I began this book with Shakespeare’s Ulysses and his description of emulation’s “thousand sons,” a hyper-competitive model of emulation. My goal throughout this study has been to examine the expansive progeny of emulation within the Renaissance (including and beyond Ullysses’s model): the iterations, uses, responses to, and generations deriving from this practice and its many theories. My work has focused primarily on the social implications of emulation in the Renaissance, building on the excellent work that has been done on imitation and emulation as functional processes, generally with an emphasis on literary and rhetorical uses.1 I have explored these implications through analyzing early modern English tragedies, with a particular interest in the relations between emulation’s diverse portrayals and roles within the theater, its uses within and relations to ancient and contemporary rhetorics, and the ways in which emulation transcends these to become part of the social setting of early modern England, part of the active sense of self and self-fashioning and an aspect of the social perception of national, political, and cultural identity.
As I hope my work has suggested, there is no logical or easy point of conclusion to this endeavor. The sons of emulation are more than a thousand, even if limited purely to dramatic works and their implications—though such a pure limitation would be a fiction. A study of drama quite naturally carries over into numerous other features of the period, including features of rhetorics and other extant literary and cultural works and theories, reflecting the social and political emphases and pressures of the times, engaging in (and engaged by) all aspects of the culture. Emulation is much more than a simple process of shaping a text in response to another work; its significance lies in its widespread and multivalent registers in the early modern period, in its place as a mindset as well as a frequent practice.
Throughout this work, one of my central points has been that emulation is not just a literary or rhetorical practice, not just a form of imitation, but a pervasive aspect of Renaissance culture, with its frequent insistence on following ancient examples and making use of contemporaneous models. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, George Abbot, later Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps most succinctly expressed imitation’s social significance within the Renaissance: “It is not in Rhetoricke onely that imitation holdeth, but in all the course of our life.”2 Imitation for Abbot is about shaping lives (and through that our societies) in response to models. Interestingly, this citation is not used, as might be expected in a scriptural exposition, in relation to following a divine or prophetic example; rather, Abbot is discussing the power of kings and leaders to influence the general body of society, and he is also specific in his examples here that this imitation is about following living examples not textual ones (though of course the broader context relates to following and learning from scripture).
The general context for Abbot’s assertion of imitation as a life-shaping practice is a chapter he has written about Jonah 3:6, which relates how the king of Nineveh listened to Jonah and made a public example of repentance that then all the people followed, while the specific context for this citation is a section that discusses how leaders in general have the power to dramatically shape a society. He gives examples of famous leaders throughout history and how their natures or preferences changed the faces of their societies:
It is the obseruation of Lodouicus Viues, that when Alexander of Macedon liued, because he was a warriour, euery man would be a souldier: in the dayes of Augustus Caesar, because he delighted in Poetry, [there] was no body who could not make a verse. And in latter ages, when Leo the tenth was Pope of Rome, because he loued merry fellowes, all Rome did ring with singers and iugglers and stage-players, but vnder Iulius the second who was both a warriour and a Pope, the city was full of armour.3
Beyond this, Abbot is adamant on the power of others, not just kings, to shape their society through their choices: “Yea it is maruell to see, how meaner men then kings are followed by their inferiours, so that the thing which seemed to be honorable, if it be by the greater rufused, doth straight way grow contemptible, yea contrary to long custome.”4
While we may or may not accept Abbot’s optimism about the power of example and imitation, he is certainly not alone in the Renaissance in his insistence on emulation’s ability to change lives and societies. His examples also connect directly to the plays studied in this work, with their examples of powerful leaders and their ability to strongly shape their cultures, at least for a moment (from, among many others, Titus, Tamora, and Saturninus to Claudius and Hamlet to Cicero and Catiline to, most emphatically, Domitian).5 How much impact emulation actually has in society is perhaps less significant than the repeated insistence in this period on its perceived impact within the culture. Emulation became a significant part of how people saw themselves and saw their society in Renaissance England.
While there are many aspects of emulation that I could continue to write on, and hope to, most critical to this study is the way in which the plays studied have created a kind of contingent interlinking of emulative practices on the stage related to the transmission and representations of cultures. I see these works (and their relations to each other) in terms Greene uses in his study of Erasmus’s Adagia, a text which arguably contains over four thousand sons of emulation—essays on ancient adages full of accretive humanistic analysis and scholarly intertextualities, including borrowings from throughout history gathered in a distinctly early modern method. Erasmus offers insights into these ancient moralistic statements, appending “allusions, quotations, erudite bric-a-brac, souvenirs, and anecdotes,” in Greene’s phrase, “underscor[ing] its own leisurely, digressive, serpentine progress … to enlarge its substance and lengthen its course,” an act that Greene parallels to the “Humanistic enterprise.”6 For Greene, “The Adagia as a whole consists of several thousand mimetic histories,” each “suppl[ying] an imitation, a mimesis of history,” a central aspect of the humanistic effort of the Renaissance “to cope with its own separation from its imputed sources and masters, … stringing up precarious lifelines, imitations of cultural sequence, defining each work, each essay, as a vulnerable extension out of the remote into a self-creating, self-vindicating present.”7
This self-vindication through what might be called creative accretive historicism, in the distinctly contextualizing process of the Renaissance humanists, is aimed at linking their culture to an authorizing site/cite in the past, which is an integral part of the plays examined in this book. These plays are each part of a larger process of seeing Renaissance England as an extension of ancient cultures, of creating an historical link through refashioning the past to match contemporary issues, challenges, and moments, and through this refashioning to become a new locus of culture, one that utilizes ancient texts and pieces with the kind of accretive creativity and insight that Erasmus demonstrates.8 Emulation in its broadest sense always includes a sense of addition, of accretion—even if the ancient tale is more stripped away than preserved, the action of founding one story on top of another always becomes at some level an addition. What we see in each of the plays in this work is not a direct repetition of Roman history or culture, but an appropriation of the culture to create a current sense of amplified identity. These are fictions concerned with a cultural transmission, a tying together of times to create something with a claim to ancient authority, but focused on also creating something with present currency as well.9
The plays and playwrights do not, of course, draw on ancient patterns in the same ways—their differences are part of the point of my focus on the “thousand sons” of emulation—but each finds its own way to create an emulative link to the past, one that offers a degree of authority, one that reifies for its audiences a (usually gratifying) link between the ancient and current culture. Jonson is the most literal and historical of the emulators examined, but his Catiline takes, under close inspection, a great deal of latitude with sources and ideas, creating a text that is finally contextualized into its own current place and time, one that is quite specific to its day. (Works like De Luna’s Jonson’s Romish Plot, which quite thoroughly, if at times forcibly, reads Catiline as analogous to its time, suggest just how completely, with appropriate effort, the contemporary can be linked to the ancient.10) Shakespeare’s Titus has traditionally not been considered a proper Roman play, and I have further stretched this designation to include Hamlet, because of the overt ways the play draws on ancient practices, perhaps most directly in the repeated links to Roman theater and precedents, but more interestingly to me in the ways in which it offers a study of Roman values in contrast and contest with the Renaissance’s many other cultural accretions. De Luna’s use of the adjective “Romish,” if for a moment it could be read without its historical (and, at that time, pejorative) link to Catholicism, perhaps best expresses the loose usage of Rome in many of the emulative acts of the Renaissance. These are mimetic histories, not intended to have final, authoritative, or historical meaning, but rather are like Greene’s lifelines (or perhaps better, pedigree lines) to a remote (and valued) past. A significant part of the valuing is located in the remoteness of the citation being made, the ability to appropriate through creative imitation, to recreate the past with added significance to the present.
Let me be clear, while the works I look at in this book are significant to this study and clearly reflective of the patterns and practices that interest me (and what they do reveal paints an insightful portrait of emulation within the period), dozens of other works could have provided equally revealing analysis. Like Hamlet, a wide range of works in the period have less than overt links to ancient culture, but a careful reading reveals remarkable and insightful links to emulation, both of Rome and beyond to many contemporary and past cultures and models. The Roman influence, however, is of particular interest since so much of the imitative theory and practices being used in the period connect to Renaissance interests in Roman ideas of mimesis (including their own appropriation of Greek and other cultures and rhetorics).
While emulation in the period is about creating a unique and often anciently authorized moment in the present, it is also specifically about the Renaissance sense of accretive practice, a rediscovery (and often reinvention) of the past and of others, in part through the kinds of restorative and also additive scholarly work in which Erasmus was engaged in his Adages. In similar ways each of the plays examined performs a similar practice of restoring a sense of the past while adding significant aspects about the present and blending (sometimes quite boldly) disparate aspects of ancient and contemporary practices—like Shakespeare’s imaginatively condensed, quasi-historical depiction of Rome in Titus or Massinger’s blending of the imitation of Jonson’s Roman tragedies with research of Domitian’s reign and his own interests in current practices of censorship and autocratic abuses of power. These practices are imitative, but with broad and accretive license, a point that recalls a suggestive definition of emulation that Greene offers (in terms of a comparison to imitation, though he generally simply blends these together): “Insofar as emulation is not merely a psychologistic term and has any formal significance, it can only mean weaker resemblance, a wider discrepancy between subtext and surface text, in short greater liberty.”11 Emulation is of course a psychologistic term and I believe it needs also to be understood that way—that is important to my reading as well. Emulation creates a sense of self (and society) in response to a broad range of others, offering significance and reinforcement through reuse, citation, allusion, appropriation, and many other forms of creative imitation. Beyond this part of what emulation means, as Greene’s definition also suggests, is a degree of freedom, an ability to create something just a bit individual or unique while using materials and ideas that are considered valuable and meaningful—a chance at text-fashioning with a certain degree of substance and significance already included, an accretive depth and force inherent to the emulative processes. This means the chance to form a renewed sense of society and self, one that adds on to what has come before, one that reshapes given materials into something different, though always with a suggestive relation to the model used.
Emulation finally means striving to go beyond in a broad variety of ways, while retaining some resemblance, some lifeline or link, with what has been done before; a point suggested by Quintilian, Jonson, and many of the theorists reviewed in this work.12 It is a process in which the Renaissance, if we can be this general, was often engaged, not in a rote repetition of what was past, but through the kinds of creative (and individually distinctive) resemblances of the past that the plays examined in this work represent. In Quintilian’s words, “no one can draw level with a man in whose footsteps he feels bound to tread”—and as these plays emphasize, the Renaissance found myriad ways to not be the “follower [who] is inevitably always behind.”13 Greene discusses briefly this move to emulative self-construction in response to ancient models, “To be no longer infans is to grow beyond and away from one’s masters.”14 Using Quintilian’s terms, we can think of emulation as not necessarily always going beyond sources or models, but the mindset of being engaged in that kind of process—the goal of trying to overtake others, even if not always successfully. The key is to not feel the need to rotely follow in the footsteps of another. What results from this kind of creative imitation is something new in a sense, though not necessarily always better—what is important is that the new work is usually more situated to its present use; it is current and (ideally) decorously contextualized to its own moment. The works discussed here each found a way to use their models, to construct from a range of borrowed practices and materials something particular and appropriate to the English Renaissance.
1 Most notably, Greene’s The Light in Troy, but also Richard S. Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981); Joel Weinsheimer, Imitation (London: Routledge, 1984); Gian Biagio Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, ed. Charles Segal (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986); David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson, G. W. Pigman III, and Wayne A. Rebhorn, eds., Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature In Honor of Thomas M. Greene (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992); G. W. Pigman III, “Imitation and the Renaissance Sense of the Past: The Reception of Erasmus’ Ciceronianus,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 9 (1979): 155–77, and “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33.1 (Spring 1980): 1–32; Stephen Orgel, “The Renaissance Artist as Plagiarist,” ELH 48.3 (Fall 1981): 476–95, 565–79; and Jean-Claude Carron, “Imitation and Intertexuality in the Renaissance,” New Literary History 19.3 (Spring 1988), among others. Timothy Hampton’s Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), while not directly about imitation also details many of the concerns and issues that surround imitative processes in the period and offers an excellent understanding of the relation between humanism and exemplarity, including “a history of exemplarity in literature from the age of high humanism in the early Renaissance to the onset of absolutism in the seventeenth century” (ix).
2 George Abbot, An exposition vpon the prophet Ionah Contained in certaine sermons, preached in S. Maries church in Oxford (London, 1600), 429.
3 Abbot, An exposition, 429.
4 Abbot, An exposition, 429–30.
5 Hamlet’s advice to Gertrude also resonates with Abbot’s discussion of changing custom through the example of one person who advocates change.
6 Thomas M. Greene, Vulnerable Text, 3.
7 Greene, Vulnerable Text, 17.
8 This refashioning of the current through the cultural capital of the past connects well with the work of Heather James in Shakespeare’s Troy. James has explored how Shakespeare’s theater uses Roman tradition, especially the tale of Troy, to legitimate the English nation and theater, to create a new cultural center founded in classical authority. Yet her work is more interested in the translation of empire and its political impact, while I have been more interested in the transmission of culture and its social impact. A significant part of James’s work is examining how Shakespeare dismantles ancient authority: “He challenges the capacity of privileged classical models to translate political and literary authority from Troy to imperial Rome and the Elizabethan court” (83). And while I agree that Shakespeare questions the direct translation of authority—humanist scholars themselves recognized that the tale of London as Troynovant could not be true, a damaging blow to any specific reliance on a translatio imperii—I also believe that Shakespeare (and other playwrights) recognized and used the capital that ancient sources represented in creating a robust and textually-grounded sense of English culture.
9 To use Ulysses’s terms, currency is more important than any other kind of superiority: “Then what they do in present, / Though less than yours in past, must o’ertop yours” (Troilus and Cressida, ed. David Bevington [London: Thomson Learning, 2001], 3.3.164–5); by coming after, even without superseding in any specific way, there is a sense of inherited greatness. This perhaps is part of what makes borrowing from ancient sources gratifying.
10 B. N. De Luna, Jonson’s Romish Plot: A Study of Catiline and its Historical Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). De Luna claims:
To demonstrate just how thoroughly Jonson’s plays “went along with the times” is the object of this study: to demonstrate that even that play which has seemed to be the most purely “classical” thing he attempted, which has seemed to have the least relevance to his own age, Catiline, also was meant to be understood as a commentary on the private and public affairs closest to Jonson and his country in the first decade of the seventeenth century. (27)
11 Greene, The Light in Troy, 179.
12 Elaine Fantham, “Imitation and Evolution: The Discussion of Rhetorical Imitation in Cicero De Oratore 2. 87–97 and Some Related Problems of Ciceronian Theory,” Classical Philology 73.1 (January 1978): 1–16, claims: “Talent is fed by competition, and, whether it be jealousy or admiration that fosters imitation, the desire of individuals to succeed raises the achievement of an art as far as its natural peak” (15). While Fantham has some somewhat romantic conceptions of literary theory, her point is that artistic achievement is based in the competitive sense of imitation (the part that should be thought of as emulation, I would argue), whether the motive behind the emulation is envious or appreciative.
13 Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 10.2.10.
14 Greene, The Light in Troy, 179. Greene deals only briefly with emulation in his work, suggesting that it is a sporadic term that is properly subsumed by “imitation.” While I agree that “emulation” as a term has a sporadic history and that “imitation” subsumes its practices and ideas, I believe it is also important to note how significant the particular focus on emulation was for the Renaissance. “Imitation” as a term (and Greene’s work certainly shows this) has if anything too much of a wealth of meanings and uses, occluding the specific strain of emulative practices that I feel has quite specific significance to the Renaissance.