Although scholars often attribute Lyly’s choice of myth to his interest in arcane philosophical allegories, the Endymion myth also served Elizabethans to comment on the adulterating intimacy between monarchs and their favorites. At least one tradition emphasized carnal interpretations of the central relationship.137 In what may be the first Shakespearean allusion to this myth, Alice Arden testifies to its associations with upward mobility and sexual favoritism when she compares Endymion to her lover, the upstart Mosby: “Had chaste Diana kissed him, she like me / Would grow lovesick, and from her wat’ry bower / Fling down Endymion and snatch him up.”138 The disparity in status between the moon goddess and the shepherd recalled that between Elizabeth and her “amorous minions,” especially those perceived as “base and unpure persons” awarded “the highest honors and most profittable offices of her courte and cuntrie.”139 Elizabeth’s courtiers themselves used the myth to comment on patterns of disgrace and return to favor. In the wake of the Vavasour affair, the elderly Lee played a sleeping knight awakened by the queen in a 1592 entertainment at Ditchley, for example. Other subjects relied on the myth to speculate about the queen’s preferences for certain lower-born male courtiers. So Spenser imagines a “Cinthia” who once “didst love / though now unthought, / And for a fleece of woll, which privily, / The Latmian shepherd once unto thee brought / His pleasures with thee wrought.”140 The oblique allusion is to a version in which Endymion and the moon consummate their relationship and produce children—and to prevalent rumors about Elizabeth’s children by Leicester, or, given the “fleece of woll,” by Hatton, whom she had nicknamed her bellwether or sheep.141
Sir Francis Bacon certainly saw Endymion’s story as a “fable” about princes and their favorites:
For princes . . . do not easily admit to familiar intercourse men that are perspicacious and curious, whose minds are always on the watch and never sleep; but choose rather such as are of a quiet and complying disposition, and submit to their will without inquiring further, and shew like persons ignorant and unobserving, and as if asleep; displaying simple obedience rather than fine observation. With men of this kind princes have always been glad to descend from their greatness, as the moon from heaven.
Endymion’s sleep stands not for philosophical contemplation, here, but for the willing abdication of masculine prerogative, the adoption of an unreasoning position of submission, in exchange for royal “favours.”142 Bacon associates the waking state with rationality, curiosity, and perspicacity, while sleep connotes a descent into ignorance, a return to what Garrett Sullivan calls “vegetable and animal life.”143 As Bacon construes the part, moreover, the ideal favorite acts like the ideal woman—he is “quiet,” “complying,” “ignorant,” and “obedient.”144
Lyly has more empathy and admiration for “men of this kind” than does Bacon. Like all royal favorites, Endymion finds early in the play that his thoughts are “stitched to the stars . . . much higher . . . than I can reach” (1.1.5–7). Eumenides regards Endymion’s amorous ambitions as “vanities” (1.1.34), since “things immortal are not subject to affections” (1.1.9–10), but the play compares its hero favorably to his friend. Where one has “greatness of . . . mind,” the other’s “fortunes . . . creep on earth” (1.2.18; 1.1.84). Endymion’s “greatness” exacts a price, however, since “traps” await those who love “one that all the world wondereth at,” making them “unfortunate” (1.2.90–94). Endymion highlights the sacrifices demanded of favorites, including their renunciation of normal masculine prerogatives, like the right to marry and produce heirs. When scandalous rumors cause him to fall out of favor, Endymion asks the absent Cynthia,
Wouldst thou have me vowed only to thy beauty and consume every minute of time in thy service? Remember my solitary life, almost these seven years. Whom have I entertained but my own thoughts and thy virtues? What company have I used but contemplation? Whom have I wondered at but thee? Nay, whom have I not contemned for thee? (2.1.14–19)
Endymion’s questions are rhetorical; like Elizabeth, Cynthia expects her favorite to forgo all others. Although she assures Endymion that her “princely favour” (5.4.168) will bring its own benefits—“thou shalt find that Cynthia shineth not on thee in vain” (5.4.186–87)—these do not include the traditional rewards of comedy, namely legitimate children and marriage, since Endymion is excluded from the festive weddings at play’s end.
Cynthia’s disclaimer notwithstanding, the favorite’s commitment to the “solitary life” struck many as a “vain” form of sexuality, a perception exacerbated by the passing years. “Great princes’ favorites” are “but as the marigold at the sun’s eye,” in Shakespeare’s telling metaphor (25.5–6). “In favor with their stars,” they can boast of “public honour and proud titles” but leave no children behind (25.1–2), which is why the speaker urges the young man to emulate the reproductive habits of the rose instead. Marriage and begetting children were “essential to the achievement of patriarchal manhood in early modern England.”145 Allen appeals to this view when he writes with scorn about the men who committed to the “single lyfe to the danger of their soules, and decay of their famelies, to attend her [that is, Elizabeth’s] pleasure.”146 Although Endymion lacks Allen’s contemptuous emphasis on waste and futility, it highlights the same deviations from masculine norm. The “restored” Endymion secures the right to bask in Cynthia’s favor only by becoming the exception to the comic rule that has “all parties pleased” through marriage (5.4.211–12).
The concerns that Endymion raises regarding the “solitary life” of the favorite target certain members of the play’s original court audience. Hatton might have stood model for Endymion in that he had “divorc[ed] himself . . . from the amiableness of all ladies” to feed on his monarch’s “favour” (2.1.44–47): “I have most entirely loved your person and service,” he wrote to Elizabeth, “to the which . . . I have everlastingly vowed my whole life, liberty, and fortune . . . God knoweth I never sought place but to serve you.”147 Although this decision brought him considerable status, Hatton had no children who might benefit from his success. By cultivating the queen’s favors, Elizabeth’s favorites assured their social and political elevation but risked canceling out other aspects of their identity. The queen’s men were aware of the risks they took “to attend her pleasure.” Explaining to his mistress, Lady Sheffield, why he could not marry her, Leicester noted that
you must think hit ys some marvelous cause that forceth me thus to be cause almost of the ruyne of my none [own] howse . . . yf I shuld marry I am seuer never to have favor of them that I had rather yet never have wyfe than lose them, yet ys ther nothing in the world next that favor that I wold not gyve to be in hope of leaving some childern behind me, being nowe the last of our howse.148
The demand that he give up “hope of leaving some childern behind” ultimately proved too much; in 1579, the earl secretly married Lettice, Countess of Essex, cousin and look-alike of his queen. Leicester was devastated when his young son, born of that union, died in the summer of 1584, shortly after the publication of Leicester’s Commonwealth. Acknowledging that the “love of a child be dear,” Hatton reminded Leicester in his letter of condolence that “of men’s hearts you enjoy more than millions,” given his status as “a grave and faithfull Councillor; a pillar of our long-continued peace; a happy nourisher of our most happy Commonwealth.”149 In his response Leicester pronounced himself a “true and faithful man to [Elizabeth] for I have lived and so will die only hers.”150 It is habitual to read such hyperbolic statements cynically, but Leicester had nothing to gain by portraying himself as the queen’s devoted lover to Hatton, who also portrayed himself that way. Rather, their letters suggest that a camaraderie developed between these men who had started out as rivals, born of the sacrifices that they had made for their “marvelous cause.”151 Elizabeth might have been, like Lyly’s Cynthia, “jealous . . . careless, suspicious, and secure,” but Hatton and Leicester nevertheless reckoned themselves, like Endym
ion, her “fish . . . which at [her] waxing is as white as the driven snow and at [her] waning as black as the deepest darkness” (2.1.31–37).
Or Hatton reckoned himself her flesh and Leicester her fowl. Ralegh was her fish. While Lyly’s animal similes are often viewed in terms of his stylistic innovations, they also mimic court discourse in their allusions to Elizabeth’s pet names for her favorites.152 When Hatton felt eclipsed by Ralegh, Elizabeth reassured the older man that “the water, and the creatures therein, do content her nothing so well as you ween, her food having been ever more of flesh than fish,” and she pronounced Hatton, her “pecora campi” far “more contenting to her than any waterish creatures.”153 At court, the representation of a moon goddess whose “authority commandeth all creatures” had a way of implicating actual individuals (1.2.34).154 When Sir Tophas’s “honour” compels him to declare war on the “monster ovis”—“a black enemy with rough locks—it may be a sheep, and ovis is a sheep” (2.2.96–98)—courtiers surely thought of the swarthy Hatton, who described himself in letters as her “Majesty’s sheep and most bound vassal” or, more prosaically, as her “Mutton.”155 To an audience attuned to “analogical reading,” the conflict between Sir Tophas and the “monster ovis” must have parodied the rivalries between Elizabeth’s favorites.156
When the “bewitched” (1.1.88) Endymion identifies himself as Cynthia’s tamed fish, or when Sir Tophas proposes to do battle with his “black and cruel enemy” (2.2.88), we might not only hear an allusion to Ralegh, Leicester, or Hatton, but also to Circe, the mythic sorceress who transfigures men into animals. Tellingly, Lyly compares the position of the courtier to that of a domesticated animal, like a squirrel carried by a gentlewoman “in a chain”—strange “what things are made for money” (2.2.148–50).157 Cynthia’s vocabulary of power draws on the process of domestication; she threatens, for example, to “tame” the “tongues” and “thoughts” of unruly subjects (3.1.17–18). Reacting to Semele’s failure to submit, Cynthia also resorts to verbal brutality, with the promise of actual brutality to follow: “Speaks the parrot? She shall nod hereafter with the signs. Cut off her tongue, nay, her head, that . . . will not be persuaded!” (5.4.224–27). Like Elizabeth, who was fond of bridling, muzzling, and collaring metaphors, Cynthia uses animal metaphors as a rhetorical means of securing her own authority, while ensuring what Bacon calls a “complying disposition” in her courtiers.158 Cynthia’s palace thus resembles “Circes dwelling place,” where “Lyons, wolves and beares” welcome visitors with “gentle looke,” “fawning feete,” and “wanton tails.”159 In its depiction of its dominating and dehumanizing moon goddess, Endymion flirts with the construction of Elizabeth as Circe found in tracts like Allen’s.160
The affinity of Cynthia to Circe attests to the queasy “proximity” of “praise and blame” in Elizabethan political discourse, a consequence of the queen’s transformation of apparent weaknesses like age or gender into political assets.161 This affinity marks a fault line, where the representations of loyal subjects converge with those of treasonous critics. George Chapman’s “Hymnus in Cynthiam” offers a case in point. It denies that Cynthia’s interest in Endymion is carnal, noting that she affects him “for his studious intellect.” But it also concludes with a request that Cynthia “execute a Magicke miracle: / Slip everie sort of poisond herbes, and plants, / and bring the rabid mastiff to these hants.” As Helen Hackett notes, Chapman’s dream here becomes a “nightmare,” which casts Elizabeth as a Circe-like enchantress surrounded by “rabid mastiffs”—the dogs used, not coincidentally, in bearbaitings.162 In their attempt to mobilize all “true Englishmen” against the Elizabethan regime, anticourt polemicists had, it seems, expressed concerns about the queen’s transformative “favour” shared by even her most devoted courtiers. So Leicester’s planned entertainments at Kenilworth included a play that figured Elizabeth as a type of Diana but concluded with a more ominous Ovidian vision of the queen who had “turned and converted” various courtiers, including her host, “into most monstrous shapes and proportions. As some into fishes, some other into foules.”163 Hatton, in a similar vein, opined that “The Queene did fishe for men’s souls, and had so sweet a baite, that no one coude escape hir network”; in truth, Harington explains, “she knew every one’s parte, and by this fishing . . . she caught many poor fish, who little knew what snare was laid for them.”164 Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Elizabeth used a “bended hook” to draw up her male favorites, transforming these “Tawny-finned fishes” in the process (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.5.13–14). Wielded by Elizabeth’s favorites, the “poor fish” susceptible to her charms and traps, transfiguration metaphors celebrate the queen’s power while expressing lingering anxieties regarding its effects.
The passing years can only have exacerbated the experience of deformity or degradation associated with being Elizabeth’s “fish.” It was one thing for Leicester to present himself as “Deep Desire,” who had undergone “a strange and cruel metamorphosis” at the queen’s hand in 1575. It was quite another thing for this image of Leicester to circulate again in 1587, when Gascoigne’s description of the “pleasures” at Kenilworth was reprinted. The claims that no “delay could daunt [the earl], no disgrace could abate his passions” had by then acquired unpleasant new connotations.165 The reappearance of the “Princely Pleasures” must have abetted widespread perceptions of the earl’s vanity, since the hopes it expressed—that the queen might marry and might marry the earl—had proved decisively futile. “The stately cedar whose top reacheth unto the clouds” had by then indicated her intention never to bow her “head to the shrubs that grow in the valley” (2.2.104–6).166 Insofar as Leicester was still presenting himself as Deep Desire, he had, like Endymion, slept “out his youth and flowering time and become dry hay before” he knew himself “green grass” (2.3.37–39).
The late Elizabethan moon cult channeled the anxieties generated by the exceptional position of men at the aging court in a productive fashion, emphasizing the control that these men could exert in reshaping their responses to their confounding queen. While it may be true that works like Endymion portray “the victimisation of the male courtier” at the hands of “the unnatural woman at the centre” of Elizabethan culture, they do not present these courtiers as “powerless.”167 Instead, the moon cult translated into the court’s own idiom the Neoplatonic injunction that elderly courtiers learn how to “check the perversity of sense with the bridle of reason.” Ralegh draws on a number of related concepts when he distinguishes Elizabeth/Diana from Circe, for example: “A knowledge pure it is hir [Diana’s] woorth to know, / With Circes let them dwell, that thinke not so.”168 His contrast implies a basis for comparison; the difference between Diana and Circe does not inhere in the goddesses but in male reactions to and perceptions of them. Ralegh’s oblique allusion to Actaeon reminds us that Diana, like Circe, can turn men into beasts, a scenario courtiers avert by policing their thoughts, sublimating their sexual impulses, and restricting their ambitions to “knowledge pure.”
In her classic essay on Petrarchan uses of the Actaeon myth, Nancy J. Vickers describes the myth in Freudian terms, as revealing the anxieties that “powerless men (male children)” feel “in relation to powerful women (mothers).”169 In Elizabethan England, the political applications of the myth dominated the familial ones, endowing the “dismemberment” that might follow on transgressive desire with a measure of literalness. Actaeon’s illicit gazing at Diana made him an exemplum of lust; as Golding explains in his dedicatory letter to Leicester, the dogs “with greedie teeth and griping pawes their Lord in peeces dragge” to punish him for his “foule excess of chamberworke.”170 Golding’s bestseller prominently displayed the Dudley bear badge in its front matter, helping to promote the association of Actaeon with transgressive courtiers baited by dogs for their excesses of “chamberwoorck,” like the earl.171 Even the queen used the myth to warn male courtiers about the consequences of such unchaste overreaching. The garden at No
nesuch Palace included “a grove (lucus) named after Diana, the goddess,” featuring a “basin” which portrayed “the story of how the three goddesses took their bath naked and sprayed Actaeon with water, causing antlers to grow upon his head, and of how his own hounds afterwards tore him to pieces.” The grove also contained a small temple, with marble tables inscribed with related mottos, reminding passers-by that “the goddess of chastity gives no unchaste councils, she does not council disgrace, but avenges it,” and that “from an unclean fountain impure springs, from an unpleasant mind a sight defiled.”172 Combined with these mottoes, the myth impressed on courtiers the need to police themselves, lest they suffer Actaeon’s fate.
Working with these same Ovidian allusions, Endymion strives to make the same distinctions between pure and impure responses to the queen. Lyly assigns aging a crucial role in this process of differentiation by emphasizing the maturation of his hero, an antitype of Actaeon who keeps the rabid dogs at bay when he prefers the “unspotted” attractions of Cynthia to the sensual allurements of Circe. Lyly brings the latter figure on stage as Tellus, the would-be enchantress who yearns for the power to turn “lovers into beasts” (1.2.74).173
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