Tudor Court Culture [1 ed.] 9781575911397, 9781575911182

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Tudor Court Culture

The Apple-Zimmerman Series in Early Modern Culture This interdisciplinary series will publish books that examine a wide range of aesthetic works and moments in their original cultural milieu. This would include, for example, the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as the products of the burgeoning theatrical industry, designed for the entertainment of heterogeneous audiences who lived in a rapidly changing world where politics, religion, national identity, and gender roles were all subjects of contestation and redefinition. We solicit manuscripts from fields including but not limited to, literature, history, philosophy, religion and political science, in order to enable a truly multifaceted understanding of the early modern period. Series Editors:

Phyllis Rackin, University of Pennsylvania Carole Levin, University of Nebraska Recent Titles

Center or Margin: Revisions of the English Renaissance in Honor of Leeds Barroll Edited by Lena Cowen Orlin The Virgin Mary as Alchemical and Lullian Reference in Donne Roberta J. Albrecht John Donne’s Poetry and Early Modern Visual Culture Ann H. Hurley Holy Estates: Marriage and Monarchy in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries Sid Ray Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith Regina Buccola The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Criticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama Marguerite A. Tassi Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage Edited by Paul Menzer Thunder at the Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage Edited by Peter Kanelos and Matt Kozusko Tudor Court Culture Edited by Thomas Betteridge and Anna Riehl Feminisms and Early Modern Texts: Essays for Phyllis Rackin Edited by Rebecca Bach and Gwynne Kennedy Theater of Crisis: The Performance of Power in the Kingdom of Ireland, 1662–1692 Patrick Tuite

Tudor Court Culture

Edited by

Thomas Betteridge and Anna Riehl

Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press

©2010 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [978-1-57591-118-2/10    $10.00 + 8¢ pp, pc.]

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48–1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tudor court culture / edited by Thomas Betteridge and Anna Riehl.   p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-57591-118-2 (alk. paper) 1. Great Britain—Court and courtiers—History—16th century. 2. Great Britain —History—Tudors, 1485–1603. 3. Henry VIII, King of England, 1491–1547— Relations with court and courtiers. 4. Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 1533–1603 —Relations with courts and courtiers. I. Betteridge, Thomas. II. Riehl, Anna, 1970. DA315.T753 2010 942.05—dc22 2009023611

printed in the united states of america

To Kent and Suzi at Hampton Court Tom

To my dear friends, Anuta, Carole, Ann, and Craig Anya

Contents

Acknowledgments   9 Introduction Anna Riehl and Thomas Betteridge   11 Courtly Pride and Christian Virtue: Thomas More’s Utopia as a Guide to Speaking to Erasmus’s “Half-Christian” “Turk” Sam Wood   25 Humanism and Court Culture in the Education of Tudor Royal Children Aysha Pollnitz   42 The Tudor Court: Dust and Desire Thomas Betteridge   59 “Where the Prince Lieth”: Courtly Space and the Elizabethan Progresses Peter Sillitoe   75 Like a Queen: The Influence of the Elizabethan Court on the Structure of Women-Centered Households in the Early Modern Period Jessica Malay   93 Courtliness and Poetry in Sidney, Lyly, and Greene Ayako Kawanami   114

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contents “Never shall my sad eies againe behold those pleasures”: Aemilia Lanyer and Her Idealization of Tudor Court Life Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier   132 Persuading the Prince: Raleigh, Keymis, Chapman, and The Second Voyage to Guiana Anna Riehl   149

Notes   167 Bibliography   193 Notes on Contributors   205 Index   207

Acknowledgments

Everyone working on mid-Tudor literature in the UK owes Mike Pincombe an enormous debt of gratitude. He has provided me with constant intellectual and practical support since I attended my first meeting of the Tudor Symposium when still a naive doctoral student. This collection had its genius in a meeting of the Tudor Symposium at Hampton Court in September 2004. I would like to thank everyone who helped make this possible and in particular Erica Longfellow and Lucy Worsley. I would like to thank the contributors for their professionalism and patience. This collection would not have seen the light of day without the tireless work of my co­ editor, Anna Riehl. Thomas Betteridge In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to Craig E. Bertolet for his support and comments on the introduction to this volume. Both Tom and I are deeply grateful to Carole Levin and Rachana Sachdev, the series editors with Susquehanna University Press, who were invariably enthusiastic, helpful, and patient throughout the process, and especially while this collection was taking its final shape. Anna Riehl

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Introduction Anna Riehl and Thomas Betteridge

The Tudor court was the political and cultural center of the English realm. From the moment its structures were formalized in 1526 with the passing of the Eltham Ordinances, it caused extreme reactions, ranging from admiration to disgust, celebration and critique.1 It was a place of performance and illusion where real ideological struggles were carried out through poetry, courtship, and drama. At the same time, the idea of the Tudor court exercised a seductive power over the country, the court itself, and later historians and literary critics; however, this compelling power of the court was belied by its problematic reality. As indicative of this reality, a complicated chivalric masque was performed at Henry VIII’s court on Christmas 1522: the performance involved the assault by courtiers, and the king himself, upon the “Castle of Loyalty”—a stage castle garrisoned by friends and relatives of the attackers. This spectacle was clearly meant to impress visiting dignitaries from Scotland, and the description provided by Edward Hall in his Chronicle does make the whole event sound extraordinary. Hall’s account of these courtly entertainments, however, cannot help but reflect their slightly ambiguous nature. He reports that the castle was “square every waie .xx. foote, and fiftie foote on heigh, very strong and of great timber, well fastened with yron . . . When the strength of this castle [of Loyalty] was wel beholden, many made dangerous to assault it, and some saied it could not be wonne by sporte, but by ernest. The kyng mynded to have it assaulted, and devised engins therfore, but the Carpenters wer so dull, that thei understode not his intent, and wrought all thyng contrary, and so for that tyme the assaulte was prolonged . . .”2 The dim-wittedness 11

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of the carpenters, and their ability to frustrate Henry’s plans, reflect a salient and sobering truth about the relative strength of the Tudor state and its dependence upon the behavior and aptitude of individuals to carry out its aims. An assault on a makeshift castle is a minor matter compared to the break with Rome or the dissolution of the monasteries, but in both carrying out entertainment and politics, Henry relied on the active support of common people, be it carpenters without whom his ideas of engines would remain immaterial or inhabitants of the provinces whose help was needed to make his policies effective.3 For the benefit of outsiders as well as its own members, the Tudor court construed itself as a place of spectacle and display. The extent to which it actually controlled the ideological agenda of its culture is not, however, identical to the amount of control that the monarch and their ministers liked to claim or assume. Sydney Anglo has recently warned against the too-ready assumption of the government’s absolute agency by some scholars working on Tudor royal iconography. Anglo writes that “The language and tone of many discussions of royal imagery are too elevated and tendentious. They assume the very things that ought to be proved: governmental planning in the creation and propagation of political symbolism on the one hand; and the existence of a sophisticated and informed public response on the other.”4 Nevertheless, the expense and organization necessary to create the Castle of Loyalty and then manage the court in a series of assaults that, according to Hall, took place over a number of days indicate that this masque was planned by the government. And despite the dullness of some carpenters, the storm of the castle was clearly a success. Certainly, it impressed men such as Hall and appears to have provided the court with plenty of Christmastime entertainment. The way in which this event was interpreted by others, those not involved or those watching from the sidelines who did not share Hall’s Tudor sympathies, is less clear. Indeed, even in the account given in Hall’s Chronicle, there is a suggestion that some people found the whole performance at best odd and at worst distasteful. In particular, Hall comments, “And as thei [the Scottish ambassadors] went thei asked a gentleman whiche accompaignied them, if all the warre tyme the kyng and the lordes wer so mery, or had had suche joyous pastyme, or kepte suche royall housholde, or were so well appareled: for in their countrey thei saied, in tyme of warre,



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was nothyng but wailyng and mournyng, and also thei thought that the realme of Fraunce, is not a realme to sport with, nor to Maske with.”5 The remarks of the Scots were in hindsight extremely prescient given the collapse of Henry’s and Cardinal Wolsey’s military and diplomatic plans in the following years, and in particular the ignominious failure of the Amicable Grant when Henry’s subjects united to refuse him the funds to carry out his foreign military adventures. In 1525, Tudor England suffered a mass taxpayers’ revolt, which forced the government to effect a complete change of its foreign policy. The account of the reaction of the Scottish ambassadors to the masque of the Castle of Loyalty is clearly designed to make them appear unsophisticated and naive. The performance was also probably intended to impress them with English bravery and élan, but it was just a show, and there is at least a hint in Hall’s words that the Scots were fully aware of the performative nature of this entertainment. Here was the English king playing at fighting, mucking about with toy siege engines that he could not even get his carpenters to make properly. Hall goes on to stress the “foynyng, lasshyng, and strikyng” that took place when the castle was assaulted, but the impression created by the question asked by the Scottish ambassadors lingers.6 There is a clear sense in his description of this event that Hall is trying too hard to stress the chivalric violence that took place as part of the masque of the Castle of Loyalty. After all, as the Scots seemed to suggest, no one was actually hurt. The courtiers and the king were only playing at being knights, indulging in war games without any real danger or loss of life. Indeed, the more Hall’s words emphasize the seriousness with which the court took this performance, the hollower it appears. The masque of the Castle of Loyalty had a clear propaganda message that was meant to impress foreign dignitaries, and particularly the visiting Scots, with the wealth and majesty of the Tudor court and Henry VIII. But its meanings were not entirely under the government’s control, and, as even Hall’s account makes clear, other interpretations of this courtly show, potentially far more critical to Henry’s pretensions, were also possible. Tudor Court Culture is an interdisciplinary volume that examines the cultural history of the court and its possible interpretations from the early 1500s to the end of the reign of Elizabeth I. The overall narrative pursued in the volume concerns the court’s increasing influence beyond its immediate environs. During the sixteenth cen-

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tury, court culture spread across the realm, and in the process, paradoxically, the actual court’s cultural status was dispersed and undermined. For example, John Heywood’s plays, discussed in Thomas Betteridge’s essay, treat the court as the political, religious, and cultural center of the country. They belong in the realm of court drama in a very real sense, since much of their dramatic impetus is provided by the court as a site of dramatic exchange. By the time one reaches the writing of men such as Sir Walter Raleigh and George Chapman, however, the court has become less a home of drama and more simply one potential source of financial patronage. The history of Tudor court culture during the sixteenth century is a movement of the court beyond its physical confines out into the country so that courtliness becomes more a state of mind, a way of behaving, a language, and a symbol. In the process, even as it continues to be well populated and prominent materially, the actual court shrinks in symbolic and cultural terms. In William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, for example, this reduction in value allows Corin to mock Touchstone’s arrogant attempts to disseminate courtliness in the Forest of Arden. Confronted with Touchstone’s conceited logic—that having not been at court and seen good manners, one must of necessity have wicked manners and therefore be damned—the shepherd opposes to it a commonsense logic of his own: “Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court.”7 Although the battle of skepticism and practicality between the two men ends with Corin’s notice that Touchstone has “too courtly a wit,”8 it is clear to both parties that Corin remains unconverted. Touchstone is left to flaunt his experience of court culture at an unappreciative Audrey, who marries this ex-courtier-cum-fool without yielding to his suggestion that she join him in a game of courtly dissimulation.9 However, Touchstone’s interactions with the inhabitants of Arden show that this model of the country’s resistance to courtliness coexists with a desire to mirror the court culture while no longer being its integral part. This urge is evident, for instance, in aristocratic women’s recreation of miniature courts in their own households discussed by Jessica Malay. This imitation seems to imply not only the popularity of Elizabeth’s successful management of her court, but also a demystification of its workings. The first three chapters of this collection investigate a cluster of issues in relation to the court of Henry VIII, articulating the ongo-



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ing negotiation of the discrepancies between the ideal and the real, desired and granted, imagined and perceived. Throughout its existence, the Tudor court was an intellectual powerhouse. But from its earliest days, it provoked mixed reactions among intellectuals who came into contact with its culture. The work of Sam Wood and Aysha Pollnitz demonstrates the uneasy relationship between court and humanist cultures. The court was at once a coveted home for humanist scholars and also the object of some of their fiercest criticisms. Wood demonstrates that the humanists were frustrated with the exaltation of material values in court to the point of questioning the court’s right to be called Christian. The reform they proposed in order to reinstate the Christian hierarchy of values parallels the program of changes in the education of royal children, as analyzed by Pollnitz. Both Pollnitz and Wood highlight the precarious status of the humanists who, in their attempts to refashion the court, faced resistance similar to that described by Hythlodaeus in Thomas More’s Utopia. Betteridge transposes this theme of wishful thinking that collides with brutal reality into the realm of literary production, allowing us a glimpse of the court’s desired self-image and its actual counterpart, reshaped under a lens of subtle literary maneuvers. In order to discuss the problematic relationship between the culture of the court and humanism, Wood juxtaposes the Erasmian concept of the Turk and the humanist view of Christian court. This chapter demonstrates that the court and the Turk begin to approximate each other, the latter being “half-Christian” in his belief in the immortality of the soul and resurrection of the body, the former losing its Christian identity through preoccupation with material values instead of spiritual virtues. Moreover, in constituting their identity, the Turk and court share cultural references and habits. Throughout the chapter, Wood draws our attention to the two humanists’ intense interest in signification: on the one hand, Erasmus locates the ultimate signs of a Christian in conduct rather than verbal assertions; on the other, the humanists are deeply invested in their belief that language constitutes reality. Wood suggests that these contradictory impulses result from recognition that, through its overreliance on materialistic signification, the court has become a “center of an epistemological perversion.” The thrust of the humanist critique of the court, therefore, is not only its failure to uphold Christian values, but also its flawed understanding of what

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marks one as a Christian. The latter shortcoming is especially important because the humanists redefine both Christian and courtly identities as fundamentally discursive and thus dependent on external signs. This way, Wood complicates the notion that the humanists envision the reform of the Christian court as an eradication of courtly pride in favor of Christian virtue and argues that, for the humanists, a reform of the court is essentially an epistemological venture, a quest for precision of verbal signification. In her examination of the importance of humanism to the En­ glish court, Pollnitz returns to the theme introduced by Wood. This essay discusses in detail the tension between humanist learning and courtiership as reflected in Tudor educational treatises aimed at the royal children. Pollnitz traces the attempts of northern humanists to shape a liberal curriculum for princes; her chapter investigates the trajectory of the humanists’ changing tactics as the traditional chivalric education proves to be impossible to dislodge. Pollnitz demonstrates that Erasmus, More, Juan Luis Vives, and other early advocates of classical learning engaged in a scathing critique of the chivalric training, an education propagated at court both in the form of physical activities like jousting, hunting, hawking, dancing, and music-making and through reading literature that portrayed chivalric pastimes and values. To these frivolous endeavors, the humanists opposed the bonae litterae, or good letters, to use Erasmus’s famous term for the classical Latin and Greek literature. As the court did not prove to be receptive to the humanists’ original program, they had to make adjustments even as they negotiated their involvement in court life. As she examines the educational practices of Princess Mary and Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, Pollnitz offers a fascinating insight into the schoolroom dynamics: the pupils’ resistance to the purely humanist model of education, and their tutors’ eventual revision of the program. In particular, the public demonstration of a royal child’s proficiency in bonae litterae begins to serve as a supplement to the show of his or her chivalric accomplishments. Furthermore, the changing political climate and success of Balthazar Castiglione’s The Courtier in the English court forced later humanists, like Thomas Elyot and Thomas Starkey, to promote an overt balance between chivalric and liberal education. Betteridge examines the strange ambiguity at the heart of early Tudor representations of the court. In particular, he argues that writers such as John Heywood, Thomas Wyatt, and John Skelton re-



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flect in their work the tension between the court’s desire to imagine itself as an island of learning and culture, a place apart, and its total material dependence on the world beyond its boundaries. Betteridge explores the discrepancies among the country’s fantasy about the court, the court’s fantasy about itself, and the less-thanglamorous reality of courtly existence. The illusory concepts of the court totalize it in a vision of order, sexuality, splendor, and power. The actual condition of the court, however, is flawed by fragmentation and disarray, and it is this embarrassing reality that the outsiders are obliviously omitting and the court itself is anxious to obscure from view. The frequently understated evidence of the jarring contrast between a “spectral court” and the “real thing” is at the center of Betteridge’s analysis of the literary responses to the court culture, illuminated by documentary testimonies to the untidiness and secrecy of the court’s real life. An examination of The Enterlude of Godly Queene Hester and Heywood’s The Play of the Weather, for instance, reveals that, in the midst of these flattering courtly fantasies, some characters function as mediators between the court and the country, thus disrupting the former’s seemingly enclosed world and hinting at the dependency between the center and margins. Betteridge juxtaposes the interplay of fantasy and reality in these two courtly plays and Wyatt’s poetry to the traces of contingency in the court’s fantasy of itself reflected in Skelton’s writing, arguing that the latter unravels its own dominant concept of monarchic power while also staging an elimination of the court’s provisional nature from its aggrandizing self-representation. The five chapters that follow move the field of the inquiry to the reign of Elizabeth I and explore the changing conditions and dissemination of the culture of the last incarnation of the Tudor court. In contrast to the majority of studies of the Tudor court that tend to concentrate on its bright center, this volume goes on to pursue a number of inquiries into the culture of the fringes and borders of the court.10 Although the figure of Elizabeth looms large in the background of these five essays, they continue Betteridge’s theme of the mutual dependence of the court and country and seek to assess the extent of the centrifugal influence of the court culture. The ideal of court behavior is at the center of Ayako Kawanami’s essay on John Lyly, Philip Sidney, and Robert Greene. Kawanami maps the influence of courtly rhetoric beyond the physical confines of the court, and in the process what emerges is uneasiness about

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the language of the court and courtly language. Stefani BrusbergKiermeier’s work on Aemilia Lanyer examines the life of a writer who existed in the margins of the court. Lanyer’s story, despite its colorful nature, can be seen as representative of those people who made the court happen: actors, musicians, servants, courtesans, and builders; all are essential to the court, and yet their labor and their lives rarely find a place in studies of Tudor court culture. Malay’s work also moves the focus from the center to the margins in her examination of the way Elizabeth’s court functioned as a model for the households of other Elizabethan aristocratic ladies. Malay suggests that for women such as Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, the creation of miniature female-centered courts was a deliberate act of self-assertion that involved deploying a specific idealized image of the Elizabethan court. This symbolic move of the court into the country serves to remind one that the Elizabethan court was constantly on the move. As Peter Sillitoe’s work shows, the progresses that Elizabeth went on throughout her realm were crucial in mapping the Elizabethan court and at the same time constituted in themselves an assertion of court culture and power. Finally, Anna Riehl demonstrates the ways in which the court came to function by the end of the sixteenth century as one site among others for political debate. In a very real sense, when Sir Walter Raleigh journeyed to Guiana, he took the court with him, and it was toward the court that he ultimately directed his aspirations. Sillitoe seeks to complicate the effect of Elizabeth I’s royal progresses on the meaning of the spaces thereby visited by the monarch and to assess the changing definitions of the court as a physical and social entity in the minds of the participants of these progresses. Sillitoe situates an aspect of conceptual evolution of the Tudor court from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I in the changing sense of where this court is located in a geographical and architectural sense and what conditions lend a place or social group the qualities allowing its definition as a court. If her father’s court has been dispersed among the numerous buildings in royal possession, Elizabeth expands the notion of the court to include, through temporary appropriation, on the one hand, the aristocratic estates visited in the course of each progress, and, on the other hand, the inhabitants of remote parts of England who would be deprived of access to the court if it was confined to a central location. Fundamental to Sillitoe’s argument is the recognition that the physical presence of the monarch,



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in Elizabeth’s case, imparts the courtly status on any setting; moreover, the arrival of the court in a country venue has a transformative effect on the new location and its inhabitants. Sillitoe’s analysis of the written accounts of Elizabeth’s progresses reveals that, with her arrival on the scene, not only the normally noncourtly locations acquire a sense of courtliness, but also the locals who greet the queen begin to approximate courtly manners. In addition, in the process of the entertainment, the space already altered by the queen’s presence is further complicated by the fusion of the imaginary space conjured by the performance and historical space appropriated by the court and its entertainment. Jessica Malay touches upon the rhetorical strategies evident in one such entertainment during Elizabeth’s visit to Bisham Abbey. Assuming that the script for that performance was authored by Elizabeth Russell, with her daughters acting the parts of the two virgins, Malay points out that the presentation of the girls’ virtues and courtly skills is designed to recreate Castiglione’s exemplary female courtiers, thereby drawing the queen’s attention to Russell’s association with the book translated by her late husband Thomas Hoby. In addition, Russell’s entertainment casts the female monarch and herself, through the frequent allusions of the two virgins to their mother, in a relationship that is at once hierarchical and reciprocal. Malay incorporates Russell’s skillful highlighting of her affinity to the queen into an account that explores the ways in which women who had close connections with the court seek to imitate the queen’s successful narrative of power and emphasize their privileged position in relation to Elizabeth as a means of empowerment. Malay is particularly interested in the choices made by aristocratic women who had witnessed firsthand Elizabeth’s fashioning of a court governed by a female and later recreated Elizabeth’s model in their own homes. In particular, Malay analyzes Bess of Hardwick’s structural and ornamental decisions in her organization of Hardwick New Hall that exploit the advantages of the positioning of public and private spaces in Elizabeth’s palaces and, in their interior design, emphasize Bess’s bond with her queen. Likewise, the design and location of Russell’s elaborate funereal monuments in honor of her two late husbands testify to her connection with the court and promote the reputation of her surviving family members. Kawanami revisits the cross-pollinating connection between courtliness and poetry, seeking to make a distinction between the

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writers’ apparent adherence to courtly values and norms of behavior and their artistic independence, which survives courtly existence even as it is informed by its rhetorical paradigms. Kawanami begins with a reminder of George Puttenham’s famous pronouncement, in his Arte of English Poesie, on the necessity of dissimulation for anyone who wishes to be successful in courtly milieu. The chapter proceeds to locate the persuasive confirmations and consequences of this tenet in works of writers composing at court or about the court. Inscribing her analysis into the courtly preoccupation with distrust, trickery, mutual surveillance, and espionage, Kawanami probes the overt and subtle meanings behind these writers’ insistent metaphoric use of words suggestive of bait-fishing, deception, and spying. In this sense, the fictional courtlike environments centered around Basilius in Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Lucilla in Lyly’s Euphues, Alexander in Lyly’s Campaspe, and James IV of Scotland in Greene’s eponymous play mirror and reinvent the intricate politics of the actual court of Elizabeth I, frequently adding a psychological dimension of courtly love games to the political interactions among the courtiers and their sovereign. However, Kawanami proposes that the rhetorical expressiveness resulting from the writers’ efforts to make their works pleasing to court and thus worthy of patronage lends them a genuine artistic merit that can be carried outside the immediate confines of the court and appreciated, as in the case of Greene’s play, by noncourtly audiences. In her inquiry, Brusberg-Kiermeier continues the exploration of the courtly cultural influence on the creating minds of the outsiders. At the center of this chapter is Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, viewed by Brusberg-Kiermeier as the poet’s purposeful attempt at reinstatement of herself as a part of the English court. In its essence, Lanyer’s collection of poems looks back to the idealized court of the late Elizabeth I and the time when Lanyer and her family enjoyed a closer relationship with that center of monarchal authority. In light of the facts and mysteries of Lanyer’s fascinating biography, her poems read as a conscious fashioning of herself as a female courtier whose virtues make her worthy of acceptance into the courtly circle. Brusberg-Kiermeier explores the complex mixture of rhetorical strategies in this former courtesan’s endeavor to prove her morality through expressions of self-humility, religious devotion, and, most strikingly, creation of an effeminized image of Christ in order to craft his affinity to virtuous women. The chapter



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additionally draws attention to the way Lanyer addresses another challenge, that of a woman attempting to advance her social status by publishing her work. One of the key observations of this chapter, however, is the idealistic, romanticized nature of Lanyer’s retrospective portrayal of Elizabethan court. Written in the wake of the demise of the last and most powerful version of the Tudor court, this incarnation nevertheless “forms part of the narrative history of Tudor court culture.” In dedicating her poems to twelve female aristocrats, Lanyer makes an explicit bid for patronage, and yet, as Brusberg-Kiermeier reminds us, the poet measures each of her addressees against the ultimate ideal of her past life, the late queen Elizabeth I. Riehl’s account of the vicissitudes of the discourse surrounding Raleigh’s voyages to Guiana continues to investigate the lasting hold of the desire for the queen’s patronage and approval. Raleigh’s secret marriage resulting in his fiasco at court, his apparently unproductive first foray into Guiana, Lawrence Keymis’s tedious second journey on Raleigh’s behalf—from the court’s point of view, Raleigh had nothing to say worth hearing. However, he desperately needed the queen’s support in funding the third trip. Raleigh’s resulting frustration lurks in the volume’s ambivalent expressions of praise and criticism, cajolery and veiled threats. As she traces the twists and turns of these conflicting meanings in Keymis’s A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana, Riehl analyzes the ways in which different parts of this book construct and achieve the authors’ rhetorical goals to encourage the queen’s support of the mission. In the process, the chapter unpacks the layers of authorship and the book’s shifting sense of its audience and subject alike. George Chapman’s poem, preceding the main narrative, is the only piece addressed directly to the queen, and Riehl argues that this text’s obscure figurations border on the obstinate and dangerous. The tragic conclusion of the story narrated in this chapter reminds us that courtiers and their followers were free to use sophisticated rhetoric in hopes of achieving their ambitions, but, in the final analysis, it was in the power of their sovereign to make their desires come true—or turn them into dust. The wonder, but also skepticism, voiced by Hall’s Scottish ambassadors at the masque of the Castle of Loyalty seems in many ways a good basis for viewing and conceptualizing the Tudor court: it was an impressive social, cultural, and political institution, although

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possibly less impressive than its apologists or monarchs made it, yet simultaneously, it was also more interesting than its own self-concept. As a fantasy, the Tudor court enthralled many inhabitants of sixteenth-century England, and it still has the ability to seduce scholars into believing its self-representation of an absolute control. Tudor Court Culture seeks to question some of the assumptions behind existing insights into the Tudor court while at the same time remaining conscious of its importance to the history of sixteenth-century England. Just as with the “Castle of Loyalty,” it may have been a provisional structure built just for show, but as a part of a strategically designed spectacle, it was quite impressive nonetheless.

Tudor Court Culture

Courtly Pride and Christian Virtue: Thomas More’s Utopia as a Guide to Speaking to Erasmus’s “Half-Christian” “Turk” Sam Wood

Writing in 1515, Erasmus shows himself to be profoundly aware of the capacity of the “Turk”1 to shape Christian identity:

To me it does not seem recommendable that we should now be preparing for war against the Turks. . . . Let us not display our wealth, our armies, our strength. Let them see in us not only the name, but the unmistakable marks of a Christian: a blameless life, the wish to do good even to our enemies, a tolerance which will withstand all injuries, contempt of money, heedlessness of glory, life held lightly; let them hear that heavenly doctrine which is in accordance with this kind of life. . . . Now only too often, we use evil to combat evil. I will say further, and I wish it were more daring than true, if you take away the name and sign of the Cross, we are just like Turks fighting Turks.2

In the context of an essay in which he urges Christian princes against war among themselves or with the Ottoman Empire, his greatest anxiety appears to be that Christians and “Turks” are the same. As things stand, the difference between Christian and “Turk” is obscured by the degenerate behavior of Christians, and when an imagined lunar visitor, knowing the teaching of Christ, seeks to locate Christians, the difference between Christian and “Turk” is erased: this visitor would see among Christians “such opulence and luxury, such lustfulness and pomp, such tyranny, ambition, trickery, envy, anger, dissension, such brawls, fights, wars, and tumults, in 25

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fact a sump of all those things Christ condemns, worse than is to be found among any Turks or Saracens . . . ”3 The erasure of Christian identity is not confined to its material assertion, and revisiting his essay in 1523, Erasmus points at once to beliefs that “Turks” share with Christianity and to nominal Christians who depart from doctrines crucial to the identity they claim. “Those whom we call Turks are to a great extent half-Christian, and probably nearer true Christianity than most of our own people. How many are there among us who believe neither in the resurrection of the body nor in the survival of the soul?”4 The comparisons of the “Turk” and Utopia are invidious, not least because if beliefs are shared and conduct equally good and bad among “Turks” and Christians, then identity depends only on its signs—a poor basis for moral superiority, let alone salvation. In place of an identity that celebrates its power and wealth through material display, Erasmus seeks to dispose of visible signs and locate the “unmistakable marks of a Christian,” not in the material signs or ceremonies of Christianity, but in Christian virtue and conduct. The figure of the “half-Christian” “Turk” stands in contrast to the pride of princely and papal courts, which lead those Christian “Turks fighting Turks,” and which are targeted throughout the essay. For real “Turks” it is suggested that there could be no spectacle more agreeable than that of mutual Christian massacre. 5 Directly addressing princes, Erasmus suggests that Christian rule “is really administration” and “this very right which you hold, was given you by popular consent.”6 With this conception of the governance, the question to debate should be whether the state is to obey a good prince or be enslaved by a tyrant, not, as is the case “whether it is to be counted as belonging to Ferdinand or Sigismund, or pay tax to Philip or Louis.”7 Indeed, princes may go to war “for no other reason than because it is a way of confirming their tyranny over their own subjects,” and the Christian “disease” of war, motivated by envy, hatred, ambition, anger, or undisciplined character is cloaked with the “respectable titles” of religion, the rights of the Church, or legal technicalities.8 Concluding his essay, Erasmus returns to question the security with which Christian princes can claim to be Christian: “If Christ is a figment, why do we not frankly reject him?”9 Here again, Erasmus casts doubt on the security of identity with the name of Christ and urges princes to follow Christ “not only in name, not by wearing his badge, but in our actions and our lives.”



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It is “for this end that Popes, princes and states should take counsel together.” His assertion that it is for princes “who should be to the State what the eye is to the body, or reason to the soul,” to quell a turbulent populace, and for popes to settle princely disturbance, locates Erasmus’s thinking in the mirror of princes’ tradition, which he explores more fully the following year in the Education of a Christian Prince (1516).10 Erasmus’s discussion of the early modern court alongside the “Turk” allows for a consideration of the court as a place of false material values, no more Christian than the values of what was perceived to be the greatest threat to Christendom. In this context the “Turk” and the court achieve an identity at once ambivalently Christian and ambivalently false, neither entirely Christian nor entirely false, which stands in opposition to Christian humanist reformulations of Christian identity. His figuration of “Turks” as “halfChristian” challenges readings of the “Turk” as a figure of absolute otherness and of Christian “inertia and religious decay” by highlighting what Christians and Muslims share.11 Instead, the “Turk” is humanized and Christianized with the result that there is increasing pressure on the question of what it means to be a Christian and where the difference between Christian and “Turk” lies. Commenting on this “curiously hybrid” figuration in the context of a discussion of Rabelais, Timothy Hampton suggests that it “points to the limitations of Christian humanism itself as it seeks to preach a doctrine of charity, of acceptance of the other, while at the same time trying to ground its work in the political and spiritual unification of a Christian Europe . . . Erasmus’s rhetoric strains under the burden of trying to accept otherness while upholding absolute truth.”12 More specifically, the encounter with the “Turk” marks a moment of tension between the Christian humanist desire to reform Christendom, most particularly Christian princes and their courts, and Christian humanist sensitivity to language and signs and their relation to context and history, what Richard Waswo calls “relational semantics.”13 That is, at the same time as Erasmus condemned the material display of the Christian court as vacuous, false, and un-Christian, he would also assert, in works such as De ratione studii (1511), a priority of signs over things, and that “For since things are learnt only by the sounds we attach to them, a person who is not skilled in the force of language is, of necessity, short-

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sighted, deluded, and unbalanced in his judgement of things as well.”14 Despite this awareness, the Erasmus translation of the New Testament (1516) highlights the necessity of understanding the textual and historical context of words in an attempt to unravel centuries of discourse and reveal a divine truth by retrieving the moment of its originary divine utterance. Thus, alongside a desire to restore language to the point that it refers to reality, there is also an awareness that language and signs constitute reality. This is what Waswo understands to be the “dilemma of the age”: “the desire for transparent cognition of things that is frustrated by the awareness of the opaque fluidity of words. The whole humanist focus on language as a sociohistorical product implied what Valla sporadically inferred from it: that semantics is epistemology, that language does not reveal reality but constitutes it.”15 In the context of such intellectual arguments, the “Turk” becomes the site of a considerable anxiety over how to assert “the unmistakable marks of a Christian” while calling into question the truth of marks in other contexts. The strain leads to some peculiar passages on Erasmus’s part as he seeks a way of asserting identity that does not have recourse to signs, while never escaping the language of signs. The most peculiar of these passages is in Dulce bellum inexpertis. Here Erasmus urges that the “Turks” should feel that they are being invited to be saved, not attacked for booty. But if such invitations fail, then Christian conduct will rise to the occasion. “If language fails us, let us go to meet them with something else—conduct worthy of the Gospel. The manner of life will have a mighty eloquence. Let us take to them a plain and truly Apostolic profession of faith, not so overloaded with human learning. Let us demand from them, more than anything else, the things we have been taught by the Holy Scriptures and the writings of the Apostles.”16 But it would seem that Christian conduct will only compensate for the deficiencies of language precisely by eloquently functioning as a language. Further, what of the locus of Christian truth in the scriptures, not as Erasmus himself demonstrated in the New Testament, the original word of God, but the discursive product of a particular moment and understood through awareness of that moment? If Erasmus wishes to dispense with human learning in the passage quoted above, we may ask where then do his own endeavors stand? We might well ask how Christian virtue is to be identified, shared as it is with “half-Christian” “Turks,” without its signs? Yet, Christianity,



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in the definition offered in Dulce bellum inexpertis, is defined purely in terms of conduct, or sola virtute, not in terms of things or anything that might signify Christianity to the “Turk” or indeed Christians. Within such a definition, one might ask what place is there even for the Cross, which Erasmus himself presents as a defective sign, if only because of its betrayal by those who lay claim to it. In this sense, while Erasmus exclaims that “a Christian is nearer allied to another Christian than any brother can be, unless the bonds of nature are closer than those of Christ,”17 in the context of the “halfChristian,” the bonds of Christ become increasingly obscure as the marks of a Christian become increasingly mistakable for those of the “Turk” and as the stability of the Cross, no less than the pomp and luxury of the court, becomes increasingly uncertain as a material marker of identity. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) can be read as an intervention in these debates, specifically by presenting a space that shares a rhetorical function with the Erasmian “Turk” as a place from which a critique of the Christian court is undertaken. Utopia seems in many ways to present the image of Christendom reformed along humanist lines; however, this imagined space is, like the “Turk,” also ambiguously “half-Christian.” Thus, even though Utopia can be considered as the realization of humanist ideal, as a text it also draws attention to the contradictory aspects of the humanist project in ways that, far from indicting the court as the site of a false Christianity, underline the necessity of the material sign to the charity underscored by Hampton. In this way, Utopia could be said to offer a guide for speaking to “half-Christians” at court and in the Ottoman Empire while foreshadowing the religious crisis that was soon to follow. The work of such critics and cultural historians as Nabil Matar, Gülru Necipog˘  lu, Daniel Goffman, Lisa Jardine, and Jerry Brotton allows us to better situate Erasmus’s anxiety and Utopia in relation to the Ottoman Empire. What emerges from their studies is a space in which Ottoman sultans and Christian princes negotiated with each other commercially and culturally as well as militarily. This space challenges our ideas of Renaissance Europe, leading Jardine and Brotton to speak of a “shared cultural sphere,” what Goffman calls the “Greater Western World.”18 Describing this cultural sphere further, Jardine and Brotton, as well as Necipog˘   lu, point to circulation of art objects between Christian and Islamic courts in which

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the right to inhabit the identities of Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Constantine is contested variously by Süleyman the Magnificent, Charles V, and Francis I.19 Henry VIII, too, sought the right to be called Caesar and in 1513 was offered the imperial crown by Maximilian at Tournai. 20 Henry refused, but was a late candidate for election following Maximilian’s death in 1519. At some point during this period, More wrote a poem praising his king as “better than Caesar,” whose victory at Tournai had been bloody and precarious, while Henry’s had been peaceful and emphatic. 21 These imperial aspirations directly inform the Erasmian critique of the court, as he asks “what greater madness could there be than for a man who has received the Christian sacraments to model himself on Alexander, Julius Caesar, or Xerxes, whose lives even the pagan writers criticized (or those of them who had some degree of judgment)?”22 Alongside the lavish assertion of imperial identity, it is also possible to point to the ambivalent attitudes of the Christian court to the “Turk.” Equally lavish was the assertion of princely identity in terms that sought to illustrate power and wealth by appropriating Ottoman identity. In a paper discussing ambivalent sixteenth-century attitudes to turbans, Matar points to the association of this headwear with the Ottoman sultan, especially in images of Süleyman I, sultan from 1520 to 1566, to become “an enviable symbol of might and authority,” and notes that prior to this moment, in the first year of his reign, Henry VIII attended a banquet at Westminster in Turkish dress. 23 Such displays were to be found across Europe, and in a dispatch from the imperial court in Vienna, Henry’s ambassador Robert Wingfield reports a great embassy of bishops and four lords from Hungary and Poland who visited him or passed by his lodging: “amongst them was many spare horses . . . of the Turks, and divers of the noblemen were [dressed] like Turks, and some like Tartars . . . over their vestments be it called it seemed th[ey were of] silk and their scimitars garnished bo[th with] gold and silver.”24 Given these accounts, it would seem that had Erasmus sought confirmation that Christians were acting as “Turks,” he only needed to visit the courts at London or Vienna. More than this though, Wingfield’s dispatch also tells of an anxiety to speak with the “Turk” while reminding us of the expense involved in diplomatic activity. His letter is essentially a begging letter as he hopes Henry will “consider [that] his last remittance will not last as many days



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as there are pounds.” 25 Wingfield was particularly anxious because of an upcoming gathering of rulers loyal to the emperor “for which there will lack no pomp.” Indeed, he wishes that a well-moneyed man were in his place as rewarding the exceeding number of trumpet and tabor players, as well as other minstrels, of all the kings and princes will make a great hole in his purse. Nevertheless, he valiantly continues, “there is written above mine arms standing on my gate my name ambassador to the King of England and of France, which I am sure shall be seen and read by all nations that be of Christendom and many other for there will be present Russians, Tartars, Wallacks and Turks.” The ambivalence of Christian rulers’ attitude to the Ottoman Empire is underscored in their response to it as a threat, particularly their response to calls from the Fifth Lateran Council for crusade supported by a five-year truce to be administered by the papacy. 26 The result was the 1518 Treaty of London, which, masterminded by Thomas Wolsey, aimed to guarantee peace indefinitely through multilateral agreement superintended by Henry rather than papal supremacy. The treaty makes no effort to militarize Christendom, while references to the “Turk” in the preamble are not considered pertinent enough to the substance of the treaty to be mentioned by the catalogers of the Letters and Papers.27 The treaty was marked by the betrothal of Princess Mary Tudor to the dauphin and the return of Tournai by England. 28 That Mary had already been betrothed to the future Charles V in an alliance of England and the empire against France, following the capture of Tournai three years previously, seems to have been no obstacle to the later betrothal and is indicative of the fleeting nature of early modern treaties. The treaty of London itself only lasted for thirty months.29 From the letters of Sebastian Giustinian, the Venetian ambassador in London, we learn that after speaking with both Wolsey and the newly appointed privy councillor Thomas More, Giustinian gave a noncommittal answer to an invitation to the signing of the treaty “knowing that [the Doge] had not chosen to be mentioned in the quinquennial truces made by his holiness, or thought it fit to celebrate the prayers ordered by him, lest the fact should become known to the Turk.”30 The ambassador did ultimately attend the signing, and writes that after a grave oration from Richard Pace, the peace was proclaimed in tones so low as to lead him to think “this equivalent to cancelling the clause against the Turk.”31 In

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Rome, it was reported that Henry was no more interested in going to war with the Ottoman Empire than he would be if Selim had threatened the Indies; this policy of inaction was pursued despite the claim of Leo, prior to the treaty’s signing, that his protectors were so unhelpful that, were Ottoman forces to land in Italy, he would be compelled to flee Rome “with such saints reliques as he might assemble.”32 Despite this, it would appear that a reference to the “Turk” does survive in Pace’s oration from the altar of St. Paul’s, not in the form of the Ottoman Empire but in the French signatories to the treaty. In his study of the “Entertainments for the French Ambassadors,” “the like of which,” Giustinian fancied, “was never given by Cleopatra or Caligula,” Glenn Richardson notes that Pace specifically recalls the English victories of 1513 and suggests that although superficially concerned with the Ottoman threat, Pace’s oration and other celebrations of the treaty “foreshadowed defeat for any ‘Turks’ much nearer home who decided to upset the new world order.”33 Like More’s figuration of Henry as better than Caesar, Pace’s oration points to the difficulties humanists faced at court in praising their “half-Christian” rulers while maintaining a commitment to Christian peace. Shared imperial aspiration, the appropriation of Ottoman identity, extravagant diplomatic encounters, and duplicitous treaties give substance to Erasmus’s anxiety that Christians shared, more than he would wish, with the “Turk.” Most particularly, duplicitous treaties also illuminate one of the most ironic passages of Utopia as well as allowing Utopia to be placed in the ambivalent space that Christians share with the Ottoman Empire. The Utopians do not make treaties believing that nature is a sufficient bond between one man and another, “If a person does not regard nature, [they ask] do you suppose he will care anything about words?”34 This attitude stands in contrast to that found in more familiar parts of the world. In Europe, however, and especially in those parts where the faith and religion of Christ prevails, the majesty of treaties is everywhere holy and inviolable, partly through the justice and goodness of kings, partly through the reverence and fear of the Sovereign Pontiffs. Just as the latter themselves undertake nothing which they do not most conscientiously perform, so they command all other rulers to abide by their promises in every way and compel the recalcitrant



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by pastoral censure and severe reproof. Popes are perfectly right, of course, in thinking it a most disgraceful thing that those who are specially called the faithful should not faithfully adhere to their commitments.

The “Turk” is not specifically mentioned here, but there is a sense of Europe as a space shared by Christians and an unspecified other. Here the most obvious targets of Hythlodaeus’s irony are the Christian rulers whom we encounter in his two imagined councils in book 1, and who are also found in the condemnation of war by Eras­mus and other humanists of More’s circle. The supposedly just papal arbiters of disputes between Christians are also a target. Yet the effect of the irony is to obscure where exactly Hythlodaeus’s identity lies: with those parts where the faith and religion of Christ prevails, or more generally in Europe, shared as it is with the “Turk.” The difficulties of placing Hythlodaeus’s point of view becomes more apparent when we consider the passage in the 1551 translation by Ralphe Robynson where Hythlodaeus locates himself in Europe, and specifically “these partes,” rather than the Yale ed­ itors’ “those parts,” where Christianity is professed: “For here in Europ . . . , and especiallye in thies partes where the faythe and religion of Christe reygneth . . . ”35 However, the problem here is that it is Europe generally and “those parts” that are the target of Hythlodaeus’s irony, specifically the courtly world of princes and popes. Of course, Hythlodaeus ultimately identifies himself with Utopia, but from this distance the difference between the Christian and the “Turk” is obscured, as it is in Erasmus’s rhetorical figure of the Christians who are “Turks fighting Turks” and the hybrid figure of the “half-Christian” “Turk.” This irony leads me to suggest that Utopia and the “Turk” achieve a rhetorical identity as strategies with which humanists could critique and reform the ills of Christendom. There is, however, a significant difference in these strategies as Hythlodaeus offers Utopia as a positive comparison to Christendom, while the “Turk” exists as Christendom’s negative, what it should be better than, what it is the same as, not what it should aspire to be. It is in terms of what Christians should aspire to be that Utopia achieves an identity with Erasmus’s aspirations for the reform of Christendom. This identity has been understood in a variety of ways. J. H. Hexter sees both More in Utopia and Erasmus in Dulce bellum inexpertis to be concerned with the question of “What is it to

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be a Christian?”36 He sees Erasmus offering an answer that true Christianity does not lie in the Scholastic theology of the day. This theology had accommodated itself to the thinking of Aristotle which suggested that “no society where all things were held in common could flourish” and justified the pursuit of honor, riches, and power, the basis of the early modern court and thereby its greatest “greed, pride and tyranny,” and had reduced the teaching of Christ to “external acts of sacerdotally certified and clerically sponsored busy-work.”37 Instead, “to be a Christian was not first and foremost to assent to creed, or participate in a particular routine of pious observances; it was to do as a Christian; to be Christian was a way of life.”38 Utopia, with its presentation of Christian Europe in book 1 and the “best state of the commonwealth” in book 2, in Hexter’s argument, raises a question: “between the Europeans and the Utopian, which are truly Christian?”39 For Hexter, the answer is unequivocally the Utopians. They possess an austerity and moderation becoming of the Christian, and a social order that “established the rules of life which Christ had taught as the right way for men, but which, according to Erasmus’s Dulce bellum inexpertis, had been reasoned away in Christian Europe by Aristotelian theologians and Romanist lawyers in order to permit the pursuit of profit, usury, private property.”40 In another context, J. C. Olin sees Utopia as a “dramatic commentary” to Erasmus’s essay on the adage Amicorum communia omnia to which Erasmus gave first place in his collection of adage essays and spoke about at length in its introduction.41 It would seem inevitable that in such texts as Amicorum comunia omnia and Utopia we would see a questioning of private property similar to that which is seen in Dulce bellum inexpertis, but they also assert an identity between the teaching of Christ and Plato’s community of property.42 Hythlodaeus makes a similar identification and extends it to Utopia when he refuses the role of court counselor on the grounds that he would not be listened to and although his advice that a king should look to the welfare of his citizens rather than increase his revenue by their subjugation may be disagreeable, he asks, “What if I told them the kind of things which Plato creates in his republic or which the Utopians actually put in practice in theirs? Though such institutions were superior (as, to be sure, they are) yet they might appear odd because here individuals have the right of private property, there all things are in common.”43 Hythlodaeus identifies Utopia



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with the teaching of Christ when, at the conclusion of his description, he asserts that regard for self-interest or Christ’s authority “would long ago have brought the whole world to adopt the laws of the Utopian commonwealth, had not one single monster, the chief and progenitor of all plagues striven against it—I mean, Pride.”44 Here we are given an image of Pride not even consenting to be made a goddess over wretches “if the display of her riches did not torment and intensify their poverty.” This echoes the description of the court, which precedes the earlier identification and to which Hythlodaeus counsels better management of existing revenue: “to be sure, to have a single person enjoy a life of pleasure and self-indulgence amid the groans and lamentations of all around him is to be the keeper, not of a kingdom, but of a jail.”45 Hythlodaeus defends his advice as “appropriate and obligatory to have propounded everywhere,” and continues that “if all things which by the perverse morals of men have come to be seen odd are to be dropped as unusual or absurd, we must dissemble among Christians almost all the doctrines of Christ.”46 As with Erasmus, the justification of this courtly pride is the clergy which seeks to accommodate Christ’s “teaching to men’s morals as if it were a rule of soft lead that at least in some way or other the two might be made to correspond.” In this way, both Erasmus and Hythlodaeus see the material excesses of the court to be the manifestation of Pride and to stand in opposition to a modest Christian virtue. Further, they both see this courtly pride to be justified by the chicanery of a morally bankrupt theology. Yet, for all the theological disagreements in which Scholasticism is seen as the justification for courtly excess, as was hinted at toward the end of Dulce bellum inexpertis, it was also Erasmus’s conviction that reform would be effected through the court and that, “The corruption of an evil prince spreads more quickly and widely than the contagion of any plague. Conversely, there is no other quicker and effective way of improving public morals than for the prince to lead a blameless life.”47 If Christendom was to be transformed along humanist lines, the first step lay in the transformation of courtly pride into Christian virtue. The nature of this transformation depended on the eradication of what was seen to be a false set of material values and the restoration of words and signs to a Platonic correlation in which signs referred precisely to things. This is evident in Erasmus’s most concerted attempt to reform the Christian

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court when he tells his first reader, the future Charles V, that a “large section of the masses are swayed by false opinions, just like those people trussed up in Plato’s cave, who regarded the empty shadows of things as the things themselves.”48 Instead, the Christian prince might consider Plato’s model of the philosopher-king, but must understand that “‘philosopher’ does not mean someone who is clever at dialectics or science but someone who rejects illusory appearance and undauntedly seeks out and follows what is true and good. Being a philosopher is in practice the same as being a Christian; only the terminology is different.”49 In this sense, the thrust of Erasmus’s reform of the Christian court is not theological, but epistemological. A greater sense of the false values of the court is seen in his essay on the adage the Sileni Alcibiadis. Throughout this essay, Erasmus’s concern is to show that “the real truth of things is most profoundly concealed, and cannot be detected easily or by many people.”50 Despite this difficulty, “the stupid multitude, judging things as they do as their criteria for every purpose what is most clearly obvious to the bodily senses, constantly make mistakes and go astray, are misled by phantom images of good and bad, and keep their admiration for any Silenus that is inside out.” The first example of such an “inside-out Silenus” is the Christian prince. Here, the scepter, insignia, bodyguard, and titles may imply an earthly deity, but the prince, unlike the original sileni which opened to reveal a god despite their ugly exterior, reveals “a despot, sometimes an enemy of the his citizens, one who hates the peace . . . in a word, what the Greek proverbs call ‘an Iliad of evils.’”51 In the same text, priests are indicted for living on the level of “Eastern potentates” while the “true enemies of the Church [are] simony, pride, lust, ambition, anger, impiety. These are the Turks against whom Christians must always be watchful . . . .”52 Yet, as with Erasmus’s attitudes to language in the conversion of “Turks,” his ideal Christian prince in the Sileni Alcibiadis is not without his problems. As Erasmus is defending himself from the imagined charge that he wants “a prince to be like what Plato makes his guardians in the Republic,” it would seem that the Christian prince is as far removed from the bodily senses as the real truth. He asks who has “the more exalted idea of kingly excellence”: his imagined interlocutor who wishes him to be a “despot,” “surfeit[s] him with pleasures . . . make[s] him the servant and bond-slave of his appetites . . . Or I, who desire to see a prince



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to be as like as can to God, whose image in some sort he bears, surpassing all other men in wisdom, which is the merit peculiar to kings, and far removed from all base desires and all distempers of the mind that carry away the common herd; I . . . want him to admire nothing common, to rise above riches, to be in short in the commonwealth what the soul is in the body and God is in the universe[.]”53 This invisible, almost celestial prince becomes the logical parallel to the desire to assert Christian identity with invisible yet unmistakable marks and eloquently “speak” to the “Turk” through a way of life when language has failed. These contradictory positions are, I suggest, the result of the desire to restore language to a point when it referred transparently to the divine alongside the simultaneous awareness that the very reason for such a restoration is that language in fact constitutes reality. In this sense it is highly significant that the only way of presenting reformed Christendom was possible in fiction. In contrast to Erasmus’s “stupid multitude,” the Utopians are able to see through the exterior and, as a consequence, treat gold and silver so that “no one values them more highly than their true nature deserves.”54 Specifically, they show an awareness that gold itself, without human imagination, is without value.55 This awareness is seen again in their attitude to those who take pleasure in a better cloak and think themselves better people for wearing it.56 The point would seem to be that the Utopians ignore the bodily senses as giving access to truth because they understand the material to signify only through human agency. That is, the Utopians seem to anticipate Saussure to see that signifiers are essentially vacuous and to have no essential relationship to either their signifieds or those who bear them. For this reason, Hythlodaeus would have us believe that the Utopians are able to avoid a “futile consensus” by which mortals imagine things to be “sweet to them in spite of their being against nature (as though they [mortals] had the power to change the nature of things as they do their names).” So far, this chapter has suggested ways in which the early modern court achieves an identity with the “Turk” as ambivalently “halfChristian” while Utopia also achieves a rhetorical identity with the “Turk” as a humanist strategy in the reformation of the Christian court. Crucially though, in this rhetorical strategy the “Turk” is offered as a negative comparison, while Utopia is a positive comparison and, alongside holding all things in common, it shares with the

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humanists an awareness of the vacuity of signs. This awareness, that names can be changed and that the meaning of signs is the product of human imagination and “futile consensus,” informs both Hythlodaeus’s account and Erasmus’s attempt to define the Christian in terms of conduct. The court becomes the center of an epistemological perversion that believes that the material can be made to signify, and then believes that signification. In this context, we can understand Erasmus’s concern to escape the bodily senses and his ambivalent attitudes toward signs and language. The point here is that as much as Erasmus seeks to illustrate the vacuity of the material sign as used in courtly discourse and restore scriptural language to an original meaning, as is implied by the earlier quotation from De rationne studii, the knowledge of words precedes the knowledge of things, and to this extent reality is always constituted by signs. But if this is the case, then we are forcibly returned to the question of what are the unmistakable marks of a Christian and how are they to be shown to the “half-Christian,” whether in the Ottoman Empire or in the Christian court. This question, of course, in terms of the Christian court, is the crux of the dispute of book 1 of Utopia. It is also where I see Utopia’s intervention in the two humanist debates on the nature of being a Christian and attention to the context of language. The significant point is that, as much as Hythlodaeus is willing to describe Utopia in Peter Gillis’s garden, he refuses to describe it in the council chamber, first, on the grounds that he would not be listened to, and second, after More’s advice to moderate his counsel because it would accomplish “nothing else than to share in the madness of others as [he] tried to cure their lunacy.”57 Thus, given the choice of not being heard or speaking falsehoods and dissembling Christianity among Christians, Hythlodaeus, citing Plato, chooses not to be heard.58 In this sense, he parallels the absence of the visible sign in the unmistakable mark of a Christian or of language in the eloquent discourse that will convert the “Turk” to become the fictional counselor to Erasmus’s invisible prince. This silent “part without words” is suggested by More’s response to Hythlodaeus’s thrusting of “novel ideas” on people. 59 Instead of Hythlodaeus’s “academic philosophy which thinks itself suitable to every place,” he suggests “another philosophy, more practical for statesmen, which knows its stage, adapts itself to the play in hand, and performs its role neatly and appropriately.” That is, it would



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seem that the would-be counselor to the “half-Christian” must be aware of his context. Yet this position is not as innocent as it might seem, because it implies not only that the counselor must address the world as he finds it, but must also use language as he finds it. Put another way, he must operate within the “futile consensus” that the Utopians have apparently avoided and respond to the implication that changing the name of something might also change its nature. Here it is worth noting that More’s approach is not without its problems and that in speaking at court he is (prophetically) denied the part without words allowed to Hythlodaeus. As Mary Thomas Crane has suggested, the textual More’s suggestion that the counselor is an “assumed role, rather than the expression of his wisdom and prudence, marks a radical departure from humanist theory and serves as threatening demystification of it.”60 Yet, as much as it risks humanist counsel as an act, this passage also highlights the difficulties humanists faced in speaking at court. It shows the counselor to be an artificial, false pose generated to efface the power relations in which he finds himself compelled to speak. The point that the councillor is compelled to speak within a “futile consensus” would seem to recall the argument of Brendan Bradshaw who, arguing against Hexter’s reading of the Utopians as Christians, highlighted that in one crucial respect the Utopians are not Christian at all. While the Utopians seem to embody Christian virtue and, like the “Turks,” believe in the immortality of the soul, and indeed their diverse religions are converging around a deity that looks suspiciously like a Christian God, the Utopians lack the cultic aspects of the Christian religion.61 In this sense, it might be suggested that, like the “Turk” and the Christian court, they be considered “half-Christian.” Because of this lack, Bradshaw sees Utopia not as an embodiment of a model of a reformed Christendom, but as an indicator of the need for an ongoing conversation between, on the one hand, the statesman, presented as the textual Thomas More, concerned with practicability and making what he cannot turn to good “as little bad as he can,” and, on the other hand, Hythlodaeus, the creation of the authorial More, an intellectual concerned with morality, as the two converge on the question of the best commonwealth.62 In this argument More’s final defense of private property and reservations about Utopian common life, “which utterly overthrows all the nobility, magnificence, splendor, and majesty which are, in the estimation of the common people,

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the true glories of the commonwealth” are explained in terms of political expediency.63 “The fact that the ‘common estimation’ was based on illusion was irrelevant.”64 While this may be irrelevant in the context of a debate about Christianity of Utopia, it does not seem irrelevant in a debate about humanist thinking about language and rules for speaking. In this context, there is an intimate relation between the signs of Christianity and the glories of the commonwealth. That is, with the destruction of its glories, the commonwealth ceases to be recognized as the commonwealth, both internally and externally. Here More would seem to recognize that signs are vacuous but also essential to identity, and that the same situation would seem to pertain to the signs of Christendom. Utopia’s intervention in the humanist reformulation of Christendom and humanist attention to language was to show that identity, Christian as much as courtly, is discursive and, as such, depends on signs. In this sense, Utopia shows what Erasmus does not dare say in Dulce bellum inexpertis : that “without the name and sign of the Cross,” Christians cease to be recognizable as Christians regardless of their conduct because the understanding of things, in this case, Christians, depends precisely on the signs that they bear. That is, and to return to Erasmus, Utopia highlights the contradiction between a humanist conception of language that emphasizes the priority of signs over things and skill in the “force of language,” as Eras­mus does in De ratione studii, and the aspiration that Christians be known and know themselves by conduct, sola virtute, without entering into the processes of signification. For Erasmus, the perception that signs have a priority over things prompted, on the one hand, a renewed attention to language that resulted in his translation of the New Testament, highlighting the instability and contingency of signs. On the other hand, despite this renewed attention, it also prompted the desire to either return signs to a mythical Platonic correlation with things and give signs an absolute and stable content, seen in The Education of the Christian Prince, or the desire to dispense with the material signs of identity altogether, as seen in works such as Dulce bellum inexpertis, because signs are vacuous and pretending to a content that they could not have. In contrast, More in Utopia recognizes the vacuity of signs but also that they are essential to identity, and that to eliminate the process of signification by which the courts asserted their pride and identity would also mean



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to eliminate the very same process by which Christians might proclaim their identity, both to themselves and others. In the years following the publication of the texts discussed above, these contradictions would play a significant role in the tearing apart of the consensus around Christian worship. Utopia, therefore, may be seen to anticipate arguments confronting more directly the contradictions in Erasmian thinking as they become increasingly unsustainable in the Reformation. In his Reformation texts, More directly asserts an equivalence between words and things. This equivalence is particularly felt in the images which both Utopia and the vision of Christendom announced in Dulce bellum inexpertis lack. Here More suggests to Reformers who would rely only on scripture that the name of Christ is just another image “representynge his person to mannes mynde and ymagynacyon.”65 In addition to being images, words “be no naturall sygnes or ymages but onely made by the consent and agreement of men.”66 As Brian Cummings has argued, “in his attack on the Lutherans, [More] comes close to deconstructing the Biblical text and the possibility of interpreting it.”67 Further, if to use the name of Jesus was to play with high stakes in the late 1520s, More also perceived that, to adapt a phrase from Stephen Greenblatt, there are not two forms of language, one referential and the other nonreferential, one for courtly pride and the other for Christian virtue.68 The consequence is that to eliminate the signs of Christianity, as much as to change “charity” into “love,” or “grace” into “favor,” would mean to “iugle awaye, not only those termys of grace and the very name of grace out of mennys earys / but also the bylefe of all grace, and therwith the effecte of all grace clene out of mennys hertes.”69

Humanism and Court Culture in the Education of Tudor Royal Children Aysha Pollnitz

In sixteenth-century England, northern humanists made

strident cases for educating young men and occasionally women in “good letters” (bonae litterae), a curriculum that emphasized the study of Latin and Greek grammar and rhetoric, classical authors and scripture. The schooling of princes attracted particular attention.1 Desiderius Erasmus (ca.1467­–1536), the great classical and biblical scholar, presented his Institutio principis Christiani (1516) to Henry VIII in 1517. Erasmus argued that in hereditary monarchies, “the main hope of getting a good prince hangs on his proper education.” It was to be “managed all the more attentively, so that what has been lost with the right to vote is made up for by the care given to his upbringing.”2 Erasmus’s French contemporary, Guillaume Budé, complained that despite this imperative for princely learning, rulers “fondly trumpet their ignorance of letters (litterae), and think none of their duty lies in the arts of peace.”3 This chapter examines the rise of the bonae litterae in the English court by examining its influence on the education of Tudor princes, particularly on the schooling of Henry VIII’s eldest children, Princess Mary (later Mary I, 1516–1558) and Henry Fitzroy (1519–1536), his illegitimate son who became Duke of Richmond in 1525. How successful were humanists in associating virtuous kingship with training in “good letters”? The study of early modern aristocratic education, pioneered by social historians, has gained impetus from the “new court history” that has emerged in the last two decades. Scholars, including John Adamson, have argued that early modern courts were not mono42



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lithic structures, let alone institutions devoted to princely propaganda. Rather, courts were subject to a variety of intellectual and artistic influences whose comparative strength at any moment depended on patronage networks. Humanists were educators, advisors, and men of letters who edited, imitated, and taught classical Latin and Greek literature, and who stressed its value for understanding contemporary politics, ethics, and religion. They represented one of the competing aesthetics in early modern courts. David Loades and Maria Dowling have proposed that humanists’ success in acquiring patrons and pedagogical appointments in Henry VIII’s reign ultimately transformed the education of courtiers and catalyzed the Elizabethan literary renaissance. Both scholars acknowledge, however, that English humanists, including those who served as schoolmasters to Henry VIII’s children, often met with indifference or even outright opposition at court.4 This lack of receptivity is hardly surprising. Prior to the English appearance of Baldessar Castiglione’s Il cortegiano (1528), a generation of northern humanists, including Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), a Spanish pedagogue, had proclaimed themselves disgusted by the existing court culture and the chivalric education that they reckoned had shaped it. Despite their horror, humanists were still determined to be a part of the English court. Historians have frequently attributed their willingness to serve to their desire to affect the moral and political edification of the governing class. In the words of Thomas More’s persona in Utopia, they hoped to make what they could not reform “as little bad as possible.”5 In From Humanism to the Humanities, however, Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine proposed that beneath such elevated rhetoric, humanist pedagogues were frequently self-interested types who turned out competent, docile linguists in order to win themselves powerful friends.6 If this was their plan, then court humanists were frequently thwarted. As Rebecca Bushnell has argued, in British royal schoolrooms, the pedagogical authority of the tutor was frequently trumped by the superior social status of his pupil. Bushnell characterized the schoolmaster’s experience as similar to Raphael Hythloday’s account of the princely counselor in book I of Utopia. Either this hapless adviser tried “to root out . . . the seeds of evil and corruption” and was “banished forthwith, or treated with scorn”; or he was seduced by thoughts of power and became dishonest himself; or he acted as “a screen for the knavery and folly of others” at

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court.7 In addition to asking how humanist pedagogues viewed the court, this essay examines the way they fashioned their role within it. Were they flatterers or honest counselors in its service? One way of answering this question is to consider humanists’ descriptions of the dangers inherent in traditional methods for bringing up courtiers as well as humanist claims regarding the benefits of liberal education. Having considered the relative position of the bonae litterae at court at the turn of the sixteenth century, this chapter will show how Erasmus’s, Vives’s, Thomas More’s, and Richard Pace’s pedagogical writings attempted to swing the balance in their own favor as they competed for patronage at court. Then the focus will shift from educational theory to practice. Specifically, I will claim that the theoretical arguments, as to whether future governors needed to be skilled with their pens or their swords, took material shape in the schoolrooms of Henry VIII’s eldest children. It was this debate that encouraged those “shews” of neoclassical learning that became an important measure for princely potential in the sixteenth century. Indeed, the final section of the chapter surveys the legacy of these early pedagogical discussions for subsequent humanists’ accounts of the English court and their advisory role within it.

Princely and Aristocratic Education in the Fifteenth Century If Erasmus had visited England in the later decades of the fifteenth century, he would have found that the court served as a center for the education of noble youths. According to John Fortescue, they were instructed “in athletics, moral probity and manners” at court.8 The household order for Edward IV (1471–73) confirms that up to fifty young aristocrats in his service were brought up to attend religious services; read and speak in English and French; ride, hunt, shoot, joust, and carry armor; possess table manners; play the harp and pipe; and to sing and dance by a “master of the henchmen.” While they gained a smattering of Latin from their grammar master, it is clear that their education was predominately chivalric. 9 Most of these youths encountered the classical world through works like Guillaume Fillastre’s Toison d’or (ca.1470). Burgundian literature adapted ancient legends, epics, and histories to espouse con-



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temporary codes of courtesy.10 Otherwise, one of the most widely circulated texts in fifteenth-century England was the romance of Tristan, which emphasized that a king must be trained in arms and manners to be a perfect knight.11 By the late fifteenth century, the duties of a knight involved everything from managing one’s own estate to occupying high civil and military offices for the Crown. In addition, the knight’s chivalric code was starting to include those rituals and activities that displayed one’s gallantry in a court setting rather than on the battlefield. An English knight was able to sing and dance and yearned to be elected to the Order of Saint George.12 Most of the literate members of society came from aristocratic and gentle families, but from his seventh birthday, and certainly after his fourteenth, a knight’s physical education often diverged somewhat from the schooling of a future clergyman, lawyer or physician. By the time of Erasmus’s 1505–6 trip to England, however, courtly education was changing. As the anonymous author of the Book of Noblesse put it, young men “descendid of noble bloode and borne to arms” had grown strangely concerned with “civile matiers.”13 The sons of Henry VII benefited from this heightened interest in literature, which they often read in classical Latin rather than French. One wonders how fully Prince Arthur absorbed the writings of twenty-five authors that his tutor, the poet and historian Bernard André, claimed that he had read. Yet the very existence of a list citing Virgil, Cicero, Livy, Ovid, Thucydides and Guarino of Verona, along with the stiff and ornate neoclassicism of Prince Arthur’s Latin epistles to Catherine of Aragon in 1499, indicate the humanist influence on his schooling.14 The poet John Skelton prepared a collection of Latin moral adages for his pupil, the future Henry VIII. The Speculum principis (composed 1501 and presented 1509– 12) was drawn from the Disticha Catonis (a third-century collection of Latin proverbs), the Bible, and the historical anecdotes of Valerius Maximus. Both Valerius Maximus and the Disticha had been recommended by Erasmus for the early stages of Latin grammar and composition. Indeed, Erasmus praised Skelton’s efforts in educating Prince Henry on a number of occasions.15 Skelton flirted with humanism, but he simultaneously schooled his charge in texts redolent of the traditional Burgundian literary culture. He probably used a mid-fifteenth-century tract Enseignement de vraie noblesse and a thirteenth-century version of Récits d’un

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ménestrel de Reims to instruct Henry in princely responsibilities. Henry was also taught French by Giles Duwes, who subsequently described the language as idiosyncratic and courtly, rather than as a halfway point to the perfection of classical Latin. Traditional chivalric exercises were emphasized in Henry’s upbringing, and the prince showed great facility in music, dancing, riding, hunting, and tilting. Indeed, while the adult Henry VIII desired to be thought of as a learned theologian and discriminating patron of the arts, his heart probably remained in the tiltyard.16 When Princess Mary was born in 1516, therefore, the cultural life of the English court was predominately chivalric, but it had a tincture of Erasmian humanism. Mary’s mother, Catherine of Aragon, had already signaled her support for the bonae litterae. She made Erasmus’s English patron, William Blount, Lord Mountjoy Chamberlain of her household in 1512. For humanists looking to establish themselves in Henry VIII’s court, therefore, Princess Mary’s survival of early infancy (and the hope that a healthy boy would follow her) offered opportunities for pedagogical office and the chance to tip the scales of royal education further toward the liberal arts and sciences.

Northern Humanists and the Call for Pedagogical Reform During the first two decades of Henry VIII’s reign, northern humanists offered the English court a series of pedagogical advice books. In their treatises, Erasmus, Vives, Pace, and More claimed that instead of learning to hunt and hawk, those born for the state should be educated liberally. Italian and French humanists writing about royal education had often praised magnificence (magnificentia) and the pursuit of military glory (gloria) as “princely” virtues. Consequently, they had included traditional chivalric training alongside good letters in their prescriptions.17 As Eric Nelson has pointed out, however, Henrician humanists, including Erasmus, More, and Pace, attacked these “neo-Roman” values in favor of a predominately Platonic account of the commonwealth, which emphasized contemplation and justice through the rule of reason.18 The Graecistes, as More called his circle, reckoned that chivalric training was cultivating a dangerous



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love of war and wealth at court. The Lucianic satire in Erasmus’s Adages (1515), the Querela Pacis (1518) and More’s Utopia (1516) and Epigrammata (1518), was frequently aimed at the animal appetites (appetitus) and the chivalric customs (consuetudo) that blinded men’s reason to the true consequences of warfare. Dominic Baker-Smith has proposed a specifically Anglo-Scottish context for these writings: Henry VIII’s 1513 invasion of France and James IV’s irresponsible foray into England which resulted in the Battle of Flodden. Among the dead was James’s illegitimate son Alexander Stewart, who had been a much-loved pupil of Erasmus.19 Northern humanists claimed that nothing less than the total substitution of bonae litterae for chivalry and courtly accomplishments would break vainglorious custom and tame the bestial appetites of future governors. In the Institutio principis Christiani, Erasmus insisted that “a prince’s prestige, his greatness, his regal dignity must not be established and preserved by noisy displays of privileged rank but by wisdom, integrity and right action.”20 Such “noisy displays” included martial exercises, playing instruments, hawking, and hunting. “What could be more foolish,” Erasmus demanded, “than to judge the prince by accomplishments like these: dancing gracefully, playing dice expertly, drinking liberally, giving himself airs [and] plundering the people on a regal scale . . . ?” These manifestations of the court’s preoccupation with magnificence encouraged rulers to shape their behavior with reference to external show rather than internal virtue. It was crucial to distinguish “a real king from the actor.” Moreover these courtly activities created an appetite for leisure (otium), which distracted the prince from his duty.21 Most critically, chivalric exercises and hunting encouraged odious militarism. A true Christian prince would rather tolerate an injury to the extent of his empire than to his citizens. In summary, chivalry taught princes to “play at tyrants,” a game they would perfect at the expense of their subjects. 22 By way of solution, Erasmus advocated stripping back aristocratic instruction so that there was little difference between the education that he proposed for a prince and the curriculum he recommended for boys at John Colet’s school at St. Paul’s.23 Erasmus’s arguments against military exercises, hawking, hunting, and dancing were seconded in contemporary humanist treatises. In the first book of More’s Utopia, Hythloday launched a scathing critique of warmongering European kings who had been

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“immersed . . . and infected with false values from boyhood on.” In book 2, he criticized hunting, in particular, for corrupting the character of its adherents. A more natural sense of pleasure could be derived from reading Greek moral philosophy.24 With respect to the misuse of leisure, Richard Pace’s De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur (1517) also contained a dialogue that castigated idle, ignorant noblemen. The set piece involved an aristocrat who insisted that instead of a liberal education, noblemen needed to learn to “blow the horn properly, hunt like experts and train and carry a hawk gracefully.” His respondent in this dialogue, a character called Pace, retorted that this limited curriculum would leave aristocrats unable to address ambassadors or participate in government. He warned that, as a result, “learned country boys would be called upon” to replace them. 25 While Pace cautioned the nobility, Vives counseled Henry VIII that the chivalric ethos threatened to render his aristocracy ungovernable. Unless they abandoned their swords for pens, they were likely to “sacrifice the public good to serve their private interest and imagine for themselves some foolish notion of liberty which will not make them free but evil.”26 Henrician humanists agreed that the commonwealth was poorly served when its governors were taught to value glory and magnificence rather than wisdom, integrity and piety. Despite the fact that aristocratic women did not typically take part in battle and usually played a secondary role in chivalric rituals, northern humanists were equally caustic about their customary education. Both Vives’s De institutione feminae Christianae (1523) and Erasmus’s Christiani matrimonii institutio (1526) were dedicated to Catherine of Aragon for the edification of her daughter Mary. Both contained harsh indictments of the existing state of female education, which they argued encouraged girls’ appetites at the expense of their reason. Erasmus complained that a fashionable upbringing typically involved going to church, not to pray but “to see and be seen,” singing lewd songs, and dancing to corrupting music with “the frantic shrilling of the pipes and the thumping of the drums, all adding to the frenzy.”27 Vives concurred that dancing, along with female adornment, indicated lasciviousness and was to be shunned by truly Christian women.28 What was needed, the humanists argued, was liberal education that would cultivate feminine reason and virtue, by which they meant piety, chastity and obedience. For Erasmus and Vives, female virtue was a passive creature,



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but she was as ill-served as her brother by chivalric customs of the court. In addition to condemning the physical side of chivalric training, Henrician humanists proscribed its literature. Vives prohibited Christian women, and tried to dissuade men, from reading the tales of Tristan, Lancelot du Lac, and Pyramus and Thisbe. “These books were written by idle, unoccupied, ignorant men, the slaves of vice and filth,” he thundered, “I wonder what it is that delights us in these books unless it be that we are attracted by indecency.”29 In the Institutio principis Christiani, Erasmus similarly condemned the tales of Arthur and Lancelot as “not only tyrannical but also utterly illiterate.”30 Certainly these works glorified war, but humanists were much more emphatic about their dangers for female readers who were unlikely to seek to emulate heroic feats of arms. Moreover, these “tyrannical” and “illiterate” French romances also contained many of the same moral lessons as humanist pedagogues had stressed in their pedagogical treatises, such as the importance of active service, justice, and self-restraint. 31 One begins to suspect, then, that Erasmus and Vives had an additional, unstated reason for wanting to exclude French romances from aristocratic schoolrooms. In part, at least, they attacked chivalric literature in the court for the same reason that they deprecated the use of Priscian’s and Donatus’s grammars in schools and criticized neo-Roman values in the republic of letters: they were attempting to emphasize the superiority of their own pedagogy over prevailing customs. The humanists’ battle, in England at least, was conducted for the ear of Henry VIII. Lines in this conflict were entrenched by patronage networks. Until the mid-1520s, their most powerful supporters were Catherine of Aragon and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Among Wolsey’s great enemies were the king’s “minions,” Henry’s carousing, pro-war, tiltyard friends who became Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber in 1518. As the library of Sir Nicholas Carew shows, the minions usually preferred tales of Enguerrain de Monstrelet and Lancelot to classical authors.32 Vives, Erasmus, Pace, and More were setting their pedagogy and politics against their patrons’ opponents, too. The humanists’ appeal for aristocratic schoolrooms to be purged of chivalric training did have a genuine and radical political component. Yet their protest also involved strategic rhetorical amplifica-

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tion (amplificatio). Moreover, their general critiques of court culture were issued alongside panegyrics, often in epistolary form, of its English manifestation. Erasmus’s 1519 letter to James Banisius, for instance, which describes Henry’s court as having more learned men than any university, has contributed to the humanist’s reputation for mendacity.33 Yet Erasmus himself explained on a number of occasions that a panegyric was intended to prescribe ideal behavior rather than praise its achievement. 34 Humanists were rhetoricians but not inevitably docile flatterers in the service of good letters and the arts of peace. There is evidence that their strategy of combining a general critique of chivalry with specific panegyrics of English learning bore fruit in raising the profile of the bonae litterae at court. In 1518, for instance, Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon supported Pace, More, and Erasmus’s case for Greek studies at Oxford against the “Trojans” intent on preserving the medieval statutes.35 Moreover, as we will see in the next section, the education of Henry VIII’s children was more self-consciously humanist than the king’s own schooling had been.

The Education of Mary Tudor and Henry, Duke of Richmond The educations of Henry VIII’s eldest children Princess Mary and Henry, Duke of Richmond, were commensurate with the humanists’ pedagogical treatises. Their schooling shows that Erasmus’s and Vives’s prescriptions were influential at court. Both royal children studied under tutors who were learned in the bonae litterae: the scholar and clergyman Richard Fetherston was appointed to teach Mary in around 1525, and the prominent grammarian John Palsgrave and the diplomat and Greek scholar Richard Croke became Richmond’s schoolmasters in 1525 and 1527, respectively. Erasmus praised Mary’s progress in Latin grammar, suggesting that she may have been following Thomas Linacre’s prescriptions in the Rudimenta grammatices (1523) and aspects of Vives’s curriculum in the first letter of De ratione studii puerilis (1523), both of which were dedicated to her. 36 Richmond studied Latin composition and italic handwriting by composing letters to his father and Wolsey. Under his schoolmasters, he read a number of authors whom Erasmus had



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recommended for the early stages of Latin grammar, including Terence and Virgil. Yet neither Richmond nor Mary was introduced to the northern humanists’ pet subject, classical Greek. Indeed, Palsgrave recalled that Thomas More had advised him that “a lytyll Latine schould serue so the saide Duc myght haue Frenshe.” “To be playne with you,” Palsgrave concluded, “me thynketh that our shavyn [corrupt] folk wold in no wyse he schoulde be lernyd.”37 The tension between court custom and the bonae litterae in the education of royal children had become more than rhetorical. Both Mary and Richmond were instructed in precisely those chivalric exercises that the Henrician humanists condemned. Mary learned music and dancing, activities that Vives and Erasmus had forbidden for true Christian women. According to three of François I’s gentlemen, who visited the princess at Richmond on July 2, 1520, Mary received them “with the most goodly countenance, proper communication and pleasant pastime in playing at the virginals.”38 It was a performance designed to impress: Henry VIII had recently betrothed his young daughter to the French dauphin. Indeed, this was the first of many occasions on which Mary danced or played to further her father’s schemes for her marriage. In 1527 her dancing pleased another delegation of French ambassadors visiting England as part of a plan to contract her to either François or Henri, duc d’Orleans. The masque in which she performed involved telling imagery. Its dominant hues were the Tudor colors of red and white: rubies and coral were interspersed between roses and (Spanish) pomegranates rambling over a gilded mountain. In the midst of the tableau, Mary emerged from a cave inside the mountain. Plato’s cave perhaps? Was she the future philosopher-king bringing England as her dowry? 39 Vives and Erasmus had insisted that dancing in public indicated a lack of chastity, but Mary’s performances, one of which hijacked their favorite model of good rule, were used to emphasize her potential to grace the court of her future spouse. The literary debate about the value of hawking and hunting described in Richard Pace’s De fructu was replicated in a genuine standoff between the gentlemen of the Duke of Richmond’s household and his humanist tutors. In 1525, the duke was sent to preside over the northern counties of his father’s realm. In the same year, Richmond’s first master, Palsgrave, complained to More that his charge was continually distracted from his lessons by sports. Every day “more and more sondry callers” arrived to insist that he shoot,

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hunt, hawk, and ride for them. 40 In July 1527, Croke, who succeeded Palsgrave, begged Wolsey to decree that the duke’s studies “be not interrupted for ever y tr yefull, or reasorte of ever y stranger.”41 Like Pace and Erasmus, Richmond’s tutors were concerned that the duke’s appetite for leisure was being encouraged by ignorant advocates of horn-blowing. Unless Richmond attended to his studies, they warned, he would be of little use to his father’s government. George Cotton, a gentleman usher at Sheriff Hutton, was described by the tutors as the prime scourge of Richmond’s schooling. In 1527, Croke claimed that Cotton withdrew the duke and his schoolfellows to archery practice when they should have been in the schoolroom. A further epistle from Croke to Wolsey in 1528 charged Sir William Parr, the household’s chamberlain, with setting a poor example for Richmond by his own idleness and love of the chase.42 Parr and Cotton allegedly encouraged the boys to taunt their teacher, even in church, calling him a “Notorious rascal, presumptuous and bile-filled” (Notum, Nebulonem, Improbum, Melancholicum). Cotton mocked those who were “learned in Roman letters” to the duke’s schoolfellows and defended Richmond when his schoolmaster rebuked him for grammatical mistakes.43 Cotton’s actions seem to have been aimed at undermining the pedagogical authority of the tutors by emphasizing their low social (and, implied moral) status.44 Croke, Palsgrave, and aristocratic boys who took their academic lessons too seriously were base clerks. For his part, Croke feared that Richmond’s wit, which showed “the greatest promise,” was liable to be “ruined under such masters, who measure everything for their own pleasure and utility, and nothing for the advantage of their lord.”45 In fact, if the constant riding and archery practice are indicative, Cotton and Parr were probably trying to instruct the duke in the traditional and, in their view, more noble art of chivalry. Hunting was taken seriously by Richmond’s northern council. Thomas Magnus, the duke’s surveyor, wrote to Wolsey in 1527, gloating that upon a request from James V of Scotland, Richmond had “sent to the said king tenne couple of his oune houndes” and a suitably unctuous letter. Magnus wrote that he trusted that this overture would ensure “myche goodnes, perfite love, and favour . . . betwene booth the young princes.”46 As far as the householders were concerned, Richmond’s chivalric and sporting interests had more diplomatic value than a



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piece of well-turned Latin. So, when Palsgrave and Croke actually attempted to apply Erasmus’s and Vives’s rhetorically charged prescriptions and purge chivalric training from Richmond’s curriculum, they, like Hythloday’s honest counselor, met with ridicule and scorn. The tension at Sheriff Hutton has been put down to a conflict between the fashionable southern court, open to new ideas about learning, and the backward northerners of Richmond’s household who persisted in the old ways.47 As we have seen, however, Henry’s minions were keeping chivalric culture alive in the Privy Chamber, and the king himself was deeply susceptible to its charms. Indeed, when Croke protested to Cotton that Wolsey preferred that Richmond remain indoors with his books rather than hunt or hawk, Cotton allegedly replied that “my lord Cardinal will not dare to maintain those orders if the king choose to dispute with them.”48 On this occasion, Wolsey and the humanists were forced to moderate their demands. Henry might have respected the bonae litterae and tolerated humanists’ moderately critical counsel, but he was never going to become an opponent of militarism or courtly display. Erasmus’s suggestion that princes should be instructed in nothing more than the plan of studies prescribed for learned commoners would never be realized in the English court. By 1526/27, Croke and Mary’s tutor, Fetherston, seemed to have digested this unpleasant dish. Rather than continue to follow Erasmus and Vives in berating the moral corruption seeded by chivalric displays, the royal tutors learned from their opponents at court. They developed ways in which their pupils could display their expertise in the bonae litterae too. Croke proposed to Wolsey that instead of riding for his visitors, Richmond might “exhibit and make som shew of his lerninyng.”49 He also ensured that the duke sent regular letters to his father and Wolsey in a fine italic hand “to make demonstration off thys [his] procedinge in writinge.”50 Mary was also encouraged to show off her grammatical prowess. In 1527, her translation of a prayer of Thomas Aquinas was circulated so that learned courtiers, like Henry Parker, Lord Morley might “not only meruell at the doinge of yt, but farther for the well doynge.”51 Morley’s politic delight made the point neatly: pedagogues had cultivated Mary to the extent that she could be praised for her erudition as well as her dancing. Of course, continental humanists had long been adept promot-

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ers of their own erudition. Prior to the education of Mary and Richmond, however, there is less evidence that English pedagogues extended the humanist culture of display to schoolroom exercises. From the late 1520s onward, however, all English royal children were taught to make “shew[s] of . . . lernyng” for the court. If the bonae litterae were going to be considered useful for princes as well as scholars, they had to offer opportunities for royal children to display their precocity. Indeed, Mary’s and Richmond’s exhibitions contained specific messages designed to promote the value of liberal education to the court. Richmond’s letters to Henry VIII and his godfather Wolsey routinely rehearsed the connection between learning, virtue, and the commonwealth, which Erasmus had emphasized. The eight-year-old duke promised to “applie and incline me to my lerning, and to procede in vertue.”52 When Richmond wrote to his father on Croke’s departure from Sheriff Hutton in 1528, he praised his tutor for taking “payne, labour, and diligence tenduce me in Lerninge” in order that he might “be more able to serve youre said highenes.”53 The letter was his schoolmaster’s final sally against the proponents of chivalry at Sheriff Hutton. Pace had argued that only a liberal education would enable noblemen to take their places in the king’s service: Croke ensured that the message was parroted back to Henry in the painstaking italic of his son. Mary’s translations also testified to the nature and purpose of her schooling. In her English version of the “Prayor of saynt Thomas of Aquine,” its speaker implores God to “graunte [her] to covyt with an ardent mynde those things whiche may please [him].”54 With this translation, Mary showed that like Vives’s Christian woman, she spent her otium in devotional reading rather than dancing. While Vives had warned Christian women against preaching, he had encouraged them to instruct children and servants on moral and religious topics. The princess’s efforts, circulated openly under her name, combined the courtly ethos of display with humanist injunctions for female piety and modesty. Erasmus, Pace, and Vives had attacked activities like dancing, hawking, and hunting in order to promote the bonae litterae at court. Richmond’s education, however, shows that their writings had helped to generate a material tension between the two cultural aesthetics in the early years of the sixteenth century. While the humanists’ radical attack on court culture had won them powerful patrons like Wolsey and Catherine, in practice, Henry required his



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children’s schoolmasters to accept their instruction in chivalric exercises. Fetherston, Palgrave, and Croke were not utterly downtrodden, however. They recognized that by training royal children to produce exhibitions of their learning, they could trumpet its importance. Mary’s and Richmond’s juvenile works did more than show their princely potential. They ventriloquized the value of liberal education for the court.

Consequences for Princely Education in the Sixteenth Century In the years between 1525 and 1534, the machinations of Henry VIII’s long divorce and break from Rome stripped Pace, Vives, and More of their influence at court. Fetherston was arrested in 1534 and executed six years later for refusing to take the oath of supremacy. Even the loyal Croke watched his career languish in the 1540s. The king grew intolerant of any counsel that did not forward his predetermined objectives, let alone advice that made explicit criticisms of his court. 55 These changes resulted in a number of consequences for the theory and practice of English royal education. Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano had arrived in London by 1530. The work depicted the ideal aristocrat as one who combined Ciceronian eloquence with chivalric prowess. It was a model in tune with Henry VIII’s self-image.56 Moreover, Castiglione’s claim that potential counselors should win a prince’s favor by using the arts of pleasing rather than through Erasmian-style criticism proved better suited to the time. In the 1530s, Thomas Elyot and Thomas Starkey followed Castiglione’s lead in arguing for a balance between chivalry and humanist learning in aristocratic education. In The Boke Named the Gouernour (1531), dedicated to Henry, Elyot applauded Greek studies and Erasmus’s Institutio principis Christiani. Yet he also argued that hunting served as an important preparation and “imitacion of batayle” for future governors. Dancing, moreover, prepared both noblemen and women for the reciprocal duties of marriage. 57 In A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (written ca. 1532), Starkey emphasized the importance of letters but he was similarly keen to see nobles occupy their “voyd times” with “featys of the body and chyvalry.”58 Elyot and Starkey acknowledged that overindulgence in chivalric recreations might lead one to neglect affairs

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of state. Ultimately, however, they agreed with Castiglione that, when practiced moderately, such exercises were outer manifestations of inner virtue.59 Elyot and Starkey’s apparently more conciliatory model was not simply pandering to Henry VIII’s shorter fuse. While the Graecistes had aimed to moderate princely government by raising the profile of the bonae litterae and reducing the influence of the pro-war party at court, Elyot’s and Starkey’s treatises imagined a commonwealth in which the king took the nobility into his political confidence. By praising chivalric pursuits for governors, they made it clear that, by birth and schooling, the aristocracy were the monarch’s natural advisors. Indeed Starkey proposed that because kings (however well educated) could not be trusted to rule moderately on their own, they “must be temperyd & brought to ordur” by others, nominally a council of learned aristocrats. 60 This neo-Roman theory of the “myxte state” and the concordant “balance” between a liberal education and chivalry in aristocratic schooling was also evident in Thomas Hoby’s translation of The Courtyer (1561) and Humphrey Gilbert’s 1572 plan for an academy for court wards.61 After 1530, therefore, English humanist pedagogical theory reflected the experience of educating royal children in the 1520s. After Sheriff Hutton, there were no further attempts by royal tutors to curtail their charges’ riding or archery practice. In an early draft of The Scholemaster, Roger Ascham praised Elizabeth for her expertise in Greek and in “ridingge most trymlie, in dansing most comlye, in playing of Instrumments most excellentye.” Despite all of this, she remained as chaste as Diana when it came to “courtlye pleasing” and “vayne delites.”62 Similarly, Edward VI’s Chronicle abounds with accounts of running at ring and shooting at base. Edward’s schoolmaster, John Cheke, made no complaint and regularly circulated reports of the king’s simultaneous progress in rhetoric and Greek moral philosophy. 63 The lack of Croke-ish grumbles from these later royal schoolmasters suggests their confidence that the bonae litterae, and Greek studies particularly, were holding their own in princely education. Later royal schoolmasters also imitated and amplified the practice established by Mary’s and Richmond’s tutors, of displaying their princely charges’ erudition. James VI and I’s first heir, Prince Henry, even matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1605.64 Over the course of the sixteenth century, this practice meant that



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as well as shaping a royal child, education became an exercise in fashioning subjects’ attitudes toward their (future) ruler. In the Basilicon Doron (1599 and 1603), for instance, K ing James instructed Prince Henry to consider rhetoric and poetry in the same category as hawking, hunting, and tilting. If practiced correctly, these “indifferent things” served “greatly for allurements to the people” whose goodwill and obedience could be secured by such shows of royal virtuosity. 65 By teaching princes to display their learning, royal pedagogues had made knowledge of the bonae litterae a stunt that monarchs could use to secure and even extend their authority.

Conclusion Erasmus and the Tudor educators who followed him would have been horrified by the accusation that their pedagogical prescriptions amounted to self-interested flattery. They consistently made the case for moderate, pious, and diligent government and for liberal education, a mechanism that they thought would advance such government. Yet northern humanists were strategic in the pursuit of these ends and adjusted their claims with an eye to their patrons and the prevailing mood at court. Vives, More, Erasmus, and Pace may have been horrified by the consequences of war, but they also exaggerated its relationship to court culture and French literature in order to distinguish their own pedagogy. In the royal schoolroom, Croke, in particular, adopted precisely those courtly modes of display that his fellow humanists had condemned in order to simulate Richmond’s love of learning. One might argue that this modification was an example of what the character “More” in Utopia called adapting one’s philosophy “to the drama at hand.”66 In the end, however, humanists were not as cunning as they thought. Their “shews of . . . lernyng” made princely erudition a trick that a monarch like James VI and I could use to secure his subjects’ awe and obedience. This was, of course, the antithesis of Erasmus’s objective in writing the Institutio principis Christiani. Humanist pedagogues at Henry VIII’s court may well have laid the ground for the Elizabethan literary renaissance but, inadvertently, they also watered the seeds of Jacobean absolutism. The tense relationship between humanists and proponents of

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chivalry suggests that the age of Henry VIII did not combine the two aesthetics as seamlessly as has sometimes been supposed. Indeed, the competition between them—backed by rival proponents and patrons—was important in developing the ethos of the early modern court. In addition to seeking patronage themselves, humanists were theorists of the political offices and relationships that propelled this rivalry. As long as their dual status as players and commentators is recognized, northern humanist accounts of monarchy offer a keyhole into the ideas that shaped the English court.

The Tudor Court: Dust and Desire Thomas Betteridge

This essay is concerned with desire of and for the early Tudor

court. Henry’s court was at once a brutal, concrete reality and a mirage, an illusion. In the work of writers like John Skelton and Thomas Wyatt, the court is simultaneously desired and achieved, celebrated and condemned; it is the ground from which they write and the object that they desire. The court in its fullness hides this tension within the internal wealth of its culture, in the depths of its writing, painting, and drama, only for this tension to return in the materiality of courtly forms. The Tudor court told itself—and anyone prepared to listen—that it was the center of power, authority, and culture. It consistently created metaphoric celebrations of itself as the center of the realm, while in the writing of poets like Wyatt and Skelton, its contingent nature stages a subversive return. Ernesto Laclau has commented that, “all hegemony tries to re-totalize and to make as necessary as possible the contingent links on which its articulating power is based. In this sense, it tends to metaphorical totalization. This is what gives it its dimension of power. It is power, however, which maintains the traces of its contingency and is, in that sense, essentially metonymic.”1 This essay addresses the trace of contingency, the dust of partiality, as it appears in early Tudor writing. The Tudor court’s version of itself is marked by a simultaneous assertion of itself as a place of order, harmony, and authority and an anxious desire to obscure its disordered fractured reality. This discussion is in two parts. The first section will examine a number of mid-Henrician responses to the court, including Wyatt’s courtly lyrics, while the second part will look in detail at the work of Skelton. This chapter will argue that the Henrician court paradoxically exists in its purest state in the work of Skelton before this 59

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court starts to emerge as a coherent institution during the 1520s and ’30s. In Magnyfycence and The Bowge of Courte, Skelton creates a Henrician court before the avant la lettre, a spectral court that haunted the real thing, not as a hidden secret but as dust, detritus, as a material reminder of the court’s consistent failure to achieve its fantasy of itself.2

The Tudor Court Bishop John Fisher had a very clear view of what he thought was the true nature of Henry VIII’s court. Drawing upon his experiences of visiting the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Fisher commented on the courtly splendor of the meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I. I doubte nat but ye haue herde of many goodly syghtes which were shewed of late beyonde the see, with moche Ioy and pleasure worldly. Was it nat a great thynge within so shorte a space, to se thre great Prynces of this worlde? . . . accompanied with so many other fayre ladyes in sumptuouse and gorgeous apparel / suche daunsynges, suche armonyes, such dalyaunce, and so many pleasaunt pastimes, so curyouse howses and buyldynges, so preciously apparayled, such costely welfare of dyners, souppers, and bankettys, so delicate wynes, soo precyouse meatys, such and soo many noble men of armes, soo ryche and goodly tents, suche tourneys, and such feates of warre.3

Fisher’s words invoke an image of the Field of the Cloth of Gold as a cornucopia of courtly pleasure. His rhetorical strategy in this passage is to combine specific objects with generalized terms so that his listeners and readers are incited to indulge their imaginations, to create a totalizing metaphoric court of their own desire and desires filled with precious foods, curious buildings and pleasant pastimes; a court that is at once a place of endless consumption and that endlessly consumes. Not surprisingly, Fisher goes on to critique the pleasures offered by the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and in particular he compares them unfavorably with the joys of heaven. It is, however, only later in the sermon that the listener or reader is exposed to the full weight of Fisher’s critique of courtly life. Fisher writes “that lytell whyle that we were there [the Field of the Cloth of Gold], somtyme there was suche dust, and therewithall so great wyndes, that all the ayre was full of dust. The gownes of veluet and



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clothe of gold were full of dust / the ryche trappers of horses were full of dust / hates, capes, gownes, were full of dust / the here and faces of men were full of dust / and briefly to speke, horse and man were so encombred with dust, that scantly one myght se another.”4 Fisher’s dust reduces all the curious, delicate detail of his earlier description of the Field of the Cloth of Gold to one indistinguishable mess or chaos of dust; where before there appeared to be an endless collection of sights to feast one’s eyes upon, now there is only dust. The metaphor of dust for sin is, of course, a traditional one; what makes Fisher’s use of it so powerful is the way he deploys it to reverse his earlier image of a consuming court of endless consumption. Now, instead of plenteous delicacies united by their desirability and availability, one is presented with a totalizing dust that, in its remorseless materiality, reduces everything to the same dirty encumbered state. The Eltham Ordinances were passed in 1526 to regulate the court. Their aim and scope were sweeping. They were designed to be all-encompassing, with every facet of court life coming within their purview. For example, the “Boche of the Court,” which details the fees to be paid to various members of the court, spells out exactly what Anne Harris, the king’s laundress, should wash every week. “The said Anne [Harris] shall weekly wash 7 long Breakfast clothes, 7 short ones, 8 Towels, 3 dozen of Napkins, and Pieces as need shall require; and by the same shall deliver as much . . . as shall be necessary to serve the King’s Majesty.” Harris was also to “provide as much sweet Powder, sweet Herbs, and other sweet things, as shall be necessary to be occupied for the sweet keeping of the said stuff . . . ”5 The precision with which Harris’s duties are set out in the ordinances is typical. Their ultimate aim was to create a court that was entirely fixed and self-regulating. Indeed, there is a mechanical logic to their precision suggesting that if everyone carries out his or her duties as specified, if Harris always provides as much sweet powder as necessary, the court will function perfectly without further human intervention. This image of the court as a self-regulating machine can obviously be related to the similar logic that drives Thomas More’s Utopia, in which rules set down in the mists of time keep the Utopian commonwealth in perfect working order. The ordinances, however, and again like More’s Utopian state, are haunted by knowledge of their own provisional flawed nature. For example, the Ordinances

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spend some time discussing court meals and the eating habits of courtiers. They order that “all such as have their lodgings within the court” not to, “cast, leave, or lay any maner of dishes, platters, saucers, or broken meat, either at the . . . galleryes, or at their chamber doors, or in the court, or other place; but immediately after they shall have occupied them, to carry them into the squillery.”6 Later, the ordinances prohibit the dining of noblemen in “corners” stating that, “forasmuch as by reason that sundry noblemen, gentlemen, and others, doe much delight and use to dyne in corners and secret places, not repairing to the king’s chamber nor hall . . . by reason whereof the good order of the said chamber and household is greatly impaired . . . ”7 The Ordinances seek to create a totalizing image of the court as transparent and ordered, but in the process seem unable to avoid creating an alternative court marked by secrecy and mess; a court in which noblemen delight to dine in corners and where dirty plates litter the corridors. There is a basic incompatibility between the court ordinances seek to bring into being and the one that they actually describe. A very similar tension lies at the heart of two court plays, The Enterlude of Godly Queene Hester and John Heywood’s The Play of the Weather.8 Queene Hester stages a failure of counsel that takes place in a clearly courtly setting. The play is based on the biblical book of Esther. It appears to create a rather daring equation between the attacks on monasticism in Tudor England with the persecution of the Jews perpetrated by the villain in the book of Esther, Haman. In this play, King Assuerus marries Hester but is then persuaded by his corrupt counselor Aman to purge the realm of Jews. The play ends, after Hester has persuaded the king to reverse his policy, with the death of Aman on his own gallows. Queene Hester hinges on the proper functioning of the court since at its heart is a set of relationships that only make sense in a courtly setting. In particular, the oscillation between the personal and public that marks the play is profoundly courtly. It is only when Hester acts simultaneously in the public and private domains as Assuerus’s wife and most trustworthy counselor that Aman’s corruption is revealed. There are a number of vice figures in Queene Hester: Pride, Adulation, Ambition, and Hardydardy. The first three are relatively conventional figures. In this play they have, however, been made redundant by Aman. When Pride tells his fellow vice, Adulation, that,



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“Aman . . . woulde no man but hym selfe / Shoulde be proude,” Adulation responds by making a similar complaint about Aman’s behavior, Adulation: Pryde: Adulation:

And, as for Adulation, must change his occupation, It is not worth a pease. Why so? For my lorde Aman doeth al that he can, I assure you, without doubt, To take up al flatterers, and al crafty clatterers That dwell fourtye myle aboute.9



Aman’s evil has left no place for pride, adulation or ambition. The status of the final vice is, however, rather different. Hardydardy is a strange figure. It is not really possible to translate his name. Indeed, to do so is in some ways immediately to miss the point of this vice since Hardydardy above all represents the trickster or clown. His name is part of who he is since Hardydardy’s speech, like his name, puts sound before meaning, playfulness before sense. Hardydardy at one level represents the theatre, and he is therefore, in a strange way, a chorus-like figure. Certainly this is the role that he appears to occupy at the end of the play when it is Hardydardy who tells Assuerus what has happened to Aman. Hardydardy: Phalaris coulde not get with in the bull to shett (Lo, here beginnes the game!) Wherefore, in dede, he toke for nede Perillus, maker of the same.

In he did him turne, and made the fier to burne And greatly to increace. He cast him in such heate, and eke in such sweate, He fried him in his greace.

Assuerus: What meane you by this? Hardydardy: I wyll tell you, by gis, my hole intencion. I meane, my master is the fyrste taster Of his owne invencion. The gallhouse he made, both hye and brode, For Mardocheus [Hester’s uncle] he them mente; And how he is faine him selfe, for certaine, To play the fyrste pagente.

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Queene Hester ends with Aman defeated but with Hardydardy still at large. Indeed, it is at least arguable that Hardydardy’s role is enhanced at the end of the play, given that it is he who has to tell Assuerus that Aman has been hung. It is also noticeable that while the rest of the characters remain consistently within the frame of the play, it is Hardydardy who can step outside of it and remind the audience that they are watching a pageant. As courtly entertainment, Queene Hester flatters that court as a place where decisions are made. This is not to suggest that this play was performed at court, but it is to argue that the way it imagines the Henrician polity functioning is courtly. John Guy comments that, if “Court and Council were the hub of national politics, relations between Court and Country were the key to political stability.”10 In Queene Hester, there are two conduits through which the country makes itself heard in the closed world of the court—a world, moreover, in which council has been fundamentally undermined by Aman’s corruption. One of these is Hester, who as a Jew has a privileged, if slightly ambiguous, link to the victims of the persecution instigated by Aman. The other, however, is clearly Hardydardy, who not only, as has been suggested, at times plays the role of the chorus, but who also represents the voice of popular folk wisdom, the wit of the marketplace or tavern. Hardydardy embodies the relationship between the court and the country. He is alien to the court and at the same time part of it. Unlike the other vices, Hardydardy’s status is ambiguous: neither fully evil nor totally benign, he hovers between the two states, reminding the audience of both what the court was not and what it relied upon in order to exist. The vice in John Heywood’s The Play of the Weather, Merry Report, embodies a very similar tension. Merry Report, however, has an even closer relationship to the court than Hardydardy. At the opening of Heywood’s play, Jupiter comes to earth in order to resolve the disputes that are raging among his human subjects over the weather. He decides that he needs someone to manage the process for him, and the vice Merry Report puts himself forward. When Jupiter questions his qualification for the role, Merry Report responds by telling the god that as no one else had applied for the job, he does not have any choice. Merry Report goes on to defend his name to Jupiter by telling him a bawdy story.



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Merry Report: And for my name, reportyng alwaye trewly What hurte to reporte a sad mater merely? As by occasyon, for the same entent To a serteyne wedow thys daye was I sent Whose husbande departyd without her wyttynge (A specyall good lover and she hys owne swettynge) To whom at my commyng I caste such a figure, Mynglynge the mater accordyng to my nature, That when we departed above all other thynges She thanked me hartely for my mery tydynges.11

This speech exemplifies Merry Report’s ambiguous nature. It is bawdy and humorous, misogynistic and reductive. It relies on the audience not engaging for a moment with the reality of the husband’s death. In this speech the widow is pleasured by Merry Report’s impressive “figure,” while the audience is seduced by his wit. Merry Report deploys his status as a fool, a vice, to mediate between the world of the court and the country, widow and audience. It is this meditative role that gives the vice his power. In these terms, Jupiter’s decision to appoint Merry Report to manage the discussion over the weather is more sensible than it initially appears. The Play of the Weather at once enacts and obscures the dependent relationship between court and country. In the process, it places Merry Report in a very powerful symbolic position. In particular, the theatrical enactment of his assumption of the role of mediator works to obscure the extent to which this role existed before it is created by the play’s narrative. Slavoj Žižek comments that, “The price one pays for narrative resolution is the petitio principii of the temporal loop—the narrative silently presupposes as already given what it purports to reproduce. . . . .”12 Žižek’s argument is that narrative serves to obscure some original deadlock so that by making something subject to narratological production, it hides the extent to which it is ultimately contingent and arbitrary. By creating a narrative of Merry Report’s appointment to the role of mediator between court and country, Heywood hides the extent to which Merry Report already represents the dependency of the court on its links with the country. Wyatt’s courtly poems embody a very similar symbolic structure. Wyatt consistently creates texts that seek to totalize the contingent. In particular, Wyatt’s court poems are marked with an internality that tempts the unwary reader to delve deeper and deeper into

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them for a meaning that they have already passed through, around, or over. James Simpson has recently argued that a distinguishing feature of Wyatt’s poetry is its inability to escape a disabling paralysis at its heart.13 This sense of entrapment is true, not only of the lyrics Wyatt writes, but also his satires. The poem, “My mother’s maids when they did sew and spin,” is a beast fable. As such it invites the reader to indulge in a specific form of topical interpretation, reading the beasts as representative of contemporary issues. In particular, “My mother’s maids” is designed to incite its readers to draw a parallel between the experience of the town and country mice and that of Tudor people drawn to the court by fantasies of wealth and advancement only to find it dangerous and vicious. At one level, it appears that “My mother’s maids” has a relatively uncomplicated message, which is that the simplicity and hardship of the countryside is preferable to the danger of the court and town. Having recounted the story of the town and country mice, Wyatt then goes on to tell the reader through an address to John Poyntz the moral of his beast fable, which is, “Each kind of life hath with him his disease.”14 The final recommendation of the poem is to “. . . seek no more out of thyself to find / The thing that thou hast sought so long before, / For thou shalt feel it sitting in thy mind.”15 There is, however, something uncanny about what appears on the surface to be a relatively straightforward statement of Stoic philosophy. What is this “thing” that can be found sitting in one’s mind? The implication of Wyatt’s poem is that it has been there all along, waiting to be “felt” or found. Even more worrying is the symbolic link between this “thing” and the cat that catches and eats the unwary country mice. Amidst this joy befell a sorry chance That, wellaway, the stranger brought full dear The fare she had. For as she looked askance, Under a stool she spied two steaming eyes In a round head with sharp ears. In France Was never mouse so feared, for though th’unwise Had not yseen such a beast before, Yet had nature taught her after her guise To her know her foe and dread him evermore.16

There is a level at which the cat has always been waiting for the mouse, and certainly the end of the country mouse’s narrative was



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always going to be this sad encounter with her ancestral enemy. Wyatt’s narrative effectively creates two stories, one a beast fable and one an admonition, both of which conclude with the subjects recognizing a thing that has always sat in their minds. It would be a mistake, however, to see this moment of recognition as one of self-discovery. At the heart of “My mother’s maids” is a moment in which the self recognizes itself as radically external. The truth of the cat as the country mouse’s destiny has always been there waiting outside her fantasies of a good life; the truth, the thing sitting in men’s minds, has always been there, and it is only their constant seeking that has prevented them finding it. Stephen Greenblatt has suggested that the narrators of Wyatt’s court satires, once they withdraw from court life, achieve “a sense of self-confidence and self-content, of integrity and invulnerability.”17 Green­ blatt goes on, however, to argue that the cost of this new sense of self is a “coldness that lurks beneath the surface energy” and “a stiffening sense that seem to preclude the possibility of full emotional life.”18 The country mouse in “My mother’s maid,” however, does not experience the country as a place of self-confidence. For her it is a place of lack filled by fantasies of an easy life in the town. “My sister,” quod she, “hath a living good And hence from me she dwelleth not a mile. In cold and storm she lieth warm and dry In a bed of down. The dirt doth not defile Her tender foot. She laboureth not as I. Richly she feedeth and at the rich man’s cost, And for her meat she need not crave nor cry.”19

Greenblatt is undoubtedly right to suggest that there is something lacking in the country that Wyatt’s court poems seem to have in abundance. But it is not sexuality or power. For Wyatt and his narrators, the court as a fantasy offers a way of avoiding its reality. It is in the arbitrary contingent nature of the cat that the reality of court life returns to in “My mother’s maids.” The fantasy of a court as a site of sexuality, desire, and power, the fantasy that runs through Greenblatt’s analysis of Wyatt’s poetry, is a court fantasy. The reality of the Henrician court sits in, or more accurately on, the surface of poems like “My mother’s maids” or, even more so, “Whoso list to hunt” with its incitement to be read as a complex text whose meaning resides in the swirling dance of Henrician love

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politics. “Whoso List to Hunt” creates an image of courtship as a form of hermeneutic hunting. It suggests that all will be rendered to the reader/hunter once the deer, love, meaning has been achieved. The reality of the court life that this poem at once articulates and obscures is marked by the tension between the expansiveness of the proverbial tag, “to catch the wind in a net,” and its location within a tightly closed formal sonnet that claims to be the product of the narrator’s internalized love trauma. Greg Walker has recently suggested that “My mother’s maids” articulates a similar tension between the generalized ethos of its beast fable and the specific criticisms it makes of Henry VIII’s court.20 In “Whoso Lists to Hunt,” Wyatt’s takes the image of love as hunting and uses it as a totalizing metaphor for the courtiership. In the process, it seeks to hide or obscure the contingent provisional nature of the court by raising its narrator’s predicament to a universal level by means of exploiting the ethical status of proverbial discourse.21 The ultimate metonymic failure of this moment of totalization is, however, marked by the tension between the poem’s two nets—the one with which the narrator/reader seeks to catch the wind and the net of the poem’s form, which undoubtedly does catch something in its textual strands and knotty syntax. Elizabeth Heale has suggested that, in Wyatt’s courtly satires, the narrator’s voice “is very carefully balanced between the idiom of an honest provincial gentleman insufficiently sophisticated for the arts of the court, and that of an informed and educated commentator whose pointed barbs carry weight; the latter masquerades behind the naivety of the former.”22 What makes poems like “My mother’s maid” appear uncanny is that where one would expect oscillation between the narrator’s two states, provincial gentleman and educated commentator, one instead gets a stability provided through masquerade. It is not so much that within every provincial gentleman lurks a courtier or vice versa—although both are true. It is that provincial gentleman and educated commentator are both masks whose most important function is to allow the masquerade to continue.

John Skelton’s Tudor Court In the play Magnyfycence and the poem The Bowge of Courte, Skelton reflects upon the tension at the heart of the early Tudor court’s selfimage.23 Stability in these works seems to be located safely in a moral



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world of order and virtue; however, in practice, it is the contingent demands of desire that are ultimately the only constant point in the world Skelton depicts in Magnyfycence and The Bowge of Courte. Magnyfycence is a political morality play that stages the fall and redemption of its eponymous hero. Magnyfycence is a monarch who at times looks very like a young Henry VIII. The play opens with Felycyte making what appears to be a relatively simple statement concerning the state of the world. Felycyte:

Al thyngys contryvyd by mannys reason, The world envyronnyd of hygh and low estate, Be it erly or late, welth hath a season. Welth is of wysdome the very trewe probate: A fole is he with welth that fallyth at debate. But men now a dayes so unhappily be uryd That nothynge than welth may worse be enduryd.24

In this speech Felycyte draws a direct relationship between wealth and wisdom. In the process, however, the status of these terms is opened up for debate since the implication is that wealth cannot be simply defined in terms of the number and expense of one’s possessions. The logic of Felycyte’s speech is that if all people were wise, they would all be wealthy, but this seems to contradict the statement that “welth hath a season.” The solution to these apparently contradictory understandings of the relationship between wisdom and wealth comes at the end of Felycyte’s opening remarks, “But wyll hath reason so under subjeccyon, / And so dysordereth this worlde over all, / That welthe and felicite is passynge small.”25 Magnyfycence opens by setting up an ideal that no one can achieve and goes on to imply that in the end all humans are foolish victims of their sinful wills. This implication renders the action of the rest of the play largely redundant, since although the story of Magnyfycence’s fall is dramatic and salutary, Felycyte has already told the attentive listener that not only it is bound to happen, but that it will happen over and over again. The redundancy of the main plot of Skelton’s play creates space for a supplementary logic alongside the drama’s main action. As a member of the audience, one can be seduced by the story of Magnyfycence’s fall from grace, his corruption by the vices, and eventual redemption. This is certainly what the play seems to expect of its audience. Magnyfycence is an extended metaphoric mediation on

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monarchical power and the court. It appears to mount a critique of Magnyfycence while in practice using the narrative of his fall and redemption to interpolate the audience into the courtly fantasy of the monarch as a totalizing image of power and authority. To resist this totalization, one needs to step back from the play’s plot and instead concentrate on the metonymic details of the drama. After Felycyte’s opening speech, Magnyfycence stages a debate between Felycyte, Measure, and Lyberte. This is a self-consciously learned exchange drawing on the political thought of Aristotle as popularized in such works as the Secret of Secretes.26 Its central message is summed up by Measure who states that: Where Measure is mayster, plenty dothe none offence; Where Measure is lackyth, all thynge dysorderyd is; Where Measure is absent, ryot kepeth resydence; Where Measure is ruler, there is nothynge amysse.27

This speech articulates a political and aesthetic agenda; Measure’s presence does not simply guarantee the functioning of the polity but also produces harmonious authoritative poetry. It is important to note, however, that at the center of this speech is the possibility of riot and disorder. Measure frames excess and scarcity and at the same time conjures up the image of a world without measure, one in which all things are disordered and riot holds court. With the entry of the vice Fansy, Measure’s nightmare image becomes a reality. Fansy enters as if in a middle of a speech. His opening exchange with Magnyfycence immediately changes the atmosphere of the playing space which is suddenly filled with nonsense and jokes. Fansy: Tusche, hold your pece, your language is vayne. Please it Your Grace to take no dysdayne To shewe you playnly the trouth as I thynke. Magnyfycence: Here is none forsyth whether you flete or synke! Felycyte: From whens come you, syr, that no man lokyd after? Magnyfycence: Or who made you so bolde to interrupte my tale? Fansy: Nowe, benedicite, ye wene I were some hafter, Of ellys some jangelynge Jacke of the Vale; Ye wene that I am dronken bycause I loke pale. Magnyfycence: Me semeth that ye have dronken more than ye have bled. Fansy: Yet amonge noble men I was brought up and bred.28



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A “hafter” is a wrangler and dodger. Fansy, like Merry Report and Hardydardy, represents a type of wit that is alien to the measured tone of the opening of Magnyfycence. His wittiness, however, is vital to the play since it is Fansy’s plotting that leads to Magnyfycence’s fall. In particular, Fansy claims to be Largesse, and neither Magnyfycence nor his advisors seem capable of penetrating his disguise. The image of the court in Magnyfycence is at once complete and incomplete, ordered and disordered. Žižek comments that, “public state apparatuses are always supplemented by their shadowy double, by a network of publicly disavowed rituals, unwritten rules, institutions, practices, and so on.”29 Fansy is the supplement that the court denies and, at the same time, without which the court cannot exist. He represents, among other things, the desire of the court to be at once a world apart and its dependency on the world beyond its bounds. In an influential and important article, “Tudor Government: The Points of Contact,” G. R. Elton discusses the nature of the court’s relationship with the country and argues that the court functions as a place where political tensions can be addressed and resolved. He writes that “the court—the true seat of power, profit and policy—preserved peace in the midst of strife by making certain that the strife should take place within the official center of political life itself.”30 There is, however, a potential tension running through Elton’s work between the court as a place where strife could be played out and its status as a coherent powerful institution. This tension is also reflected in the idea of the court as a key point of contact between the center and the rest of the political nation. Elton writes that court fraction “spread its net over the shires.”31 This metaphor suggests that, at the same time as being the center of the polity, the court is also everywhere; it is at once centered and dispersed. For Elton, the court is a key point of contact and the embodiment of the principle of contact as central to the functioning of the polity. The court is an object of metaphoric desire and is spread across the country in the web, the contingent matter, of the relationships that exist between courtiers and their clients in the shires and towns. Magnyfycence stages the court’s status as a place of contact poised between attraction and revulsion. In particular, Skelton’s play enacts the erasure of the court’s contingent nature from the totalizing metaphoric image that Henry’s court constantly creates of and for itself. It is Fansy who represents the tensions implicit in the court’s

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place within the Tudor economy of political contact. The debate staged at the opening of Magnyfycence between Felycyte, Measure, and Lyberte is not inherently courtly although certainly it is true that such a debate would be pertinent in Henry’s court. It is Fansy’s entrance that makes the play courtly. Indeed, one could argue that it is the moment of Fansy’s entrance, the interruption of serious reasoned debate by all that Fansy represents—wit, bawdiness, and the world beyond the walls of Magnyfycence’s palace—that brings the court into being.32 Having allowed Fansy to set the agenda, Magnyfycence is relatively quickly corrupted by associated vices, including Counterfeit Countenaunce, Crafty Conveyaunce, Clokyd Colusyon, and Courtly Abusyon, reduced to a shadow of his former self and stripped of his wealth. Magnyfycence is then visited by Adversyte and Poverte. His fall, however, is not complete until he meets Dyspare and Myschefe. It is only with the advent of Good Hope that Magnyfycence can start to restore his fortunes. It transpires that a key moment in Magnyfycence’s fall was the moment when he too quickly accepted that a letter he had received came from Sad Cyrcumspeccyon, when in fact it had been written by Fansy.33 Magnyfycence’s most basic fault was to rush to judgment and in particular to trust a letter, albeit one that looked authoritative. The play suggests that this failure was ultimately a moral one, and that therefore the solution to the political crisis that caused Magnyfycence’s failings has to be addressed at the level of morality. This is undoubtedly the central argument of Skelton’s work. It is important, however, to note that, in fact, Magnyfycence’s fall is a product of a single contingent failure of interpretation, a moment when the court as a point of contact failed. Magnyfycence, despite its sophistication, cannot stage or even imagine a solution to dangers implicit in Fansy’s forged letter. Or rather, its solution is to create a totalizing metaphor for political failure in the narrative of Magnyfycence’s fall, which obscures the radical implications of the moment when a single letter leads to complete political collapse. The Bowge of Courte was probably written in 1498 or even earlier. In this poem, Skelton takes the idea of a ship of fools and applies it directly to the court. This is not, however, the same court as the one depicted in the texts that have already been discussed in this chapter. The Bowge of Courte was written before the emergence of what would now be recognized as the Tudor court. It is a pre-Henri-



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cian text, and in some ways a pre-court one. In this work, a naive narrator dreams that he has been invited to embark upon the ship of court where he finds a collection of disturbing characters, including Drede, Dyssumlation, Suspicion, and Flattery. The narrator’s experience of the court is so shocking that at the end of the poem he jumps ship in fear. And as he [Drede] rounded thus in myne ere Of false collusyon confetryd by assente Me thoughts I see lewde felawes here and there Can for to slee me of mortall entente. And as they came, the shypborde faste I hente, And thoughte to lepe; and even with that woke, Caughte penne and ynke, and wroth this lytell boke.34

The narrator leaps out of the boat into the book and in the process reverses the poem’s self-consciously poetic opening when Skelton’s narrator calls to mind “the great auctorytes / Of poetes olde. . . .”35 Jane Griffiths has recently pointed out that, “At the very outset The Bowge of Court declares itself to be as much about writing as it is about the court.”36 The Bowge of Court creates an image of a written court, one enacted in and through language. 37 The utopian court of the Eltham Ordinances, the court of Wyatt’s lyrics and of Godly Queen Hester is prefigured in Skelton’s allegory of the court as a ship of fools united only by a shared dread. The Bowge of Court travels the land, tempting the unwary to come aboard. It is at once everywhere and nowhere; a little book made of nothing more than pen and ink and a grandiose allegorical image with Drede at its heart.

Conclusion The final verse of Skelton’s poem appears to place the interpretation of the text firmly in the hands of the reader. I wolde therwith no man were myscontente; Besechynge you that shall it see or rede, In every poynte to be indyfferente Syth all in substaunce of slumbrynge doth procede. I wyll not saye it is mater in dede, But yet oftyme suche dremes be founde trewe. Now constrewe ye what is the resydewe.38

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This verse is typical of Skelton’s court writing. It opens by stating that the reader should not take the content of the poem too seriously as its “substance” proceeds from a dream. It then undermines this argument by commenting that dreams are often true and ends with reference to an unspecific and unspecified residue. The most obvious reading of the final line of The Bowge of Courte is that it invites the reader to construe or weigh up the status of the poem as a dream—whether this renders it meaningless or truthful. Skelton’s residue also, however, like Fisher’s dust or Anne Harris’s labor, refers to the reality of the court. The Bowge of the Courte, as a meaningless dream or a disturbing fantasy, participates in the ideological, metaphorical totalization of the court. Skelton’s residue, like Hardydardy, is central to the court and alien to it, the thing that has to be excluded from the court’s self-image and that, in the end, provides this image with its consistency. The Bowge of the Court is a dream of the court and the court’s dream of itself.

“Where the Prince Lieth”: Courtly Space and the Elizabethan Progresses Peter Sillitoe The court of England, which necessarily is holden always where the prince lieth, is in these days one of the most renowned and magnificent courts that are to be found in Europe. —William Harrison

The early modern court can be interpreted in a number of

different ways, as the term either indicates the fixed space of an architectural structure, such as the multiple royal palaces including Whitehall, Hampton Court, and Nonsuch, or implies the courtiers who collectively form another type of court signification. A competing instance of court description foregrounds the importance of the monarch as a figurehead of courtly space, whereby the court accompanies monarchical authority wherever she or he may be. This understanding of elite space results in an open-ended description of the court as any space that welcomes the royal presence, the court being “with” the monarch at all times. In the Elizabethan progresses, therefore, courtly space is always marked by a certain movable fluidity and lack of a fixed structure. The royal progresses acknowledged that a movable, and so less spatially confined, court granted monarchy control over the court’s meaning, as the court space accompanies the queen and relies on her authorizing presence. In this version, then, monarchical presence defines the elite space, turning a potential weakness—this unspecific space—into a strength. The monarch gives meaning to a realm through the stress on flexibility and portability. Elizabethan elite space, then, conforms to modern 75

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theoretical ideas on social space such as those outlined by Henri Lefebvre: the court is a series of fluid, ongoing definitions and formulations, rather than a physical, fixed architectural structure. However, as I demonstrate in this chapter, these progresses mean that the Elizabethan period embraced a less spatially restricted court, though this lack of restriction is accompanied by further ambivalences. The historical research of Mary Hill Cole has shed light on the dynamic coupling of spectacle and politics in the progresses, as a “temporary” Elizabethan court traveled parts of England. In this cultural and political communication between the ruler and people, the court is movable and symbolic, as Elizabeth’s presence authorizes court definition. This chapter reads the progresses and the literary texts of the accompanying entertainments in conjunction with the idea of competing court definitions, assessing the tensions inherent in the nature of the court, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of a world of spectacle and monarchical presence rather than one of fixable space.

Progresses Conceptualized You must no more call it York Place—that’s past, For since the Cardinal fell, that title’s lost. ’Tis now the king’s, and called Whitehall. —Shakespeare, Henry VIII, 4.1.97–991

The Shakespearean quotation above refers to Henry VIII’s seizure, in historical actuality, of York Place from Cardinal Wolsey and the subsequent transformation of this aristocratic space into an official royal residence. However, as Simon Thurley has shown, Whitehall Palace did not merely become just one more among the many of Henry’s palaces: Henry VIII’s Whitehall, like Wolsey’s, was charged with an administrative as well as a domestic role. This duality received official recognition in 1536 by an act of Parliament, when it was officially designated as the king’s palace, his principal seat and therefore the seat of government.2 Whitehall quickly became, it seems, the most important royal palace in the country, and when Henry converted Hampton Court, Wolsey’s other great palace, it is notable that, as Thurley explains, “[i]n a decade of almost continuous building and after spending



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about £62,000, Henry had created at Hampton Court what was universally regarded as his most magnificent house after Whitehall.”3 However, although it might be expected that Henry’s fondness for Whitehall resulted in a kind of proto-Stuart project, in that the court became fixed at the new London palace, this was far from being the case. Rather, Henry enjoyed the act of progressing, embracing this European triumphal form to a great extent, though not to the same degree as his daughter Elizabeth would in the later sixteenth century. As Thurley explains, it appears that, “[u]nder Henry VIII, there was an important distinction between the itinerant Court and the royal progress. . . . During his reign Henry VIII is known to have made some 1,150 moves between houses with his Court. Of these, 850 were to his own houses, the rest to ecclesiastical or courtier houses. Thus it can be seen that three-quarters of the moves made by the king were to houses which he owned.”4 Henry, therefore, cultivated a situation in which his own court (in the architectural sense) could be construed as various buildings scattered across the English landscape. This was a very “movable” court indeed. In refusing to force the court to carry one exclusive meaning at Whitehall or elsewhere, Henry was able to embrace the fluidity of travel for his own pleasure and the necessity of court fashioning. Similarly, Thurley’s “important distinction” between a movable court and a progress means that, at least in Henrician times, the court was quite literally always on the move, whether progressing or not. Yet, it is Elizabeth I who is rightfully regarded as the Tudor monarch who took the advantages of progressing to a logical conclusion. In fact, while Henry was keen to monumentalize his authority through numerous commissions for new buildings, Elizabeth was far happier to visit the houses of her courtiers. In doing so, the queen added a layer of mystery to the monarchical progresses in early modern Europe. Whereas Henry’s court (defined, in this instance, as a royal train of courtiers and servants) followed him to what was often a house or palace that he actually owned, Elizabeth abandoned the need to fix monarchical splendor upon any kind of architectural setting. Rather, the court accompanied Elizabeth wherever she herself went. The court, therefore, really was “with” the monarch. Elizabeth’s reign marked the high point of progressing in England, and coexisted with a characteristic attempt to keep the cost of royal expenditure low in terms of architecture and

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building. Cole cites a description of this trait by the Elizabethan historian William Harrison: “[E]very nobleman’s house is her palace, where she continueth during pleasure and till she return again to some of her own.”5 Harrison’s quotation usefully highlights the ambivalence that is innate in the cultural practice of progressing: nonroyal, elite buildings become Elizabeth’s new palaces, and so belong to her, yet, at the same time, she retains “her own” palaces. In a related point, because this study is partly concerned with the advantages of such a movable court, it is worth reflecting upon Cole’s key observation: “The constant disruption of court life inherent in her [Elizabeth’s] progresses generated a climate of chaos . . . whose effect was to keep the queen at the center of everyone’s attention, as courtiers and hosts focused on welcoming, entertaining, and petitioning her. Elizabeth’s travels inconvenienced every member of the court and hurt her treasury, but as queen she found power in the turmoil of an itinerant court and in a ceremonial dialogue with her subjects.”6 It is apparent, therefore, that Elizabeth used the progresses to her own benefit, but Cole only hints at the definitional importance of this portable court. To take this further, it is evident that as well as finding “power” in the progresses, Elizabeth was able also to consolidate a version of court space that had to feature her authorizing presence, in order to justify the use of “court” in the first place. Elizabeth’s movable status is reflected in contemporary portraiture from the period. This can be seen in the famous Ditchley portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1592) in the National Portrait Gallery at London.7 In this painting, the queen stands on a map of England, clearly transmitting the sense that the monarch is, quite literally, everywhere, a probability that is only possible through her status as a superhuman and divine presence. By implication, according to Elizabethan political discourse, the extension of the queen’s body throughout the realm also includes the circulation of the English court that her royal body carries with it: prog­ resses bring the queen and the court to multiple areas of the En­ glish landscape, the court appropriating, and so politicizing, parts of England that would otherwise be out of its reach. Of course, the most famous aspect of the Elizabethan progresses, besides the concept of progressing itself, is the entertainment and spectacle that either greeted or accompanied the queen as she traveled. Michael Leslie has persuasively argued that the move away



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from London necessitated a transfer of theatrical energy to the estates of Elizabeth’s subjects. 8 Leslie, however, does not view this shift of theatrical emphasis in a positive light for the queen, and it is here that I disagree. Whereas Leslie believes that the queen is more vulnerable as a spectator of drama and entertainment away from her more settled courts in London, I believe that this change in environment was actually a strength that Elizabeth considered worthy of highlighting. For instance, Leslie writes that “instead of the ceaseless celebration of the monarch’s absolute centrality and control, the absence of obvious physical restrictions in the [theatrical] landscape enabled the author [of the given entertainment] to compose discourses of marginality and instability.”9 This may be true, but we only have to turn to Cole’s important thesis to remember that Elizabeth was always central to these events, precisely because of the chaos of progress culture. In addition, Leslie neglects the importance of the social space of the court in these entertainments. According to aspects of political discourse in Elizabethan England, the court is always accompanying the queen, even when she visits the “property” of a courtier. As Harrison observes, these estates very quickly change into Elizabeth’s own palaces once the queen is present, and the transformative nature of drama and entertainment could only have assisted this process. Turning to the primary material, I will now explore the fictional discourses that helped to transmit the idea of a movable court space to members of the public.

“In entertainment to my princely queen”: Visited Places / Appropriated (Courtly) Spaces The texts of the Elizabethan progresses, and, more specifically, the entertainments that took place at these events, are particularly important because, when taken in their entirety, they serve as a record of the complex interplay between reality and fiction that occurred during each of the queen’s progresses. For instance, as has long been acknowledged by the wealth of historical and literary work that has arisen from the groundbreaking research of Frances Yates and Roy Strong, many scholars now agree that the praise that was lavished on Elizabeth, the so-called “cult,” actually enabled powerful aristocrats to voice their opinions on the political culture of the

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day, as well as their disguised criticisms.10 It is well known that the earl of Leicester made the most of his opportunity in 1575 when the queen visited his Kenilworth estate, as the earl used the accompanying entertainments to comment on Elizabeth’s possibilities in terms of marriage.11 The study of progresses, therefore, has advanced from simplistic notions of panegyric and rule to an argument that acknowledges politics and persuasion, as well as a sense of place and occasion. However, it is also important to recognize the ways in which the texts of the entertainments point out the spatial dynamics of the progresses, particularly in terms of the transformative power of the queen and, by implication, her traveling court.

“To discourse somewhat of Killingworth Castle”: The Kenilworth Entertainments In 1575, Elizabeth visited Robert Dudley, the earl of Leicester at Kenilworth Castle. The visit formed part of a lengthy summer progress covering the months of July and August of that year.12 The queen was more than aware of the significant theatrical effect of her court’s presence: visiting the castle was itself part of the performance, a theatrical spectacle that revolved around her own court rather than Leicester’s entertainment. What is important to uncover from the text of the entertainment is the realization that Elizabeth’s presence at Kenilworth brought with it, in Elizabethan eyes, a sense of the actual English court accompanying the monarch. Similarly, Leicester’s own elite space is appropriated during the progress and the entertainments as the courtly space that arrives from the south incorporates Leicester’s estate while Elizabeth is present. Correspondingly, if we turn attention to “[t]he mercer and minor court official” Robert Laneham’s key description of the event in his printed letter to his friend Humphrey Martin, it is clear that Laneham felt part of a true court rather than a simple collection of courtiers and servants.13 As we will see, in many of the entertainment texts, the visit of Elizabeth is believed to transform the physical place into a courtly otherworld, just as characters in the entertainments undergo various transformations owing to monarchical presence. In his text, Laneham indicates that he has been, at the very least, a privileged spectator on the progress and at the entertainments.



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This belief is apparent from the text’s title: A Letter: Whearin part of the entertainment vntoo the Queenz Maiesty at Killinwoorth Castl in Warwik sheer in this soomerz progress 1575 is signified / from a freend officer attendant in coourt vntoo hiz freend a citizen and merchaunt of London.14 What is striking about this designation is the nature of the announcement, as Laneham conveys news about “this soomerz progress” as if an audience is waiting to be kept up-to-date on the events via the work’s status as a type of newsletter.15 It is also significant that the recipient of the original letter is “a citizen and merchaunt of London.” Clearly, this signifies as much about the social status of the two men as it does about progresses. Yet the letter’s title hints at the concept of a news report distributing information about the court’s progress for the London bookstalls. It is also worth remembering that the writer obviously sees himself as a courtier even when away from the London palaces, precisely because he is accompanying monarchical authority on the progress. In the beginning of his description, Laneham makes a point of stressing his place “at Coourt”: “After my harty commendacionz, I commend me hartely too yoo. Understand ye, that syns throough God and good fre’ends, I am placed at Coourt h’eer (as ye wot) in a woorshipfull room: Whereby, I am not only acquainted with the most, and well knoen too the best, and euery officer glad of my company: but also haue poour, a dayz (while the Councell sits not) to go and too see things sight worthy, and too be prezent [sic] at any sheaw or spectacl, any whear this Progress reprezented untoo her highness.”16 Laneham gives the movable court a sense of architectural permanence by his use of the word “room.” Whether this term signifies his own private room in an aristocratic house is unclear, but it does display the Elizabethan sense of a traveling court while still utilizing architectural discourse. Similarly, Laneham points out the inherent theatricality of the progresses, as he immediately observes the shows and spectacles that underwrite the importance of the court’s travels in Elizabethan political (and theatrical) culture. The writer’s description of the setting of the events is similarly revealing of a sense of awe and wonder on the part of Laneham: But h’eerin, the better for conceyuing of my minde and instruction of yoors, ye must gyue me leaue a littl, az well to preface vntoo my matter, az too discoors sumwhat of Kyllingwoorth Castl. A Territory of the right honorabl, my singular good Lord, my Lord the earl of

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Leyceter: of whooz incomparabl cheering, and enterteynment thear vnto her Maiesty noow, I will sheaw yoo a part heer, that coold not s’ee all, nor had I seen all coold well report the hallf: Whear thinges, for the parsons, for the place, tyme, cost, deuisez [sic], straungnes, and aboundauns, of all that euer I sawe (and yet haue I been, what vnder my Master Bomsted, and what on my oun affayrs, while I occupied Merchaundyze, both in Frauns and Flaunders (long and many a day) I saw none ony whear so memorabl, I tell you playn.17

The writer makes it clear that he has been part of a privileged, elite social space in which a sense of mystery and wonder only adds to the theatricality of both the entertainments and the progress of royal authority. Indeed, Laneham implies that the atmosphere of grandeur in the architectural setting of Leicester’s castle is significantly increased by the arrival of the Tudor queen, just as the sensation of performativity accelerates that same process during the entertainments. Because the progressing Elizabethan court necessarily lacked a genuine architectural presence, it is interesting to view the way in which Laneham’s description of the events transfers this missing architectural discourse onto Kenilworth Castle. The court’s appropriation of the physical structure endows the building with a sense of courtliness, just as the fluidity of the court’s meaning is mapped directly onto the estate during the visit. As Laneham observes: “These armonioous blasterz, from the foreside of the gate at her highnes entrauns whear they began: walking upon the wallz, vntoo the inner: had this musik maynteyned from them very delectably while her highnes all along the Tiltyard rode unto the inner gate next the baze coourt of the Castl: whear the Lady of the Lake (famous in king Athurz book) with too Nymphes wayting vpon her, arrayed all in sylks attending her highnes comming.”18 In the medieval and early modern periods, a base court meant a certain area of a castle or palace, and did not signify, in itself, royal authority. Yet it is worth highlighting the fact that Laneham brings this to our attention, as the base court gathers momentum as a privileged space owing to the presence of Elizabeth and her court. The description of the castle as a court continues, “So passing intoo the inner Coourt, her Majesty (that never rydez but alone) thear set dooun from her Pallfrey, waz conueid vp too chamber: when after, dyd follo so great a peal of gunz, and such lyghtning by fyer woork a long space toogyther: as Iupiter woold sheaw himself too be no further behinde



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with hiz wellcoom.”19 As is often the case in the early modern period, the word “court” carries with it various significations, intentional or unintentional on the part of the writer. In this example, Laneham clearly means the inner court of the actual castle, a physical space. Yet this process of signification is complicated by the visit of the court itself, in that Elizabeth’s royal presence means that Laneham’s discourse resonates with the movable court as its members continue on the progress. Likewise, in this text it is often virtually impossible to distinguish which definition of a court Laneham intends to signify by his use of the word. Later in the work, he tells the reader: “Az the cumpany in this order wear cum into the coourt, marueyloous wear the marciall acts that wear doon thear that day.”20 In this instance, then, “court” may imply part of the castle structure, as Laneham feels that Kenilworth has been incorporated into the English court owing to the presence of the queen and her courtiers. This theme continues as Laneham introduces the concept of a palace as a signifier of royal authority: “But beeing heer noow in magnificens and matters of greatnes: it fallz well too mynde. The greatnes of hiz honorz Tent, that for her Maiestyez dyning was pight at long Ichington, the day her highnes cam to Kyllingwoorth Castl. A Tabernacl indeed for number and shyft of large and goodly roomz, for fayr and eazy officez: both inward, and ooutward all so likesumin [likesome] order and eysight: that iustly for dignitee may be comparabl with a beautifull Pallais, & for greatnes and quantitee with a proper Tooun, or rather a Cittadell.”21 Here a discourse about one type of elite space cannot avoid being transformed into a discourse about another, greater type of elite space, as the description of an aristocratic, nonroyal setting turns sharply into a depiction of a courtly space through the use of the signifier “Pallais.” This happens in the text precisely because of the appropriation of Kenilworth by the visiting court despite the fact that this aristocratic space was regarded as a castle. As Laneham puts it, “waz euer Kenelwoorth more nobled then by thiz, hiz lordships [Leicester’s] receiuing [sic] her highnes noow.”22 Similarly, as the text makes clear, the visit of Elizabeth greatly increases the presence of nearby aristocrats: “That thiz thing amoong the rest waz for full signifiauns of hiz Lordships honorabl, frank, frieendly and nobl hart toward all estatez. Which, whither cum they to stay and take cheer, or straight to returne: too see or too be seen: cum they for duty too

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her Maiesty or looue.”23 Indeed, this comment reveals a tension in the progresses, in that it is unclear if the visitors flock to an aristocratic space owned by Leicester or a courtly space created by the queen’s presence. One definition of the court that was current in the early modern period included the idea of the social space being formed by a collection of courtiers. During the progresses, the growth of the courtly space accelerated further because the travels allowed greater access to the monarch, thus allowing the court to expand as the queen greeted dignitaries, more aristocrats, and, perhaps, even the common people.24 This expansion is confirmed in Laneham’s description of the visit to Kenilworth Castle on two separate occasions in the text. As the work makes apparent: “Tuisday, according too commaundement, cam oour Coventree men.” Laneham also points out that Elizabeth greeted these people with much care, mentioning her “highness myrth and good acceptauns.”25 Later in the text, Laneham comments upon the interest generated by the visit of the queen: The Parcae (az earst I should haue sayd) the first night of her Maiestiez cumming: they heering and seeing so precioous adoo heer, at a place vnlookt for, in an uplondish Cuntree, so far within the Ream: preassing intoo euery steed whear her highness went, whereby so duddld with such varietee of delyghts, dyd set asyde their huswifry, coold not for their harts tend their work a whyt. But after they had seen her Maiesty a bed, gat them a prying intoo euery place: olld hags, az fond of nuellries, az yoong girls that had neuer seen Coourt afore: but neyther full, with gazing nor wery with gadding, leaft of yet for that time, and at high midnight, gate them giggling, (but not alooud) into the prezens Chamber: minding in deed with their prezent diligens, too recompens their former slaknes.26

Whether the attention was desired or not, the progresses led to an expansion of the court space as far greater access was possible away from the confines of the great London palaces and “physical” courts, such as Hampton Court and Whitehall. As this quotation demonstrates, ordinary subjects were able to witness the queen’s presence on the progresses, and, as Laneham describes, this accessibility meant that the court was a visible space for those present. In fact, these people were able to witness court fashioning and definition because of Elizabeth’s royal attendance.



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The court’s transformative influence on the visited environment is also clear when we look at Laneham’s description of one of the entertainments and, more specifically, the famous Lady of the Lake scene that was devised both to entertain and persuade the queen. As the text recollects: from the midst of the Pool, whear, vpon a moouabl Iland, bright blazing with torches, she [the Lady of the Lake] floting too land, met her Maiesty with a wel penned meter and matter after this sorte: First of the auncientee of the Castl, whoo had been ownerz of the same, een till this day, most allweyz in the handes of the earls of Leyceyter, hoow she had kept this Lake syns king Arturz dayz, and noow vnderstanding of her highnes hither cumming, thought it both offis and duety in humbl wyze too discoouer her and her estate: offring vp the same, her Lake and poour thearin, with promis of repair vnto the Coourt. It pleazed her highnes too thank this lady and too ad withall, we had thought indeed the lake had been oours, and doo you call it yourz noow? Well we wyll heerin common more with yoo hereafter.27

Here the mythical and fictional discourse of the entertainment resonates with a touch of reality in terms of the appropriation of the landscape by the courtly space. Evidently, the entertainment meant to signify that the land would belong to Elizabeth if she accepted Leicester’s marriage proposal. Yet it is revealing that, although Elizabeth thanks the lady in the fictional entertainment, she cannot resist an opportunity to utilize the political interaction that progressing allowed her. If, as Laneham reports, the queen believed the land to belong to her already, this assertion is apparently indicative of the appropriation of a visited place by the progressing court space in all its mysterious guises. Furthermore, Cole has pointed out that, at the visit to Kenilworth, Elizabeth was annoyed with Leicester because of complications involving the genuine ownership of the estate: “Elizabeth took Robert Dudley to task when he forgot to recognize her royal ownership of his borrowed estate Kenilworth during the queen’s visit.”28 In this instance, then, it may be that progressing allowed the queen to reclaim a space that had always been, in reality, part of the courtly realm. This sense is also evident in Laneham’s narration of the visit, when he informs the reader of the splendor of the setting: “who that considerz, vntoo the stately seat of Kenelwoorth Castl, the

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rare beauty of bylding that hiz honor hath auaunced.”29 Here Laneham hints at an act of elite spatial transformation, as his register acknowledges Kenilworth as both “Castl” and “stately seat.” Thus, we can view the complex interplay between courtly and aristocratic elite spaces. Similarly, at the end of the printed account, Laneham makes it clear that he has written the letter to his friend while still on the royal progress, though the queen has now left Kenilworth. Laneham signs off: “Well onez agein fare ye hartely well. From the Coourt. At the Citee of Worceter, the xx. of August. 1575.”30 Having regained one royal space, the progress has moved on to another location, while always being “the court.”

“Yonder comes the Fairy Queene”: The Visit to Woodstock As part of the summer progress in 1575, Elizabeth also visited Sir Henry Lee at Woodstock.31 As Jean Wilson has shown, the visit and accompanying entertainment was meant to be, in part, a reply to the Kenilworth event.32 In this progress and particularly in the entertainments, the queen’s presence is able to transform events. One of the texts, the anonymous “The Tale of Hermetes,” was made available in The Queenes Maiesties Entertainement at Woodstock, a collection printed ten years after the events, thus testifying to the continued public interest in courtly events, the progressing culture, and such transformations.33 In “The Tale,” the Hermit’s sight is restored by the appearance of the great queen.34 Similarly, the arrival of Elizabeth is carefully described by the writer at the opening of the text: “This said, he bringeth them al to ye place where the Quenes Maiestie stood (in a fine Bower made of purpose couered with greene Iuie, and seates made of earthe with sweete smelling hearbes, (euen suche a place as you shall coniecture) and after some reuerence beginning his tale.”35 On one level, it can be argued that the queen is simply being greeted with a sense of conformity and celebration, as one would expect for a monarch in the early modern period. However, this passage also helps to point out a key feature of the progresses and the accompanying entertainments: the arrival of Elizabeth and her court alters the landscape as the queen’s entry is registered in a pastoral diction that conveys her relationship with the physicality of Woodstock.



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After the Hermit has concluded the tale, the author of the prose supplement to the entertainments observes that Elizabeth has followed the fictional character: This learned or long tale being brought to his end: the poore Hermit loden as it were with beades and other such ornaments of his profession-, begins to tread the way before the Queen, which her Maiestie espying, refused her steed, and betook her self in like sort to the use of her feet, & accompanying the Hermit (her self waited on of the rest) fel into some discourse & praise of his good tale, which not ended, or rather scarce fully begun, the Q, Ma. had in sight the house, which indeede was a place by art so reared from the ground, as neuer before, nor hereafter, shal I see ye like.36

It is apparent that the house noticed by the queen is actually a building owned by Lee. Unsurprisingly, the structure is clearly magnificent, as the narrator informs the reader. In this sense, then, an elite space is again made more important by the regal presence. However, this passage also gives us a unique glimpse of the fusion of theatrical and fictional space with the space of historical actuality that occurs during the performance of the entertainment. Significantly, the Hermit is still “in character” as he discourses with the queen. At this moment, therefore, Elizabeth vacates the “real” space and transfers her performative energies to the fictional space of the entertainment. In a similar fashion to the encounter with the Lady of the Lake in the Kenilworth entertainment, fiction and reality merge in the moment of performance, just as the progress has allowed the courtly world of the area in and around London to travel to, and thus appropriate, aristocratic spaces elsewhere in the country. Another crossover of fictional and “real” spaces occurs when the Hermit leaves the setting: Thus the Hermite departes, & the Queenes Maiesty addresseth her selfe with merry cheere to banqueting, which to encrease a diuine sound of vnacquainted instruments in the hollow roome vnder the house, made such stroakes of pleasure, & moued such delights, that if Apollo himselfe had byn there, I thinke hee would haue intreated the learning of their skill, or at leaste forgotten the pleasant remembrance of his sweete Daphnes. Her Maiesty thus in the middest of this mirth might espy the Queen of the Fayry drawen with 6. chil-

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dren in a waggon of state: the Boies bravely attired, & her selfe very costly apparrelled, whose present shew might wel argue her immortality, and presenting her selfe to the Queens Maiesty.37

Here the conventions of progressing allow Elizabeth to leave behind the world of the entertainment (the Hermit) and to reenter the “real” world (the banquet). Furthermore, the arrival of another monarch (the Queen of the Fairies) enables Elizabeth’s courtly space to engage once more with the fictional world. This time, however, the fictional space of the entertainment can be seen also as a courtly realm, owing to the presence of the Fairy Queen. Indeed, the conventions of progressing and accompanying theatrical entertainment allow two different court spaces to mingle at the moment of performance. This view is confirmed a little later in the narrative, when Elizabeth interacts once more with the fictional characters. As the narrator informs the reader: I think (good sir) I haue within little repeated the names of those that were Ladies and maides of Honor, at these sightes, wherein you shall see the vaine, that runneth to the liking of such kinds. Now her Maiestie being risen: with good cheere, accompanied with the Queene of the fay r ye and the Ladye Caudina; she commeth from her banquite, and at her departure the Lady Caudina sayth: Let thankes suffice in worde where strength in pow’re doth faynte.

lette pith in prayer from Heauen to crave requite.38 Again, then, the concept of Elizabethan progressing allows various spaces to merge and interact, as a fictional courtly realm is able to enter into a discourse with the reality of Elizabeth’s courtly space. Later in the text, the actions of the Fairy Queen appear to mirror those of the progressing Elizabeth. As Alexandro states, “But yonder comes the Fairy Queene, / and brings with her in trayne, / My lord the Duke with merry looke, / I hope weis home againe.”39 Like Elizabeth, the fictional queen of the entertainment is able to progress with her court and so is capable of accessing alternative spaces and worlds. The implication of “I hope weis home againe” signifies that, at least in the world of the Fairy Queen, there is a more fixed courtly base to return to. This type of spatial interaction is visible also when Elizabeth visits civic spaces that are supposedly “noncourtly.”



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“That they may see with what maiestie a prince raigneth”: The Appropriation of Urban Space In 1578, Thomas Churchyard published his account of the queen’s visit that year to Suffolk and Norfolk as his “discovrse” on the events.40 This additional account of a progress mainly deals with the entertainments and shows that greeted the queen as she entered the city of Norwich, possibly because these were devised by Churchyard himself. The beginning of the work is of particular interest because of the writer’s address to a certain Master Gilbert Gerrard, the queen’s attorney general. As Churchyard remarks, “I haue presented you with a little Booke, that makes not only report of the noble receiuing of the Queenes Maiestie into Suffolke and Norffolke, but also of the good order, great cheere, and charges that hir highnesse subjects were at, during hir abode in those parties. And because I sawe most of it, or heard it so credibly rehearsed, as I know it to be true, I meane to make it a mirror and shining glasse, that al the whole land may loke into, or use it for an example in all places (where the prince cometh) to our posteritie hereafter for euer.”41 This passage reminds us of the earlier opening to Laneham’s report, in which the relaying of information about the court’s progress is viewed as vital for the public good. In addition, we witness once again a recollection of the expansion of the courtly space, as the “common people” rush to greet the court and its queen. Last, Churchyard testifies to the importance of entertainments and theatrical spaces as he voices the idea of his pamphlet as a kind of manual for other areas should the court decide to visit them. It is crucial, therefore, for a location to embrace theatrical space in order to make possible the arrival of a courtly realm. Indeed, Churchyard continues on this topic when he states that he hopes “that euery other Sheere, where the Queenes highnesse hath not bin, will rather strive to follow this lanterne when occasion is offered.”42 The next section of the pamphlet features an address to the reader. Significantly, it is at this point that Churchyard engages with familiar subject matter for the early modern progress as he records the good behavior of the people when they meet their queen: And albeit it seemeth strange, that people nurtured farre from Courte, shoulde vse much courtesie, yet will I prooue by the humble-

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nesse of the common people, where lately the Prince hath passed, that if in a manner all ciuilitie were vtterly decayed, it might haue bin found freshly flourishing in many of those parties and places specifyed before: for so soone as the presence of the Prince was entred in their boundes, by a meere motion of homage and fealty, a generall consent of duetie and obedience [sic] was seene thorough the whole Countrey, and well a were they that first find occasion by any meanes to welcome a Courtier, and not with feyned ceremonies, but with fr”iedlye entertaynemente.43

Again, it is noteworthy that Churchyard identifies Norwich as, obviously, a noncourtly space without the presence of monarchical authority. However, this situation changes with the entry of the queen, as the progress appropriates the city, transforming it into a royal territory. Owing to this change, the role of the common people alters: it is not that the people join the court as courtiers, as this is clearly not the case; rather, as the court space expands and renegotiates the boundary between royal space and urban space, the common people behave differently, even though they have been “nurtured farre from Courte.”44 Thus, the courtly presence of the monarch redefines the urban space and the accompanying behavior of the citizens, at least according to Churchyard’s account. Yet the remainder of Churchyard’s pamphlet is mostly concerned with the descriptions of the entertainments that he provided, and his fictional narrative engages with issues of space that underscore the stress on fluidity upon which the progresses insist. For instance, Lady Beauty states: Most royall Prince, speede on thy comely pace, Make hast in time, to do thy subjects good, Go runne with me, to stay this heauie cace, Take paynes good Queene, to gayne the giltlesse bloud.45

Here literary discourse interacts with the movable nature of the Elizabethan court and the monarch herself as Elizabeth’s portability is underscored by the use of “speede,” “comely pace,” and “hast in time.”46 Likewise, “runne with me” suggests also the communal embracement that was so important to the concept of Elizabeth’s progresses. Evidently, Churchyard envisaged that his audience would be well aware of the transportable nature of Elizabeth’s reign. However, as a device for the praise of the monarch, the strategy has



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a fault in that the quotation seems to imply that Elizabeth’s court should be at the service of the people as it travels the country.

Conclusion: Progresses in the 1590s As has been well documented, Elizabeth continued to progress throughout her rule, even through the troublesome 1590s. However, the progresses were scaled down as her reign drew to a close.47 It is odd, therefore, that some of the more famous progress entertainments took place in the 1590s, though this fact may have more to do with their survival in “good” texts rather than the actual occasion.48 What is striking about these works is the way in which a sense of transformation still underpins the later entertainments. Although Wilson’s introductory notes to the progresses are not at all concerned with the spatial dynamic of the events or the texts, it is worth remembering her insistence on the alteration of fictional narrative in the four texts she selects for her edition, all of which date from the 1580s and 1590s. As Wilson states, “The transformations of landscape effected in these entertainments are astonishing in their nature.”49 This change is quite clear in the texts themselves. For instance, in the Cowdray text, it is once more noticeable that we can observe the same slippage from a “real” space to a theatrical, and so fictional, landscape: “The Queen, having dyned at Farnham, came with a great traine to the Right Honorable the Lord Montacutes, vpon saterdaie being the 14 daie of August about eight of the clocke at night. Where upon sight of her Majestie, loud musicke sounded, which at her enteraunce on the bridge suddenly ceased. Then was a speech delivered by a personage in armour, standing between two Porters, carved out of wood, he resembling the third: holding his club in one hand, and a key of golde in the other, as followeth.”50 Later in the same entertainment, Elizabeth is greeted by a wild man who remarks, “Mightie Princesse, whose happines is attended by the heavens, and whose government is wondered at upon the earth: vouchsafe to heare why this passage is kept, and this Oke honoured. The whole world is drawen in a mappe: the heavens in a Globe: and this Shire shrunke in a Tree: and what your Majestie hath often heard of with some comfort, you may now beholde with full content.”51 In this passage, it is apparent that the progresses and

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ensuing entertainments permit access, yet again, to a fictional and magical space. Similarly, the spatial dynamics of the whole world can be altered and gazed upon through the court’s presence and the accompanying theatrical energy. It is not surprising that a movable court should be concerned, through its entertainments, with different social spaces, whether aristocratic or monarchical, fictional or real. However, when James I came to the throne in 1603, an entirely different court began to grow around Whitehall as the court masque helped to fix the court space as an architectural setting.

Like a Queen: The Influence of the Elizabethan Court on the Structure of Female-Centered Households in the Early Modern Period Jessica L. Malay

Queen Elizabeth, by all accounts, possessed a personal pres-

ence that pervaded much of the social and cultural life of the society over which she reigned. Her influence was diffused and widespread and thus in many ways became indistinguishable from contemporary social practice. Thus, to speak of Elizabeth’s influence is to pronounce upon a banality that would seem to need no explanation or exposition, while to ignore it is to shirk real engagement with a powerful force that shaped a society. It is certainly not my purpose here to consider the pervasive influence Elizabeth had upon her culture. However, it is instructive to consider the ways in which the strategies she employed and developed within her court informed the practices of particular individuals within her culture, especially women. In the early modern period the restraints upon female agency— political, social, and individual—were many. The cultural mechanisms through which women were able to appropriate authority were controlled by custom and by law. Despite this disadvantage, many women, especially those freed from the constraints of marriage, developed strategies to circumvent these limitations. Through these strategies, many women successfully invested themselves with at least a modicum of power and authority that allowed them to pursue their personal goals. These women found in Elizabeth I’s practices an effective model by which they could maintain authority in their households and promote their own interests in the wider context of Elizabethan court culture. Her female courtiers would 93

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certainly have witnessed Elizabeth’s effective employment of court structure, both spatially and administratively, to fix her authority. When these female courtiers found themselves in a position to exercise authority within their own households, generally through widowhood or marital circumstances, Elizabeth’s practices were certainly the most salient model at hand. Elizabeth herself, upon becoming a queen regnant, was in need of models upon which to draw in the construction of her court and even her definition of self, as there was no precedent for a “sole quene.” Certainly, as Judith Richard discusses, Mary I’s reign allowed for clarification of some of the legal issues regarding a queen regnant to be clarified, resulting in Parliament’s passage in 1554 of “An Acte declaringe that the Regall power of thys realme is in the Quenes Majestie as fully and absolutely as ever it was in anye her most noble progenytours kynges of thys Realme.” This act effectively conferred upon Mary I and future queens regnant the full power and status of kings.1 However, Mary’s marriage and the various constitutional issues surrounding the sharing of power between spouses that ensued provided Elizabeth with more of an example to avoid than one to appropriate. Instead, Elizabeth looked to her progenitors, those kings and queens of the past, to construct her regnal narrative and the theater upon which it would be displayed, drawing upon a rich architectural and administrative heritage. As early as the twelfth century there was some attempt at physically structuring court accommodation so as to limit access to the king through the use of a private chamber or suite of chambers separated in some manner from the rest of the residence. This trend was accelerated during the reign of Edward IV, who, as Simon Thurley suggests, “transformed earlier antiquated houses and castle by providing himself and his family with separate privy lodgings.” This restructuring was part of Edward’s strategy for centralizing power. Whereas earlier kings and queens had only limited private provision, living in the court as the greatest of the nobles, Edward’s building projects established in stone the beginning of a political strategy of limited access controlled by the sovereign for his or her own purposes. 2 In this way, Edward and later English monarchs were able to control access to their person and thus the benefits that accrued through this access. This restriction in turn enhanced their power as the English monarchs increasingly became the primary source of political benefits. Through strategic building design



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that accentuated the separation of the monarch from subjects, the primary importance of the sovereign was given spatial form. Architectural innovations limited access to the royal person, elevating those who were allowed to penetrate the architectural space and come within the presence of the monarch. Henry VII further innovated both the architectural and administrative construction that enhanced the primacy of the sovereign. His creation of the privy chamber became an administrative tool to ensure this primacy. The privy chamber, made up of body servants, insulated the king from importuning courtiers. By controlling access to his person, Henry VII enhanced both his status and his power. By Henry VIII’s reign, this strategy was expressed most clearly in the Eltham Ordinances of 1526, which state, “In the good keeping of the privy chamber rested the king’s quiet, rest, comfort and preservation of his health,” therefore “noe person . . . from henceforth presume, attempt or be . . . admitted to come or repaire into the king’s privy chamber; other than such onely as his grace shall from time to time call for.”3 Here, Henry VIII asserted the right and the intention of the monarch to actively control access to his person, an assertion already apparent in the building and court practices of his Yorkist predecessors, as well as his father. As all political and social advancement was increasingly dependent upon this access, the authority of the monarch was greatly enhanced. Thus, the Yorkist kings, and even more assuredly the Tudor sovereigns, instituted a narrative of kingship that posited their unique standing, separate from even the nobles of the realm. The aim of this narrative was certainly the consolidation of power. Tudor policies, by implementing a centralized authority around whom clients or courtiers vied for access, created a power gradation connected to the level of access to the authority figure granted to individuals. Elizabeth, having witnessed the efficacy of this strategy in the reign of her father, and to a certain extent brother and sister, appropriated this structure within her court. As is well known, Elizabeth commissioned little building beyond the maintenance of her father’s extensive palaces, finding them to be structurally adequate for her own strategies of authority. She did modify her father’s use of the privy chamber by removing administrative elements dealing with the affairs of government in order to form a stable environment of personal support.4 Her privy chamber came to resemble

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that of Henry VII, manned with intimates in order to limit the ability of factional strife to disrupt the queen’s most intimate domestic space. Certainly, the privy chamber served to enhance Elizabeth’s power by restricting access. However, the privy chamber also became, under Elizabeth, a female domain. The courtiers who “manned” these most private spaces and served her in the most intimate ways were, of necessity, women. Pam Wright terms these women Elizabeth’s familia with many of them serving for decades. 5 Thus, at the heart of Elizabeth’s court, both architecturally and administratively, was a female space that quite effectively provided the queen with privacy while enhancing her authority. This institution, borrowed from her Yorkist and Tudor predecessors and modified by Elizabeth, served her well throughout her reign. Within this private space, Elizabeth formed a narrative that would be displayed in the larger theater of her court. The Tudor monarchs realized early the importance of creating a narrative through which they could enhance and promote their dynasty and their particular reign. Both Henry VII and Henry VIII appropriated the discourse of imperial Rome, figuring themselves as Caesars. 6 They also made use of Biblical figures such as David and Solomon in order to communicate an enhanced understanding of their power and their divine destiny. John Guy claims that these narratives “served to regulate the organization of the Court in the interests of royal power, and to maximize the reputation of the king and the Tudor Dynasty.”7 This, of course, was not unusual in the history of English kingship. The use of figures and motifs in promoting kingly power and stature has a long history in the narrative strategies of English kings. The difficulty facing Elizabeth, however, was how to create a narrative of sovereignty, given the need to navigate the anxieties surrounding her gender. Of course, the most obvious models at hand were English queens of the past. In the late medieval period, queens often fulfilled an intercessory role making the appropriation of biblical figures of virtue and intercession like Deborah, Judith, Esther, Susanna, and even the Virgin Mary, useful in the narratives of medieval queenship. Indeed, the ceremony surrounding the coronation of queens often posited the queen as a Bride of Christ, thus figuratively conflating the king with Christ. J. L. Laynesmith contends that the frequency of this imagery in royal ceremonies throughout Europe reinforced kingly authority. 8 As queen regnant, Elizabeth certainly saw in this imag-



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ery an opportunity to construct a narrative of queenship that could alleviate anxiety caused by her gender while elevating her authority beyond the level even her father could have attained within his own imperialist narrative. By appropriating the position of intercessor, validated through the narratives and practice of generations of queens, Elizabeth was able to claim an authority that was not antithetical to her gender. In her collection of prayers, Christian Prayers and Meditations in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and Latin (1569), Elizabeth compares herself to Abraham, Lot, Jacob, Daniel, and Susanna, inferring the role of God in her preservation.9 Later she presents herself as the defender of Christ’s church, using a striking parallel structure to align herself clearly with biblical heroines: “persist for the glory of Thy name, for the honor of Thy Son, for the repose and quietude of Thine afflicted Church—in giving me strength so that I, like another Deborah, like another Judith, like another Esther [italics mine], may free Thy people of Israel from the hands of Thy enemies . . .”10 As well as these named biblical figures, Elizabeth’s prayers, speeches, and letters consistently position her as God’s hand­maiden, a term she uses frequently. Again, this image is in keeping with the historically situated role of the English queen as intercessor. Yet, Elizabeth’s deployment of this imagery, given her role as queen regnant, takes on a power and authority unavailable to queen consorts of the past. The absence of a king as husband realigns the figures. Within the discourse of the queen consort, she wielded her intercessory power through her relationship to a king, who stood in as a proxy for Christ. Elizabeth had no husband, and thus no proxy to serve as mediator between herself and divine authority. Thus, while the use of figures long associated with queenship would have been accepted as appropriate by her contemporaries, the removal of the king as intermediary infused Elizabeth’s regnal narrative with a potent authority through its direct relationship with the divine. Thus, in the creation of her regnal narrative, Elizabeth showed herself to be adept at appropriating strategic practices of past sovereigns and reforming them for her own use. The spatial and administrative organization she favored, which restricted access to her person, furthered her authority and no doubt her comfort. The regnal narrative she constructed of her queenship as intercessory served to alleviate anxieties surrounding her gender while paradox-

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ically increasing her authority. By figuring herself as intercessor, Elizabeth encouraged a greater sense of a communal, albeit hierarchical, relationship. This bonding ameliorated some of the more negative repercussions of a strong centralized monarchy, while maintaining the power of the political arrangement, something her Tudor father and grandfather were not able to achieve. Elizabeth’s female courtiers would certainly have witnessed Elizabeth’s strategic use of spatial organization and narrative construction, confirming in their estimation the importance of these strategies in the promotion of authority. When these female courtiers found themselves in a position to exercise authority within their own households, the structure of power as practiced by the queen provided a potent model. Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury—better known as Bess of Hardwick—provides a dynamic example of a female courtier’s use of Elizabeth’s strategies to empower herself within her own household. Shrewsbury (then Elizabeth Cavendish) joined Queen Elizabeth’s court at its inception in 1558,11 though she remained for only a few years, returning to Derbyshire after her marriage to William St. Loe. Many years later, in the 1590s, Shrewsbury created a “courtlike” environment at Hardwick New Hall, usefully drawing upon her experiences in Elizabeth’s court. Shrewsbury’s household at Hardwick New Hall proclaimed her independence and agency after the ongoing and humiliating conflicts with her fourth husband, George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, in the final years of their marriage. At one point during this conflict, Elizabeth Shrewsbury found herself virtually homeless. David Durant describes the Earl’s persecution of Elizabeth Shrewsbury as “no less than a mania.”12 It was at the beginning of this period, in June 1583, that she bought the Hardwick manor, her birthplace, from her brother for £9,500.13 This purchase was more than simply expedient. In taking possession of her maternal family estate, Shrewsbury proclaimed her independence from the authority of her husband, wresting back agency from the humiliations of her marital conflict. She extended and refurbished Hardwick Old Hall in order to accommodate her household, though the refurbishment also provided an opportunity for experimentation in design, most interestingly in the two High Great Chambers. However, it is in the design of Hardwick New Hall where one can read a personal narrative of authority realized architecturally throughout the house.



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The interior of the New Hall is hierarchically ordered. Service rooms, including the kitchen and servant quarters, are on the ground level. The magnificent state apartments, including the impressive “High Great Chamber,” are on the second level, while in between, on the first level, are the apartments used for daily living. The design of the first floor provided a separate dining and leisure space for Shrewsbury’s gentlewoman in a small dining room and the Low Great Chamber. These rooms formed a part of Shrewsbury’s private rooms in the southern portion of the house on the first floor. Durant notes that this configuration of the house elevated the female retainers over the male and enhanced Shrewsbury’s authority over all household members.14 Another of Shrewsbury’s innovations, that enhanced the privacy of these rooms was to incorporate a cross-hall through the center of the house. There are a variety of architectural interpretations of this particular feature,15 but what it did most practically was protect and limit access to Shrewsbury’s private chambers even more effectively. In order to access these rooms, one must go through the gallery of the chapel, then a small dining chamber or anteroom, to the Low Great Chamber. From here the hall gallery leads across to Shrewsbury’s withdrawing room linked to Shrewsbury’s bedchamber, the maid’s room, and the rooms of her granddaughter, Arbella Stuart. This arrangement clearly draws on the layout of private rooms in many royal palaces. An interesting corollary to Shrewsbury’s plan of private rooms can be found in the well known story of an incident in 1564, related by Sir James Melville. Melville recounts how he was taken by the queen through the state apartments at Whitehall, moving into ever more private rooms, finally arriving in Elizabeth’s bedchamber where he was treated to a view of the miniatures within “a little cabinet.” The first of the miniatures shown to him was of the Earl of Leicester, the queen’s most favored courtier and particular intimate at the time. This incident was part of the political maneuvers connected to a possible marriage between Mary Queen of Scots and the Earl of Leicester. The episode was designed to communicate Earl of Leicester’s high status in court, revealed by the fact that his miniature or “proxy” was allowed to reside in the most private and thus most privileged of spaces in Elizabeth’s palace. Melville’s own access to this space was also designed to flatter, with the hope of eliciting a positive response from the ambassador, and hopefully his queen.16

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This episode reveals the important political uses and implications of limiting and then conferring access to private spaces. In the layout of Shrewsbury’s New Hall, she too limited access to a particular “gem,” her granddaughter and strong claimant to the English throne, Arbella Stuart. Shrewsbury’s design of her private chambers, like Elizabeth’s palaces, created a complicated access to the private spaces of the house; those spaces that housed the most precious objects. In addition to Shrewsbury’s living “treasure,” Arbella, her chests of money and documents are shown in the 1601 inventory to stand in a closet connected at the farthest end of the house, accessible only from Shrewsbury’s bedchamber.17 And, of course, these rooms were also where Shrewsbury herself was most often to be found, situated as they were in the warmest corner of the house. Thus, they functioned as the center of Shrewsbury’s estate management, where she spent long hours on correspondence, reviewing accounts, and other business. If the private rooms at Hardwick New Hall were designed, like palaces, to restrict access and thus enhance authority, Shrewsbury’s rooms of state were designed with an additional effect in mind, also much practiced in the Tudor palaces—that of eliciting public awe. Indeed, the flowing approach up the impressive staircase emphasizes the ceremonial route through the house. Mark Girouard describes the staircases at Hardwick as “the most unique and daring feature” of the house.18 This progression up the staircase is designed to be experienced both physically and visually. The relatively low ceilings on these staircases cleverly create a sense of enclosure. The release from this close space of the staircase exaggerates the perception of height when one reaches the uppermost landing, enhancing one’s physical and visual response to the High Great Chamber. A reaction of awe and surprise is elicited upon entering this room of vast light and space. This response would, in turn, reinforce a sense of Shrewsbury’s aristocratic position and public status to the high status visitors entertained in these rooms. The design and decoration of the High Great Chamber would continue to build upon and enhance this impression of Shrewsbury’s status. All the state rooms on this floor are rooms of grand display: the vast height of the High Great Chamber, with its huge windows, allows for an impressive prospect of the countryside. The gallery runs alongside the state rooms, the length of the entire second story, and is impressive in length and height. The state rooms were rooms



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of display for the entertainment of high-status visitors and played an important role in the narrative of authority Shrewsbury wished to communicate. Many elements of this narrative, clearly appropriated from Queen Elizabeth’s regnal discourse, were modified and even exaggerated in Shrewsbury’s execution of them. Indeed, one could suggest that the sheer weight of figurative imagery both in the construction of the house and the inside decor speak of an overinscribing of space. There has been some attempt to create a coherent thematic schemata for Shrewsbury’s design choices, with perhaps the most compelling of these being Gillian White’s argument that three clear themes are present when one analyzes the building, interior decoration, and purchases specifically made for the New Hall. White identifies these themes as the assertion of identity, the government of self, and the government of the nation.19 It is not the purpose here to discuss the merits of the sometimes competing interpretations of Shrewsbury’s building design and interior decoration.20 Indeed, some attempted arguments for a coherent design scheme risk missing elements of Shrewsbury’s narrative, which, while perhaps sometimes chaotic in theme, remains consistent in its purpose of communicating a figure of authority to those who read or experience the house. This element of the unsystematic in the figures employed by Shrewsbury was certainly present in the narrative Elizabeth chose for herself. Indeed, one can see this discourse as a palimpsest that relies on the interaction of a multiplicity of interpretations in the construction of the narrative of authority. The weakness of this strategy, of course, is that these interpretations are of necessity unfixed, always complicated by their reception. This instability perhaps goes some way to explain the cumulative figurative weight in the design and decoration of the New Hall. By the 1590s, Shrewsbury would be well aware of the vulnerability of the narrative one attempts to construct. Her life in Elizabeth’s court and her close contact with that court throughout the decades would have proved an instructive lesson on how the figures one drew upon to create one’s own narrative of authority could be reinscribed by others in an attempt to appropriate that authority as well as subvert or destroy it. Certainly her long association with another queen, Mary Stuart, would also have confirmed this lesson. Thus, in constructing the New Hall, Shrewsbury attempted to fix her narrative through repetition in a variety of media.

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The most often derided of these repetitions is the use of Shrewsbury’s initials, E.S., in stone, plaster, marble, paint, and textiles. Add to this the many heraldic references to the Shrewsbury family throughout the house and there can be no doubt in the minds of an observer, even today, that the narrative to be told within this space is that of Elizabeth Shrewsbury and her relationship to the queen. Shrewsbury never sought to claim the connection to the divine that Elizabeth’s narrative consistently asserts. It was not appropriate that she do so, but she stops only just short of this claim. In Elizabeth’s narrative of authority, the queen positioned herself as a handmaid to Christ. In Shrewsbury’s narration, the countess positions herself as the handmaid to the handmaid of Christ. All the imagery expressed both decoratively and architecturally support this as the house’s most salient message. As has been discussed by many, the house is replete with images of virtue. The 1601 inventory names tapestries depicting charity, wisdom, prudence, classical knowledge, resignation to God, and many other qualities admired in women of the time generally, and in the queen specifically. Allegorical figures of the virtues abound, as well as biblical and classical characters who exemplify the virtues. It would take several pages to list all of the figures related to virtuous behavior within the house during Shrewsbury’s life there, but a short list from the 1601 inventory will suffice to make clear the abundance of virtue figures Shrewsbury placed in the house. In the Best Bedchamber there hung one tapestry depicting Faith in opposition to Mohamet, while in another, Hope was set in contrast to Judas. In a third, Temperance was placed in opposition with Sardanapales. In this room, there was also a carpet depicting the biblical story of David and Nathan. In the gallery, there are still the massive tapestries depicting the story of Gideon and also of Hercules listed in the inventory. One of the overmantels in the gallery also continues to display the figure of Justice. A needlework valance portrayed the parable of the prodigal son while the story of the fall of Phaeton appeared on a needlework cushion cover. A painted cloth purchased by Shrewsbury continues to give a vivid rendition of the conversion of Saul, while another presents Paul and Barnabas at Lystra, and a third shows Paul standing before Agrippa. Penelope, Lucretia, Zenobia, and Cleopatra were also represented in the household decor as designed by Shrewsbury. 21 It has been argued that the presence of some of these figures can be discounted as



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forming part of Shrewsbury’s narrative of authority and instead seen as simply practical purchases necessary in order to furnish the house in a relatively short period. It has been suggested that Shrewsbury’s use of the secondhand market to pick up tapestries and other furnishings may have meant that quality and price, rather than thematic integrity, was uppermost in her mind. This possibility, coupled with the fact that many of the furnishings and decorative items had long been in Shrewsbury’s possession, has led some to argue against any attempt at a thematic reading of the figures presented in the household decoration. This position, however, is not tenable. Shrewsbury possessed or was building other houses when she designed and “dressed” the New Hall, and thus one can assume she chose those items that she felt most suited the new establishment. 22 As for purchases on the second hand market, certainly her choice would have been limited. Still, finding works that depicted some form of female virtuous behavior would not be difficult in the period. Again, the influence of the court ensured that much material featuring motifs of virtue was in circulation. However, there is one figure recurring several times that does merit some interest beyond the general thematic of virtue, though it is certainly emblematic of virtue in the extreme. These are the four pictures of the Virgin Mary listed in the 1601 inventory. One of these images is identified as “the picture of our Ladie the Virgin Marie”in the gallery, 23 another is of the Virgin Mary and the three kings, and a third is of the Annunciation. A fourth picture of the Virgin Mary was listed in the Low Great Chamber. 24 Given the heightened religious tensions of the 1590s—which often took on an iconographic zeal targeted at what was seen as “popish” imagery— one might ask why Shrewsbury, a woman who slept with a book listed as “Calvin upon Jobe” by her bed, 25 displayed these paintings of the Virgin Mary in the high-status room of the gallery, the personal space of the Low Great Chamber, and two (or three) in her chapel. While Shrewsbury was not aligned with the more extreme reformists in religion, there is no question that her religious views were conventionally Protestant. And yet these images of the Virgin seem to have caused no concern, being clearly identified in the 1601 inventory. The likely explanation is that these paintings of the Virgin Mary functioned, as many of the other decorations of the house, as exemplars of virtue and intercession. Medieval queens were often pre-

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sented as Marian figures in both textual and visual representations. For example, Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s consort, is depicted in a portrait surrounded by roses and gillyflowers, symbolism that depicted virginity by the roses and motherhood through the gillyflowers. Woodville is dressed in a blue cloak spread “wide like that of Mary as the Mother of Mercy.”26 This imagery was seen to be consistent with the queen’s role as intercessor. And while Elizabeth I never explicitly compared herself to the Virgin Mary, as noted above, she consistently presented herself as God’s handmaiden as well as an intercessory mother figure for her people. Thus, Shrewsbury’s inclusion and likely fondness for these pictures of the Virgin Mary, long in her possession, can be directly related to the overriding influence of her life: the queen. The New Hall, and most especially the high-status rooms of the second floor, display most richly the part of Shrewsbury’s narrative connecting her with the queen. In these rooms she represents the “court” of the woman she had so long served and places herself within that narrative. The most striking imagery appears in the High Great Chamber in the frieze of Diana, which covers the upper portion of three walls. While much has been written on the possible interpretations of this scene, the overriding signification is that of a glorious golden or pastoral world in which the magnificent Queen resides. Ceres, the goddess of plenty, is represented in the south window recess, a figure again often associated with Elizabeth and reinforcing the theme of the golden age so often associated with the queen in art and literature. In the middle of the room the fireplace overmantel presents Elizabeth’s arms in a strapwork cartouche. This imagery is integrated into the woodland scene, seemingly set atop the verdure of the frieze. In the adjoining gallery, two more pictures of Elizabeth were listed in the 1601 inventory. One is likely the grand portrait that is still displayed in the room today. This portrait, from the Hilliard workshop and likely purchased by Shrewsbury in 1599, is a regal picture of the queen presented in a luxurious display of confidence and authority. Roy Strong describes the picture as “epitomizing an outmoded aesthetic,”27 but perhaps what may appear to be an anachronistic portrayal of the queen by the 1590s was exactly what Shrewsbury wanted, an iconographic figure of the queen she had so long served. The narrative Shrewsbury constructed and displayed at Hardwick New Hall published the personal integrity, virtue, and author-



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ity of Elizabeth Shrewsbury. When Shrewsbury bought Hardwick, her marriage was in ruins while her personal authority and her reputation for integrity were dangerously eroded. Seeking to reestablish these, she turned to the one model of female agency that was most potent, that of the queen. Shrewsbury, as a member of Elizabeth’s court at the time of the queen’s ascension to the throne, witnessed Elizabeth’s strategies for asserting her authority when Elizabeth too was in a vulnerable position. The queen’s development of a narrative of authority set within a spatial organization suited to the magnification of this authority played an important role in Elizabeth’s early success in establishing her position. The lesson was not lost on Shrewsbury, who instigated a similar strategy at Hardwick and experienced a similar success. Elizabeth Shrewsbury was, albeit after a long and often arduous journey, an extremely wealthy and powerful woman in possession of estates. That she would use Elizabeth as a model is not surprising. However, she was certainly not the only woman who created a narrative of authority by appropriating Elizabeth’s strategies. Elizabeth (Cooke) Hoby, later Lady Russell, with more limited means, also understood the power of a compelling narrative strategically placed. Russell did not serve in the court of Elizabeth. However, as sister-in-law to William Cecil and aunt to Robert Cecil, with whom she kept up a lively correspondence, she had close and continuous contact with the court for decades. After her marriage to Thomas Hoby in June 1558, the young couple spent the autumn of that year in London amid the ceremony and festivities of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Given her close connections with the Cecil household, Russell would certainly have participated in at least some of these festivities, allowing her, like Elizabeth Shrewsbury, to observe Elizabeth I’s construction of a narrative of authority at close hand. Certainly Russell’s early experience of Elizabeth’s court was hugely inf luential in her later strategies for the promotion of her own household. Russell appropriated iconography and discourses modeled and sanctioned by Elizabeth I because Russell, like Elizabeth, understood that a narrative of authority displayed through spatial acts could promote and secure social advancement. Russell spent her life in pursuit of this advancement, for which she was prepared early in life by her father Anthony Cooke. His educational strategy for his daughters allowed them to take their place among the most highly educated subjects in the realm. Cooke was part of a circle of

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ambitious courtiers, including William Cecil and Philip Hoby, who took advantage of the opportunities available for gentlemen in the courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI. The marriages Anthony Cooke arranged for Russell and her sisters were designed, as was common in the period, to advance the power and influence of the family. Anne Cooke married Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper, while Mildred Cooke married William Cecil. 28 Russell’s first marriage, to Thomas Hoby, was less advantageous than that of her two elder sisters, but started out hopefully enough. Thomas, younger brother and heir to Philip Hoby, was by all accounts a capable and ambitious young man.29 The newlyweds continued to cultivate their relationship with powerful members of Elizabeth’s fledgling court, including Russell’s brother-in-law, William Cecil. The young couple also quickly began to participate in the type of display they hoped would contribute to their social advancement. Upon Philip Hoby’s death in 1558, they inherited Bisham Abbey and continued enlarging it. They added rooms onto the south side of the hall and constructed a northern range consisting of a tower, dining room and library.30 According to Thomas Hoby’s diary, they decorated the gallery with heraldic glass. 31 These strategies for enhancing their family prestige were successful. In 1566, Thomas Hoby was appointed as ambassador to France and was knighted as part of this appointment. Along with a pregnant Russell and their three children, he embarked from Dover for France in the spring of that year. Unfortunately, by the middle of July, Thomas Hoby was dead. Up to this point, Russell had worked in partnership with Hoby to achieve their goals. However, upon his death, she found herself heavily pregnant and the head of a vulnerable family of three young children, with the goal of establishing the Hoby family in great jeopardy. Like Shrewsbury and Elizabeth herself, Russell found herself in a moment of crisis. Her response was to create a narrative of authority communicated through its realization in space in the form of a monument. Russell designed a marble tomb in All Saints church, adjoining the Bisham Abbey estate, home of the Hoby family. On this tomb chest lie two recumbent figures representing Thomas Hoby and his brother Philip. The figures are in full armor, their heads resting on their helmets, while at their feet there are carved hobby hawks. Margaret Whinney notes that the positioning of the figures was unique in England at that time. The style of the figures, different



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from that practiced by English sculptors, reveals a French influence. Whinney suggests that they may have been designed in France by Pierre Bontemps.32 Certainly, the style of the figures closely resembles the reclining form of John d’Humières, carved by Bontemps in 1550, now in the Louvre. Thus, the Hoby tomb proclaims visually the artistic innovation and sophistication of Russell, publishing her familiarity with continental movements in the arts. This was a familiarity she promoted later in her prefatory poem for Bartholo Sylva’s Giardino Cosmografico Coltivato, a manuscript gift project for Queen Elizabeth designed by Russell, her sisters, and others. 33 In addition to the reclining figures, the Hoby tomb features columns of the Doric order and three large heraldic shields. In the shallow arch behind the figures on two panels is a Latin elegy written by Russell. On the tomb chest is an elegy in English by Thomas Sackville. 34 Other texts are carved in panels that frame the top of the tomb chest. The elegies that festoon this monument realized in stone the praises of the queen. Elizabeth wrote to the young widow: “We hear out of France such singular good reports of your duty well accomplished towards your husband, both living and dead, with other your sober, wise and discreet behaviour in that Court and country, that we think it a part of great contentation to us, and commendation of our country, that such a gentlewoman hath given so manifest a testimony of virtue in such hard times of adversity. And, therefore, though we thought very well of you before, yet shall we hereafter make a more assured account of your virtues and gifts.”35 Elizabeth’s letter reflects the praises of Russell by two other queens, Catherine de Medici and Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, as well.36 Through repetition, Russell’s elegies reenact the heroic actions so praised by the queens. In English, on the front of the tomb chest, Sackville asserts: In forein land opprest with heapes of grief, From part of which when she [Russell] discharged was By fall of teares, that faithfull wives do shead; The corps, with honour, brought she to this place, Perfourming here all due unto the dead. That doen, this noble tombe she causd to make.

Here Sackville presents a moving image of a grieving widow who surmounts her pain to fulfill her duty to her dead spouse. This image is enlarged and filled with pathos in Russell’s highly person-

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alized description of the same scene in the Latin verse on the tablets above the monument: I take my husband’s corpse and children’s feeble limbs. And so with filling womb I return by land and sea To our homeland, lost in sorrow, loving death.37

Her imagery amplifies her pain and grief, thus positioning her actions as heroic deeds set against a backdrop of incredible hardship. Thrice more on the monument, she reiterates with emotive language this episode. 38 Like Shrewsbury, and indeed Elizabeth herself, Russell employed repetition to ensure the constant communication of this narrative of authority. Consistent also with the practices of Elizabeth and Shrewsbury, the acceptable models of female virtue are employed. And again, Russell relied upon contiguity with Elizabeth to empower these models. In 1574, Russell married her second husband, John, Lord Russell, heir to Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford. At first this would appear to be an incongruous marriage. Russell was forty-six at the time of the marriage while Lord Russell was in his midtwenties, about the same age as her sons. However, Russell’s brother-in-law William Cecil had long sought an advantageous match for her and perhaps this appeared to be the best opportunity to secure one. Francis Russell was a close friend of Cecil’s, and the religious and political positions of the two families were very similar, so it is likely that this was also a strategic marriage. Whatever the reason for this decision, and despite Russell’s age, the marriage resulted in the birth of three children: a son, Francis, who died as an infant and two daughters, one of whom, Anne, became the Countess of Worcester. During Russell’s second marriage, the queen’s continued interest in the Hoby family, and Russell’s careful management and administration of the estate of her eldest Hoby son, Edward, resulted in his marriage in 1582 to Margaret Carey, the daughter of Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, the queen’s cousin. This marriage secured the future of the Hoby heir and realized the ambitions of Philip and Thomas Hoby to enter the elite ranks of the culture that Russell had stewarded for decades. Unfortunately, the death of Lord Russell two years later in 1584 placed Russell and her Russell daughters in financially strained circumstances, jeopardizing Rus-



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sell’s ability to secure appropriate marriages. Russell’s response took a variety of forms but was rooted in the narrative of authority born out of the death of Thomas Hoby. Again, for her Russell husband she set about to create a monument. However, this monument, this bearer of her narrative, was to be placed in a much grander theater: Westminster Abbey. After the dissolution of the monasteries, Westminster Abbey became a royal peculiar. In order to erect a monument there, one needed the permission of the Crown. During Elizabeth’s reign, burial in the abbey was reserved for those whom Elizabeth wished to grant special favor, and was especially used for the honoring of noblewomen, including several women from Elizabeth’s privy chamber. However, the dynamic of this gift was much more complex than it might first appear. According to J. S. W. Helt, “death, because of its finality, leaves cultures vulnerable to disintegration as individuals are alienated by the loss of family members and friends, and as social groups suffer the loss of integral members.”39 In order to mitigate the repercussions of death upon the living community, early modern English society built funerary monuments. These monuments formed a connection—through the motifs of architecture, elegies, portraiture, and other kinds of secular art—that served to rejoin the dead with the living. By accessing a complex assortment of architectural motifs, heraldic symbolism, effigies, and texts, their mental actions could be realized through a chain of social activities where the “imaginary is transformed into the real.”40 For Elizabeth, Westminster Abbey served as an extension of her court. Elizabeth’s gift of permission for burial within Westminster Abbey allowed the honored departed to take up a permanent position within her court. Indeed, these dead, who had once formed a part of her living familia, through their tombs erected in Westminster Abbey, were able to rejoin the court and provide symbolic support to the queen. As a result, these monuments became potent bearers of Elizabeth’s narrative of authority. The honors attributed to them could be appropriated by the queen, their virtues serving as potent advertisements for the glory of the court of this most glorious queen. Russell’s monument certainly participated vigorously in this discourse. John Russell’s tomb is more traditional than the Hoby tomb. Most likely from the Cure workshop, it is very similar to dozens of monuments across the country. Russell is portrayed in full length,

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lying on his side, in his robes of state. An effigy of their son, the baby Francis is tucked in at his feet, a reminder that Russell did her duty in producing an heir. Two women in relief hold the frame of the coat of arms; they most likely represent the Russell daughters, Anne and Elizabeth. The tomb is decorated with heraldic devices and architectural motifs signifying the status and honor of John Russell. However, the most striking element on the tomb are the elegies in three languages—English, Latin, and Greek. These elegies communicate Russell’s lamentations for the death of her husband, her directives to her daughters, and the “Epicedion” by Russell’s first son, Edward Hoby, in praise of his stepfather. From these verses, when read together, emerges a narrative of a family huddled around the tomb of the departed, deep in the throes of mourning. There is the desolate wife, “my wounded mind is torn by death’s pitiless feeding”; the stoic stepson, “Who you were, what sort, and how much, your heraldry shows / Your unstained life teaches, and your woeful death proves”; and the aggrieved daughters, “Weep now, daughters, now chant out a mourning poem.”41 Russell’s texts produce a dramatic scene where the voices of the bereaved family can be “heard” emanating from the texts inscribed on the tomb. This narrative of grief informs Russell’s larger narrative of authority based on her relationship to the members of this family. She is the mother of mourning daughters, an obedient and dignified son, and a dead infant heir to an earl. She is also an educated woman, writing verse in Latin, Greek, and English. She is the dutiful and desolate wife. As with the Hoby tomb, her portrayal of herself goes beyond accepted tropes of female mourning. The eloquence of her words depicts a courageous, even classically heroic woman in the face of the death of this incomparable second husband: “John was his name,” she laments “(ah, was) wretch must I say / Lord Russell once, now my tear-thirstie clay.”42 The dynamic relationship of monumental discourse and textual meaning constantly inform and reinforce each other. In this way Russell guarantees the transmission of her own narrative while further reinforcing Elizabeth’s narrative of authority in a “theater” that guaranteed a steady stream of consumers.43 However, it was not only in the creation of monuments that Russell utilized court discourse and practice in order to construct and publish her narrative. The transient displays of progress entertainments could also be useful in promoting ambition and securing one’s reputation. Queen Elizabeth’s progresses were certainly calcu-



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lated to promote her authority, but in turn, the queen’s strategies of displaying herself through her progresses also provided her courtiers with the opportunity to display themselves to her and her powerful attendants. Russell took just such an opportunity in a bid to promote her Russell daughters to a place in court during Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Bisham in 1592. The Oxford printer Joseph Barnes published the text of this entertainment along with two others. The title proclaims, “Speeches delivered to her Majestie this last Progresse, at the Right Honorable the Lady Russel’s at Bissam . . . ”44 While there is some discussion about the authorship of this piece, it seems most likely that Russell is indeed the author, considering the content and the purpose, along with her known literary abilities. The entertainment begins with the meeting between a wild man and the queen. The wild man, tamed by the queen’s perfection, offers to protect her as she nears Bisham Abbey. The action then moves to a conversation between a lustful Pan and two virgins who identify themselves as daughters of the “farme” (Bisham Abbey). These virgins were certainly performed by Anne and Elizabeth Russell. The daughters are portrayed as intelligent young women who successfully parry Pan’s lascivious advances with their wit, demonstrating a familiarity with classical allusions and gentle comic rhetoric. They also display their needlework skills, both through the props they hold in the scene and the similes they use in their clever exchanges with Pan. Their chastity and virtue are shown through their easy defeat of Pan’s threatening advances. Indeed, the young women are presented through this production as model female courtiers. Baldassare Castiglione, in his Book of the Courtier, describes the perfect woman courtier as possessing “noblenesse of birth, avoidinge Affectation or curiositie, to have a good grace of nature in all her doinges, to be of good condcyons, wyttye . . . a certein sweetnesse in language that may delite, wherby she may gentlie entertein all kinde of men with talke woorth the hearynge and honest, and applyed to the time and place, and to the degree of the person she communed withal.”45 Elizabeth would have easily recognized the connection between the portrayal of the Russell daughters and Castiglione’s well-known description. Thomas Hoby, Russell’s first husband, was the translator of the English edition of this work. It is likely that Russell was involved with the preparation of the text prior to its publication in 1561, given her facility with the Italian language, her work as a translator,

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and Thomas Hoby’s protests, no doubt overly modest, in his letter to Henry Hastings, of his “small understanding of the tongue.”46 Whatever Russell’s involvement with the work, she certainly read it. By alluding to it, Russell asserts her own connection to this book and possibly a comparison with the virtuous Duchess of Castiglione’s text, the Lady Elizabeth Gonzaga, who presides over a court residing on her estate. Indeed, Russell’s presence is asserted throughout the text of this entertainment. The daughters attribute their knowledge of Elizabeth’s virtue to the lessons their mother taught them, “What our mother hath often told us, and fame the whole world, cannot be concealed from thee [Pan]; if it be, we wil tell thee; which may hereafter make thee surcease thy suite, for feare of her displeasure, and honor virginitye, by wondering at her virtues.” Pan is instructed to “give our mother warning” of Elizabeth’s approach, and thus a god is sent to wait upon Russell, signifying her as the head of the Bisham household. After a song of Ceres, a mother figure often associated with Elizabeth (and displayed by Shrewsbury as well), the piece ends with a direct reference to Russell and the effect Elizabeth’s visit to Bisham will have upon her: “And this muche dare we promise for the Lady of the farme, that your presence hath added many daies to her life, by the infinite joyes shee conceyves in her heart, who presents your highnesse with this toye and this short prayer, poured from her hart, that your dayes may increase in happines, your happines have no end till there be no more dayes.”47 In this way, the entertainment draws to a conclusion that binds Russell to the queen in an action of reciprocity that alludes to a golden age of mutual, albeit hierarchical, relationship which defeats time itself. The queen on this occasion was generous to Russell, accepting both daughters into her court, resulting in the successful marriage of Anne Russell to Henry, Lord Herbert, son of the Earl of Worcester in 1600. The wedding was attended by Queen Elizabeth along with many important courtiers.48 The effect of Elizabeth’s reign on the women of her realm has been discussed from many perspectives. It has been argued that because the legal and political structures that regulated and often stifled female agency remained in place during Elizabeth’s reign, her gender did little to empower the women of the period. However, the very gender of the queen posited a unique and powerful female presence that provided a model other women could follow. Eliza-



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beth, as a queen regnant, inserted into contemporary understanding of gender a unique and positive manifestation of female authority. Contemporary and even modern political thinkers tend to discount the effect of Elizabeth’s position on the lived realities of other women. Yet the actions of women like Shrewsbury and Russell make clear that Elizabeth was a potent emblem of female authority. Their actions reveal that the appropriation of elements of Elizabeth’s regnal narrative and the strategies through which this narrative was displayed could imbue women other than the queen with authoritative agency even within a society that often militated legally and politically against just such agency.

Courtliness and Poetry in Sidney, Lyly, and Greene Ayako Kawanami

Tudor courtly poets engaged in producing poetic works with

aesthetic appeal within or near the political and cultural milieu of the court, the center of power and fashion. While seeking out the artistic merits of their poetic works, courtly poets, with a view to obtaining favor and preferment, somehow had to negotiate the burden of the patronage of their social superiors, prominent courtiers in general and the queen in particular. The idea that helped them to bridge the apparently incompatible interests of political maneuvering and artistic creativity was the Tudor court’s correlation between courtliness and poetry. The elucidation of this idea, which was the key to one’s success as a reputable courtly poet, can be found in George Puttenham’s contemporary rhetorical treatise The Arte of English Poesie (published in 1589 but circulated in manuscript since the mid-1560s). As Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker suggest, “ ‘Puttenham’ cuts the gordian knot of the problem with which contemporary criticism wrestled so unprofitably by relating literature not to ethics but to life.”1 The most unusual feature of The Arte of English Poesie is its treatment of poetic language as a living art for reflecting a refined and polished way of life in the cultural precinct of the court. The Arte of English Poesie is therefore a useful guide to rhetorical expertise as well as courtly manners; to master the art of poetry means to master the art of living as a courtier. Puttenham begins the treatise by discussing what poets and poetry are and what matters they employ as their topics, and he then moves on to discuss different forms of poetry, metrical proportions, and poetical ornaments. Finally, he concludes the whole discussion of poetic expertise by instructing 114



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his reader on how to maintain the reputation of being a very good courtier. In order for a courtier to “retaine the credit of his place, and profession of a very Courtier,” Puttenham says, he needs “cunningly to be able to dissemble.”2 He goes on to explain that “he could dissemble his conceits as well as his countenances, so as he never speake as he thinkes, or thinke as he speaks, and that in any matter of importance his words and his meaning very seldome meete.”3 It is not a mere coincidence that Puttenham names the rhetorical figure Allegoria—in his terms, “the chief ringleader and captaine of all other figures,” “the Courtier or figure of faire semblant.”4 It is a figure that functions as an effective means of creating a kind of dissimulation in which “the wordes beare contrary countenaunce to th’intent” through speeches “wrested from [their] owne naturall signification to another not altogether so naturall.”5 Words do not match with meanings. The trait shared between poetical rhetoric and courtly behavior is dissembling or dissimulation, a trick by means of which appearance is made to be split apart from reality. Given this common tendency, modern critics have shed light on the way in which literary works by writers like Philip Sidney and John Lyly had been shaped by way of mirroring their experience at court. In his book Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England, Daniel Javitch gives an explanation of the court’s role in nurturing poetic works: “A basic reason why these artifices were so esteemed was their resemblance to the artifices courtiers themselves sought to display in their conduct.” Javitch contends that the qualities of rhetoric in poetry characterized by “ornamental features,” “deceptive verbal tactics,” and “playful motives” are in accord with the inclinations of courtly mind characterized by Baldassare Castiglione’s sprezzatura, a courtly way of making an easygoing and nonchalant pose so as to hide efforts and difficulties.6 In her more localized analysis of the semantic shift of the term “courtship,” Catherine Bates also makes explicit an association between courtliness and poetry at the court of Elizabeth I. Bates pays attention to the fact that it was not until the sixteenth century that the modern sense of “courtship,” “wooing someone,” evolved from its older sense “being at court.” The double meanings of “courtship,” Bates suggests, enabled courtly poets to make their frustrations in wooing the queen reflected in the depictions of the vicissitudes of love in their poetry. Thus Lyly could be engaged in exploring “the highly ambivalent relation between licit and illicit sexuality.” Lyly’s

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ever extending debate style gives his loving characters Euphues and Lucilla “a further opportunity to flirt with each other, thereby demonstrating that their ‘endless’ discourse is simply a means to achieve an improper end (or at least to defer achieving a proper one).”7 The endless discourse of flirtatious love between Euphues and Lucilla, in turn, echoes a sense of frustration and failure on the part of Lyly in his attempts to court the queen. In the following discussion of the writing of Sidney and Lyly, I will also focus on some deceptive and ambiguous expressions and will argue that they are metaphorical representations of the ambiguous attitude that courtly poets could not perhaps avoid assuming within the network of royal patronage. In particular, I will foreground words with the subtle nuance of dissembling and deception like “eye,” “bait,” “shadow,” “gudgeon,” and “net” in connection with the idea of the court as an intelligence agency that encouraged courtiers to engage with—and in—spying and espionage. But the link between courtliness and poetry, by yoking together deceptive courtly behavior and rhetorical ambiguities, carries an obvious implication: the artistic value of courtly works, with their dependence on courtly practice, cannot outlive the existence of the court. I would like to suggest, however, that such courtly works have artistic merits independent of the agency of the court. In the first part of this essay, I will explore the autonomous artistic value of Sidney’s Old Arcadia (ca. 1578–80) and Lyly’s Euphues: Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Campaspe (1584) while simultaneously arguing that they are couched in terms indicative of courtly behavior of dissembling, especially spying and espionage. In the second part, I will follow through the literary representation of the link between courtliness and poetry by anglicizing Robert Greene’s The Scottish History of James the Fourth (ca. 1590–91), a play probably written for the popular stage, in order to find out the way the artistic merits of courtly works have been passed on to the literary works outside the courtly domain. Greene’s James IV depicts the Scotch court where the correlation between courtliness and poetry is taken for granted, by alluding to key terms in Lyly’s Euphues in support of the idea. Before turning to the works of Sidney and Lyly, I would like to dwell a little more on what Puttenham calls dissembling in terms of both rhetorical figure and courtly behavior. In addition to the rhetorical figure Allegoria, another suitable example that for Putten-



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ham illuminates the association between courtliness and poetry is the rhetorical figure Paradiastole, in Puttenham’s terms, “the Curryfavell”: But if such moderation of words tend to flattery, or soothing, or excusing, it is by the figure Paradiastole, which therefore nothing improperly we call the Curry-favell, as when we make the best of a bad thing, or turne a signification to the more plausible sence: as, to call an unthrift, a liberall Gentleman: the foolish-hardy, valiant or couragious: the niggard, thriftie: a great riot, or outrage, an youthfull pranke, and such like termes: moderating and abating the force of the matter by craft, and for a pleasing purpose, as appeareth by these verses of ours, teaching in what cases it may commendably be used by Courtiers.8

Elsewhere in the treatise, on the other hand, “a curry favell” is applied to courtiers’ characteristic behavior: . . . Every sort and maner of businesse or affaire or action hath his decencie and undecencie, either for the time or place or person or some other circumstaunce, as Priests to be sober and sad, a Preacher by his life to give good example, a Judge to be incorrupted, solitarie and unacquainted with Courtiers or Courtly entertainements, & as the Philosopher saith Oportet judicē esse rudem & simplicem, without plaite or wrinkle, sower in looke and churlish in speach, contrariwise a Courtly Gentleman to be loftie and curious in countenaunce, yet sometimes a creeper, and a curry favell with his superiours.9

Puttenham, through the term “Curry-Favell,” characterizes a typical courtier as high-minded yet servile. Puttenham’s ideal courtier is required to fashion himself by means of a clandestine shift of his personality from less recommendable to more respectable. In parallel with the courtly behavior of “curry-favelling,” Paradiastole, “the Curry-favell,” is a rhetorical figure that facilitates a semantic shift within a single word, for example, from “unthrift” to “liberall,” from “foolish-hardy” to “valiant or couragious,” from “niggard” to “thriftie,” and from “a great riot, or outrage” to “an youthfull pranke.” It is characteristic of dissembling in terms of both courtly behavior and poetical rhetoric to derive two disparate characters/ meanings from a single personality/word under cover of ambiguity and secrecy. In this practice, furthermore, it is required to display magnanimity in the very act of behaving sneakily.

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It is a short step from here to the pastoral world of Sidney’s Old Arcadia in which love intrigues among noble aristocrats are developed under cover of the darkness of solitary woods. On seeing the picture of Philoclea, who has retired to Arcadia’s desert with her father, Duke Basilius, her mother, Duchess Gynecia, and her sister, Pamela, Prince Pyrocles decides to disguise himself as an Amazonian woman named Cleophila, in order to approach her more easily. But his disguise unexpectedly results in attracting both Basilius and Gynecia, who has seen through it from the beginning. Consequently Pyrocles/Cleophila must “wade betwixt constancy and courtesy,” giving expressions of “love both active and passive.”10 Pyrocles/Cleophila needs to resolve how to “ join obtaining with preventing,” in other words, “how to satisfy, and yet not satisfy, such hopeful desires.”11 Pyrocles/Cleophila goes on to win, with bountiful affection, the trust of both Gynecia and Basilius to later betray it with a great subtlety. The climax of Pyrocles/Cleophila’s dissembling comes when he/she whispers to Gynecia and Basilius, respectively, to come to his/her dark cave to have a hoped-for but unexpected affair, while he visits his true love Philoclea. Interestingly, these dissembling intrigues are all peppered with eye metaphors. The lovers are all under the condition of being watchful yet being watched: Pyrocles/Cleophila must “deceive such heedful eyes”of Gynecia and Basilius, “so were these two now thrown into so serviceable an affection that the turning of Cleophila’s eye was a strong stern enough to all their motions.”12 The condition of being “watchful yet watched” in the context of dissembling behavior could well be seen as mirroring the atmosphere of the court. As John Michael Archer suggests, Elizabeth’s court constituted Europe’s first substantial espionage network of informants, courtiers, and salaried spies, not least in terms of gathering information on the sovereign’s personal life.13 In this system, courtiers for intelligence purposes watched each other, and looked at the queen, who relied on the intelligence network, for royal patronage. Meanwhile, the queen, while being watched, monitored the sexual relationships and marriages of her courtiers. In the case of Sidney, in particular, his place within the espionage system was clearly colored by the activities of his father-in-law Francis Walsingham, the spy master who began his career as a spy by helping expose the conspiracy surrounding the proposed union of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk and Mary Stuart.



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It is plausible that the anxious circumstance under which the three lovers keep an eye on one another in Old Arcadia is an illustration of the courtiers’ uneasy act of watching one another, and the encounters of Gynecia’s “heedful eyes” and Pyrocles’ controlling eyes (“Cleophila’s eye was a strong stern”) represent moments of the watchful-and-watched relationship between the queen and Sidney. But there could be more than a reflection of courtly espionage in Sidney’s depiction of love. Pyrocles/Cleophila’s dissembling attitude, of being both “active and passive” or “watchful and watched,” is given exemplary expression in the term “bait.” Having expressed his love to Philoclea by revealing his identity in the former scene, Pyrocles/Cleophila in the next scene of their encounter “overrule[s] all wonted shows of love to Philoclea, and convert[s] them to Gynecia.”14 This is all because Cleophila/Pyrocles makes Gynecia “bite of her other baits.”15 “Bait” here undergoes a clandestine semantic shift from attractive words to deceitful attitudes in the nature of Puttenham’s Allegoria and, for that matter, it corresponds to courtly dissembling by being “both active and passive” and “both watchful and watched.” But the semantic shift in the word “bait” in the following verses is not confined to a mere sign of courtly dissembling. It is geared to presenting complex feelings of love: Aurora, now thou show’st thy blushing light (Which oft to hope lays out a guileful bait, That trusts in time to find the way aright To ease those pains which on desire do wait) Blush on for shame that still with thee do light On pensive souls (instead of restful bait) Care upon care (instead of doing right) To overpressed breasts, more grievous weight. As oh! myself, whose woes are never light, Tied to the stake of doubt, strange passions bait; While thy known course, observing nature’s right, Stirs me to think what dangers lie in wait. For mischiefs great, day after day doth show; Make me still fear thy fair appearing show.16

Pyrocles/Cleophila hopes that Aurora shows the right way out of a deceitful act of dissembling (“a guileful bait”) together with the

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blushing light of dawn. Even released from “a guileful bait,” however, Pyrocles will be tormented by “overpressed breasts, more grievous weight” rather than given “restful bait,” and will become “strange passions bait.” In the face of the anxiously waited moment of fulfilling his love for Philoclea after avoiding the web of deceitful love intrigues, Pyrocles even finds that “the extremity of joy is not without a certain joyful pain.”17 In the course of the semantic shift of “bait” in these verses, it changes its focus from strategic planning to amorous thinking. Sidney shows more interest in describing the ambiguous feeling of love of “a certain joyful pain” than reflecting upon the courtly dissembling of being “watchful yet watched.” The persistent use of words with deceptive connotations like “shadow” and “gudgeon” causes the spirit of dissembling to pervade Lyly’s Euphues. In his determination to choose amorous relationship rather than faithful friendship by usurping Philautus’s love Lucilla, Euphues murmurs: “Let Philautus behave himself never so craftily, he shall know that it must be a wily mouse that shall breed in the cat’s ear; and because I resemble him in wit, I mean a little to dissemble with him in wiles.”18 Initially, Euphues and Philautus become the most intimate friends. Euphues selects Philautus for his best friend since he sees in him “the lively image of Euphues.”19 Philautus also gives weight to their resemblance and thus says: “And seeing we resemble (as you say) each other in qualities, it cannot be that the one should differ from the other in courtesy.”20 But Euphues makes dissemblance out of resemblance; as a wily mouse proves a fatal enemy of a cat while like a friend whispering in its ear, so Euphues becomes a wicked traitor while simultaneously behaving as a close friend. Euphues’s covert change of behavior is enhanced by a cunning shift in the semantic meaning of “shadow.” When Philautus first takes Euphues to the house of his love Lucilla, he half in jest introduces Euphues as his “shadow”: “I was the bolder to bring my shadow with me . . . knowing that he should be the better welcome for my sake.”21 By saying so, Philautus implies that Euphues should be welcome on the grounds that he is Philautus’s “shadow”—“a reflected image” or “a parasite (L. umbra)”—despite not having an invitation. The meaning of “shadow” is then twisted in the mouth of Euphues, who plans to win Lucilla in a rivalry with Philautus: “As Philautus brought me for his shadow the last supper, so will I use him for my shadow till I have gained his saint.”22 “Shadow” in this



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passage has a slightly different sense, meaning “protection” or “mask.”23 Euphues, as suggested by the term “shadow,” has performed a secret turnaround in order to relegate Philautus into a mere convenient friend who unknowingly enables him to visit and woo Lucilla. “Shadow,” which by itself can evoke some dark or sneaky action, serves here as a sign of a competition in dissembling and deception between Euphues and Philautus. Euphues justifies the practice of dissembling by saying that “he that cannot dissemble in love is not worthy to live.”24 This phrase is a variation on a proverb on the path to worldly success, “He who cannot dissemble cannot rule.” Euphues’s betrayal of Philautus, by way of both dissembling behavior and the semantic shift of “shadow,” may well reflect Lyly’s experience of the uneasy condition of courtiers. Additionally, it is indicative of the fact that Lyly observed a similar correlation between courtliness and poetry to that which Puttenham recommended in his work. Undoubtedly, “shadow” is one of Lyly’s favorite terms. It plays a significant role in his courtly drama Campaspe. In this work, the painter Apelles carries out Alexander’s order to draw a picture of his beloved Campaspe. In the process, however, he falls in love with her himself and has to think of a secret device to prolong their time together. Apelles achieves this aim by destroying his picture of Campaspe as soon as he finishes it. The conflict between licit love for his sovereign and illicit love for Campaspe in Apelles’ mind is presented by Lyly as an ambiguity over the difference between a display of obedience and an act of deception through a complex handling of the term “shadow.” Apelles tells his servant Psyllus to keep watch outside his painting shop whenever he draws a picture of Campaspe. Psyllus says as follows, “It is alwayes my maisters fashion, when any fair Gentlewoman is to be drawne within, to make mee to stay without. But if he shuld paint Iupiter like a Bul, like a Swan, like an Eagle, then must Psyllus with one hand grind colours, and with the other hold the candle. But let him alone, the better he shadowes her face, the more will he burne his owne heart.”25 By letting his servant keep watch outside his atelier, Apelles can show how diligently he has been engaged in performing his obligatory work. But Apelles has been enjoying his secret love for Campaspe by metamorphosing his public opportunity into a private one, as implied by Psyllus’s reference to the Ovidian episode of Jupiter’s

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achievement of secret love by a series of metamorphoses. The term “shadow” here nicely points to Apelles’ dissembling; it indicates Apelles’ attitude as an obedient servant with the sense of “portray,” while at the same time implying by means of another sense of “conceal” Apelles’ deceitful act of hiding Campaspe from the view of Alexander for the very reason of his love for her.26 In the meantime, Alexander, who suspects that Apelles may be in love with Campaspe, spies out his true mind by spreading a lie that his painting shop is on fire. To Apelles, who has been thrown into confusion worrying about Campaspe’s safety yet pretends to worry about his artifact (“I have so much pleased my selfe, that the shadow as much delighteth mee being an artificer, as the substaunce doth others that are amorous”), Alexander says, “you lay colours grosely; though I could not paint your shop, I can spy into your excuse.”27 The semantic shift of “shadow” from “portray” to “conceal,” or from “portray”/“paint” to “conceal” to “spy,” is a salutary reminder that Alexander’s court is also under the espionage-like condition of being watchful and being watched. All the same, the reciprocation of “shadow” in the following conversation between Apelles and Campaspe takes us far beyond the awareness of the link between courtliness and poetry: Apelles:

I shall never drawe your eies well, because they blind mine. Campaspe: Why then, paint me without eies, for I am blind. Apelles: Were you ever shadowed before of any? Campaspe: No. And would you could so now shadow me, that I might not be perceived of any.28

The double meaning of “shadow”/“paint” in Apelles’ “Were you ever shadowed before of any,” on the one hand, and “conceal” in Campaspe’s “And would you could so now shadow me,” on the other, may also suggest that the two lovers have been caught in the conflict between licit love and illicit love, which in turn implies active as well as passive attitudes in the sovereign-servant relationship. But there is more than this to the implication of “shadow.” The respective eyes of Apelles and Campaspe are, so to speak, “shadowed,” as in blinded, by the power of love. Both Apelles and Campaspe try to search each other’s mind in vain because they cannot get a clear view. At this stage, the term “shadow” serves as a



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signpost pointing toward the delicate and elusive feeling of love, rather than an indication of the conflict between licit love and illicit love that courtiers would have experienced as part of their courtly life. In Euphues, the running metaphor of bait-fishing, together with associative words like “gudgeon” and “net,” serves not only to remind us of the link between courtliness and poetry but also makes us probe into the psyche of lovers. Euphues decides to make his abode in Naples (“the nourisher of wantonness”) rather than in Athens (“the nurse of wisdom”), in spite of Eubulus’s vehement opposition to it. 29 Naples, which is “a court more meet for an atheist than for one of Athens, for Ovid than for Aristotle, for a graceless lover than for a godly liver,”30 abounds with various temptations, love in particular. It is attractive, especially to witty youths like Euphues, for, as the narrator says, it is a truism that “the fleetest fish swalloweth the delicatest bait, that the highest soaring hawk traineth to the lure, and that the wittiest brain is inveigled with the sudden view of alluring vanities.”31 The parallelism between “the fleetest fish” and “the wittiest brain” is revealing: as the fleetest fish swallows the most delicate bait, so the wittiest person is subject to love. “Bait” is a deceitful means that draws fish with its attractiveness but betrays them into a snare. As far as love is concerned, “bait,” as we have observed in Sidney’s Old Arcadia, is a sign of an attitude of dissembling, “both active and passive” or “both watchful and watched,” that courtiers assumed in order to win in their love intrigues. As well as love, however, “bait” also illuminates the nature of being in love, with its deceitful oscillation between happiness and disappointment. “Bait” is a figurative means for exploring the psyche of lovers from the opposite angles. In the complex mesh of courtship that takes place in Naples (what Mincoff terms “flirtation”), 32 consistent allusions to bait-fishing are to the fore. At times lovers fish for their counterparts by means of bait, and at times lovers get caught in others’ nets. In the process both lovers and readers come close to the core of the feeling of love. In love with Lucilla, Euphues sets up the metaphorical bait of Livia in order to entrap Philautus. When asked by Philautus a reason for his depression, Euphues “dissemble[s] his sorrowing heart with a smiling face.”33 In effect, he dissembles his troubled mind in love with an unwavering mind in friendship, and makes a false confession that he has fallen in love with Lucilla’s friend, Livia. Livia

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therefore becomes the person, in the narrator’s terms, “whom Euphues made his stale.”34 Philautus, who is never suspicious of Euphues’s dissembling, feels glad that he has got his comrade in love and that they can now visit Lucilla’s house together to woo their respective lovers, while Euphues whispers behind his back, “Take heed, my Philautus, that thou thyself swallow not a gudgeon.”35 The narrator’s remarks immediately following these sarcastic words of Euphues are very suggestive indeed: “which word Philautus did not mark until he had almost digested it.”36 It is not until he realizes Livia is only a camouflage enabling Euphues to develop a secret relationship with his beloved Lucilla that Philautus finds himself entrapped by the bait laid by Euphues (“stale”/Livia/“gudgeon”) and feels its taste bitter. Euphues, however, comes to swallow the bitter-tasting bait in the same way as Philautus. While Lucilla, though only indirectly, shows her amorous inclination for Euphues, she slips into the arms of her new love Curio. Lucilla then ridicules Euphues through yet another metaphor of bait-fishing: “you . . . angle for the fishe that is already caught.”37 Meanwhile, Euphues summarizes his bitter experience of love through an allusion to the deceptive use of bait (“gudgeon”) in fishing: “My harvest shall cease seeing others have reaped my corn; as for angling for the fish that is already caught, that were but mere folly. But in my mind, if you be fish, you are either an eel which as soon as one hath hold on her tail will slip out of his hand, or else a minnow which will be nibbling at every bait but never biting. But what fish soever you be, you have made both me and Philautus to swallow a gudgeon.”38 In Euphues probing into the ambiguity of love is intertwined with an imaginative act of laying bait for catching a fish. Being cautious about expressing their love, both Euphues and Lucilla transform his/her ambivalent attitude into their counterpart’s by blaming each other for laying bait while each of them pretends to be an honest lover; Euphues says to Lucilla earlier in this romance that women’s beauty is “a delicate bait with a deadly hook”; Lucilla tells Euphues that “men are always laying baits for women which are the weaker vessels.”39 By saying this, they are both laying bait; the more they lay to entrap their counterparts, the more opaque and ambiguous their love looks. This is one reason why they can flirt with each other. So, for both Euphues and Philautus to “swallow a gudgeon” betokens a loss of their entitlements to a probe into the ambiguity of



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love; Lucilla, by contrast, can retain the dissembling nature of bait, and hence retains her right to an exploration of the ambiguity of love by narrowly slipping off from a holding hand (like an eel) or by merely nibbling at the laid bait without being deceived into the net (like a minnow). On the surface, Lucilla appears to be emphatically condemned by Lyly’s work as a sexually light and loose woman when Euphues realizes that he has been “made to swallow a gudgeon.” Euphues’s misogynous attack on Lucilla seems to be unsparing to the point of cruelty. Recalling the episode of Vulcan’s net in the fourth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a story in which Vulcan catches in his invisible net his lustful wife Venus and her lover Mars in amorous dalliance, making his wife the object of universal derision, Euphues seemingly intends to make Lucilla a similar public laughingstock: “And in that you bring in the example of a beast to confirm your folly, you show therein your beastly disposition, which is ready to follow such beastliness. But Venus played false! And what for that? Seeing her lightness serveth for an example, I would wish thou mightst try her punishment for a reward, that being openly taken in an iron net all the world might judge whether thou be fish or flesh—and certes, in my mind no angle will hold thee, it must be a net.”40 There is, however, in this passage a continuation of the topic of lovers entrapped in a net between courtship at the amorous court in Naples and the heavenly sexual intrigue of Greek mythology. And, for that matter, the topic is enhanced by verbal dissembling: directly, the dissembling of “fish” and “flesh,” and indirectly, the dissembling of two implications brought about by the shared image of “net”—beastliness and divinity. This ambiguity could cast a shadow of doubt over the ostensible function of the “net” to give a sensible conclusion to the amorous experience of Naples. In this respect, it is important to note that Lyly sets aside a detail part of Ovid’s account of Vulcan’s net, which is the information on how Vulcan fashioned a net fine enough to deceive (fallere) eyes, “extemplo graciles ex aere catenas retiaque et laqueos, quae lumina fallere possent, elimat” (Straightway he fashioned a net of fine links of blonze, so thin that they would escape detection of the eye),41 stressing instead the didactic message of how Vulcan punished Venus for her adultery. It is interesting to note, however, that Lyly does cast a thin “net” of the finest kind that could well deceive the eyes of any readers who believe Euphues ends with the didactic message of the repentance of the prodigal.42

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It could be considered inappropriate to read Greene’s James IV in the context of the correlation between courtliness and poetry, for Greene has no history of service at court. Nevertheless, Greene had been conscious of the literary achievements of the courtly writer Lyly throughout his career since he made his debut on the literary stage with his Euphuistic romance Mamillia: A Mirrour or Looking-glasse for the Ladies of Englande in 1580. In particular, James IV shows Greene’s awareness of Euphues because the metaphor of bait-fishing is essential to the development of the plot. The brief outline of the plot is thus: the Scotch King James IV harbors an amorous desire for Ida, daughter to Countess Arran, while he has been married to Dorothea, daughter to the king of England. Ateukin, an obscure arriviste full of ambition, starts to climb the ladder of promotion as a successful courtier by encouraging the king to pursue his immoral love and deceiving him into thinking that his love for Ida is thoroughly acceptable. As Ateukin gains power over the king, the court gets fraught with sycophancy and treachery and becomes the center of moral decay. In order to gain the absolute trust of the king, Ateukin plans to assassinate Dorothea. Although Dorothea narrowly escapes from the court in disguise, the war between Scotland and England that breaks out because of this wicked design makes the whole country desolate. Ateukin is finally banished after his treacherous schemes are disclosed, James IV repents, Dorothea safely returns, and the two countries retrieve their harmonious relationship. One of the most interesting characters in this play is Slipper, a cony-catcher by profession yet one of Ateukin’s servants. Slipper constantly criticizes his master Ateukin, an upstart courtier, for all of his audacious temperament as a social climber. The Scotch court of James IV is characterized through the mouth of Ida as a privileged place where wise men display their “art”: “I count of court, my lord, as wise men do: / ’Tis fit for those that knows what longs thereto; / Each person to his place: the wise to art, / The cobbler to his clout, the swain to cart.”43 James IV and his courtiers address one another as men of art, as if to be acknowledged as such would be a signal honor. Ateukin, a Gnatho-like parasite, flatters the king by the honorable designation: “Dread king, thy vassal is a man of art, / Who knows by constellation of the stars, / By oppositions and by dire aspects, / The things are past and those that are to come.”44 In the immoral pursuit of love for Ida,



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James IV singles out Ateukin as the sole confidant, saying, “Thine art appears in entrance of my love.”45 Ateukin, who is determined to take whatever measure to attain success at court, has every confidence in his own “art”: “For men of art, that rise by indirection / To honour and the favour of their king, / Must use all means to save what they have got, / And win their favours whom they never knew.”46 It is Ateukin who appears to be the most adept practitioner of “art” at the Scotch court. He has so honeyed a tongue—according to Andrew, one of his servants, “melle dulcior fluit oratio”47 —that it is as good for writing love poetry as to successfully flatter his betters. Once in the king’s confidence, Ateukin declares: “And first, to fit the humours of my lord, / Sweet lays and lines of love I must record; / And such sweet lines and love-lays I’ll indite / As men may wish for and my liege delight.”48 The court is supposed to be a venue where courtiers exchange poetry as part of their sprezzatura. But there is a tinge of political maneuvering in Ateukin’s playful act of writing love poetry that “men may wish for and my liege delight.” “Art” in this context pertains to two different kinds of skill: rhetorical expertise of a successful courtly poet and political maneuvering of a successful courtier. The double implication of “art” enables us to associate James IV’s Scotch court with the Tudor court in which the correlation between courtliness and poetry was constantly being observed by men like Puttenham. Ateukin quite easily shifts political machinations to poetic exercises, as if he had been trained to exercise the “art” in Puttenham’s school, switching the meaning of a single word from one to another in the writing of poetry. With respect to the dual nature of the “art” put into practice at the Scotch court, Ida’s description of the court is illustrative: Because the court is counted Venus’ net, Where gifts and vows for stales are often set; None, be she chaste as Vesta, but shall meet A curious tongue to charm her ears with sweet.49

The court is described as amorous Venus’s place of abode (“Venus’ net”) where courtiers woo their loved ones (followers of chaste Vesta) with charming words. In its association with “net,” however, the sense of “stales” could be transferred from “mistresses” to “decoy-birds” or “bait” used to entice other birds or fish. The implica-

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tion of Ida’s comments is that when men use poetry to woo with “A curious tongue to charm her ears with sweet,” it is always done for the benefit of their rivals as well as the women they love. 50 “Venus’ net,” which is connotative of a courtly environment for the exchanges of love, is at the same time an institution of political import. Courtship (wooing ladies by poetry) and courtiership (wooing one’s betters by flattering words) are intertwined in the doubly functional court. The political maneuvers of clever Ateukin, who clambers up the social ladder from an unknown poor scholar to a most favored courtier, are stressed by recurrent allusions to “net” and related images, for instance, “fishing” and “snare.” Ateukin’s motto is “No fishing to the sea, nor service to a king”; Andrew talks about his master’s artifices: “When sinners seem to dance within a net: / The flatterer and murderer they grow big; / By hook or crook promotion now is sought”—while the crimes that sinners think they have committed unnoticed are exposed to public eyes without fail, the wrongdoings of the flatterer and murderer Ateukin are never brought into light.51 Ateukin continuingly sets up a political “net” to entrap his fellow courtiers. Finding himself entrapped in a political “net” by Ateukin’s flattering words, the king finally confesses that “flattering tongues, by whom I was misled, / Have laid a snare to spoil my state and me.”52 With no counterparts at court to frustrate his ambition, Ateukin continues to ascend the ladder of success by dexterously casting a metaphorical “net.” But it is Slipper, Ateukin’s horse-keeper and cony-catcher, who makes him turn from the trapper to the trapped. In so doing, Slipper also depends upon the metaphor of fishing, especially bait (“gudgeon”), which alludes to fish in a net: Slipper: Now, I pray you, sir, what kin are you to a pickerel? Ateukin: Why, knave? Slipper: By my troth, sir, because I never knew a proper situation fellow of your pitch fitter to swallow a gudgeon. Ateukin: What meanest thou by this?53

In contemporary usage “slipper” was used for a common name of slippery fish, particularly a little fish that looked at first glance like a gudgeon.54 We may well envision from this sense of “slipper” that Slipper has taken part in the courtly game of a casting “net,” in such a way that he plays the role of “bait”/“gudgeon” in attracting



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Ateukin into a net, while he himself flees away, taking advantage of his slipperiness. Slipper’s “I never knew a proper situation fellow of your pitch to swallow a gudgeon” may be a conscious echoing of the following passage from Euphues: “But in my mind, if you be fish, you are either an eel which as soon as one hath hold on her tail will slip out of his hand, or else a minnow which will be nibbling at every bait but never biting. But what fish soever you be, you have made both me and Philautus to swallow a gudgeon.” One could argue that Slipper has succeeded Lucilla as well as Ateukin since she plays the role of “bait”/“gudgeon” in order for Euphues and Philautus to swallow, while she herself slips away like an eel or a minnow in an imminent danger of being entrapped. With intent of becoming a perfect gentleman, Slipper decides to dress himself up with the assistance of the Tailor, the Cutler, and the Shoemaker. What is remarkable about his gentlemanly garments, however, is that they have a lot of “holes” and “cuts,” as illustrated by the conversation between Slipper and the Tailor over the former’s doublet: Slipper: Tailor. Tailor: Sir. Slipper: Let my doublet be white northern, five groats the yard; I tell thee, I will be brave. Tailor: It shall, sir. Slipper: Now sir, cut it me like the battlements of a custard, full of round holes; edge me the sleeves with Coventry-blue, and let the linings be of tenpenny lockram. Tailor: Very good, sir. Slipper: Make it the amorous cut, a flap before. Tailor: And why so? That fashion is stale. Slipper: O, friend, thou art a simple fellow; I tell thee, a flap is a great friend to a storre: it stands him in stead of clean napery, and if a man’s shirt be torn, it is a present penthouse to defend him from a clean housewife’s scoff.55

No matter how “brave” Slipper may wish to be, his preference for “holes” and “cuts” in his garments makes the doublet blemished. Indeed the Tailor shows his disapproval when he comments, “That fashion is stale.” Slipper’s doublet is “full of round holes” and has an opening “cut” like that of an open pie with its fillings covered with custard cream; its sleeves edged with cheap “Coventry-blue”

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tend to have “holes”; its linings are susceptible to “holes” since they are of cheap “tenpenny lockram.” Slipper’s doublet also has an amorous “cut.” One could argue that “holes” in Slipper’s gentlemanly garments are closely related to the “art” that courtiers put into practice at court. A person who has a facility to swiftly transfer verbal meanings from one to another is an expert at evasions, “starting holes” in the contemporary sense of the word.56 It is telling that Greene uses this phrase in one of his cony-catching pamphlets in the context of the association of garments with rhetorical expertise. In A Disputation Betweene a Hee Conny-catcher, and a Shee Conny-catcher (1592), the thief Laurence and the whore Nan discuss which of them is the more harmful to the public. Nan wins Laurence over by exhibiting her persuasive rhetoric and demonstrating the extent to which whores can make use of a much wider range of clothes and ornaments to deceive people’s eyes, and Laurence is sufficiently impressed to admit his defeat by saying, “I know not where to touch you, you are so wittie in your answeres, and have so many starting hoales.”57 Nan’s “holes” clearly have a bawdy meaning as well as reflecting her skill with words. Through the same association, Slipper’s “holes” stand for his claim to a rhetorical capability, as well as having a literal meaning. Slipper’s “holes” also function as symbolic niches where stories of amorous as well as sexual relationships between man and woman start unfolding. The “amorous cut” of Slipper’s doublet, one could argue, marks the struggle of its owner against the aggressive (sexual) assaults of “a storre” (a sturdy woman) or “a clean housewife’s scoff” (a shrewish woman).

Conclusion Slipper exhibits a courtly poets’ art in such a way that while building upon “hole” (“a starting hole”—the expertise to shift verbal meanings), he metamorphoses “hole” (a starting hole) into “hole” (an opening cut). Slipper’s brave handling of rhetoric could be considered against a background of the courtly tradition of linking courtliness to poetry that I have traced in Puttenham, Sidney, and Lyly. But Slipper simultaneously severs the connection between courtliness and poetry only to develop a love story of his own inasmuch as “holes” in his garments (a signature of courtiers)



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detract from his good reputation as a courtier. Slipper’s ambivalent attitude is attested by the fact that he replaces Ateukin, who exploits the connection between courtliness and poetry solely for political interests, on the one hand, and succeeds Lucilla, who explores the simultaneous feelings of excitement and disappointment in love, on the other hand. Slipper’s dissembling, among other things, is an eloquent testimony to the diverse nature of courtly works.

“Never shall my sad eies againe behold those pleasures”: Aemilia Lanyer and Her Idealization of Tudor Court Life Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier

The Tudor court was the center of politics and culture, and

this meant that at its margins the question of affiliation was constantly under negotiation. Whether one could regard oneself as a “major” or a “minor” courtier became clear by one’s actual distance to the monarch or patron, for example, by the character of the rooms one was allowed to access. The architecture of Hampton Court, for instance, implies that surveillance at the Tudor court did not only work one way—as in the panoptic prison described by Michel Foucault in Surveiller et Punir (1976)—but that surveillance was a complex process and formed part of the community at court. The community of courtiers would try to detect the status of a courtier’s favor or disfavor by observing not only the courtier’s distance to the patron but also the amount of time the courtier was allowed to spend in the patron’s company or in what kind of activities the courtier was allowed to participate. Changes in sympathies or political necessities created a need for the courtiers to continuously locate and relocate themselves in these hierarchies without creating an impression of anxiety, disquietude, or even dissatisfaction in the eyes of the patron. Thus, the court was at the same time static and dynamic and required the courtier’s acceptance of both the centrality of the monarch or patron and the need for mobility. Many of the lives of Tudor courtiers had a similar structure: first service in a household, then a career, for example, as a politician or clergyman, or in a legal or artistic profession. Even the lives of art132



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ists and musicians were often interrupted by traveling, army service, or secret-service missions, according to the preferment of the patron. This intermingling of culture and commerce, of the arts and the mercenary, is typical of the Tudor court “show business.” For these men, trade, travel, and travail went hand in hand, or possibly—when they eventually settled down somewhere—music, manufacture, and management. Moreover, many destinies of members of courtiers’ families display the early modern practice of treating soldiers or artists as well as women as commodities. Statements that have come down to us, for instance, from lawsuits, show a clear awareness of the existence of complex hierarchies for courtiers.

Courtesan or Female Courtier? In my analysis of the texts written by the poet Aemilia Lanyer, née Bassano (1569–1645), I will illustrate this awareness of an unstable status and the wish to overcome it. In 1611, Lanyer published a heterogeneous collection of poems in print which she named after the longest of the poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (“Hail, God, King of the Jews”).1 Daughter to Baptista Bassano and wife to Alphonso Lanier, Aemilia Lanyer not only joined two large families of courtiers, but her life also shows how closely love and politics were intertwined at the Tudor court. In this respect, Lanyer’s life can be compared to that of Mary or Anne Boleyn, two other commoners who tried to make social careers for themselves at the Tudor court. The Boleyns were one of the numerous families of courtiers who tried to gain more influence at court, and that was exactly what Mary (c. 1499-1543) was supposed to accomplish together with her brother George (ca. 1500– 1536) and her sister Anne (ca. 1501–36). Before Henry VIII became infatuated with her younger sister, Anne, Mary Boleyn was Henry’s mistress from about 1522 onward. In 1520, she had already married William Carey (d. 1529), and in 1523 the affair with Henry was still alive, since Henry had one of his ships named after his mistress, Mary Boleyn. Mary gave birth to two children, Catherine Carey and Henry Carey (ca. 1524–96), which some historians believe to have been fathered by Henry VIII. E. W. Ives supports this highly contested theory and supposes that Henry VIII rather wanted a married mistress in order not to overemphasize the lack of a male heir, by

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begetting children whose paternity could be denied.2 As Mary’s sister Anne later gave birth to a girl who was to become Queen Elizabeth I, Catherine and Henry—the son’s name might also emphasize the fatherhood—were either first cousins or half sister and half brother of Queen Elizabeth. The claim of half brotherhood might also be supported by the fact that Elizabeth knighted Henry Carey and made him 1st Baron Hunsdon when she ascended the throne in 1559. As her reign progressed, Elizabeth continued lavishing honors upon Carey. He became Lord Chamberlain in 1583 (and thereby patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men), and when the Spanish Armada was expected, he commanded the queen’s bodyguard. Henry Carey chose a girl called Aemilia Bassano as his mistress in about 1588. He was forty-five years her senior, provided her with an income of forty pounds a year, 3 and kept her until she became pregnant at the age of twenty-three; then she was paid off and married, probably by arrangement of Henry Carey himself. Not only did love and politics intermingle in the lives of Mary Boleyn and Aemilia Lanyer, the two women might even have been directly connected. Although the Boleyn girls and Lanyer had a different social background, they shared their main focus on advancement at court. Since it is obvious that at the Tudor court career options for women were smaller in number than those for men, I would suggest that the courtesan should be regarded as a form of a female courtier. I would further argue that, in her collection of poems, Lanyer idealizes her life under Tudor reign in order to renew her contacts with other former members of Elizabeth’s court. As we know, Henry VIII took great delight not only in women but also in music. And, astonishingly enough, a combination of these two interests might have been the reason for the existence of Aemilia Lanyer in the first place. When Henry VIII wanted to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in order to be able to marry Anne Boleyn in the early 1530s, he was desperately seeking to buttress his case for an annulment with scriptural authority. He sent agents to several places and, among others, one, Edmond Harvel, to Venice to learn the opinions of Jews and monks there. Finally, an apostate named Mark Raphael was invited to England to present his favorable report at court.4 When he came to London, he might well have taken in his entourage a group of musicians—of Venetian and Jewish descent like himself—who were commissioned to come to the English court to work for Henry VIII. This group of musi-



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cians were the six Bassano brothers about whom Henry obviously had heard many good things. 5 In many letters, there are reports that the Bassanos were a Venetian family who, over several generations, included a number of highly regarded composers and musicians, and who were especially renowned for their excellence in playing wind instruments.6 The most famous member of this family was Giovanni Bassano (1558–1617), who lived in Venice and was a composer, cornetto virtuoso, and singing teacher to the seminary of St. Mark’s. He had an influence on other members of the Venetian school, most significantly on Giovanni Gabrieli, who probably also wrote virtuoso pieces for Giovanni Bassano. So far, no one has been able to shed light on the exact family relations of the numerous Bassanos, not even the part of the family resident in England. There is no proof anywhere that it was difficult for these musicians to change their place of residence, language, or religion, which conveys the impression that they were very successful cultural, linguistic, and religious go-betweens. As court servants, the Bassanos received privileges like good pay, livery, financial rewards, grants, and some freedom from parish duties. The open-mindedness of the Tudor court also shows itself in the fact that commoners like the Bassanos were granted their own coat of arms, which they had brought with them from Italy. The Bassanos clearly were part of a large group of early modern intermediaries who originally came from the Continent to work for aristocratic employers at the English court. The musicians of families like the Bassanos or the Laniers were typical of a new social class of independent, gifted artists and craftsmen who were able to seek employment or patronage at whatever European court they wished. In London, the youngest of the brothers, Baptista Bassano (d. 1576), lived with Margaret Johnson (d. 1587), who might have been the aunt of Robert Johnson (1583?–1633), lutenist and composer, musician to Shakespeare’s company, and later musician to the court of Charles I. It is unclear whether Margaret and Baptista were legally married. They had two daughters, Angela and Aemilia.7 What we know about Aemilia Bassano’s earlier life before her advancement by Henry Carey is based on the few statements and claims she makes in her poems. But we do know facts about her later life from different kinds of records, for example, that she was married to Alphonso Lanier with a dowry of forty pounds, obviously because she was pregnant from Lord Hunsdon, on October 18, 1592. 8 The son

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was called Henry after his father (and perhaps even his grandfather) and joined the king’s Musicke in 1629, but had already died by 1633. Alphonso Lanier was the recipient of a royal stipend that had once been Baptista’s, and he became a member of the recorder consort originally started by Baptista Bassano and his five brothers. Alphonso’s father and uncle, Nicholas (i) and John Lanier (i), originally came from Rouen, but settled in London in 1561 and became wind players in Elizabeth I’s royal band.9 Nicholas was the father of at least eleven children, six sons and five daughters, and grandfather of more than thirty-six grandchildren. The daughters were married to musicians; the sons all became wind players in the royal band. Members of the Lanier and Bassano families also gained advantage and income from patents and licenses granted by the queen and later by the king. Alfred Leslie Rowse mentions that Alphonso Lanier was allowed to receive six pence for every load of hay and three pence for every load of straw brought into London and Westminster. Rowse also reprints a letter written by Bishop Bancroft (shortly to become archbishop of Canterbury) to Robert Cecil, then Lord Cranbone, dated August 24, 1604, praising Lanier for his services and calling him “mine old fellow and loving friend.”10 The fact that Alphonso Lanier helped his wife finance the publication of her poems proves that he supported her wish for renewed advancement. Since he was one of the fifty-nine musicians who played at the funeral of Elizabeth I, he might also have mourned Elizabeth’s death and shared his wife’s tendency to idealize the Tudor court under Elizabeth in retrospect. It was certainly understandable for Aemilia Lanyer to seek the advice of astrologer Simon Forman when her husband served in a royal mission in hope of learning that she would soon be a lady. We owe some information on her married life to the physician’s diaries and casebooks.11 Obviously, Lanyer saw her social situation as highly unstable, since her husband lost money and ran into debts.12 In 1597, Alphonso accompanied the earl of Essex in his army on the Island Voyage to the Azores.13 The previous year, when he had assaulted Cádiz, the earl had handed out the title of knight to sixtyeight gentlemen adventurers, much to Elizabeth’s annoyance.14 But as the Azores enterprise failed, Essex could only give away a few knighthoods to his disappointed followers. That great advancement and a successful transgression of artistic and class boundaries was not impossible can be illustrated by



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the life of the most famous exponent of the Lanier family. Two of the sons of Alphonso’s brother John (ii), called Nicholas (iii) and John (iii), became the best-known musicians of the Lanier family. But while none of John’s (iii) music survives, many of Nicholas Lanier’s (iii, 1588–1666) works have come down to us, and he is still regarded as one of the most important songwriters of his time. Nicholas was a first cousin of Aemilia’s son Henry and played an important role in European artistic history, for not only did he compose numerous songs and the music for four of Ben Jonson’s masques, but he also won acclaim as a painter and dealer of paintings. He was indentured to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, for a period up to 1607.15 Such protection and patronage must have been valuable to him, for he was appointed Master of the Musicke to Prince Charles in 1618 at a salary of £200 a year, and, when Charles acceded, Lanier became Master of the king’s Musicke (1625). Charles I sent him to Italy to buy pictures (three visits between 1625 and 1628), thirty-four of which survive today at Windsor Castle. The pictures purchased by him bear his mark, a small star.16 Several portraits of Nicholas Lanier are known, among them Van Dyck’s portrait in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. This painting is “said to have been what prompted Charles I to invite Van Dyck to England (where he stayed with Lanier’s brother-in-law Edward Norgate).”17 Nicholas Lanier not only published a book of etchings and painted himself–one self-portrait from ca. 1644 even shows him with a sheet of music of his own composition,—he also had a poetic gift, illustrated by the fact that he wrote the poem of his cantata Hero and Leander and the verses of some of his songs himself.18 Since Aemilia Lanyer was rediscovered by Rowse in the 1970s, she has remained one of the candidates for Shakespeare’s dark lady. She was five years younger than Shakespeare; her patron was Shakespeare’s patron as well; and later her husband’s patron was Shakespeare’s patron, too. Although no portrait of Aemilia Lanyer survives, she might well have had dark eyes and dark hair because her father was Italian. It might be that they had heard of or even knew each other, but so far we have no proof that Lanyer and Shakespeare actually ever met. Lanyer might have left the court when she was married in 1592, while Shakespeare probably only arrived at Elizabeth’s court at Christmas 1594. Supporters of the dark lady theory, however, point to the writers’ ages, the dates of publication of their poetry collections (1609 and 1611), and the ambitious char-

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acter of both publications. When one takes into consideration that two characters in Titus Andronicus are called Aemilius and Bassianus and that some scholars date the play around 1592, it is difficult to believe that Shakespeare or George Peel did not know Aemilia Bassano/Lanyer. Even if it was George Peel who chose those names completely on his own account,19 other Shakespearean plays—for example, The Merchant of Venice, in which the Venetian gentleman Bassanio “gives rare new liveries”20 —suggest that Shakespeare must have known at least a male member of the Bassano family.    

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The publication of her poems in 1611 establishes Aemilia Lanyer as a generic go-between in at least two senses: in terms of genre from teaching or performing music to writing creatively and, moreover, in terms of gender as one of the first female English poets to publish in print. Lanyer might also have transgressed linguistic boundaries, teaching Italian to English aristocratic girls. That we know nothing of her language skills despite what she has published in English indicates how far the assimilation in the second generation had got already. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum draws on Lanyer’s Italian roots as it is written in ottava rima, a form of verse introduced by Giovanni Boccaccio in the fourteenth century. It is difficult to say if any of the poems in this collection are suitable for singing. The ottava rima makes it not impossible, but the structuring of the contents does not seem helpful in general, especially in the poem “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum” itself, because the praise of her prospective patronesses keeps interrupting Lanyer’s tale. Even if the poems were not intended for singing, Lanyer can be described as a musical writer, because she often uses musical metaphors, some of which are so special that it seems unlikely that she was not a musician herself. The way that Lanyer fashions herself in the poems shows that she wishes to be regarded as a female courtier from a family of courtiers.

Devotional Writing and Political Rhetoric Lanyer might well have chosen devotional writing because it was then, together with translation, the most accepted form of writing



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for women. Her publication highlights two central conflicts: on the one hand, the gender conflict, since the court offered different possibilities for male and female courtiers, and, on the other hand, the conflict between courtly pride and Christian virtue that applied to both sexes. Obviously, Lanyer hoped that a collection of devotional poems could reestablish her as a courtier and at the same time prove her morality. The publication of the poems can certainly be regarded as an expression of her awareness of her unstable social status and as a project of relocation. Lanyer combines courtly and devotional language and fashions herself as both a writer and a Christian, “Vouchsafe to view that which is seldome seene, / A Womans writing of divinest things,”21 and presents her writing as the appropriate reading for “All Vertuous Ladies in Generall” and her dedicatees in particular. She politely humiliates herself and thereby constructs a poetic sensibility for herself: “My weake distempred braine and feeble spirits.”22 As Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne have argued, it is important to regard speech forms of supplication and complaint as variations of early modern rhetoric even though “it is difficult for us nowadays properly to appreciate or, indeed, accept [them].”23 Lanyer’s self-humiliation is of course a rhetorical fiction like other lamenting or beseeching female voices in literature of the time. But when one looks at legal terminology, it becomes obvious that a bill of grievances often asked for a language of entreaty or humble and grief-ridden self-abnegation and that such seemingly unpolitical speech patterns must therefore be understood “as a moral and affective force within early modern political culture.”24 The reference to her humble position is not only an expression of decorous modesty; it also helps Lanyer introduce her subject, the Passion of Christ, for example, in the dedication to Mary Sidney where she humiliates herself because she feels that her writing is not fit for the subject.25 In Lanyer’s devotional view, Jesus serves as the key to everything good, as the means to attain knowledge and virtue, as the tool to open the hearts of the ladies addressed by her, 26 and, hopefully, to win an income through patronage. In the legitimization of her writing, Lanyer combines the two most prominent excuses that early modern women had at their disposal: that she has to speak out in order to serve the community and that she has been authorized to do so by God.

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In general, men are presented pejoratively by Lanyer, but she constructs a surprising image of Christ by combining male with female virtues and thus makes him the supreme object of female desire. Lanyer’s Jesus is double-gendered because he is praised for traditionally female virtues but also becomes the ideal husband: “In whom is all that Ladies can desire; / If Beauty, who hath bin more faire than he?”27 With his “curled lockes,” “lips like Lillies,” and his “alablaster [sic] breast,”28 Lanyer’s Christ is at the same time a female mirror image as well as a foil for female desires. Lanyer combines feminine physical beauty with male constancy, and also with a male sexuality that is designed for women: “Take this faire Bridegroome in your soules pure bed” or “Vouchsafe to entertain this dying lover.”29 The beauty of body and spirit combined with the weakness of the victim are central features in the complex processes of descent and emergence that link Lanyer’s women to their savior. Jesus therefore contrasts sharply to the “evill disposed men” addressed by Lanyer who “doe like Vipers deface the wombes wherein they were bred . . . ”30 In contrast, Lanyer praises female activity and eloquence, for instance, those of Hester and Pilate’s wife. Her poetic defense of Eve is especially daring, because, as Susan Wiseman suggests, “if Lanyer’s reading of Eve’s crime is accepted, it invites a renovation of the gender hierarchy—and so of the wider political world.”31 Wiseman further argues that Lanyer’s use of exemplarity of biblical and mythical women or potential patronesses serves “to put women in relation to politics” and especially to establish women’s political virtue.32 In fact, Lanyer puts strong emphasis on the fact that her devotional writing has a “protofeminist” aim: “And this have I done, to make knowne to the world, that all women deserve not to be blamed.”33 She retells Christ’s Passion as the story of his special, close relation to women34 and argues that women are predestined to understand Jesus better than men because they also have to endure pain, especially when giving birth: “You [men] came not in the world without our paine.”35 By aligning traditional female subordination with traditional martyrdom, 36 Lanyer constructs a close relation between virtuous women and an effeminized Christ. Female erotic fulfillment becomes possible through sublimation of carnal lusts in a spiritual relationship with Jesus. Worldly desires are transformed into something that I call “virginal sensuality,” a form of sensuality reserved for devout women such as medieval re-



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cluses or the Virgin Queen. In writings by many recluses, we find descriptions of their love for Jesus or an observation of epiphany that can be read as sensual or even erotic experiences in a sublimated and spiritualized form. Lanyer chooses devotional writing as a genre acceptable for women and constructs a transfer of virtue through writing and reading. Especially in her numerous dedications, she uses the image of a mirror to evoke the communication she is aiming at, a communication between the eye of the reader, the text, and the author. The processes of writing and reading thereby acquire a sensual quality. Her writing about Christ’s passion and his virtues reflects the image of the prospective reader: “Then in this Mirrour let your faire eyes looke, / To view your virtues in this blessed Booke.”37 What Wendy Wall calls “the interactive mirroring of female virtues” describes the process of writing and reading as the transfer of virtue.38 As Jesus is the perfect subject for female learning, Lanyer asks her readers: “Therefore in recompence of all his paine, / Bestowe your paines to reade.”39 Lanyer constructs a female line of succession for virtue and includes herself as a pupil into the female lineage: “You the Sunnes virtue, I that faire greene grasse, / That flourisht fresh by your cleere virtues taught.”40 By implying that the “virginity,” “innocence,” and “purity” of her subject are transmitted through her texts and also reflect on herself, she displays an artistic and courtly pride that conflicts with the modesty of female devout belief. She even claims that the title for the collection of poems was a divine inspiration given to her in a dream by God.41 One of Lanyer’s central ideals of patronage is to have “grace” bestowed upon herself as a sign of attention or “mercy.” “Grace” is closely linked to “virtue,” two poetic cultural constructions, of which “wealth” and “honour” clearly are the more worldly versions. Female virtuous courtliness is thus poetically constructed as a state of mind that idealizes the courtier’s financial dependence on the patron. But actually, not only art becomes a commodity, but questions of chastity and sexual activities also arise in the process of searching for a patron who “incites” the pen or the instrument. As in other early modern poems, this idealized patron is presented as a model for all kinds of aspects in arts, fashion, and decorum, and the artist / courtier tries to become a reflection of her patron as well as “entertain” her and receive money and attention in return.

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With the help of devotional writing, Lanyer obviously wishes to transform her role at court from that of an Elizabethan “courtesan” to that of a Jacobean “courtier” and to make her patronesses forgive her former sexual transgression—a paradoxical situation, since her status under Elizabeth and the existence of her son are inseparably linked to it. Lanyer writes dedications of various length and form, mentions nine dedicatees by name, and also includes Catherine Howard’s three daughters. Ina Schabert has argued that by dedicating her poems to twelve aristocratic ladies in total, Lanyer alludes to the ritual of the Lord’s Supper with his twelve apostles and that her collection of poems can therefore be regarded as a female celebration of the Eucharist: “Lanyer does not merely claim, she boldly assumes a priestly office. . . . When she passes the text on to her readers, she appropriates the role of distributing Holy Communion.”42 With the help of courtly and devotional language, Lanyer constructs a party of devout women who celebrate Christ’s Passion together by writing and reading about him. Elizabeth I is so central to Lanyer’s project because she functions as a religious and secular leader and will serve to legitimate the (female) assumption of (male) religious authority. Lanyer’s strategy is highly problematic, however, because her poems list dedicatees of very different faiths.43 Thus, they combine religious tolerance and eclecticism and at the same time show a violent conversion to Protestantism on Lanyer’s side because she employs “the established Protestant principle of the spiritual equality of the sexes in the sight of God.”44 In her dedication to Mary Sidney, Lanyer compares her text with the writings of her addressee and defends her own work as honey, which might not be as fine and costly as sugar but is “wholesome” and delightful to the taste as well.45 She describes her poems as “the first fruits of a womans wit” and offers them for consumption to her possible readers: “On heavenly food let them [your daughters] vouchsafe to feede.”46 “Food” and “fruit” also refer to Jesus as he is the “faultlesse fruit” of the “blessed Virgin” and his body becomes “heav’nly Manna” in the Holy Communion. 46 Wall says that Lanyer suggests the Divinity in her own work by making Christ the poorly dressed book.48 I would argue that a book about Christ’s Passion is the spiritual food that Lanyer tries to sell to her dedicatees. The process of writing is compared to the presentation of food and the process of reading to eating, both allowing for sensual pleasure.



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Christ’s Passion can purify human existence as royal benevolence can forgive transgression and thereby direct an author’s destiny: “Unto the Meane he makes the Mightie bow, / And raiseth up the Poore out of the dust.”49 Her poems indicate that Lanyer regards herself as a female courtier who was well established under Elizabeth I and would like to play a role at Queen Anne’s court as well. Patronage could restore Lanyer to the fullness of court life and offer a relatively safe position in the aristocratic circle. Lanyer’s verbal overabundance and bold protofeminist claims might have well been regarded as offensive and marked her as a “scold” or “shrew” in the eyes of her readers. As Lynda E. Boose has explained, the discourse of the shrewish woman “locates the tongue as the body’s ‘unruly member’ [and] situates female speech as a symbolic relocation of the male organ, an unlawful appropriation of phallic authority in which the symbolics of male castration are ominously complicit.”50 Lanyer chooses a devotional subject in order to counteract in advance any possible reproaches that she might be assuming “phallic authority” and retells the story of Christ as a tale of feminine suffering. While Shakespeare transforms the taming story and reshapes “the trope of the shrew/scold from an old, usually poor woman or a nagging wife into the newly romanticized vision of a beautiful, rich and spirited woman” in The Taming of the Shrew, 51 Lanyer wishes to romanticize Christ’s relation to women and transform him as well as Eve into fellow sufferers in a courtly community of women.

The Court as a Community of Women According to her poems, Lanyer was fostered in the household of Susan Bertie Grey, Countess of Kent, and later attached to the household of Margaret Russell Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, and her daughter, Anne Clifford Sackville, Countess of Dorset. Lanyer might well have been educated along with the noble girls she attended. Thus, her worldview was probably mainly based on the structure of courtly households headed by female patrons whose homes were often modeled on Queen Elizabeth’s court. The last poem in Lanyer’s collection is called “The Description of Cooke-ham” and is probably the first poem in the English country-house tradition. 52 As Margaret Clifford occasionally resided

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there, Lanyer must have been in Cookham as part of her entourage. She repeatedly claims to be writing in the service of Margaret Clifford: “As you commanded me in that faire night”; or, “From whose desires did spring this worke of Grace.”53 Thus, Lanyer excuses her bold project to publish in print, with God’s inspiration, her patronesses’ wishes and her service to the female courtly community. With the help of descriptions of her life at Cookham, which she repeatedly calls “delightful,” she constructs an idyllic situation in a female aristocratic world, which she is allowed to share. The Eden-like garden of Cookham becomes a desirable world of courtly recreations: Remember beauteous Dorsets former sports, So farre from beeing toucht by ill reports; Wherein my selfe did alwaies beare a part, While reverend Love presented my true heart: Those recreations let me beare in mind . . . .54

Lanyer might have benefited from advanced ideas of female education, since these miniature women-centered courts offered such possibilities of female self-assertion. As Ann Baynes Coiro has argued, Lanyer’s understanding of self-promotion by publishing in print can be compared to that of Ben Jonson, who wrote to some of the same ladies as Lanyer. 55 In his country-house poem “To Penshurst” (1616), Jonson praises the comfortable life attainable through patronage. While Jonson delights in the description of food and drink, Lanyer mainly mentions sports and recreations. Singing serves as a form of entertainment, which can be seen as a sign of virtue. Lanyer’s own situation as a servant is comparable to that of the birds in the garden: “The little Birds in chirping notes did sing, / To entertaine both You and that sweet Spring.”56 In her tale, her poetic sensibility and consciousness of her social status guide her behavior toward her employer: “The pretty Birds would oft come to attend thee, / Yet flie away for feare they should offend thee.”57 As Wendy Wall has noted, Lanyer presents herself as a wounded bird, a Petrarchan image, which is employed to connect Christian suffering with social alienation. 58 Margaret Clifford’s strong Christian belief enables her to join in the singing and thereby become part of Lanyer’s musical writing. After Margaret and Anne Clifford have left Cookham, however, the place is as desolate as Lanyer herself. 59



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Finally, all the plants are mourning, especially the favorite tree of the countess. The countess gives the tree a parting kiss, but Lanyer steals this kiss from the tree for herself, which causes nature’s ultimate sadness: “While all the rest with this most beauteous tree, / Made their sad consort Sorrowes harmony.”60 I would argue that the stealing of the kiss is, on the one hand, a metaphor for Lanyer’s wish to transgress class boundaries: committing a “theft” indicates how desperate she is to become an accepted court member again. On the other hand, the picture of natural sadness as group dynamics is based on the musical practice of playing in consorts. The Bassano family mainly wrote consort music, and the Lanier family mainly performed in consorts. Therefore Aemilia Lanyer, as the perfect generic go-between, chooses “sad consort Sorrowes harmony” as the appropriate musical description for a farewell scene in her poem. The reference to the musical practice of numerous family members can also be read as a hint to her dedicatees that she deserves to be regarded as a female courtier and musician-turned-poet. The publication of her poems can be seen as an expression of Aemilia Lanyer’s wish to relocate herself once more, probably for her son’s sake. Her family background and personal history probably made it seem natural for her to try to revive old court contacts and seek patronage once again at the age of forty-two because her son Henry approached marriageable age. Lanyer might also retrospectively idealize Tudor court life under Elizabeth I to draw attention to the possibility that her son might be Elizabeth’s nephew. According to her own understanding, it seems, Lanyer is allowed to enter the circle of virtue and redemption, as by God’s mercy all Christians “happily are chang’d, / Who for our faults put on his righteousnesse, / Although full oft his Lawes we doe transgresse.”61 Lanyer expresses the hope that God will forgive all of her transgressions, but her constructed modesty cannot hide her criticism of social inequality and her wish to subvert power relations. The publication itself is a clear indication for Lanyer’s self-esteem and ambition. The text makes obvious that she is aware of the boldness of her project to strengthen her position and that of her family by writing. The metaphors she chooses often indicate this consciousness, for example, when she compares writing to climbing: “In these few Lines, will put me out of breath, / To run so swiftly up this mightie Hill, / I may behold it with the eye of Faith.”62 Her .

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social dissatisfaction and financial ambition cause ambiguities of meaning and poetical disruptions in her poems. For instance, she writes in her dedication to Anne Clifford: What difference was there when the world began, Was it not Virtue that distinguisht all? All sprang but from one woman and one man, Then how doth Gentry come to rise and fall?63

Lanyer clearly wishes to transgress religious, class, and gender boundaries. As Goldberg has pointed out, Lanyer links female goodness with male sovereignty by comparing Margaret Clifford and Jesus, “a likeness that overcomes gendered difference. Likeness thus is not simply a matter of gender identification; moreover, likeness also expresses desire, precisely the desire of like for like.”64 Her appropriation of the Passion of Christ can thus be read as a retrospective idealization of Tudor court life under Elizabeth as a protodemocratic community of women: “Lanyer’s poem would seem to be offering a kind of inverted homosociality, in which Jesus serves as go-between.”65 Lanyer’s bold wish for equality in class as well as in gender might explain why she obviously had no notable success with her project. Lanyer outlived her husband and her son and took care of her son’s children after his death. At the end of her long life, she seemed to have had a regular income, perhaps from her brothersin-law, who had inherited her husband’s royal licenses. Her poems attest to the artistic contradiction of producing work for immediate gain or preferment and composing or writing for memory. On the one hand, her retrospective idealization forms part of the narrative history of Tudor court culture. On the other hand, Renaissance self-fashioning as self-promotion becomes a distinct strategy in her work. She continuously locates and relocates herself in her own hierarchy in terms of social status and moral supremacy. It is clearly obvious that the spatial relationships created within Lanyer’s selfconscious texts are an expression of the topology of power that is crucial to all members of the English court. Lanyer designs what I suggest to call her own “rhetoric of incitement and retainment,” a formula of fiction and wishful thinking. Actually, when she published her poems, the cultural status of the English court was dispersed and weakened so that her texts can be regarded as a ficti-



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tious reconstruction of an ideal. At the moment of writing, all the recreations in which she might have been allowed to join in as a minor courtier under Elizabeth are already part of her memories, which she idealizes as “those pleasures past”: 66 Farewell (sweet Cooke-ham) where I first obtaine’d Grace from that Grace where perfit Grace remain’d; And where the Muses gave their full consent, I should have powre the virtuous to content: Where princely Palace will’d me to indite, The sacred Storie of the Soules delight. . . . Never shall my sad eies againe behold Those pleasures which my thoughts did then unfold . . . 67

When one looks closer at Lanyer’s presentation, it turns out that the happy times were already irrevocably lost when the miniature court of Cookham disassembled: “. . . taking me by the hand, / You did repeat the pleasures which had past, / Seeming to grieve they could no longer last.”68 In order to construct a harmonic relation between her praise of the miniature Tudor court of Margaret Clifford and her devotional self-fashioning, Lanyer not only emphasizes Clifford’s religiousness but also presents the courtly pleasures as “fleeting wordly Joyes that could not last.”69 She obviously felt she had to weaken the pleasurable effects of the courtly recreations for moral reasons. At the same time, she applies to the countess to remember them, to make them part of the cultural memory of the female courtly community: “Therefore sweet Memorie doe thou retaine / those pleasures past, which will not turne againe.”70 By repeatedly stressing the mother-daughter relations between some of her prospective patrons, Lanyer commemorates the image of the parent-child relation that Elizabeth I used to describe her bond with her subjects and at the same time constructs the ideal patron-poet relation. With the help of her rhetoric of exemplarity, she contrasts a female and a male court and tries to construct a direct line of female virtue from Eve to her most powerful addressee, Queen Anne.71 In her poetic defense of Eve, Lanyer argues that Eve’s fault was “onely too much love.”71 Goldberg has pointed out that this argument rather initiates a process of social elevation for Eve than that it creates a favorable comparison for Queen Anne: “it could be ar-

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gued that her elevation to sovereignty and the production of her goodness resonates with Lanyer’s celebration of her aristocratic patrons. Eve’s sovereignty and liberty make her a ‘great Lady.’ ” 73 Lanyer does not succeed in breaching the gap between the idealized memories of the past Tudor court and the reality of the present Jacobean court. This can be illustrated, for instance, by the fact that she addresses more than half of the dedication to Queen Anne’s daughter Princess Elizabeth to the memory of Elizabeth I: Most gratious Ladie, faire Elizabeth, Whose Name and Virtues puts us still in mind, Of her, of whom we are depriv”d by death; The Phoenix of her age, whose worth did bind All worthy minds so long as they have breath, In linkes of admiration, love and zeale, To that deare Mother of our Common-weale.74

As Wiseman has pointed out, Lanyer’s collection of poems “articulates the power and problems inherent in using exemplarity to evidence the poet’s power of praise,” precisely because this power in a recursive turn also includes the power to dispraise.75 Elizabeth I remains the ultimate example against which all dedicatees are being tested. Lanyer’s construction of female political virtue, her evocation of an ideal female court, and also her vision of paradise appear to be influenced by her idealized view of the past: even her spelling of Elysium, “Elizium,” reminds of Elizabeth.

Persuading the Prince: Raleigh, Keymis, Chapman, and The Second Voyage to Guiana Anna Riehl

A lthough much of England’s exploration of the New World

in the sixteenth century was carried out in the name of Queen Elizabeth, she did not always readily invest in the success of these ventures. As a result, the would-be explorers were pressed to summon their persuasive powers (or enlist those of more eloquent contemporaries) in order to seek the queen’s approbation and in due course convince her to finance their voyages. In this connection, the name of Sir Walter Raleigh is one of the most prominent, given his foundation of the short-lived colony of Virginia, named after the Virgin Queen. The indefatigable explorer supplemented his service at court with an intense pursuit of varied colonial enterprises: Raleigh undertook or sponsored a number of voyages to the New World, followed by years of repeated attempts to persuade Elizabeth I, and later James I, to turn England’s attention to the gold mines of Guiana (present-day Venezuela).1 In 1596, Raleigh made his last significant attempt to engage Elizabeth’s interest in funding another voyage to Guiana. He was joined in his plea by Lawrence Keymis and George Chapman. These authors differed dramatically in their individual interest in the colonial enterprise; however, their book was unified by the common purpose of persuasion. The petitioners’ commitment to their practical goal produced distinct rhetorical strategies, especially striking in the book’s complicated relation to its audience, above all the queen herself. The task was exceptionally daunting since Raleigh, due to his secret marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton in 1592, was at the time a persona non grata at court; even three years after the offense, the 149

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queen’s anger was still unabated. Upon Sir Walter Raleigh’s return from his initial exploration of Guiana in 1595, Queen Elizabeth staunchly refused to see him and would hear nothing about furthering his plans for colonization of this distant land. Adamant in his pursuit, Raleigh turned to writing, but his gripping and often fantastical stories about the Trinidadian wonderland generated more skepticism and ridicule than inclination to support his search for El Dorado. Such reaction was not altogether unreasonable, given, for instance, Raleigh’s exotic references to the Amazons and headless men said to “haue their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the midle of their breasts, & . . . a long train of hair grow[ing] backward between their shoulders.”2 From Raleigh’s defensive remarks in “The Epistle Dedicatorie” to his Discoverie of the large, rich, and bevvtiful empire of Guiana, one surmises that, for instance, some skeptics suggested he never undertook the journey and instead whiled the time away hidden in Cornwall.3 The unwelcoming reception of Raleigh’s colonial proposals was summed up as follows: “for enuy and priuate respectes, his labors were lessened, his informations mistrusted, his proffers not regarded, and the due honour of his deserts imparted to others.”4 Raleigh, nevertheless, had at least one like-minded follower. In 1596, Elizabeth’s former favorite delegated his loyal friend and employee Keymis to undertake the second exploratory trip to Guiana on Raleigh’s behalf. Keymis published a detailed account of his findings later that year, in a slim quarto volume entitled A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana. Although the title page bears Keymis’s name, the book’s layered authorship is evident both in the multiplicity of the components and in the variations of the key elements in the argument. In contrast to the preceding Discoverie, whose every part bears Raleigh’s initials and thus admits only one authorial voice, the range of persuasive expression in The Second Voyage is far more complicated. The edition is comprised of four prefatory addresses and one main narrative; the latter, as well as the opening dedication to Raleigh, are signed by Keymis; De Guiana is initialed “GC” (George Chapman), while a Latin poem directed to Thomas Harriot bears Keymis’s initials. Additionally, the book is branded with Raleigh’s full coat of arms prominently displayed opposite to Keymis’s exuberant dedication to his commander. It is likely that Raleigh himself not only supervised and edited the resulting publication, but also wrote the



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address “To the Fauourers of the Voyage for Guiana,” the only unsigned component of the book. Thus, Keymis’s voice is put forth as predominant: as Raleigh’s right-hand man in this matter, and provider of vitally important facts about Guiana, he both models an enthusiastic approbation for his chief’s heroism and confirms the validity of Raleigh’s expeditionary proposals. Chapman’s verses, in contrast, verge on the anonymous, and, along with the rest of the introductory material, contribute to the sense of multiplicity of Raleigh’s well-wishers. Why did the poet choose to compose an elaborate promotion of Raleigh’s colonial aspirations? Whereas Keymis was instrumental to Raleigh’s Guiana enterprise, the extent of Chapman’s personal involvement in this venture is undocumented. Even the possibility of the poet’s direct acquaintance with Raleigh remains questionable. Chapman, however, is known to have had associations with some of Raleigh’s men, John White and Matthew Roydon among them. 5 Jonathan Hudson, one of Chapman’s recent editors, suggests that either Raleigh or Harriot commissioned the poet to write De Guiana. 6 If so, he was made privy to the book’s rhetorical aims only insofar as they allowed him to argue Raleigh’s case. Chapman was definitely too poor to become a financial contributor, nor did he express any fondness for long journeys across the ocean. The poet’s literary contribution to the volume, whose argument follows Raleigh’s Discoverie in its dependence on the nonliterary (i.e., nonfictional), stands apart even from the commonplace Latin poem that follows Chapman’s epic exercise. Keymis’s writing style is consistently more forthright, and his role in the book is more pronounced than that of Chapman, who is obscure both in his poetic expression and degree of personal investment in the success of this joint argument. It is curious that although The Second Voyage is pervaded by a single governing consciousness (that of Raleigh), this publication makes every effort to downplay Raleigh’s participation in its production. The volume obviously attempts to change the courtier’s prior strategy: in place of Raleigh’s solo testimonies and persuasions, pleas and advertisements, attempts to gain personal access to the queen or penetrate her mind by means of his book-length report, The Discoverie of Guiana, there are now other voices that sing essentially the same tune, but in a different key. Raleigh is not merely rehabilitated: he is exalted. By changing the point of view,

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the new book corrects and recasts his image, transforming him from a potentially unreliable storyteller and risk taker into heroic patriot guided by a coherent vision of colonial success. For this reason, Raleigh’s presence in the volume is implicit and yet pervasive. Keymis readily confesses taking recourse to Raleigh’s own words and thus admits that his leader is the author of the book almost as much as of the enterprise itself.7 At the same time, both installments authored by Keymis explicitly address Raleigh as the primary audience: he is the “you” in these texts, and Keymis’s account sounds like an authentic report to his superior. This construction is in itself a strategic ruse. In publishing The Second Voyage, Raleigh and Keymis are not planning simply to advertise their private business. Just the opposite, and with little pretense, the book aims to convince, convert, and enlist, and thus targets an audience outside of Raleigh’s circle. The most prominent person who absolutely must be won over is, of course, the queen. It is, after all, “for the Prince to beginne, and ende this worke.”8 But getting a reluctant monarch to change her mind requires caution and ingenuity. That is why Elizabeth is an implicit audience who is always on the authors’ minds, but only occasionally on their tongues. For the same reason, finding her in this text is often as challenging as imagining her in its audience. In his pithy summation of the similarities of De Guiana and two other early modern expeditionary poems, Richard Helgerson points to the “identification of the monarch and the arms-bearing nobility” as a common feature of these exhortations.9 What is striking, however, in Chapman’s poem as much as the other parts of Keymis’s volume, is the instability of such identification; and when such melding of the queen and nobility becomes an authorial or interpretive option, it is very problematic in its effects. In fact, the concept of the audience imagined by this book is as fluid as its sense of authorship and agency. On one hand, Queen Elizabeth is not consistently merged with the nobility, as Helgerson suggests; on the other, the effect of such rhetorical identification when it does take place is fraught with political and poetic difficulties. At the basic grammatical level, the audience construction in this book depends on a manipulation of the pronouns, a game that becomes especially sophisticated in Chapman’s epic song. Simply put, the producers of The Second Voyage aim their appeal for support and funding of the exploration of Guiana at those



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members of the society who are in position to supply the required investment. Winning over the queen’s graces is undoubtedly on the top of the list, but the authors make it clear that the Crown’s support must be supplemented by the “approbation and purses of manie Aduenturers.”10 As they seek to justify the publication of their findings and proposals (the information that may be expected to be kept secret in order to prevent competition), the authors frequently downplay their desire to convince Elizabeth to sponsor their venture. On one occasion, they even imply that her support in the matter has been already accomplished and thus invite the other investors to participate in their colonial enterprise which, it would seem, the queen is unable to launch single-handed: “if the action were wholly to be effected at her Maiesties charge: then might it at her Highnesse pleasure, be shadowed with some other drift, and neuer bee discouered, vntill it were acted: But since it craueth the approbation and purses of manie Aduenturers . . . great reason it is, that where assistance is to be asked, due causes bee yielded, to perswade and induce them vnto it.”11 Undoubtedly, the hint at an opportunity to join in a project favored by the queen herself is calculated to magnify the attractiveness of the investment. The authors omit how much (or how little) the actual contribution of the Crown amounts to at that point. Indeed, Elizabeth did consent to support the Guiana venture when Raleigh headed there for the first time, 12 and was disappointed with the result. Although her disgraced courtier returned optimistic about the future, he had no material gain to show for his initial effort. Elizabeth was not interested in waiting for the uncertain prosperity that Raleigh imagined was hidden in Guiana’s depths.13 As a direct consequence of this dismissive attitude on the part of the queen, her court, and London merchants, the level of anxiety and sense of urgency in this book are overwhelming. Despite their best efforts to sound confident in the success of their enterprise, the authors make it clear that, with the Spanish already dominating a part of Guiana, time is running short: if England does not immediately seize the opportunity to conquer at least some areas, Spain will solidify its hold on the country’s riches. In addition to arguing numerous reasons why England should make haste, The Second Voyage undermines the objections raised by skeptics. It is the destructive malice of Raleigh’s personal enemies and excessive caution of many potential contributors unwilling to take

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the risk that are the two major obstacles the book attempts to overturn. But what position is Elizabeth assigned in this argument? Is she imagined as a financial investor or figure of authority whose acknowledgment of the exploration of Guiana as a sound venture would lend the matter a much-needed respectability? Do the authors fear that she is siding with Raleigh’s detractors or rather assume that she hesitates to sponsor an uncertain endeavor? With the exception of Chapman’s verse, The Second Voyage never singles out the monarch as a specific addressee of the book’s appeals. Neither is she an explicit target of its aggression. Instead of issuing any direct admonitions to the queen, the authors travel a safer, albeit welltrodden route—that of aiming the oblique arrows at her advisors: “it had been blindnesse and deafnesse in those that being neere her Maiestie: do spend their daies in seruing the cõmon weale, not to see, and know in so waightie a matter: it had beene malicious obstinancie, impotencie of minde, and more than treason to the common wealth, the matter standing onlie vpon acceptance, to seeke either to forestowe so fit an occasion, or forsake so general a blessing.”14 Subtle flattery has long been an effective method of persuasion, and the authors of The Second Voyage are not entirely above such means. As an earlier example demonstrates, they intimate, at one point, that the queen is already on their side. To enhance the impression of Elizabeth’s involvement and thus conceal her lukewarm treatment of colonial dreams, Keymis adopts his predecessor’s narrative strategy: emphasizing the devotion to the English queen by the Guiana natives. In the Discoverie, Raleigh makes much of their adoration of Elizabeth’s portrait; furthermore, his claim to be the English queen’s agent of liberation of Guiana from the Spanish oppression supposedly causes such an eager veneration of Elizabeth’s princely power that “in that part of the world her maiesty is very famous and admirable, whom they now call Ezrabeta Cassipuna Aquerewana, which is as much as Elizabeth, the great princesse or greatest commaunder.”15 In The Second Voyage, Raleigh’s story is echoed in Keymis’s sketchy reports that some inhabitants have heard of “our Princesse Iustice, rare graces, and virtues” and others keep a “precise fast one whole day in honour of the great Princesse of the North their Patronesse & Defender.”16 These remarks are clearly calculated to please the queen.



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The authors are also careful to acknowledge the utmost importance of Elizabeth’s wise leadership: “It is fit onelie for a Prince to beginne, and ende this worke: the maintenance and ordering thereof requireth Soueraigne power, authoritie and commandment” (italics mine).17 Keymis is certain that “her Maiestie may to her and her successors, enjoy this rich and great empire . . .” However, it immediately transpires that he is genuinely concerned that, in the absence of the royal guidance, the colonizers may savagely reap the riches of the land and neglect the long-term interests of the state of England: “Subiects . . . may through her Maiesties gracious sufferance, ioyning their strength together, inuade, spoile, and ouerrunne it, returning with golde and great riches. But what good of perpetuitie can followe thereof? Or who can hope that they will take any other course, then such, as tendeth to a priuate and present benefite; considering that an Empire once obtained, is of congruitie, how and wheresoeuer the charge shall grow, to be annexed vnto the Crowne? The riches of this place are not fit for anie priuate estate . . .”18 Whatever their personal aspirations, at this point the authors openly urge their queen to assume a leading role. Moreover, not only is this entreaty worded in an oblique way, but it connotes a simultaneous critique of Elizabeth’s inopportune reluctance to take the enterprise under her wing and a warning about the consequences of such an apathy which, the explanation hints, is tantamount to negligence (elegantly coded in the beginning of the argument as her “gracious sufferance”). In the midst of this apprehensive argument lies a logical and yet dangerously ambivalent question, “considering that an Empire once obtained, is of congruitie, howe and wheresoeuer the charge shall grow, to be annexed vnto the Crowne?” On one hand, the suggestion seems to be that if the private subjects are allowed to appropriate Guiana, they will rashly impoverish its resources, leaving it, however willing (“congruent”) to comply with the demand to pay regular dues to the Crown, unable to do so. On the other hand, it is unclear whether “charge” is a referent to the subjugated Guiana, in a sense of its obligation to pay, or, if it rather gestures to the Crown’s moral responsibility to exercise proper care of the colonized land. In other words, does the phrase, “charge . . . annexed vnto the Crowne” mean “riches rightfully due to the queen” or “responsibility and care expected from the queen whether she chooses boldly to head the exploration or cautiously wait aside to collect her due

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in case of success”? Keymis’s phrasing invites both meanings and, in doing so, reminds Elizabeth of the twofold nature of an ideal rulership (and Raleigh’s concept of honorable colonization): together, care and riches form the necessary “congruitie” in the imperialistic exchange between the appropriated territory and the English Crown. There is nothing inherently new in this concept of exchange between the ruler and subjects, and Elizabeth, of course, evokes the same policy when she assures her people that they will never have a prince “more careful and loving” than herself. 19 If the word “charge,” in one of its meanings, is closely related to “care,”20 the latter, in the context of Keymis’s writing, is hardly an equivalent of “love” and “concern” for the inhabitants of Guiana. Care here is rather Elizabeth’s hoped-for interest in taking charge of the exploration of the new land. And even more menacingly, the pregnant word “charge” carries the accusatory overtones, the blame that may be laid on Elizabeth’s shoulders should she leave the book’s plea unheeded. Similar compounds of praise, critique, and warning form an integral part of this volume’s rhetorical maneuvering. The instability of its imagined audience makes some passages especially difficult to navigate” “You [Raleigh] haue framed it, and moulded it readie for her Maiestie: to set on her seale. If either enuie or ignorance, or other deuise frustrate the rest, the good which shall growe to our enemies, and the losse which will come to her Maiestie and this kingdome, will after a fewe yeares shewe it selfe.”21 The first sentence neatly gift wraps the matter as a personal deal between Raleigh and Elizabeth: he prepares the wax; she merely needs to seal her claim, that is, sanction the enterprise. In this arrangement, it would seem that “envy and ignorance” are feared from someone other than the queen (envy toward Raleigh for such an achievement; envy toward Elizabeth for being offered such a gift; or, contrariwise, ignorance of the gift’s true value). The statement ends with a clear warning: the price for personal envy and ignorance is a loss for the entire land of England and its queen rather than individually for those who attempt to thwart Raleigh’s brilliant plan (this loss, of course, is further augmented by being construed as an equivalent gain for Spain). Yet it is also this very impersonal formulation, in its detachment of “envy and ignorance” from anyone in particular, that allows this volatile phrase to function as a possible



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reference to the queen herself. In this sense, the authors imply that Elizabeth has to be educated by them to recognize her imminent benefits or losses. This instance parallels some rhetorical moments in Chapman’s verse where his subject or audience, seemingly distinct from Elizabeth, in actuality subtly includes her. The authors’ clear understanding that Elizabeth’s cooperation is crucial for success, that a bulk of their persuasive force has to be directed specifically at her, is always tinted by disappointment because of the queen’s apparent indifference. This frustration with Elizabeth’s unresponsiveness transpires in the frequent instances of veiled criticism. Bitter accusations, albeit not directed explicitly at Elizabeth, nevertheless seem to aim at her obliquely, by means of fudged or omitted transitions: in particular, the authors repeatedly fail to signal the switch of their audience and/or subject under discussion. This phenomenon may indicate a conscious, strategic obfuscation or inadvertent linguistic betrayal of the authors’ disapproving attitude. It is in Chapman’s verses, however, that these instances of leakage become especially noticeable. In De Guiana, Elizabeth is invoked both as an inspirational symbol of the English nation, expected to heighten the audience’s enthusiasm, and as the audience herself. Chapman’s poem is the only text in this book that addresses Elizabeth directly, and even flatteringly refers to the queen by her customary poetic name, Eliza, rather than a ceremonious “her Maiestie.”22 By explicitly making Elizabeth his character and listener, Chapman draws her into the realm of poetic discourse, where the rules of formality and decorum, adhered to in the rest of The Second Voyage, are shifted. Chapman’s method of advancing Raleigh’s cause is highly eccentric, and his rhetorical choices are at times daring and puzzling. The “epic song,” to an extent, serves as a poetic reiteration of Keymis’s argument for colonization (and Keymis’s line of reasoning in turn mirrors Raleigh’s own convictions). Chapman begins with a grandiose version of the current political status quo (Guiana begging England for colonization) and ends with a prophecy of England’s imperial future (England graciously taking possession of the submissive new land), rolling out a didactic argument to connect the two epic points. In its relation to the queen, this line of reasoning poses as a cautious advice smothered in praise; at times, however, it verges on an admonition quite oblivious to its own audacity.23

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The two emblematic sketches that frame the poem are strategically straightforward. The main characters here are Guiana, England, and Elizabeth. The opening scene offers a decorous version of Keymis’s somewhat risqué description of Guiana as “whole shires of fruitful rich grounds, lying now waste for want of people” that “do prostitute themselves unto us, like a faire and beautiful woman, in the pride and flower of desired years,” a statement that looks back to Raleigh’s notorious declaration that “Guiana is a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead . . . ”24 Chapman reconfigures this gendered trope of a female colonized offering herself to her male conqueror into a more upright analogy of the dutiful obedience of a younger woman to an older one: Guiana, whose rich feet are mines of golde, Whose forehead knockes against the roofe of Starres, Stands on her tip-toes at fair England looking Kissing her hand, bowing her mighty breast, And every signe of all submission making, To be her sister, and her daughter both Of our most sacred Maide: whose barrennesse Is the true fruite of virtue, that may get, Beare and bring foorth anew in all perfection, What heretofore savage corruption held In barbarous Chaos; and in this affaire Become her father, mother, and her heir. (18–29)

Although Elizabeth may have considered “barrennesse” a dubious choice for an allusion to her exalted virginity, she would have found it difficult to argue with the majestic setting of this concept. Chapman evokes the conventional identification of England and Elizabeth: more precisely, Guiana is looking up to England, but bowing to Elizabeth with an implicit understanding that the eminence of the country lies in its sovereign. It is then Elizabeth, and not England, that “become[s] her father, mother, and her heir” (29). Unlike Keymis’s male-female gendering, Chapman’s distribution of gender roles is less consistent, but this very inconsistency is actually a reflection of Elizabeth’s famous self-description of harboring “the heart and stomach of a king” in “a feeble body of a woman.”25 To her androgynous ability to impersonate both mother and father, Chapman adds a twist of generational simultaneity: she can be Gui-



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ana’s sister, mother, and heir. This multivalence hinges on the queen’s virginity, which Chapman evokes in an acrobatic effort to present the conquest of Guiana as a symbolic renewal through reconception, regestation, and rebirth of the colonized land into the state of order and civilization (24–29). This fantasy of “conquest without blood” (15) is replicated in the concluding section of the poem where the prophecy of a benign colonization paints “a world of Savages” (166) gratefully giving up its gold and land to the English. Guiana is no longer a little country; it signifies the entire uncivilized humanity that eagerly waits to be possessed. The prophecy concludes with a penultimate tableau: “ . . . new Britania, humblie kneeles to heaven, / The world to her, and both at her blest feete, / In whom the Circles of all Empire meet” (182–84). The queen towers larger-than-life, with the “new Britania” (the rejuvenated England conjoined with the newly renamed Guiana) and “the world” kneeling at her imperial feet; the global iconography of this majestic picture echoes Elizabeth’s Ditchley portrait. If such predictable esteem for his sovereign’s supremacy permeated the whole poem, Chapman’s “epic” would safely serve its purpose. These laudatory images of rule, however, frame an address to Elizabeth that is far more controversial in its nature. In fact, the approaching turn is prefigured even in the poem’s early lines: the apostrophic invocation to Clio contains a shocking reference to Walter Raleigh’s Eliza-consecrated sworde, That in this peacefull charme of Englands sleep, Opens most tenderlie her aged throate, Offring to poure fresh youth through all her vaines . . . (9–13)

This remarkable image praises the renewal: the process which is described again, with a role reversal, when later the poet imagines Guiana itself being “brought forth anew” by England/Elizabeth (26). Here, the old country is rejuvenated by means of an unsettling combination of forced feeding and blood transfusion. 26 This gentle violence of renewal opens England’s throat “most tenderly”; conveniently, no consent is required from the sleeping recipient. The tension is intensified by the fact that both “th’exploit” and

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“sworde” may be understood to be opening England’s throat. Moreover, although a peaceable interpretation may see “throte” metonymically meaning “mouth,” it is almost impossible to avoid the image of the sword slitting the throat. The syntactical and semantic ambiguity in this passage may seem merely accidental at this point, but what should be a loyal subject’s worst fears is confirmed soon enough. In fact, another set of metaphors in this passage juxtaposes England’s “aged throte” and Guiana’s “fresh youth”: a slippery move since Elizabeth, then sixty-three years old and painfully self-conscious about her aging, has been habitually identified with her country. Customarily, this identification is suggestive of her enormous power and dedication to her subjects, but Chapman’s verse makes it possible to extend the trope, intimating an unsavory comparison of England’s long history to the old age of its queen. Such pregnant suggestions may signal a covert threat; at the very least, they hint at Elizabeth’s lack of vitality and help to release the pleader’s frustration. At any rate, the risky poetics of gentle violence and soft insult betray the extent to which the political ambitions of Raleigh and his men may lead them to entertain a genuine assault. The imperial dream of placing “the Monarchie of earth . . . on Eliza’s hand” (16–17) follows, along with the aforementioned vignette of Guiana, England, and Elizabeth. The poet then promptly turns to face his “most admired Soueraigne” with a direct plea to set her life-giving breath to the creation of the “golden worlde” and lend the “prosperous forewind” to Raleigh’s fleet (30–34). Raleigh’s case is further helped along by the echo between “his vertuous fruit” (40) and Elizabeth’s “fruite of vertue” (25). He is effectively presented not only as divinely elected to glory by his queen (36), but also as her counterpart, her authentic delegate to Guiana. A high degree of wishful thinking in this poem is thus intertwined with a revisionist augmentation of Elizabeth’s earlier involvement in Raleigh’s first voyage: allowing him to proceed in his own ambitious designs is certainly not the same as “electing” him to head a mission initiated by the Crown; giving him a warrant to plunder the Spaniards is not exactly a financial grant that could be accurately described as “rais[ing] him with choise Bounties, that could adde / Height to his height” (38–39). In thus extending his argument to the backward-looking praise of Elizabeth’s previous choices, Chapman invites the queen to “second . . . her last” sanc-



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tion (34) and skillfully draws her into the enterprise that she is, in actuality, so reluctant to take seriously.27 For the time being, the poem continues to flow in the epideictic vein, conveying the metaphoric advice on the proper way to increase Elizabeth’s empire. All of a sudden, however, the poet switches from one listener to another: in the middle of the verse paragraph, the second-person pronouns cease to refer to the queen. This unannounced substitution is accompanied by a fierce alliteration and striking change in tone: You then that would be wise in Wisdomes spight, Directing with discredite of direction, And hunt for honour, hunting him to death, With whome before you will inherite gold, You will loose golde, for which you loose your soules; You that choose nought for right, but certaintie, And feare that value will get onlie blowes, Placing your faith in Incredulitie . . . (66–73)

Who is being addressed? Chapman may have turned to the yet skeptical “Aduenturers” whose “approbation and purses” are craved in the address to the reader that precedes this poem. 28 Even more likely, these indignant lines are directed against Raleigh’s enemies. At any rate, this criticism is not meant for Elizabeth’s ears but, as a reader, she would receive no early warning to stop listening: it is only the plural form of “soules” a few lines into this astonishing attack that eventually signals the change in the poem’s intended audience. As a result, at least a partial transference of this passionate tirade onto Elizabeth is inevitable. Although Chapman makes a point of praising the queen for the support of her ex-favorite’s ventures, the poem is permeated by the sense of Raleigh’s heroic perseverance in the face of his detractors whose defamation implicitly ricochets at the uncooperative monarch. In order to dramatize Raleigh’s predicament, Chapman sets up the contrast where the abusive side is represented by Nature/ body and England while the soul and Raleigh belong to the wronged party (117–29). Nature itself, along with England, is strongly associated with Elizabeth, partly because of the ruler’s gender (women were frequently held to be grounded in nature and

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physicality), and partly due to the coincidence in the pronouns: the next “she” in the poem returns us to the queen. Chapman exclaims almost melodramatically, “But how is Nature at her heart corrupted, / (I mean even in her most ennobled birth?) / How in excesse of Sence is Sence bereft her?” (117–19) The audacious parenthetical remark renders the trope completely transparent and the line before it even more reckless. If, in Helgerson’s terms, this remark is an example of equating Elizabeth and the nobility, then the poet is treading on all-the-more dangerous ground, hinting that the queen’s proverbial wisdom is potentially flawed because it may be construed as an “excess of sense.” Moreover, England’s ungratefulness for Raleigh’s “heroic act” is bemoaned in a way that leaves little doubt that Elizabeth is among those whose “ease-lockt eares” (130) the poet promises to unlock with his verse: not coincidentally, Elizabeth barred Raleigh from her presence and closed her ears to the alluring call of his plentiful El Dorado. In a climactic prophecy, Chapman imagines that his verse has captured his prince’s attention precisely by breaking her reluctance to listen: he envisions “our Liege ris[ing] from her throne / Her ears and thoughtes in steepe amaze erected” (149–50).29 In its open urgency of the attempt to influence the queen, De Guiana is thus the most up-front part of The Second Voyage. Many related ambiguities are scattered throughout the book, although they may go unnoticed by a reader unfamiliar with Elizabeth’s disheartening treatment of Raleigh in the mid-1590s. It may be that Chapman’s participation was especially attractive to Raleigh and Keymis because, as a lowly outsider and a masterful obfuscator, he was prepared to convey Raleigh’s frustrations without compromising himself and his fellow authors. But what would move the writer to take these risks? An ambitious poet who believed that his superior intelligence and learning merited an improvement in financial status, Chapman habitually wrote difficult poems for a discerning audience—an audience whose superiority, too, rested on intellect rather than noble birth. De Guiana is unique in Chapman’s oeuvre, however, in being addressed to the queen, and not as a potential patron for himself, but as a patron for Raleigh’s imperialistic enterprise that would add glory to the En­ glish Crown and benefit its subjects. Casting himself in the role that was hardly socially appropriate, that of an advisor to the prince, Chapman takes a significant risk that stands in stark contrast to



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Elizabeth’s own wariness in extending support. This audacious strategy may be better understood in light of Chapman’s conviction that true poetry is driven by furor poeticus: a Platonic concept of divine inspiration that unties a poet’s tongue bound by social constraints.30 More pragmatically, such poetic boldness itself may serve as an example to the queen as well as tender an ambivalent comment on her intelligence (both her proverbial wisdom possibly questioned in the poem and her ability to read difficult verse). Chapman’s rhetoric, therefore, challenges courtly values—economic, political, and poetical—and advances a value system of his own. In pondering the meaning of this challenge, one may question to what extent the authors of this volume are conscious of talking at the court or being outside of it. In Raleigh’s Discoverie, his aforementioned stories about the indigenous population bowing to the “great cassique of the North” Ezrabeta clearly aim to impress the English queen; likewise, Raleigh’s insistent emphasis on directing his men to practice courtly values of chastity and continence in relation to the female inhabitants of Guiana is designed to serve, at least in part, the same purpose.31 Both Raleigh’s and Keymis’s Guiana narratives, however, reveal the Englishmen’s readiness to deal in practical courtly strategies less exalted (although perhaps more favored) than their queen’s demand of chastity from her courtiers. In fact, both narratives make their proposed venture more attractive to their audiences by inviting the prospective colonizers to enact some familiar courtly tactics and replicate a courtly hierarchy in Guiana. If the virtuous behavior toward native women is expected to meet with Elizabeth’s approval, the tactics of cunning and deliberate deception modeled by Raleigh and Keymis and, even more so, the promises of riches and heightened social status, decisively exclude the queen from the targeted audience. Thus, Raleigh intimates to his readers how cautiously he has avoided, in his dealings with the natives, a revelation of his ultimate desire for gold acquisition, offering instead the tale of Guiana’s liberation from the Spanish oppressors. Raleigh keeps his men’s resemblance to their Spanish rivals to himself: they “came both for one errant” and “both sought but to sacke and spoyle them . . . ”32 Keymis uses similar tactics of deceit in assuring the natives that he returned with so few soldiers not because, as we know, his enterprise still lacks support of the Crown, but because, “if her Maiestie should haue sent a power of men . . . the Indians might perhaps imagine, that we came

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rather to inuade, then to defend them.”33 Although elegant dissimulation was highly valued at the English court, Raleigh’s and Keymis’s ruses capitalize on their queen’s good reputation with the natives and thus undermine its integrity. 34 Such maneuvers seek to utilize the queen as an accomplice and insofar as the authors lack her consent, this strategy reported on the domestic front is risky. In contrast to the methods favored in Raleigh’s first Guiana book where the author makes several attempts to engage Elizabeth directly, the Second Voyage generally positions itself at a respectful distance from court. This distancing is especially evident when Keymis reports the natives’ disappointment in Raleigh’s absence from the second expedition: they clearly perceive Keymis as a second-rate representative of a distant kingdom. If Raleigh presents himself as Elizabeth’s envoy and harbinger, Keymis puts on a similar role in relation to Raleigh: his surrogate, his representative, and yet clearly not his equal. Consequently, whereas Raleigh turns to Robert Cecil and Lord Howard with intent to generate a patronage from these powerful courtiers, Keymis, in dedicating his work to Raleigh, who directly employed him to conduct the exploration, ostensibly leaves The Second Voyage outside any concrete courtly alliance other than one implied by Raleigh’s own unstable social status.35 Nevertheless, the opportunity for a courtly patronage, which seemingly lapses in Keymis’s dedication of the book to the very person whose support constitutes the book’s main purpose, is gloriously recaptured in Chapman’s poem. If in its distancing from court, Keymis’s publication may seem to be a fainter reiteration of Raleigh’s appeal, albeit spiced with a passionate valorization of Raleigh himself, De Guiana contributes an altogether brilliant poetical argument that lifts Keymis’s entire book from the redundancy of being, as its title openly admits, the second one. In its masterful style and bold appeal to the queen herself, Chapman’s epic song ushers this modest volume into Elizabeth’s courtly chambers, a social space where neither Keymis nor Chapman were personally welcomed. In this process of skipping the steps of the social hierarchy, the daring elements of the poem are all the more intriguing. Given Chapman’s social and economic difficulties and the likelihood that De Guiana was the poet’s best opportunity to get noticed by the queen, how could he afford to doubt her intelligence? Perhaps the answer to this question lies both in Chapman’s personal experience



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and the loopholes in the early modern regulation and interpretation of published texts. Because this poet’s noteworthy brushes with censorship were to come only years later, 36 he may be, at the time of De Guiana, just beginning to test the limits of safe political expression. Indeed, he conceals most of his risky gestures within difficult passages. The most lucid parts are unequivocally complimentary and lay out in the open a tempting description of imperial majesty well fit to motivate the queen to pursue the colonization. As a result, Chapman’s address to Elizabeth is subtle, balanced, and ambiguous. The rhetorical essence of De Guiana showcases, in a concentrated form, the same strategy as the rest of the book: nothing seditious is stated clearly and directly. In sum, this publication exemplifies “the hermeneutics of censorship,” Annabel Patterson’s term for “a system of communication (‘literature’) in which ambiguity becomes a creative and necessary instrument . . . ”37 No overt retribution came to Chapman in response to his incautious exercise of poetic license. If she detected the poem’s incongruities, Elizabeth still ignored the entire ordeal: the ambiguous poem, the ambitious book, and the enterprise itself. Neither, however, did the queen extend any reward, even though the poet adhered to obscure modes of expression and cushioned his critique in skillful substitutions: despite its cautious tactics, The Second Voyage indubitably fell short of its ultimate rhetorical goal. In the end, the book’s clever combination of prose and poetry, its scattered indirect hints and focused pleas to the monarch, its third-person assertions of the necessity of the prince’s involvement framing an energetic petition to their “most admired Soueraigne”—in other words, all the authors’ exertions—came to nothing. The uncompromising seriousness that fuels this publication, however, is beyond doubt. Although Raleigh and his loyal man Keymis persevered in their colonial dreams, it was not until long past Elizabeth’s lifetime, in 1617, when the two finally reached Guiana’s shores once more. That tragic journey marked the end of their lives: unable to protect Raleigh’s son from death and having disastrously failed to locate the coveted gold mines, Keymis committed suicide on the ship; Raleigh was tried and executed upon his return to England. The appeal of The Second Voyage was all too genuine, and two out of three men who voiced it were fundamentally invested in its success. Raleigh not only conducted the preliminary investigation for this project, but also financed Keymis’s trip, which the courtier himself was un-

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able to undertake. On his part, Keymis poignantly pledged his life to justify the expediency of his hero’s endeavor and bequeathed the remainder of his years to the success of this mission. 38 He kept his word. Chapman’s participation, in contrast, was transitory. The poet lent the entrepreneurs his voice; he sang their plea in earnest, taking both the risks and glory and leaving only his initials under its powerful last line. Was his full name omitted because he was just a commissioned performer, or was it left out in order to protect him? The first answer argues his glory; the second, his risks.

Contributors Thomas Betteridge is Reader in English Literature, 1550–1750, at Oxford Brookes University. He is author of numerous articles on English Reformation literature and author of Literature and Politics in the English Reformation (2004). He is currently working on a major research project in part nership w it h Histor ic Royal Palaces, f unded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, entitled Staging the Henrician Court. Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier is currently teaching at the University of Paderborn. She has lectured in Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, and the United States. She is the author of a monograph on stagings of the body in Shakespeare’s history plays (Körper-Inszenierungen in Shakespeares Historien, 1999) and coeditor of Shakespeare in the Media: From the Globe Theatre to the World Wide Web (2004). She continues publishing on Shakespeare and Aemilia Lanyer, Victorian literature and culture and contemporary British drama and film. Ayako Kawanami has taken a doctorate in English literature at the University of Warwick, UK, and is teaching English and English literature at the University of Hirosaki, Japan. She has published articles on Robert Greene, Shakespeare, and Thomas Heywood, and is currently working on the influence of Ovid on Lyly, Greene, and Shakespeare.  Jessica Malay is a senior lecturer at the University of Huddersfield. She is the author of Textual Constructions of Space in the Writing of Renaissance Women (2006) and has written a number of articles about women’s writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Aysha Pollnitz is Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She has published essays on Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, and on Shakespeare and political thought. She is writing a monograph, Princely Education in Sixteenth-Century Britain.

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Anna Riehl is an assistant professor at Auburn University. Her monograph, The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Elizabeth I, is forthcoming. Her article on anamorphosis of John Donne’s poetry has been published in the ELR, and her essays on Elizabeth I and the angelic and heraldic tropes are forthcoming in other essay collections. Peter Sillitoe read English at the University of Wales, Bangor, before going on to complete a PhD at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of numerous articles on Renaissance drama and the court and is currently finishing a monograph entitled Defining Elite Space in Early Modern England. Sam Wood is currently based at the University of Leeds and Manchester Metropolitan University. His forthcoming publications include an article on the place of Thomas Aquinas in the thinking of Thomas More and an article on Othello, home and honesty. He is working on a new project that looks at early modern attitudes to homelessness.

Notes

Introduction 1. The Eltham Ordinances, passed in 1526, were presented in public as a se­ rious attempt to reform the court, although it is now recognized that they also had the effect of increasing the power of Thomas Wolsey. They are a set of rules designed to order every last detail of the court. See John Guy, Tudor England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 103–4. 2. Edward Hall, The vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre [and] Yorke, beeyng long in continual discension for the croune of this noble realme with all the actes done in bothe the tymes of the princes, bothe of the one linage and of the other, beginnyng at the tyme of kyng Henry the fowerth, the first aucthor of this deuision, and so successiuely proceadyng to the reigne of the high and prudent prince kyng Henry the eight, the vndubitate flower and very heire of both the sayd linages (London: Richard Grafton, 1548), fol. C.xxxiii verso. 3. Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2003). 4. Sydney Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship (London: Seaby, 1992), 3. 5. Hall, The union, fol. C.xxxiiii recto. 6. Ibid., verso. 7. As You Like It, 3.2.40–42, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997). 8. Shakespeare, As You Like It, 3.2.61. 9. Ibid., 3.3. 10. For examples of studies on the Tudor court, see, for instance, The Tudor Monarchy, ed. John Guy (New York: Hodder Arnold, 1997); John Guy, Tudor England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995); David Loades, The Tudor Court (London: Batsford, 1986); and David Starkey, ed., The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London: Longman, 1987).

Courtly Pride and Christian Virtue 1. I use quotation marks to indicate that I am using a sixteenth-century term referring to a sixteenth-century figuration. The “Turk” was commonly

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used as a term for both a feared and powerful nation and its leader in the sul­ tan. As such it articulates early modern attitudes to the Ottoman Empire and should not be confused with the modern state of Turkey. 2. Margaret Mann Phillips, The “Adages” of Erasmus: A Study with Translations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 344. 3. Phillips, “Adages,” 329–30. 4. Ibid., 346. 5. Ibid., 333. 6. Ibid., 341. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 349. 9. Ibid., 352. 10. Ibid. 11. Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 21–25. Cf. James K. Mc­ Conica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3. Dimmock’s work includes a chapter on More’s polemics. While I agree with his assessment of the Reformation use of the “Turk” to demonize a religious opponent, I suggest that the “Turk” was a great deal more ambiguous before religious divisions within Christendom cre­ ated opportunity for such demonization. 12. Timothy Hampton, “ ‘Turkish dogs’: Rabelais, Erasmus, and the Rhetoric of Alterity,” Representations 41 (1993): 63. 13. Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 11. 14. Erasmus, De ratione studii, trans. Brian McGregor, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Peter G. Beitenholz et al., (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1974–), vol. 24, Literary and Educational Writings, vol. 2, ed. Craig R. Thompson (1978), 666. 15. Waswo, Language and Meaning, 218–19. 16. Phillips, “Adages,” 348. 17. Ibid., 327. 18. Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 42; Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 8–11. 19. Jardine and Brotton, Global Interests, 47. 20. J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (London: Eyre & Spotiswoode, 1968), 97–105. 21. The Complete Works of Saint Thomas More, ed. Louis L. Martz et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963–97), vol. 3, bk. 2; Latin Poems, ed. Clarence H. Miller et al. (1984), 257. Henry’s victory may well have depended on the far more bloody destruction of Thérouanne a few weeks earlier. See Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 35–36. 22. Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Neil M. Cheshire and Michael J. Heath, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Peter G. Beitenholz et al. (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1974–), vol. 27, Literary and Educational Writings, vol. 5, ed. A. H. T. Levi (1986), 252.



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23. Nabil Matar, “Renaissance England and the Turban,” Cairo Papers in Social Science 19 (1996): 39–54. See also Matar’s Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press 1998). 24. United Kingdom, Public Record Office, “Robert Wingfield to Henry VIII,” Vienna, July 10, 1515, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII: Preserved in the Public Record Office, the British Museum, and elsewhere in England, arr. J. S. Brewer et al., (London: Longman, 1867–1910), vol. 2, bk. 2, no. 684. Interpolations in square brackets are those of the editors of Letters and Papers. 25. Editors’ italics. 26. Garrett Mattingly, “An Early Non-Aggression Pact,” Journal of Modern History 10 (1938): 6. 27. Ibid., 7; United Kingdom, Public Record Office, “Treaty of Universal Peace,” London, October 2, 1518, in Letters and Papers, vol. 2, bk. 2, no. 4469. Cf. Thomas Rymer, Foedera (London: A & J Churchill, 1712), 13:624–31. 28. Glenn Richardson, “Entertainments for the French Ambassadors at the Court of Henry VIII,” Renaissance Studies 9 (1995): 405. 29. Mattingly, “An Early Non-Agression Pact,” 13. 30. United Kingdom, Public Record Office, “Sebastian Giustinian to the Doge,” London, September 18, 1518, in Letters and Papers, vol. 2, bk. 2, no. 4438. 31. Ibid., no. 4481. 32. K. M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (Philadelphia: American Phil­ osophical Society, 1984), 3:185. Cf. United Kingdom, Public Record Office, “Sebastian Giustinian to the Doge,” London, November 9, 1518, in Letters and Papers, vol. 2, bk. 2, no. 4563; United Kingdom, Public Record Office, “Intelli­ gence from Rome,” May 30, 1517, in Letters and Papers, vol. 2, bk. 2, no. 3307. 33. Richardson, “Entertainments for the French Ambassadors,” 407–8. 34. Complete Works of Saint Thomas More, ed. Louis L. Martz et al., vol. 4, Utopia, ed. J. H. Hexter and Edward Surtz (1965), 197. 35. A fruteful, and pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weale, and of the newe yle called Vtopia . . . , trans. by Raphe Robynson (London, 1551), sig. O3v. 36. J. H. Hexter, introduction to Complete Works of Saint Thomas More, vol. 4, Utopia, lxvii–lxxv. 37. Ibid., lxviii–lxx. Cf. Phillips, “Adages,” 330–32. 38. Hexter, introduction to Complete Works, 4:lxx, italics Hexter’s. 39. Ibid., lxxv, italics Hexter’s. 40. Ibid., lxxv. 41. John C. Olin, “Erasmus’s Adagia and More’s Utopia,” in Miscellanea Moreana: Essays for Germain Marc’Hadour, ed. Clare M. Murphy et al., 130 (Bingham­ ton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1989). 42. Olin offers his own translations of the relevant passages. They may also be found in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 31, “Adages,” trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, 1, 15, and 29–30. 43. Complete Works of Saint Thomas More, vol. 4, Utopia, 101. 44. Idid., 243. 45. Ibid., 95. 46. Ibid., 101.

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47. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 27, The Education of a Christian Prince, 219. See More’s expression of this idea, Complete Works of Saint Thomas More, vol. 4, Utopia, 57. 48. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 27, Education of a Christian Prince, 219. 49. Ibid., 214. 50. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 34, Adages vol. 4, trans. and annotated by R. A. B. Mynors (1992), 267–68. 51. Ibid., 268 52. Ibid., 271, 275. 53. Ibid., 273. 54. Complete Works of Saint Thomas More, vol. 4, Utopia, 151. 55. Ibid., 157. 56. Ibid., 167. 57. Ibid., 97, 101. 58. Ibid., 101–3 59. Ibid., 101. 60. Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in SixteenthCentury England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 105. 61. Brendan Bradshaw, “More on Utopia,” Historical Journal 24 (1981): 10– 13. Bradshaw’s argument is based on situating Hexter’s, based on Dulce bellum inexpertis, alongside the Enchiridion militis Christi where the sacraments have an important place enabling “communication with the Deity.” In this context, I cannot disagree with his argument, but do point out that Erasmus’s articula­ tions of what is necessary to be a Christian are contradictory, hence Bradshaw’s disagreement with Hexter. 62. Bradshaw, “More on Utopia,” 26–27. 63. Complete Works of Saint Thomas More, vol. 4, Utopia, 245. This passage has been the subject of considerable dispute with Hexter and George Logan, in The Meaning of More’s Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), see­ ing it as ironic, while Bradshaw argues against this view. Logan does not seem to me to properly take account of Bradshaw’s point that a counselor aware of his context cannot recommend Utopia because it would overturn the glories on which the commonwealth rests. See Logan, The Meaning of More’s Utopia, 242– 43. 64. Bradshaw, “More on Utopia,” 25. 65. Complete Works of Saint Thomas More, vol. 6, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. Thomas M. C. Lawler, Germain Marc’Hadour, and Richard C. Marius (1981), bk. 1, 39–40. 66. Ibid., 46. 67. Brian Cummings, “Iconoclasm and Bibliophobia in the English Refor­ mation,” in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 192. 68. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), 57. 69. Complete Works of Saint Thomas More, vol. 8, The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, ed. Louis A. Schuster et al., (1973) bk. 1, 206–7.



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Humanism and Court Culture 1. This chapter draws upon Aysha Pollnitz, “Princely Education in Six­ teenth-Century Britain” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2006). On Eras­ mus’s phrase bonae litterae, see James McConica, “The Fate of Erasmian Hu­ manism,” in Universities, Society and the Future, ed. N. Phillipson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), 41–42. 2. Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, ed. Lisa Jardine, trans. Neil M. Cheshire and Michael J. Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1997), 5. 3. “Ignorantiam literarum percupide sibi vendicent, ac nihil sui muneris esse in pacis artibus credant,” in De studio literarum recte et commode instituendo, by Guil­ laume Budé (Paris: Jodocus Badius, 1532), fol. 11r. 4. Hannah Smith, “Court Studies and the Courts of Early Modern Europe,” Historical Journal 49, no. 4 (2006): 1229–38; John Adamson, “The Making of the Ancien Régime Court, 1500–1700,” in The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual Politics and Culture under the Ancien Régime, 1500–1750, ed. John Adamson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1999), 7–41; Maria Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII (London: Croom Helm, 1986); and David Loades, The Tudor Court (London: B. T. Batsford, 1986), 114–26. 5. Thomas More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. George M. Logan, Robert Adams, and Clarence H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1995), 96, 97; James McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 12. 6. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986), xiv. 7. Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); More, Utopia, 82, 83, 100, 101. 8. John Fortescue, De laudibus legum Anglie, ed. S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), 110. 9. The Household Order for Edward IV, ed. A. R. Myers (Manchester: Man­ chester University Press, 1959), 126–27, 137–38. 10. Gordon Kipling, The Triumph of Honour: Burgundian Origins of the Elizabethan Renaissance (The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1977), 23. 11. Jean Meyer, L’éducation des princes en Europe du XVe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Perrin, 2004), 68, 70–71. 12. Nicholas Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London: Hambledon Press, 1989), 83, and From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy, 1066–1530 (New York: Methuen, 1984), 211, 213, 216; Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 5–6, 10; Sydney Anglo, introduction to Chivalry in the Renaissance, ed. Sydney Anglo (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1990), xi–xii. 13. The Boke of Noblesse, Addressed to Edward IV on his Invasion of France in 1475, ed. John Gough Nichols (London: Roxburgh Club, 1860), 77.

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14. Bernard André, Historia regis Henrici septimi, ed. James Gardiner (Lon­ don: Longman et al., 1858), 43; Prince Arthur to Katherine of Aragon, October 5 and November 1, 1499, Egerton MS 616, fols. 14, 16, and 17 (variant), British Library, London; see Steven Gunn, “Prince Arthur’s Preparation for Kingship,” in Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales: Life and Death and Commemoration, ed. S. J. Gunn and L. Monckton (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, forthcoming, May 2009); David R. Carlson, “Royal Tutors in the Reign of Henry VII,” Sixteenth Century Journal 22, no. 2 (1991): 253–79. 15. F. M. Salter, ed., “Skelton’s Speculum principis,” Speculum 9 (1934): 25–37; Erasmus to Prince Henry, Greenwich, Autumn 1499, and Bologna, November 17, 1506, in Erasmus, Opus Epistolarum Desiderii Erasmi Roterdami, ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen, and H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 1:239–41 and 1:433–34. 16. Kipling, Triumph of Honour, 11–30; Carlson, “Royal Tutors in the Reign of Henry VII,” 268; J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 2nd ed. (Methuen: London, 1976), 18, 20–21; Giles Duwes, An Introductory to Read, to Pronounce and to Speak French Truly (London: T. Godfray, 1532?), sigs. A2r–A3v. 17. For instance, Giovanni Pontano, De principe, ed. Eugenio Garin, Prosatori Latini del quattrocento (Turin: Guilio Einaudi, 1977), 8:1024–27, 8:1038–41, 8:1044–47, 8:1056–60. 18. Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2004), 19–34. 19. Dominic Baker-Smith, “ ‘Inglorious glory’: 1513 and the Humanist At­ tack on Chivalry,” in Chivalry in the Renaissance, ed. Sydney Anglo (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1990), 129–44. 20. Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince, 14. 21. Ibid., 15, 17, 46–47. 22. Ibid., 9, 28, 102–3. 23. Cf. Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince, 12–13, 61–65, with Erasmus, De copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo and De ratione studii ac legendi interpretandique auctores, trans. Betty I. Knott, Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings, vol. 2, ed. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of To­ ronto Press, 1978), 284–88, 666–91. 24. More, Utopia, 82, 83, 170, 171. 25. Richard Pace, De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, ed. Frank Manley and Richard S. Sylvester (New York: Renaissance Society of America and Frederick Ungar, 1967), 22, 23. 26. publica produnt dum serviunt privatis, stultam quandam excogitant imaginem libertatis, qua non fiunt liberi, sed mali. Juan Luis Vives, De pace inter Caesarem et Franciscum, ed. Gregorio Mayans y Siscar (Valencia: St. Monfort, 1782–80; facsimile, London: Gregg Press, 1964), 5:180. 27. The dedicatory copy to Catherine is British Library G.12018. Erasmus, The Institution of Marriage, trans. Michael Heath, in Erasmus on Women, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 15–21, 79–130, 16, 18. 28. Juan Luis Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, ed. Charles Fantazzi and Constantinus Matheeussen (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 20–25, 28, 29, 38, 39,



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148–57; Carlos G. Noreňa, Juan Luis Vives (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 193–96. 29. Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, 46, 47; De disciplinis libri xx (Frankfurt: Joannes Gymnicus, 1532), 82. 30. Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince, 61. 31. Michael Heath, “The Education of a Christian Prince: Erasmus, Budé, Rabelais—and Ogier le Danois,” in Humanism and Letters in the Age of François Ier, ed. Philip Ford and Gillian Jondorf (Cambridge: Cambridge French Colloquia, 1996), 46–47, 52–54. 32. “The Guardrobe of the Manor of Bedington, in the charge of Sir Mi­ chael Stanhope, Keeper of the House,” Harleian MS 1419B, fols. 373r–382v, British Library, London; David Starkey, “Intimacy and Innovation: The Rise of the Privy Chamber, 1486–1547,” in The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. David Starkey et al. (London: Longman, 1987), 81–82, 101–7. 33. Erasmus to James Banisius, Brussels, May 21, 1519, in Opus epistolarum, 3:593. 34. David Rundle, “ ‘Not So Much Praise As Precept’: Erasmus, Panegyric, and the Renaissance Art of Teaching Princes,” in Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, ed. Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone, 148–69 (Cambridge: Cambridge niversity Press, 1998). 35. Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII, 22–23, 26, 30–32. 36. Erasmus to John Vergara, Basel, March 24, 1529, in Opus epistolarum, 8:108; Thomas Linacre, Rudimenta grammatices, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scholar Press, 1971); Vives, De ratione studii puerilis (Strasbourg: Peter Schoeffer, 1523), sigs. K3r–L7r; Ethan H. Shagan, “Fetherston, Richard (d. 1540)”; Gabri­ ele Stein, “John Palsgrave (d. 1554)”; and Jonathan Woolfson, “Croke, Richard (1489–1588),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press 2004); http://www.oxforddnb.com, articles 9374, 21227, and 6734. 37. Quotation from John Palsgrave to Thomas More, Sheriff Hutton, 1525, in The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elizabeth F. Rogers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 405; Richard Croke to Cardinal Wolsey, Sher­ iff Hutton, July 6, 1527, in Inventory of the Wardrobe, Plate of Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, ed. John G. Nichols (London: Camden Society, 1855), xlviii. 38. David Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 19–20. 39. Edward Hall, Hall’s Chronicle Containing the History of England During the Reign of Henry the Fourth and the Succeeding Monarchs to the End of the Reign of Henry the Eight, ed. Henry Ellis (London: J. Johnson et al., 1809), 2:722–23. 40. Palsgrave to More, Sheriff Hutton, 1525, in Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, 404. 41. Croke to Wolsey, Pontefract, July 6, 1527, in Inventory of . . . Henry Fitzroy, xliv. 42. Croke to Wolsey, Pontefract, July 6, 1527, and Sheriff Hutton, February 28, 1528, in Inventory of . . . Henry Fitzroy, xlii, xlvii. 43. Croke to Wolsey, Pontefract, July 6, 1527, in Inventory of . . . Henry Fitzroy, xxxix–xl.

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44. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching, 39. 45. ingenium longe optimum . . . perierit tandem, his magistris, qui sua vo­ luptate utilitateque omnia, nihil domini commodo metiuntur. Croke to Wolsey, Sheriff Hutton, February 28, 1528, in Inventory of . . . Henry Fitzroy, xlvii. 46. Thomas Magnus to Wolsey, Pontefract, February 8, 1527, in Inventory of . . . Henry Fitzroy, xxxi. 47. Beverley A. Murphy, Bastard Prince: Henry VIII’s Lost Son (Stroud: Sutton, 2001), 75. 48. Non audebit (inquit) ista asserere D. Cardinalis, si his de rebus rex cum illo velit disputare. Croke to Wolsey, Pontefract, July 6, 1527, in Inventory of . . . Henry Fitzroy, xxxviii. 49. Croke to Wolsey, Pontefract, July 6, 1527, in Inventory of . . . Henry Fitzroy, xlv. 50. Richmond to Henry VIII, Sheriff Hutton, March 4, 1528, in Inventory of . . . Henry Fitzroy, liii. 51. Henry Parker, Lord Morley, “The Prologue,” Royal MS 17 C. XVI, fol. 2v, British Library, London. 52. Richmond to Henry VIII, Sheriff Hutton, July 20, 1527, in Inventory of . . . Henry Fitzroy, xxxvi. 53. Richmond to Henry VIII, Pontefract, October 26, 1528, in Inventory of… Henry Fitzroy, xlviii. 54. Princess Mary, “The Prayor of saynt Thomas of Aquine,” in Privy Purse Expenses of the Princess Mary, ed. Frederick Madden (London: William Pickering, 1831), clxxiii. 55. Greg Walker, Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 13–26; John Guy, “The King’s Council and Political Participation,” in Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500–1550, ed. Alistair Fox and John Guy, 135–38 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 56. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed. Virginia Cox, trans. Thomas Hoby (London: Everyman, 1994); Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s “Cortegiano” (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 29–32, 60; David Starkey, “The Court: Castiglione’s Ideal and Tudor Reality,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982): 232– 39. 57. Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouernour, ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1880), 1:39–42, 188, 203–53. 58. Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. Thomas F. Mayer, Camden Society Fourth Series (London: Royal Historical Society, 1989), 125. 59. Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouernour, 1:42. 60. Starkey, Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, 120, 125. 61. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Hoby; Humphrey Gilbert, Queene Elizabethes Academy, ed. Frederick James Furnivall (London: Trübner & Co. for the Early English Text Society, 1869), 1–12. 62. Roger Ascham, Royal MS 18.B.XXIV.2, fol. 70r–v, British Library, Lon­ don.



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63. Edward VI, Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI, ed. Wilbur K. Jordan (Ithaca: Folger Shakespeare Library by Cornell University Press, 1966), 32, 57, 104–6; Martin Bucer to Brentius, Cambridge, May 15, 1550, in Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, ed. Hastings Robinson (Cambridge: Parker Society at Cambridge University Press, 1847), 2:543; Roger Ascham to Johann Sturm, Augsburg, December 14, 1550, in The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, ed. J. A. Giles (London: J. R. Smith, 1864), 1:ii: 226. 64. Harleian MS 7044, fols. 100r–107v, British Library, London; Anthony Nixon, Oxford’s Triumph in the Royall Entertainement of His Moste Excellent Maiestie, the Queene, and the Prince (London: Edward Allde, 1605). 65. James VI and I, Basilicon Doron, in James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 55–59, quotation from 59. 66. More, Utopia, 96, 97.

The Tudor Court 1. Ernest Laclau, The Politics of Rhetoric (Colchester: Essex Papers in Politics and Government, 1998), 13. 2. Slavoj Žižek comments that “object petit a is the reminder that can never be sublated [aufgehoben] in the moment of symbolization. So not only is this re­ minder not an ‘inner’ object irreducible to external materiality—it is precisely the irreducible trace of externality in the very midst of ‘internality,’ its condi­ tion of impossibility (a foreign body preventing the subject’s full constitution) which is simultaneously its condition of possibility. The ‘materiality’ of this re­ minder is that of the trauma which resists symbolization.” Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please!” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2000), 90–135, 117, emphasis in the original. 3. John Fisher, English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester: Sermons and Other Writings 1520 to 1535, ed. Cecilia A. Hart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 227. 4. Ibid., 229. 5. “Ordinances for the Household made at Eltham in the XVII year of King Henry VIII 1526,” in A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household (London, 1790), 215. 6. Ibid., 149. 7. Ibid., 153. 8. For the dating of these plays, see Greg Walker’s editorial comments in Medieval Drama: An Anthology, ed. Greg Walker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 409– 10 and 456–57. 9. Ibid., 417. 10. John Guy, “Wolsey and the Tudor Polity,” in The Tudor Monarchy, ed. John Guy (London: Arnold, 1997), 317. 11. Walker, Medieval Drama, 460.

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12. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 11. 13. James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 2002), 159. 14. Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (London: Pen­ guin, 1978), 191. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 190. 17. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 131. 18. Ibid., 132. 19. Wyatt, Complete Poems, 189. 20. Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 307–18. 21. See Adrian O. Ward, “Proverbs and Political Anxiety in the Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey,” English Studies 81 (2000): 456–71. 22. Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry (London: Longman, 1998), 134. 23. For Magnyfycence’s courtly setting, see John Scattergood, “Skelton’s Magnyfycence and the Tudor Royal Household,” Medieval English Theatre 15 (1993): 21–48. For the play’s political context, see Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 24. Walker, Medieval Drama, 352. 25. Ibid., 325. 26. Robert Copland, The secrete of secretes of Arystotle (London, 1528). 27. Walker, Medieval Drama, 354. 28. Ibid., 357. 29. Slavoj Žižek, “Holding the Place,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2000), 313. 30. G. R. Elton, “Tudor Government: The Points of Contact,” Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3:57. 31. Ibid., 56. 32. For a discussion of Fansy’s status as a fool, see Peter Happé, “Fansy and Foly: The Drama of Fools in Magnyfycence,” Comparative Drama 27 (1993–94): 426–52. 33. Walker, Medieval Drama, 405. 34. John Skelton, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (London: Penguin, 1983), 61. 35. Ibid., 46. 36. Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 57. 37. For an interesting reading of The Bowge of Courte as a literal drama, see Leigh Wisner, “The Bowge of Courte: Drama Doubling as Dream,” English Literary Renaissance 6 (1976): 3–39. 38. Skelton, Complete English Poems, 61.



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“Where the Prince Lieth” The epigraph at the beginning of the chapter is from William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (New York: Cornell University Press, 1968), 227. 1. William Shakespeare, Henry VIII, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 3111–93. 2. Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life, 1460–1547 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 54. I am grateful to Janette Dillon for this important reference. 3. Ibid., 52. Emphasis mine. 4. Ibid., 67, 73. 5. William Harrison, The Description of England, quoted in Mary Hill Cole, The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony (Amherst: Massachu­ setts University Press, 1999), 65. Jayne Archer and Sarah Knight observe that “[a]s the peripatetic court settled briefly in the grounds of a private host . . . his or her household became the court—the center of the nation’s focus—and the court became the household,” emphasis in the original. See “Elizabetha Trium­ phans,” 11, in The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. by Jayne Archer et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). I am grateful to the editors of this collection and to the authors of each of the chapters for permission to see this material prior to publication. See, in particular, Archer and Knight, “Elizabetha Triumphans”; Cole, “Monarchy in Motion: An Over­ view of Elizabethan Progresses”; Hester Lees-Jeffries, “Location as Metaphor in Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation Entry (1559)”; C. E. McGee, “Mysteries, Musters, and Masque: The Import(s) of Elizabethan Civic Entertainments”; David M. Bergeron, “The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Thomas Churchyard and the 1578 Norwich Pageant”; Elizabeth Goldring, “Portraiture, Patronage, and the Progresses: Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the Kenilworth Festivities of 1575”; Ga­ briel Heaton, “Elizabethan Entertainments in Manuscript: The Harefield Fes­ tivities (1602) and the Dynamics of Exchange.” See also Heaton, “The Queen and the Hermit: The ‘Tale of Hemetes’ (1575),” forthcoming. I am grateful to Dr. Heaton for providing this material prior to its publication. In addition, see also Clifford Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Sym­ bolics of Power,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, 3rd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1983; 2000), 125. See also Cole, “Monarchy,” for the fact that Elizabeth went on twenty-three progresses altogether. Last, for a detailed contextualization of the progresses in terms of Elizabethan notions of fairy, see Matthew Woodcock, Fairy in “The Faerie Queene”: Renaissance ElfFashioning and Elizabethan Myth-Making (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), particularly 43–50. 6. Cole, The Portable Queen, 5. Elsewhere, Cole refers to “a dislocating con­ fusion that reminded courtiers, citizens, and hosts of the queen’s centrality in their lives.” See 10. 7. On the Ditchley portrait, see William Leahy, Elizabethan Triumphal Processions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 59; Jayne Archer and Sarah Knight, introduc­ tion to The Progresses; Elizabeth Goldring, “Portraiture, Patronage.”

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8. See Michael Leslie, “ ‘Something Nasty in the Wilderness’: Entertaining Queen Elizabeth on Her Progresses,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 10 (1998): 53. 9. Ibid., 54. 10. Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (Lon­ don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), particularly 88–111; Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977). For a more recent discussion, see Woodcock, Fairy in “The Faerie Queene,” 31. 11. On this, see Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Suffolk: D. S. Brew­er, 1980), 119; Cole, Portable Queen, 133. 12. See Cole, Portable Queen, 188. Cole has compiled a chronology of the progress, reporting that it took in various properties in Warwickshire and Staffordshire. 13. This description of Laneham’s status is by Goldring, in “Portraiture, Pa­ tronage.” See this chapter also for the alternative spelling (Langham) and a brief survey of the debates about the authorship of Laneham’s work. 14. See Robert Laneham, A Letter: Whearin part of the entertainment vntoo the Queenz Maiesty at Killinwoorth Castl in Warwik sheer in this soomerz progress 1575 is signified / from a freend officer attendant in coourt vntoo hiz freend a citizen and merchaunt of London (London, 1575). The text is available also in a modern, edited form. See Robert Langham: A Letter, ed. R. J. P. Kuin (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983). On this visit, see Goldring, “Portraiture, Patronage.” See also George Gascoi­ gne, The princelye pleasures at the courte at Kenelworth, in The whole workes of George Gascoigne Esquire (London, 1587). 15. See Heaton, “Elizabethan Entertainments in Manuscript,” which views the circulation of such progress texts. On the newsworthy nature of such texts, Heaton observes that “[t]hese written accounts were the only point of access to royal entertainments for many contemporaries” (227). Heaton continues later in his study: “Entertainment texts, whether in manuscript or print, were not produced by or for a monolithic central authority” (231). In his appendix, Heaton makes it clear that there is no evidence of manuscript circulation for this text. 16. Laneham, A Letter, 1. 17. Ibid., 2. 18. Ibid., 10. 19. Ibid., 15. 20. Ibid. See also 38: “[B]rought all ind’eed intoo the great coourt, ’een vnder her highnes windo too haue b’een s’een.” 21. Ibid., 78. 22. Ibid., 82. 23. Ibid., 76. 24. For more on the “common people” in Elizabethan progressing culture, see Leahy, Elizabethan Triumphal Processions. 25. Laneham, A Letter, 45. 26. Ibid., 63–64. Emphasis mine.



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27. Ibid., 10–11. 28. Cole, Portable Queen, 65. 29. Laneham, A Letter, 66. 30. Ibid., 87. 31. See The Queenes Maiesties Entertainement at Woodstock (London, 1585). See also Heaton, “The Queen and the Hermit.” 32. Wilson, Entertainments, 120. Wilson glosses the event as part of a “chi­ valric romance.” She traces the narrative of the story on the same page. See also David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642 (London: Edward Arnold, 1971), 35–36. 33. See Heaton, “The Queen and the Hermit,” for the authorship of this text. Heaton suggests the possibility that George Garrett was the writer. Also, his study charts the complex history of the text’s manuscript transmission. 34. See Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 35. 35. The Queenes Maiesties Entertainement at Woodstock, sig. B1r. 36. Ibid., sig. B4r. 37. Ibid., sig. B4v. 38. Ibid., sig. C2r. 39. Ibid., sig. F2r. 40. See Thomas Churchyard, A Discovrse of The Queenes Maiesties entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk: With a description of many things then presently seene (London: 1578). On this progress and the entertainments, see Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 37–44; Bergeron, “The ‘I’ of the Beholder”; C.E. McGee, “Mysteries, Mus­ ters”; Woodcock, Fairy in The Faerie Queene, 41–42. 41. Churchyard, A Discovrse, sig. A2v. 42. Ibid., sig. A3r. 43. Ibid., sig. B1r–B1v. Emphasis mine. 44. Ibid., sig. B1r. This theme continues throughout the rest of the address to the reader, and it is interesting to observe the emphasis Churchyard places upon the queen’s court (or at least her “trayne”), rather than the figure of the monarch alone. The visit of the court is also significant: And although it be a custome, and most laudable manner for the poore commons to runne in flockes to see their soueraigne, yet there, as me thought, their desire was so great, that they hadde neuer ynough of the sight so long wished and desired: and such reuerence and humilitie they vsed to­ wardes all the trayne, wheresoeuer they encountered anye of them, that the inwarde affections of the people was playnely expressed by their outward ap­ parance, and manifest courtesies: in so much, that the meanest persons that followed the Court, stood maruellously contented with that they saw, and wondered at the rare & good maner of the people, especially in Norwich, where the entertainemente was so greate, that all degrees, from the highest to the lowest, were had in such admiration, that it seemed another worlde to beholde: which newe kinde of reuerance, and comely custome of the Countrey (as it may be properly applyed) makes the old haughtinesse, and stiffenecked behauiour of some places, to blushe, and become odious, yea in

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soyles, that the Prince generally keepeth hir residence, & most abode in, where proude people will passe by many of the Nobilitie, without mouing eyther cappe or knee, a stubborne stoutenesse, and an vnmannerly disor­ dered boldness. (Churchyard. A Discovrse, sig. B1v—B2r. Emphasis mine.)

In this passage, note how the movement from a description of the Norwich lo­ cation to the London one resonates with a sense of these different spaces alter­ ing the actions of the people who live in the two areas. Also, we can observe the suggestion of spatial transformation in the passage I have emphasized. 45. Churchyard, A Discovrse, sig. F1v. See Bergeron, “The ‘I’ of the Beholder” for the abandonment of parts of Churchyard’s show for the queen, owing to the poor weather. 46. Note also the title of Cole’s book on the progresses (The Portable Queen). 47. See Cole’s Portable Queen in its entirety. 48. In her collection of Entertainments, Wilson chooses four texts to edit and freshly reproduce. Of the four entertainments selected, only The Four Foster Children of Desire (1581) dates from outside the 1590s. The other three texts are the entertainments at Cowdray and Elvetham (both 1591) and the famous events at Ditchley in the following year. 49. Wilson, Entertainments, 42. 50. Cowdray: 1591, in Wilson, Entertainments, 86–95 (88). 51. Ibid., 91.

Like a Queen I would like to thank Nancy Skewis and Sheila Sweetinburgh for their help­ ful input on this essay. 1. Judith M. Richards, “Mary Tudor as ‘Sole Quene’? Gendering Tudor Monarchy,” Historical Journal 44 (1997): 903–4. 2. Quoted in Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life 1460–1547 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 4–5; 18–21. 3. Ibid., 136. 4. See Pam Wright’s essay, “A Change in Direction: The Ramifications of a Female Household, 1558–1603,” in The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. David Starkey et al., 147–72 (London: Longman, 1987) for a discussion of Elizabeth’s privy chamber. In this essay, Wright argues that the privy chamber was essentially apolitical though the women employed there could exert some limited influence. In a recent essay, Natalie Mears argues that the women of the privy chamber exerted a much greater political influence than Wright suggests. See her essay, “Politicos in the Elizabethan Privy Cham­ ber: Lady Mary Sidney and Kat Ashley,” Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1540–1700, ed. James Daybell (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 67–82. 5. Wright, “A Change in Direction,” 157–58. 6. David R. Carlson, “The ‘Opicius’ Poems (BL Cotton Vespasian B.iv) and the Humanist Anti-Literature in Early Tudor England,” Renaissance Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2002): 869–903.



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7. John Guy, “Tudor Monarchy and Political Culture,” Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. John Morrill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 221. 8. J. L. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 31. 9. Prayers and Meditations in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek and Latine (London, 1569), sig. Mm3v. This prayer was written in Spanish. See Leah Mar­ cus et al., eds., Elizabeth I: Collected Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 155, for the English translation. 10. Prayers, sig. Nn4r–4v; Marcus, 157. 11. In referring to the women in this essay, I will use the surname favored by the women themselves. 12. David N. Durant, Bess of Hardwick, Portrait of an Elizabethan Dynast (Lon­ don: Peter Owen [1977], rev. ed. 1999), 119. 13. Ibid., 104. 14. Ibid., 181. 15. Mark Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 153. 16. James Melville, The Memoirs of Sir James Melville of Halhill, ed. Gordon Donaldson (London: Folio Society, 1969), 37; Patricia Fumerton, “Secret Arts of Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets,” Representing the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 93. 17. Santina M. Levey and Peter K. Thornton, eds., Of Household Stuff: The 1601 Inventories of Bess of Hardwick (London: National Trust, 2001), 54. 18. Girouard, Robert Smythson, 157. 19. Gillian White, “ ‘That whyche ys nedefoulle and nesesary’:  The Nature and Purpose of the Original Furnishings and Decoration of Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire” (Diss., University of Warwick, 2005). 20. For further discussion of the decorative schemes at Hardwick New Hall, see Anthony Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 247–95. 21. Levey and Thornton, eds., Of Household Stuff. 22. The building work on Hardwick Old Hall was only completed in 1591. Shrewsbury commenced work on the New Hall in this year. She also began building the mansion at Oldcotes in 1593. All these houses would have needed interior decoration. 23. Levey and Thornton, eds., Of Household Stuff, 51. 24. Ibid., 51–52. There is a degree of ambiguity in this reference as the in­ ventory reads, “too pictures of our Ladie the Virgin Mary and the three Kings, the salutation of the Virgin Marie by the Angle.” It seems likely that here the inventory actually means there are two pictures, one of the virgin and the three kings and one of the Annunciation. However, it is possible there were two paint­ ings of the Virgin Mary and the three kings. 25. Levey and Thornton,eds., Of Household Stuff, 53. 26. Laynesmith, Last Medieval Queens, 32–34. 27. Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Pimlico, 1987), 150.

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28. Katherine Cooke, another sister, married the diplomat, Sir Henry Kil­ ligrew, while the youngest sister, Margaret, married Sir Ralph Rowlett after she served in the court of Mary I. 29. Thomas Hoby is most famous for his translation of Baldassare Castigli­ one’s Book of the Courtier. The circumstances of this translation are related in The Travels and Life of Sir Thomas Hoby, Kt., of Bisham Abbey, written by himself, 1547–64, ed. Edgar Powell (Publications of the Camden Society, 3rd ser.,1902), vol. 4, Miscellany, vol. 10, RHS. 30. “Parishes: Bisham,” A History of the County of Berkshire, (1923), 3:139–52. 31. Thomas Hoby, “A Booke of the Travaile and Lief of Thomas Hoby,” ed. Edgar Powell (Publications of the Camden Society 3rd ser.,1902), vol. 4:129. 32. Margaret Whinney, Sculpture in Britain, 1530–1830 (Penguin: Harmonds­ worth, Middlesex, 1964), 9. 33. Bartholo Sylva, Giardino Cosmografico Coltivato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Ii.5.37. 34. A new manuscript that allows for a clear attribution of the English elegy in the center of the tomb chest, beginning “Two worthy Knights” to Thomas Sackville, appeared in Bonham’s sale catalog for auction on September 28, 2004, lot 392. This manuscript has now been acquired by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Eng. c. 7065, fols. 124–25. 35. Elizabeth Tudor, quoted in G. B. Harrison, ed., Letters of Queen Elizabeth (London: Cassell, 1935), 48–49. Elizabeth Tudor, “Letter to Elizabeth Hoby.” A copy of this letter purporting to be from the original can be found in T. Baker Collectanea Oxoniensia, Harley MS. 7035, British Lib., London. f. 161. For a fur­ ther discussion of the effect of this letter on Elizabeth Russell’s identity, see Jessica Malay, “Elizabeth Russell’s Textual Performances of Self,” Comitatus 37 (2006): 146–68. 36. Calendar of State Papers Foreign, 1566–1568, ed. James Crosby Allan (Lon­ don, 1871), 106. 37. Translated in Louise Schleiner’s book, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 208. All subsequent references to translations of Russell’s Greek and Latin tomb inscriptions will refer to this book and be referenced within the text. Tomb inscriptions in English will be quoted from the tombs themselves. 38. Jessica Malay, “Elizabeth Russell’s Textual Performances of Self,” Comitatus 37 (2006): 150–51. 39. J. S. W. Helt, “Women, Written Memory and Will-Making In Elizabethan England,” in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, 190 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, 2000). 40. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 251. 41. Elizabeth Russell in Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, 49, 48. 42. Ibid., 50. 43. For further discussion of the monuments of Elizabeth Hoby Russell, see Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cam­



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bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Malay, Textual Construction of Space (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 2006), 155–92. 44. Speeches Delivered to her Majestie this last progress, at the Right Honorable the Lady Russel’s at Bissam, the Right Honorable the Lorde Chandos at Sudley, at the Right Honorable the Lorde Norris at Ricorte (London, 1592). For further discussion of this event, see Alexandra F. Johnston, “The ‘Lady of the farme’: The Context of Lady Russell’s Entertainment of Elizabeth at Bisham, 1592,” Early Theater 5 (2002): 71–85; Malay, “Elizabeth Russell’s Textual Performances of Self,” 160– 61. 45. Thomas Hoby, The Book of the Courtier by Count Baldassare Castiglione Done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby, Anno 1561 (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1928),189–90. 46. Ibid., 6. 47. Speeches Delivered to her Majestie, sig. A3v–A4v. 48. Elizabeth “Bess” Russell died at court of an illness. She has a unique monument in Westminster Abbey that was erected by her sister Anne to the left of their father, John Russell’s, tomb.

Courtliness and Poetry 1. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker, introduction to The Arte of English Poesie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936; repr., 1970), x. 2. George Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker, 299. All the references cited from Arte are to this edition. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid.,186 and 299. 5. Ibid.,186. 6. Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 6. 7. Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 101. For another ac­ count of courtly work as a reflection of courtly dissembling, see Louis Adrian Montrose, “Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship,” Renaissance Drama 8 (1977): 3­­–35. 8. Arte, 184–85. 9. Ibid., 292–93. 10. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 180, 188. All the references cited as OA are to this edition. 11. Ibid., 188, 181. 12. Ibid., 181, 191. 13. John Michael Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), esp. 41–66. For an account focusing on an indirect influence of espionage on Eliza­ bethan prose works, see R. W. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-

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Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 14. OA, 183. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 188. 17. Ibid., 201. 18. John Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, in “Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit” and “Euphues and His England,” ed. Leah Scragg, 56 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). All the references cited as Euphues are to this edition. 19. Ibid., 44. 20. Ibid., 46. 21. Ibid., 47. 22. Ibid., 55. 23. For the various implication of “shadow,” see Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2nd ed., s.v. “shadow” (sb. 5a, 8a, 12a). 24. Lyly, Euphues, 79. 25. John Lyly, The Complete Works of John Lyly, vol. 2, ed. R. Warwick Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 3.2.1–6. Text references are to act, scene, and line of this edition. 26. See OED, s.v. “shadow” (v. 8, 6a). 27. Lyly, Complete Works, 5.4.90–93 and 5.4.94–95. 28. Ibid., 3.3.1–6. 29. Lyly, Euphues, 83. 30. Ibid., 33. 31. Ibid., 34. 32. Marco Mincoff, “Shakespeare and Lyly,” Shakespeare Survey 14 (1961): 16. 33. Lyly, Euphues, 58. 34. Ibid., 70. 35. Ibid., 60. According to OED’s definition, a “stale” is a deceptive means of allurement, or a person or thing held out as a lure or bait to entrap a person, and a “gudgeon” signifies bait or something swallowed greedily, while at the same time indicating a small fish frequently used for bait (s. vv. “stale” [sb. 2], “gudgeon” [sb. 2b, 1]). 36. Lyly, Euphues, 60. 37. Ibid., 82. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 49 and 68. 40. Ibid., 82–83. 41. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library 42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 4:176–78. 42. The typical reading of Euphues from this point of view is Richard Helger­ son, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 43. Robert Greene, The Scottish History of James the Fourth, ed. Norman Sand­ ers, the Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1970), 1.1.103–4. Textual references are to act, scene, and line of this edition.



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44. Ibid., 1.1.187–90. 45. Ibid., 1.1.237. 46. Ibid., 1.2.49–52. 47. Ibid., 4.5.26. 48. Ibid., 1.2.43–46. 49. Ibid., 1.1.112–15. 50. For an environment of poetry exchanges among an aristocratic coterie in sixteenth-century England, see Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). For readings of Renaissance texts in this context, see Coppélia Kahn, “The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 45–72; Nancy Vick­ ers, “ ‘The blazon of sweet beauty’s best’: Shakespeare’s Lucrece” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, 95–115 (New York: Methuen, 1985). 51. Greene, Scottish History, 1.2.40 and 4.5.80–82. 52. Ibid., 5.6.29–30. 53. Ibid., 2.1.82–86. 54. “A little sharpe-toothed, scalelesse, livelie, and slipperie sea-fish, that at first sight resembles a gudgeon” is given under gavot in Randle Cotgrave’s French-English dictionary (1611). See the Early Modern English Dictionar­ ies Database (EMEDD), s.v. “slipper,” http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/english/ emed/emedd.html. The database has now been changed to LEME. 55. Greene, Scottish History, 4.3.34–48. 56. Florio translates Deriuieno into “a starting hole, an evasion, a shift to scape or go from ones word” in his Italian-English dictionary (1598). See EMEDD, s.v. “starting hole,” http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/english/emed/emedd.html. The obsolete phrase “a starting hole” was in frequent use in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, as OED’s many examples show (s.v. “starting-hole,” [sb. 2]). 57. Robert Greene, A Disputation Betweene a Hee Conny-catcher and a Shee Conny-catcher, in The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: Russell & Russell, 1881–86), 10:227.

“Never shall my sad eies” 1. Although her name is sometimes spelled “Emilia Lanier,” I will use the spelling “Aemilia Lanyer” because this is the one she chose for her publication. 2. See E. W. Ives, Anne Boleyn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 20. 3. A. L. Rowse, ed., The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum” by Emilia Lanier (London: Cape, 1978), 11. 4. David Lasocki, The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians and Instrument Makers in England, 1531–1665 (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1995), 93–94. 5. The earliest document discovered that proves that the Bassanos were a family with musical members dates back to 1515 (Lasocki, The Bassanos, 3). 6. Lasocki, The Bassanos, 9–10.

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7. About Angela Bassano, it is only known that she probably married Jo­ seph Holland in 1576 and died before 1587. (Cf. Susanne Woods, introduction to The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xvii. 8. Germaine Greer et al., eds., Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of 17th Century Women’s Verse (London: Virago, 1985), 44. 9. As sometimes sons, nephews, and grandsons bore the same name, the numbers in brackets state the affiliation to the respective generation of the family after they came to England. 10. Quoted from Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 18–9. 11. See Judith Cook, Dr. Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician (London: Vintage, 2002), 104ff. 12. See Woods, Poems, xxi. 13. Lasocki, The Bassanos, 102. 14. Ibid., 103. 15. His name occurs in the Cecil family and estate papers at Hatfield House as a recipient of various payments (between 1605 and 1613). He may have gone to join the earl’s son, William Cecil, on his voyage to Italy in 1610, since William wrote to his father asking for Lanier to be sent “into Italy with me by reason of a desire to learn the viol while I am there” (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie [London: Macmillan, 1980, repr. 1995], 10:454). 16. New Grove Dictionary, 454. 17. Ibid., 455. 18. Michael I. Wilson, Nicholas Lanier: Master of the king’s Musick (Aldershot: Scholar, 1994), 239. 19. See Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 20. 2.2.104–5. 21. Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 41; all page numbers follow Rowse’s edition. 22. Ibid., 45. 23. Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne, eds., introduction to Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2007), 14. 24. Ibid., 15. 25. Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 64. 26. Ibid., 65. 27. Jacqueline Pearson, “Women Writers and Women Readers: The Case of Aemilia Lanier,” in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing, ed. Kate Chedgzoy et al., 46 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996, repr. 1998); Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. 28. Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 71. 29. Ibid., 54, 65. 30. Ibid., 77. 31. Susan Wiseman, “Exemplarity, Women and Political Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne, 143 (New York: Routledge, 2007).



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32. Ibid., 135ff. 33. Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 77. 34. Ibid., 78. 35. Ibid., 105. 36. See B. R. Siegfried, “An Apology of Knowledge: Gender and the Herme­ neutics of Incarnation in the Works of Aemilia Lanyer and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” EMLS 6, no. 3 (January 2001):1–47. 37. Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 72. 38. Wendy, Wall, “Our Bodies/Our Texts? Renaissance Women and the Tri­ als of Authorship,” in Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, ed. Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, 61 (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993). 39. Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 76. 40. Pearson, “Women Writers,” 46ff; Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 53. 41. Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 68. 42. Ina Schabert, “The Lady’s Supper: Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘Salve Deus Rex Ju­ daeorum’ as a Female Celebration of the Eucharist,” in Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Tobias Döring and Susanne Rupp, 157ff. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). 43. Lanyer’s dedicatees are Queen Anne; her daughter Princess Elizabeth; Lady Arabella (Stuart) Seymour; Lady Susan (Bertie) Grey, Countess of Kent; Lady Mary (Sidney) Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Lady Lucy (Harrington) Russell, Countess of Bedford; Lady Margaret (Russell) Clifford, Countess of Cumberland; Lady Catherine (Knyvett) Howard, Countess of Suffolk, and her three daughters; and Lady Anne (Clifford) Sackville, Countess of Dorset. Schabert explains that Queen Anne was known for her Catholic sympathies and that Arbella Stuart also had Catholic connections. In contrast, Susan Ber­ tie was a radical Puritan who was in exile with her mother during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary. While Margaret Clifford was known for her piety, Lucy Russell and Catherine Howard were known for their worldliness (see Schabert, 158ff.). 44. See Richards, ed., Rhetoric, Women and Politics, 17. 45. Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 63. 46. Ibid., 47, 69. 47. Ibid., 105, 134. 48. Wall, “Our Bodies/Our Texts,” 63. 49 .Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 83. 50. Lynda E. Boose, “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member,” in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps (New York: Verso, 1995), 263. 51. Ibid., 257. 52. Cookham is a royal manor near Maidenhead in Berkshire that was an­ nexed to Windsor Castle from 1540 and belonged to the Crown until 1818 (Greer et al., eds., Kissing the Rod, 51). 53. Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 79 and 137.

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54. Ibid., 140. 55. Ann Baynes Coiro, “Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Posi­ tion in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson,” Criticism 35, no. 3 (Sum­ mer 1993): 359, 364ff. 56. Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 138. 57. Ibid., 138. 58. Wall, “Our Bodies/Our Texts,” 62. 59. Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 142. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 81. 62. Ibid., 89. 63. Ibid., 73. 64. Jonathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 27. 65. Ibid., 32. 66. Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 137. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 141–42. 69. Ibid., 137. 70. Ibid., 140. 71. Ibid., 43. 72. Ibid., 104. 73. Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing, 20. 74. Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, 47. 75. Wiseman, “Exemplarity,” 140–43.

Persuading the Prince I would like to thank Thomas Herron, Carole Levin, Thomas Betteridge, and especially John Huntington for reading and commenting on drafts of this article. 1. For a gripping account of Raleigh’s sustained pursuit of the Guiana dream, see Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973),103–13, 155–70. 2. Sir Walter Raleigh, The discouerie of the large, rich, and bevvtiful empire of Guiana with a relation of the great and golden citie of Manoa (which the spanyards call El Dorado) and the prouinces of Emeria, Arromaia, Amapaia, and other countries, with their riuers, adioyning. Performed in the yeare 1595. by Sir W. Ralegh Knight, captaine of her Maiesties Guard, Lo. Warden of the Sannerries [sic], and her Highnesse Lieutenant generall of the countie of Cornewall (London: Robert Robinson, 1596), 70. STC (2nd ed.) / 20634, Early English Books Online reproduction of a copy from the Huntington Library. 3. Ibid., A3r. 4. Lawrence Keymis, A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana. Perfourmed and Written in the Yeare 1596 (London: Thomas Dawson, 1596; repr., New York:



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Da Capo Press,1968), E2v. References to this volume will be referred to as The Second Voyage. 5. See, for instance, Raymond Waddington, The Mind’s Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 92–93. Chapman’s long poem The Shadow of Night contains “Hymnus in Cynthiam,” whose symbolism draws on Raleigh’s cult of Elizabeth as Cynthia. 6. George Chapman, Plays and Poems, ed. Jonathan Hudston (London: Pen­ guin Books, 1998), 414. 7. Keymis emphasizes that his writing echoes and draws upon Raleigh’s language: “ . . . where my lamp had oile, it borrow light also; and my speech, which is altogether vnsaourie, season it selfe with some of the leauen of your own discourse touching this discouerie” (E2v). 8. Keymis, The Second Voyage, F2v. 9. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 173. 10. Keymis, The Second Voyage, A4r. 11. Ibid. 12. In December 1594, Elizabeth signed a warrant that granted Raleigh rights to “attack possessions of the king of Spain,” as well as gave her courtier full authority over every man on board, thus showing at least political support for Raleigh’s expedition to Guiana (Steven W. May, Sir Walter Ralegh [Boston: Twayne, 1989], 15). 13. Raleigh’s Discoverie of Guiana, in its detailed account of his explorations, aims to disprove the rumors that he had never even been to Guiana. The gen­ eral skeptical attitude persisted, however, despite Raleigh’s attempt to justify his enterprise in writing. 14. Keymis, The Second Voyage, E2v–E3r. 15. Raleigh, Discoverie, B4r. 16. Keymis, The Second Voyage, B3r, C3r. 17. Ibid., F2v. 18. Ibid., F3r. This postulate echoes and reevaluates the conclusion of Ra­ leigh’s Discoverie where he announces that, if God does not move Elizabeth to possess Guiana, Raleigh “wil judge those men worthy to be kings thereof, that by her grace and leave will undertake it of themselves” (101). 19. Elizabeth I, “Elizabeth’s Golden Speech,” November 30, 1601, in Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000), 340. 20. “The duty or responsibility of taking care of” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2.13). 21. Keymis, The Second Voyage, F3v. 22. The authors’ reluctance to mention Elizabeth in a straightforward man­ ner goes as far as referring to her as the “great Princess of the North” or God’s “chosen seruant” with a marginal explanation that the phrase stands for “Her Maiestie” (Keymis, The Second Voyage, C3r, F2v). 23. De Guiana has not been frequently discussed by Chapman’s critics. Since I wrote this article, two important analyses of this obscure text have been pub­

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lished: Kristen G. Brookes explores the poem’s recasting of the familiar het­ erosexual symbolism of colonization in “A Feminine ‘Writing That Conquers’: Elizabethan Encounters with the New World,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 48, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 227–62; and David McInnes analyzes the epic song’s classical allusions in “The Golden Man and the Golden Age: The Relationship of English Poets and the New World Reconsidered,” Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature 13, no.1 (May 2007): nineteen paragraphs (electronic publication, http://extra. shu.ac.uk/emls/13–1/mcingold.htm). For extensive inquiries into Chapman’s oeuvre, see Millar MacLure, George Chapman: A Critical Study (Toronto: Univer­ sity of Toronto Press, 1966); Raymond B. Waddington, The Mind’s Empire: Myth and Form in George Chapman’s Narrative Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ versity Press, 1974); Gerald Snare, The Mystification of George Chapman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989); John Huntington, Ambition, Rank, and Poetry in 1590s England (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 24. Keymis, The Second Voyage, F2v; Raleigh, Discoverie, 96. See Louis Mon­ trose for an incisive treatment of the gender-specific issues in this text. “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” in New World Encounters, ed. Ste­ phen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 177–217. 25. “Queen Elizabeth’s Armada Speech to the Troops at Tilbury, August 9, 1588,” in Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus et al., 326. 26. In his late fifteenth century Diary of the City of Rome, Stefano Infessura shares the story known as the first recorded account of a blood transfusion. In order to revive the comatose Pope Innocent VIII, blood taken from three ten-year-old boys was poured into his mouth. Essential ignorance of the specif­ ics of the circulatory system continued well into the seventeenth century when William Harvey rediscovered and described the circulation of the blood in the human body. Chapman’s metaphor, therefore, is less an image of cannibalistic consumption than a reference to blood transfusion, complicated by the puz­ zling use of a sword, an instrument not only of opening the mouth but also, more conventionally, bloodletting. 27. Upon Raleigh’s return from his first voyage to Guiana, as Greenblatt points out, Elizabeth “shared with the court, the powerful merchants of the City, and the general public a wry skepticism about his enthusiastic reports” (Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh, 104–5). 28. Keymis, The Second Voyage, A4r. 29. This imagery resonates with the story of the sirens and Ulysses: unlike his companions, Ulysses did not stop his ears but had himself tied to the mast in order to survive the sirens’ song (Homer, Odyssey, book 12). 30. On the Neoplatonic concept of furor and Chapman’s unique fusion of it with the Stoic doctrine of tranquillity, see Huntington, 106–27. 31. Montrose demonstrates that Raleigh uses his crew’s chaste behavior to­ ward female population as a main marker distinguishing the English colonizers from the rival Spanish conquerors. Montrose also notes that, in Raleigh’s per­ sonal case, this continence and willingness to await Elizabeth’s orders corrects his previous indiscretion of a secret marriage. 32. Raleigh, Discoverie, 79.



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33. Keymis, The Second Voyage, B2v. 34. On dissimulation as a courtly value, see, for example, Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 35. On hierarchy and comradery in Raleigh’s address to Cecil and Howard as a reflection of the “extreme degree of stratification in Elizabethan society,” see Montrose, “The Work of Gender,” 210. 36. In 1603, Chapman was involved in a defamation suit after being hired to write a play purposefully aimed to blackmail a young heiress into marriage; and in 1605, in the company of Ben Jonson and John Marston, Chapman was sent to prison for ridiculing King James’s compatriots in Eastward Ho (Debora Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility [Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl­ vania Press, 2006], 85, 164). Ironically, this play makes fun of the voyages to Virginia. 37. Annabelle Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 18. 38. Keymis, “The Epistle Dedicatorie,” in The Second Voyage, A2v, E3r.

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Index Alexander the Great, 30 Amicable Grant, the 13 André, Bernard, 45 Anglo, Sydney, 12 Anne of Denmark, 143, 147, 148, 187  n. 43 Aquinas, Thomas, 53, 54 Archer, Jayne, 177  n. 5 Archer, John Michael, 118 Aristotle, 34, 70 Arthur Tudor, Prince, 45 Ascham, Roger: The Scholemaster, 56 Azores, 136 Baker-Smith, Dominic, 47 Banisius, James, 50 Barnes, Joseph, 111 Bassano, Aemilia. See Lanyer, Amelia Bassano, Angela, 135, 186  n. 7 Bassano, Baptista, 135, 136 Bassano, Giovanni, 135 Bates, Catherine, 115 Battle of Flodden, 47 Bergeron, David, 180  n. 45 Bisham Abbey, 106, 111–12 Blount, William, Lord Mountjoy, 46 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 138 Boleyn, Anne, 133, 134 Boleyn, George, 133 Boleyn, Mary, 133, 134 Book of Noblesse, 45 Boose, Lynda E., 143 Bontemps, Pierre, 107 Bradshaw, Brendan, 39, 170  n. 61 Brookes, Kristen G., 189–90  n. 23

Brotton, Jerry, 29 Budé, Guillaume, 42 Bushnell, Rebecca, 43 Castiglione, Balthazar: The Courtier, 16, 43, 55, 56, 111, 115, 182  n. 29 Catherine of Aragon, 45, 46, 48–50, 54, 134 Carew, Sir Nicholas, 49 Carey, Catherine, 133, 134 Carey, Henry, 108, 133–35 Carey, William, 133 Cecil, Robert, 105, 136, 137 Cecil, William, 105, 106, 108 Chapman, George, 14, 149–51, 189  n. 5, 191  n. 36; De Guiana, 21, 152, 157–66, 189–90  n. 23 Charles I, 135, 137 Charles V, 30, 31, 36 Cheke, John, 56 Churchyard, Thomas, 89–91 Cicero, 45 Clifford, Margaret Russell, Countess of Cumberland, 143–47, 187  n. 43 Coiro, Ann Baynes, 144 Cole, Mary Hill, 76, 78, 79, 85, 177  n. 6, 178  n. 12 Constantine, 30 Cooke, Anne, 106 Cooke, Anthony, 105–6 Cooke, Elizabeth. See Russell, Elizabeth Cooke, Katherine, and Margaret, 182  n. 28 Cooke, Margaret, 182  n. 28 Cooke, Mildred, 106

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index

Cotton, George, 52, 53 Crane, Mary Thomas, 39 Croke, Richard, 50, 52–57 Cummings, Brian, 41 Deveraux, Robert, Earl of Essex, 136 Dimmock, Matthew, 168  n. 11 Disputation Betweene a Hee Conny-catcher, and Shee Conny-catcher, A, 130 Disticha Catonis, 45 Dowling, Maria, 43 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester, 80–85, 99 Durant, David, 98 Duwes, Giles, 46 Edward IV, 44, 94, 104 Edward VI, 106; Chronicle, 56 Elizabeth Stuart, Princess, 148 Elizabeth I, 17–21, 56, 75–80, 82–98, 101, 102, 104–13, 115, 118, 133, 136, 137, 142, 143, 145, 147–50, 152–64, 189  n. 12; Christian Prayers and Meditations, 97–98 Elton, G. R., 71 Elyot, Thomas, 16, 55–56; The Boke Named the Gouernour, 55 Eltham Ordinances, 11, 61–62, 73, 95, 167  n. 1 Enterlude of Godly Queene Hester, the, 17, 62–64, 73 Erasmus 25–30, 32, 42–47, 49, 50–54, 57; Adages, 25, 28, 34, 36, 47; Amicorum communia omnia, 34; Christiani matrimonii institution, 48; De ratione studii, 27, 38, 40, 50; Dulce bellum inexpertis, 28–29, 33–35, 40, 41; Education of a Christian Prince, 27, 40, 42, 47, 49, 55, 57; translation of the New Testament, 28; Querela Pacis, 47; Sileni Alcibiadis, 36–37 Essex, Earl of. See Deveraux, Robert, Earl of Essex Fetherston, Richard, 50, 53, 55 Field of Cloth of Gold, 60–61 Fillastre, Guillaume; Toison d’or, 44

Fisher, John, 60–61 Fitzroy, Henry, Duke of Richmond, 16, 42, 50–54, 57 Forman, Simon, 136 Fortescue, John, 44 Foucault, Michel: Surveiller et Punir, 132 Francis I, 30, 51, 60 Gabrieli, Giovanni, 135 Gerrard, Gilbert, 89 Gheeraerts the Younger, Marcus; portrait of Elizabeth I (the Ditchley portrait), 78 Gilbert, Humphrey, 56 Girouard, Mark, 100 Giustinian, Sebastian, 31, 32 Goldberg, Jonathan, 146 Greenblatt, Stephen, 41, 67, 188  n. 1, 190  n. 27 Greene, Robert 17; James IV of Scotland, 20, 116, 126–31; Mamillia, 126 Grey, Susan Bertie, Countess of Kent, 143, 187  n. 43 Griffiths, Jane, 73 Goffman, Daniel, 29 Grafton, Anthony, 43 Guarino of Verona, 45 Guiana, 18, 21, 149–66 Guy, John, 64, 96 Hall, Edward: Chronicle, 11–13, 21 Hampton Court, 75–77, 84, 132 Hampton, Timothy, 27, 29 Happé, Peter, 176  n. 32 Hardwick, Bess of. See Talbot, Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury Hardwick New Hall, 98–105 Hardwick Old Hall, 98 Harriot, Thomas, 150 Harrison, William, 78, 79 Harvel, Edmond, 134 Harvey, William, 190  n. 26 Hastings, Henry, 112 Heale, Elizabeth, 68 Heaton, Gabriel, 178  n. 15, 179  n. 33 Helderson, Richard, 152



index

Helt, J. S. W., 109 Henri, duc d’Orleans, 51 Henry VII, 95, 96 Henry VIII, 11–13, 18, 30–33, 42, 47, 49–51, 53–56, 58, 69, 76–77, 95, 96, 106, 133, 134; education of, 45–46; entertainment at court of, 11–13 Henry Stuart, Prince, 56–57 Herbert, Henry, 112 Hexter, J. H., 33–34, 170  n. 63 Heywood, John, 14, 16–17; The Play of the Weather, 17, 62, 64–65 Homer, Odyssey, 190  n. 29 Hoby, Edward, 108, 110 Hoby, Philip, 106, 108 Hoby, Thomas, 19, 56, 106, 108, 109, 111–12, 182  n. 29 Howard, Catherine, 142, 187  n. 43 Howard, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, 118 Hudson, Jonathan, 151 Huntington, John, 190  n. 30 Infessura, Stefano, 190  n. 26 Innocent VIII, Pope, 190  n. 26 Ives, E. W., 133 James IV, 47 James V, 52 James VI of Scotland (James I of En­gland) 56, 92, 149, 191  n. 36; Basilicon Doron, 57 Jardine, Lisa, 29, 43 Javitch, Daniel, 115, 191  n. 34 Johnson, Margaret, 135 Johnson, Robert, 135 Johnston, Alexandra F., 183  n. 44 Jonson, Ben, 137, 191  n. 36; “To Penhurst,” 144 Julius Caesar, 30 Kenilworth Castle, 80–86, 87 Keymis, Lawrence, 21, 149, 151–52, 154, 156–58, 162–65; A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana, 21, 150–66 Killigrew, Sir Henry, 182  n. 28

209

Killingworth Castle. See Kenilworth Castle Knight, Sarah, 177  n. 5 Laclau, Ernesto, 59 Laneham, Robert, A Letter, 80–86, 89 Lanier, Alphonso, 135, 136 Lanier, Henry, 135–36 Lanier, John (i), 136 Lanier, John (ii), 137 Lanier, John (iii), 137 Lanier, Nicholas (i), 136 Lanier, Nicholas (iii), 137 Lanyer, Aemilia, 18, 20–21, 133–48; Salve Dus Rex Judaeorum, 20, 133, 138–48 Laynesmith, J. L., 96 Lefebvre, Henri, 76 Lee, Sir Henry, 86, 87 Leicester, Earl of. See Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester Leo X, Pope, 32 Leslie, Michael, 78–79 Linacre, Thomas: Rudimenta grammarices, 50 Livy, 45 Loades, David, 43 Logan, George, 170  n. 63 London, 30, 31, 55, 77, 79, 81, 87, 134–36, 179–80  n. 44 Lyly, John, 17, 115–16, 130; Campaspe, 20, 121–23; Euphues, 20, 116, 120– 21, 123–26, 129 Magnus, Thomas, 52 Malay, Jessica, 182  n. 35, 182–83  n. 43 Marston, John, 191  n. 36 Mary I. See Mary Tudor Mary Queen of Scots, 99, 118 Mary Stuart. See Mary Queen of Scots Mary Tudor: Princess, 16, 31, 42, 46, 48, 50–51, 53–54; Mary I, 94, 182  n. 28, 187  n. 43 Martin, Humphrey, 80 Maslen, R.W., 183  n. 13 Matar, Nabil, 29, 30 Maximilian, 30

210

index

Maximus, Valerius, 45 McInnes, David, 189–90  n. 23 Mears, Natalie, 180 n.4 Melville, Sir James, 99 Monstrelet, Enguerrain de, 49 Montrose, Louis Adrian, 183  n. 7, 190 nn. 24 and 31, 191  n. 35 More, Thomas, 30–32, 43, 44, 46, 49–51, 55, 57; Epigrammata, 47; Utopia, 15, 29, 32–35, 37–41, 47–48, 57, 61 Necipog˘li, Gülru, 29 Nelson, Eric, 46 Nonsuch, 75 Norwich, 89–91, 179–80  n. 44 Olin, J. C., 34 Order of Saint George, 45 Ottoman Empire, 25, 29–37, 167–68   n. 1 Ovid: Metamorphoses, 125 Pace, Richard, 31, 32, 44, 46, 49, 52, 54, 55, 57; De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, 48, 51 Palsgrave, John, 50–53, 55 Parker, Henry, Lord Morley, 53 Parr, Sir William, 52 Patterson, Annabel, 165 Peel, George, 138 Phillippy, Patricia, 182–83  n. 43 Plato, 34, 36, 38, 40, 46, 51 Puttenham, George; The Arte of English Poesie, 20, 114–17, 119, 127, 130 Queenes Maiesties Entertainement at Woodstock, the, 86–88 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 14, 18, 21, 149–53, 156, 157, 159–62, 165, 189  n. 12; Discoverie of the large, rich, and bevvtiful empire of Guiana, 150, 151, 154, 158, 163–4, 189 nn. 13 and 18 Raphael, Mark, 134 Richard, Judith, 94 Richards, Jennifer, 139

Richardson, Glenn, 32 Richmond, Duke of. See Fitzroy, Henry, Duke of Richmond Robynson, Ralphe, 33 Rowlett, Ralph, 182  n. 28 Rowse, Alfred Leslie, 136, 137 Roydon, Matthew, 151 Russell, Anne, Countess of Worcester, 108, 111–12 Russell, Elizabeth (nee Cooke), 19, 105–12 Russell, Elizabeth, 108, 111–12, 183  n. 48 Russell, John, 108–10 Russell, Francis, 108 Russell, Lucy, 187  n. 43 Sackville, Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, 143, 146 Sackville, Thomas, 107, 182  n. 34 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 37 Schabert, Ina, 142 Scholastic theology, 34, 35 Shakespeare, William: and Aemelia Lanyer, 137–38; As You Like It, 14; Henry VIII, 76; The Merchant of Venice, 138; The Taming of the Shrew, 143; Titus Andronicus, 138 Sheriff Hutton, 52, 53–54, 56 Shrewsbury, Countess of. See Talbot, Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury Sidney, Mary, 139, 142 Sidney, Philip, 17, 115, 130; Old Arcadia, 20, 116, 118–20, 123 Simpson, James, 66 Shuger, Debora, 191  n. 36 Skelton, John, 16–17, 45, 59; The Bowge of Courte, 60, 68–69, 72–74; Magnyfycence, 60, 68–72; Speculum principis, 45 St. Loe, William, 98 Starkey, Thomas, 16, 55–56; A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, 55 Stewart, Alexander, 47 Strong, Roy, 79, 104 Stuart, Arbella, 99, 100, 187  n. 43 Süleyman the Magnificent, 30



index

Sylva, Bartholo: Giardino Cosmografico Coltivato, 107 Talbot, Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, 18, 19, 98–105, 108, 112 Talbot, George, Earl of Shrewsbury, 98 Terence, 51 Thorne, Alison, 139 Throckmorton, Elizabeth, 149 Thucydides, 45 Thurley, Simon, 76–77, 94 Treaty of London (1518), 31 Van Dyck, Anthony, 137 Vienna, 30 Virgil, 45, 51 Virgin Mary, 103–4 Vives, Juan Luis, 43, 44, 46, 48–51, 53–55, 57; De institutione feminae Christianae, 48–49 Walker, Alice, 114 Walker, Greg, 68 Wall, Wendy, 141, 142, 185  n. 50 Walsingham, Francis, 118 Waswo, Richard, 27, 28 Wells–Cole, Anthony, 181  n. 20

211

Westminster, 30 Westminster Abbey, 109, 183  n. 48 Whinney, Margaret, 106–7 White, Gillian, 101 White, John, 151 Whitehall Palace, 75–77, 84, 92, 99 Willcock, Gladys Doidge, 114 Wilson, Jean, 86, 91, 179  n. 32, 180  n. 48 Windsor Castle, 137 Wingfield, Robert, 30–31 Wiseman, Susan, 140, 148 Wisner, Leigh, 176  n. 37 Wolsey, Thomas, 13, 31, 49, 50, 52–54, 76 Woodcock, Matthew, 177  n. 5 Woodstock, 86–88 Woodville, Elizabeth, 104 Wright, Pam, 96, 180  n. 4 Wyatt, Thomas, 16–17, 59, 65–68, 73; “My mother’s maids when they did sew and spin,” 66–67; “Whoso List to Hunt,” 68 Yates, Frances, 79 York Place, 76 Žižek, Slavoj, 65, 71, 175  n. 2