Age in Love

by Jacqueline Vanhoutte

  That the years were hard on Leicester did not help his case. Robert Naunton claims that having been a “goodly person” in his youth, “toward his latter end . . . he grew high colored and redfaced.”83 In 1585, the French ambassador reached a similar conclusion: Leicester, once a “most handsome gentleman,” had “become quite plump,” an observation substantiated by William Segar’s 1587 portrait of the earl.84

  As the earl became old and grew fat, the lover’s role he had espoused increasingly became a liability. Those eager to mock Leicester portrayed him not just as “lecherous, treacherous, brutal and cunning” but also, more damningly, as bestial and “foolish.”85 The inconsistencies between Leicester’s youthful ambitions and his actual achievements helped tarnish his public image. By the time Elizabeth agreed to a more activist policy in the Netherlands, and charged Leicester with the execution of it in 1585, he was old (at least by the standards of the day) and failed miserably.86 Leicester accepted the title of governor-general of the Netherlands in 1586, thereby confirming allegations of misplaced ambition and earning himself a public reprimand from the queen. According to various sources, his stay in the Netherlands consisted, moreover, mainly of banquets and entertainments.87 The combination of hubristic overreaching, sensual overindulgence, and military fiasco proved rich fodder to critics, who characterized the earl as a vain old man who had long promised far more than he could deliver, a “noble lecher / that used art to provoke,” a “valiant soldier / that never drew his sword.”88 Summarizing a long tradition of such comments, Naunton claims the earl knew “to play his part well and dexterously, but his play was chiefly at the foregame”; in the matter of “his lance,” he “had more of Mercury than of Mars, and . . . his device might have been . . . Veni, vidi, redivi.”89 The phallic innuendos, the emphasis on age and vanity, the conflation of (failed) sexual, military, and theatrical performance became staples of anti-Leicestrian lore.

  Fig. 2. Portrait of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, by William Segar (1587). By permission of Hatfield House Library and Archives, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England.

  The incongruous discrepancy between the earl’s aging body and his indefatigable libido was first established by Leicester’s Commonwealth in 1584. It depicts a ruthless and duplicitous man, comically given over to every behavior that, according to doctors, accelerated the processes of aging: excessive eating, excessive drinking, and “overmuch venery.”90 As Sir Philip Sidney observes, Leicester’s detractors thought nothing of representing the “same man extremely weak of body, and infinitely luxurious.”91 One memorable passage describes the earl as a man who like

  old adulterers is more libidinous at this day than ever before, more given to procure love in others by conjuring, sorcery, and other such means. And albeit for himself, both age and nature spent do somewhat tame him from the act, yet wanteth he not will, as appeareth by the Italian ointment procured not many years past by his surgeon or mountebank of that country, whereby (as they say) he is able to move his flesh at all times, for keeping of his credit, howsoever his inability be otherwise for performance; as also one of his physicians reported to an earl of this land, that his Lordship had a bottle for his bedhead of ten pounds the pint to the same effect.92

  The artificial means—“conjuring, sorcery” and “Italian ointment[s]”—that hold up Leicester’s flagging “flesh” so he can “move” according to his “will” establish his sexuality as a violation of both “age and nature.” A theatrical prop of sorts, the ointment allows the earl temporarily to overcome his “inability” to turn in the sexual “performance” of a younger man.

  To portray the queen’s favorite as an aging man of giant proportions and appetites, Leicester’s Commonwealth also offers up playful renderings of the Dudley bear and ragged staff, among the most common visual symbols in the period. This ubiquitous device originated with the Beauchamp-Neville Earls of Warwick, relatives of the Dudleys through female descent. The badge connected the earl’s upward mobility with his matrimonial ambitions, since he assumed it shortly before being ennobled, at a 1562 meeting of the Knights of the Garter, when a majority of the Knights petitioned the queen to marry her favorite subject.93 Meant to advertise his connection to the legendary King Arthur, the bear and ragged staff adorned Leicester’s belongings, from books to buildings, from linens to letters, from servant’s liveries to the earl’s ceremonial armor. The device also appeared in the printed works by his many clients, and featured prominently in his courtship of the queen. In a 1570 letter to Elizabeth, for example, Leicester imagines himself her bear, “tied to your stake . . . in the bond-chain of dutiful service,” begging her not to “muzzle” her “beast.”94 A gift that Leicester gave Elizabeth in 1573 made similar use of the muzzled bear to signal his devotion; it was “a fanne of white fethers, sett in a handell of golde . . . and on each side a white beare and twoe perles hanging, a lyon ramping with a white moseled beare at his foote.”95 In the splendid entertainments at Kenilworth two years later, considered his final bid for the queen’s hand, Leicester included an actual bearbaiting (this event produced the most complete description we have of the sport).96 Because of such factors, the heraldic Dudley bear came to refer to the earl in his aspect as the queen’s lover.

  Leicester’s Commonwealth capitalizes on the familiar bear badge in a number of ways. It depicts Leicester as a predatory hypocrite who “feedeth . . . upon our differences in religion, to the fatting of himself and ruin of the realm.” The badge also proves a rich source of fat jokes: “you know the bear’s love . . . is all for his own paunch.” And it helps recast Leicester’s “service” in sexual terms, most notably when “the Bear shalbe taken to her Majesty’s hand and fast chained to a stake, with muzzle-cord, collar, and ring, and all other things necessary, so that her Majesty shall bait him at her pleasure without all danger of biting, breaking loose, or any other inconvenience whatsoever.” Used by the earl to signal his loyalty to Elizabeth I, the muzzled bear comes to signify instead his beastly subjection to the queen’s “pleasure.”97 The bearbaiting episode reconfigures the earl’s social transgressions as natural transgressions, thus highlighting the ways in which the sexual politics of the Elizabethan court violated “deep and unwritten rules about the kinds of behavior and eroticism that are appropriate to the public.”98 In its satiric recasting of the favorite-as-royal-pet motif, this passage also articulates a central paradox about Leicester, a “subject without subjection” who was at once immensely potent and publicly emasculated. The authors avoid direct criticism of Elizabeth I, enjoining her only to “turn her countenance aside” from her lecherous minion so that he might be brought to trial.99 By depicting the queen as a Circean dominatrix, however, they present her unorthodox relationship with this “old adulterer” as a source of both threat and titillation.

  The unprecedented popularity of Leicester’s Commonwealth suggests that others enjoyed its portrayal of Leicester as an oversexed old man.100 As Peter Lake notes, the tract presented itself as a rational debate among “loyal Englishmen of different religious persuasion,” thus modeling “a discussion between men of good will” accessible to all.101 The authors’ surmise that “many subjects . . . otherwise most faithful” bore the earl a “great mislike” because of “the excessive favor showed to this man so many years without desert” turned out to be accurate.102 Even those who shared Leicester’s political commitments found the pamphlet’s guilty pleasures irresistible; the Earl of Ormond caught Sir John Harrington reading it in secret and teased him about it in front of Leicester.103 By spawning multiple imitations, Leicester’s Commonwealth put into circulation what the ever-perceptive Sidney calls a “dictionary of slanders” about the earl.104 The public chatter about the “musseled” bear who led “the princly lion anie waie semes best to his owne luste and liking” endowed the famous badge, inscribed with the Garter motto “Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense,” with a peculiar irony.105 As if in acknowledgement of this phenomenon, the 1585 French translation of Leicester’s Co
mmonwealth includes a frontispiece of the bear, chained to his staff, and baited by multiple figures, both high (the hand of God) and low (a peasant).106

  William Camden confirms “that evill speakers tooke occasion to tugge and teare at [the earl] continually . . . by defamatory libels.”107 The frequently reproduced image of a great bear beset by barking dogs, which became a mainstay of anti-Leicestrian discourse, conveys the hierarchical nature of the attacks and the high level of public noise these generated.108 Strikingly, the earl’s “evill speakers” came from different backgrounds but shared a common vocabulary of ridicule. Critics of the earl’s behavior in the Netherlands opined, for example, that the “bear he never can prevail / to lion it, for lack of a tail.” And shortly after Leicester died in 1588, his theatrical troupe reported the cobbler William Storage for “leawd woordes utteryd ageynst the raggyd staff.”109 Storage was imprisoned for his offense, one indication that authorities saw such remarks as a threat, even when (especially if?) they came from a cobbler.

  Elizabeth I’s other councillors made common cause with the earl because they felt that the slanders against Leicester exposed the regime in its entirety to public judgment. Francis Walsingham pronounced Leicester’s Commonwealth “the most malicious written thing that ever was penned sithence the beginning of the world,” warning that its malice would taint all, including the queen.110 Similarly, a government proclamation ordering the suppression of antigovernment tracts argued that works like Leicester’s Commonwealth tried to make Elizabeth’s government “odious and hateful” by inciting “obloquy and hatred” for “her majesty’s principal noblemen, councillors, judges, and ministers of justice.”111 Picking up on the dissidents’ desire “to bark at the Bear that is so well britched,” Sidney pointed out in defense of his uncle that “the wolves that mean to destroy the flock hate most the truest and valiantest dogs” and that those who “persecuted . . . councillors” never ceased “before they had as well destroyed the kings themselves.”112 Sidney never published this document, probably because the government was anxious about further printed “disputation on the subject of the Earl’s morals.”113 The Privy Councillors thought, in other words, that the public debate about one of their own posed in and of itself a threat to the queen’s authority.

  Fig. 3. Discours de la Vie Abominable, Ruses, Trahisons . . . Desquelles a Usé et Use Journellement my Lorde de Lecestre (1585), 2r. RB606530, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

  The authors of anti-Leicestrian tracts had put the earl on “trial” for his “deserts towards his country,” encouraging their readers to pass judgment and thus to participate in what Michael Warner calls “the being of the sovereign.”114 Appalled, the Elizabethan regime resorted to prohibition and censorship to regain control of the conversation. On December 16, 1584, the government tried and failed to get a bill against “scandalous libelling” through the House of Lords. The following March it tried and failed to get similar legislation passed in the House of Commons.115 A few months later, in June 1585, the Privy Council issued a letter demanding still stricter suppression of the “seditious and traitorous books and libels,” in which “her Majesty” took specific exception to the “slanderous and hateful matter against [her] very good lord the Earl of Leicester” and “declare[d] . . . his innocence to all the world.” Tellingly, the letter imagines the “malicious, false, and slanderous” accounts of the earl widely “dispersed and spread abroad” by “contemptuous persons” to the general public. The Privy Council framed the controversy about Leicester as a new kind of crisis, in which an explosive and transformative mode of political communication (“the slanderous devices against the said Earl”) encouraged an infinite public (“all the world”) to think itself more discerning than “her Majesty,” who in retaining the earl’s services had allegedly “failed in good judgment and discretion.” The word “devices,” used to convey the proliferation of these slanderous materials, evokes both the mechanical reproduction associated with print technology and the heraldic emblem satirized in the attacks on Leicester.116

  Lyly’s Endymion ends on a parable about “a man walking abroad, the wind and sun [striving] for sovereignty.” Although the wind blows hard, tearing at the man’s coat, he is forced to concede victory to the sun, whose warmth succeeds where the wind’s bluster failed. The wind, the epilogue hastens to explain, is a “storm” instigated by the “malicious that seek to overthrow us.” The “sun” is the Aurora-like Elizabeth I, the “dread sovereign” whose “favourable beams” cause all, court and cast alike, to kneel submissively at her feet (1–16). Although other versions of this parable exist, Lyly’s interpretation of it—his association of the wind with the spiteful rumors, “tattling tongues” (4.1.22), and “wolves barking at . . . Cynthia” (5.1.132) referenced in the play, of the sun with the transformative qualities of the queen’s favor, of the contest between them as one over sovereignty—is unique.117 At least one reader of Endymion latched on to this interpretation; when he imagines turning his “storm-beaten face” to the sun, Shakespeare’s speaker reproduces the parable’s association with sexual “disgrace” and “shame” (Sonnets, 34.6–9).118 Scholars have long noted that Lyly’s play seems prompted by a court-related scandal, although efforts to connect the play to specific events have faltered thus far.119 If Lyly’s prologue coyly invites the very “pastimes” it rejects as inappropriate (7), the epilogue, by echoing the documents relating to the suppression of Leicester’s Commonwealth and other pamphlets, points to a relevant “pastime”: the controversies that attended the court’s alleged defiance of “age and nature.”120 In Endymion, Lyly provides a model for silencing the howling of the wolves, the pervasive gossip that Leicester’s Commonwealth characterized as “the tempest of men’s tongues, which tattled busily” of Leicester’s “actions and affairs.”121 Endymion is a figure of “age in love,” reclaimed and redeemed from scurrilous conjecture or “spite” (4.3.158), fortified against “the malicious” tongues who do “but stiffen our thoughts and make them sturdier in storms” (epilogue, 11–13). Kneeling before Elizabeth, speaking in the first person plural, the actor delivering the epilogue insists on the representative nature of Endymion’s experiences, while his phallic metaphors assert, against the “wind” (9) of rumor, the compatibility of masculine virtue and service to the queen.122

  While Leicester’s Commonwealth made Leicester an embodiment of “age in love” to a broad reading public, matters were more complicated at court, where the earl’s contemporaries also played the role of lover in vain, and where the problem of aging male sexuality needed to be addressed with corresponding delicacy. The queen’s “lovers” were all still alive in 1588, when Endymion was staged at court: Hatton was forty-nine, Leicester fifty-five, Walsingham fifty-six, and Burghley sixty-nine. The Earl of Oxford, Lyly’s patron, was thirty-eight—younger than the others, but by no means a spring chicken, at least by the standards of Tudor England, where the average life expectancy at birth was thirty-seven.123 The cast of Lyly’s play reflects the preponderance of aging men at court; it calls for at least five, and arguably more, old men.124 Despite (or perhaps because of) the prologue’s disavowal of topical allusion, scholars have expended much energy in trying to link these male characters with historical persons.125 An “ancient man” who appears to Endymion in a dream, for example, might represent Lord Burghley.126 Geron could be the Earl of Shrewsbury, and Eumenides the Earl of Sussex.127 Sir Tophas, the braggart soldier whose amorous adventures constitute the subplot, has been associated with Gabriel Harvey and Philip II of Spain.128 Corsites, the captain who first guards and then marries Tellus, Cynthia’s rival and double, may be Sir Henry Lee, the queen’s old champion, who first guarded and then bedded Anne Vavasour; or Sir Amyas Paulet, who last guarded but most assuredly did not bed Mary, Queen of Scots.129 Endymion himself might refer to James IV of Scotland, Leicester, or Oxford.130 In short, everyone who was anyone in late Elizabethan England had reason to see himself in the gray-bearded boy acto
rs of Lyly’s play.

  As the general nature of his allegory suggests, Lyly extends the trope of “mundus scenescit” to the collective plight of aging Elizabethan courtiers. That rival arguments identify Endymion with Leicester and Oxford reveals just how capacious Lyly’s mirror is, for these two were from different generations, belonged to distinct court factions, and had different religious affiliations (even if Leicester had allegedly enjoyed Oxford’s feminine “leavings”).131 The details of Endymion’s case—he loves Cynthia, he makes a mistake, he falls out of favor, he spends time in exile, he returns to Cynthia’s good graces—accord with the contours of most courtly careers, including Leicester’s, Oxford’s, Hatton’s, Ralegh’s, and Lee’s.132 Given this indeterminacy, Sallie Bond argues that Lyly’s hero functions as an “Everycourtier,” “prisoner of his own emotional role” as Petrarchan lover.133 But Endymion’s cri de coeur to Cynthia—“Have I not spent my golden years in hopes, waxing old with wishing, yet wishing nothing but thy love?” (2.1.23–25)—expresses frustration not just with having to play the role of the lover but also with having to play it into his sunset years.

  Growing old posed an occupational hazard for Elizabeth’s favorites, who could not heed medical advice to make “an ende of bodily luste” despite their need to secure a reputation for “good counsaille.”134 Noting that Cynthia’s “wavering, waxing, and waning” (1.1.39–40) does not affect her dazzling beauty, Lyly’s play concentrates instead on how her senescent courtiers might “cease off . . . to feed so much upon fancies” and avoid a “dotage no less miserable than monstrous” (1.1.28–30). According to Cicero, “libidinous volupte” is a quality “founde in younge men” but when “this folishnes . . . entangleth and captivateth the senses of old men” who are “light witted, & keep not them selves within the limittes of reason” it “is commonly called Dotage.”135 When applied to Endymion’s feelings for Cynthia, the word emphasizes the convergence of senility and sexual infatuation, casting aging as a problem for the men attracted to the moon goddess, rather than for the moon goddess herself. Lyly turns to Castiglione’s Bembo, who holds that the elderly courtier can be “inflamed with those loves that are sweet without bitterness,” for a solution: his hero narrowly avoids a “monstrous” fate by pursuing an “unspotted” and age-appropriate love (5.4.167) for Cynthia, thereby abiding by court protocols without violating generational decorum.136