As I mentioned above, the court dramatist alters the classical myth, in which Endymion remains eternally young, to have his hero change perceptibly over the course of the play. Other characters comment on this transformation: Endymion’s “golden locks” become “silver hairs,” his “chin, on which scarcely appeareth soft down” becomes “filled with bristles as hard as broom” (2.3.34–41). Lyly surrounds his sleeping hero with four other aging or aged male lovers, moreover—Geron, Corsites, Sir Tophas, and, arguably, Eumenides. The play’s preoccupation with superannuated male sexuality elicits little critical commentary, perhaps because critics are reluctant to consider the possibility that all the male characters get older. While acknowledging Endymion’s “visible signs of age,” for example, David Bevington finds that “almost surely, the other members of the court have not aged visibly along with him, despite plentiful evidence of a long lapse of time.” Perhaps the theory that Lyly’s play employs a “double sense of time” developed as a palatable alternative to the idea of a stage full of aging lovers.174 In fact, the play insists that everyone but the immortal Cynthia is subject to time. Even the sapling next to which Endymion falls asleep in act 2 grows into a tree by act 5. While some characters, like Geron, are old when introduced, others, like Eumenides, age along with Endymion. When the baffled Endymion wakes up from his long sleep, he fails not just to recognize his own aged body but also that of his best friend. Gazing on Eumenides’ altered face as in a mirror, Endymion theorizes that his “affection is old and [his] appetite cold” (5.1.174–75). Eumenides has become an old man, a state that Endymion finds, in accordance with the medical and philosophical authorities of the time, incompatible with a hot sensual appetite.
In contrast to earlier versions of the myth, which focus on the moon’s susceptibility to human beauty, Lyly’s revision also focuses on Endymion’s susceptibility to feminine beauty.175 Lyly’s hero endures his fate because of his sexual misbehavior, unlike his classical analogue, whose sleep is a gift from the gods. This alteration reflects the common association of sleep to lust; according to Sullivan, “passionate excess and immoderate sleep” were considered “states of being over which reason has no restraining influence . . . sleep and the passions each mark humans as functionally the same as beasts.”176 When they mock Endymion, the children of the subplot remind us that sensual love is emasculating: it “taketh men’s stomachs away that they cannot eat, their spleen that they cannot laugh, their hearts that they cannot fight, their eyes that they cannot sleep, and leaveth nothing but livers to make nothing but lovers” (2.2.9–13). Despite the risk of dismemberment and emasculation, Lyly’s hero cannot resist the “allurements of pleasure” or his “loose desires” (1.2.46–50) for Tellus. Topical readings have identified Tellus, who plays earth to Cynthia’s heaven, with Lettice Knollys, Douglas Sheffield, Anne Vavasour, or Mary, Queen of Scots.177 While these ladies certainly drew attention to the problem of courtly male sexuality (all four have cameos in Leicester’s Commonwealth), the logic of Lyly’s allegory also makes Tellus a dark reflection of Elizabeth’s body natural.178
Lyly splits his queen in two, presenting her body politic as Cynthia, the “more than mortal” object of platonic adoration (1.2.19). The earthly Tellus yearns for adoration of a different sort, recalling polemical accounts of a queen whose enchanting ways made men choose the “single lyfe . . . to attend her pleasure.” As Curtis Perry points out, the subject of royal favoritism “focuses attention on the gap between the king’s two bodies” because political rewards are allotted according to personal preference.179 What renders Cynthia superior to Tellus is the fact that “Cynthia governeth all things” (1.2.29–30); her politic “majesty” distinguishes her from her more natural counterpart (2.3.18). Tellus, meanwhile, recalls Allen’s Elizabeth/Circe. She intends to “entangle” Endymion in a “sweet net,” catching him by means of “witchcraft” (1.2.44, 82), forcing him to use “his sharp wit . . . in flattering of [her] face and devising sonnets in [her] favour,” and encouraging him to spend “the prime of his youth and pride of his time . . . in melancholy passions, careless behaviour, untamed thoughts, and unbridled affections” (1.2.64–67).180 Tellus even proffers the empty promises to suitors that, according to Allen, caused the “sum of the nobility” to remain unmarried for Elizabeth’s sake (see 4.1.60–64).181
In this reading, Endymion’s forty-year sleep—induced by Tellus, with the help of the witchlike Dipsas—signifies his surrender to fleshly lust for the queen (and not, as is sometimes argued, for other women), which renders him vulnerable to malicious tongues. “It is an old saying,” Eumenides observes, “that a waking dog doth afar off bark at a sleeping lion” (3.1.10–11). Hackett argues that “dream-settings” like the one in Endymion were popular at court because they “enabled erotic plots to be constructed around Elizabeth.”182 The possibility that Tellus and Cynthia represent two facets of the same entity resolves the apparent contradiction between the claims that Endymion makes regarding his “solitary life” and evidence of his ongoing relationship with Tellus. The play implies that this relationship has been consummated—Tellus has “yielded” to Endymion (5.4.79)—and it may even imply, in its references to Tellus having made a “picture of Endymion” (5.4.264), that the union produced a child.183 These rumors swirling about Tellus and Endymion recall the ones about Elizabeth and her favorites, like the claims “that Lord Robert kept her majesty” and that he “hath had five children by the queen.”184 Within the framework of the play, these rumors are the only ones that can account for the “many wolves barking at Cynthia.”
While the feelings of lust that Tellus inspires might be tolerable in a young man, Castiglione’s Bembo would find them reprehensible in an old one. Aging gracefully requires the sublimation of erotic passion into platonic admiration. In Lyly’s peculiarly Elizabethan revision of these Neoplatonic motifs, it requires Endymion to forgo Tellus (the queen’s body natural) in favor of Cynthia (the queen’s body politic), for whom “all things must be not only without lust but without suspicion of lightness” (4.1. 75–76). Only when the hero’s “fair face” has “turned to withered skin,” does he learn to bring these “thoughts within the compass of [his] fortunes” (4.3.86). Cynthia rewards him with the chaste Neoplatonic kiss that wakes him up, a kiss that “may be said to be the joining of souls rather than of bodies,” and that thus is allowed even to old men.185 To be sure, the moon goddess remains concerned that “eating immoderately or sleeping again too long” will cause her favorite “to fall into a deadly surfeit or into his former sleep” (5.1.155–56). By echoing Renaissance treatises on aging, which emphasized the nefarious effects of “surfette” on “the memorie and reasonable parte” of the aging male, Cynthia establishes herself as an antitype of Medea, whose sexual rejuvenation of the aged Aeson made her “an emblem of unnatural desire” in the period.186 Although Cynthia does magically rejuvenate Endymion by play’s end, his metamorphosis hinges on his love becoming “unspotted” by sexuality. A kind of logic, deriving from humoral accounts of the body, informs this final transformation. Having made an “ende to bodily lust,” Endymion conserves his vital heat and so is able “to waxe yonge agayne,” thus overcoming his resemblance to Tithonus.187 Lyly’s hero achieves the mentality of an old man in the body of a youth, neatly reversing the age-in-love figure that he embodied earlier in the play, and becoming the masculine counterpart of Cynthia/Elizabeth. Under such conditions—and only under such conditions—Cynthia can allow Endymion to persevere in his feelings for her, rewarding them with royal “favour” (5.4.177).
Lyly’s play might thus be seen as a recuperative, didactic effort directed at Elizabeth’s aging favorites, who had since their youth expressed their desire for the queen in eroticized terms, and who were now subject to unprecedented public ridicule for remaining incongruously trapped in the posture of the lover. Endymion offers these courtiers a choice: they can model themselves after the protagonist, who wakes up to his gray hairs in time to adjust his behavi
or, who gives up all claim to a physical relationship with Cynthia, and who learns to take “more pleasure in [his] aged thoughts than ever [he] did in [his] youthful actions” (5.4.1175–76). Or they can, like the other old men in the play, continue to expose themselves to public mockery. Through his depiction of Sir Tophas and Corsites, Lyly clarifies that he shares in the contempt for senescent male sexuality that pervaded the works of anticourt polemicists. The main plot of Endymion shows how courtiers might avoid the “perpetual infamy” associated with such “monstrous dotage.” The subplots show what such infamy might look like by ridiculing the “certain deformity” and “wonderful thralldom” of aging males.
Tophas and Corsites are both foils for Endymion, although Corsites is more obviously so, since he falls for the same witchy woman. Charged with guarding Tellus, he succumbs to her charms instead. When giggling fairies pinch him so that “spots” run “o’er all his flesh” (4.3.43), the punishment marks Corsites as a lecher. Black spots were associated with leprosy, a disease allegedly brought on by an overabundance of lechery, and punningly alluded to by Zontes, who observes that Corsites seems “more like a leopard than a man” (4.3.89).188 As this comment indicates, Tellus has made good on her desire to turn her lovers into animals. The fairies also construe Corsites’s lust for Tellus, which causes him to intrude on the sleeping Endymion, as a “trespass” against Cynthia in their song: “Saucy mortals must not view / What the Queen of Stars is doing” (4.3.42, 33–34).189 Corsites becomes a version of Actaeon, punished for wanton prying into the queen’s mysteries. Cynthia’s reprimand reinforces this network of connections by targeting Corsites for ridicule: “You may see, when warriors become wantons, how their manners alter with their faces. Is it not a shame, Corsites, that having lived so long in Mars his camp, thou should’st now be rocked in Venus’s cradle?” (4.3.125–28). As her metaphor underscores, Corsites’s spotted desire for Tellus is a “shame” because it involves the violation of an age barrier, reducing the old captain to the status of a napping infant.
The play’s condemnation of aging male sexuality is even more acerbic in its treatment of the “vainglorious” Sir Tophas, a character to whom “report hath been prodigal,” since it left him “no equal” (2.2.85, 118–19). A braggart soldier who becomes the willing victim of two aging witches, Tophas bears the unmistakable imprints of both Roman comedy and English political culture. His name derives from Chaucer’s Thopas, a would-be knight noted for pleasing women, dreaming of fairy queens, and being “Yborn . . . in Flaundres.”190 By the time Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote his satires, Thopas had already become a figure for courtly excess.191 In keeping with this trend, Lyly’s miles gloriosus seems to have waddled straight out of anticourt propaganda. Where the change from Sir Thopas to Sir Tophas calls Sir Christopher Hatton to mind, the associations with Flanders glances at Leicester, whose exploits in the Low Countries were a frequent source of ridicule.192 The huffing and puffing knight is markedly corpulent: “more than a man,” as his page Epi comically asserts (1.3.41–42), and less than a woman, as the ensuing action demonstrates. Tophas also suffers from a discrepancy between his desires and his ability to perform them; where Leicester was “more Mercury than Mars,” Tophas aspires to be “Mars and Ars” but achieves only “mass and ass” (1.3.96–97). His preposterous claims to military prowess are further undermined by his confusion of battling and banqueting; as his page observes, “other captains kill and beat, and there is nothing you kill but you also eat” (2.2.71–73). Although his thoughts “swell” (2.2.80) like Endymion’s, the cowardly Sir Tophas remains mired in flesh, a ludicrous and lubricious figure of “surfeit” (2.3.144).
Bevington argues that Tophas is “a vehicle for a thoroughly English satire directed at social climbing, affected Petrarchan posing . . . and other mannerisms of the courtly hanger-on.”193 I would add that categories of age figure prominently in Lyly’s satire, giving it a topical edge that has gone largely undetected (Plautus’s miles gloriosus was neither old nor fat). As sensual desire—that “great platter of plum-porridge of pleasure” (5.2.9–10)—returns the old man to the status of a child and an animal, the subplot plays out the Ovidian scenarios averted in the main plot. Tophas at first disclaims interest in sensual love, which he “disdain[s] as a thing childish and fit for such men as can digest nothing but milk” (2.2.139–41). He soon finds, however, that “love hath, as it were, milked my thoughts” (3.3.23). The “amorous knight” (3.3.94) falls in love first with Dipsas and then with Bagoa, two old hags. Epiton explains that his “master loveth antique work” (5.2.34–35), glancing perhaps at Leicester’s patronage of antiquarians and his similar preference for “argumentum at antiquitate.”194 In the grips of his infatuation, the old soldier “doth nothing but make sonnets” (4.2.23), expressing his preference for old wine and old conies and old matrons:
Epi, I feel all Ovid de Arte Amandi lie heavy at my heart as a load of logs. What a fine thin hair hath Dipsas! What a pretty low forehead! What a tall and stately nose! What little hollow eyes! What great and goodly lips! How harmless she is, being toothless! Her fingers fat and short, adorned with long nails like bittern! In how sweet a proportion her cheeks hang down to her breasts like dugs, and her paps to her waist like bags! . . . How virtuous is she like to be, over whom no man can be jealous! (3.3.53–64)
We laugh, here, not only at the aptly named Dipsas, but also at her lover, whose Ovidian allusions and Petrarchan blazon reveal his ridiculously inappropriate erotic longings.
“Love” is indeed a “lord of misrule” (5.2.5) when it makes old men behave like young ones, a comment that at the Elizabethan court was not without political implications. G. K. Hunter assures us that “the love which Sir Tophas expresses for Dipsas does not in any way modify the view we take of Endimion’s love for Cynthia,” but it is hard not see in this ridiculous old man who “ventureth on her whom none durst undertake” (3.3.74–75) a grotesque reflection of the play’s hero.195 Overcome by his passion (and by the wine he consumes in large quantities), Tophas falls asleep on stage. Where Endymion wakes up in time to control his sensual desires, Sir Tophas’s lust has made him an “amorous ass / who loves Dipsas” (3.3.120–21).196 As readers of Castiglione might expect, he exposes himself to the mockery of the children on the stage, who bark at him and propose to “let bandogs shake him” awake (3.3.131). Bandogs are mastiffs, the preferred breed for bearbaitings.197 Although Lyly never stages this baiting of the old man, he invites us to imagine it. Diane Purkiss persuasively argues that Dipsas figures “Elizabeth’s obsolescence as a vehicle for maternity.”198 Tophas in turn embodies the vain, impotent, and theatricalized sexuality of the queen’s aging courtiers. His willingness to accept Bagoa as a substitute for Dipsas, when the latter turns out to be unavailable—“so she be a wench, I care not” (5.4.293–94)—shows him to be a “Lord . . . nothing squeamish for satisfying of his lust,” who can “be content (as they say) to gather up crumbs when he is hungry.”199 Here, then, is a fit embodiment of the “insatiable couetousnes and concupiscence” that Cardinal Allen and others found at Elizabeth’s aging court.
By showing Tophas’s conversion from miles gloriosus to senex amans, Lyly capitalizes on the latent theatrical metaphors used to describe the inappropriate sexual performances of old men. Cicero thought decorous old age entailed being “contented wyth the space & tyme, whych god graunteth,” just as a “Stageplaier . . . muste so expresselye handle and playe his parte, that he maye wynne prayse and commendacion.”200 Far from being contented with the “parte” assigned to him, Tophas sets about playing one more properly belonging to a younger man. Unable to “stand” without a woman, Tophas gives up his sword, shield, gun, and “pike” (3.3.19, 37), the theatrical props of masculinity, to devote himself to his two “old matrons” (5.3.101). The fat knight’s transformation into a would-be gallant is effected through an actual costume change; “discover me in all parts,” he commands his page, “that I may be like a lover, and then I will sigh and die. Take m
y gun, and give me a gown” (3.3.27–29). He even considers changing his beard to complete his impersonation, although he confesses himself unsure as to whether he should sport the “bodkin beard or the bush” (3.3.35). Epiton’s quip—“Will you be trimmed, sir?” (3.3.34)—clarifies that Tophas’s plans involve a wholesale categorical demotion, tantamount to castration (Epiton’s name means “to cut short”).201 By cross-dressing as a young lover, the aging Sir Tophas literally takes himself “a hole lower” (3.3.89).
As moments like this show, Lyly’s child actors played up the “natural tension between the child himself and the adult he is imitating.”202 Much of the comedy in Endymion self-consciously calls attention to the distinction between men and children.203 The numerous references to the beards that help the boys signal advanced age emphasizes their blurring of generational categories: the boy actor who took on the role of Tophas donned a gray beard to play an old man criticized for behaving like a boy. Hunter argues that the “incapacity of the boys to represent adult passions” helped Lyly offer “portraits” of the court “which avoid any personal implication.” 204 While this may be true of Cynthia, whose character remains untainted by the references to age-inappropriate behaviors, the same cannot be said for Endymion or Sir Tophas. By highlighting one contradiction (the old man cross-dressed as the lover) by means of its inverse (the boy cross-dressed as an old man), Lyly’s metatheatrical references construe aging male sexuality as a categorical regression. To draw on one of its favorite metaphors, the play thus holds up a mirror to the courtiers who have “waxed old” without “knowing it.”
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