The earl was an obvious target for malcontents and dissidents: not only did he enjoy a privileged relationship with the queen, but he was also the leader of the Protestant faction at court, and a major patron and protector of radical Protestants. Leicester conducted his affairs, including his courtship of the queen, in a shockingly public fashion, moreover. Relying on traditional modes of aristocratic self-display, he ordered matching portraits showing himself and the queen for the 1575 festivities at Kenilworth, for example. According to Elizabeth Goldring, these gestured toward “a future in which Leicester is no longer an earl, but a prince consort or a king.”26 Leicester was also among the first statesmen to turn to the printing press to court “popularity,” a word that Jeffrey S. Doty shows gained traction during this period and which referred to the cultivation of popular favor and to the public pitching of political arguments.27 Straddling old and new methods of publicity, the earl relied on his extensive patronage network to circulate flattering images of himself—at times quite literally, in that some books included a portrait of the handsome aristocrat.28 Others reproduced the Dudley bear and ragged staff, an aristocratic “insignia” of the sort Jürgen Habermas associates with the “representative” publicity of pre-print culture.29
Fig. 1. Dudley Bear and Ragged Staff, Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (1586), O1R. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
While Leicester and his older brother Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, had adopted the badge to advertise their (matrilineal) descent from the fifteenth-century Beauchamp Earls of Warwick, the badge now signaled Leicester’s official imprimatur in printed books sold to a burgeoning population of readers instead. The epistolary dedications of these books presented the earl as the embodiment of Protestant and humanist ideals; he was a man “upon whose wisedome, foresight, trustinesse, pollicie, & stoutness, God hath ordained the securitie of our most gracious soveraigne Lady, & of her Maiesties Realme and subiectes” as well as “of his owne Religion.”30 Leicester deserved promotion to the highest places not because he had the right aristocratic credentials but because he had all the right “qualities of the mind, and . . . qualities of the bodye.” Thomas Blundeville proposed others might look to the earl as a “glasse” showing these qualities, and that “those that Honors woulde atcheeve / and Counslers eke desire to bee” should take him as their model.31 Years later, Francis Bacon would affirm Blundeville’s wisdom, by advising the turbulent Earl of Essex to imitate his stepfather when addressing the queen.32
All this humanist puffery had unintended consequences, however. While the idea that Leicester’s career offered a reproducible blueprint for upward mobility was exciting to some, it proved alarming to others. The earl had in effect invited these others to discuss their reservations by going public with arguments about his own merits. Taking the cue, Leicester’s Commonwealth represents itself “a debate or conversation” about the earl, illustrating “the relationship operating between rumour, manuscript and print.”33 Although he presumably came to regret it, Leicester had initiated this conversation. Where his clients found a paragon of excellence, his critics saw “an aspiringe minde . . . tristinge after dignities, swaie and authoritie” far beyond those afforded by his place. Not only was the earl an ambitious upstart, according to these naysayers, but he was also an aging voluptuary “loste in lawless luste” and “base and filthy luxurie.”34 Leicester achieved unprecedented notoriety, becoming the most discussed member of the regime after the queen. His defenders wondered at his detractors, who found “new & strange kinds of rancor and venim (more then all the Poets from the beginning of the worlde could ever invent from the description of Envie, & the Furies themselves) wherewith to . . . empoison their most outragious slaunders, breathed out against him.”35 Because the Dudley bear and ragged staff was a frequent target, these “new & strange” attacks became identified with the sport of bearbaiting (see chapter 1).
There are, in other words, specific historical reasons that the “volumes of report” on the “doings” of the great sound like the “false, and most contrarious quest” of barking dogs to Shakespeare (Measure for Measure, 4.1.59–61), or that he developed a “strong if unconscious association between sex and publicity.”36 Shakespeare’s earliest reference to bearbaiting takes the form of a figurative assault on an earl proud of his badge; Clifford, playing on Warwick’s “rampant bear chain’d to the ragged staff,” threatens to “rend” the “bear / And tread it underfoot with all contempt, / Despite the bearard that protects the bear” (2 Henry VI, 5.1.203, 208–10). Although it lacks sexual overtones, this exchange links bearbaiting tropes to attacks on the bear and ragged staff badge, a visual symbol that Londoners would have identified with the Elizabethan Earl of Leicester. Plays like Merry Wives of Windsor and Twelfth Night exploit audience interest in such court connections in more subtle fashion, by casting their aging lovers as the bear-like objects of public scorn. In its first chapter, this book traces Shakespeare’s enduring fascination with the senex amans through Lyly’s Endymion to the Catholic exiles who first used bearbaiting tropes to portray the Elizabethan court as a hotbed of geriatric sexuality. Subsequent chapters show that Shakespeare addresses a range of timely subjects through the timeless figure of the old man in love, including the problems attendant on the succession (in Twelfth Night), the relation of Elizabeth I to the country that she governed (in the Falstaff plays), and the nature of the queen’s powers over male subjects (in Antony and Cleopatra). His lusty old men thus testify to the complicated pleasures afforded by the playwright’s exploitation of court scandal, as well as to his tendency to extend to his audiences the tools for political judgment.37
Although they participate in a “fashion,” Shakespeare’s contributions to the age-in-love tradition are distinguished by his self-consciousness about the commercial, political, and artistic implications of this figure. Metatheatrical devices underscore how the spectacle of a highly placed older man succumbing to erotic impulses produces debate among lower-placed beholders (e.g., the opening scene of Antony and Cleopatra). Insofar as this debate occurs among inferiors about superiors, and alludes to real as well as imaginary figures, it confirms that the theater is a “place of judgment,” to which “even the worste sorte of people” are admitted as “the judges of faultes there painted out,” a process that the antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson argues is “neyther lawfull nor convenient” but constitutes “a kinde of libelling, and defaming.”38 Gosson, who takes special exception to the lampooning of public figures on stage, was right; in an absolute monarchy, “private men, and subjects” had no “lawfull authoritie . . . to judge” the men that the sovereign had raised to public office.39 Yet Shakespeare shows us private subjects—including his Windsor wives—modeling such behavior repeatedly. By peddling the fantasy of calling a powerful man to “accompt . . . to see what other men could say against him,” Shakespeare embraces the democratizing functions of the theater, and positions his audiences as “adjudicating” publics, a rhetorical strategy that Peter Lake and Steven Pincus find characteristic of the emergent Post-Reformation public sphere.40
As Lake, Doty, Bruster, Paul Yachnin, Stephen Wittek, András Kisery, and others have argued, early moderns turned to the theater to satisfy cravings generated by changing modes of publicity, like the desire for “news” or for the political competence that might produce social prestige.41 Works about the court supply these cultural goods in abundance. The “new & strange” stories about Leicester were considered “news,” for example, since many believed them true (like participants in today’s internet culture, participants in early modern print culture were not always able to distinguish real from fake news). The “growing news consciousness” that marked Elizabethan culture was a top-down affair; in plays and pamphlets alike, “news” means “news at the court” (As You Like It, 1.1.97) and more specifically still news about “who’s in, who’s out” of favor at the court (King Lear, 5.3.15).42 While it privileged sexual morality and social decorum over mo
re political concerns, the late Elizabethan conversation about court favoritism was conducted among “private persons” about the public figures who ruled them.43 Theatrical representations of lecherous old courtiers contributed to this phenomenon by inciting audiences to laughter, considered in the period a form of judgment. In the Book of the Courtier, laughter performs the same work of enforcing social norms as “praising or censuring.” Not only does Castiglione discuss how to provoke laughter, but his courtiers also express their decorous “regard for time and place” by laughing together at manifest absurdities, like the idea of “old men [in] love.”44 The judgments encouraged by the theatrical fashion for old men’s venery were not valid because they conformed to the edicts of reason, as in the Habermasian ideal of the public sphere. Rather, these were social judgments, based on commonly held criteria regarding appropriate sexual and generational behavior, which put into play emotions of shame, envy, desire, disgust, embarrassment, and resentment. By making, in Henry Wotton’s memorable phrase, “greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous,” theatrical portraits of deviant elderly courtiers also distinguished moral status and social prestige from class rank, thereby granting audiences a measure of ascendancy over their nominal betters.45
Since perceptions of Elizabeth’s favorites impinged on perceptions of her legitimacy, these scathing portraits implicated the regime as a whole. Ultimately, the target was the queen herself. A commonplace of post-Machiavellian political thought held that subjects could judge monarchs by the company they keep. Blundeville argues, for example, that if counselors “be well chosen, the Prince is judged as well of straungers as of his owne subjects to be wise and carefull of his common wealth” but “in preferring will before reason” a prince risks “rather to be called a tyrant than a Prince.”46 Such views made relations of love or friendship fraught for all monarchs, who in showing affection for one subject risked alienating others.47 A female ruler whose promotions reflected “private affection and respect, or partialitie” incurred the additional risk of confirming that women were natural tyrants who privileged “will before reason.”48 Under such conditions, Sir Philip Sidney believed that “who goes about to undermine” Leicester’s good name “resolves withal to overthrow” the queen.49 Curtis Perry’s “dream of the impersonal monarch” first appeared during Elizabeth’s reign because it gave expression to gendered longings.50 The protopublic sphere may have been politically radical and democratizing, as Doty, Kisery, Lake, and others have argued, but it was also socially conservative. It enforced gender and generational hierarchies and gave rise to the modern idea that “to be properly public required that one rise above, or set aside, one’s private interests and expressive nature.” Michael Warner’s language here points to the constitutive role that social decorum—always a gendered phenomenon—plays in framing notions of publicity. By conjuring “affects of shame and disgust” through satiric depictions of elderly courtiers devoted to queens, plays helped redefine “proper” publicity in terms of traditional masculinity.51
As a group, late Elizabethan and early Jacobean playwrights were intent on exploiting the democratizing and misogynistic implications of “age in love” figures. Where Jonson or Middleton invariably present lecherous older men as sources of ridicule, Shakespeare’s aging lovers often produce more nuanced reactions, however. The critical tradition on Falstaff or Antony bears ample witness to these characters’ ability to elicit a range of responses beyond condemnation, including powerful emotions of loss, sympathy, and identification.
One explanation for Shakespeare’s distinctive approach can be found in the network of social relationships connecting Elizabeth’s most talented subject to her favorite subject. When Jonson and Middleton began writing plays, Leicester had been dead for years; neither playwright is thus likely to have had much exposure to the queen’s elder favorite. In contrast, Shakespeare, eight years older than Jonson and sixteen years older than Middleton, came of age when Leicester was still the premier theatrical patron in the country. Leicester died in 1588, at the beginning of Shakespeare’s career as writer, when the public theater was a fledgling institution, just starting to wean itself from court patronage. The founder of the Theatre where Shakespeare’s plays were first staged, James Burbage, had been a liveried member of the earl’s famous traveling troupe, as had the clown Will Kempe. Leicester was also instrumental in putting together the Queen’s Men, the company of elite players created for Elizabeth I in 1583, which included several more of Shakespeare’s future colleagues. One scenario for Shakespeare’s “lost years” has him starting his career with either Leicester’s players or with the Queen’s Men, which needed an actor when it visited Stratford in 1587.52 Even if he did not learn his craft under the earl’s protection, as so many of his colleagues did, Shakespeare must have taken a lifelong interest in Leicester, who was the local magnate in Warwickshire. The playwright’s boyhood coincided with the earl’s long public courtship of the queen, which had culminated in the legendary 1575 entertainments at Kenilworth, near Stratford. Some biographers believe Shakespeare to have attended these entertainments, alluded to in several plays.53 Had Leicester succeeded in his matrimonial ambitions, Warwickshire as a whole might have reaped the benefit.54 If the earl’s hopes of preferment were always pinned on pleasing the queen, Shakespeare’s hopes must have at one time been pinned on pleasing the earl.
Throughout his career, the homology between theatrical artist and royal favorite gave Shakespeare a way to orient himself in relation to the extraordinary woman who ruled the country. Already in Love’s Labor’s Lost Berowne berates the “allow’d” Boyet for being “some please-man, some trencher-knight, some Dick / That smiles his cheek in years and knows the trick / To make my lady laugh when she’s disposed” (5.2.478, 464–66). The aging upstart’s gift for “jesting merrily” with the Princess of France turns her aristocratic suitor’s show to a stale “Christmas comedy” (5.2.462–77). The idea that royal favorites were usurpers of aristocratic privilege who resembled actors or jesters is not new to Shakespeare. Those who resented the queen’s men often described them in theatrical terms. Robert Naunton reproduces a classic bit of gossip from the period, for example, when he claims “Hatton came to the court . . . as a private gentleman of the Inns of Court in a masque, and for his activity and person (which was tall and proportionable) taken into the Queen’s favor.”55 When wielded by less favored subjects, the analogy to theatrical artists highlighted violations of divinely sanctioned class and gender hierarchies. Elizabeth’s alleged proclivity for handsome and entertaining men—“Daunsers . . . [who] please her delycate Eye”—made mincemeat out of traditional criteria for judging masculine excellence, installing in pride of place a lowly “vegetable” like Hatton or a consummate hypocrite like Leicester, who knew how “to play his part well and dexterously.”56 According to one observer, the queen always surrounded herself with “very tall, fine strong men . . . so that I never in my life saw their like.”57 Critics proposed that the queen’s preference for such charismatic and attractive men threatened to undermine the hierarchical order over which she presided.
The emphasis on the favorites’ theatricality reflects anxiety about the destabilizing effect of the queen’s elective powers, which Shakespeare at times shares, as do the modern critics and historians who reproduce these unflattering stereotypes about Hatton and Leicester.58 But throughout his career Shakespeare also relishes the possibility that gifted artists who brought a bit of “sport” to court, and who knew how to “please . . . the ladies” might become “made men” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.1.10–12, 4.2.17–18). Louis Montrose characterizes Bottom’s experiences in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as “an outrageous theatrical realization of a personal fantasy” common among Elizabethans.59 A handful of privileged men had realized this fantasy, or so many Elizabethans believed. In addition to being the subjects of envy and slander, Hatton and Leicester were aspirational models of sorts, who had achieved what Tom MacFaul describes as the “high
est point to which a subject might aspire.”60 Their careers were a major source for the dream of social mobility that haunts Elizabethan culture, and that, in Shakespeare’s works, so often takes the peculiar form of election, on the grounds of sexual merit or personal attraction, by a regal woman. Bottom, Malvolio, Falstaff, Claudius, Othello, and Antony play out (or attempt to play out) different versions of this scenario, which revises orthodox humanist fantasies about meritocracy along unorthodox sexual and gendered lines.
The homology between theatrical artists and royal favorites shapes the age-in-love figures that concern me in this book, and helps to provoke the incompatible impulses—the desire to punish and the desire to emulate—that account for the complexity of Shakespeare’s lusty old men. In a political setting, the royal favorite’s resemblance to a theatrical artist evokes negative associations, prompting retaliation, like the verbal beatings that Hatton and Leicester endured, or the stage violence visited on characters like Claudius, Falstaff, or Malvolio. In a theatrical setting, where audiences share Elizabeth’s notorious “partialitie” for amusing performances, the same likeness can also conjure the adulterating emotions of pleasure and admiration that modify colder judgments. The obloquy reserved for lecherous older men in early modern culture thus allows Shakespeare to test his own faculties of suasion, his uncanny ability to turn apparent transgression into artistic transcendence. The playwright inherited a fundamentally satiric trope from classical authors like Plautus, which been adapted by earlier Elizabethan writers to convey a critical attitude toward Elizabeth I and her court. He experimented with this received material in a range of generic modes—submitting it to the self-reflective conventions of the sonnet or to the synthesizing tendencies of tragicomedy, for example. These experiments in turn produced new perspectives on the court and on the idea of artistry. Shakespearean age-in-love figures share a tendency to suppress “simple truth” (138.8) in favor of the lies, dreams, and “rare vision[s]” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.205) of the con artist and the artist. That these visions are often inspired by a “great fairy” (Antony and Cleopatra, 4.8.12) tells us something about the strong toil of Elizabeth I’s grace on Shakespeare’s imagination.
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