1. All quotations from Shakespeare are from Riverside Shakespeare.
2. Vaughan, Approved Directions, 113. Bartholomaeus Anglicus defines the “striplyng age” as between 14 and 28 years of age, although he notes that some “phisitions” extend it to “the end of thirtie or five and thirtie,” the time in life “to get children.” The characters I examine in this book would have fallen in the age known as “Senecta”—“old men” who not yet reached the state of “Senium,” or extreme old age (Batman upon Bartholome, 70v). The division into stages was commonplace, although there was disagreement about the chronological age signaling the advent of a new stage. Functionality played as much of a role as chronology in staging life; see, e.g., Shahar, Growing Old, 12–18; and Alexandra Shephard, Meanings of Manhood, 54–55, 215–17. The disagreements derived partly from the different paradigms for staging life—Aristotelian, Galenic, Ptolemaic, and Christian; see Burrow, Ages of Man; and Bruce Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, 71–82. Shephard argues for “the use of 50 as the milestone from which to approach ageing in the early modern past” (216). Beam agrees that the individual lifespan “was divided into three to twelve stages, with the first stage of old age “beginning anywhere from 40 to 65, but typically located around age 50” (“Female Old Age,” 99). Men in the “green” old age were especially suited to governance and public service; see Thomas, “Age and Authority,” 211; and Shephard, 41–42, 231–32.
3. Ralegh, History, 127–28. This task confronts men in the sixth stage, with the seventh stage reserved for extreme old age. Ralegh also identifies the “third age,” which follows infancy and school years, as the time for amorous pursuits.
4. The sonnet speaker’s sense that his age exposes him to judgment is shared by other aging males in the lyric tradition; see, e.g., Donne, “Canonization,” where the lover feels others “flout” his “five grey hairs” (3).
5. Klause, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” 306. Other critics who consider the issue are Hallet Smith, “Bare Ruined Choirs,” 233–49; and Martin, Constituting Old Age, 113–25.
6. Fiedler, “Eros and Thanatos,” 235, 238. Anthony Ellis concurs “that the laughter this figure provokes has a timeless quality,” although his own analysis is “grounded in the distinct social and political contexts” (Old Age, Masculinity, 3, 9).
7. Adams, Leicester and the Court, 28.
8. Thomas, “Age and Authority,” 211. In 1597, the thirty-four-year-old Robert Sidney was too young for a position in the queen’s entourage.
9. Roser, “Life Expectancy”; Oeppen et al., “Measurements of Late Medieval Mortality,” 162.
10. Quoted in Klein, “Tim Kaine’s Feminism.”
11. For the “debilitating” effect of erotic desire on rational masculinity see Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, 9.
12. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 73; Rosenberg, Leicester, 26. The earl’s regal aspirations were much discussed; if he was “little inferyor to a kynge in atoritye and superioritye,” he conducted himself as the “emperor in [his] owen desiers” (News, 144).
13. Castiglione, Courtier, 340.
14. Levin, Heart and Stomach, 45–47, 66–90. See also Robert Shephard, “Sexual Rumours,” 101–22; and Cressy, Dangerous Talk, 69–75.
15. Adams notes that scholars underestimate Leicester’s importance as favorite because Essex has eclipsed his stepfather in the historiographical imagination (Leicester and the Court, 46–67). One exception is Perry, who examines the Jacobean tradition on Leicester (Literature and Favoritism). For theatrical allusions to Leicester, see Jones and White, “Gorboduc,” 3–16; Lake, “From Leicester His Commonwealth,” 128–61; and Tricomi, “Philip, Earl of Pembroke,” 332–45.
16. Quinn, “Celebrity,” 156, 159.
17. Levin observes, “Rumors about Elizabeth’s sexual misconduct . . . centered on her relationship with Dudley” (Heart and Stomach, 45).
18. Cressy, Dangerous Talk, 62–67.
19. Adams, “Dudley, Robert.”
20. Middleton, Revenger’s Tragedy, 1.1.34–36. All references to Middleton are to Works.
21. Middleton, Mad World, My Masters, 4.2.18–21, 31. The fashion extended to poetry; see Achileos, “Youth, Old Age,” 39; and Martin, Constituting Old Age, 100–136.
22. See, e.g., Guy, “The 1590s,” 1–19.
23. Middleton, Mad World, My Masters, 4.4.51–52.
24. Bruster, Question of Culture, 64.
25. Essex’s claims about his intentions are a famous instance of this ploy, used also by the Wyatt rebels against Mary Tudor in 1554 and by the participants of the Northern Rebellion against Elizabeth in 1570. For the queen as the victim of a conspiracy of “evil counsels,” see Lake and Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 6–7. Indirect means were favored because treason and sedition laws made speaking openly against the queen a crime; see Levin, Heart and Stomach, 68–69; and Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason, 137. Like Perry, I am skeptical of the idea that “attacking the king’s servants provides a way to voice dissent while maintaining” loyalty to the monarch (Literature and Favoritism, 10).
26. Goldring, “Portraiture, Patronage,” 170–74.
27. Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity, 4–18.
28. See, e.g., the portrait included in Ralph Lever’s The Philosophers Game (1563).
29. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 8.
30. Golding, “To . . . Lord Robert Dudley,” 4v. Like Golding’s Ovid (see chapter 2), his translation of Bullinger’s A Confutation of the Popes Bull . . . against Elizabeth (1572) reproduces the Dudley bear badge.
31. Blundeville, Profitable Treatise, D3r; “To the Ryght Noble Erle of Leycester,” A2. The final quote comes from a poem printed on the title page, which also reproduces the Dudley bear badge. On Leicester’s clients presenting him as an exemplar, see Rosenberg, Leicester, 51–52; and Vanhoutte, “Itinerarium.”
32. Francis Bacon to the Earl of Essex, October 4, 1596, in Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, 2:44.
33. Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 11.
34. “Letter of Estate,” 25, 27, 30.
35. Briefe Discoverie, 49–50.
36. Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity, 47–49. As subsequent chapters show, these patterns explain why “personalized satire” came to be represented as “animal-baiting” (Scott-Warren, “Bear-Gardens,” 80n50). Notably, Vincentio’s complaint refers to Lucio’s slander that the “old fantastical duke of dark corners” is an expert “woodman” (Measure for Measure, 4.3.156–62).
37. On Shakespeare’s tendency to invite audiences to scrutinize political phenomena, see also Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory, 109–27.
38. Gosson, Plays Confuted, C8v-Dr.
39. Briefe Discoverie, 110.
40. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 186; Lake and Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 6.
41. Wittek makes the case for “the formative function of Shakespeare’s theater in the news culture” (Media Players, 1); on political competence, see Kisery, Hamlet’s Moment.
42. Wittek, Media Players, 3. The Jacobean “discourse of favoritism”—a major strain of which looked back on Leicester—prepared the ground for the transformations described by Habermas by giving “symbolic expression to deep and recurring political tensions inherent in the ongoing centralization of the state” (Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 4, 33).
43. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 27. Others have found Habermas’s emphasis on the “critical reasoning of private persons on political issues” (29) overly restrictive; e.g., Wilson and Yachnin take a “post-Habermasian” approach to the topic, which “focuses on a plurality of publics rather than on a single public sphere” and “is interested in accidental and unintended outcomes as much as intended ones” (introduction, 7). See also Yachnin, “Performing Publicity”; and Doty, who argues that what matters is not “the quality and depth of the arguments” but the fact that “private people . . . are talking about the political sphere on a significant scale at all” (Shakespeare, Popularity, 137).
44. Castiglione, Courtier, 146, 204, 106.
45. Wotton to Sir Edmund Bacon, July 2, 1613, Letters and Life of Sir Henry Wotton, 2:32–33.
46. Blundeville, Profitable Treatise, N2r, Q3r.
47. Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 151–53.
48. Blundeville, Profitable Treatise, Or, Q3r. For the commonplace that women are natural tyrants, see, e.g., Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet.
49. Sidney, “Defense of Leicester,” 252.
50. Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 9. Perry identifies Shakespeare’s Henry V with this “dream” but thinks Falstaff “an attempt, perhaps, to exorcise the specter of Richard II’s wanton favorites” (7). For Falstaff as reflection of Elizabeth’s minions instead, see chapter 3.
51. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 40, 62.
52. See, e.g., Baldwin, Organization and Personnel, 290–92; Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare, 31–61; and Streitberger, “Personnel and Professionalization,” 346.
53. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 48–51.
54. Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare, 14.
55. Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, 67.
56. A supporter of the Duke of Norfolk, quoted in Levin, Heart and Stomach, 78; Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, 68, 50–51. Shannon claims favors bestowed on men like Leicester and Hatton bypassed “the evolving system of Tudor ‘meritocracy’” (Sovereign Amity, 146). Arguably, however, promotions of favorites represent a refinement of this system, in which alternate ideas of merit might be glimpsed; see chapter 4.
57. Platter, Travels, 194.
58. E.g., MacCaffrey, who claims “Leicester and Hatton were advanced to high office . . . because of their private attraction for the Queen” (Elizabeth I, 457). Later in the same passage, he anachronistically characterizes Burghley and Walsingham as “professionals” and Leicester and Hatton as “amateurs.” Guy emphasizes Leicester’s “flashy good looks,” which Elizabeth found “irresistible” (Elizabeth, 44). Peck also describes Leicester as “the Queen’s creation, above his intrinsic merits” (introduction to Leicester’s Commonwealth, 49). These stereotypes are misogynistic, in that they cast a “powerful woman” as easily “dazzled by a man’s dancing” (Levin, Heart and Stomach, 79). See also Collinson, who argues the stereotype “ignores Hatton’s long political apprenticeship and underestimates his considerable ability; while Leicester, thanks to his many enemies, has been unfairly dismissed and vilified” (“Elizabeth I”).
59. Montrose, “Shaping Fantasies,” 35.
60. MacFaul, “Kingdom with my Friend,” 52.
61. Thomas, “Age and Authority,” 205. See also Taunton, Fictions of Old Age, 127–32.
62. See, e.g., Thomas, “Age and Authority”; and Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 70.
63. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 11r-v. According to Thane, this treatise was “widely read in Europe,” shaping “feelings about old age from the ancient world onwards” (Old Age, 40). See also Taunton, Fictions of Old Age, 1–9; Martin, Constituting Old Age, 10–11, 19–25; and Shephard, Meanings of Manhood, 23.
64. A prosperous old age was the reward for a virtuous life, and “that old age which had no noble deedes to defende it selfe withal . . . was wretched and miserable” (Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 46r). “Flourishing old age” was considered “a continuation . . . of patriarchal manhood”; however, only the righteous might expect to reap its rewards (Shephard, Meanings of Manhood, 41–42).
65. Thomas, “Age and Authority,” 238–39; Shephard, Meanings of Manhood, 44–45, 231–45. Extreme old age often produced less enviable social conditions; see, e.g., Taunton, Fictions of Old Age, 38–39, 48–72; Martin, Constituting Old Age, 137–75; Ellis, Old Age, Masculinity, 15–39; and Collington, “Sans Wife,” 185–207.
66. Shahar, Growing Old, 5–6.
67. Taunton, Fictions of Old Age, 5; Martin, Constituting Old Age, 18. See also Ellis, Old Age, Masculinity, 15–16; and Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 45.
68. The premodern bias against senescent sexuality is gerontophobic only if we privilege the (modern) view that human beings “largely ground” their “identities” upon “sexuality” (Martin, Constituting Old Age, 107).
69. Shephard, Meanings of Manhood, 3. According to Shephard, “Apart from gender, age was the most directly acknowledged difference to inform constructions of normative manhood” (9).
70. Shephard, Meanings of Manhood, 21, 1.
71. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 21v-22r.
72. Young men were compared to animals because of their alleged failure to control passions (Thomas, “Age and Authority,” 218).
73. Shahar, Growing Old, 38.
74. Joubert, Popular Errors, 117.
75. Castiglione, Courtier, 338–40.
76. In advanced senescence, “the physiological changes occurring in the body . . . cause the old man to become childlike” (Shahar, Growing Old, 39). Very old men were likened to women and children—all three groups lacked the heat associated with courage, for example; see Vaughan, Approved Directions, 107, 214; Shahar, Growing Old, 71; and Ellis, Old Age, Masculinity, 17. This amounts to a privileging of men we would consider middle-aged. The “gender convergence” brought about by extreme age “may have been positive for women but was negative for men” (Shephard, Meanings of Manhood, 221).
77. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 23v-r.
78. See King Lear, where the forty-eight-year-old Kent describes himself as “not so young . . . to love a woman for singing, nor so old to dote on her for anything” (1.4.37–38); Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 24v; Boorde, Breviarie, 31; and Stubs, Anatomie of Abuses, which attributes the beheading of John the Baptist to Herod’s “foolish dotage” (76).
79. Stubs, Anatomie of Abuses, 64.
80. Vaughan, Approved Directions, 70; Boorde, Breviarie, 31. For the regimen that old men were advised to follow, see Shahar, Growing Old, 38–40, who also notes that only men were urged to refrain from sexual intercourse (78); and Ellis, Old Age, Masculinity, 1–3.
81. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 3r, 43r.
82. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 51v.
83. See also Collington, “Sans Wife,” 192.
84. Thomas, “Age and Authority,” 243.
85. Bartholomaeus, Batman upon Bartholome, 70; Shahar, Growing Old, 64.
86. Collington discusses cuckoldry as the plight of older men (“Sans Wife,” 188).
87. Joubert, Popular Errors, 117. Citing Joubert, Martin argues that the individual “constitution” enabled resistance to social protocols regarding aging (Constituting Old Age, 8).
88. Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, 20.
89. Shahar describes the charivari as a punishment for transgressive sexuality (Growing Old, 80–81). For Sonnet 138 as an instance of “the May-December topos that informs the cuckoldry plots” of Shakespeare’s plays, see Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye, 165.
90. Othello is the exception. It does follow the May-December plot—one reason that I use this play only to illustrate general points about age and sexuality.
91. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 46v, 33v; conduct manuals reveal “misgivings that, far from being self-contained exemplars, many men constantly worked against the patriarchal goals of order and control” (Shephard, Meanings of Manhood, 10).
92. Hatton to the Earl of Leicester, July 21, 1584, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 382.
93. Dyer to Christopher Hatton, October 9, 1572, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 17. Dyer’s letter gives the lie to Guy, who claims “none of Elizabeth’s contemporaries . . . believed that a woman’s high rank could trump her gender” (Elizabeth, 11).
94. Taylor, “Social Imaginaries,” 106.
95. Peck, introduction to Leicester’s Commonwealth, 48. On the peculiar “intensity of personal vilification” directed at Leicester, see also Adams, Leicester and the Court, 50.
96. Lord Burleigh to Christopher Hatton, July 13, 1581, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 177; Frye, Elizabeth I, 9.
97. Montrose, “Shaping Fantasies,” 32.
98. Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, 2.
99. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, 104.
100. Bates, Masculinity, Gender, 1.
101. Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 171.
102. Grady, “Impure Aesthetics,” 276, 285.
103. Dutton, Mastering the Revels, 61.
104. Hunt, Shakespeare’s Speculative Art, 3.
105. The most detailed account of Lyly’s influence on Shakespeare is Hunter’s John Lyly, 298–349. Although Shakespeare refers only once directly to Lyly (in 1 Henry IV), his influence is “evident throughout Shakespeare’s comedy” (298). Philippa Berry shows how “the lunar image” of Elizabeth I popularized by Endymion shaped A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Chastity and Power, 134, 144–46). Others have argued for Gallathea’s influence on Shakespeare’s romantic comedies; see, e.g., Rackin, “Androgyny, Mimesis,” 29–41; and Scragg, “Shakespeare, Lyly, and Ovid,” 125–34.
106. Prologue, Endymion, 7. Lyly urges his audience not to indulge in “pastimes”; however, as Patterson (Censorship, 28–29) and Dutton (Licensing, xi) argue, disclaimers like this are invitations to analogic reading. On Lyly’s fusing of real and fictional figures, see also Bruster, Question of Culture, 65–93.
107. Gurr, Playgoing, 151.
108. Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity, 23.
109. Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, in vol. 4 of Works, induction, 64–65, 103.
110. Dutton, Licensing, xi.
111. Privy Council Minutes, August 15, 1597, in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:323. On the significance of this title, see chapter 3.
112. Privy Council Minutes, July 28, 1597, in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:322.
113. Dutton, Mastering the Revels, 113. Dutton sees the measures taken by the Privy Council, like the 1598 measure restricting the acting companies to two, as responsive to the commercial interests of these theatrical troupes (Licensing, 24).
114. In Every Man Out of His Humour, probably censored for including a player who performed the part of Elizabeth (see chapter 3); Endymion and Cynthia’s Revels; The Revenger’s Tragedy; Antony and Cleopatra; and The Merry Wives of Windsor, respectively.
115. Bevington, Tudor Drama, 1.
116. See also Dutton, Licensing, xi; and Patterson, who calls attention to the prohibitive function of the intentional fallacy associated with formalist criticism (Censorship, 31–33).
117. Bevington, 25. As McDonald observes, “it has become axiomatic that satire was foreign to Shakespeare’s natural temper” (Shakespeare and Jonson, 77).
118. Bevington resists the idea that Titania refers to Elizabeth because it implies “outrageous treatment” of the queen (Tudor Drama, 10). This prejudice persists. Grady proposes that one function of the “western vestal” speech is to “immunize the play from an undesired infernal interpretation of Titania—the Fairy Queen of this play—who might easily be seen, thanks to Spenser, as an allusion to Elizabeth” (“Impure Aesthetics,” 285). I doubt a play can “immunize” itself against well-established associations in this manner. The bias against political readings seems peculiar to Shakespeareans.
119. Steggle, Wars of the Theatres, 18.
120. Jonson, Every Man Out, in vol. 1 of Works, 3.1.410–1; “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare,” in Riverside Shakespeare, 97.
121. Essex to Elizabeth I, May 12, 1600, quoted in Chambers, 1:324–25.
122. Privy Council minutes, May 10, 1601, Chambers, 4:332. According to Chambers, Richard Tarleton was reprimanded for targeting Leicester and Ralegh in a play (1:324).
123. Jonson, Every Man Out, 2.3.348–49.
124. Dutton, Licensing, xvii.
125. “glance, v.1,” OED online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/78698 (accessed November 3, 2017).
126. On The Murder of Gonzago, see also Dutton, Licensing, 7; and Yachnin, “Performing Publicity,” 205–8.
127. Patterson, 11, 18. As long as playwrights veiled matters, the censors applied what Dutton calls the “court standard in their licenses” (Licensing, 6). See also Bednarz, who argues that Shakespeare represents the layering “of an oblique topical subtext” as “a powerful mode of covert communication” (Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, 193).
128. Patterson emphasizes the reader’s role in determining meaning in this process, since “authors who build ambiguity into their works have no control over what happens to them later” (Censorship, 18). As Dutton notes, in reference to A Game at Chess, “The audience was apparently expected to be able to make sense of composite or multi-faceted allusions which may have no literal or one-to-one relation to person or events, but imaginatively merge disparate materials” (Mastering the Revels, 241).
129. Carlson, Haunted Stage, 39.
130. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 11.
131. In an age given to political applications, Leicester’s preeminence made him a favorite point of reference for decades after his death. One of the few documents offering hard evidence of early modern reading habits, the Earl of Pembroke’s edition of George Chapman’s The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron (1607–8), contains a marginal note identifying the titular character, a royal favorite, with Pembroke’s great-uncle, Leicester; see Tricomi, “Philip, Earl of Pembroke,” 342. Perry argues that “successive favorites” were “pigeonholed . . . into the same ethically charged stereotypes” devised for Leicester (Literature and Favoritism, 2), although the aging sexuality motif seems not to have transferred over to Jacobean favorites.
132. Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, 51.
133. Middleton, Revenger’s Tragedy, 1.1.34–35.
1. Bevington reviews the evidence for dating, concluding that the play was performed at court on February 2, 1588 (introduction to Endymion, 8–9).
2. Lyly, Endymion, 5.1.73–76. Further references appear parenthetically.
3. Betts, “Image of this Queene,” 155.
4. Gascoigne et al., Princely Pleasures, C6r. For the performative aspects of the relationship between Elizabeth and Leicester in the entertainments, see Susan Frye, Elizabeth I, 56–96.
5. “prick, n.,” OED online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/151146 (accessed November 3, 2017).
6. The other would be William Cecil, Lord Burghley. The queen came close to marrying Dudley in the early 1560s (Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony, 40–72). Although he gave up hope after 1575 (Levin, Heart and Stomach, 47, 73), Leicester functioned as Elizabeth’s “surrogate husband” for the remainder of his life (Adams, “Dudley, Robert”). Leicester became Master of the Horse in 1558, member of the Order of the Garter in 1559, member of the Privy Council in 1562, Constable of Windsor Castle in 1562, Earl of Leicester in 1564, and Lord Steward in 1587.
7. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 12v–13r, 30r, 26v.
8. Knox, First Blast of the Trumpet, 11.
9. Shephard, Meanings of Manhood, 29.
10. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 7.377. Circe represents effeminizing sensuality in early modern works; see, e.g. Britland, “Circe’s Cup”; and Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, 84–115. Sullivan examines the association of Circe and sleep, which signals the descent into brutishness, in Sleep, Romance.
11. On Golding and Leicester, see Rosenberg, Leicester, 156–60.
12. Allen, Admonition, viii.
13. See Lake and Pincus for the regime’s attempts at mobilizing various publics, “Rethinking the Public Sphere.” Dutton points out that it is hard to “distinguish sexual discourse from that of religion and politics” in this period (Licensing, 52).
14. Allen, Admonition, xix, vii.
15. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 87.
16. Briefe Discoverie, 14. On this pamphlet, see also introduction and chapter 2.
17. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 75.
18. For censorship “flash-points,” see Dutton, Licensing, xviii. Perry identifies the tract as a source for the emergent “cultural fantasy” of the “all-powerful royal favorite” (Literature and Favoritism, 2).
19. Deats, “Disarming of the Knight,” 289. Pincombe describes Endymion as a “ludicrously impotent courtly lover” (Plays of John Lyly, 94).
20. Castiglione, Courtier, 145.
21. Halpin first proposed that Endymion refers to the Earl of Leicester in his much maligned Oberon’s Vision, 77–78. He cast Lady Douglas Sheffield as Tellus. While many of Halpin’s identifications are dubious, an aging royal favorite must needs have called Leicester to mind in the 1580s. Leicester occupied the position of leading favorite for thirty years; see Adams, Leicester and the Court, 46–67.
22. Traditionally, Lyly’s plays were read as flattering to Elizabeth I, but recent scholars argue “apparent allusions” to the queen “are often remarkably unflattering” (Alwes, “‘I Would Faine Serve,’” 213). Maurice Hunt, for example, sees Endymion as a critical “glass” reflecting the queen’s “problematic removed virginity” (Shakespeare’s Speculative Art, 116). Lyly does consistently represent Elizabeth I as attractive, regardless of her age.
23. Castiglione, Courtier, 335.
24. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 114. Like Scragg, I think Lyly “remained embedded in the literary consciousness” of the 1590s and early 1600s (“Victim of Fashion,” 214).
25. Mullaney, “Mourning and Misogyny,” 151.
26. Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 213, 241.
27. Allen, Admonition, llvii, xv–xvi, xix, xx. His portrait of Elizabeth is consistent with premodern views about sexually active older women “as possessing some secret knowledge which enabled [them] to bend others to [their] will” (Shahar, Growing Old, 80).
28. Elizabeth thought Leicester’s conduct in the Netherlands gave “the world just cause to think that we are had in contempt by him that ought most to respect and reverence us”; “Letter to the Earl of Leicester,” April 1586, in Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 277.
29. Berry, Chastity and Power, 135.
30. Martin, Constituting Old Age, 112. On the origins of the moon cult as a “private” form of adulation practiced by Sir Walter Ralegh in the 1580s, which spread to become “public” in the 1590s, see Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, 48. Berry attributes the prevalence of lunar images in part to Endymion’s influence (Chastity and Power, 134).
31. Both Mullaney and Montrose cite Anthony Rivers, a Jesuit priest, who claimed that at the Christmas celebrations in 1600, the queen was “painted in some places near half an inch thick” (quoted in Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 243). Basing himself on this same evidence, Mullaney argues that the queen was “a painted image no less than the Rainbow portrait was” (“Mourning and Misogyny,” 147). As Riehl observes, however, “this story is hardly unbiased, nor is it eyewitness testimony” (Face of Queenship, 60).
32. Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 230, 213.
33. Ralegh, “Ralegh to Elizabeth,” in Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 307.
34. See Marotti’s “Love is Not Love” for an influential statement of this position; for a critique informing my comments, see Minogue, “Woman’s Touch,” 559–61.
35. Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 244; MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I, 396. Hammer reminds us that while “Elizabeth’s ageing was effectively overlooked . . . the same was not true” for the men around her; nonetheless, he attributes the continued wooing of the queen to her “splendid royal ego,” and labels the whole process “grotesque” (“Absolute and Sovereign Mistress,” 39–42). See also Guy, Elizabeth, 147.
36. Minogue, “Woman’s Touch,” 561. Martin notes that “the abrasive judgments” of critics in this regard “betray an implicit repugnance for the aged physique” of the queen (Constituting Old Age, 52).
37. Vaughan, Approved Directions, 29.
38. Aging had been characterized as a cooling process since the translation of Aristotle’s Parva Naturalia in 1240 (Thane, Old Age, 52–53).
39. Taunton, “Time’s Whirligig,” 32.
40. De Villanova, Defence of Age, B2v, A2r, B3r. As Shahar notes, writers who discussed the problems of aging limited themselves to men, since “the emphasis was always on the physical powers, the power of doing, the power to command and to think” (Growing Old, 19).
41. Castiglione, Courtier, 430, 346, 358. Dust notes that Endymion and The Courtier share a concern with “whether an old man can be a good lover” (“Kiss,” 88). On aging in The Courtier, see also Ricci, “Old Age,” 57–73.
42. Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, 15, 47. Not all contemporary portraits of Elizabeth follow this pattern of rejuvenation; see, e.g., Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe, 40–41; and Riehl, Face of Queenship, 151–70.
43. Martin, Constituting Old Age, 33.
44. The charges of vanity occur in the earliest scholarship on Elizabethan literature; see, e.g., Halpin, Oberon’s Vision, 60. Recent historians and new historicists, eager to separate themselves from their predecessors, nevertheless depict the queen as vain. Adams finds that “Elizabeth’s notorious vanity permeated all aspects of Court life” (Leicester and the Court, 37). Guy, who aims to convey “the truth about the ageing Elizabeth,” faults William Camden for drawing “a veil over her vanity and temper tantrums” (Elizabeth, 6, 1). Montrose agrees that vanity was her salient characteristic (Subject of Elizabeth, 232). The word “vanity,” which bears distinctly feminine and derogatory connotations, casts the queen’s efforts as failures. Montrose describes de Maisse’s “perceptions of the vanity and melancholy of this personage” which in “no way negate his numerous observations of her grace, vitality, and political cunning” (233). However, de Maisse never describes the efforts of the queen as vain; instead, he bears ample testimony to their success; see below.
45. Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe, 3. Arnold’s findings substantiate the 1593 claim of Sir John Fortescue (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) that “‘as for her apparel, it is royal and princely, beseeming her calling, but not sumptuous nor excessive’” (1). Elizabeth’s average expenses during the last four years of her reign were a mere fraction of James’s expenses for the first five years of his: £9535 to James’s £36377 annually.
46. Strong’s expression, cited by Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 222.
47. “Queen Elizabeth’s First Reply to the Parliamentary Petitions,” November 12, 1586, in Elizabeth I: The Collected Works, 186.
48. Elizabeth I, “Queen Elizabeth to Monsieur, May 14, 1582”; “Queen Elizabeth to James VI of Scotland, circa June or July 1585”; and “Queen Elizabeth to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, July 1597,” in Elizabeth I: The Collected Works, 251, 262, 386.
49. Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 244. He takes the quotation from Devereux, Lives and Letters of the Devereux, 2:131, who cites Ralegh’s History of the World (1614) as the source. The anecdote is reproduced in Hyde, “Difference and Disparity.” Both sources were written after the occurrence of the incident they describe.
50. “Letter Exchange between Sir Robert Cecil and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex,” in Elizabeth I: The Collected Works, 335.
51. I phrase myself cautiously because immediate reactions are irretrievable. What I am talking about are eyewitness accounts, as provided by letters, journals, and other documents, written in the aftermath of an actual encounter with the queen (like the journal of de Maisse, discussed below).
52. Harington, Nugae Antique, 2:215–17.
53. Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sidney, August 30, 1600, in Letters, 529–30.
54. Montrose acknowledges the highly “subjective” nature of his collection of “slanderous, flattering, or merely curious anecdotes,” which he justifies by reference to his interest in “perceptions and ideological appropriations of the Queen” (Subject of Elizabeth, 247). Fair enough, except that most works he cites in support of his claim that Elizabeth had become an object of contempt during her own lifetime were written after she died. Compare Bishop Goodman’s sense in the 1650s that in the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign “the people were very generally weary of an old woman’s government” (quoted in Court of King James I, 1.97) to the French Ambassador’s sense in 1597 that “her government is fairly pleasing to the people, who show that they love her, but it is little pleasing to the great men and nobles; and if by chance she should die, it is certain that the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman” (De Maisse, Journal, 11–12). De Maisse mentions the queen’s gender as a source of resentment but not her age (although he does discuss her age in other contexts; see below).
55. Harington, Nugae Antique, 1:317.
56. Platter, Travels, 192. See also Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe, 11–12; and Guy, Elizabeth, 363, for other such testimonials from foreign visitors.
57. Richards, “Love and a Female Monarch,” 158.
58. Harington, Nugae Antique, 1:362, 1:360, 1:167.
59. Simon Forman’s dream testifies in similar fashion to the lasting allure of this “little elderly woman” capable of “talking and reasoning of many matters” (quoted in Montrose, “Shaping Fantasies,” 32). Levin points out that the queen’s attractiveness stems from her power in the Forman dream; clearly, the aphrodisiacal aspects of power need not benefit men only (Dreaming, 151). See also Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 45–66.
60. Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 232.
61. Martin, Constituting Old Age, 48–49.
62. De Maisse, Journal, 37.
63. Riehl, Face of Queenship, 46–47, 75–77.
64. De Maisse, Journal, 110, 38, 60–61, 82.
65. Machiavelli, Prince, 71.
66. De Maisse, Journal, 27.
67. Marlowe, “Elegia XIII,” Poems, 59–60, ll.42–43.
68. “An Epilogue by Shakespeare?,” in Riverside Shakespeare, ll.8–15.
69. Davison, Davison’s Poems, 254. The queen’s “agelessness” became a “persistent theme of late panegyric” (Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 64).
70. Ralegh, “Nature that Washt Her Hands in Milke,” Poems, 112, ll.32–34. The concern with aging in Ralegh’s poetry may respond to “the spectacle of an aging monarch” (Martin, Constituting Old Age, 107).
71. Spenser, Amoretti, 67.5; Poetry, 614. See also Ralegh’s “Ocean to Cynthia,” which dwells on its speaker’s “vain thought” (129). The lover who loves in vain derives from the Petrarchan tradition. George Gascoigne was another poet who assumed the pose of the aging lover; see Laam, “Aging the Lover.”
72. For these rumors, see Levin, Heart and Stomach, 71–90; and Robert Shephard, “Sexual Rumours,” 101–22.
73. Allen, Admonition, xviii–xix.
74. Adams, “Dudley, Robert.”
75. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 193; Haynes and Murdin, “Confession of Arthur Guntor,” 365. On Leicester vs. Hatton and Ralegh, see, e.g., Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 203; and Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 31. According to Perry, a distinctive contribution of Leicester’s Commonwealth is the representation of Leicester as an upstart. In fact, the charge haunted Leicester from the onset of his career; see Vanhoutte, “Itinerarium.”
76. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 80. The Duke of Norfolk made a similar observation earlier in the reign (MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I, 92).
77. Elizabeth to the Earl of Leicester, April 1586, in Elizabeth I: The Collected Works, 277.
78. Hatton’s correspondence routinely refers to these nicknames. For example, Walsingham wrote to Hatton that the queen “feareth greatly her Mutton, lest he should take some harm amongst those disordered people” (April 23, 1579, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 115).
79. Notably, Burghley’s personal relationship with the queen “was based upon trustworthiness and length of service” rather than “elaborate romantic courtesies” (Hammer, “Absolute and Sovereign Mistress,” 42).
80. Elizabeth I to Lord Burghley, received May 8, 1583, in Wright, Queen Elizabeth and Her Times, 2:201.
81. Castiglione, Courtier, 165.
82. Quoted in Shephard, “Sexual Rumours,” 104.
83. Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, 51.
84. L’Aubespine-Chateauneuf, “Ambassade,” 79. Translation mine.
85. Peck, introduction to News, 142. See also chapter 3.
86. One sympathetic contemporary describes Leicester’s “aged bodie” at this time (“Dead Mans Right,” A3r).
87. Holinshed, Chronicles, 1426. The work’s pro-Leicestrian tendencies are evident in its inclusion of a long treatise “of the earles of Leicester by succession” (1419). See also News.
88. “Epitaphium,” Leicester’s Commonwealth, 292.
89. Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, 51–52. The Latin phrase translates as “I came, I saw, I went back.”
90. On this tract’s depiction of Leicester as “some sort of sex addict or monster,” see also Lake, “From Leicester his Commonwealth,” 143; and Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 27.
91. Sidney, “Defense of Leicester,” 262.
92. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 89.
93. Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony, 58.
94. Leicester to Elizabeth I, January 16, 1570, Calendar of State Papers, 198–99. On the badge’s ubiquity, see also the introduction. The badge featured prominently in various entries into Dutch cities; see, e.g., Delineatio Pompae Triumphalis (1586).
95. Nichols, Progresses, 1:527.
96. In the Letter purportedly written by Robert Laneham describing the entertainments, initially suppressed but reprinted in 1585. See also Stephen Dickey, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy,” 278.
97. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 72–73, 193.
98. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 25.
99. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 100, 193.
100. On the tract’s popularity, see Peck, introduction to Leicester’s Commonwealth, 46–51.
101. Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 127.
102. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 187.
103. Harington, Tract on the Succession, 44.
104. Sidney, “Defense of Leicester,” 256.
105. “Letter of Estate,” 24.
106. Discours de la Vie Abominable, front matter. The accompanying poem identifies Leicester as the infamous bear, noted for his ferocity, his tyranny, and his luxury.
107. Camden, Annales, 3.288. According to Adams, Camden derived these materials from Leicester’s Commonwealth (Leicester and the Court, 53–56).
108. Dickey discusses the hierarchical nature of bearbaitings as well as their noisiness (“Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy,” 263).
109. Quoted in “Dudley Bear and Ragged Staff,” 68; entry dated September 7, 1588 (Galloway, Records of Early English Drama, 90).
110. Walsingham to the Earl of Leicester, September 29, 1584, in Leicester’s Commonwealth, 285.
111. Proclamation 672, in Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, 2:506–8, 507.
112. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 192; Sidney, “Defense of Leicester,” 252–53.
113. Peck, introduction to Leicester’s Commonwealth, 9.
114. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 186; Warner, 69.
115. Peck, introduction to Leicester’s Commonwealth, 7–8.
116. Privy Council to the Mayor of London, “in defense of the Earl of Leicester,” June 1585, in Leicester’s Commonwealth¸ 283–84.
117. Bevington, Endymion, 195–96n1–9. The barking wolves are mentioned repeatedly; e.g., Endymion denies being a wolf who barks at Cynthia (2.1.34). According to Pincombe, the expression “He barks at the moon that endeavours to disparage truth” was proverbial (Plays of John Lyly, 83).
118. See also Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, 799–800.
119. Efforts to connect the play to Leicester’s marriage to Lettice Knollys or Oxford’s affair with Anne Vavasour are unpersuasive because these events predate the play by many years; see Bond, Works of John Lyly, 198; Hunter, John Lyly, 187; and Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 27. By 1588, Elizabeth had forgiven both noblemen for their amorous trespasses. Bevington proposes instead that the play refers to suspicions surrounding the Earl of Oxford’s loyalties (27–35).
120. Perhaps Lyly intended Endymion to distance Oxford from his fellow Catholics Henry Howard and Charles Arundell, suspected of having coauthored Leicester’s Commonwealth. Peck makes a persuasive case for Arundell’s coauthorship; see his introduction to Leicester’s Commonwealth, 13–26. Oxford accused Howard and Arundell of treason at Leicester’s behest (Peck, 19–20). On Oxford’s complicated relationships with these noblemen, perhaps referenced in Endymion’s dream, see also Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 30–32.
121. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 75.
122. The epilogue accounts for the fact that some critics have identified Endymion with Lyly; see, e.g., Hunt, Shakespeare’s Speculative Art, 125; or Pincombe, Plays of John Lyly, 77–87.
123. Sir Walter Ralegh, in his ascendancy at the time, was thirty-four in 1588. Essex was twenty-three. Leicester died later that same year.
124. The number depends on whether all the characters age along with Endymion, a subject on which there is critical disagreement.
125. Berry characterizes as “fairly comical” scholarly attempts to “fit real names to characters” (Chastity and Power, 116). Bevington reviews the most important arguments in his introduction to Endymion; examples identifying Endymion as Leicester include Halpin, Oberon’s Vision, 49–77; and Bond, Works of John Lyly, 9–10 and 81–103. Although these interpretations are often excessive, it is clear to me, as it has been to most recent commentators, that Lyly invites what Dutton calls “analogic” readings (Licensing, xi).
126. For the old man as Burghley, see, e.g., Bennett, “Oxford and Endimion,” 354–69.
127. Bond and Halpin agree on Shrewsbury; Halpin argues for Sussex and Bond for Sidney.
128. For Gabriel Harvey, see Bond, Works of John Lyly, 10; for Philip II, see Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 43.
129. For Corsites as Sir Henry Lee, see Bennett, “Oxford and Endimion,” 367. Paulet was notoriously unsympathetic to his charge; for Corsites as Paulet, see Bond, Works of John Lyly, 10.
130. For Endymion as James IV, attempting to distance himself from Mary, Queen of Scots (Tellus), see Feuillerat, John Lyly, 141–90. For Endymion as Oxford, see Bennet, “Oxford and Endimion”; and Bevington, who complains about “the unsatisfactoriness of such topical readings” (introduction to Endymion, 27) but nonetheless proceeds to make the case for Oxford, on different grounds than Bennet’s.
131. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 89.
132. As Le Comte notes, “anyone of Elizabeth’s leading courtiers might be called Endymion.” He cites a passage in William Browne’s Brittania’s Pastorals (1613–16), which identifies Endymion with Ralegh, Leicester, and Essex (Endymion in England, 70–71). On the play’s applicability to Elizabeth’s courtiers, see also Dutton, Mastering the Revels, 65; and Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 50–51.
133. Sallie Bond, “John Lyly’s Endimion,” 189–90. This perceptive essay emphasizes aging, even though it also argues that Lyly’s “approach to the drama . . . tends to remove Endimion from any pointed comparison with the English realm” (191).
134. Bartholomeaus, Batman upon Bartholome, 71.
135. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 24v.
136. Castiglione, Courtier, 335. Endymion’s general debt to Castiglione is widely recognized; see Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 12, 15–21; Hunter, John Lyly, 128; and Dust, “Kiss.”
137. On the various strains of the myth, see Le Comte, 1–39; Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 10–14; and Thomas, “Endimion and Its Sources,” 35–52. My comments about Lyly’s use of his sources reflect information made available by these scholars.
138. Arden of Faversham, 14.150–54. Tantalizingly, this passage suggests that Elizabeth I’s taking of favorites might provide a model for emulation.
139. Allen, Admonition, xv; see also Leicester’s Commonwealth, which repeatedly accuses Leicester of having “rise[n] and mount[ed] aloft from base lineage” (174).
140. On Lee as Endymion, see Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 64; Spenser, Epithalamion, 21.378–382; Poetry, 636.
141. On these rumors, see Levin, Heart and Stomach, 77–90. Although Le Comte does not mention the connection to contemporary rumors, he notes that Spenser’s “apostrophe [to Cynthia] is perfectly in tune with the occasion, except for the esoteric reminder that Cynthia had been seduced with a fleece of wool” (Endymion in England, 42).
142. Bacon, “Endymion, or the Favourite,” in Wisdom of the Ancients, 717–18.
143. Sullivan, Sleep, Romance, 74.
144. Although Adams describes Leicester as “practically” Elizabeth’s “surrogate husband” (“Robert Dudley”), it might be more accurate to say that the earl functioned as a surrogate wife.
145. Shephard, Meanings of Manhood, 74.
146. Allen, Admonition, xxi.
147. Hatton to Elizabeth I, undated, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 21.
148. “A Letter from Robert, Earl of Leicester,” 25. The editor, Conyers Read, argues that the letter was written to Lady Sheffield, around 1573.
149. Hatton to Leicester, July 21, 1584, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 381.
150. Leicester to Hatton, July 23, 1584, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 383.
151. This correspondence substantiates Adams’s claim that faction did not play as great of a role as is sometimes assumed at the Elizabethan court (Leicester and the Court, 60). See also Hammer, “Absolute and Sovereign Mistress,” 40–42.
152. I am grateful to Jo Carney Eldridge, whose paper “Elizabeth’s Courtships and the Great Chain of Being” at the 2009 Queen Elizabeth I Society meeting first alerted me to the relevance of the queen’s nicknames.
153. Sir Thomas Heneage to Hatton, December 29, 1582, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 297–98.
154. See, in contrast, Bond, who claims the “overall effect” of Lyly’s style “would be to take the audience far away from the frustrations of everyday life in Elizabeth’s court” (“John Lyly’s Endimion,” 192).
155. Hatton to Elizabeth I, September 19, 1580, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 158; Hatton to Elizabeth I, undated letter, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 28.
156. Dutton, Licensing, xi.
157. Other court writers likened the power that monarchs wield over subjects to the power that humans wield over animals. For Sidney, “the dog” who “was in his collar taught his kind” emblematized the reluctant monarchical subject (Old Arcadia, in Major Works, 42–138, ll.137–38).
158. A famous anecdote recounts that Elizabeth referred to Leicester as her lapdog, “as soon as he is seen anywhere, the people say that I am coming” (quoted in Kendall, Robert Dudley, 87). For the bridling metaphor, see her 1566 speech to a joint delegation of Lords and Commons, where she refers to members as “bridleless colts” who “do not know their rider’s hand” (Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 93).
159. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 14.297.
160. In a related move, “Endymion intentionally conjures the witch” Dipsas (Neufeld, “Lyly’s Chimerical Vision,” 193). Audience members versed in mythology would know that Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft, invoked by Ovid’s Circe and his Medea, “was identified as the third, waning face of the moon” (Berry, Chastity and Power, 131). Cynthia is also implicated in Endymion’s enchanted sleep because “the moonwort covering the bank on which he reclines links it to the moon goddess” (Hunt, Shakespeare’s Speculative Art, 111). On the three faces of the moon, see also Pincombe, Plays of John Lyly, 97–98; Purkiss, Witch¸186; and Hackett, Virgin Mother, 182–86. Although Neufeld mentions Circe, she follows Purkiss and Pincombe in identifying Medea as the classical figure most relevant to the play’s depiction of its major female characters.
161. Betts, “Image of this Queene,” 176.
162. Chapman, “Hymnus in Cynthiam” (1594), Poems, 31–45, ll.10, 494, 516–18; Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 49.
163. Gascoigne et al., Princely Pleasures, C5r.
164. Harington, Nugae Antique, 1:358–59.
165. Gascoigne et al., Princely Pleasures, C6r.
166. Another line that recalls Leicester’s appearance as Deep Desire is Tellus’s description of Endymion as a plant that “pricks” (3.1.37).
167. Neufeld, 195, 204.
168. Castiglione, Courtier, 339. Ralegh, “The Sheepheards Praise of his Sacred Diana,” 17–18, in Poems, 4–5.
169. Vickers, “Diana Described,” 273.
170. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.302; Golding, “Prefatory Epistle,” 99. Actaeon is a recurring figure in court literature and in anticourt propaganda. Leicester’s Commonwealth puts an interesting spin on the Actaeon myth by claiming that those who know of Leicester’s perfidies cannot reveal them, since “it would have been as dangerous unto them as it was to Actaeon to have seen Diana and her maidens naked” (100). A picture of this scene was among Leicester’s substantial collection displayed at Leicester House (Goldring, Robert Dudley, 225, 302).
171. Verstegan, Declaration, 30.
172. Platter, Travels, 195–96.
173. Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 18.
174. Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 55. Dares, in a conversation with Samias about what Eumenides has just said, refers to Geron as “the other old man” (5.1.3). Although the implication is that Eumenides is old, Bevington argues that the reference is to “Geron, the other man besides Eumenides, and who is old (as Eumenides is not; the play employs a double sense of time)” (Endymion, 163n3). This seems an attempt to make the evidence square with the theory. Bond suggests sensibly that having the characters age would reinforce “visually the theme of Cynthia’s immutability” (“John Lyly’s Endimion,” 196). Bond is unique in pointing out that fifty-five-year-old women can be worthy objects of amorous desire (196n7).
175. Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 11.
176. Sullivan, Sleep, Romance, 17.
177. For Lettice Knollys, see Bond, Works of John Lyly; for Lady Sheffield, see Halpin, Oberon’s Vision, 61; for Anne Vavasour, see Bennet, “Oxford and Endimion”; for Mary, Queen of Scots, see Berry, Chastity and Power, 129. Bevington takes Tellus to be an embodiment of the Catholic Church (introduction to Endymion, 32–33).
178. Lyly’s other plays testify to his familiarity with this distinction. Allegorical readings of Endymion echo discussions of the queen’s two bodies; see, e.g., Saccio, who writes that “Cynthia and Tellus clearly offer to Endimion higher and lower kinds of love, rapt adoration of a goddess or pursuit of ordinary earthly beauty” (Court Comedies, 173); or Purkiss, who writes that “Cynthia is goddess and a queen” where Tellus “is seductress and figure of the world” (Witch, 188).
179. Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 54.
180. Although Sullivan never discusses Endymion, the pattern here is consistent with the one he describes, where the “male hero is lulled asleep by the blandishments of a female enchantress (or her nymph)” (Sleep, Romance, 11).
181. Allen, Admonition, xxi.
182. Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 45.
183. A possibility sometimes posited by readers who identify Tellus with Anne Vavasour, who bore Oxford an illegitimate child; or with Lady Sheffield, who bore Leicester an illegitimate child. Tellus discusses the picture she has made of Endymion in 4.1.1–31; see Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 19–20.
184. Quoted in Cressy, Dangerous Talk, 70–71.
185. Castiglione, Courtier, 350.
186. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 23v-r; Purkiss, “Medea,” 41. Hackett characterizes this as an “audacious” eroticized moment, “Dream-Visions,” 50; however, the Neoplatonic valence of the kiss here trumps its erotic one.
187. De Villanova, Defence of Age, B2v.
188. See, e.g., Grigsby, Pestilence, 35–44.
189. Edward Blount added the song in the 1628 edition. Whether the songs are Lyly’s own or “is a matter of debate, but prevailing opinion” is that “the songs, written by Lyly himself, were copied out separately for the boy choristers and were then held back from original publication as part of the boy actors’ repertory” (Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 2).
190. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, VII.718–19. On Tophas’s ancestry, see Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 14; and Deats, “Disarming of the Knight,” 284. On Tophas, Thopas, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, see Pincombe, Plays of John Lyly, 101–105; and Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 51, 55.
191. Wyatt, “Mine Own John Poyntz,” in Complete Poems, 186–89, ll.50–51.
192. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 92.
193. Bevington, Introduction to Endymion, 14; on Lyly as a satirist, see also Berry, Chastity and Power, 113, 116, 130–31.
194. Fleetwood, Itinerarium, 31; Endymion, 5.2.34.
195. Hunter, John Lyly, 316.
196. Oddly enough, Pincombe finds Tophas “not at all a parody of Endymion” since the former is “emasculated” while the latter a “supervirile warrior” (Plays of John Lyly, 104).
197. “bandog, n.” OED online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/15158 (accessed November 3, 2017).
198. Purkiss, Witch, 187. That Dipsas provides a reflection of Elizabeth was first put forward by Berry, who notes that the “misogynistic representations” of Dipsas and Bagoa “contaminate by their proximity the icon of Elizabeth” (Chastity and Power, 133). Tophas is rarely seen as a vehicle for such allegory, although Deats does note that his “descent into absurdity” lampoons Endymion’s deterioration (“Disarming of the Knight,” 288).
199. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 89.
200. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 51v.
201. Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 13.
202. Hunter, John Lyly, 94.
203. Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 58.
204. Hunter, John Lyly, 97. Hunter thinks Tophas was played by a boy (237) but some critics, taking references to Sir Tophas’s age and stature literally, argue that an adult actor may have been used in the part (Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 57).
205. Halpin suggests that the epilogue, by begging for the queen’s protection from “the malicious that seek to overthrow us with threats,” recognizes that the powerful men at court might take exception to the play (Oberon’s Vision, 51).
206. As Hunter memorably put it, Lyly remained in his “posture of painful supplication for the rest of his life,” without obtaining the preferment that he claimed the queen had promised him (John Lyly, 78).While Hunter and others have cast Lyly as a “victim of fashion,” Scragg proposes that he may have fallen afoul of the queen instead (“Victim of Fashion,” 221).
207. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 21, 25–26.
1. Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth, 23–30.
2. Rowe, Life of Mr. William Shakspear, ix. Dennis has an earlier version of the anecdote in Comical Gallant, A2r.
3. Bradley, “Rejection of Falstaff,” 77–78.
4. All quotations from Shakespeare are from the Riverside Shakespeare. There are two major exceptions to my generalization about the critical tradition: the Oldcastle controversy raises the possibility that Falstaff satirized Lord Cobham (see below), while Merry Wives has been linked to the Order of the Garter (e.g., Erickson, “Order of the Garter”).
5. “minion, n.1 and adj.,” OED online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/118859 (accessed March 18, 2018). The word derives from the French “mignon.” It gained prominence in relation to the young men around Henry VIII (Walker, Plays of Persuasion, 66–72) and acquired sexual connotations in the Elizabethan period; see, e.g., Cardinal Allen’s use of it, below. Shannon surveys the meanings of this word, arguing that the more negative connotations it accrued “emerge within the same time frame in which the absolutist theory of kingship underwent such expansion” (Sovereign Amity, 144).
6. Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory, 136.
7. Lyly, Endymion, 1.1.40; Ralegh, “Ocean to Cynthia,” ll.271–73. For the moon as a symbol of constancy-in-change, see e.g., Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 16. The moon became the image “most closely associated” with Elizabeth during the final decade of her reign (Berry, Chastity and Power, 135). See also Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, 48.
8. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 190–91.
9. Allen, Copie of a Letter, 10, 27; Admonition, XVIII. On the latter passage, see also Levin, Heart and Stomach, 80–81; and Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 33.
10. Machiavelli, Prince, 77; Blundeville, Profitable Treatise, D2r-v.
11. Camden, History, 53.
12. Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 147.
13. Briefe Discoverie, 110.
14. Briefe Discoverie, 14; Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 4.
15. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 25–27.
16. De Certeau, Writing of History, 8.
17. “Letter of Estate,” 29.
18. “Letter of Estate,” 26.
19. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 193.
20. According to Shannon, “Hal’s dissimulation of mignonnerie raises the banner of impropriety from his very first appearance with Falstaff” (Sovereign Amity, 174). First-time spectators do not realizethat Hal is dissimulating until the scene ends and a solid basis for comparison is established. Only then does Shakespeare distinguish Hal from those genuinely in the grips of favoritism.
21. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 72–73.
22. Carlson, Haunted Stage, 7, 49, 46.
23. Castiglione, Courtier, 147.
24. Briefe Discoverie, 46; Leicester’s Commonwealth, 188.
25. Berger, Waking Trifles, 144.
26. “Letter of Estate,” 29. For Falstaff as Hal’s collaborator, see Berger, Waking Trifles, 144–45; and “Prince’s Dog,” 40–73. For rumors about Leicester, see Levin, Heart and Stomach, 47, 71–90, and previous chapters.
27. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 193; Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 90.
28. Peck repeatedly refers to the materials about Leicester as constituting his “black legend” (introduction to Leicester’s Commonwealth).
29. Yachnin, “Populuxe Theatre,” 38–68. Levin, Heart and Stomach, demonstrates that gender shaped perceptions of the queen; as McLaren shows, queenship encouraged “men—and not women: the exclusion is important—to image themselves as both citizens and subjects” (Political Culture, 8). Feminist critiques of Jürgen Habermas’s work show the bourgeois public sphere to be similarly premised on the exclusion of women; see, e.g., the essays by Fraser and Eley in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere. I think it no coincidence, therefore, that the gardener in Richard II stages “a type of politically engaged subjects” talking to a queen (Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity, 51); or that the “dream of the impersonal monarch” emerged during Elizabeth’s reign (Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 9).
30. Whitney, Early Responses, 92. On Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, and theatricality, see Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, 138–39.
31. Habermas defines the public as a collection of “private persons” who participate in the “public sphere” through discussion of political issues (Structural Transformation, 28). Early modern scholars have tweaked this to offer a “historically grounded conception of the public sphere” (Lake and Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 2). For how this idea pertains to early modern literature, see Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 3–4; Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity, 186–87; and Wilson and Yachnin, introduction to Making Publics, 5.
32. Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory, 123. See also Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 222–28; and Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, 143–54. In their eagerness to find in Falstaff a “plebeian, subaltern” resistance (Grady, 151), critics often disregard evidence of Falstaff’s social rank (including his fat, which marks him out as a man of leisure), or his appalling behavior as military commander. As Knowles notes, however, Falstaff clearly “belongs to the elite chivalric class” (“1 Henry IV,” 418).
33. See, e.g., Fraser, who writes that “deliberation” is associated with men and “can serve as a mask for domination” (“Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 119).
34. Camden, Annales, 3.287. Both descriptions suggest syphilis; however, Kendall suspects the fever resulted from malarial infection (Robert Dudley, 232), as does Adams (“Dudley, Robert”).
35. For synchronic and diachronic forms of celebrity, see Quinn, “Celebrity,” 159.
36. Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 24.
37. Castiglione, Courtier, 340.
38. On this, see also introduction and chapter 1.
39. Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels, vol. 1 of Works, 4.3.94–96. The character who speaks these lines, Philautia or Self-Love, is closely associated with the queen’s favorites. For more, see next chapter.
40. See Rosenberg, Leicester, for books; and Goldring, Robert Dudley, for the arts.
41. Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity, 189.
42. Because few play-texts survive, scholars have been unable to ascertain whether the earl used the traveling troupe to promote specific positions; “there is a strong possibility that on the one hand Leicester himself, or on the other the players and their writers, chose to present plays which supported the patron’s public activities” (Gurr, “Privy Councilors,” 230).
43. Maclean, “Tracking Leicester’s Men,” 259.
44. Jones and Stallybras, Renaissance Clothing, 8.
45. Entry dated September 7, 1588, Galloway, Records of Early English Drama, 90.
46. “Within any theatrical culture audience members typically see many of the same actors in many different productions, and they will inevitably carry some memory of those actors from production to production” (Carlson, Haunted Stage, 53)—and from troupe to troupe.
47. Susan Frye, Elizabeth I, 78. For the earl as a theatrical patron, see Maclean, “Tracking Leicester’s Men,” and Gurr, “Privy Councilors.” For the earl’s patronage and his courtship of the queen, see my “Itinerarium.” Two descriptions of the 1575 entertainments at Kenilworth appeared in print: The Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth (1576), reprinted in The Pleasauntest Workes of George Gascoigne Esquyre (1587); and A Letter, Whearin Part of the Entertainment unto the Queenz Maiesty, at Killingworth Castl . . . is signified (1575), purportedly written by Robert Laneham (which contains a description of a bearbaiting). Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595–96) and his Twelfth Night (1601–2) allude to the Kenilworth entertainments. On the speculations of biographical critics who place an impressionable eleven-year-old Shakespeare of prodigious memory at Kenilworth in 1575, see Belsey, A Future for Criticism, 47. On Gascoigne’s relationship to Leicester, see Rosenberg, 166–72.
48. Gascoigne, Noble Arte of Venerie, 133.
49. The Riverside editors conjecture that Mistress Quickly makes an error in consigning Falstaff to Arthur’s bosom, when she must have meant Abraham, but Falstaff is associated with Arthur elsewhere; see 2 Henry IV, where he enters singing about “When Arthur was first in court” (2.4.33). Leicester’s bear badge was an attempt to establish descent from Arthur through etymology (Arthur was thought to derive from the Welsh “Arth,” meaning bear, or from the Latin Arcturus, a star in the constellation of Ursa Major). After the chance of marrying Elizabeth evaporated, Leicester continued to use Arthurian iconography; in The Hague, for example, he entered through an arch decorated with the ragged staff, which included a representation of Arthur, and which announced that “we hope he proves a second Arthur” (Delineatio Pompae). Holinshed includes descriptions of this entry and of the banquets with “wine in abundance” attended by Leicester (Chronicles, 1426). Leicester’s recourse to Arthurian themes explains why the person posing as Elizabeth’s illegitimate son in 1588 identified himself as Arthur Dudley; see Cressy, Dangerous Talk, 72.
50. Quoted in Cressy, Dangerous Talk, 73.
51. Nashe, Pierce Penniless, 69. Nashe’s beast fable reproduces many features of anti-Leicestrian discourse; e.g., he endows the bear, a “hungrie usurper,” with insatiable appetites, a tendency to poison enemies, and the power to “blinde” the lion “as he liste” (69–74).
52. Charnes, Notorious Identity, 3.
53. “Dead Mans Right,” A3v.
54. The more than sixty surviving manuscripts indicate that Leicester’s Commonwealth remained in wide circulation throughout the early modern period. Most extant copies date to the seventeenth century. Although few Elizabethan copies of this proscribed book survive, it nevertheless must have spawned an underground tradition, making “the retailing of scandalous stories about” Leicester “a national pastime” (Peck, introduction to News, 141).
55. Perry, who examines the Jacobean tradition on Leicester, notes that these allusions form part of “mountain of evidence for the ongoing popularity of the libel” (Literature and Favoritism, 36). Dutton gives a persuasive account of the tendency to read analogically in Licensing; see also introduction.
56. “Epithaphium,” Leicester’s Commonwealth, 292, ll.5–6. This poem is sometimes attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh; see Poems, 120.
57. Bruster, Question of Culture, 81.
58. Untitled poem, in Leicester’s Commonwealth, 293, ll.13–22.
59. According to Scott-Warren, bearbaitings may have been popular because of local pride in the breed, for which the English had long been famous (“Bear Gardens,” 73–74).
60. Untitled poem, Leicester’s Commonwealth, 293, ll.29–30.
61. News, 145. Further references to this treatise are included parenthetically.
62. Briefe Discoverie, 46, 61.
63. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 94.
64. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 16.
65. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 129. News was inspired by this passage, which goes on to note that the earl will not be able to avoid being called to account in the next life.
66. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 21v.
67. Castiglione, Courtier, 338.
68. Jonson, Every Man Out, in vol. 1 of Works, 3.1.410–11; Lake and Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 6.
69. Gascoigne et al., Princely Pleasures, C6r.
70. The author coyly refuses to name Leicester’s paramours who “are yet liveing and may amend” (News, 154). The references to a gaping gulf allude to John Stubbs’s notorious 1579 pamphlet of that name. Based on an earlier reference, which describes Leicester as having as great a difficulty “to winde him selfe out of the Duke of Norfolk’s business as” he “had afterward to untwist [him] selfe from a lady of his name and blud” (151), Peck identifies the lady as Lady Sheffield, née Douglas Howard, cousin to Norfolk and mother to Leicester’s illegitimate son Robert Dudley. Peck suggests that the reference to her nose may reflect a failed treatment for syphilis but no other sources mention Lady Sheffield’s nose (News, 151n26). Although she was not of Norfolk’s name, Elizabeth was of his “blud” (they were cousins), and she was famously “high-nosed” (Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, 38). It is likely that the author wishes to call Elizabeth to mind as well as Lady Sheffield; according to the conjectures of Elizabeth’s more imaginative subjects, these two ladies had literally occupied the same position vis-à-vis Leicester. Other scholars who see the fiend as a stand-in for the queen include Betts, “Image of this Queene,” 155; and Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 203.
71. Privy Council to the Mayor of London, June 1585, in Leicester’s Commonwealth¸ 282–84, 283.
72. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 79.
73. Verstegan, Declaration, 30.
74. “Dead Mans Right,” A3v-A4r.
75. Leicester’s Ghost, 25. Its modern editor reviews the evidence for dating, arguing that parts of the poem were written while Elizabeth was still alive (Williams, introduction, xiv). The charge shows up in Leicester’s Commonwealth; see previous chapter, and “Letter of Estate,” 30.
76. On the gendered aspects of the “bourgeois model of ‘rational-critical debate,’” see also Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 51.
77. Leicester’s Ghost, 10.
78. Yachnin, “Populuxe Theatre,” 49.
79. See Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 1–7. For Lyly’s influence on Shakespeare, see Hunter, John Lyly, 298–349; and Montrose, Purpose of Playing, 162–68. 5.5 of Merry Wives riffs on scenes in Endymion, including the pinching of Corsites by fairies; see below.
80. See Montrose, Purpose of Playing, 151–78, on Titania; Levin, Heart and Stomach, on Olivia, 136–37; Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, on Gertrude and Cleopatra, 100–168; and Erickson, “Order of the Garter,” on the wives of Windsor.
81. Tophas is “an important Janus-faced figure” who “looks back to Chaucer’s Sir Thopas, Roister Doister, and Gascoigne’s Pasiphilo and forward to Falstaff, another braggart warrior” (Deats, “Disarming of the Knight,” 284).
82. Barkan, Gods Made Flesh, 262.
83. The name Titania was used by Ovid in reference to Diana and Circe; by the 1590s “the figure of the Fairy Queen was firmly associated with Elizabeth I” (Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 59). On the play’s “bestialized eroticism,” see Boehrer, “Economies of Desire,” 100. Boehrer thinks about the bestiality in terms of same-sex desire, where my argument relates it to transgressive heterosexual desire instead.
84. Leicester accused Simier of relying on magic potions to sway Elizabeth; by way of retaliation, Simier informed Elizabeth of Leicester’s secret marriage to Lettice Knollys; see Levin, Heart and Stomach, 60–61. The episode was a favorite source of gossip. The addition to the French translation of Leicester’s Commonwealth, for example, accuses Leicester of attempting to murder Simier (“Appendix B,” Leicester’s Commonwealth, 238).
85. See Woodcock, “Fairy Queen Figure.” Woodcock argues that the Lady of the Lake in the Kenilworth entertainment is a fairy queen (100). The fairy queen continued to be a favorite at court entertainments after Leicester’s suit had failed, and the association with Elizabeth proved perdurable. Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon (1607) identifies “Titania the Fairie Queene” as “our late Queen Elizabeth,” for example (Hopkins, Drama and the Succession, 53–54).
86. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 46–47.
87. On this aspect of the play, see Montrose, “Shaping Fantasies,” 52. For more recent takes on the play’s relation to Elizabeth, see Clement, “Imperial Vot’ress”; and Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 59–61.
88. “Letter of Estate,” 31.
89. Golding, “Prefatory Epistle,” in Ovid, Metamorphoses, 405, l. 4. On the possible homage to Leicester as patron, see also my “Itinerarium,” 99.
90. Barkan, Gods Made Flesh, 262.
91. Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 60. Hackett goes on to argue that while Bottom as a commoner is elevated, Titania is degraded by the experience—an accurate assessment, which points to the play’s ambivalence regarding female rulers.
92. As Wilder puts it, “While parodying the player’s trade socially and affectively, Bottom nonetheless comes to embody many of these traits without parody” (“Changeling Bottom,” 46).
93. Dutton, Licensing, 34.
94. Although Grady identifies Bottom as the “privileged vessel” of the aesthetic because of his relationship with Titania, he subordinates Titania’s political associations to her status as a “personification of natural fertility and its associated properties of sexuality and maternity” (“Impure Aesthetics,” 287).
95. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 22, 42.
96. Montrose, “Shaping Fantasies,” 32.
97. Barkan, Gods Made Flesh, 261.
98. Bacon, “Endymion, or the Favourite,” Wisdom of the Ancients, 717. See also chapter 1.
99. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 191; Verstegan, Declaration, 53.
100. Worden asserts that, with the exception of Wolsey in Henry VIII, “there are no favourites with major parts in Shakespeare” (“Favourites,” 171). Perry briefly discusses Falstaff, but without noting specific allusions (Literature and Favoritism, 7–8). MacFaul includes a longer discussion of Falstaff, in which he casts Falstaff as a “scapegoat for the prince’s sins” (“Kingdom with my Friend,” 63).
101. John Pole, describing Leicester, quoted in Robert Shephard, “Sexual Rumours,” 104; see previous chapter.
102. Carlson, citing Herbert Blau, Haunted Stage, 1.
103. According to an old tale, the queen intervened on Cobham’s behalf. See Richard James, “Epistle-Dedicatory,” 143; and Rowe, Life of Mr. William Shakspear, ix. Taylor’s reconstruction of the circumstances “lend[s] . . . plausibility” to this tradition (“William Shakespeare,” 352); see also Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory, 93–94. As Dutton points out, however, “it is possible that the Cobhams intervened as and when they did, not simply out of family pique, but because the fat knight had immediate and uncomfortable political connotations” (Mastering the Revels, 10).
104. Prologue to Sir John Oldcastle (1600), A2r.
105. Traub points out the name could also refer to castration, an equally apt association (Desire and Anxiety, 57).
106. Briefe Discoverie, 49.
107. For accusations of treason see, e.g., Leicester’s Commonwealth, 73; and “Letter of Estate,” 25. Both men served as generals.
108. The 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles parallels the Cobhams and the Dudleys; a genealogical treatise on the Earls of Leicester is followed by a similar treatise on the Lords Cobham, which includes a Latin poem on Sir John Oldcastle, 1424–1505. The material on Leicester was cut from later editions. The woodcut appears in Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 592.
109. Poole, “Saints Alive!” 54, 64; Verstegan, Declaration, 53; “Letter of Estate,” 31. There’s substantial overlap between the Marprelate controversy and the earlier controversy about Leicester (Lyly contributed works to both). “Letter of Estate” reproduces the association with Bacchus, 31. News claims that Leicester was “so greate a student of Baccus” that he thought there would be “quaffing in heaven as there is in Flanders” (148). For a recent account of Falstaff’s connection to Oldcastle and to the Marprelate controversy, see Jensen, Religion and Revelry, 153–56.
110. Sidney, “Defense of Leicester,” 256; see also previous chapter.
111. Nashe picks up the infernal themes in his description of Leicester as “a right earthly divell” (Pierce Penniless, 81).
112. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 89.
113. Sidney to Sir Francis Walsingham, March 24, 1586, Prose Works, 3:167.
114. See Baldwin, Organization and Personnel, 241–43, on Kempe as Bottom. Although earlier scholars proposed other actors, including Thomas Pope, for the part of Falstaff (Baldwin, 229–32), Wiles’s argument that “Falstaff was written for Kemp” is now broadly accepted (Shakespeare’s Clown, 120). The similarities between Bottom and Falstaff lend weight to Wiles’s argument, since “playwrights . . . specifically created and designated parts suited to the particular range and talents of individual actors” (Stern and Palfrey, Shakespeare in Parts, 41). We do not have a birthdate for Kempe, who began his theatrical career in the early 1580s (Butler, “Kemp, William”).
115. The earl’s alleged fondness for drink was linked to his residency in the Netherlands—unfairly so, according to Adams (“Dudley, Robert”). For Kempe’s biography, see Butler, “Kemp, William”; and Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 24–42.
116. Hornback, English Clown, 5, 132–34.
117. Jones and Stallybras, Renaissance Clothing, 2–3.
118. Wotton to Sir Edmund Bacon, July 6, 1613, Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, 2:32–33. Roland Whyte describes a now lost play, The Overthrow of Turnhout, which depicted several living gentlemen and in which the actor who played Sir Francis Vere “got a beard resembling his, and a watchet satin doublet with hose trimmed with silver lace” (Whyte to Robert Sidney, October 26, 1599, Letters, 362–63). Jones and Stallybras discuss Middleton’s Game of Chess, in which the actor playing Gondomar had obtained the Spanish Ambassador’s cast-off clothing (Renaissance Clothing, 196).
119. So many lines refer to Falstaff’s sweat staining his shirt that Shakespeare may have meant for it to become stained (Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 124).
120. Kempe may have had other garments associated with Leicester in his possession; according to Platter, English actors were “most expensively and elaborately costumed” because “eminent lords or Knights at their decease” bequeathed clothes to servants, who sold them to actors (Travels, 167).
121. See also, e.g., Leicester’s Commonwealth, which describes the earl as among the “cunning practitioners in the art of dissimulation” (132).
122. Chambers and Greg, Dramatic Records, 2:262–63.
123. Allen, Admonition, xviii.
124. On Tarleton’s connection to Leicester, see Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 12; and Billington, Social History, 35.
125. See, e.g., Whitney, Early Responses, 81; and Bevington, introduction to Henry IV, Part I, 32.
126. My argument thus explains why Falstaff is so eager to prove that “being old and fat is no natural bar” to his desires, and why Shakespeare collapses “the characteristics of the clown with those of the courtly wit” (Ellis, Shakespeare’s Practical Jokes, 86–89).
127. Entry dated September 7, 1588, Galloway, Records of Early English Drama, 90. See also previous chapter.
128. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 78.
129. Berger, Waking Trifles, 134–35.
130. As Wilson and Yachnin note, “the idea of ‘the public’ or ‘the world’ motivates public making” by promising “boundlessness or even immortality” (introduction to Making Publics, 5). On the leveling effects of “embodied writing,” see Bruster, Question of Culture, 80–81.
131. Hobbes, On Human Nature, IX.13, 46; Gosson, Plays Confuted, C8v-Dr.
132. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 69.
133. Freedman, “Falstaff’s Punishment,” 165.
134. Dutton, Licensing, 30–38.
135. See also Rackin, Stages of History, who describes this moment in terms of the players deferring to “the present realities of female power and authority that hovered at the margins of their historical stages” (147).
136. Whitney, Early Responses, 71–111.
137. Rackin gives the classic account of Wales as a place of “female enchantment” (Stages of History, 171–76).
138. Sullivan, Sleep, Romance, 82. Sullivan describes the Welsh lady and Lady Hotspur as a Circean figures (72–80). Berger reviews the reasons that Falstaff’s lines here might refer to Hal (“Prince’s Dog,” 43–44). Falstaff, not Hal, “has a passion for friendship, a tendency to be ‘bewitched’” (Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 171).
139. On idleness, effeminacy, and bestiality as characteristic of Circe’s victims, see Brodwin, “Milton and the Renaissance Circe.” The dispersal and regendering of the Circe myth in 1 Henry IV helps account for the ambivalent sexuality and gendering of Falstaff (and, I would argue, Hal) noted by critics like Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 21–23; and Traub, Desire and Anxiety, 50–70.
140. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 21v-22r.
141. According to Bradley, “all competent estimates” involve separating “the real Falstaff” from the “degraded” one “befooled” by women (“Rejection of Falstaff,” 78). Even critics skeptical of Bradley’s assumptions have confirmed his judgment by ignoring Merry Wives. As Rackin demonstrates, “From Maurice Morgan to Harold Bloom, male critics have fallen in love with the Falstaff of the history plays and identified with him,” while they have rejected Merry Wives, because “Falstaff’s humiliations are devised by women” (Shakespeare and Women, 67–68). The result, Rackin shows, has been a critical tradition that labels the Falstaff from Merry Wives an “impostor” (68), a position against which my argument advocates.
142. Erickson, “Order of the Garter,” 119, 130. I do not believe, as Erickson does, that Merry Wives is a court play that “favors aristocratic interests” (124); rather, I agree (albeit for different reasons) with Freedman that it was written for the public stage (“Shakespearean Chronology”). The quote from Auden is from “Prince’s Dog,” 157–58. Falstaff’s age situates him as a contemporary of Elizabeth and Leicester, both born in 1533.
143. Ralegh had gone in person. Leicester sponsored others to go in his place. The Galleon Leicester participated in the ill-fated Fenton expedition in 1582, for example (Adams, “Robert Dudley”). Fenton is the name of Ann Page’s courtly suitor in Merry Wives.
144. The licenses and monopolies that the queen awarded her favorites were a source of incessant grumbling; see Leicester’s Commonwealth, 96; and “Letter of Estate,” 31.
145. Falstaff’s association with animals is well established; see, e.g., Sullivan, Sleep, Romance, 85; and Traub, Desire and Anxiety, 56–57. In the space of one scene Hal refers to Falstaff as a “dog,” an “old boar,” and a “town bull” (2 Henry IV, 2.2.107, 146, 158).
146. Kegl argues the “‘abominable terms’ promote collective identities” in this play (“Adoption,” 254).
147. Golding, “Prefatory Epistle,” 405, 408. On Actaeon and Elizabeth, see, e.g., Berry, Chastity and Power, 28–29, 99, 137–38; Dutton, Mastering the Revels, 133–34; and previous chapter. On Falstaff and Actaeon, see Steadman, “Falstaff as Actaeon,” and Barkan, Gods Made Flesh, 281–82.
148. Privy Council Letter to the Mayor of London, June 1585, in Leicester’s Commonwealth, 282–84.
149. On the Garter and its origins see, e.g., Platter, Travels, 207.
150. Holinshed immortalized Leicester’s ostentatious celebration of the Garter Feast during his stay in the Netherlands (Chronicles, 1433). Hunt describes the associations of the Order in relation to the motto’s retributive properties (“The Garter Motto,” 383–406).
151. Jonson, “To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare,” in Riverside Shakespeare, 97, l.29.
152. According to Camden and others, this is what Leicester did in the Netherlands (Annales, 214).
153. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 73.
154. “Letter of Estate,” 24.
155. Sullivan, Sleep, Romance, 82. Sullivan’s language recalls Traub’s argument about Falstaff as a fantasized mother figure rejected by Hal in his bid for male subjectivity. Where Traub sees Hal as a “‘prototypical’ male subject” (Desire and Anxiety, 51), I think his political status as a prince dominates Shakespeare’s representation. Traub’s argument leads her to liken Falstaff to Elizabeth I (69–70), where I think we are supposed to compare the queen to Hal.
156. Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity, 83.
157. For Fluellen’s comparatives as a parodic reflection of humanist historiography, see Rackin, Stages of History, 239–40. Fluellen does not seem to remember Falstaff’s name, a fact that Rackin attributes to Falstaff having “acquired the impotence (fall-staff) of fiction” along with its “license” (240).
158. De Certeau, Writing of History, 8.
159. The indeterminacy about who plays the Fairy Queen, or the incongruity of Mistress Quickly playing the Fairy Queen, highlight this act of usurpation. We are meant to think of Elizabeth but the relation is one of likeness rather than of identity, as critics like Helgerson assume (Adulterous Alliances, 72).
160. Rackin, Stages of History, 138.
161. Prologue to Sir John Oldcastle, A2r.
162. Quoted in Whitney, Early Responses, 74. Whitney cites Hotson in supposing the reference is to Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham (74–75).
163. Rowe, Life of Mr. William Shakspear, XVIII.
164. Whitney notes that a central question raised by the early reception of this character is “how a satiric butt came to release so many positive reactions and sympathetic applications” (Early Responses, 73). For every reader who applauds the wisdom of Hal’s decision, another derides its callowness; see, e.g., Bradley, “Rejection of Falstaff”; Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory, 145; and Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 227. Hunter reviews arguments on either side (“Shakespeare’s Politics”), as does Crewe (“2 Henry IV: A Critical History,” 433–50).
165. The “inexhaustible” qualities of Falstaff, his “resistance to closure,” are key to “the character’s enduring popularity” (Whitney, Early Responses, 70–71).
1. Shaw, “Better than Shakespeare?,” xxviii.
2. Whitney, Early Responses, 71–111.
3. Jonson, Every Man Out, 3.1.23. Further parenthetic references to Jonson’s plays are to vol. 1 of Works. Falstaff describes himself as an “apple-john” (1 Henry IV, 3.3.4). There are continuities as well between Merry Wives and Every Man in His Humour (1598); see McDonald, Shakespeare and Jonson, 31–55.
4. The Cambridge editors point out that Every Man Out obsessively refers to the Falstaff plays, especially Merry Wives (1:240); on the Henriad, see also Gras, “Twelfth Night,” 547. Shift further resembles Falstaff in having a “shift of names,” in plying his trade at Paul’s, and in being associated with dirty shirts (3.1.7–10). On the censoring, see Clare, “Comical Satires,” 34; and Dutton, Mastering the Revels, 136–37. Jonson erred in identifying the actor as Elizabeth rather than featuring a substitute as Lyly and Shakespeare had; “to represent the Queen theatrically could only draw attention to the discrepancies between images of immortality and perpetual youth and the reality of the Queen’s old age” (Clare, 35).
5. Carlson, Haunted Stage, 26.
6. The connection between this passage in Every Man Out and the plot of Twelfth Night is often noted; see Clare, “Comical Satires,” 33; and Bednarz, Poets’ War, 180. Although little consensus exists about what the connection signifies (Gras, “Twelfth Night,” 545), most critics agree that Twelfth Night has an oppositional relation to Jonson’s comedies (Bednarz, 180–81; Leonard, “Shakespeare and Jonson Again,” 45–69).
7. McDonald, Shakespeare and Jonson, 1–16. McDonald proposes Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s plays exist on a “sliding scale,” with Jonson’s “most satiric” and Shakespeare’s “most romantic” comedy at either end (55).
8. Hunter, “English Folly,” 85. Bednarz’s claim that Shakespeare’s “most radical closural variation before 1599” on comic form is in Love’s Labor’s Lost (Poets’ War, 63) disregards the ending of Merry Wives, in which Falstaff is exposed and his romantic plots foiled. On the “nearly satirical” effect of Merry Wives, see also Bevington, “Shakespeare vs. Jonson,” 114.
9. Jensen, Religion and Revelry, 20.
10. Kerrigan discusses the relation between gossip and social structure, “Secrecy and Gossip in Twelfth Night.”
11. Middleton, Microcynicon, in Works, 1974. For the “violent literary fantasies” that characterized the wars of the theatres, see Bruster, Question of Culture, 65–93. Bruster identifies this phenomenon with the Martin Marprelate controversy but, as I argued in the previous chapter, the kerfuffle about Leicester created the same “abusive, flyting atmosphere” (68). Scott-Warren notes that “although nobody has ever proved that Malvolio or Morose represented real individuals, they are clearly embedded in the satirical culture” that Bruster describes (“Bear-Gardens,” 80n50).
12. Dickey, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy,” 262. On Twelfth Night’s bearbaiting references, see also Berry, “Twelfth Night,” who argues that the “subliminal metaphor” figures the audience as spectators and Malvolio as the bear (118); and Scott-Warren, who finds that “the sports of baiting and playing occupied homologous social positions” (“Bear Gardens,” 64).
13. Bruster, Question of Culture, 80–82.
14. Markham to Harington, in Harington, Nugae Antique, 1:240.
15. Harington, Ajax, 171.
16. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 192; Peck, introduction to Leicester’s Commonwealth, 19.
17. Harington, Ajax, 70. According to Donno, Harington’s satire is so obscure as to make identifications difficult (introduction to Ajax, 21). The scandal caused by the pamphlet indicates that contemporaries were able to identify Harington’s targets, however, and Scott-Warren persuasively takes this reference to Leicester as the “Beare” to be the source of the queen’s disfavor (“Harington, Sir John”). Harington refers to “Sarcotheos” (72) when describing Ajax’s pedigree—Donno attributes this name to Harington’s coinage but Sarcotheos is also Leicester’s companion in the anonymous satire News from Heaven and Hell (see chapter 2). In a section decrying courtly pride Harington also takes a jab at “close stools” dressed in “fugered satin and velvet” (111). Leicester was a fan of these luxurious conveniences; see Donno, 111n5; and Adlard, Amye Robsart, 243.
18. Fiedler, “Eros and Thanatos,” 238.
19. Lyly, Endymion, 1.1.5–7. All references are to this edition.
20. Castiglione, Courtier, 145. See below for some examples of “deformity” used in this manner.
21. According to Jensen, “Falstaff’s siege on the marital, sexual, and economic values of Windsor . . . are punished in the same way [as] Malvolio’s attack on ‘cakes and ale’” (Religion and Revelry, 158). Given the similarities, however, these characters may suffer for the same crime.
22. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 247.
23. On Malvolio’s madness and class, see Kamps, “Madness and Social Mobility.”
24. According to this false etymology, the word “satire” derives from sat irae, meaning “full of anger” (Gurr, Playgoing, 159).
25. On Jonson’s medicinal views of satire, see, e.g., Craik and Pollard, “Imagining Audiences,” 13.
26. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 41, 13. Boym sees nostalgia as a modern phenomenon; however, she also explores its roots in Renaissance melancholy, and cites Hamlet and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (5). Although the word “nostalgia” was not coined until later in the seventeenth century, “the feeling of nostalgia was voiced” in many early modern texts (Karremann, “Passion for the Past,” 152). Mullaney identifies a “sadness” closely related to nostalgia, “a kind of homesickness in reverse,” as one of the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation (Reformation, 31).
27. Critics apply these adjectives repeatedly to the play; see Schiffer, “Taking the Long View.”
28. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 54.
29. Malcolmson, “What You Will,” 166. See also Jensen, who argues that Feste and Toby are “complementary” (Religion and Revelry, 177); and Hollander, who sees Viola and Sir Andrew as analogues (“Morality of Indulgence,” 233).
30. On Malvolio and Orsino as baited bears, see Dickey, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy”; and Scott-Warren, “Bear-Gardens,” 66. That Twelfth Night focuses on eroticized forms of social mobility is a commonplace; see, e.g., Malcolmson, “What You Will”; and Schalkwyck, “Love and Service.”
31. In this context, Peter Smith describes the “linguistic essentialism” that informed early modern attitudes towards names and anagrams (“Alphabetical Position,” 1211).
32. Malcolmson, “What You Will,” 171. On the significance of names, see also Arlidge, Prince of Love, 85–95.
33. Plato, Symposium, 30–31.
34. See the epigraph and dedication of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, 1799.
35. Schiffer, “Taking the Long View,” 9. Critics who link Sir Toby to Falstaff include Jensen, Religion and Revelry; Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 249–50; Barton, “Sense of an Ending,” 107–8; and Arlidge, Prince of Love, 89.
36. Jensen, Religion and Revelry, 160.
37. News, 157.
38. See, e.g., Endymion, Cynthia’s Revels, or Every Man Out, where the courtier Fastidious Brisk dreams of being “graced” by court ladies (2.3.231).
39. Greenblatt contends “this was a career that Elizabeth herself, let alone her male subjects, could not tolerate in any woman of lesser station” (Shakespearean Negotiations, 69). On Olivia’s use of miniatures, see Levin, Heart and Stomach, 134. Hotson, who speculates that Elizabeth I commissioned Twelfth Night to entertain Duke Bracciano in 1601, claims that Orsino represents the Italian duke, while Olivia is “a romanticized and youthful shadow” of the queen (First Night, 121).The portrait of Olivia is not an entirely flattering one, however; see below. Other critics have noted the analogy with the queen (e.g., Suzuki, “Gender,” 141).
40. Hotson, First Night, 126. Notably, in Emanuel Forde’s The First Part of Parismus the Renowmed Prince of Bohemia, one possible source for Twelfth Night, the character named Olivia is a middle-aged queen; see Staniyuković, “Masculine Plots,” 116.
41. Tennenhouse, “Power on Display,” argues that “the absence of desire in Olivia is tantamount to political disruption” (85), with evident topical applications in late Elizabethan England.
42. In Peele’s Arraygnment of Paris, Diana describes England and Elizabeth: “The place Elyzium hight, and of the place / Her name that governs there Eliza is” (5.1.67–68). The pun was still current at the time of Elizabeth’s death; see Petowe, who finds that “sweet Eliza in Elizium lives, / In joy beyond all thought” (Elizabetha quasi vivens, A4r).
43. Levin, Heart and Stomach, 136.
44. On Orsino and the Actaeon myth, see also Smith, “Alphabetical Position,” 214–15, and Dickey, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy,” 274. Hotson points out the parallels between Orsino’s rhetoric and Ralegh’s First Night (125).
45. Blundeville, Profitable Treatise, title page.
46. According to one witness, the entertainment caused all manner of analogic readings, and the disgruntled queen “said that if she had thought there had been so much said of her, she would not have been there that night” (Rowland Whyte to Robert Sidney, November 22, 1595, Letters, 88). A marginal note Bacon wrote explains to Essex that it was “the Queen’s unkind dealing, which may persuade you to self-love” (Guy, Elizabeth, 255).
47. “Letter of Estate,” 31. Cynthia’s Revels extends a pattern also evident in Every Man Out; indeed, Jonson’s appropriation of Lyly’s allegory might have been a consequence of the negative reactions to the earlier play (Dutton, Mastering the Revels, 132). “Actaeon” is usually read as Essex; see, e.g., Clare, “Comical Satires,” 39; and Dutton, 133. The fountain may refer to the one at Nonesuch palace, which depicted Actaeon’s fate as a warning against “the fruits of an evil mind and an evil spirit” (Platter, Travels, 196). See also chapter 1.
48. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 8.
49. Laneham, Letter, 42. Since the nineteenth century, the captain’s line has been identified as an allusion to Kenilworth. Belsey disputes the allusion, chiefly because Greenblatt and other biographical critics have speculated that the eleven-year-old Shakespeare attended the entertainments in 1575 (Future for Criticism, 47). As I note in the previous chapter, however, Shakespeare need not have a prodigious memory to refer to the Kenilworth dolphin, since the accounts of the Kenilworth entertainments were reprinted in the mid-80s.
50. Ralegh, “Cynthia,” 23.10, in Poems, 46.
51. Allen, Admonition, xxi.
52. Greville, Sir Philip Sidney, 183.
53. Paster, Body Embarrassed, 33.
54. Callaghan, “Body Politics,” 140. On Olivia’s humiliation, see also Paster, Body Embarrassed, 30–34.
55. News, 155.
56. Malvolio is frequently identified with Jonson’s satires; see Hollander, “Morality of Indulgence”; Malcolmson, “What You Will,” 182; and Bevington, “Shakespeare vs. Jonson.”
57. “This was how . . . Hatton had first attracted the Queen’s attention” (Clare, “Comical Satires,” 40).
58. The song “Ah, Robin” is attributed to Sir Thomas Wyatt; see Poems, CXXXIX, 175–76. Others have connected Feste’s alias to Lyly’s play but without being able to make much of it. So Arlidge notes only that both Twelfth Night and Endymion link “love and misrule” (Prince of Love, 14). Jensen argues that “Maister Parson,” the title given “Sir Topas,” alludes to the “bad” Sir John in Sir John Oldcastle and “should be seen as a theatrical in-joke that signals this scene’s return to the earlier Oldcastle controversy” (Religion and Revelry, 164).
59. Knox, First Blast of the Trumpet, 11.
60. Smith notes Malvolio’s resemblance to Bottom but not to the other two characters (“Alphabetical Position,” 1213).
61. Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 245.
62. “The Ballad of Constant Susanna” (1624); see also Hotson, the only critic to have noted that Malvolio is repeatedly teased about his age (First Night, 100–111). Hotson proposes that Shakespeare satirizes the elderly Sir William Knollys, the Controller of the Royal Household—one of five royal offices that came with a staff—for having made a fool of himself over a maid of honor (103–8). I think another surfeiting old man the better candidate. Notably Sir Toby sings snatches from the ballad “Three Merry Men We Be,” in which Robin and Arthur—two names associated with Leicester—beat one another with “a Staff of another Oak-graff.” Knollys had a pattern of falling for much younger women; however, the young women who captured his interests had no power to advance his career. He could and did rely for that purpose on his blood-ties to Elizabeth. As Leicester’s brother-in-law and Essex’s uncle, Knollys might well have been associated with the phenomenon of royal favoritism. Leicester married Knollys’s sister Lettice in 1578. Knollys and Leicester were friends and allies; Leicester had knighted his brother-in-law in 1586 during the ill-fated campaign in the Netherlands. See Stater, “Knollys, William.” Hotson’s argument about Knollys rests in part on his belief that the play was commissioned for a court performance, a position few other critics or editors have accepted.
63. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 43r; Castiglione, Courtier, 334. Cicero writes about such old men that their “service” is better than young men’s, since “matters of great waight, are not done wyth bodily strength, nimbleness, celeritie . . . but wythe counsaile, wisedome, authoritie and pollicie” (11r).
64. Castiglione, Courtier, 334. Petrarch subscribed to similar beliefs (Secret, 130–31).
65. See, e.g., Callaghan, who deems that stockings are “incongruous” because Malvolio is a servant wearing the costume of a gentleman (“Body Politics,” 136). While the saffron used for yellow dye was indeed a luxury associated with court fashions (Jonson’s courtiers wear yellow garments), Malvolio is a “gentleman” in his own right (4.2.82, 5.1.280). Jonson’s Philautia wears yellow, so it may have been associated with self-love more specifically. Jones and Stallybras demonstrate attacks on yellow clothes featured prominently in anticourt polemics later in the seventeenth century (Renaissance Clothing, 67). On the associations of Malvolio’s stockings, see also Linthicum, “Cross-gartered Yelllow Stockings.” Schalkwyck argues persuasively that Malvolio and Cesario may be “of equal rank,” and that stewards, who “occupied critical positions of authority and trust” could “be drawn from the yeomanry, the lesser gentry, and in some case the upper gentry” (“Love and Service,” 87). For Malvolio as a gentleman, see also Berry, who notes that there are “twenty-two references to ‘gentleman’, more than any other play in the canon. . . . And all sixteen of the references that precede Malvolio’s are to Cesario” (“Twelfth Night,” 116n10). Some critics think Orsino’s reference to Sebastian’s “right noble” blood suggest a higher rank (5.1.264); see Kamps, “Madness and Social Mobility,” 240; and Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 71–72. This ambiguous reference cannot much alter an impression created over the four previous acts, however, nor are Viola, Sebastian, or their father ever identified by title.
66. Elyot, Castel of Helthe, 41.The medical definition of “obstruction” was dominant in the sixteenth century; see “obstruction, n.,” OED online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/129985 (accessed March 24, 2018), where all examples prior to this one are drawn from discussions of health or diet.
67. An equivalent comic effect might be obtained in a modern-dress production by having Olivia’s steward dressed in tight bell-bottoms.
68. A director “who elects, as Bill Alexander did in the 1987–88 RSC staging of the play, to chain Malvolio (Anthony Sher) to a stake during the dark-house scene is likely to be chided” even though “the connection is powerfully supported by the evidence of one early ‘reading’ of Twelfth Night,” Ben Jonson’s Epicene (Scott-Warren, “Bear-Gardens,” 66). Notably, the baiting metaphors in Epicene involve Mrs. Otter and her husband, and reproduce the gendered pattern that I have identified. Insofar as Mrs. Otter insists on treating her husband as her subject, and on being herself called a princess, she is modeling her relationship on that of Elizabeth I and her favorites.
69. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 22r.
70. Dickey notes the association with bears, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy,” 268. For works that made comic capital of Leicester’s position as Lord Steward, see previous chapter.
71. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 93.
72. As Kamps observes, “The Lady of the Strachy has never been successfully linked to a historical person, but it is clear in the context of the play she is supposed to be a real person, suggesting that Malvolio’s mad desire is already a historical reality” (“Madness and Social Mobility,” 237). Although no direct source has been found for the Malvolio plot, critics often speculate that he is “modeled on a real person” (Schiffer, “Taking the Long View,” 9). Hopkins finds that “Twelfth Night has a number of references” to Elizabeth’s court, which “despite many attempts to elucidate them, remain entirely opaque to us” (Drama and the Succession, 102). She includes the possible allusion to the ring given by the queen to Essex and the famous anecdote about the queen’s desire for a dog (5.1.6–8). Hopkins thinks that Malvolio’s being a steward refers to the Stuart succesion (105). Interestingly, Malvolio has also been seen both as a representation of Shakespeare himself (Greenblatt, Will in the World, 82–83), and as Shakespeare’s representation of Jonson (Riggs, Ben Jonson, 84).
73. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 131; Hotson, First Night, 126.
74. Smith, “Alphabetical Position,” 1220.
75. Harington, Ajax, 162. This passage, too, might have occasioned the queen’s displeasure.
76. Paster, Body Embarrassed, 32. Paster cites Harington in her analysis of this scene, but without noting the possible allusions to the pamphlet in the play.
77. Harington, Ajax, 61–62.
78. Arlidge and Gras argue the play was commissioned for the Middle Temple performance, a proposition that Harbage had previously rejected because we have no evidence of professional companies being commissioned in this manner (Rival Traditions, 116). As Gras points out, though, to say that “that Twelfth Night was written for performance at Middle Temple is not to say that the play was written only for that purpose” (“Twelfth Night,” 546). That the Templars’ taste for satire extended to plays is attested to by Jonson’s dedication of Every Man Out to the “Noblest Nurseries of Humanity and Liberty in the Kingdom, The Inns of Court” (appendix D to Every Man Out, Works, 1:427). Jonson adapted aspects of verse satire to the stage in the wake of the Bishop’s ban (Dutton, “Jonson’s Satiric Styles,” 59).
79. Betts, “Image of this Queene,” 162. According to Hunt, all early modern pornography contained elements of political satire (Invention of Pornography, 11).
80. There has been some debate about whether the ban aimed to suppress satire or pornography, with McCabe making an argument for the former (“Elizabethan Satire”), and Boose arguing the latter position (“Bishops’ Ban”). Boose makes a compelling case that the censorship of Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573) set a precedent for the 1599 ban; what the authorities objected to was the dissemination “to a mass readership” of a book that “sexualized” the “politics of courtly discourse” (191).
81. Bruster, Question of Culture, 92.
82. On Twelfth Night’s use of legal terminology and the reference to the windows, see Akrigg, “Middle Temple”; and Arlidge, Prince of Love, 26–27, 37–40.
83. Arlidge, Prince of Love, 47.
84. On Dudley and Gorboduc, see, e.g., Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, 39–45; Jones and White, “Gorboduc,”; Vanhoutte, Strange Communion, 111–34; and Astington, Actors and Acting, 70–71. The Revels Prince at the Inner Temple was the “Prince of Sophie,” which helps make sense of Fabian’s comment that “I will not give up my part of this sport for a pension of thousands to be paid from the Sophy” (2.5.179–80; Arlidge, Prince of Love, 58–61). On Hatton, see MacCaffrey, “Hatton, Sir Christopher.” Hatton participated in several festivities for the queen put on at the Inner Temple, and may have coauthored another tragedy put on for the queen (Tancred and Gismund [1568]).
85. Every Man Out may have been performed at the Middle Temple in 1598–99; like Twelfth Night, it makes use of material—including the device of the fake letter—from the Middle Temple revels of 1597–98 (Gras, “Twelfth Night,” 552–54). On Ralegh, see Nicholls and Williams, “Ralegh, Sir Walter”; Guy, Elizabeth, 74; and Arlidge, Prince of Love, 71, 83–84. According to Guy, traditionally Elizabeth had first Leicester and then Essex sit next to her at Twelfth Night festivities (268).
86. Arlidge, Prince of Love, 6.
87. Privy Council to the Mayor of London, June 1585, in Leicester’s Commonwealth¸ 283.
88. As Clare notes, Jonson’s disclaimer “contradicts the initial boast of Asper that he would expose the follies of the time” (“Comical Satires,” 32).
89. Paster, Body Embarrassed, 34. On Olivia as the “real threat to the hierarchical gender system,” see also Howard, “Crossdressing,” 43.
90. Berry, “Twelfth Night,” 111–12. See also Hollander, “Morality of Indulgence,” 222.
91. Barton, “Sense of an Ending,” 110.
92. Riverside Shakespeare, 444n73.
93. Petrarch, Secret, 131; Shahar, Growing Old, 64.
94. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 242.
95. Kamps thinks Malvolio fails to perform his class identity, and goes so far as to classify Malvolio as a “commoner and Toby’s subordinate” (“Madness and Social Mobility,” 235). As the careers of Elizabeth’s favorites show, in a complex and multitiered hierarchical society not every upstart is a commoner, however.
96. Schiffer, “Taking the Long View,” 30, 19.
97. Ralegh, History, 127.
98. Brantley, “Boys Will Be Boys (and Sometimes Girls),” New York Times, November 10, 2013. Brantley specifies that the images conjured are of a “young Elizabeth” but the fifty-something Rylance looks middle-aged even by our standards. I can only think that the usual blindness to male aging in our culture accounts for Brantley’s comment.
99. Ralegh, “Of Favorites,” Poems, 49.9, 19–20, 122.
100. Howard, “Crossdressing,” 432. She identifies the treatment of Orsino as “much less satirical” than the treatment of Olivia.
101. Tennenhouse, “Power on Display,” 84.
102. The ambiguity regarding Orsino’s rank is usually treated as a textual problem (Schiffer, “Taking the Long View,” 4). My argument implies it might instead be a “functional ambiguity” (Patterson, Censorship, 18). On Orsino’s “equivocal title,” see also Suzuki, “Gender,” 154.
103. As Dickey notes, “The real bear of the play, etymologically speaking, is Olivia’s other main suitor, the Duke of Illyria, named Orsino from the Latin ursus, and more immediately from the Italian orsino” (“Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy,” 273). On Orsino as “little bear,” see also Schleiner, “Orsino and Viola.” Arlidge, Prince of Love, endorses Hotson’s theory that the allusion is to the visiting Duke of Bracciano (First Night, 15). Arlidge and Hotson cite Webster’s The White Devil (1612), which deals with the scandalous lives of members of the Orsini family, in support of this theory. But Webster’s play also compares its Duke of Bracciano to Leicester, suggesting a complex network of connections at work (5.3.153–54). Like Malvolio, Orsino has been identified with a number of historical figures (Gras, “Twelfth Night,” 555).
104. Leicester to Elizabeth I, January 16, 1570, Calendar of State Papers, 198.
105. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 73. See also News, 155.
106. Gascoigne et al., Princely Pleasures, C6r; Leicester’s Commonwealth, 193.
107. Bevington, “Shakespeare vs. Jonson,” 120.
108. Harington is fond of the trope as well; see his section on hunting, where he segues from a discussion of dogs to a description of “this captious time” when so many are “readie to backbite every mans worke” (Ajax, 110).
109. Dekker, Satiromastix, 4.1.133–34. The quip implies that the eponymous isle might have been Gran Canaria, renowned for its mastiffs. It may also have been the island where Elizabeth I kenneled her dogs; as Marcus points out, the play may have explored “likenesses between the Queen’s canines and her courtiers” (“Jonson and the Court,” 31).
110. Jonson to Cecil, 1605, Works, 2:646.
111. Aubrey, “Sir Walter Raleigh,” 255. Steggle argues for the legitimacy of Aubrey’s anecdote, concluding that, despite Jonson’s protestations to the contrary, personification played an important role in Every Man Out (“Charles Chester,” 319). Chester was widely associated with the Canaries, lending further credence to the identification not just because Buffone is fond of canary wine (Steggle, 314–16, 322), as Falstaff is, but also because these islands were renowned for the breeding of “bandogs.”
112. Gras argues that the “derisive treatment” Jonson reserves for Puntarvolo shows his contempt for “stock romantic plots” (“Twelfth Night,” 547). Puntarvolo has been identified with Ralegh, Harington, and Anthony Munday; see Steggle, War of the Theatres, 12.
113. Jonson, “Appendix A” to Every Man Out, Works, 1:422. Bednarz offers a contrasting reading, in which Every Man Out furnishes a “counter-ideal for what it condemns” (Poets’ War, 64).
114. The generic designation “Comicall Satyre,” Jonson’s own, appears on the title page of Every Man Out (1600); Works, 1:249.
115. Jonson, “Appendix A,” Works, 1:421.
116. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 186–87.
117. Blundeville, Profitable Treatise, Or.
118. Marcus, “Jonson and the Court,” 32.
119. Baiting all the characters, “the play . . . reproduces the arbitrary and inconclusive nature of a baiting contest” (Dickey, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy,” 272).
120. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 83–84.
121. Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 245.
122. McDonald speculates that “the rise of dramatic satire probably aided Shakespeare in making the transition from comedy to tragedy” (Shakespeare and Jonson, 72), a transition heralded by the bifurcated portrayal of Orsino and Malvolio.
123. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 45.
124. On Malvolio’s threat as a rebuttal of Jonson’s theories, see Bednarz, Poets’ War, 192.
125. Berry, “Twelfth Night,” 119.
126. See also Bednarz, who argues that Shakespeare “followed Jonson’s example” in order to “contradict him” (Poets’ War, 179).
127. Berry, “Twelfth Night,” 114.
128. Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 230, 233.
129. Berry, “Twelfth Night,” 4. Not all readers are so moved by Malvolio; Barber derides Lamb’s response as a “romantic and bourgeois distortion” (Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 255–56). On the conflicted critical responses to Malvolio, see Schiffer, “Taking the Long View,” 10.
130. As Gras notes, “The Orsino plot line is implicitly connected with poetry and the theater by imagery concerning theatrical role-playing” (“Twelfth Night,” 559).
131. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 13.
132. Karreman, “Passion for the Past,” 153.
133. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 4.
134. Goldring, “Portraiture, Patronage,” 183.
135. Stanivuković, “Masculine Plots,” 126.
136. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 52.
137. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, xvi.
138. Callaghan, Paster, and Howard argue that Olivia is punished; however, she is also rewarded, Levin observes, with the nontraditional marriage that she has sought all along (Heart and Stomach, 137). Sir Toby does not say that Olivia wishes never to marry—just that she does not wish to marry someone who can claim superior status.
139. On amity between Orsino and Viola, see Osborne, “Marriage of True Minds,” 100.
140. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 83.
141. Castiglione, Courtier, 340.
142. Martin, Constituting Old Age, 113–25.
1. All references to Shakespeare are from the Riverside Shakespeare. All references to Middleton are from the Works.
2. Carlson, Haunted Stage, 8.The strongest evidence for typecasting practices in early modern theater involves comic roles (Bentley, Profession, 206–33).
3. Mullaney, “Mourning and Misogyny,” 152.
4. See also Neill, who argues that Vindice’s anger is focused on the “illegitimate son and the transgressive mother” (“Bastardy, Counterfeiting,” 398).
5. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 24.
6. Cuff, Differences of the Ages, 115.
7. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 48r.
8. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 24.
9. Among those who do make connections are Mullaney, who finds it “tempting” to identify Hamlet’s mother and Elizabeth (“Mourning and Misogyny,” 148); and Erickson, who argues that “Queen Gertrude functions as a degraded figure of Queen Elizabeth,” with Hamlet reflecting Essex (Rewriting Shakespeare, 86). For Essex, see also Patterson, Popular Voice, 11, 27, 93–94. Leicester is rarely mentioned in this context, even though he was Essex’s stepfather, and thus provides a point of comparison for Claudius. Recent critics have generally emphasized that Hamlet is acutely “aware of its late Elizabethan status” (Mullaney, 149).
10. Mullaney, “Mourning and Misogyny,” 158. See also Neill, “Bastardy, Counterfeiting,” 413.
11. Neill, “Bastardy, Counterfeiting,” 410; Leicester’s Commonwealth, 87.
12. Allen, Admonition, xix. On the tendency of anticourt polemicists to ascribe Circean powers to Elizabeth, see previous chapters.
13. Mullaney, “Mourning and Misogyny,” 162.
14. While Orsino seems the most likely part for Burbage to have played in Twelfth Night (Baldwin, Organization and Personnel, 240), Astington suggests he may have played Malvolio instead (Actors and Acting, 37). Both are age-in-love parts (see previous chapter). Lowin was young to play Claudius and Falstaff; however, he had the right physique. See Butler, “Lowin, John.”
15. Baldwin, Organization and Personnel, 238.
16. Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, 45.
17. Jankowski, “Egypt’s Queen,” 98.
18. Yachnin, “Courtiers,” 4.
19. Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, 140, 145.
20. In contrast, ahistorical readings often put Antony at the center of the play; on this critical tendency, see Fitz, “Egyptian Queens.”
21. Yachnin, “Courtiers,” 7.
22. Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels, in vol. 1 of Works, 3.4.40.
23. Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels, in vol. 1 of Works, 3.5.96.
24. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, 56. On the implication of this male rhetoric, see also Levin, Heart and Stomach, 121. Morris first noted that Cleopatra, in her desire to figure as “president” of her kingdom, recalls Elizabeth I at Tilbury (“Queen Elizabeth I ‘Shadowed,’” 276). Based in part on this evidence, Jankowski argues that Cleopatra emulates Elizabeth in manipulating the fiction of the king’s two bodies, although “unlike Elizabeth, she does this by making her political adversaries . . . her lovers” (“Egypt’s Queen,” 96). Guy is one exception to the consensus that a woman could outrank men by such means (Elizabeth, 11).
25. Elizabeth I, “Armada Speech,” August 9, 1588, in Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 325–26.
26. Middleton, Mad World My Masters, 4.2.19, 31; “Letter Exchange Between Sir Robert Cecil and Robert Devereux,” in Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 335.
27. Loomis, Death of Elizabeth, 79–81.
28. Tennenhouse, Power on Display, 146; Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, 162.
29. Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, 160. Shapiro, too, sees Antony and Cleopatra as a “tragedy of nostalgia” (Year of Lear, 266).
30. Rosenberg, Leicester, 160.
31. North, “To . . . Princess Elizabeth,” in Plutarch, Lives (1579), 2r.
32. North, prefatory materials, in Plutarch, Lives, 3–6r. Besides the letter to Elizabeth, these include Norton’s “To the Reader” and his translation of “Amiot to the Readers.”
33. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, xvi.
34. Shapiro, Year of Lear, 229.
35. Plutarch, “Marcus Antonius,” in Shakespeare’s Plutarch, 183, 195. Unless noted otherwise, all references are to this edition.
36. Logan, “High Events,” 156.
37. Gosson, Plays Confuted, E8r.
38. Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, 170. For Ciceronian rhetoric’s use of passions as “critical tools to civil persuasion,” see Rowe, “Minds in Company,” 55.
39. According to Platter, Elizabeth spoke Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, in addition to English (Travels, 165).
40. For the citational function of such references, see Belsey, “Myth of Venus.”
41. Tassi, “O’erpicturing Apelles,” 299.
42. Kyffin, Blessedness of Brytaine, A3v, B2r. That the Armada made English people think of Actium is further corroborated by Stow, who wrote that the Spanish ships exceed in “number” those “at command of Egyptian Cleopatra” (Annales, 46).
43. Platter, Travels, 226.
44. Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, 50.
45. Adelman, Common Liar, 81.
46. “Elizabeth I Dress,” http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-36301188 (accessed April 4, 2018).
47. Adelman, Common Liar, 65.
48. Leicester was made Master of the Horse in 1558. He retained the position until 1587, when he was instrumental in securing it for his stepson; see Hammer, “Absolute and Sovereign Mistress,” 45.
49. Leicester was a prominent patron of players, a feature of his character linked to his rise to power and to his influence over Elizabeth; see previous chapters, as well as, e.g., News, 156, 144; and Leicester’s Commonwealth, 128. The description of Ralegh is Naunton’s (Fragmenta Regalia, 72).
50. Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, 56.
51. Hammer, “Devereux, Robert.” Leicester fashioned a military identity long before his assignments in the Netherlands and at Tilbury; in a portrait that Federico Zuccaro painted for the Kenilworth entertainments (1575), he appears “the heroic Captain who vanquishes Spain and liberates the Protestant Netherlands” (Goldring, “Portraiture, Patronage,” 180).
52. “Letter of Estate,” 29. Like so much of the chatter about the earl, this bit reflects an image he sought to project. Many of the pictures in his possession had classical themes; at Leicester House, he kept eleven marble busts, one of himself, one of Elizabeth, and nine of Roman emperors; see Goldring, Robert Dudley, 218.
53. Yachnin, “Courtiers,” 8–9.
54. Luce, introduction to Antonie, 40.
55. Mary Sidney, Antonie, ll.10–11, 129, 15, 80–82.
56. Starks, “Immortal Longings,” 244.
57. Greville, Sir Philip Sidney, 155–56. On Greville’s biography, see Gouws, “Greville, Fulke.”
58. Greville, Sir Philip Sidney, 176. See, e.g., Hunter, who argues that the Essex rebellion “turned” Greville’s “general observations into what seemed like particular references” (John Lyly, 149); Bullough, Sources, 216; and Yachnin, “Courtiers,” 9.
59. Greville, Sir Philip Sidney, 194.
60. Greville, Sir Philip Sidney, 33.
61. Naunton, 74; see also Nowell Smith, introduction, x.
62. Francis Bacon, quoted in Nowell Smith, introduction, ix.
63. Greville, Sir Philip Sidney, 215.
64. “Elizabeth to Ralegh,” Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 308; “pug, n.2,” OED online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/154210 (accessed November 3, 2017). For the queen’s pet names, see also previous chapters, especially chapter 1.
65. Kendall, Robert Dudley, 87; see also Susan Frye, Elizabeth I, 67.
66. Quoted in Guy, Elizabeth, 328.
67. Harington, Nugae Antique, 1:358. Lyly likens Endymion to a fish; see chapter 1.
68. Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, 83.1–9; in Major Works, 59.
69. Bates, Masculinity, Gender, 14.
70. Platter, Travels, 193.
71. Platter, Travels, 228, 182.
72. Gascoigne et al., Princely Pleasures, C7r.
73. Adelman, Common Liar, 83. See also Bono, Literary Transvaluation, 167–86.
74. Guy, Elizabeth, 132.
75. Elizabeth I, “Armada Speech,” 326.
76. Nyquist, “Profuse, Proud Cleopatra,” 98.
77. Adams, Leicester and the Court, 138.
78. Francis Bacon to the Earl of Essex, October 4, 1996, in Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, 2:42.
79. Guy, 106.
80. Mary Sidney, 72, ll.451. Cleopatra echoes this passage when she asks Enobarbus, “Is Antony or we in fault for this?” (3.13.3).
81. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 187.
82. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I, 457.
83. Morris, “Queen Elizabeth I ‘Shadowed’”; Muir, “Elizabeth I”; and Rinehart, “Shakespeare’s Cleopatra.”
84. Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, 134–36.
85. De Maisse, Journal, 59. Other dignitaries were treated to the same ceremony; see Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe, 11–12. Elizabeth appears to have used such tactics since the beginning of her reign; her 1559 speech in response to a parliamentary request that she marry has her “stretching out” and showing her audience her hand, with the ring signifying her marriage to England. She reprised this gesture in her conversations with the Scottish Ambassador, William Maitland, in 1561 (Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 59, 65).
86. Platter, Travels, 221. The queen relied on the analogy in her speeches; e.g., “If I were a milkmaid with a pail on mine arm, whereby my private person might be little set by, I would not forsake that single state to match myself with the greatest monarch” (“Speech at the Close of the Parliamentary Session,” March 15, 1576, in Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 170). For more examples, see Mueller, “Virtue and Virtuality,” 229–31, 243n31. On Cleopatra’s use of the analogy, see also Muir, “Elizabeth I,” 199–200.
87. Muir, “Elizabeth I,” 199; see also Dash, Wooing, Wedding, 277. Frye even claims Cleopatra is “a counter-historical figure” (Fools of Time, 71). For a useful overview of the deeply divided critical tradition on Antony and Cleopatra, see Deats, “Shakespeare’s Anamorphic Drama.” On the tendency of readings to reflect either the Roman or Egyptian perspectives embedded in the play, see Hirsh, “Rome and Egypt.”
88. Fitz, “Egyptian Queens,” 297. As Fitz points out, Cleopatra’s first line aligns her with Lear, another ruler for whom love is a form of politics (303).
89. Nyquist, “Profuse, Proud Cleopatra,” 97–98; Logan, “High Events,” 162.
90. On Cleopatra as a political figure, see also Dash, Wooing, Wedding, 209–47.
91. Jankowski, “Egypt’s Queen,” 105.
92. Dash, Wooing, Wedding, 209.
93. Blundeville, Profitable Treatise, Q3r.
94. Bullough, Sources, 216.
95. “Dead Mans Right,” A4r.
96. The ability to bracket off one’s subject position is granted primarily to (white) males and an “exacerbation of sexism” is “characteristic of the liberal public sphere” (Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 114). Eley argues that the “category of the ‘public man’ and his ‘virtue’ was constructed via a series of oppositions to ‘femininity,’” so that the “natural identification of sexuality and desire with the feminine allowed the social and political construction of masculinity,” and “women were to be silenced, to allow masculine speech, in the language of reason, full rein” (“Nations, Publics,” 309). See also Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 65–124.
97. Lake, “Politics of ‘Popularity,’” 68.