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People’s handshakes often inadvertently convey an enthusiasm (or, more likely, lack of it) that they have carefully managed not to show in their facial expressions. But the handshake is in essence a gesture of openness: an act of physical engagement in which the two parties symbolically demonstrate that they are unarmed, a symmetrical expression of goodwill, and a form of touching that is exempt from the usual taboos about touching people with whom we are not intimate. Refusing to shake hands is understood as an insult. Incidentally, one of the reasons why young boys have traditionally been taught not to stand with their hands in their pockets is that there is something more than merely slovenly about concealing their hands: the attitude is one of closed defiance. In the 1820s a fashion for men walking with their hands in their pockets was noted with some alarm in the reference book The Annual Register, though it was apparently within a few years ‘superseded by the general use of gloves’.2
The semiotics of the handshake are not especially subtle. A hand offered limply suggests weakness of character, while a hand clamped on yours with vice-like strength marks an assertiveness that may be a mark of psychotic competitiveness. A firm, sober shake projects an air of reasonableness and equability. A stranger’s unfamiliar grip may be an attempt to see if you are a member of a secret society to which he belongs – perhaps the Freemasons. Slapping hands or touching fists (as famously done by Barack and Michelle Obama) can be an indication of spontaneous high spirits or of the desire to subvert the bourgeois nature of the handshake – something that also happened in Mussolini’s Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, where the salute was preferred.
The handshake is, of course, tactile. For the most part touch is a channel for communication that we use in a rather guarded fashion. Our skin is a sensory system of vital importance, and the immediacy of touch makes it powerful, sometimes threateningly so. We cultivate the sense of touch less than our other senses. What do we touch the most, besides our own bodies and our loved ones? Among the first things that come to mind are keyboards, the screens of smartphones and similar devices, door handles, taps, cutlery, paper. But because we connect personal touch with affection and with sex, we are in many situations suspicious of it. We are encouraged to hug our children, yet mostly we are conditioned to avoid touching people, ourselves and objects that do not belong to us. Teachers are trained not to touch their students. It is not unusual for people who have been touched even in passing by a stranger or an authority figure to claim that this was an assault. When the English find themselves in more tactile cultures, they sometimes exult in the therapeutic and affective possibilities of touch, but a more common reaction is revulsion or at least a shiver of distaste. Although touch can be associated with comfort, nurture, pleasure and the breaking down of social and emotional distance, it is also associated with contamination, disruption, unwelcome influence and sexual intent, as well as with verification (as if in being touched you’re being checked for signs of infirmity). The handshake is our most frequent form of public touching, but it is not sensorily rich.
One of the reasons why greetings have become less elaborate is that meeting new people has become a more common occurrence. Moreover, modern informality has eroded traditional formal greetings and replaced them with less predictable ones. Over a period of six months I noted the words with which I was greeted at the various coffee shops I patronize: ‘Hi’, ‘Hiya’, ‘Hello’, ‘Hola’, ‘Hey, buddy’, ‘What can I get you?’, ‘Can I help you?’, ‘What you havin’?’, ‘What’ll it be?’, ‘Yes, babe’, ‘My friend’, ‘Yes, boss’, ‘Yes, mate’, ‘Yes?’, ‘What can I do for you?’, ‘Who’s next?’, ‘What do you fancy?’, ‘Next customer in line, please’. This freestyle approach is seen as authentic and spontaneous, but occasionally there can be confusion about how best to respond.
If greeting people has become more relaxed (and thus in fact more awkward), the language of parting remains comparatively clear-cut, despite the rise of alternatives to a straightforward ‘goodbye’. We say goodbye – the word originally a contraction of ‘God be with ye’ – because it is a neat way of closing an encounter, but also out of some vestigial sense of the fragility of our existence and the possibility that this parting could be our last. ‘God be with ye’ was itself implicitly a contraction of ‘God be with ye till we meet again’. Other phrases used at times of parting are similarly freighted with a sense of the hazards that life involves (‘Take care’, ‘Godspeed’, ‘Be safe’, ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do’), but then there are alternatives that, in their casualness, avoid any trace of such piety or solicitude (‘See you around’, ‘Laters’, ‘Okay, then’). In other societies, the rituals of parting are more complicated. Chinese farewells are more painstaking than Chinese hellos, with the act of departure played out over an extended time and space.
The sociologist Erving Goffman has written of greetings and farewells as being like punctuation marks either side of a shared activity. They open and close a period of increased access to another person. He notes that when greetings are exchanged in passing, goodbyes are often dispensed with: we mark the end of not-being-in-touch, but we don’t move on to a true state of being-in-touch, and the encounter’s termination therefore doesn’t require ritual comment.3 In a more sustained encounter, mismatched punctuation can cause offence. Generally, a farewell is a more delicate matter than a greeting, because it lays the ground for one’s next encounter with a person. Farewells are likely to be more effusive; a hugely enthusiastic greeting is unsettling compared with a similarly enthusiastic farewell – think of the different resonances of ‘It’s fantastic to see you’ and ‘It was fantastic to see you’.
Greeting people and bidding them farewell involve what we naturally think of as ‘exchanges’. But in fact all interactions are exchanges. Sometimes the exchange is focused: there is mutual and sustained awareness of it, as when you’re making love, having a tête-à-tête, or playing chess. Sometimes it is unwitting: it happens merely because people are in one another’s presence. In both cases, though, we manage others’ impressions of us. A lot of our managerial efforts happen below the threshold of consciousness. The elements of which we are conscious strike us as theatrical: learned lines and gestures, endlessly rehearsed, but, like all theatre, an illusion that, although it usually works (and because we know it usually works), is fragile.
Kissing has long played a part in greetings and farewells. The kiss has a complex history as a seal of trust, a gesture of peace, a sacred touch, a Judas-like portent of betrayal or disaster, and a magic charm, besides its simple uses as a token of greeting or affection – and its potential as something profane, invasive, outrageous. The Greek historian Herodotus records that among the ancient Persians one kissed an equal on the mouth and someone slightly one’s inferior on the cheek. This contrasted with the restraint of the Egyptians, among whom one saluted another person in the street by letting one’s hand fall down to one’s knee. The English have in recent times been regarded as fairly unenthusiastic about greeting others with a kiss, but Erasmus, visiting England in 1499, was delighted to find that ‘when you arrive anywhere, you are received with kisses on all sides, and when you take your leave they speed you on your way with kisses.’4
In 2011 the Knigge Society, a German etiquette watchdog that takes its name from the eighteenth-century moralist Adolph Knigge, declared that in the workplace a kiss on the cheek by way of greeting was an un-Teutonic aberration. Invited to comment on this, the president of an American ‘etiquette consulting firm’, Mannersmith, claimed that ‘Kissing in greeting may be acceptable at the beginning of a business meeting or even possibly a job interview.’5 But to accept the practice of greeting others with a kiss is not to dissolve all problems. How many kisses should one give? In Italy, two seems to be the norm; in Poland and the Netherlands, it’s three; in most of France, it’s two, though there are regions where the preferred number is three or even four. And in Britain? In England? Two seems normal now. Mwah-mwah. But while the use of kiss
es as a greeting is still widely derided as a rather superficial form of geniality, the immense amount of sensory information available to us when we exchange kisses – even air kisses – should not be ignored. Through the nerve endings in our lips, through our aroma and our sense of smell, and with our hands, we transmit and receive information that’s useful, potentially empowering and potentially damaging. The line that ‘It was just a kiss’, usually mendacious, is also naïve.
Besides the encounters I’ve so far dealt with, there is another kind of meeting: a formal assembly. In the Middle Ages meetings were armed encounters: local disputes were settled by means of a ‘moot’, at which proposals were approved with a banging together of weapons – or dismissed with groans. These attempts to negotiate arguments gradually became less military in temper. During the Renaissance, urbanization and political centralization gave rise to a more parliamentary style of meeting, over which courtiers presided. Urbane discussion became the mechanism for resolving or curtailing differences and achieving solidarity. Yet even in the nineteenth century the word meeting was a euphemism for a duel – a hangover from a less bureaucratic age. And today meeting is associated with other ways of taking lives or at least sapping vitality.
The most celebrated meeting of the Tudor period is depicted in a painting not as remarkable as the Wilton Diptych but still of great historical significance: The Field of the Cloth of Gold, which today hangs at Hampton Court. In 1520 Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France staged an expensive jamboree in the vale between the villages of Ardres and Guines, a portion of neutral ground near Calais (a town then under English control). The two countries had concluded a treaty of ‘perpetual friendship’ in 1518. Now, for nearly three weeks in June, this Anglo-French accord – in truth a pretty hollow promise of peace – was sumptuously acted out. This extravagant performance was the brainchild of Thomas Wolsey, a master of alluring PR. The tents and pavilions in which much of it happened were decked with gold and silver cloth, thus providing posterity with a name to pin on this hybrid of tournament and festival, which combined diplomacy and pageantry with archery and jousting. There were feasts, processions, choral performances and displays of costume and jewellery. The two monarchs, both in their twenties, wrestled. The spirit was jubilant yet also suspicious and deeply competitive. The English contingent was more than 5,000 strong, with nearly 3,000 horses; the French contingent was of similar size and included 500 archers.
The encounter recorded in The Field of the Cloth of Gold was a giant charade, in which – no small irony – the making of peace was forcefully performed. For both parties, the weapon of choice was manners. It is fitting, then, that Henry was the dedicatee of Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531), a guide intended to equip men for positions of authority in public life. In the sixteenth century there was an increased self-consciousness about the processes by which identity was moulded.6 The Boke Named the Governour, which encouraged its readers to develop an armoury of social skills, was a primer for aristocratic self-fashioning. It has a claim to be the first truly English book of this kind.
5
Of courtiers and codpieces
fashioning Renaissance identity
The Lisle Letters, which date from the years 1533 to 1540, allow us to eavesdrop on the daily business of the Tudor world. Lord Lisle, the illegitimate son of Edward IV, was Henry VIII’s governor in Calais, and the letters sent by him and members of his family (and to them) reveal among other things the period’s changing ideas about social hierarchy and education. They suggest a society freeing itself from medieval feudalism.
The letters are, to put it crudely, full of stuff: references to bonnets and caps, spaniels and mastiffs, wine and melons, damask and velvet, gold ornaments and rings. They illuminate the wealth and hedonism of the age, as well as the importance of gifts – and how rare it was for Tudor officials to admit that what they wanted was not wine or hawks or plump quails but ready money. For the most part, acts of generosity were large and formulaic. Yet sometimes the gifts could be disarmingly personal. When Honor, Lady Lisle, was a guest of the Elector Palatine at Calais, she was surprised to see that he picked his teeth with a pin, and later she sent him her own toothpick (which she had been using for seven years) by way of an improvement.
The Lisle Letters were written at a time when the population was rising and the gap between rich and poor was growing wider. Standards of personal comfort improved at this time, but plague, influenza and terrible harvests raised rates of mortality. There was upward social mobility, but also striking downward mobility. Of the families that rose, most owed their success to political office, legal careers or the City of London, rather than to the profits of owning land. England was becoming less agrarian. Education was expanding. Literature was being politicized. The monarch controlled who was admitted to the ranks of titled aristocracy. When Henry VIII died in 1547 there were just nine more peers than when he acceded to the throne in 1509. Queen Elizabeth created or revived only eighteen peerages across her reign (1558–1603); she seems to have thought of the peerage as a select caste, for men of august lineage.1
In the age of Henry and Elizabeth, manners were for courtiers. By the eighteenth century, they were for all enlightened men. This was a big change, and it began during the Renaissance. The word courtesy started to give way to civility. The transition was not smooth, but in the seventeenth century the words civil and civility – denoting concepts learned from Italy – became central to the vocabulary of good manners.2 The distinction is this: courtesy is a quality, discussed using language that quickly becomes abstract, whereas civility implies a set of principles, an investment in a moral universe in which other people’s dignity is respected and in which their desire for dignity is respected. Moreover, courtesy is a term associated with the court and the aristocracy, whereas civility is associated with ‘civic’ matters and the life of the town. Those who cultivated civility were not hostile to aristocracy, but they were concerned with social progress and harmonious living.
Across Europe, the doctrine of civility grew as the grip of Christianity, specifically Catholicism, weakened. This may sound counterintuitive, but the advance of civility was connected to the secularization of knowledge, the emancipation of subjective reason, and the particularization of truth. It became common during the Renaissance to think rationally about matters that would once have been dealt with intuitively. In England, the Reformation created a rivalry between different Christian groups, and that rivalry broke the moral unity of the people. Scepticism increased. As society grew more materialistic and mercantile, so it inevitably became more concerned with style and self-presentation. The Canadian scholar Benet Davetian makes the interesting point that the development in art of perspective (which began in Florence with Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti in the fifteenth century) was an innovation with consequences for notions of personal identity: it replaced the symbolic representation of life with an undistorted, secular vision, allowing men and women to gaze upon art that showed the world ‘as they saw it rather than … the way they imagined God saw it’.3
None of this is to say that irrationality disappeared; we remain susceptible to intuitions, many of them flawed. Nor is it to say that all writings on manners at that time were devoid of Christian conviction. Far from it. William Fiston’s The School of Good Manners (1595), based on a French translation of Erasmus and aimed squarely at children, opened with the words ‘The fear of the Lord, is the beginning of wisdom, said Solomon the wise most truly’ – ‘Let children therefore, first and principally learn to walk in this fear.’4 Rhetoric of this kind was common, and to this day fear of divine judgement nourishes morality.
However, in the wake of the English Reformation, which had been catalysed by the growth of printing and literacy, there was a new emphasis on the faith of the individual – and indeed on the individual. Although religion continued to be understood as a great help in dealing with daily problems, it was a tenet of Protestanti
sm that the individual had a personal relationship with God, rather than one mediated by a priest. For Protestants, faith was less corporate than it was for Roman Catholics; it was for the individual to achieve salvation. In time, an increasingly entrepreneurial streak would develop: ministers set up their own congregations, and worshippers shopped around for churches that suited their aspirations. Meanwhile individual believers, convinced of their personal accountability, were more likely to be critical of one another, engaging in ‘mutual surveillance’.5
In the sixteenth century, visitors to England commented on the piety of the people they met, not on their scepticism. They also noted the freedom enjoyed by women, the abundance of silver in circulation, the absence of fortified towns, and the habit of sending children out to serve in other families. As for manners, it was usual for foreigners to assume that they were something quite new to the English. Typically the English had been represented as a barbarous island race, heartless and destructive, although there was also a tradition of regarding the English as unusually good-natured and free from vindictiveness.
Meanwhile the English who ventured abroad were a source of concern to their compatriots. Allegedly they were quick to fall for new fashions and glittering trinkets, and it was common for critics of foreign travel to claim that it exacerbated English ‘inconstancy’ and posed a threat to the political and moral character of the nation. The poet-soldier Sir Philip Sidney was praised for rejecting ‘foreign toys’ during his travels; by implication, others were more susceptible to novelties.