sold to the mistress of a bordello. Cavendish may have deprived her characters of their mothers in order to allow them to act independently and receive broader educations—but also to put them into dangerous or risky situations that would add to the excitement of the story as well as to the necessity that the heroine act independently. Without mothers to help them make the transition to womanhood, they must venture outside the domestic world for their education. Instead of depending on a fairy godmother or a magic spell, these characters demonstrate their own mental and physical skills in attaining their ends—but with the help of male mentors. This absence of mothers may relate to the need for adolescent girls to separate from their mothers in order to become women themselves, a theme common in folktales. As Karen E. Rowe argues, many fairytales split the mother figure into an idealized mother (who dies) and a jealous, evil stepmother: “As the child matures, she becomes increasingly conscious of conflicting needs for both infantile nurturing and independence and suffers as a result severe ambivalences toward the mother … . The authoritarian mother becomes the obstacle which seems to stifle natural desires for men, marriage, and hence the achievement of female maturity” (213). The girl turns to her father in an oedipal attachment which still leaves her dependent but “guarantees respite from maternal persecutions and 4

 Though strong female characters were not uncommon in male-authored romances, Cavendish’s protagonists are especially heroic, some of them acting as rulers, generals, and colonizers. Heroic women are the norm in most of Cavendish’s works, especially the romances, the plays, and her “romancical,” “philosophical,” and “fantastical” work The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (124). Scott-Douglas argues that Cavendish used real-life French “women warriors and writers” in her writings, in ways that “coalesced with her own ideas about her political and social enterprise as a poet and with her concept of authorial genius as she defined it in reference to Shakespeare” (151).

Absent Mothers and Male Mentors in Margaret Cavendish’s Romances

159

offers a compensating masculine adoration” (214). In Rowe’s Freudian reading, the heroines are usually able to break the restraints placed on girls by mothers who wish them to conform to the ideal of domestic womanhood but they then must move past the potential for incest with their fathers to find love with men their own ages. However, this process forces them back into the domestic role of wife and mother. Cavendish’s heroines throughout her works tend to break free of maternal restrictions and paternal authority to find their own marital partners and sometimes to engage in duties beyond the domestic ones. Cavendish’s erasure of mothers indicates not only her debt to folktales, early romances, and Shakespeare, but also the influence of her own life story, her own “family romance.” According to Hackett, Cavendish wished to play the romance heroine herself, blurring the line between fact and fiction in her works (187).5 As Hackett describes it, Cavendish blends fact and fiction by “putting [herself] into [her] fictions” (189), making herself a character in “The Blazing World” and adding actual events into her plays and romances. Her fictional romances play out some of her fantasies of holding absolute power and venturing from the domestic sphere to a life of excitement, danger, and, as a result, maturation into the world of men. In her own life, as described in her autobiography, “A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life,” published in Nature’s Pictures drawn by Fancy’s Pencil to the Life, the same volume in which these two romances appeared, Cavendish’s father died when she was two years old, but her mother was a strong presence in her breeding and education. As the youngest of eight children, Margaret was protected and coddled. Though her mother was a model for her of an independent woman, raising her children and managing a large household on her own, according to Cavendish she never stopped grieving for her husband and “made her house her Cloyster, inclosing her self, as it were therein” (“A True Relation” 48). The young Margaret left her family to join the court of Queen Henrietta Maria and eventually married a man who was 30 years her senior, thus playing out the role of a romance heroine who is orphaned, leaves her family, joins the royal court, and finds love and marriage. She was also perhaps re-enacting the “Electra” complex described by Sigmund Freud by her marriage to a much older man,6 and also the “family romance,” by which a child, needing to liberate himself from his parents, engages in daydreams that his “true” parents are royalty (237–41). Marianne Hirsch has revised Freud’s theories to suit female children: just as young men wish to “kill” their fathers and marry their mothers, female children, especially those with artistic ambitions, “need to kill or to eliminate their mothers from their lives, if they are 5  Mendelson discusses Cavendish’s plays as “autobiographical self-fashioning”: “In the plays, self-fashioning runs the gamut from thinly disguised autobiography to sheer fantasy, including dreamlike inversions of Cavendish’s own life experiences which we might characterize as ‘anti-autobiography’” (“Playing Games” 201). 6  It is interesting that, despite Cavendish’s marriage to an older man, her fictional heroines desire young men, with old men functioning as parental figures or rejected suitors.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

160

not to resign themselves to a weak imagination” (56). Cavendish left her mother and erased mothers from her romances. Having left her mother, Margaret may have expected more independence in the Queen’s court but, according to Katie Whitaker, she found the opposite was true; there was not much privacy in this world and her life was closely supervised and regulated (51). She begged her mother to allow her to return home, but her mother refused. When Henrietta Maria fled England for France, Margaret accompanied her. Now her life truly resembled a romance: “fleeing heroic princesses, terrifying voyages, and mariners washed up on barren shores would all feature in the fiction and drama she wrote in later life” (57). Moreover, the queen herself functioned as a type of repressive mother or witch figure like those common to many folktales and romances. Then in true fairytale style, Margaret met William Cavendish, her Prince Charming, who would rescue her from her service to the Queen, replace the father she had never known, and become her husband. Margaret was also mentored by William’s brother Charles, who became “a close friend—conversational companion, patron, protector, and intellectual mentor, a man she would look up to and hero-worship” (82). The emphasis on male mentors in her romances may indicate a need to engage with a father figure in a way she was never able to with her own father, but which she possibly acted out in her marriage to a much older man. Having missed the oedipal phase as proposed by Freud, she gives her heroines the opportunity to be nurtured by men. Cavendish became a wife but never a mother; she substituted for children the “paper bodies” of her writings (Paper Bodies 81–2). However, as Stephen GuyBray has pointed out, Cavendish, in Sociable Letter 143, alters the conventional metaphor (4): the author is not the parent of the text but it is the copies of her texts that act as parents to the originals headed for publication (3). Thus, her “refashioning of the reproductive metaphor ascribes agency and sexuality to her texts” (4). Her books “are not her children; … Newcastle’s use of the reproductive metaphor actually grants her texts autonomy rather than brings them further under her control” (4). She applies the reproductive metaphor to texts in ways that do not necessitate that she be a mother or have a mother. In fact, Cavendish expresses in some of her works a negative attitude to mothers and mothering.7 In “The Convent of Pleasure,” the women in Lady Happy’s allfemale community present plays about wives whose husbands beat them, cheat on them, gamble, and drink. Pregnancy and childbirth are described as painful and tragic, with babies born dead and grown children making their mothers miserable. In Sociable Letter 93, the narrator disparages societal expectations that all women must bear children, declaring that motherhood is only necessary if husbands have

7

 Shakespeare, observes “maternity is associated in the late plays not only with positive and life-giving powers, but also with more negative themes. Mothers are often dead or believed dead” (153). Both Adelman and Wilson have also commented on the negative attitudes to mothers and maternity in Shakespeare’s plays (Hackett 155).

Absent Mothers and Male Mentors in Margaret Cavendish’s Romances

161

no heirs to carry on their family names (145). Cavendish displays a disgust of the maternal body—of the sickness, the unnatural desire for certain foods, the egotism of pregnant women, the dangers of the birthing process. She criticizes a culture that does not value women who are unable or unwilling to become mothers. Though Cavendish praises her own mother in her autobiography, she closes “A True Relation” by identifying herself as the daughter of “Master Lucas” and the “second Wife to the Lord Marquis of Newcastle,” ignoring the connection to her mother. The role models for the life she wished to lead were the men who encouraged her studies of “masculine” subjects and promoted her profession as a writer. Interestingly, this autobiography was excised from the second edition of Natures Pictures. Line Cottegnies has suggested that because of Cavendish’s “radical insight into the textuality of the self and of truth itself,” she may have withdrawn this work from the second edition “because it was too radical for her public” (115). Cavendish’s negative comments about mothers reflected attitudes in early modern culture. Though mothers were sometimes idealized—“the good mother would be tender and loving, transmitting her own good qualities to her offspring by her breeding of the child in her womb, and by her nursing it at her own breasts” (Mendelson and Crawford 67)—they were also viewed with “suspicion,” as Suzanne Penuel observes in her analysis of “male mothering” by Prospero in The Tempest (125). Penuel discusses the anxiety caused by the mystery of the woman’s role in conception (116) and by the conflation, during the early modern period, of “vulnerable bodies, motherhood and witchcraft” (117). In the same volume, Donna C. Woodford discusses the “fear of maternal agency” (187) in relation to Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and the “great anxiety over these exclusively female realms of power [motherhood and nursing]” (187). As Penuel and Woodford demonstrate, the reproductive power of women was misunderstood or seen as a threat by some men during this era. As well as absenting mothers from literary and theatrical texts, anxieties about maternal power caused restrictions on the education of women and by women: “By the end of the seventeenth century, women’s ‘natural’ capacity for maternity was regularly deployed as an emblem of their unfitness for ‘higher’ things. Educated men separated reason and feeling, claiming that as women were deficient in reason, they were suited only for domestic duties as wives and mothers” (Mendelson and Crawford 68). One can understand why Cavendish would disagree with such a limited role for women and also realize that a male mentor and educator might be more likely than a female to help a woman escape the subordinate position expected of her. A man taking on a parental role closer to that of “mothering” would not have the disadvantage of playing a subordinate role to someone else within the family. He would also have the knowledge from his own education and life experience to prepare a daughter for the world outside the home. His nurturing would be from a position of power or authority rather than from one of subordination. The male guardians of the orphaned young women in Cavendish’s romances exhibit the loving and nurturing characteristics that one might define as womanly or motherly but also educate the women to acquire abilities usually

162

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

considered “masculine.” (Of course, in Travellia’s case, her adopted father believes her to be a boy.) Cavendish’s mother did provide an education for her daughters but one based on their gender, as was typical of the time period (see Mendelson and Crawford 89, 90–91). Margaret and her sisters were taught “singing, dancing, playing on Musick, reading, writing, working, and the like,” and were bred “virtuously, modestly, civilly, honorably, and on honest principles” (“A True Relation” 43). William Gouge, in “Of Domesticall Duties” (1622), writes that a mother’s duty is to educate her children when they are very young, since a mother “hath the best opportunity to perswade them to what she liketh best,” but that fathers must also participate in nurturing them: “It is … a ioynt duty belonging to both. Fathers therefore must doe their best endeuour, and see that mothers doe theirs also, because he is a gouernour ouer child, mother, and all” (546).8 After a time, boys were expected to leave their mothers’ “feminine” influence in order to grow into masculinity (Celovsky 213); Anthony Fletcher writes that “Maternal influence was seen as dangerous, even pernicious” (340). Women, however, were to remain with their mothers or female substitutes until maturity (Hull 149). Their education was preparation for marriage “through a moral and social programme rather than an academic one” (Fletcher 376). If, as Janet Adelman proposes, “suffocating mothers” are a threat to the “boychild, who must form his specifically masculine selfhood against the matrix of her overwhelming femaleness” (7), those mothers might also be threats to young women who wish to engage in society in ways their mothers neither wished for them nor trained them for—social and political realms in which their mothers were not permitted to participate. The education mothers gave their daughters, as discussed above, was one that prepared them for marriage and domestic duties—and for motherhood. Though some feminist thinkers, such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,9 believe that the mother-daughter bond is essential for a woman’s growth and not to be denigrated, Cavendish may be indicating that it could be beneficial for a young girl to learn masculine pursuits from a masculine figure. Indeed, the inadequacy and repressiveness of a “feminine” education are obvious in many of Cavendish’s writings. Her heroines are not well served by the rules formulated in the conduct books, especially those by Puritan writers such as Gouge—though these young women do remain chaste and virtuous. Cavendish comments in several of her works about the exclusion of women from university educations. She complains in her letter “To the Two Most Famous 8  Gouge, however, believes that fathers have the right to whip their children and must keep their wives under control. (Shepard also discusses whippings as household discipline [136].) Though Gouge did emphasize the importance of love between husband and wife, his patriarchal stance and his puritan religious beliefs would not have been well received by Cavendish, a staunch Royalist. 9  Gilbert and Gubar’s approach, as well as opposing theories proposed by Adrienne Rich and others, is discussed by Hirsch (44).

Absent Mothers and Male Mentors in Margaret Cavendish’s Romances

163

Universities of England,” “we are become like worms, that only live in the dull earth of ignorance, winding our selves sometimes out by the help of some refreshing rain of good education, which seldom is given us, for we are kept like birds in cages, to hop up and down in our houses … ” (74). Cavendish was very aware that the lack of a university education prevented women from attaining more powerful roles in society. It is not surprising, then, that her heroines would benefit from instruction given them by male parental figures. It may seem unusual that it is men who guide Deletia and Travellia through the journey to womanhood and help them manage their sexual development, but we can see in the advice books to women and other accounts that men were attempting to take control of the sexual and childbearing roles of women (Hull chs. 3 and 4). One example of men’s appropriation of women’s roles is the interference by the male medical profession in the all-female domain of the birthing room, with the regulation of midwives and the emergence of male midwives (Fraser 509–10 and Fletcher 238). Men were, as well, writing manuals regarding the birthing of babies and the raising of both male and female children (Miller 5, Hull ch. 3). With the questioning of the traditional gender roles, it seemed more likely that men could nurture and educate female children. Nancy Chodorow writes, “There is no evidence to show that female hormones or chromosomes make a difference in human maternalness, and there is substantial evidence that nonbiological mothers, children, and men can parent just as adequately as biological mothers and can feel just as nurturant” (29). In the early modern period, just as today, maternity, as discussed throughout Moncrief and McPherson’s anthology Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, was performative and socially constructed. Moncrief and McPherson observe that “attention to the constructed nature of gender and to maternity as a gendered concept divulges that masculinity and maternity are not always mutually exclusive categories” (12). Similarly Naomi J. Miller, in her introductory chapter to Maternal Measures, observes, “Maternity itself was both a physical and social construct in the early modern period” (4); in the same volume, Susan Frye argues that the “maternal role” was “necessarily unstable,” and “like all subject positions … varying both with historical circumstance and the ongoing effort to imagine a ‘self’” (229). In the early modern period, the definition of masculinity was also in flux. It is therefore not surprising that men would be characterized as having nurturing qualities. However, the father’s relationship to his daughter’s education was problematic. While sons could be educated to carry on their father’s attributes, daughters “could never be as much a part of the self as sons” (MacFaul 57). We see in Cavendish’s romances, however, father figures who take on the education of women who are not their biological offspring. We also see that a man can, with some success, teach a woman masculine pursuits. The changing definition of family was another factor that challenged gender roles and familial relations. Lawrence Stone writes that as the nuclear family developed, family relationships began to evolve into ones characterized by “greater

164

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

freedom for children and a rather more equal partnership between spouses” (149), due to what he calls “affective individualism.” Though both parents remained very involved in marriage negotiations for their children, young adults, by 1660, were beginning to exercise more freedom in the choosing of marital partners (Stone 183). Even Gouge, as early as 1622, sanctioned the involvement of both parents and of the children in marriage negotiation. He believes that parents (implying both mother and father) must provide “fit mariages for their children” (564). Children must not marry without their parents’ consent but should not be forced into a marriage. Parents must not “through a couetous desire to get great and rich matches for their children, marie them before they be of years of discretion to like or dislike” (566). Gouge also cautions that the couple should not be “of too vnequall an age” (565). It would seem, then, that Deletia’s uncle errs in contracting her to someone when she is too young to agree and also errs in urging her to marry the elderly Viceroy. Though Cavendish is writing at a time when change was occurring, when the concepts of companionate marriage and scholarly education for women were becoming less objectionable, she reveals, especially in “The Contract,” the limitations placed by parental figures or guardians on a woman’s choice of husband. For Deletia and Travellia, marriage is not necessarily something sought after; both young women, at certain points, are trying to avoid a romantic, sexual, or legal union with the men who desire them (and whom they desire). As they struggle to make their own choices about sexuality and marriage, they are profoundly influenced by male caregivers, while any women who nurture or give advice are harmful, greedy, or inadequate. Deletia’s aunt is barely mentioned and has no influence on Deletia’s education, and the bawd and the Prince’s aunt treat Miseria/ Travellia as a commodity existing solely to satisfy a man’s desire. Deletia’s uncle, in his obsession with her marrying well, and Travellia’s adopted father, in his raising of her as a fisherman father would raise his son, are the influences that shape the two women and lead them to the outcomes of their journeys. In “The Contract,” Deletia is raised by her uncle after the death of her parents. Though she “was nursed up very carefully by his wife,” that invisible woman disappears from the story, and “the uncle grew extreme fond and tender of his niece, insomuch that she grew all the comfort and delight of his life” (3). We learn that the uncle was “well bred” and has retired from a career as a soldier and traveler. Since his retirement, he has become a “great student” and an “excellent scholar” (3). The uncle does not confine his duties to those usually consigned to fathers, but takes on the role of educating his niece. He fulfils the maternal role by nurturing her and by educating her, from the age of four, in singing and dancing; yet he also teaches her, beginning when she is seven years old, disciplines usually reserved for male students—moral philosophy, history, and poetry. However, the uncle and his friend, an important duke, arrange the future marriage of the girl, when she is only seven years old, to the Duke’s younger son. Cavendish shows us a society in which aristocratic parents arrange their children’s marriages for the purposes of ensuring wealth and position—for their children

Absent Mothers and Male Mentors in Margaret Cavendish’s Romances

165

and often for themselves as well. The older Duke wants the girl for his son, since she is to inherit a great deal of money, and the son in question is a younger son, who is not expected to inherit. The uncle balks at this arrangement, since he does not want his niece to marry someone without an inheritance. The Duke, his son, and the uncle agree to this contract between a young man and a child only at the instigation of the dying Duke. However, the young Duke, who does inherit due to the death of his older brother, loves a married woman whom he eventually marries, in violation of his original contract. We can see that women have little choice in matters of marriage and that the one female guardian, the aunt, is entirely erased from the story and from any decisions regarding Deletia’s future. When the uncle learns of the violated contract, he takes his niece out of the domestic world, to the city, for further education; there she attends lectures in natural philosophy, physics, chemistry, and music, as well as court sessions to learn about the system of justice. Finally, when he feels she is ready, at age 16, he arranges for her to “come out” into society by attending a masque. Deletia realizes that her uncle’s intention is to place her on the market as an eligible woman: “what doth my uncle mean to set me out for show? Sure he means to traffic for a husband” (11). The word “traffic” is an interesting choice, since “to traffic” implies to trade or to buy and sell commodities. Even in her youth, Deletia is aware that her society considers marriage an economic transaction performed by family members. The uncle’s plans are successful since Deletia’s unveiling at the masque attracts the attention of the Duke himself, as well as that of an elderly viceroy. Like Cinderella, Deletia stuns everyone with her beauty but disappears before her identity is known. The Viceroy then arranges a ball, hoping this lady will attend; when she does, both he and the Duke begin to court her. The uncle takes an authoritarian role by promising his niece to the elderly Viceroy, without her consent, drawing up in fact another contract. The Duke, however, convinces the Viceroy, by threatening to murder him, to sign a statement that he will not marry Deletia. Though the uncle does relent, the issue must be resolved in court, where Deletia, because of the education given her by her uncle, is able to speak eloquently on her own behalf, winning over the judges and acquiring the husband she desires. Problematic here is the fact that Deletia is arguing for the validity of a marriage contract that she had no part in signing or even in agreeing to. In her testimony, she uses her innocence and youth as a defense, for those qualities support her goodness and her worthiness to be the wife of the Duke. The Duke, on the other hand, speaks of his own youth as a time of recklessness in which he violated a contract he had agreed to against his own desires. It is clear that society’s expectations and rules for young women are different from those for young men. In fact, the parties had already agreed that the Duke and Deletia should be married, honoring their original contract; the trial is therefore only a formality, as discussed by Victoria Kahn (185–9). As Kahn writes, the fraudulent aspect of the trial and other tensions make us uncomfortable with the ending. Also problematic are the uncle’s shortcomings as a parental figure. Though his education of Deletia in subjects beyond the domestic and social helped her

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

166

achieve the marriage that she now wants, he is by turns authoritarian and weakly sentimental, unable to balance selfless nurturing and self-interest. One wonders if his interest in Deletia borders on an unconscious desire to possess her himself or an unhealthy dependence on her: “Nay, said he, I will never part, for I will end the few remainder of my days with thee” (22).10 The elderly viceroy, then, may be a figure on whom the uncle projects his own personality and desires. He also seems overly interested in social position and wealth in his choice of spouses for his niece. Deletia needs to become independent from her uncle in order to mature—but it is not at all clear that she does so. The uncle is leading her back into the domestic world, where she will be the wife of a wealthy man. This will ensure her a comfortable future, where she will have some authority in a household of servants, and it will possibly ensure the uncle’s future as well. It is also important to those of the aristocratic class that their children marry equals in social standing. The Duke is definitely of the upper class and has elevated himself by his marriage to the Duchess—had he been a woman, his reputation would have been destroyed by his behavior but he remains in an acceptable position to his peers. Though the uncle educated Deletia in subjects beyond those required for a wife and mother-to-be, he also was obviously planning for her to be the wife of a wealthy and prominent man. Cavendish is walking a fine line between challenging the patriarchy and promoting married love as the ultimate goal for women. Though Deletia is welleducated, and argues well in court before the judges, we have no indication that she will use her education further or receive further education. She will now become wife—and very likely mother. We wonder if the Duke has indeed reformed and if Deletia will be happy—though she will have both riches and title. There is no embrace, no words of love between the Duke and Deletia at the end, though each has spoken before the judges, he has confessed his faults, and she has asked the judges to excuse him. The story ends with the Viceroy’s proposal to the abandoned Duchess; she accepts, saying she makes “no question but fortune hath favoured me in the change” (43). Perhaps Deletia has once again been deleted as she returns to the domestic sphere, with a husband, and also with an uncle who has sworn to live with her always. One wonders at Cavendish’s intention here. Certainly Deletia is admirable in her intelligence and cleverness; certainly she is successful in that she is able to marry the man that she loves. As is so often the case with Cavendish, however, we are left with contradictory feelings about the outcome. Perhaps Deletia has chosen the feminine route, the uterine-shaped vessel filled with something that is not exactly poison but designed to keep the woman in the home under the eyes of 10

 The undercurrent of incestuous desire would further connect this romance to the Cinderella folktale. The theme of incest, a folkloric element found in early versions of the Cinderella story, is also present in King Lear’s attachment to his daughter Cordelia (Philip 3). Dundes, however, argues that the incestuous desire in King Lear is of daughter for father, rather than father for daughter (353–66).

Absent Mothers and Male Mentors in Margaret Cavendish’s Romances

167

her husband and her uncle. It seems that the absence of an influential mother figure and the academic education supported by her male guardian did not after all take her out of the domestic world—at least not for long—though it did give her the knowledge and ability to secure the outcome she desired. In her relationship with her uncle, she continues to respect him though she has learned to rely on her own judgment in making decisions. The result, however, is very different in “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.” In contrast with the status-conscious uncle, the nurturing father figure in “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity” is a sea captain, living outside of society and its focus on class and wealth. He is also much more successful than Deletia’s uncle in his balancing of maternal and paternal, feminine and masculine, qualities. He is an older man, who is distanced from social conventions and is not concerned with marketing young people for marriage. Not an aristocrat, he has no reason to be concerned about inheritances or bloodlines. In addition, he believes that Travellia is a boy and educates her in a way suitable to male children. He is very different from the female caregivers encountered by this young lady, whose name changes from the lady to Miseria to Affectionata to Travellia to Princess or Viceregent. It is a woman who sells her to the bordello and an “old bawd,” keeper of the bordello, who employs the language of seduction to convince the lady to “seize the day.” Women are not supportive nurturers here: even the Prince’s kindly aunt is firmly on her nephew’s side. Though the lady’s mother may have been a nurturing woman who loved her daughter, she did not wish to go on living after her husband died: she “died for grief,” Miseria says, “and left me destitute of friends in a strange country, [with] only a few servants” (56). (This is somewhat reminiscent of Cavendish’s mother, who, according to Cavendish in “True Relation,” “made her house her Cloyster” (48), though she did not leave her children destitute.) Cavendish denigrates the women who should be motherly but who instead favor men or need men and promote young women as objects to be enjoyed and used by men. Miseria, however, defies this culture that merchandises women and demonstrates masculine courage even before she is adopted by the kindly sea captain. In the bordello, she cleverly gains possession of a pistol. By gaining a pistol, she is, in a sense, trying to gain a phallus—the power to decide for herself regarding her sexuality and her future life.11 She also procures a packet, or bladder, of poison, as mentioned earlier—a more feminine symbol—-planning to poison herself rather than lose her virginity. Her power is in her chastity if she is to have any value to society or any respect for herself—or any autonomy. However, instead of shooting herself, she turns the pistol outward, shooting the prince, who wishes to seduce her. She has opted for the aggressive external, and therefore masculine, instrument, rather than the internal female one. This action foreshadows her later shooting of the priest, as well as her assumption of a masculine identity. Nevertheless, she 11  Greenstadt notes that “this appears to be the first work of English literature in which a woman violently attacks and defeats her would-be rapist” (133).

168

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

does attempt to poison herself later, but is healed by the Prince’s aunt. The aunt’s healing of Travellia may point to what might be thought of as a “maternal” quality, but her actions are due to her affection for her nephew, who is in love with the young lady. However, Miseria’s attempt to poison herself is not repeated after she is adopted and educated by the sea captain. She has now learned to be assertive, not only in the use of a pistol but also in her use of language and rhetoric to defeat or to win over her enemies. Like Deletia, Miseria (or Affectionata) experiences desire, though she is especially concerned about her chastity, as she flees the married man who, at first, wants only to have sex with her. She escapes, disguised as a boy, and is adopted by the man who becomes her mentor and nurturer. After their capture by cannibals, the sea captain teaches his “son” to use a pistol with accuracy and advises him regarding the colonization and conversion of the cannibals. Travellia succeeds in this task, shooting and killing the chief priest with her pistol, converting the natives, and becoming their priest and god, thus transforming an entire culture. The rejection of fixed gender roles is further emphasized by Cavendish’s alternating use of masculine and feminine pronouns for Travellia. Kathryn Schwarz argues that, despite the name changes and pronoun shifts, this heroine “insists throughout on a condition of reference” (280): Travellia “assumes male disguise under a name with a feminine ending” (280).12 The shifting of pronouns, however, is not necessarily random. Usually, when Travellia is thought to be male or behaves in a masculine way, the masculine pronoun is used. She is “he” throughout the episode with the cannibals. However, once she meets the Prince, the pronouns change as her feminine feelings for him enter the picture: up until the time that Travellia becomes fully feminine once more, the pronouns shift between the two genders. We can see that gender identification is indeed unstable and changeable.13 Cavendish rejects the idea of fixed gender roles throughout this romance, in relation to Travellia, but also in relation to her male caregiver. Cavendish also challenges society’s emphasis on women’s chastity, showing the dangers that the focus on the body might cause in a woman’s psyche. Schwarz writes that in Cavendish’s romances “[c]hastity as a sexual identity underlies and finally overrides questions of gender” (280); Travellia’s obsession with her chastity, learned from her society and her previous domestic education, gives way to something fuller and more active, as she engages in activities beyond the escape from rape and prostitution and beyond a concern about her value as a virgin destined to become a wife. Interestingly, the captain’s education of her helps her

12  Leslie declares that Cavendish “neither inverts nor corrects gender roles through transvestism. Rather than disguising or disclosing gender by turns, her use of cross-dressing generally works to destabilize and challenge gender as a natural marker of identity and difference” (190) 13  See Tien-yi Chao for another discussion of Cavendish’s pronoun shifts in “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.”

Absent Mothers and Male Mentors in Margaret Cavendish’s Romances

169

regard her chastity as an active virtue,14 allowing her to avoid the passive role of virgin or wife. The captain educates Travellia very differently from the way that Deletia’s uncle educated her. Thinking that she is a boy, he educates her in masculine skills, but those skills do not conflict with the feminine virtues that the old man himself exhibits in his own character. The sea captain educates Travellia with love and without any authoritarian, patriarchal behavior. While Travellia becomes a god to the cannibals, her father gains the reputation of healer: the tribesmen believe that he brought the unconscious Travellia back to life. Unlike Deletia’s uncle, he is not at all manipulative, functioning instead as a kindly advisor, combining love and the nurturing often considered “maternal” with paternal lessons in power and governance. He weeps with Travellia when they are threatened with separation by the Prince, who has become the leader of a band of pirates. He later heals the Prince as well, helping him overcome his melancholy, as well as his war wounds. Unlike the Prince’s aunt in “The Contract,” who heals Deletia out of love for her nephew, not out of concern for Deletia, the sea captain has real affection for his “son.” Jennifer Vaught proposes that men of feeling were not considered unmasculine during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but were found “worthy of respect from the latter part of the sixteenth century onward” and “celebrated as powerful, strong, and heroic in a wide range of literary works written during this period” (23). The old sea captain is emotional, nurturing, and devoted to his adopted “son” in ways that do not conflict with his masculinity. After Travellia reveals her gender to her father, he tells her to “dissemble” and to “put on a smooth and pleasant face, and let your discourse be compliant, that you may have a free liberty” (85), treating her now in a more protective way. Nevertheless, he continues to encourage her more masculine activities, especially in the Kingdom of Amity, where Travellia becomes ruler of the kingdom and general of the army, having proven herself masculine enough to attract the love of the queen (a plot device similar to that of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night). She herself plans a military strategy to rescue the Queen, who has been taken prisoner by the King of Amour. She chooses the strongest men as soldiers (with herself as their general) and the aged as counselors (including her father), leaving the women and children behind to pray for their victory (96). Travellia, however, is wounded in battle, “having no skill in the art and use of the sword, nor strength to assault, nor resist … ” (99). Though she has learned to appropriate masculinity in her use of the pistol and in her abilities to govern nations and plan battle strategies, she lacks the strength needed to fight with a sword—but she recovers enough to order the storming of the city, only agreeing to a peace treaty on the advice of an elderly, wise, male counselor. She has indeed rejected the poison for the pistol, though she learned early on to direct the pistol outward, and was later taught by her father to shoot to kill. She, however, remains feminine in her caring personality. 14  Leslie sees Travellia’s chastity as an active virtue (179, 188), and calls her a “virgin-virago” (179). She does not, however, discuss the possible influence on her by her father-figure, the captain.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

170

The old sea captain continues to call Travellia “son,” even on his deathbed (107). After his death, Travellia, in her eulogy, praises him for his many attributes: his masculine characteristics of wisdom, knowledge, reason, honor, industry, courage, and wit; his feminine traits of temperance, gentleness, sweetness, kindness, compassion, and piety. This is not to say that men did not possess these “feminine” characteristics, but that these qualities were considered feminine by definition. His death signals her maturity, her readiness to marry a reformed and newly widowed prince who will give her a much stronger role within their probably companionate marriage. Both the Prince and Travellia have matured enough to join their love with friendship: they are appointed Viceroy and Viceregent, respectively, of the Kingdom of Amity. The Prince tells Travellia that he will submit to her governance, but she replies “that he should govern her, and she would govern the kingdom” (116). Cavendish here balances masculine and feminine traits within one woman, power and subjection within one relationship. Travellia’s freedom from maternal supervision and from the patriarchal definition of a daughter’s position within the family have enabled her to establish a marital relationship that allows her agency and choice. She has again clothed herself in female attire but reserves the right to return to male clothing “if it be to serve the Queen and kingdom” (115). She is now a princess, becoming royalty through marriage but also by means of her accomplishments—and the help of her father who, unlike Deletia’s uncle, encouraged her growth into an independent adult. We can see that the fact that she was raised as a man, and by someone who had no knowledge of or interest in upper class society, has allowed her agency and the potential to continue to participate in the political world. She has rejected poison and learned to use the pistol in ways that go beyond her self-preservation, as she participates actively in the world of colonization, politics, and rulership. The fact that Travellia’s father has died, while Deletia’s uncle is still living, may indicate the greater degree of autonomy secured by Travellia. While Deletia ultimately settles for the female role, the bladder or packet (though she does not try consciously or literally to administer poison to herself), Travellia retains the pistol, the masculine ability to govern and the right to maintain her agency.15 Nevertheless, both poison and pistol must be put aside if there is to be an amicable and balanced marital relationship. In both works, the protagonists are educated and influenced by nurturing men who help them gain power in the outside world. Deletia’s uncle is instrumental in introducing her to a world of courtship, fashion, and legal negotiations: without his conveyance of Deletia to the city and to the masque, she would not have learned how to market herself and then make her own choice. He raises her, however, within society, and with full knowledge of her role as a female. He tends to be 15

 Kahn writes of the “incompatibility between Cavendish’s critique of the marriage contract with her royalist argument for allegiance to the king”: “Whereas Assaulted and Pursued Chastity negotiates this tension by making Travellia the ruler of the kingdom, The Contract ends on a note of diminished female agency” (193).

Absent Mothers and Male Mentors in Margaret Cavendish’s Romances

171

authoritarian and is fully entrenched in his society (though his love of his niece does lead him to soften his rules), but he has strength and tradition on his side, as well as upper class standing. He is able to get results. The adopted father of Travellia encourages her to learn languages, to govern, to convert, to fight: without his tutelage, she would not have had the training in masculine arts nor the security and loving protection that would give her the courage to continue her struggle. He raises her to be strong and independent, in the way that a boy would be raised. He is generous and nurturing, completely unselfish, but unaware of class anxieties and society’s rules. He would never be able to find a spouse for Travellia of her own social standing. Nevertheless, his kindness and love give her the strength to make her own choices and protect herself until the man she loves is worthy of her and available to marry. He exhibits more of the traits that society considered feminine and “maternal” than does Deletia’s uncle. While Deletia learns only intellectual and rhetorical skills, Travellia learns physical skills, by which she can exhibit agency outside of and within marriage. Though Deletia’s world is full of restrictions, laws, and unwritten expectations, Travellia’s, though freer, is filled with danger, isolation, and violence. Cavendish has presented her readers with two very different situations and with two very different models of parental guidance. However, both male caregivers educated these young women to be active and self-motivated—and to fight to attain the lives they desired. Deletia and Travellia have become royalty in their own lives with the help of male parental figures. Though it is troubling to us to see the motherly roles of women so undervalued, Cavendish may be suggesting that a man who possesses both maternal and paternal characteristics is more able, during that time period, to educate a young woman in ways that will allow her to take control of her own life. The male mentors in Cavendish’s two romances taught these young women to defend themselves but also to move forward into fulfilling futures, whether it be marriage or governance. However, the marriages of Deletia and Travellia also reveal the extent to which women’s free choice and participation in society were limited in the Early Modern period. Deletia, as wife, will be considered inferior to her husband and is not likely to achieve a political position. Travellia does become Vice-Regent of a country but is marrying a man who attempted to take from her the chastity so highly valued by society; though he offers her governance over him, she refuses (116). Regardless of the results, each woman makes her own choice—one influenced, as discussed above, by the education received from her male mentor. These romances by Margaret Cavendish do more than present strong female heroines; they also question the gendering of specific parental roles, demonstrate the value to women of male mentoring, and suggest changes occurring in the definition of gender and of family. They reflect, as well, Cavendish’s own experiences, her own “family romance” and perhaps her fantasies. She gives her heroines powers that she could not fully possess in her own life, despite the education given her by her husband and by her brother-in-law. Deletia and Travellia, due to their education

172

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

by male mentors, are able to perform masculine, public roles—to an extent and for a time—and they do succeed in marrying men they love. However, it is clear from Cavendish’s writings that women in the seventeenth century had achieved equality with men neither in the public realm nor in the private one. Cavendish’s employment of the romance genre allowed her to express her feelings about injustices to women and to fantasize about possibilities for improvement, especially if women could receive the education reserved for men. To make those fictions and dreams a reality would take great effort—something that could only be imagined by Cavendish in her writing. Bibliography Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish. Ed. Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003. Print. Cavendish, Margaret. “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.” Lilley 45–118. ———. “The Contract.” Lilley 1–43. ———. The Convent of Pleasure. Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader. Ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000. 97–135. Print. ———. The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World. Lilley 119–225. ———. Natures Pictures drawn by Fancy’s Pencil to the Life. 1656. Women Writers On-Line. Web. December 3, 2014. ———. Sociable Letters. Ed. James Fitzmaurice. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004. Print. ———. “A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life.” Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader. Ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000. 41–63. Print. ———. “To the Two Most Famous Universities of England.” Philosophical and Physical Opinions. 1655. Rpt. in Women’s Political and Social Thought: An Anthology. Ed. Hilda L. Smith and Berenice A. Carroll. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. 74. Print. Celovsky, Lisa. “Early Modern Masculinities and The Faerie Queene.” English Literary Renaissance 35.2 (2005): 210–47. Print. Chao, Tien-yi. “The Construction of Transmutable Gender in Margaret Cavendish’s Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.” In-between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 16.1–2 (2007): 83–93. Print. Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Print.

Absent Mothers and Male Mentors in Margaret Cavendish’s Romances

173

Cottegnies, Line. “The ‘Native Tongue’ of the ‘Authoress’: The Mythical Structure of Margaret Cavendish’s Autobiographical Narrative.” Authorial Conquests 103–19. Dundes, Alan. “‘To Love My Father All’: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Folktale Source of King Lear.” Southern Folktale Quarterly 40 (1976): 353–66. Print. Fletcher, Anthony. Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Print. Fraser, Antonia. The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England. 1984. London: Mandarin, 1989. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “Family Romances.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Vol. 9. London: Hogarth, 1959. 237–41. Print. Frye, Susan. “Maternal Textualities.” Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period. Ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. 224–36. Print. Fuchs, Barbara. Romance. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. New Critical Idiom. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Print. Gouge, William. Of Domesticall Duties. 1622. EEBO. Web. February 10, 2010. Greenstadt, Amy. Rape and the Rise of the Author: Gendering Intention in Early Modern England. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. Print. Guy-Bray, Stephen. Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Texts Come From. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. Print. Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print. Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Print. Hull, Suzanne W. Women According to Men. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996. Print. Kahn, Victoria. Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Print. Leslie, Marina. “Evading Rape and Embracing Empire in Margaret Cavendish’s Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.” Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1999. 179–97. Print. Lilley, Kate, ed. The Blazing World and Other Writings. By Margaret Cavendish. 1992. London: Penguin, 2004. Print. MacFaul, Tom. Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print. Mendelson, Sara. “Playing Games with Gender and Genre: The Dramatic SelfFashioning of Margaret Cavendish.” Authorial Conquests 195–212. ——— and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720. 1998. Oxford: Clarendon, 2003. Print.

174

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Miller, Naomi J. “Mothering Others: Caregiving as Spectrum and Spectacle in the Early Modern Period.” Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period. Ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. 1–25. Print. Moncrief, Kathryn M. and McPherson, Kathryn R., eds. Performing Maternity in Early Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Print. Penuel, Suzanne. “Male Mothering and The Tempest.” Moncrief and McPherson 115–27. Philip, Neil. The Cinderella Story. London: Penguin, 1989. Print. Rowe, Karen K. “Feminism and Fairy Tales.” Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. Ed. Jack Zipes. 1986. New York: Routledge, 1989. 209–26. Print. Schwarz, Kathryn. “Chastity, Militant and Married: Cavendish’s Romance, Milton’s Masque.” PMLA 118.2 (2003): 270–85. Print. Scott-Douglas, Amy. “Enlarging Margaret: Cavendish, Shakespeare, and French Women Warriors and Writers.” Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections. Ed. Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 147–78. Print. Shepard, Alexandra. Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Print. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. Print. Vaught, Jennifer C. Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Print. Weitz, Nancy. “Romantic Fiction, Moral Anxiety, and Social Capital in Cavendish’s ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.’” Authorial Conquests 145–60. Whitaker, Katie. Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by Her Pen. New York: Basic, 2002. Print. Wilson, Richard. “Observations on English Bodies: Licensing Maternity in Shakespeare’s Late Plays.” Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property and Culture in Early Modern England. Ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. 121–50. Print. Woodford, Donna C. “Nursing and Influence in Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale.” Moncrief and McPherson 183–95.

Chapter 9

The Maternal Rejection of Romance

1

Julie A. Eckerle

Early modern English mothers exerted extraordinary effort to instruct their children in spiritual matters,2 including spiritual reading. This we know in part because of ample testimony in life writing3 by and about these mothers. In addition to the entire genre of the mother’s legacy, in which women advised their children from the rhetorical—and sometimes literal—platform of the deathbed,4 letters, diaries, and autobiographies indicate that mothers actively modeled spiritual reading for their children and that these children in turn learned to be devoted readers of the Scripture and other spiritual texts in part because of these lessons. And yet, thanks to this same body of autobiographical material, we also know that many women

1

 I would like to thank Karen Bamford for giving me the opportunity to present an early version of this article at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Venice in 2010 and Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane for her valuable comments on an early draft. 2  Women’s role in “household education”—as Willen calls it—has been well documented. Although women instructed children and servants in a wide range of material, and though their pedagogical responsibilities obviously varied greatly depending on class, religious orientation, and the precise historical moment, women’s greatest educational responsibility post-Reformation was generally in religious and moral education, “virtually synonymous” concepts in the early modern period (Charlton vii). As Travitsky notes, “[i]n England, due to the relatively late onset of humanism and the advent of religious reform, the new Renaissance theories resulted in the development of a ‘new mother’ who was learned and pious, responsible for raising her children and developing her own potential” (33). On women’s pedagogical responsibilities, see Willen; Charlton; Dowd, esp. 133–72; Green, esp. 204–29; and Snook, esp. 163–5. 3  The phrase “life writing,” defined by Kadar as “a less exclusive genre of personal kinds of writing” (4), not only allows for greater formal variety than terms like “autobiography” but also acknowledges that all instances of writing about one’s life may offer insight into the autobiographical impulse. I use “life writing,” therefore, to denote a wide range of biographical and autobiographical texts. For exclusively autobiographical forms, “self-writing” is also a more inclusive term and thus more appropriate for early modern England than more narrowly defined terms. See Trill, esp. xxxvii; Graham; and Dowd and Eckerle, esp. 2–3. 4  Dowd further describes this genre as a means for women to “represent their own work as educators” (146) and as evidence of “maternal pedagogy as a lived, textual practice” (159); see esp. 146–60.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

176

read romance,5 a much more controversial type of reading material. Given this seemingly contradictory reality in which women read romance and—as mothers— performed an influential pedagogical role in their households, it makes sense to examine women’s life writing more closely for insights into mothers’ guidance on the supposedly immoral romance genre. What we find—and in many cases what we don’t find—suggests a critical shift in an early modern woman’s relationship with romance when she transitioned from maidenhood to motherhood. Although, relatively speaking, female life writers in early modern England do not give a great deal of space to romance reading, those who mention it almost always reject it as a vice of their maiden days. Once these women became wives, it seems, romance passed the way of childish things, and once these wives became mothers, they warned their own children against such idle stories (and, indeed, against storytelling more generally).6 Because mothers were largely responsible for early childhood education—and thus for conveying a particular patriarchal ideology to their charges—this turn against romance in a woman’s maturity had significant ramifications not only for the genre itself, which has constantly struggled for respectability,7 but also for women’s self-understanding through at least a few generations. In this chapter, therefore, I explore maternal attitudes about romance that can be gleaned from a range of textual examples. My approach is threefold: first I briefly consider men’s construction of women’s reading in their compilations of exemplary women’s life writing; second I survey the attitudes about romance conveyed by early modern Englishwomen in their own voice in their life writing, including mother’s legacies; and third I consider a few representations of maternal storytellers in romance. My findings suggest that while women may have read romance and even appreciated it at some level, they seem to have accepted the pervasive cultural attitude against romance when it came to conveying knowledge 5

 Women’s precise relationship to romance has been a subject of debate for centuries. What we can state with some certainty is that the dominant moral position in early modern England held that romance was too immoral for female readers, that some theorists and writers nonetheless made the case that romances were capable of the Horatian ideal of both delighting and teaching, that internal invocations of female readers were frequently a rhetorical pose rather than references to real female readers, and that—despite the controversy—many women did indulge in romance reading, especially in the seventeenth century. See Hackett and Newcomb on the complexities of women’s reading and the gradual process by which women came to be real romance readers rather than projections of the cultural imagination. 6  Storytelling has long been associated with the feminine in a derogatory and sexist manner. Thus, as with romance in particular, early modern women who were concerned for their reputations tried to distance themselves from so-called “idle” speech as much as possible. See Hackett, esp. 12–16 and 150–52; Harries; Lamb, “Apologizing for Pleasure in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry”; Lamb and Bamford; Parker; and Warner. 7  See, for example, Radway’s ground-breaking discussion of romance’s late twentiethcentury female readership.

The Maternal Rejection of Romance

177

to their children. Indeed, from this perspective, early modern maternity can be seen as the death of romance. Of course, as with most notions in a patriarchal society, the gold standard is established by men.8 And in men’s representations of exemplary women in printed texts that include excerpts from the women’s own writing, a woman’s reading of “good books” is paramount.9 In Memoirs of The Life and Character of Mrs. Sarah Savage (1664–1752), for example, J. B. Williams describes a well-educated young woman who became an exemplary Christian wife and mother as well as an active reader. Indeed, the Memoirs are filled with the titles and authors that not only helped her avoid idle thoughts during her waking hours but were “such books as were best calculated to strengthen the understanding, to quicken devotion, and excite to holiness” (57). This is the familiar model of the ideal female reader articulated in early didactic works like Juan Luis Vives’s The Education of a Christian Woman (1524), repeated ad infinitum in the written lives of women through at least the mid-eighteenth century, and (as we will see) articulated by women as well as men. In The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker (1623–90), another text in which a seventeenth-century woman’s words are selected and contextualized by a man (in this case, the writer’s husband, Anthony), Elizabeth Walker is seen extending this model of exemplary reading into an educational tool within her household, as she models daily reading for household members, requires that her maids read to her each morning, encourages the household to read together on Sundays, and actually teaches reading through devotional and historical texts as well as the lives of holy persons—all of which are, again, collectively described as “good Books” (106). On the other hand, readers are assured that Walker “would strictly charge the Servants not to tell [the children] foolish Stories … which might tincture their Fancies with vain or hurtfull Imaginations, and choak the good Seed of Pious Instruction, or draw them from it” (69). Significantly, just as Walker made pedagogical use of biographies of pious individuals, so did The Holy Life become reading material for others, including Savage.10 In this way, idealized models of women’s reading passed not only from a woman to her children, servants, and other household members, but also to other women.

8  For the cultural knowledge and ideology scripted by men for women in early modern England, see Crawford, esp. 6–13, and Hull. 9  What is meant by “good books” was of course flexible, depending on the political/ religious climate. For example, Rose Hickman (later Throckmorton, ca. 1526–1613), a Protestant during Mary Tudor’s reign, writes that “My mother … used to call me wth my 2 sisters into her chamber to read to us out of the same good books uery priuately for feare of troble bicause those good books were then acco[m]pted hereticall” (3v–4r). Generally speaking, however, “good books” typically meant spiritual texts as opposed to secular ones. 10  Savage apparently read many women’s lives, including Walker’s, Samuel Bury’s An Account of the Life and Death of Mrs Elizabeth Bury, and Theophilus Rowe’s The Life of Mrs. Rowe (Williams 58).

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

178

It is not surprising, therefore, that in their own life writing, written and/or published without a man’s explicit editorial input, women nonetheless consistently indicate how reading is an essential feature of their private devotions and specifically note the “good books” that they read and meditate on (in addition, of course, to the ever-present Bible reading). Quaker Elizabeth Andrews (1628–1718), for example, notes reading “a book of the trial of George Fox” (qtd. in Booy 115)11 in her brief autobiography, later published as “An Account of the Birth, Education and Sufferings for the Truth’s Sake of that Faithful Friend, Elizabeth Andrews.” Scotswoman Lilias Dunbar Campbell (1657–92) mentions reading John Flavell’s Divine Conduct in what is extant of her diary (160). Women like Elizabeth Carey, the Viscountess Mordaunt Duncairn (1633–79), frequently record their reading of sermons (235), often returning to the same ones over and over or reading their own notes of sermons they have heard personally. And Lady Elizabeth Delaval (1648/49–1716), who will be discussed further below, recounts reading several “good books” as well, including “Bishope Anedrews in his 5th Sermon of the Resurection” (49) and Herbert’s poetry (64). Such examples are endless, making quite clear that women’s devotional reading occupied a great deal of their mental space and spiritual practice but also contributed significantly to their self-construction in personal and autobiographical writing. Given this pervasive construction of a woman’s appropriate reading, the rare exceptions stand out and provocatively suggest that behind the sanctioned image of a virtuous woman’s household reading lurked a quite different reality. For example, in a particularly unique case, one that directly counters the examples of Savage and Walker, Arnold Boate manages to construct his wife, Margaret (ca. 1626–51), as an ideal Christian wife who not only taught her daughter “the beginnings of reading” (66) but was also herself an avid reader of romance. Certainly, Arnold lists many more appropriate texts among his wife’s reading, including The Practice of Piety and, more generally, “books of devotion, meditations, and moral instructions” (4). However, as Arnold explains, Margaret particularly loved elegant well contrived Romants, or fained histories, such as Sidneys Arcadia, … the reading of which choice Romants she did with much contentment bestow some part of her time now and then: … But as greate a lover as she was of wit, and of all the productions of it; the least mixture of prophanenes, obscenenes, or lasciviousnes, did so sowre them unto her, as she did not onelie loose all pleasure in them, when so tainted, but she did perfectlie loath and detest them. (94–6)

Boate’s disclaimer indicates his awareness of how an admission of romance reading could taint the memory of his beloved wife, but he was clearly not willing to omit the fact altogether. Indeed, it is important to acknowledge that romance had its defenders as well as its detractors and that even some adult women treat romance in their life writing  David Booy notes that this book was Saul’s Errand to Damascus (115).

11

The Maternal Rejection of Romance

179

in a positive way. In a rare example of a seventeenth-century pious woman who actually defends romance reading, the never-married Elizabeth Isham (1609–54) claims in her unpublished autobiographical narrative that readers are in part responsible for what they take from a text and that, regardless, both Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene—texts that her brother had recommended to her—“shew foorth the vertues of the mind, as well as the perfections of the body” (26r). Based on her numerous autobiographical accounts, Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676) also read Arcadia (61) and The Faerie Queene (48). And her decision to have herself placed in front of bookcases including everything from theology to romance in the triptych portrait she famously commissioned speaks volumes not only about the range of reading an educated woman of her time was capable of but also about the formative influence Clifford attributed to these texts, including romance.12 The genre most definitely influenced Dorothy Osborne (1627–94/5), who, in witty letters to her future husband, Sir William Temple, frequently adopts the genre’s language for sharing romantic gossip about various ladies and their “Gallant[s]” (76) and comments voluminously on the romances in which she and Temple indulged. Significantly, her comments convey an extraordinary comfort level with the genre, allowing her to discuss specific texts without reserve, as in the following quip about characters’ tales in Madeleine de Scudéry’s Artamènes, or The Grand Cyrus:13 “When you have read what Every one say’s for himself, perhaps you will not thinke it soe Easy to decide which is the most unhappy as you may think by the Titles theire Storry’s bear, only let mee desyre you not to Pitty the Jelous one, for I remember I could doe nothing but Laugh at him, as one that sought his owne vexation” (124). For Osborne, romance reading provides an endless source of delight and conversation. But Margaret Boate, Isham, Clifford, and Osborne are the exceptions rather than the rule. Not one of these romance-reading women either mentions or is mentioned as reading romance in the context of mothering, and there are a far greater number of female life writers who, as noted above, vehemently attribute romance reading to their youthful and wayward days. In a characteristic disclaimer, Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick (1624/25–78), notes that her sister-in-law influenced her “to be very vain and foolish, inticing me to spend (as she did) her time in seeing

 Arcadia, The Faerie Queene, and Alexander Barclay’s Argenis, among others, can all be seen in this pictorial representation of Clifford’s personal library. Scholars have devoted significant commentary to this portrait, known as the “Great Picture,” in recent years. For its relationship to Clifford’s reading, see especially Lamb, “The Agency of the Split Subject.” 13  The Grand Cyrus, which, as Kenneth Parker notes, Osborne likely read in the original French (Osborne 296, n.10), was one of the most popular of the many French romances imported into English society in the seventeenth century. 12

180

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

and reading plays and romances” (4).14 After her conversion, however, Rich says that she “spent much time in reading in the Word, laying by my idle books” (22). This conventional plot (a conversion narrative of sorts) is repeated over and over in early modern Englishwomen’s life writing, recounting not only an intensified spiritual devotion that leads to replacing “idle books” with “good books” but also the adoption of new life roles—as wife and mother—that must supersede the ways of an easily influenced and unmarried girl. Furthermore, while life writers refuse to link mothers and romance, they do make quite clear that young maidens who develop a passion for romance and other idle tales are frequently encouraged to do so by other women (like Rich’s sisterin-law). In these cases, the virtuous mother’s instructional role is usurped by a maternal surrogate who feeds the child fanciful lore as a wet nurse might provide potentially contaminated surrogate milk.15 A particularly instructive example of this phenomenon appears in The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, whose mature self, like the mature Rich, repents of her early romance reading. Delaval details the corrupting influence of a household servant, a “Mris Carter for whose company I wou’d With great pleasure haue neglected the learning of euery thing that I was apoynted to Learn” (11). Mistress Carter first seduced the young Elizabeth Livingston into an appreciation of fairy stories when she was ten years old. As Delaval explains, she “charged Me with great secresy, and told me that if She and I cou’d but get out often to walke Alone, the Queen of that vnknown Land she Vs’d to talke to me of … wou’d be so graceous as to let me Se in priuate one of her Court” (12). Among other things, the secret bond that developed between Delaval and Carter led the young girl to prefer Carter’s company to her governess’s and romances to the more instructive stories her governess might teach her. Because “Mris Carter had so fill’d my head With foly’s,” she writes, “what I red was alltogether Romances” (15). Delaval concludes that she thus wasted “the Blosome time of my life. which shou’d haue Been spent in laying a good foundation of What is to be learnt in such Book’s as teach’s us Heauenly wisdome” (15–16). Here again, romances are seen as the opposite of “good books,” as material that only a false or bad mother would share with a child. By demonstrating the threat posed by surrogate maternal figures in the absence of an appropriate mother figure,

14  Significantly, Anthony Walker (discussed above as the compiler of his wife’s writings) was also a spiritual advisor to Rich and eventually included excerpts from her life writings in his funeral sermon-turned-published life Eureka, Eureka (1678). 15  As has been well documented, there was a strong belief in early modern England that breastmilk conveyed virtues and vices as well as nutrition to the nursing baby. As Miller notes, “The participation of female caregivers in all areas of early modern life offered … a spectacle of caregiving powers, potentially life-threatening as well as life-giving” (1); breastfeeding is an excellent example of this twofold power, especially given the increased danger to infants nursed by women other than their own mothers (Adelman 4). See also Adelman 4–8, and Fildes.

The Maternal Rejection of Romance

181

Delaval’s experience highlights the importance of the mother’s instructional role.16 After all, as Delaval points out, “Mris Carter … might As easely haue turn’d me to delight in Wisdome As in foly” (8). With its vivid depiction of the wily, deceptive, and ultimately dangerous Mistress Carter, Delaval’s text points to the problem of alternative maternal figures who frequented the lives of early modern children. Competitors for the performance of maternal duties included wet nurses, stepparents,17 servants, nurses, governesses, and teachers outside the home, all of whom might wield a negative influence over an unsuspecting child. Furthermore, given cultural anxieties about the feminine and “contaminating female matter” (Adelman 6),18 there was often a fine line between the wholesome mother and the wayward nurse onto whom these anxieties tended to be displaced. Indeed, early modern maternity was a subject of anxiety as well as veneration, and all of the beatific effects a mother might have always had the potential for drifting into negative influence, or suffocating femininity.19 Nursing or wet nursing was one dilemma, as was its parallel in moral nutrition: educating one’s children directly or turning them over to nurses, household servants, or governesses. As we have seen, the consequences of the latter were potentially dire, leading young girls into ignorance and a damaging detachment from reality. Therefore, as the controversy over nursing one’s own children continued, especially among the upper classes,20 it became increasingly clear that a good mother would at the least take charge of her own children’s early moral education, most specifically by following the advice of divines like William Gouge and “let[ting] them read the holy Scripture. … Thus will children sucke in religion” (qtd. in Willen 145). Reading was not, in other words, a trivial matter but one of the most important foundations a mother could provide for her children—akin to her own breastmilk. Therefore, in recognition of a maternal figure’s pedagogical power, and in opposition to the potential danger posed by surrogate mothers, early modern 16

 Significantly, Delaval’s grandmother, the worthy mother figure who actually taught Delaval to read, had limited opportunities to influence her granddaughter because they only spent a few months a year together. Delaval seems to have had a tumultuous, often strained, relationship with the aunt with whom she lived, and her mother died when she was a baby. 17  For the general attitude that “stepmothers and -fathers were widely regarded as very threatening,” see Dubrow (350). 18  As Adelman explains, “[b]oth actual conditions and current beliefs … conspired to locate the child’s vulnerability in the body of the nurse/mother.” And a strong cultural belief persisted “that the mother could literally deform fetuses through her excessive imagination, her uncontrollable longings, her unnatural lusts” (6). 19  I allude here to Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. For cultural anxieties about maternity as manifested in The Faerie Queene, see Anne-Marie Strohman’s chapter in this volume. 20  In The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie (1622), a text sometimes categorized as a mother’s legacy, Elizabeth Clinton countered the upper-class tradition of wet nursing and advised women to nurse their own children.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

182

women anxious to be “good” mothers (even, if necessary, from beyond the grave) filled their life writing with advice about how their children should seek wisdom. Elizabeth Richardson perhaps best implies the stakes involved in the successful fulfillment of this maternal duty in “A Letter to my foure Daughters”—a prefatory epistle to her A Ladies Legacie to Her Davghters (1645):21 “I know you may have many better instructers then my self, yet can you have no true mother but me, who not only with great paine brought you into the world, but do now still travell in care of the new births of your soules; to bring you to eternall life” (6, emphasis added). Not only will Richardson’s ability as an instructor determine the fate of her children’s souls, but it will also indicate her authenticity as a mother. Clearly, then, such a mother’s advice in regards to appropriate reading also came with high stakes attached and tended to include instruction in what kinds of materials to read (typically scripture and other devotional texts); how to make the best of that reading in order to achieve a right relationship with God (often by incorporating prayer and meditation); and even how often to read (i.e. daily). Significantly, Dorothy Leigh not only offers this traditional advice in her mother’s legacy, The Mothers Blessing (1616), but also pointedly explains that while a chaste woman “is alwaies either reading, meditating, or practising some good thing which she hath learned in the Scripture” (30–31), an unchaste woman “delights to heare the vaine words of men” (31). Leigh refers here to men’s vocalized flattery, especially in courtship, but her concern applies equally well to men’s written words in secular texts like romance, a more suitable counterpoint to the words of Scripture and other “good bookes [that] worketh a mans heart to godlines” (93–4).22 The collective evidence gleaned from life writing by and about early modern women thus clearly demonstrates just how taboo the romance genre was considered for virtuous women: these texts safely isolate romance reading to non-maternal activities and time periods, they associate any idle romance-reading with other women who may be read as usurping the mother’s role, and they emphasize—in the absence of romance—the “good books” that should comprise a virtuous woman’s reading and the curriculum she should provide to her children or wards. In other words, while “advice-dispensing mothers” (Frye 227) were valued, storytelling mothers were not; exemplary mothers neither share idle tales with their children nor model romance reading for them.23 Thus women’s life writings occasionally 21

 Richardson’s version of the mother’s legacy takes the form of a collection of sample “Prayers for the use of others (under my care)” (48). 22  Although Leigh primarily addresses her three sons in this text, she clearly imagines female readers as well. She makes clear that both girls and boys should be taught to read (24); dedicates the text to the Princess Elizabeth in a prefatory epistle; and periodically implies a more general female readership. 23  The fact of modeling (or not modeling, as the case may be) is critical given the “imitative learning techniques” of the time, “whereby pupils learned morality and character development by modeling their behavior on that of parents and schoolmasters” (Dowd 135)

The Maternal Rejection of Romance

183

record the gift of a romance from a father (Rich) or brother (Isham) but never from a mother. This pattern also appears in the inscriptions found in early modern books, for even though this evidence reveals a few examples of women who gifted romances, the recipients of such gifts were most often boys. For instance, an inscription in a 1648 volume of Richard Fanshawe’s Il Pastor Fido explains that a woman gave it to her grandson: “giuen to my [sic] by my grandmother 1692 [G]er Hamond [Iunio]r.”24 Similarly, the book collector Frances Wolfreston (ca. 1607–77) likely shared her copy of Emanuel Ford’s Famous Historie of Montelyn with her eldest son (Gerritsen 272) 25 and bequeathed most of her collection, including romances, to her children (Morgan 196). And Lady Ann Fanshawe (1625–80), wife of Richard, gave a copy of her husband’s translation of the dramatic romance To Love Only for Love Sake26 to her son, as indicated by the inscription “for my Deare Sonn Sr Richard ffanshawe … No th18 1670.” Significantly, Ann does not mention romance in her own autobiographical narrative, despite the fact that it appears to have been influenced by the genre.27 On the contrary, it is only through this inscription—which performs a motherly duty by sharing a father’s work with his son—that her firsthand knowledge of romance becomes irrefutably clear. Yet one manuscript—a collection of poetry originally written by Nicholas Oldisworth in the 1630s and later transcribed and dedicated to his wife, Mary—offers tangible evidence that a woman may indeed have gifted a romance to her daughter. For at some point this collection, which also happens to include and—in some cases—texts and characters. Such techniques can be seen in Leigh’s advice that her sons pick saints’ names for their children, since the children will then pay more attention to those saints when reading and thus “learne to imitate their vertues” (43–4), and in her observation that good books mold a reader into a good Christian, just as “the fire warmeth the wax and maketh it fit to receiue a good fashion” (94). Yet this theory could work against its practitioners, since it applied just as effectively to non-authorized models; malleable readers might be molded by less satisfactory texts, too, leading once again to the cultural anxiety that women who read romances would soon start acting like the loveobsessed heroines of those texts. 24  This volume is Folger G2175, Copy 1; it is an original work rather than a translation of Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido, as Fanshawe intended it as an addition, or supplement, to Guarini’s work. I am grateful to the Folger Shakespeare Library for the short-term fellowship that allowed me to spend June 2011 examining inscriptions in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century romances in the Folger’s collection. 25  This 1618 edition of Montelyn is Folger STC 11167.2. It is inscribed by Wolfreston herself, with “Frances wolfreston hor bowk” (A3r), and by a male “Francis,” whom Johan Gerritsen believes to be her eldest son (272). 26  This 1670 edition of Fanshawe’s translation of Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza’s Querer Por Solo Querer is Folger H3798. 27  See my “Recent Developments” and Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing for a thorough analysis of romance influence on early modern Englishwomen’s life writing, including Fanshawe’s.

184

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

the first part of a prose romance titled The Chronicle of Europe, passed to the Oldisworths’ daughter, as recorded in the following inscription: “Margaret Man Her Book Given Me By My Dear Mother” (qtd. in Hardman 162). Whether Mary gave the book to Margaret because of her father’s poems or because of the romance, which had been annotated to draw attention to exemplary passages (174), is just as unclear as whether Margaret appreciated the manuscript for its poems or for the romance or for the blank pages that she, presumably, filled with recipes.28 Nonetheless, this obscure example holds out hope that romances were indeed gifted to women by women, even if there are almost no records of such transactions. But the lack of records is telling. That most early modern mothers who left written traces of both their reading and mothering identities seem to have accepted the pervasive cultural attitude against romance is, in and of itself, not a surprise. But it becomes more interesting in the face of other evidence of women’s active engagement with the romance genre. Indeed, as I suggested of Fanshawe above, much early modern women’s life writing reveals the pervasive influence of romance on the life writing itself, both in formal elements and content, and on women’s self-understanding, since they use romance as a means of writing the self. Even Delaval and Rich, for example, produce texts that adopt romance language, assumptions, and motifs, from the daughter’s resistance to arranged marriage to romance-inflected speech on the part of her lovers and suitors.29 So my point is not that women were so indoctrinated against romance as to fully bar it from their lives but that—upon becoming mothers—their relationship to the genre changed and that, at least in formally documented claims, they never allow it to be associated with motherhood or with their duties as mothers. These findings are borne out in the world of romance itself, which is filled with virtuous and rhetorically skilled storytelling women.30 Quite often, the stories narrated by female characters in romances like Arcadia, The Faerie Queene, and Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania—romances, it should be noted, that make extensive use of embedded narratives and thus provide significant storytelling time to women—are in fact much like mini-romances, often conveying autobiographical tales of the speakers’ adventures. Upon closer examination, however, one sees that the storytelling women depicted in these texts are rarely mothers. Although there are many reasons that may explain this absence, including the fact that romances by their very nature tend to focus on the adventures of young, not-yet-married

28  See Hardman for a full discussion and description of this manuscript, which is housed in the Bodleian. 29  For the influence of romance specifically on Delaval and Rich’s life writing, see Ezell and Wray, respectively. 30  See my analysis of these storytelling women in “Urania’s Example: The Female Storyteller in Early Modern English Romance.”

The Maternal Rejection of Romance

185

individuals,31 the consequent impression nonetheless confirms that the mother’s role does not involve idle tale-telling but must focus instead on conveying culturally sanctioned material to her children in rather narrowly understood terms.32 Wroth’s two-part Urania, for example, contains at least 135 embedded tales. Of these, only four are narrated by female characters who are identified as mothers, and only one of these tells her tale with her child present.33 Although all four are respectable characters who use their tales in part to request assistance or protection for their children, the absence of a single mother who tells a story of any sort, romance or otherwise, to her own child is striking.34 Similarly, of the 38 embedded tales in The Faerie Queene, not a single one is told by a mother. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia35 generally follows this pattern as well but, significantly, allows two of its 26 tales to be narrated by mothers to their own children. The first of these unique narrators is the infamous Miso, the peasant woman given temporary oversight of the Arcadian princesses in the topsy-turvy world that is Sidney’s Arcadia. Emboldened by her newfound power, Miso co-opts a storytelling session from her royal charges and sets in place a series of rules for how the stories will proceed henceforth. She swears, boldly claims the first tale, “tun[es] her voice with many a quavering cough” (307), and proceeds to tell what Helen Hackett has called “a stereotypical old wives’ tale” (112), specifically an uncouth story of how she received a blasphemous poem about Cupid from a questionable old woman who indulged in sops of wine throughout their encounter. Miso’s rude tale conveys her unfounded pride, her sexual promiscuity before 31  Indeed, many examples of women’s life writing from this time, like their romance counterparts, end with the writer’s marriage or are written in widowhood, reinforcing the sense that women’s identities as individuals and the life stories that convey these identities come to an end in marriage. On this argument in relation to Lucy Hutchinson (1619/20–81), see Smith, esp. 88. 32  Even the experience of the virtuous Hermione in Shakespeare’s dramatic romance The Winter’s Tale bears this out, since the early scene in which she asks her young son, Mamillius, to join her in storytelling by telling her a tale (2.1) occurs while she is still tainted by her husband’s suspicions and her own pregnant belly; for an insightful analysis of women’s negatively understood copiousness, which—in early modern texts—takes the form of sexuality, pregnancy, obesity, and verbosity, see Parker. 33  These characters are Dalinea (I.241–2), who speaks with her baby in her arms; Sydelia (I.275–83); the Queen of Argos (II.93–5); and Lamurandus’s wife (II.188–90). 34  It should be acknowledged, however, that Urania is filled with strong mother-child pairs, even if the relationships do not involve storytelling. I am grateful to Naomi J. Miller for reminding me of this point. 35  In contrast to the Old Arcadia, which has a relatively straightforward narrative structure and contains only nine embedded stories, Sidney’s partially revised version, or New Arcadia, makes much greater use of the embedded narrative device, assigns some of these tales to female narrators, and often incorporates several layers of embedded stories. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia combines Sidney’s unfinished “new” version with the original conclusion.

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

186

her marriage, and her bawdy sense of humor—all in the presence of her own daughter, Mopsa, as well as the princesses. Miso is neither a model woman nor a model mother, and her storytelling scene provides a strikingly negative example of how knowledge can be passed through the maternal line—in this case from a drunken old woman who may be read as a surrogate mother to Miso through Miso herself (who is consistently depicted as a selfish and misguided mother) to a foolish and impressionable daughter. Mopsa, not surprisingly given such a teacher, proceeds to tell her own convoluted and poorly delivered fairy tale that reveals just how disconnected she is from any notion of reality.36 Thus we have a fictional counterpart to Delaval’s story of the negative influence the real-life Mistress Carter imparted through ill-considered stories. Arcadia’s second storytelling mother, Cecropia, is no more encouraging, for she occupies the position of principal villain through most of the romance and is referred to as “an evil mother” (444) shortly before she begins to narrate her tale of pride, rage, and treachery against Arcadia’s royal family to her son, Amphialus. Though a remarkably noble son for such a mother, Amphialus is nonetheless persuaded to join her evil campaign against the Duke’s family, thus suggesting once again that storytelling mothers are rhetorically dangerous mothers who use their words and copious textuality to mislead and mis-educate the very young people they should be guiding in more noble behaviors. Indeed, based on this brief survey of female-authored life writing and female-narrated stories in romance, mothers simply do not (and should not) “do” romance. If read at all, the genre should be read by maidens who are not responsible for others’ moral education or maybe by mothers like Margaret Boate who, we must assume, understand that romance has no place in their families’ metaphorical “schoolroom.” In romance itself, women can share tales without risk to their reputations, but they must do so with noble intent, under the most urgent circumstances if they happen to be mothers, and—ideally—without impressionable children present. In short, in early modern England, romance and motherhood were, for all intents and purposes, inimical endeavors; and becoming a mother in this period thus entailed (or was believed to entail), among other things, an uncompromising rejection of romance. As suggested above, the consequences of this repudiation were far-reaching. On the one hand, by not sharing romances with their children, especially daughters, early modern Englishwomen participated in the vilification of romance that, in a rather circular fashion, made it the stuff of rebellious childhood rather than mature adulthood. Furthermore, either suppressing their interest in romance or relegating it to a secret space in their adult lives introduced into women’s psyches as well as their households a fundamental and potentially dangerous contradiction. For a woman like Delaval, this is borne out in her meditations, in which she repeatedly castigates herself for the time she has wasted on romance and simultaneously struggles to understand how she ended up in an unhappy marriage with a man 36

 I discuss Miso and Mopsa’s tales in “Urania’s Example,” 27–8.

The Maternal Rejection of Romance

187

she did not love. The benefit of her marital situation, she notes in a seemingly un-ironic tone, is that she is “not … charmed with so much loue for my Husband As might make mine grow Cold to my God” (313). Indeed, the story she keeps telling herself is that this is as it should be, that less romance-reading would have altered her expectations and thus reduced her emotional pain upon her entry into a loveless match arranged by her guardians. But she nonetheless writes a tale (in the form of her collective meditations) in which she is the victim of numerous, quite commonplace romance villains (evil servant, selfish aunt, false lover) and in which she insists that the love match she desired would have resulted in much greater personal happiness. These two selves (the submissive and repentant wife and daughter on the one hand and the petulant, wounded, and confused maiden who once considered eloping on the other) struggle for priority in her personal writings and—through this conflict—poignantly testify to the emotional costs of the culture’s conflicting messages about romance. As Delaval never had children, we cannot know for certain whether this mixed message about the romance genre or the more traditional one she tried so desperately to adopt would have trickled down to her offspring. More likely than not, given the examples discussed in this chapter, her vocalizations would have offered one message while her private actions and the writings produced in her closet would have, potentially, offered another. I hardly intend to suggest that all early modern women were closet romance readers; on the contrary, I believe that the opposite is more likely. However, early modern women’s life writing suggests that romance was a formidable cultural presence, and given the fact that so many female life writers seem to have found personal value in the genre when it came to narrating their own life stories, this absolute silence surrounding the genre in their household duties, and specifically in their role as mothers, indicates a clear fracturing of women’s identities. In some ways, this is a classic conflict between available subject positions, similar to the “divided subject” Mary Ellen Lamb attributes to Clifford because of the multiple and sometimes contradictory positions she occupied in her lifetime: wife, landowner, aristocrat, woman, daughter, parishioner, “loyal subject,” and even “implied (male) reader” (350, 352, 349). Arguing that Clifford’s “agency as a subject derived from, and contributed to, her agency as a reader,” Lamb draws a link between Clifford’s extensive reading, consisting entirely of texts “written by male authors and … addressed primarily to male readers,” and her “assumption of the traditionally male role of landowner” (349). Furthermore, through a comparison of the pictorial representation of her mother’s conventional reading (the Bible, Seneca, and medical remedies) and Clifford’s own, much expanded reading in the triptych, Lamb argues effectively that Clifford had moved beyond her mother and “the patriarchal texts of her culture to use them rather than to be defined by them” (366).37 And yet, even Clifford’s forceful personality was limited 37  Unfortunately, Clifford’s historical perspective in this portrait means that it does not depict her children or their reading.

188

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

by the subject positions available to her, as especially evidenced in “her appeal to a competing discourse of class” (366). I reference Lamb’s discussion of Clifford here because of the resonance it has for my own argument. Certainly, some women’s willingness to defend romance and others’ willingness to write romance suggests that women were not entirely determined by the strong cultural current against the genre. In some cases where women vocalize their rejection of romance (as with Delaval), their personal texts stubbornly reveal the genre’s influence on their thoughts and self-construction anyway. But, as with Clifford, all cultural transgressions are accompanied by submission to other cultural limits. In the case at hand, that limit is the introduction of romance into an early modern woman’s life as a mother. Therefore, although early modern Englishwomen were willing to violate some social taboos by reading romance and, increasingly, writing and publishing all kinds of texts,38 the evidence examined here suggests that combining romance and maternity was simply a step too far. Instead, we see a consistent distancing between discussions of romance and mothering in the same body of writing, even in otherwise voluble mothers’ writings, and I have noted occasional gaps between the idealized maternal image presented on paper and the reality of some women’s reading identities behind the scenes. These silences state quite clearly that early modern women continued to struggle against an ancient legacy of the ideal mother’s role. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates explains this traditional position in relation to the importance of stories to the creation of an ideal state: Our first business, it seems, is to supervise the storytellers and to choose their stories only when they are edifying and reject them when they aren’t. And we’ll persuade nurses and mothers to tell our chosen stories to their children, since they will shape their children’s souls with stories much more than they do their bodies by handling them. Many of the stories they tell now, however, must be thrown out. (qtd. in Morales 25–6)

Put differently, in the case of early modern England “a woman’s participation in the social education of her children could only exist to the extent that it coincided with the direct transmission of her husband’s values, mimicking the patrilineal inheritance system to which it was so closely aligned” (Dowd 136).39 Based on the written evidence examined in this chapter, mothers seem to have heard this message, or—perhaps—to have realized that they must perform as if they had.40 38  I follow Ezell and others in considering “publication” at this time to include both print and manuscript publication. 39  It should be noted that Dowd’s fascinating argument allows room for “more complex and flexible narrative relationships between mother and child” that create “the possibility of more sustained subject positions for women as household educators” (139). 40  Moncrief and McPherson argue persuasively that “maternity—both public and private, physically embodied and enacted—must be considered performative and that

The Maternal Rejection of Romance

189

Thus the heroic identities they may have cherished in their more private moments of reading and writing accompanied romance into the rubbish bin. Left in their place was a dutiful army of exemplary mothers. Bibliography Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Boate, Arnold. The Character of a Trvlie Vertvovs and Piovs Woman, … Mistris Margaret Dvngan. Paris, 1651. Print. Booy, David, ed. Personal Disclosures: An Anthology of Self-Writings from the Seventeenth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Print. Bury, Samuel. An Account of the Life and Death of Mrs Elizabeth Bury. Bristol, 1720. Print. Campbell, Lilias. “The Memoirs of Mrs. Campbell, from the Year 1674 to 1692.” Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern Scotland: Writing the Evangelical Self, c. 1670-c.1730. Ed. David George Mullan. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. 136–89. Print. Carey, Elizabeth. The Private Diarie of Elizabeth Viscountess Mordaunt Duncairn. Ed. Lord Roden. Duncairn: Macrory, 1856. Print. Charlton, Kenneth. Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 1999. Print. Clifford, Anne. The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford. Ed. D. J. H. Clifford. Phoenix Mill, England: Alan Sutton, 1990. Print. Clinton, Elizabeth. The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie. Oxford, 1622. Print. Crawford, Patricia. “The Construction and Experience of Maternity in SeventeenthCentury England.” Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren. Ed. Valerie Fildes. London: Routledge, 1990. 3–38. Print. Delaval, Elizabeth. Meditations. Bodleian MS. Rawlinson D.78. de Mendoza, Antonio Hurtado. Querer Por Solo Querer. Trans. Richard Fanshawe. 1670. Folger H3798. Print. Dowd, Michelle M. Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. ——— and Julie A. Eckerle. “Introduction.” Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England. Ed. Dowd and Eckerle. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 1–13. Print. Dubrow, Heather. “‘I fear there will a worse come in his place’: Surrogate Parents and Shakespeare’s Richard III.” Miller and Yavneh 348–62. the maternal body, as a result, functions as a potent space for cultural conflict, a site of imagination and contest” (1).

190

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Eckerle, Julie A. “Recent Developments in Early Modern English Life Writing and Romance.” Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1081–96. Print. ———. Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Print. ———. “Urania’s Example: The Female Storyteller in Early Modern English Romance.” Lamb and Bamford 25–39. Print. Ezell, Margaret J. M. “Elizabeth Delaval’s Spiritual Heroine: Thoughts on Redefining Manuscript Texts by Early Modern Women.” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 3 (1992): 216–37. Print. Fanshawe, Ann. Memoirs. British Library MS 41161. Fanshawe, Richard. Il Pastor Fido. 1648. Folger G2175, Copy 1. Print. Fildes, Valerie. Breasts, Bottles and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1986. Print. Ford, Emanuel. Famous Historie of Montelyn. 1618. Folger STC 11167.2. Print. Frye, Susan. “Maternal Textualities.” Miller and Yavneh 224–36. Gerritsen, Johan. “Venus Preserved: Some Notes on Frances Wolfreston.” English Studies 45 (1964): 271–4. Print. Graham, Elspeth. “Women’s Writing and the Self.” Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700. Ed. Helen Wilcox. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 209–33. Print. Green, Ian. The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530–1740. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Print. Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print. Hardman, C. B. “The Book as Domestic Gift: Bodleian MS Don. C. 24.” Women and Writing, c. 1340–c. 1650: The Domestication of Print Culture. Ed. Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman. York: U of York, 2010. 162–76. Print. Harries, Elizabeth Wanning. Twice upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Print. Hull, Suzanne W. Women According to Men: The World of Tudor-Stuart Women. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1996. Print. Isham, Elizabeth. My Booke of Rememberance. Transcription Alice Eardley. Princeton University Library Robert H. Taylor Collection RTC01 no. 62. Kadar, Marlene. “Coming to Terms: Life Writing—From Genre to Critical Practice.” Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Ed. Kadar. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. 3–15. Print. Lamb, Mary Ellen. “The Agency of the Split Subject: Lady Anne Clifford and the Uses of Reading.” English Literary Renaissance 22.3 (1992): 347–86. Print. ———. “Apologizing for Pleasure in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry: The Nurse of Abuse Meets the Tudor Grammar School.” Criticism 36 (1994): 499–519. Print. ——— and Karen Bamford, ed. Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Print.

The Maternal Rejection of Romance

191

Leigh, Dorothy. The Mothers Blessing. 1616. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Print. The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works I, Pt 2,Vol. 8. Miller, Naomi J. “Mothering Others: Caregiving as Spectrum and Spectacle in the Early Modern Period.” Miller and Yavneh 1–25. ——— and Naomi Yavneh, eds. Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Print. Moncrief, Kathryn M., and Kathryn R. McPherson. “Embodied and Enacted: Performances of Maternity in Early Modern England.” Performing Maternity in Early Modern England. Ed. Moncrief and McPherson. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 1–13. Print. Morales, Helen. Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. Morgan, Paul. “Frances Wolfreston and ‘Hor Bouks’: A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book Collector.” Shakespeare: Text, Language, Criticism. Hildesheim, Germany: Olms-Weidmann, 1987. 193–211. Print. Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Print. ———. “Gendering Prose Romance in Renaissance England.” A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary. Ed. Corinne Saunders. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 121–39. Print. Osborne, Dorothy. Letters to Sir William Temple. Ed. Kenneth Parker. London: Penguin, 1987. Print. Parker, Patricia. Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. London: Methuen, 1987. Print. Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984. Print. Rich, Mary. The Autobiography of Mary Countess of Warwick. Ed. T.C. Croker. London: Richards, 1848. Print. Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages 22. Richardson, Elizabeth. A Ladies Legacie to Her Davghters. London, 1645. Print. Rowe, Theophilus. The Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe. London, 1739. Print. Savage, Sarah. Memoirs of The Life and Character of Mrs. Sarah Savage. Ed. John B. Williams. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845. 27–239. Print. Sidney, Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Ed. Maurice Evans. London: Penguin, 1977. Print. ———. The Old Arcadia. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Print. Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Print. Snook, Edith. “‘His open side our book’: Meditation and Education in Elizabeth Grymeston’s Miscelanea Meditations Memoratives.” Miller and Yavneh 63–75.

192

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A.C. Hamilton. London: Longman, 1977. Print. Throckmorton, Rose. “MS narrative by Mrs. Rose Throckmorton, formerly wife of Anthony Hickman, of her own and the latter’s sufferings as Protestants during Queen Mary’s reign, written by her in her own hand in her 85th year, circa 1610.” British Library. Additional MS 43827. Travitsky, Betty S. “The New Mother of the English Renaissance: Her Writings on Motherhood.” The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature. Ed. Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner. New York: Frederick Unger, 1980. 33–43. Print. Trill, Suzanne. “Introduction.” Lady Anne Halkett: Selected Self-Writings. Ed. Trill. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. xvii–xlii. Print. Vives, Juan Luis. The Education of a Christian Woman. Ed. Charles Fantazzi. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. Print. Walker, Anthony. Eureka, Eureka. The Virtuous Woman found Her Loss Bewailed, and Character Exemplified in a Sermon Preached at Felsted in Essex, April, 39, 1678. 1678. Print. ———. The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker, Late Wife of A.W. D.D. Rector of Fyfield in Essex. London, 1690. Print. Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Noonday, 1994. Print. Willen, Diane. “Women and Religion in Early Modern England.” Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe. Ed. Sherrin Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 140–65. Print. Williams, J. B. Memoirs of the Life and Character of Mrs. Savage. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845. 27–239. Print. Wray, Ramona. “[Re]Constructing the Past: The Diametric Lives of Mary Rich.” Betraying our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts. Ed. Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway, and Helen Wilcox. New York: St. Martins, 2000. 148–65. Print. Wroth, Mary. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995. Print. ———. The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Ed. Josephine A. Roberts, Suzanne Gossett, and Janel Mueller. Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999. Print.

Afterword

Untellable Tales Clare R. Kinney

In the first of two reunion scenes presented to us in Act 5 of Pericles, the protagonist, paralyzed by grief, recognizes his lost daughter and exclaims, “O, come hither, / Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget … ” (5.1.194–5). Pericles’s words tellingly revise the incest riddle of the play’s first scene, whose solution sends him off on his traumatized wanderings—but here it is a virginal daughter who takes the place of the mother and who recalls the near-catatonic prince of Tyre to the land of the living. Mothering her own father, Marina teaches him to speak again, as if she were indeed nurturing an infant (the word quite literally means “unspeaking” in its Latin form of infans). She does so, furthermore, through an act of narration, relating her own history of loss and abduction and trial; she has, in effect, become a relater of romance. At this charged moment in its action, Pericles briefly offers a representation of the power of the mother (as life-giver, as nurturer, as storyteller), and then proceeds to undo it. The very act of curing Pericles reinstates him as patriarch, as governor of more than just himself. We should note, too, that the virginal Marina’s healing gift of new life to her father sidesteps the problematic, messy and anxiety-provoking business of material, biological begetting and parturition and erases the presence and threat of the desiring female body. As Janet Adelman suggests, in this scene and in Pericles’s subsequent reunion with the resurrected Thaisa (hidden away as a celibate priestess for 15 years), we have the recuperation and regeneration of the family, freed from the sexual body (and especially from that of the mother) (196–8). At the same time, we have an almost immediate silencing of Marina the storyteller: she will speak only once more after the paternal reunion of 5.1.1 Helen Hackett has persuasively described the ways in which the genre of romance (with its emphasis on narrative dilation and often dangerous travails, its movement toward revelation, “delivery,” and “issue”) is very much concerned with the dynamics of maternity; she has also noted its interest in the pleasures of less than elevated storytelling, associated in early modern culture with women’s oral narratives (“‘Gracious be the Issue,’” 29–30; 32–5). Diane Purkiss’s investigation of the “part-told tales” that haunt The Winter’s Tale takes as her starting point the work’s repeated metatheatrical—or are they metanarrational?—invocations of laughable and incredible “old tales” (75). But what precisely is the mother’s role in the creation of romance, which often involves birthing something quite unexpected 1

 Marina’s last speech is at 5.3.44–5.

194

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

out of a potentially tragic narrative or dramatic frame? In The Winter’s Tale, the business of begetting is itself reinvoked when Leontes, gazing upon Florizel and his unknown betrothed, exclaims: I lost a couple that ’twixt heaven and earth Might thus have stood, begetting wonder, as You, gracious couple, do. (5.1.131–3)

In presenting before his eyes youthful versions of Polixenes and Hermione, restored to him in their most pristine state, Florizel and Perdita “beget” wonder, but it is Paulina who will preside over the climactic version of what Maria Del Sapio Garbero describes as the “spectacularization of pure wonder” and who will be midwife to the very “stuff of romance” (99). As in Pericles, we have a complex reimagining (and abstraction) of the maternal principle, accompanied by the creation of narrative. Paulina, for example, lets it be thought that a very particular artist has created the statue of Hermione (5.2.91–5), teases Leontes with the possibility that he might think that, in animating the statue, she would be performing necromancy (5.3.87–92), and announces that the resurrection of Hermione might be considered the improbable matter of an “old tale” (5.2.115–17). In turning art into life, she acts as the agent of “good goddess Nature” (2.3.103), releasing Hermione from her long travail and inviting her to utter her first words to her daughter (5.3.120–21). The play nevertheless refuses Paulina the role of mother—or rather cancels her quite literal maternity—and her power seems to be predicated upon what is, in effect, her disembodiment. It is easy to forget that Paulina is a mother. And yet when Leontes accuses Hermione of adultery and treachery before the Sicilian courtiers, Paulina’s husband, Antigonus, offers a rather disturbing defense of his queen that foregrounds their own offspring; Be she honour-flawed, I have three daughters; the eldest is eleven The second and the third nine, and some five; If this prove true, they’ll pay for’t: by mine honour, I'll geld ’em all—fourteen they shall not see To bring false generations. (2.1.143–7)

Paulina, it seems, is a mother three times over, and the maker of potential mothers. But no further mention is made in Shakespeare’s play of this aspect of her identity; or rather, the play behaves as if Perdita is the only “daughter” whose delivery she can preside over: “Turn, good lady; / Our Perdita is found” (5.3 120–21; emphasis mine). Abused in conventionally derogative terms as a “mankind witch” and a “bawd” in her earlier confrontation with Leontes (2.3.68–9), Paulina enjoys in Act 5 in a kind of sexless partnership with the penitent king, in which she is his spiritual advisor, political counselor and superego; in the interim, Hermione’s

Afterword

195

problematically sexualized body has been first imprisoned and then presumed dead. The traduced queen stands trial, and then stands still, awaiting the re-delivery of her lost daughter; in the pastoral revels of Bohemia, Perdita’s virginal body takes the place of Hermione’s sexually experienced and egregiously maternal body. Paulina displaces the ostensible work of a male sculptor, practices an art “lawful as eating” (5.3.111), creates a spectacle of wonder, presides over the awakening and re-pledging of Leontes’s faith, but is not quite made present as a sexed woman until Leontes, as if emphasizing his own (albeit perhaps redeemed) obsession with the making of narratives, sets about marrying her off to Camillo in the concluding speech of The Winter’s Tale (5.3.135–45). In the play’s last lines, Paulina’s staging of romance—as well as her independent agency—is recontained by Leontes’s improvisation of romantic comedy. His tale-telling reframes hers. The powerfully eccentric versions of “rebegetting” I have just discussed are, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, part of a much larger phenomenon. Early modern romance is, it seems, a discourse at war with itself. A “maternal” genre par excellence, it may nevertheless underline the appropriation of the maternal lexicon by male “makers” or—as Marianne Micros’s discussion of two romance novellae by Margaret Cavendish demonstrates—actually substitute male mentors and nurturers for absent mothers. It may also at once stage and seek to escape a nexus of anxieties provoked by the potential errancy and troubling power of the maternal body and the maternal voice, often deploying narrative or dramatic devices that variously villify, purge, erase, displace, replace, or contain the figure of the mother. (The conflicted nature of the genre is further emphasized by the fact that so many of the male authors who employ these tactics claim, as Helen Hackett has pointed out, to be writing merely for a female audience [Women and Romance Fiction 4–19].) It is worth remembering what Susan C. Staub glances at in her discussion of Spenser’s discursive practices: the primal continuity of romance with the “mother tongue” (28). The very term is first employed, in the twelfth century, not to describe a particular kind of narrative but to designate a narrative written in the French vernacular, en roma(u)nz: in the “Romance” language that children learned from their mothers, as opposed to the Latin of the clergy.2 Yet as Julie A. Eckerle demonstrates, in her careful exploration of the writings of women who recall their own girlhood pleasures, early modern mothers are under enormous cultural pressure to reject the putative errancies of romance reading and are indeed quite likely to blame their enchantment by romance upon the influence of morally unreliable maternal surrogates. The “mother tongue” of male-authored early modern romance meanwhile remains strikingly preoccupied with exorcising or reconfiguring the power of the mother. Several of the chapters here bear witness to the variety and the ingenuity of such reconfigurations. Del Sapio Garbero offers a powerful exploration of the 2  The twelfth-century author of short romances, Marie de France, writes of drawing a tale “de latin en romaunz” (i.e. translating it from Latin into French) in the Prologue to her Lais (line 30).

196

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

manner in which the threatening maternal body is resuscitated and denatured as “art made flesh” in The Winter’s Tale; remediated, as it were, through man-made mimesis (112). Her identification of depictions of the transfiguration of the Virgin as potentially influencing Shakespeare’s staging of Hermione’s resurrection is interestingly complemented by Staub’s discussion of the ways in which Spenser’s reimagining of “virgin birth” in The Faerie Queene’s account of the origins of Belphoebe and Amoret refocuses and appropriates (pro)creative power through authorial mythopoesis. Staub illuminates, furthermore, the ways in which the poet’s recourse to the technical vocabularies of medicine and horticulture “manage,” even as they abstract, the material maternal body in Book III’ s Garden of Adonis (29). Anne-Marie Strohman detects a similar “managing” of maternity in The Faerie Queene’s insistent deferral of Britomart’s final union with Arthegall and her assumption of matriarchal authority: “the idea of Britomart as mother is less threatening” than her physical body in the text (44). Enveloped in the armor that masks her body and causes her to be “read” as a man, Britomart’s rites of passage as a young woman become conflated with those of a novice knight. She cannot, it seems, be a questing hero in her own body: the narrative of her questing (as opposed to her extra-diegetic, providentially approved role in a larger history) does not include motherhood. Spenser’s account of Britomart’s quest, moreover, makes a point of displacing a maternal figure as narrator. Her nurse’s counsel and remedies and the old woman’s very attempt to relate her child’s woes are ultimately rebuffed by Merlin’s curt question, “Glauce, what needes this colourable word … . ?” (III.iii.19); he substitutes for her speech his own narrative of Britomart’s manifest destiny. An authoritative figure from the romance corpus of the Matter of Britain rejects the old wife’s tale. Nevertheless, as we so clearly see in The Winter’s Tale, romance cannot actually dispense with “old wives’ tales.” Mary Ellen Lamb has written persuasively about the vigorous reappearance in the products of early modern learned culture of the officially scorned narratives associated with uneducated women, ostensibly “unspeakable” but remarkably resilient (45–62). They coexist, indeed, with those other never-quite-eradicated narratives of maternal desire that Karen Bamford elegantly illuminates in her discussion of All’s Well that Ends Well and The Winter’s Tale. To be sure, the desires of the mother may be represented only to be demonized. The Countess of Roussillon’s yearning to regain her lost daughter-in-law and Hermione’s patient counting of the frozen hours of her “winter’s tale” until Perdita/Proserpina returns reaffirm a nurturing identity directed at a beloved young woman that is perhaps relatively unthreatening to the masculine subject. But Sidney’s revised Arcadia, as both Naomi J. Miller and Richard Wood note, offers us two anxiety-provoking figures: Gynecia, the relatively young wife of the dotard Basilius, who refuses to stay in her proper place as Philoclea’s mother and, desiring Pyrocles, becomes her own daughter’s rival; Cecropia, who is not sexually aggressive but whose “forcible love” (to borrow Miller’s useful term) for her son Amphialus provokes her interventions into the public sphere that bring war

Afterword

197

and chaos to Basilius’s dukedom. Cecropia and Gynecia’s respective sexual and political transgressions are fused in the figure of Andromana, the power-hungry and promiscuous “wicked stepmother,” and Richard Wood proposes that the latter is neutralized within the narrative logic of the text by Helen of Corinth, whose idealized queenship rewrites a strain of anti-Elizabethan criticism that depicted Sidney’s queen as a problematic (step)mother to her nation. It’s a delicate business, celebrating maternal desire (or the desires of the mother that exceed simple maternality), and Karen Bamford rightly asks in her Introduction “Is motherhood compatible with heroism?” (3) —a question that’s all the more germane in an early modern context, in which the law of “coverture” subsumes the very identity of the wife as speaking and desiring subject within that of her husband.3 Interestingly, the two plays in which Bamford locates an attentiveness to the fulfillment of maternal desires also stage the pregnant female body. The Winter’s Tale begins with a woman near her term; All’s Well That Ends Well concludes with the miraculous reappearance of a visibly pregnant Helen (as Bamford observes, Diana’s announcement that Helen can already feel “her young one kick” [5.3.302] means that Helen must be at least in her fifth month [126, note 18]). But the dramatic designs of the two plays “manage” those bodies very differently. Hermione’s anxiety-provoking body is first imprisoned and then kept in seclusion until the resurrection that re-presents her when she has passed her childbearing years. Helen offers some rueful comments after her “bed trick” allows her to consummate her marriage with the unwitting Bertram (4.5.211–25) and is present in 5.1. to discover that the King has gone to Roussillon, but she is notably absent from most of the play’s final scene: after her entrance at line 304 of its ever-growing confusion, she speaks only three times before the action draws to a close.4 If the wonders that accompany the very different resurrections of Helen and Hermione are the very stuff of the “old wives tales,” a narrative of maternal desire that makes present in extended form the procreative condition nevertheless remains almost unspeakable (to reinvoke Lamb) in literary romance. It can, however, be discerned in a rather different place and I propose to glance at where it lies half-hidden and where, perhaps, it resurfaces. Diane Purkiss notes the persistence in The Winter’s Tale of elements derived from orally transmitted folklore and ballad. Leontes, she proposes, refusing to raise Perdita and bent upon erasing both the body of the child and his nightmare vision of an adulterous wife, takes upon himself the role of the “Cruel Mother” found in many traditional ballads.5 Francis Child’s monumental nineteenth-century 3  For a useful summary of coverture as a legal principle (and its social implications), see Dolan 255–9. 4  To be sure, if Helena is far enough along in pregnancy to be able to feel her child kick by the time she confronts Bertram, she and her co-conspirators must have had a rather slow journey back from Italy, even by early modern standards! 5  Although some of these traditional ballads would receive broadside publication before they began to be collected by antiquarians in the eighteenth century, they are to be

198

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

collection of English and Scottish ballads collates both printed and oral sources and a recent scholar of his corpus has pointed out that the ballad singers named by Child (who had themselves often heard the songs from mothers or nurses or female servants) are predominantly women (Wollstadt 74–5).6 The ballad, then, is a form presided over by many female makers and transmitters of “women’s stories,” and there is one particularly powerful ballad whose near-invisibility and fragmentary survival in early modern romance is worth pondering. “Tam Lin” (Child, Vol. 1 #39) is mentioned in The Complaynt of Scotlande (1549), one of the earliest printed works discussing traditional ballads (66). “Tam Lin” is not only, in terms of genre, an arresting version of romance; it also presents a plot that’s almost unseen in the print romance canon. This ballad makes a pregnant, unmarried woman, a woman whose body clearly registers the consequences of her own sexuality, the heroine of a tale of testing and questing in which it is possible to be both a mother and a lover. A young aristocratic woman (a king’s daughter in some versions) defies a prohibition and visits a forbidden place, Carterhaugh, where any visitor must surrender either her green mantle or her maidenhead to the mysterious Tam Lin. When she plucks an interdicted rose, Tam Lin accuses her of trespassing and she answers him roundly: “‘Carterhaugh, it is my ain, / My daddie gave it me; / I’ll come and gang by Carterhaugh, / And ask nae leave at thee’” (Version A, stanza 7). A tactful ellipsis in most versions of the ballad shows us Janet returning to her father’s castle still wearing her mantle.7 She has conceived, and the compressed timeline of the ballad moves us to the moment at which one of her father’s knights laments that he or one of his fellows will be blamed for her now visible pregnancy; in the striking stanzas that follow, Janet not only puts the knight in his place but also tells her father, when he upbraids her, that she will bear the blame herself—and that the father of her child is her “true-love,” an Elfin knight, and a better choice than any of the lords available to her (Version A, stanzas 12–15). Returning to Carterhaugh she asks Tam Lin who and what he is and learns that he is in fact a human lord’s son, kidnapped by the amorous Fairy Queen as he rode hunting; he has dwelled in her domain ever since and now fears that he will be chosen as the “tithe” that the fairies must pay to Hell every seven years. He also instructs her on how to rescue him. At midnight, as the fairy court rides by, Janet pulls Tam Lin from his steed and holds him fast in her arms as he turns into a series of fearful beasts and a red hot iron; at the distinguished from the kind of “journalistic” (in The National Enquirer sense) broadside material purveyed, for example, by Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale. See Wollstadt 15–17. 6  For a more general account of women as makers and singers as ballads and the subsequent printing, editing and transmission of such ballads, see Symonds 13–37. 7  In some iterations of the ballad, there’s a strong suggestion of rape (see e.g. version D in Child). But in other versions obliquely suggest that our heroine chooses not to surrender her green mantle, but rather her maidenhead; she is clearly depicted as wearing that garment on her return to her father’s castle in version A.

Afterword

199

end of these metamorphoses he is simply a naked man, over whom she casts her green mantle. The Fairy Queen curses Janet and declares that had she known a mortal woman would rob her of her prize, she would have taken out his eyes and replaced them with “twa een o tree” (Version A, stanzas 41–2). Child’s introduction to the ballad traces its ancestry all the way back to the story of Peleus’s capture of Thetis (the mother of Achilles), but remarkably does not note that the bold lover who must win a shapeshifter in all the variants of the tale that he records is male (Child, 1. 336–9) . This is not, incidentally, the only traditional ballad in which a pregnant woman pursues her own desires, endures physical challenges and finds a husband; “Child Waters” (Child, 3. #63) gives us a heavily pregnant lady who follows her love on foot, disguised as his page, and endures desperate hardship; her beloved only takes her as his wife after she gives birth in a stall of his stables. But the Child Waters’s story is more reminiscent of the “patient Griselda” tales; Tam Lin’s Janet is intent not only on making sure her child has a father, but also upon a rescue of a Christian knight from supernatural powers. Her unorthodox and unambiguously female questing agency is privileged throughout the poem; she does not cross dress; she seeks out the “adventure” of Carterhaugh; she defies conventional masculine authority (Tam Lin’s own initial prohibitions, the remonstrations of her father’s knight, her father’s accusation); she succeeds in the supernatural trials she must face. Her pregnant body is not erased—indeed, she has already presided at a kind of birth when her lover, naked and vulnerable, is reborn into his human form. She combines the identities of lover and mother for much of the poem. One of the ballad’s variants notably underlines her agency in two additional concluding stanzas (our heroine is here Margaret, not Janet): These news has reachd thro a’ Scotland And far ayont the Tay, That Lady Margaret, our king’s daughter, That night had gained her prey. She borrowed [i.e. redeemed] her love at mirk midnight, Bare her young son ere day, And though ye’d search the warld wide, Ye’ll nae find sic a may. (Version G, stanzas 58–9)

The explicit reference to the lady as a successful hunter reverses the dynamics of the ballad’s opening (in which all young women who visit Carterhaugh are potentially the supposed elfin knight’s “prey”) and repeats, with a difference, Tam Lin’s own capture by the Fairy Queen at the hunt. In this variant, the narrative’s conclusion also collapses together the successful delivery of the stolen knight and the successful delivery of the heroine’s baby. The young woman’s simultaneous occupation of the roles of transgressor of cultural norms and prohibitions, heroic

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

200

quester/rescuer, mother, and desiring woman is as striking as the ballad’s complete lack of interest in offering any moral commentary upon her actions.8 It is interesting to ponder some of the romance narratives discussed in this volume in the light of this unorthodox and yet resilient story. That striking “early ‘late romance’” (Bamford 126), All’s Well that Ends Well, reverses the ballad’s dynamics; its heroine’s seemingly impossible quest is to beget a child fathered by her reluctant and absent husband in order to repossess him as her proper spouse. Her journey and her travails end with her pregnancy; her pregnancy does not impel them. Britomart’s quest for a mysterious man who is also a Faerie knight will conclude in marriage and motherhood, but she quests under a mask that seems to deny the very possibility of a maternal identity and she is a virgin whose desire, it is emphasized, is chaste.9 Young Janet/Margaret might seem to enact, with a difference, the “forcible love” Naomi J. Miller discusses in her incisive account of the way in which Mary Wroth finds a space to distinguish and divide the power of the mother(s) from the power of the patriarchy in Love’s Victory. But Wroth’s play also separates the figures of Musella’s mother and the presiding and maternal Venus from the daughter whose desire to be with the man she loves can only, it seems, be achieved by dying in his company. Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania does, however, offer us a mother-as-quester, even if its ever-multiplying narratives do not at first glance foreground motherhood. The work’s heroine, Pamphilia, does not give birth to a child until very near the end of the never-finished manuscript continuation to the 1621 text and (like Wroth herself) loses her child very shortly thereafter. Pamphilia’s own mother is almost invisible in the romance, although Wroth emphasizes Pamphilia’s affection for the noble Queen of Naples, mother of the wandering Amphilanthus and Pamphilia’s never-quite-mother-in-law. Although many of Pamphilia’s friends and peers become mothers (apparently in the white space between Urania I and Urania II), the unpublished continuation’s domination by a plotline concerning the mysterious loss and captivity of their children rather insistently separates mothers from their offspring, refocusing attention on the fates of the second-generation characters in the absence of their parents. There is, however, one striking exception to Wroth’s general lack of interest in the representation of maternity.

8

 The richness and complexity of the narrative is underlined by its inclusion of one and sometimes two alternative figures of the Bad Mother. In two of the iterations collected by Child (G, I), Tam Lin is a very young boy when captured by the Fairy Queen (who is thus a predatory mother as much as a seducer); in another (F), Janet’s own mother tells her of a herb she must eat to abort the child she carries. The heroine defies both of these figures—but she equally defies all patriarchal prohibitions as well. 9  See, for example, Merlin’s insistence that no “wandring” female eye was involved in Britomart’s falling in love with the shadowy presence of Arthegall (The Faerie Queene III.iii.24.1).

Afterword

201

In the 1621 Urania, Pamphilia’s older brother Parselius, who has pledged his faith to the supposed shepherdess Urania, is separated from her by the enchantments of Cupid’s palace in Cyprus. Arriving at an unknown castle, he finds there Dalinea, the sister of his friend Leandrus and becomes enamored of her; they marry, but a dream in which Urania appears and upbraids him for his faithlessness leaves Parselius consumed with shame and he abandons Dalinea and enters into various wanderings. Urania, now rescued from the enchantments of Cyprus, is told by the enchantress Melissea that in order to be freed from the miseries of lost love she must let herself be thrown into the ocean from the rock of St. Maura. Parselius, arriving as this is happening, jumps in after her; both young people emerge from the waters with no recollection of their former feelings for one another. Shortly afterwards, a veiled lady accompanied by a very young child arrives at the court of Parselius’s father, tells of her marriage to Parselius and requests the opportunity to claim her husband. Parselius at first attempts to deny the marriage and the child, but upon recognizing Dalinea’s voice confesses all, relates the history of his dealings with both Urania and Dalinea, and acknowledges the latter as his wife. We have here a shadowy echo of the oral tradition’s questing lady “with child” confronting an alien court; the maternal body is to an extent foregrounded in the scene. It is, however, a somewhat attenuated echo, a half-told tale. Dalinea, a less forceful young woman than the “Tam Lin” heroine, defers all final judgment to the King of Morea, Parselius’s father, before confronting her husband (242); perhaps tellingly, she also veils her “shame,” refusing to reveal her face until Parselius confirms before his father “‘what privately … you vow’d in sacred marriage’” (242). Parselius himself is not so much a shape-shifter as a waverer, who nearly perjures himself before his own wife; at the end of his confession of his marriage to Dalinea; moreover, he still demonstrates a lingering skepticism and anxiety about the claims of the mother of his child: “‘if you be not she, you wrong your selfe extreamely; and I vow, that (but for her selfe) I never yet did touch, nor ever will; then seeke another husband, and a father for your child’” (243). And the whole episode becomes, for its most privileged witness, the faithful Pamphilia, the occasion for a meditation upon the way in which “none but [Love’s] servants can let such waverings possesse them” (244). The maternal heroine survives only in this diminished fashion in the work of a revisionary female romancer, but perhaps another echo in another text still speaks to the persistence of what John Niles, discussing the complexities of “Tam Lin,” calls “the story of a man and woman who survive” (347). As the young woman in the ballad holds fast her knight through his many transformations, They next shaped him into her arms Like a red-hot gaud o airn; But she held him fast, let him not go, He’d be father o her bairn. (Version E, stanza 19)

202

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Janet/Margaret must hold fast to the burning bar of iron in order to win the warm naked body of the man; enduring its heat will ensure that her child has a father. There’s an astonishing moment at the end of The Winter’s Tale when Leontes, touching for the first time the hand of the apparently reanimated Hermione, says “O, she’s warm!” (5.3.109). His joyous response to Hermione’s living human flesh resonates across the whole span of the play to displace the words which mark the beginning of his destructive jealousy: “Too hot, too hot!” (1.2.107). In Act 5, the king’s imagination of a transgressive, promiscuous, threateningly pregnant woman’s body has been purged: fleetingly, lovingly, Hermione is reembodied in his embrace. Lustful “burning” has given way to the warmth of new life. But we are not, in the end, in the territory of ballad: we do not have a mother who embraces a new-born human knight, but rather a father who embraces a newly resurrected and “metamorphosed” woman who is now beyond the age of childbearing. The body of the mother no longer threatens with its power to beget; and that other begetter, Paulina, the fabricator of wonder, the woman who has presided over the reawakening of Leontes’s faith and outdone all the “old tales” that might be “hooted at,” the mother whose maternity is forgotten by the play itself, will shortly be silenced. In early modern romance, as the chapters in this volume so thoughtfully and variously demonstrate, the story of the mother as heroine or the heroine as mother is—to invoke a resonant phrase from the conclusion of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, one of the most shocking contemporary narratives of maternal power—“not a story to pass on” (275). Bibliography Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Child, Francis James, ed. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Vol. 1. Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1882. Print. ———. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Vol. 3. Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1885. Print. The Complaynt of Scotlande (1549). Ed. James A. H. Murray. Early English Text Society. London: Trubner, 1872. Print. Extra Series no. 17. De France, Marie. Lais. Ed. Phillipe Ménard. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979. Print. Dolan, Frances E. “Battered Women, Petty Traitors, and the Legacy of Coverture.” Feminist Studies 29 (2003): 249–77. Print Hackett, Helen. “‘Gracious be the issue’: Maternity and Narrative in Shakespeare’s Late Plays.” Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings. Ed. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. 25–39. Print. ———. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print.

Afterword

203

Lamb, Mary Ellen. The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. Print. Niles, John. “Tam Lin: Form and Meaning in a Traditional Ballad.” Modern Language Quarterly 38 (1977): 336–47. Print. Shakespeare, William. All’s Well that Ends Well. Ed. Susan Snyder. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Print. Oxford Shakespeare. ———. Pericles. Ed. F. D. Hoeniger. London: Methuen, 1963. Print. Arden Shakespeare. ———. The Winter’s Tale. Ed. Stephen Orgel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Print. Oxford Shakespeare. Sidney, Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Ed. Maurice Evans. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Print. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. London: Longman, 2001. Print. Symonds, Deborah A. Weep Not For Me: Women, Ballads and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997. Print. Wollstadt, Lynn. “Women and Ballads and Ballad Women: Gender and the History of Scottish Balladry.” Diss. University of California, Davis, 2001. Print. Wroth, Mary. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Binghamton: MRTS, 1995. Print. Renaissance English Texts 140.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Index

Discussions of literary and critical works are indexed under the author’s name, and the first bibliographic entry of each work is indexed. Abate, Corinne S., 71 Abbott, Geoffrey, 79, 89 Acts and Monuments, 78 Adelman, Janet, 5, 6, 8, 44–5, 93, 103, 125–6, 142, 160, 162 , 180, 181, 193 Adlington, W., 131 adoption, 7, 129 adultery, 108, 194–5, 197 as petty treason, 78–9 advice to monarchs, 49–50, 53, 56–9, 68–9 to mothers, 137, 138, 144 age, 6 agriculture, 15–16 Alberti, Leon Battista, 97 Alexander, Catherine M. S., 133 Alexander, Gavin, 53, 69 allegory, see under romance Allen, M. J. B., 73 anagnorisis, see recognition Anderson, Judith H., 38, 39, 47 Andrewes, Lancelot, 178 Andrews, Elizabeth, 178 Anjou and Alençon, Francis, Duke of, 49–50, 56, 57, 62 Annunciation, the, 20, 40 Apollonius, The Story of, 120, 122–3, 131 Apuleius, Lucius, 127–8, 131 Archer, John Michael, 117, 174 Ariosto, Ludovico, 157 Aristotle, 21, 103–4 Arnold, Bill T., 119, 131 Arons, Wendy, 15, 29 arts continental theories of, 96–7, 99, 100 visual, 94–100, 102

Ascham, Roger, 55 Ashcroft, Peggy, 129 Ashliman, D. L., 77, 87, 88, 90 Assumption, the, see under Virgin Mary Atchity, Kenneth J., 47 audience response, 54, 76–78, 79, 84, 88, 96–7, 104, 110, 123–4, 128 authority, 137, 139–42 matriarchal/maternal, 1–2, 6, 34, 44–6, 50, 128, 146–7, 150, 158–9, 196 patriarchal/paternal, 4, 6, 14, 17, 37, 123–4, 137–8, 144–5, 148, 158–9, 193 royal, 124 authorship, 137–8 autobiography, see life-writing Aylmer, John, 55–6, 70 babies, 78, 80 abandonment of, 82 exposure of, 52, 82, 84 as monsters (monstrous births), 27, 82 murder of (infanticide), 77, 78–9, 80–81, 82–4 see also children Bachelard, Gaston, 78, 90 ballads, 5, 197–200 female makers and transmitters of, 198 incest in, 76, 84–8 infanticide in, 83–4 Shakespeare’s use of, 76, 84, 86, 197–8 singers of, 198 Bamford, Karen, 1–10, 91, 108, 119–34, 175, 176, 190, 196, 197, 200 Banister, John, 25 Barber, C. L., 103, 114 Barclay, Alexander, 179

206

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Barkan, Leonard, 95, 100, 112, 113, 114 Bartholomeusz, Dennis, 124, 132 Barton, John, 124 Bashar, Nazife, 22 Basile, Giambattista, 87, 127, 132 bastardy, 78, 81, 82, 142 Bayly, Lewis (Practice of Piety), 178 Beal, Peter, 62, 70 Bear, R. S., 114 Beer, Gillian, 3, 8 begetting, see conception, pregnancy, and childbirth Bell, Ilona, 67, 70 Bellamy, John, 80, 90 Belsey, Catherine, 83, 84, 90 Bergdolt, Klaus, 115 Berger, Harry, Jr., 17, 24, 29, 37, 47 Berggren, Paula S., 5, 8 Berns, Ute, 115 Berry, Edward, 50–51, 63, 65, 70 Berry, Phillipa, 39, 47 Bevington, David, 71 Bible, The, 67, 178 Genesis, 119–20, 131 Psalms, 20, 52–3 Bicks, Caroline, 104, 106, 108, 114 births, 4 monstrous, see under babies see also childbirth Bishop, T. G., 75, 90 Bloom, Harold, 133 Boate, Arnold, 178, 189 Boate, Margaret, 178, 179, 186 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 126, 130, 132 bodies, 113 contaminating, 103, 107 dead, 105–6 early modern, 104 female, 6, 14–16, 25–6, 100–102, 112–14, 147, 193, 195 as gardens/landscapes, 14–16, 20, 27–9 incestuous, 86 incorruptible, 110 male, 44 maternal, 2, 3, 4–5, 7, 13–17, 20–29, 34, 43–5, 81–2, 86–7, 93–5, 102–12, 113–14, 161, 195–6, 197, 199, 200, 202

parturient, 104–5 pre-Reformation connotations of, 110–11 as property, 4, 16 unreadable, 82 violation of, 155–6 boiling, 80 Bondanella, Julia Conway, 116 Bondanella, Peter, 116 Book of Common Prayer, The 20 books, 26, 160 idle vs. good, 177–8, 180, 182–3 see also manuals Booy, David, 178, 189 Bottigheimer, Ruth B., 87, 90 Bowerbank, Sylvia, 172 Bowers, Fredson, 114 Bowra, C. M., 72 brains, 79, 80–2 breastfeeding (nursing, wet-nursing), 1, 45, 56, 81, 180–81 Brennan, Michael G., 73 Breur, Horst, 15, 29 Brewer, Derek, 2, 3, 8, 119, 132 Broaddus, James W., 17, 29 Broner, E. M., 192 Browne, Thomas, 13, 28, 29 Buckman, Ty, 46, 47 Bullokar, John, 22 burden, 17 burial, 82–3, 109–10 burning, see fire Burrow, Colin, 152 Burt, Richard, 117 Bury, Elizabeth, 177 Bury, Samuel, 177, 189 Buxton, John, 68, 70 Calvin, John, 102 Calvino, Italo, 127, 132 Campbell, Lilias Dunbar, 178, 189 Campbell, Thomas, 124 cannibals, 156, 168–9 Carey, Elizabeth, Viscountess Mourdaunt Duncairn, 178, 189 Carroll, Berenice A., 172 Carroll, Michael P., 20, 29 Carroll, William C., 123, 132

Index Carter, Mistress, 180–81, 186 Cary, Elizabeth, 143–4, 151 Tragedy of Mariam, 6, 138, 144–6, 147, 150 Castiglione, Baldassarre, 95–7, 114 castration, 24, 78–9, 80 catharsis, see purgation and under romance Catty, Jocelyn, 22, 29 Cavanagh, Sheila T., 43, 47 Cavendish, Charles, 160 Cavendish, Margaret, 2, 3, 6–7, 155, 156–7, 159–63, 172, 195 “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity,” 7, 155–6, 157–9, 163, 164, 167–72 attitude to mothers, 7, 159–61, 164, 167 autobiographical elements in her work, 159–60, 167 “Blazing World, The,” 159 “Contract, The,” 7, 155, 156, 157–9, 163, 164–7, 169, 170–72 “Convent of Pleasure, The,” 160–61 education of, 162–3 fathers in her romances, 7, 155–6, 163, 164–72 romance elements in her life, 159–60 Sociable Letters, 157, 160–61 “To the Reader,” 156–7 “True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life, A,” 159, 161 see also under folktales Cavendish, William, 160, 161 caves, 38–9 Caxton, William, 115 Celovsky, Lisa, 35, 36, 42, 45, 47, 162 censorship, 66–7 Cerasano, S. P., 153 Chamberlain, John, 146–7, 151 Chamberlain, Stephanie, 45–6, 47 Chao, Tien-yi, 168, 172 Charles I, King, 97 Charlton, Kenneth, 175, 189 chastity, 2, 35, 38–9, 42, 46, 156–8, 167–9, 171 Child, Francis James, 85, 90, 197–8, 202 childbirth, 6, 13, 17, 25, 43, 93, 106, 108, 146, 160–61 Christian attitudes to, 1

207

as metaphor, 122–3, 160 in Pericles, 103–7 in The Winter’s Tale, 104 children death of, 77 loss of, 200 see also babies and orphans “Child Waters” (ballad), 199 Chodorow, Nancy, 163, 172 Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London, 80, 90 churching, 41, 108 Clark, Stuart, 102, 114 Clayton, Martin, 97, 117 Cleaver, Robert, 54, 70 Clement VII, Pope, 96 Clifford, Anne, 148, 179, 187–8, 189 portrait of, 179 Clifford, D. J. H., 189 Clinton, Elizabeth, 146, 151, 181, 189 Coch, Christine, 44, 46, 47, 54, 70 Coghill, Nevill, 125, 132 Coke, Sir Edward, 80 Complaynt of Scotland, The, 198, 202 Compleat Midwifes Practice, 29 conception, 13, 26–7, 194, 198 miraculous (spontaneous generation), 4, 14–15, 17, 20–22, 41, 43, 196 theories of, 21–4 consent, 22, 24, 121, 164–5 containment, 4 contracts, see arrangements under marriage Corpus Christi tradition, 5 Cottegnies, Line, 161, 172, 173 counsel, see advice court counsel, see advice courtiers, 49–50 courtship, 121–3, 155, 182 coverture, 197 Craig, Joanne, 13, 17, 29, 33, 34, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47 Crawford, Patricia, 40, 41, 45, 47, 48, 133, 161, 162, 173, 177, 189 Cressy, David, 1, 8, 41, 47 crime, see adultery, murder, and treason criticism feminist, 1, 5, 93–5, 119, 125, 162 new historicist, 84

208

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

psychoanalytic, 34, 93–4, 119, 103, 142, 158–9, 159–60 Croce, Benedetto, 132 Croker, T. C., 191 Crooke, Helkiah, 15–16, 18, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 105, 107, 114 cross-dressing, 35–6, 37, 142, 156–7, 167–70 see also disguise Crucifixion, the, 87, 85 cultural unconscious, 75–6 Dalton, Michael, 22, 29 Daniel, Samuel, 147 D’Arco, Carlo, 96, 115 Davidson, Cathy N., 192 Davidson, Peter, 91 Deane, Jennifer Kolpacoff, 175 deferral/delay, see under maternity and romance De France, Marie, 195, 202 de L’Aubespine, Guillaume, 62 Delaval, Elizabeth Livingston, 178, 180–81, 184, 186–7, 188, 189, 194, 195–6 Del Sapio Garbero, Maria, 6, 20–21, 93–117, 115, 194, 195–6 de Mendoza, Antonio Hurtado, 183, 189 Dench, Judi, 129 Denny, Lord Edward, Earl of Norwich, 157 de Scudéry, Madeleine, 179 desire, 3, 6, 7, 22–4, 108, 119, 121, 137, 144–5, 168 see also under fathers, incest, and mothers d’Este, Isabella, 97 de Voragine, Jacobus, 109–10, 115 diaries, see life-writing Dicsone, Alexander, 62 diegesis, 76 disguise, 4, 7, 35–7, 38, 39, 46, 142 Dolan, Frances E., 1, 2, 4, 8, 77, 79, 82, 197, 202 domestic manuals, see under manuals Doran, Gregory, 129 Dormitio Virginis, see under Virgin Mary Dorsten, Jan van, see van Dorsten, Jan Dove, John, 126

Dowd, Michelle M., 175, 182, 188, 189 Dragstra, Henk, 192 Dubrow, Heather, 72, 181, 189 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester, 49, 61, 62, 66, 69 Du Laurens, Andrea, 25 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 61–2, 70, 73, 191 Dundes, Alan, 166, 173 Dunworth, Felicity, 2, 8, 125 d’Urfé, Honoré, 141 Dyer, Edward, 51 Dyer, T. F. Thiselton, 84, 90 Eardley, Alice, 190 Eckerle, Julie A., 2, 7, 8, 45, 175–92, 189, 190, 195 education, 1, 5, 7, 45, 68, 161–3, 164, 166, 167, 168–9, 175–6, 177, 180–82, 184–5, 186 Edwards, Robert, 85 Eggert, Katherine, 24, 29, 50, 70 ekphrasis, 94, 95, 99, 102, 113 Elizabeth, Princess, later Queen of Bohemia, 182 Elizabeth I, Queen, 13, 20, 61, 65, 70, 96–7, 197 advice to, 49–50, 53, 56–9, 60, 64, 68–9 as author, 67 chastity as signature virtue of, 46, 55 as a garden, 14 maternal metaphors of, 5, 46, 49–50, 54–6, 59, 67, 69, 197 proposed marriage of, 49–50, 56, 62 as ruler, 35 self-representations of, 42, 46 succession (lack of), 46, 57 as surrogate mother, 5, 49–50, 53–5, 67, 69 as virgin, 35, 46, 54 Ellington, Donna Spivey, 29 Elliott, Marianne, 129 Ellis, F. S., 115 El-Shamy, Hasan, 132 emasculation, 36–7 England, as a garden, 14 Ephesus, 94, 106, 108–9, 111, 114

Index as location of the Assumption, 109 Ephraim, Michelle, 141, 151 erasure, 21, 27, 44, 65, 78–80, 82, 89, 138, 142, 150, 159–60, 165, 166, 193, 195, 197–8, 199 Estok, Simon C., 25, 30 Evans, Maurice, 191, 203 executions, 79–80 methods of, 78–80 as means of erasing identity, 78–80 of women, 78–80 Ezell, Margaret J. M., 1, 8, 184, 188, 190 Faerie Queene, The, see under Spenser, Edmund Fagles, Robert, 132 Fahey, Mary Frances, 33, 47 fairytales, see folktales family, 37–8, 44, 61, 139–42, 148, 163–4, 170–71, 193 family plots, see under romance Fanshawe, Ann, 183, 184, 190 Fanshawe, Richard, 183, 189, 190 Fantazzi, Charles, 192 Farrell, Kirby, 70 fashioning mutual, 5, 50, 58, 64, 67–8 self-, 50–51, 97, 159 fathers, 7, 44, 67–8 adoptive, see surrogate as blocking figures, 33, 121–2, 148 and daughters, 37, 120, 123, 143, 147–50, 163, 193 desires of, 6, 119–20, 122–3, 125 as educators, 45, 161–72 surrogate, 7, 61, 120, 155, 158–9, 160, 161–2, 164–72, 195 fear, 1, 4, 7, 45, 75, 103, 130–31, 137, 161 irrational, see paranoia female sexuality, see under sexuality feminist criticism, see under criticism Ferguson, Margaret W., 9, 151 Feuillerat, Albert, 152 Fildes, Valerie, 10, 47, 180, 189, 190 Finucci, Valeria, 29 fire death by (execution), 77–8, 79–80 as means of purification, 79–80

209

as metaphor for love, 78 Fissell, Mary E., 16, 20, 21, 30, 104, 115 Fitzmaurice, James, 172, 174 Flavell, John, 178 Fletcher, Anthony, 23, 30, 162, 163 Fletcher, John, 94, 114, 147 folktales, 5, 75–6, 83–4, 119–20, 126–7, 155, 160, 180 audience knowledge of, 76 “Catskin” type of, 87–8, 129 Cavendish’s use of, 155, 158–9 incest in, 76, 84, 87–8, 129, 166 lost girl theme in, 76 Shakespeare’s use of, 75–6, 84, 87–9, 120, 125, 197–8 Ford, Emanuel, 183, 190 Fox, Adam, 2, 8 Fox, George, 178 Fox, Susan C., 33, 47 Foxe, John, 78 Francus, Marilyn, 2, 8 Fraser, Antonia, 163, 173 Fraunce, Abraham, 51 Freud, Sigmund, 24, 103, 115, 159–60, 173 Frey, Charles, 123, 132 Frye, Northrop, 3, 8, 95,96, 115, 119, 123 Frye, Susan, 42, 47, 54, 70, 163, 173, 182, 190 Fuchs, Barbara, 157, 173 Fuller, David, 126, 132, 138 Fumerton, Patricia, 90 funerals, see burials Galen, 15, 21 Garber, Marjorie, 151 Garbero, Maria Del Sapio, see Del Sapio Garbero, Maria Garden of Adonis, see under Spenser, Edmund gardens / gardening, 20, 27–9 theories of, 14, 27–8 see also under manuals Garry, Jane, 125, 132 Gaselee, S., 131 gaze male, 6, 25–6, 99, 100–102, 105, 107 scientific, 26, 104–5, 196

210

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

gender, 6, 7, 29, 50, 53, 57, 127, 138–9, 140–42, 147, 155, 162–3, 168–9, 171–2 Gerard, John, 27, 30 Gerritsen, Johan, 183, 190 gestation, 14, 21, 24 Gilbert, Sandra M., 162, 173 Gill, Gillian C., 115 Goldberg, Jonathan, 14, 17, 30, 34, 44, 45, 47 Golden Legend, The, see under de Voragine, Jacobus Golding, Arthur, 59, 64–5, 72 Goldwell, Henry, 61, 70 Gonzaga, Federico, 95, 97 Gonzaga family, 95–7 Goodman, Christopher, 55, 70 Goold, G. P., 72 Gossett, Suzanne, 141, 192 Gouge, William, 23, 30, 54, 70, 162, 164, 173, 181 Gowing, Laura, 22, 30, 82–3, 90 Graham, Elspeth, 175, 190 Green, Ian, 175, 190 Green, Monica, 25, 30 Greenblatt, Stephen, 50, 70, 91, 133 Greene, Gayle, 10 Greene, Robert, 90, 157 Pandosto, 5, 76, 85, 126, 139, 141 Greenstadt, Amy, 157, 167, 173 Gregerson, Linda, 37, 47 Greville, Fulke, 50, 57–8, 62, 67–8, 69, 70 Grimm, Jacob, 132 Grimm, Wilhelm, 132 Grymeston, Elizabeth, 137, 138, 139, 151 guardians, see surrogate under fathers and mothers Guarini, Giovanni Battista, 147 Gubar, Susan, 162, 173 Guerrini, Anita, 90 Guillemeau, Jacques (James), 25, 30, 81, 90, 106 Guy-Bray, Stephen, 160, 173 gynecology, see under manuals Hackett, Helen, 2, 3, 8, 20, 30, 93–4, 110, 143, 146, 151, 157, 159, 160, 176, 185, 193, 195

Hadfield, Andrew, 66–7, 70 Hager, Alan, 50, 51, 71 Halliday, Robert, 82, 90 Halliwell, James Orchard, 84, 90 Hamilton, A. C., 3, 10, 64, 71 Hamlin, Hannibal, 73 Hanawalt, Barbara A., 31 Hanford, James Holly, 51, 71 Hannay, Margaret P., 51–2, 69, 71, 73, 139, 151 Hardman, C. B., 184, 190 Hardman, Phillipa, 176, 190 Hardy, Alexandre, 76 Harries, Elizabeth Wanning, 190 Harvey, Elizabeth D., 15, 16, 24, 25, 30 Harvey, William, 26 Hattaway, Michael, 133 Haussmann, W. H., 116 Havenstein, Daniela, 13 Haydocke, Richard, 115 Hayes, Catherine, 79 heart as seat of feeling, 81–2 maternal, 81–2 Heiserman, Arthur, 120, 132 Heliodorus, 120, 131, 132 Henderson, Katherine Usher, 152 Hendricks, Margo, 30 Henrietta Maria, Queen, 159–60 Henry, Lorena, 40, 48 Henry VIII, King, 96 Herbert, George, 178 Herbert, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, 50, 51–2, 62, 68–9, 73, 144 “Even Now That Care,” 68–9 relationship to Philip Sidney, 52–3, 67 translation of Psalms, 52–3, 68–9 Herbert, William, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, 51–2 heresy, 77, 78–9, 177 heroism, 3, 156, 158, 159, 197, 198–200 Hickman, Rose, later Throckmorton, 177 Higgins, Clare, 129 Hill, Thomas, 28, 30 Hillman, David, 91 Hippocrates, 21, 23, 25 Hirsch, Marianne, 159–60, 162, 173

Index Hobby, Elaine, 14, 30, 31 Hoby, Thomas, 99, 114 Hoeniger, F. D., 116 Hoenselaars, A. J., 10 Homer, 4, 64, 71, 112, 119, 131, 132 Homily against Peril of Idolatry, 102 homoeroticism, 85 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 64–5, 71 Howell, Jane, 124 Hughes, Paul L., 72 Hughes, Ted, 107, 115 Hull, Suzanne W., 162, 163, 173, 177 humors, 15, 105–6 Hunt, John Dixon, 27, 30 husband-murder, see under murder Hutchinson, Lucy, 127, 133, 185 Hutton, Ronald, 80, 90 imperialism, 13 impregnation, see conception Incarnation, the, 20–21, 78 incest, 5, 94 in ballads, 76, 84–8 brother-sister, 84–6 and desire, 76, 166 evasion of, 76–7 father-daughter, 82, 85, 86–9, 158–9 in folktales, 76, 84, 129, 166 mother-son, 85–6 narcissistic, 84–5 in Pericles, 102, 103, 193 twins and, 85 in The Winter’s Tale, 76–7, 88–9 infanticide, see under babies infantilization, 36–7, 44, 45 infant mortality, 45 inheritance, 82 and attainder, 80 inscriptions, 183–4 Irigaray, Luce, 107, 113, 115 Isham, Elizabeth, 179, 183, 190 Ivic, Christopher, 30 James I, King, 67–8, 69 Johnson, Christopher H., 91 Jonas, Richard, 14 Jonson, Ben, 120, 133

211

Jorden, Edward, 105, 115 Josephus, Titus Flavius, 144, 145 journals, see life-writing jousts, see tournaments Kadar, Marlene, 165, 170, 190 Kahn, Victoria, 165, 173 Keeble, N. H., 133 Kelly, Kathleen Coyne, 173 Kemble, John Philip, 124 Kermode, Frank, 116 kidnapping, 17–18 King, Margaret L., 1, 8 Kinnamon, Noel J., 73 Kinney, Clare R., 71, 193–203 Kiser, Lisa J., 31 Klein, Joan Larsen, 151 Klemp, P. J., 79, 90 knights, knighthood, 34–7, 42 Knoppers, Laura Lunger, 9 Knowles, James, 115 Knox, John, 55, 56, 71 Kouffman, Avra, 1, 8 Krier, Theresa M., 2, 5, 9, 125 Kristeva, Julia, 107, 115 Kuin, Roger, 70 lactation, see breastfeeding Lamb, Mary Ellen, 2, 9, 52, 91, 152, 176, 179, 187–8, 190, 196, 197, 203 landscapes, see under bodies Langlois, Janet L., 125, 132 Languet, Hubert, 58 Larkin, James F., 72 Latham, M. W., 84, 90 Lawrence-Mathers, Anne, 190 Lawson, William, 27, 28, 30 Lee, Sir Henry, 51 “Leesome Brand” (ballad), 84–5 Leicester, Earl of, see Dudley, Robert and Sidney, Robert Leigh, Dorothy, 2, 9, 130, 137, 138, 139, 182–3 Lenz, Carolyn Ruth Swift, 10 Leonardo da Vinci, 96 Leslie, Marina, 168, 169, 173 Levin, Carole, 55, 71 Lewalksi, Barbara K., 147, 151

212

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Lewis, C. S., 33 Liddell, Henry George, 64, 71 life-writing, 7, 159–60, 175–84, 185, 186–8 Lilley, Kate, 173 “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard” (ballad), 86 Lockwood, Matthew, 79, 90 Lodge, Thomas, 141 Lomazzo, Giovanni, 97, 115 Louden, Bruce, 119–20, 131, 133 Luckyj, Christina, 2, 9 lust, 38–9 Luther, Martin, 102 Luzio, Alessandro, 96, 97, 116 Lyly, John, 71, 157 Endymion, 54, 57 MacDonald, Michael, 82, 90 MacFaul, Tom, 163, 173 Madonna, see Virgin Mary magic, 34, 37, 76, 99, 112, 129, 157, 158 Maguire, Laurie, 126, 129, 133 Mahelot, Laurent, 76 maidenhood, 4, 7, 33, 180 male gaze, see under gaze male guardians, see surrogate under fathers Mantegna, Andrea, 96 Mantua, 95–6 manuals of advice to/from mothers, 137, 138, 162–3, 182 domestic, 23, 28, 54, 162, 164 gardening, 16–17, 20, 27–9, 196 medical/gynecological, 14, 15–16, 20, 22–7, 104–5, 107, 163, 196 midwifery, 15–16, 163 manuscripts, circulation of, 53, 62, 183–4 Marcus, Leah, 70 Marian martyrs, see under martyrs Markham, Gervase, 16, 28, 30 marriage, 22–3, 33, 40–41, 128 arrangements, 1, 128, 155–6, 158, 164–7, 184, 187 Marshall, Sherrin, 192 Martin, L. C., 29 Martin, Randall, 1, 9, 151 martyrs, Marian, 78

Mary, Queen of Scots, 62, 63 masculinity, 20, 37, 81–2, 140–42, 144–5, 155–6, 158–9, 161–3, 167–72 maternal affection, see love under mothers maternal authority, see under authority maternal desire, see under mothers maternity, 1–3, 5–7, 13–14, 40, 163 anxieties about, 4, 22, 26, 41, 43–6, 137, 139, 142–3, 161, 181–2, 193, 195, 196 and catastrophe, 93, 146 and catharsis, see purgation as a condition of speech, 144–6, 150 constructions of, see performative and representations of as the death of romance, 176–7 delayed/deferred, 4–5, 33–5, 41–3, 46, 196 and emotions, 3, 129–31 and grace, 93, 99, 103, 107 and heroism, 3, 197, 198–201 and love, 44–5, 81–2, 130, 137, 139–40, 144, 150–51, 167, 196–7 management of, 4–6, 196, 197 and marriage, 40–41 and men, 155 performative, 6, 137–41, 143–51, 163 popular conceptions of, 17, 138, 161 and power, 2, 4, 16–17, 27, 43–6, 144–5, 181–2 and prophecy, 33–5, 40, 41, 46 and purgation, 5, 6, 93–4, 104, 106 and purification, 5 and recognition, 97 regenerative, 5, 6 representations of, 1, 6, 102, 131, 137–8, 141–3, 167, 194–6 in the romance tradition, 143–4 as topos, 7–8 transformations of, 4, 6–8, 21 and visual arts, 100 see also mothers Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 52, 71 May, Steven, 62, 71 Mazzio, Carla, 91 Mazzola, Elizabeth, 55, 61, 71 McAbee, Kris, 90 McClure, Norman Egbert, 151

Index McCumber, John, 103–4, 116 McKenzie, Andrea, 79, 91 McLaren, A. N., 1, 50, 71 McLaren, Dorothy, 9 McManus, Barbara F., 152 McMullan, Gordon, 126, 133 McPherson, Kathryn R., 2, 9, 138, 163, 188–9 McWilliam, G. H., 132 Mears, Natalie, 57, 58, 71 medicine, see under manuals Meek, Richard, 95, 116 Melchiori, Giorgio, 116 Ménard, Phillipe, 202 Mendelson, Sara, 40, 41, 45, 48, 121, 159, 161, 162, 172, 173 menstruation, 16, 24–5 mentorship, 7, 155, 158, 160, 161, 163, 167–8, 170–72 Mentz, Steve, 141, 151 meter, 89 Michie, James, 71 Micros, Marianne, 6–7, 155–74, 195 Middleton, Thomas, 129 midwives, 15, 25 male, 163 Midwives Book, The, 19 Mikrokosmographia, see Crooke, Helkiah Miller, David Lee, 13, 17, 26, 30 Miller, Frank Justus, 72 Miller, Naomi J., 6, 9, 104, 116, 130, 137–53, 163, 173, 174, 180, 185, 189, 196, 200 mimesis, 94, 100, 103, 108, 113–14, 196 miracles, see under conception misogyny, 56 Mitchell, Juliet, 85, 91 monarch-subject relations, 50, 67 Moncrief, Kathryn M., 2, 9, 138, 163, 188–9 monsters, see under babies monstrous births, see under babies Montemayor, Jorge de, 141 Montrose, Louis Adrian, 67, 71 Morales, Helen, 188, 191 Morgan, J. R., 132 Morgan, Paul, 183, 191 Morrison, Toni, 202, 203

213

motherhood, see maternity and under mothers mothers, 1, 34 absent, 6–7, 37, 120–21, 126, 141–2, 155, 158, 161, 195 as adulterers, 78–9, 108, 194–5, 197 advice books of, see under manuals as agents, 138, 144–5, 146, 195, 199 as antagonists, 3, 127, 186, see also stepauthority of, see under authority as authors/storytellers, 3, 7, 75, 146, 184–6, 188 as blocking figures, 3, 33, 36, 45, 141 bodies of, see under bodies and children, 44, 137 and daughters, 89, 123–31, 140, 143, 147–8, 159, 162 “demonic,” 2, 150, 196 desires of, 6, 121, 122–6, 129, 131, 138, 196–7, 199 as educators, 5, 45, 161–3, 175–6, 177, 180–82, 184–5, 186 erasure of, 21, 27, 44, 138, 142, 150, 159–60, 193–5, 199 fairy god-, 128–9, 158 of fathers, 193 and gifts, 182–4 “good,” 2 grand-, 126, 181, 183 idealized, 5, 158–9, 161, 188 identities of, 83 in-law, 126–30, 200 love of, see under maternity as monsters, 2, 82–4 and motherhood, see maternity negative attitudes to, 160–61, 167 power of, see under authority representations of, 6, 34, 99 resurrected, 77, 94, 106, 108–12, 125–6, 194, 197, 202 in romance, 3, 93–4, 137 as seductresses, 3, 59–60, 200 sexuality of, 4, 41, 198–200 single, 40–41, 45–6 and sons, 75, 162 and spectacle, 94–5, 195

214

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

step-, 3, 5, 49–50, 52, 54–5, 59–60, 63, 66, 69, 126–7, 143, 158–9 stereotypes of, 3, 5, 6, 7, 54–6, 63, 144 surrogate, 37, 38, 49, 52–4, 55–6, 59, 63, 69, 180–82, 185 see also maternity mother tongue, see vernacular Mueller, Janel, 70, 141, 192 Munda, Constantia, 141, 152 Muir, Kenneth, 115, 116, 133 Mullan, David George, 189 murder, 78–80 as petty treason (husband-murder), 78–9, 140 Murphy, Terence R., 82, 90 Murray, A. T., 71 Murray, James A. H., 202 mutilation, 86 see also under executions Myrick, Kenneth Orne, 66, 72 Mystery Plays, 20 narratives embedded, 184–5 making of, 194–5 see also under romance Nashe, Thomas, 157 Neale, J. E., 63, 72 Neely, Carol Thomas, 5, 9, 10, 123, 125 Newcomb, Lori Humphrey, 2, 9, 138–9, 145, 152, 176 Nichols, John Gough, 90 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 94–5, 112–13, 116 Nile River, 26, 27 Niles, John, 201, 203 Norbrook, David, 62, 72 Nosworthy, J. M., 152 Nunn, Trevor, 124, 129 nursing, see breastfeeding Oedipal attachments, see incest Olchowy, Gloria, 5, 9 Oldisworth, Margaret, later Man, 184 Oldisworth, Mary, 183–4 Oldisworth, Nicholas, 183–4 old wives’ tales, 2, 75–6, 143, 185, 193, 196, 197 Oram, William A., 38, 39, 48

O’Reilly, Andrea, 10 orgasms, 22, 24 Orgel, Stephen, 96, 116, 123–4 orphans, 7, 76, 158–9 Osborn, James M., 52, 72 Osborne, Dorothy, 179, 191 Ottway, Sheila, 192 Ovid, 59, 64, 72 Pafford, J. H. P., 10 painting, see under arts Paleologo, Margherita, 97 Pandosto, see under Greene, Robert Paracelsus, 15 paranoia, 75–6 parenthood, 7, 49, 52, 56, 59, 63, 121–3, 170–72 see also maternity and paternity Parker, Kenneth, 179, 191 Parker, Patricia, 26, 30, 33, 41, 48, 72, 176, 185, 191 Parmigianino, 97 Partee, Morriss Henry, 75, 91 parturition, see childbirth Paster, Gail Kern, 15, 26, 31, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108 pastoral, 51, 65, 108, 140, 149, 157, 195 paternal desires, see under fathers paternity, 80, 142–3 see also bastardy, fathers, and under authority patriarchy, 3, 4, 37, 119–20, 131, 137–8, 142, 148, 155, 177, 188 see also under authority patronage, literary, 50, 52, 68 Patterson, Annabel M., 72 Penni, Francesco, 100 Penuel, Suzanne, 142, 146, 152, 161 Perrault, Charles, 127, 129, 133 Perry, Ruth, 84–5, 91 Pfister, Ma, 22–3 plots comic, 120–31 romantic, 2–3 tragicomic, 93–4, 97, 123–31 see also under romance poets, 67–8 Pontormo, Jacapo da, 108

Index pregnancy, 1, 13, 21–2, 43, 93, 103, 106, 126, 143, 148, 160–61, 197, 198, 200 as burden, 17 Prior, Mary, 9, 10 privacy, 25–6, 121, 160, 172, 188–9 pronouns, 168 prophecy, 33–7, 40, 41, 46, 61 prostitution, 158, 167, 168 Purchas, Samuel, 40 purgation, 5, 6, 93–4, 103–4 see also under maternity purification, 4, 5, 79–80, 107 Purkiss, Diane, 5, 75–91, 193, 197 Quilligan, Maureen, 9, 24, 31, 39, 42, 47, 57, 66, 72 Quint, David, 72 Quitsland, Jon A., 17, 31 Radway, Janice A., 176, 191 Raggianti, Carlo Ludovico, 116 rape, 22–4, 39–40, 41, 43, 44, 167, 198 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 94–5, 96, 100, 111, 113 Raynalde, Thomas, 14, 15, 16, 22, 23, 25, 28, 31 reading, 2–3, 7, 52, 156–7, 175–84, 186–9 Reardon, Bryan P., 119, 132, 133 recognition, 97 reconciliation, see under romance Redford, Donald B., 119–20, 133 Reformation, the, 21 Reiter, Rayna, 133 reproduction, 13 metaphors of, 15–17, 160 nonsexual/asexual, 13, 20, 22, 26, 43–4 theories of, 20–7 see also birth, childbirth, conception, and gestation resurrection, 77, 149, 169, 194, 197 see also under mothers reunions, see family under romance Rich, Adrienne, 162 Rich, Mary, Countess of Warwick, 179–80, 183, 184, 191 Rich, Lady Penelope Devereux, 51 Richards, Jennifer, 115

215

Richardson, Elizabeth, 182, 191 Richmond, Velma Bourgois, 111, 116 Ringler, William A., 134 Riverius, Lazarus (Lazare Rivière), 23 Roberts, Josephine A., 141, 153, 192 Robertson, Jean, 51, 52, 72 Roche, Thomas P., Jr., 17, 20, 31, 42, 43, 47 Roden, Lord, 189 Romack, Katharine, 174 romance advice in, 49 allegory in, 17, 33, 36, 38–9, 42, 46, 63 attitudes to, 7, 156–7, 176–7, 178–80, 184, 186–9, 196 and Catholicism, 111 and continental art theory, 97 deferral in, 33, 41–3, 34–5, 41–3 definitions of, 3–4, 119 dramatic, 137–9, 143–7, 149, 185, 193–4 endings of, 113–14, 121, 157–8, 166–7 family (reunion), 5, 6, 87–8, 93, 103, 107, 119–31, 143, 159, 193, 201 female authors of, 2–3, 6, 137–9, 143–4, 156–9, 171–2, 200 female protagonists in, 3, 7–8, 33–44, 46, 41–2, 155–9, 170–72, 196, 198–202 female readers of, 2-3, 7, 52, 156–7, 175–7, 178–81, 182–3, 195 as gifts, 182-4 Greek and Latin, 120, 122–3, 127–8, 131, 157 male-authored, 4, 6, 137–8, 141, 146-7, 150, 158, 187, 195 maternal, 6, 7, 93–4, 121, 125, 145, 193–4, 195 maternal rejection of, 7, 156–7, 176–7, 179–80, 182, 184, 186–7, 195 morality of, 66, 176 mothers in, 3, 137, 143–4 narrative conventions of, 2–3, 4, 7–8, 33, 35, 36, 38, 41–2, 49, 93, 119–21, 123, 131, 157–8, 184, 187 novels, 157 patriarchal, 6, 119–20, 137–8, 146 plots of, 2–3, 33, 120–21

216

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

prose, 85–6, 125, 139–41, 155, 157 and reconciliation, 93–4, 125, 193 religious, 5 spectacle in, 99, 113–14, 195 surrogate parents in, 59–60, 155–6, 163–72 transitional states in, 33–42, 45–6, 93–4, 196 and women, 2–3, 93–4, 157–8, 171–2, 176, 178–80, 183–7 Romano, Giulio, 6, 95–6, 97, 98, 99–101, 104, 108, 111, 112 Rose, Mark, 42, 48 Rose, Mary Beth, 2, 5, 9, 70, 120–21, 124, 131 Rösslin, Eucharas, 14, 15 Rothwell, Kenneth S., 124, 133 Roudiez, Leon S., 115 Rouger, Gilbert, 133 Rowe, Elizabeth, 177 Rowe, Karen K., 158–9, 174 Rowe, Theophilus, 177, 191 royal proclamations, 49, 56–8 Royer, Katherine, 79, 91 Rubens, Peter Paul, 96 Rubin, Gayle, 131, 133 Ruddick, Sara, 7, 10 Rueff, Jakob, 27, 31 Sabean, David Warren, 91 Sabie, Francis, 77 St. John, 109 Salingar, Leo, 95, 116 Sandy, Gerald N., 134 Saunders, Corinne, 3, 8, 10 Savage, Sarah, 177, 178, 191 Sawday, Jonathan, 15, 31 Schiffer, James, 152 Schwarz, Kathryn, 2, 10, 36, 48, 168, 174 Schwartz, Regina, 29 Scott, Robert, 64, 71 Scott-Douglas, Amy, 158, 174 secrets, 25–8, 102 self-fashioning, see under fashioning self-writing, see life-writing semen, 23–4 sermons, 178, 180 Serpieri, Alessandro, 116

sex (intercourse), 13, 22–4, 39, 43–4 see also gender sexuality, 20, 28, 78, 137 female, 4, 23–4, 34, 39, 144–5, 156, 185–6 Shakespeare, William, 3, 5–6, 10, 17, 72, 75, 79, 91, 93, 108, 112, 116, 120, 131, 152, 157, 160, 203 All’s Well that Ends Well, 6, 121, 126–31, 196, 197, 200 As You Like It, 122, 141 and Catholicism, 111 comedies of, 6, 121–3 Comedy of Errors, 122, 126, 131 Cymbeline, 6, 122–3, 127, 131, 142–3, 150 Hamlet, 5 Henry VIII (All Is True), 79 and Italian visual culture, 96–7, 99–100 Julius Caesar, 81–2 King Lear, 88, 166 late plays, 6, 93, 100, 112, 137, 141, 145 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 121 Macbeth, 77, 80–1 Measure for Measure, 89 Merchant of Venice, The 122 Merry Wives of Windsor, 122 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 54, 57, 60, 122, 127 Much Ado about Nothing, 122 Pericles, 6, 21, 94, 97, 99, 100, 102–7, 109, 111, 113, 119, 120, 121, 123, 127, 131, 193, 194 repetition in, 103–4 reunions in, 119–31 romances and tragicomedies of, 2–3, 93–5, 97, 113, 120–21, 122–31 Romeo and Juliet, 149 Sonnets, 137, 138, 143–4 spectacle (acts of seeing) in, 94, 96, 97, 99, 102–3, 112 Taming of the Shrew, The 122 Tempest, The, 6, 94, 99, 123, 131, 137, 142, 161 Twelfth Night, 121, 169 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 121–2

Index Venus and Adonis, 147 Winter’s Tale, The, 5, 6, 7, 21, 75–8, 80–86, 88–9, 94–7, 99, 100–102, 106–8, 110–12, 121, 123–6, 131, 137, 139, 141–2, 143, 149–50, 161, 185, 193–6, 197, 202 see also under ballads, childbirth, fathers, folktales, and incest shame, 15, 17, 26 Shapiro, Gary, 95, 116 Sharp, Jane, 31 Shenk, Linda, 55, 72 Shepard, Alexandra, 162, 174 Shepherd, Geoffrey, 64, 72 Shoemaker, Stephen J., 109, 116 Siddons, Sarah, 124 Sidney, Barbara, 139, 148 Sidney, Sir Henry, 61 Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, see Herbert, Mary Sidney Sidney, Philip, 3, 49–54, 57–9, 61–3, 65–9, 72–3, 134, 139–40, 152, 157, 191, 203 Apology for Poetry, An (Defence of Poesie), 64, 67, 68, 69 Arcadia, Old, 49–51, 52, 58, 59–61, 63, 65, 137, 140, 144, 147, 150, 185 Arcadia, The Countess of Pembroke’s (New), 5, 6, 7, 49–51, 53, 55, 59, 63–7, 69, 137, 140–41, 144, 147, 150, 178–9, 184–6, 196–7 Astrophil and Stella, 51, 54–5, 127 “Four Foster Children of Desire,” 61 use of Greek names, 64–5 “Letter to Queen Elizabeth,” 5, 49, 50, 56, 57–8 relationship to Mary Sidney Herbert, 52–3 representations of maternity in, 5, 49–50, 55, 66, 137, 140–41, 196–7 revisions of the Arcadia, 49, 51, 62–4, 65–6 self-representations of, 50–51, 63, 65–6, 69 Sidney, Robert, Earl of Leicester, 51, 139, 143, 148, 152 Sidney family circle, 139–40, 148 Silberman, Lauren, 21, 24, 31, 39, 48

217

Skretkowicz, Victor, 51, 53, 62, 73 sleep, 17, 20–21, 23–5, 43 Slights, William W. E., 81, 91 Smith, Emma, 126, 129, 133 Smith, Hilda L., 172 Smith, Sidonie, 185, 191 Snook, Edith, 175, 191 Snyder, Susan, 203 Southwell, Robert, 78, 91 spectacle, 94, 97, 102–3, 195 and faith, 102 Spenser, Edmund, 3, 10, 31, 34, 48, 157, 192, 195, 203 Britomart (III), 33–8, 39–44, 46, 196, 200 Chrysogone (III.vi), 14–15, 17, 20, 23–29 Faerie Queene, The, 2, 3, 4–5, 13–17, 20–29, 33–4, 38, 41–2, 43, 178, 184–5, 196 Garden of Adonis (III.vi), 4–5, 14, 15, 24, 27, 43–4 Spiller, Elizabeth A., 13, 31, 67–8, 73 spontaneous generation, see under conception statues, 77, 88–9, 97, 99–100, 102, 108, 112, 123–4, 194 Staub, Susan C., 1, 4, 10, 13–31, 41, 43, 44, 195, 196 Stephens, Dorothy, 38, 39, 46, 48 Stevens, Scott Manning, 81, 91 Stillman, Robert E., 58, 61, 67, 73 Stone, Lawrence, 163–4, 174 Strachey, James, 173 Straparola, Giovanni Francesco, 87 Strier, Richard, 72 Strohman, Anne-Marie, 4–5, 26, 33–48, 196 Stuart, Elizabeth, Princess, later Queen of Bohemia, 182 Stubbs, John, 49, 56–8, 67, 73 surrogates, see under fathers and mothers Swaim, Kathleen, 70 Swann, Marjorie, 13, 31 Sweeney, Anne, 91 Symonds, Deborah, 91, 198 tales, see folktales and old wives’ tales “Tam Lin” (ballad), 198–200, 201–2

218

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Tasso, Torquato, 147, 157 Temple, Sir William, 179 terror, see fear theater, 95, 97, 99–100, 113 Thickstun, Margaret Olofson, 42, 48 Thompson, Stith, 125, 127, 134 Throckmorton, Rose Hickman, 177, 192 Tintoretto, 96 Titian, 96 Tonkin, Humphrey, 33, 37, 48 tournaments, 42, 51, 63, 65, 96 tragicomedy, 93–5, 113, 147 as a maternal form, 2–3, 93, 121 as romance, 97 transactions, cross-cultural, 95–7 Transfiguration, the, 94–5 transfigurations, 95, 99, 196 transvestism, see cross-dressing and disguise Traversi, Derek, 123, 134 Travitsky, Betty S., 9, 45, 48, 175, 192 treason, 78–80 see also adultery and murder Trill, Suzanne, 10, 175, 192 trompe-l’œils, 99 Trubowitz, Rachel, 81, 91 Turner, Grantham, 71 twins, 4, 14, 17, 20, 43, 85 uteruses, see wombs Uther, Hans-Jörg, 125, 129, 134 vagina dentata, 24 vaginas, 28 van Dorsten, Jan, 62, 73 Vanhoutte, Jacqueline, 50, 54, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 73 Vanita, Ruth, 102, 116 Vasari, Giorgio, 96, 97, 99–100, 112, 114, 116 Vaught, Jennifer C., 169, 174 vernacular, as “mother tongue,” 28, 195 Vesalius, Andreas, 21–2, 31 Vickers, Nancy J., 9 Villeponteaux, Mary, 42, 46, 48 virginity, 4–5, 6, 16, 22, 46, 155–6, 158, 167–9, 193, 198 see also maidenhood

Virgin Mary, 4, 6, 20–21, 40, 196 Assumption of, 20–21, 95, 100, 109, 111 Dormitio Virginis, 6, 20, 100, 109–11 iconography of, 20, 102, 108, 111 narratives of, 109–11 visual arts, see under arts Vives, Juan Luis, 177, 192 Walker, Anthony, 177, 180, 192 Walker, Elizabeth, 177, 178 Walker, Garthine, 1, 10, 22, 31 Wall, Wendy, 28, 31, 147, 152 Waller, Gary, 151 Wall-Randall, Sarah, 143, 152 Walsh, Eugene M., 47 Warner, Marina, 2, 10, 20, 31, 125, 127, 134, 176 Watson, Patricia A., 127, 134 Watson, Sara Ruth, 51, 71 Wayne, Valerie, 2, 9, 20, 31 Weitz, Nancy, 157–8, 172, 174 Weller, Barry, 151 Wells, Stanley, 72 wet-nursing, see breastfeeding Wheeler, Richard P., 103, 114 Whitaker, Katie, 160, 174 Whitaker, Lucy, 97, 117 White, R. S., 120, 123, 134 Whitford, Margaret, 115 Whitworth, Charles, 122, 134 widows, widowhood, 41, 45, 126–7, 130, 139, 147, 148 Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E., 45, 48 Wilcox, Helen, 2–3, 10, 31, 94, 131, 192 Willen, Diane, 175, 181, 192 Williams, Grant, 30 Williams, John B., 177, 191, 192 Wilson, Adrian, 104, 117 Wilson, Richard, 104, 117, 160, 174 Wimberley, Lowry Charles, 84, 91 wish-fulfilment, 3, 6, 119, 121–3, 129, 131, 155–6, 159–60 witches/witchcraft, 45, 80, 142, 160–61 wives’ tales, see old wives’ tales Wolfreston, Frances, 183 Wollstadt, Lynn, 198, 203

Index wombs, 13–17, 19, 20–24, 27, 42–3, 104–5, 107, 146 women as agents, 170–72, 187–8, 197, 199 as authors/storytellers, 1, 2, 3, 176, 184–6, 193–4, 196, 201 catastrophic role of, 93, 146 education of, 155–6, 161–3, 164–5, 166, 168–9, 180–82, 184–5 as heroes, 156, 158, 200–201 in paintings, 97–100 as readers, 2, 7, 52, 175–84, 186–9 representations of, 177 roles of, 14, 34, 35, 40–41, 46, 137, 144–6, 155, 158–9, 194–5, 197–8 and romance, 2–3, 7, 93–4, 176–7, 186–9 as rulers, 50 see also under mothers Wood, Richard, 5, 49–73, 196–7 Woodford, Donna C., 141–2, 153, 161 Worden, Blair, 57, 63, 64, 73 Woudhuysen, H. R., 53, 73

219

Wray, Ramona, 184, 192 Wroth, Mary, 3, 153, 192, 139–40, 143–4, 148, 157, 203 Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, The, 138, 139, 140, 141, 157, 184–5, 200–201 Love’s Victory, 6, 7, 137–8, 139–40, 146–51, 200 Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, 148 representations of maternity in, 200–201 Wyatt, Michael, 97, 117 Wynne-Davies, Marion, 22, 31, 153 Xenophon, 64 Yates, Frances A., 51, 73 Yavneh, Naomi, 9, 104 Yearling, Rebecca, 42, 48 Yetter, Leigh, 79, 91 York Mystery Plays, 20 Zander, William, 10 Zipes, Jack, 132, 174

This page has been left blank intentionally