Age in Love

by Jacqueline Vanhoutte

  Among Falstaff’s salient features in this regard is his unparalleled ability to incite judgment and thereby to induce “other men,” including playgoers, into a community defined by the willingness to engage in critical dialogue: what matters about the old knight is not so much that he is witty in himself but that he is the cause of wit in others.31 The radical impulses that critics identify with Falstaff—his so-called “resistance to the totalizations of power”—inhere in this effect.32 There is something democratizing about a process that unites and elevates “men of all sorts” in the intellectual baiting of a figure associated with Elizabeth I. There is also something gendered at work in this process. The exercise of wit and judgment, faculties that, as Castiglione’s emphasis on them shows, were associated with elite masculinity, compensates for and even averts the threat of erotic and political subjugation that the lecherous old man embodies.33 The age-in-love trope has the potential to catalyze horizontal exchanges as well as vertical ones, since it moves people to discriminate according to age and gender rather than class. Shakespeare seizes on this potential in his unforgettable portrait of “an old fat man” who looks to be made “either earl or duke” (1 Henry IV, 5.4.142) by rendering dubious service to his prince (in the Henriad) or his mistresses (in Merry Wives).

  That Shakespeare’s dissolute favorite glances at Elizabeth’s deceased favorite is not as much of a stretch as might at first seem. Leicester died eight years before the first Falstaff play was staged, of “continuall burning Feaver,” or what Mistress Quickly calls “a burning quotidian tertian” (Henry V, 2.1.119).34 But the earl had by then achieved a lasting impact, due to his dual status as the period’s preeminent patron and its favorite target of invective. The form this celebrity took was all the more unprecedented for being diachronic; even postmortem, Leicester continued to represent certain feared, despised, and admired traits in the English imaginary.35 Writing about this long afterlife in seventeenth-century political discourses, Perry shows that “the changing uses of the image of Leicester provide an excellent case study of the longevity”—and, I would add, the commercial viability—“of topical reference.”36 Notably, Shakespeare highlights the issue of Falstaff’s afterlives. All three plays featuring the old knight ask us to compass his death and to imagine him at his final judgment. By recycling the motifs of Leicester’s posthumous reputation, these aspects of Falstaff’s characterization exploit the “perpetual infamy” that Castiglione ascribed to the old man in love, and that Leicester embodied for his contemporaries.37

  Leicester’s self-promotion laid the groundwork for his lasting cultural cachet. While his was in some ways a traditional sense of politics, the earl relied on newfangled methods to pursue his ends.38 Like the “popular breeches” described in Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels (1600), a satiric comedy about court favorites, Leicester was “not content to be generally noted in court” but did “press forth on common stages and brokers’ stalls to the public view of the world.”39 He did so by commissioning frequent and frequently copied portraits of himself, and by accepting the dedications of over a hundred printed books, available for purchase in “broker’s stalls.”40 For Jonson as for Jeff Doty the word “popular” designated “communicative acts that subjected political matters to the scrutiny of ‘the people.”41 Because of the personal nature of Elizabethan politics, the matter that the earl most often sought to communicate about was himself. Jonson attributes to the “common stages” a role in the popularization of court materials, thinking perhaps of the enterprising earl. Leicester had patronized a traveling troupe of players from the moment he took office as Master of the Horse in 1558 to the moment he died in 1588, and helped launch the careers of James Burbage, Will Kempe, John Heminge, and possibly Shakespeare himself.42 These actors, who would go on to found the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, valued the connection with Elizabeth’s eldest favorite enough that in 1572 they requested and were granted the right to become his liveried household retainers.43 The earl spent copiously on clothes for his actors, including livery shirts adorned with the Dudley bear badge and ragged staff, meant to advertise the troupe’s relationship to him. As Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybras remind us, “memories and social relations were literally embodied” in such garments.44 When others uttered “leawd words . . . ageynst the raggyd staff,” the earl’s players took umbrage because their own identities were at stake.45 As long as audiences remembered Leicester’s men, these players could no more shed their employment history than they could shed their skin.46 Like Jonson’s pants, the actors carried their courtly past onto the “common stages,” inviting the ghost of their old patron to haunt their performances. The theatrical metaphors that became part of the evaluative lore on the earl reflect his long-standing association with players of all kind, including those at the Globe, and conveyed a widespread perception that he was an inherently theatrical person.

  Not content to show himself only on stages, Leicester was also a pioneer when it came to using the new modes of publicity afforded by the printing press. Entertainments like the ones he hosted at Kenilworth helped shape Shakespeare’s imagination not just because they were spectacular, but also because they found their way into print, and so into the stalls of booksellers. As we saw in the last chapter, George Gascoigne’s Princely Pleasures was reissued in the late 1580s, when Shakespeare was in his mid-twenties, so that it continued to “advertise [the earl’s] position as the queen’s favorite” for years after the original performance. Although some scholars speculate that Shakespeare attended the entertainments as a boy, it is more likely that he read about them in works like Gascoigne’s.47 Other books pressing the earl’s case also found their way into the playwright’s hands. Gascoigne’s The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (1575) includes a woodcut of the kneeling earl, offering the choice part of a deer to the queen during a hunting party at Kenilworth.48 Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) glances at the earl in the character of Arthur, an association that Leicester had promoted at Kenilworth and that might explain the Hostess’s insistence that the dead Falstaff is “not in hell” but “in Arthur’s bosom” (Henry V, 2.3.9–10). Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1576), the source for multiple allusions describing the effects of lust on older Shakespearean males, displays the Dudley bear and ragged staff on its title page, and includes a long dedicatory letter to “the ryght Honorable and . . . singular good Lord, Robert Erle of Leycester.” Most pertinently, perhaps, the major source for Shakespeare’s history plays, Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), offers up a long description of the earl’s banqueting in the Netherlands, as well as a treatise establishing his aristocratic credentials, including his descent from the Beaufort Earls of Warwick.49 By the mid-1590s, when Shakespeare began writing the Falstaff plays, he had to look no further than his bookshelf for the “famous factes” about the earl.

  The malicious gossip about Leicester proved as enduring as his efforts at self-promotion. Through the 1590s, commoners continued to be brought before the authorities for claiming “my lord of Leicester had four children by the queen’s majesty.”50 In 1592, Nashe’s Pierce Penniless’s Supplication to the Devil recalled a time when “the beare . . . being chiefe burgomaster of all the beastes under the lyon, gan thinke with himself how hee might surfet in pleasure.”51 As such references show, where Leicester had pursued popularity, he obtained notoriety; this “pathological version of fame” was an unintended effect of forces that he had sought to harness to his own ends—“emergent capitalism” and “textual and theatrical reproduction.”52 The proliferation of “millions of impieties “sith [the earl’s] death,” abusing “the people by their divelish fictions . . . all to bring” Leicester’s “vertues & person in popular hatred,” prompted an impassioned posthumous defense, “The Dead Mans Right,” in 1593.53 Coy about the precise nature of the multitudinous slanders involved (the anonymous author only notes that these made his ears blush), the tract nevertheless suggests that the materials derived from Leicester’s Co
mmonwealth continued to shape the earl’s public image long after he died.54

  Fig. 4. Title page of Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1584). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

  Meant to alarm, Leicester’s Commonwealth had succeeded in entertaining. As Perry points out, plays ranging from The Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1587) to The White Devil (ca. 1612) continued to assume “a ready familiarity” with its slanderous contents.55 While these tragedies allude to Leicester’s reputation as a Machiavellian politician, other works show the late earl as “the noble lecher / that used art to provoke.”56 The recurrent pun on lecher/Leicester confirms that the “nascent public sphere of the Elizabethan era involved identity and decorum more than rationality or policy, and was often irreverent rather than somber.”57 Playing on the bear and ragged staff, the more salacious entries in Leicester’s “black legend” expose the earl explicitly to mocking social judgments. One poem rejoices, for example, that

  The stately Bear that at the stake would stand

  ’Gainst all the mastiffs stout that would come forth

  Is muzzled here and ringed with our hand . . .

  Great Robin, whom before all could not take,

  Is here by shepherd’s curs made for to quake.

  Thus may we learn, there is no staff so strong

  But may be broken into shivers small

  No beast so fierce the cruel beasts among

  But age or cunning gins may work his fall.58

  The poem reflects conventions established by Leicester’s Commonwealth in relating the earl’s bear badge, his upstart ambition, his bestial nature, and his failing genitals. But it also outdoes its source by envisaging the “staff so strong” reduced to “shivers small” by “shepherd’s curs.” Emphasizing the class differential between the bear and his pursuers, the poem endows these curs with the homegrown courage of the celebrated English mastiff.59 The “fall” of the earl’s “staff,” meanwhile, stands for the moralistic and socially conservative admonition “to be content and not desire / For all do fall that do aspire.”60 In this way, the earl’s impotence becomes the inevitable consequence of his social mobility and sexual opportunism. Shakespeare mines this same vein of humor in his representation of Falstaff.

  Nowhere are the salient aspects of Leicester’s posthumous reputation more entertainingly on display than in News from Heaven and Hell, an unpublished satire written by an anonymous adherent of the court sometime after the earl’s death in 1588. In its competitive escalation of inherited materials, the little-known News sets a precedent for Shakespeare’s conversion of Leicester’s black legend to theatrical purpose. Among other things, this satire makes elaborate and equal opportunity fun of both the earl’s “ragged” and his “Stewardes staff.”61 The anonymous author evokes a theatricalized world, in which Heaven is a kind of castle, as in the morality tradition, and hell the domain of vice-like fiends. News’s “quandam Earle of Lescester” is a lover of the moon, who shares multiple traits with Endymion’s Sir Tophas, including a rotund physique, a fondness for having “a page” carry a “bole of wine to refresh him,” and a tendency to lecherous and animalistic behavior (144, 146). By devising condign punishments for this elderly lover, News shows the figure of Leicester-in-lust remained attractive to writers because it authorized their political judgments. The satire thus corroborates the suspicions of pro-government thinkers that the “slanderous inveighing” against the queen’s great favorite contributed to a usurpation of royal prerogative, which might result in “private subjects” allocating to themselves “the power of setting up and putting downe Princes.”62 That such power is a source of great pleasure is implied by the frankly pornographic bent of the narrative.

  News signals its participation in a broader and ongoing discussion about the earl by its self-conscious orientation toward a remembering public familiar with anti-Leicestrian lore and eager to hear “the last reporte . . . brought by the post” of the earl’s adventures (158). Although it never saw print, News thus shows the reflexivity and attention to temporality that Warner defines as characteristic of public-making texts.63 In addition to engaging in the “traffic in news” about the earl, News invites debate by construing its readers as members of a jury, instructing them to “waye” with their “charytable wisdomes” what the earl deserves (155), and elevating them to the level of St. Peter and Pluto, the authorities passing judgment within the narrative.64 Its legalistic account of the earl’s postmortem travails capitalizes on the notion first aired in Leicester’s Commonwealth that Leicester has “a conscience loaden with the guilt of many crimes, wherof he would be loth to be called to accompt or be subject to any man that might by authority take review of his life and actions when it should please him.”65 The author introduces Leicester’s ghost on his way to Final Judgment, clad in “a fine white shirte wrought with the beare and the ragged staffe,” with “his Stewards staffe of office in his hande,” trying “with shewes to delude the worlde there as he had done here” (144). Where in life the earl’s “vaine pompe” (144) fooled the powers-that-be, including Elizabeth I, in his imagined afterlife “Munsur Fatpanche” (146) meets with a more discerning public, alerted to the pleasures that await by the coy references to the bear badge. News recycles old material for its “corpulent” (145), lubricious, and theatrical antihero but also adds new touches, endowing the ghost with such a propensity for “much sweating,” that his embossed “shirte” becomes “all wet” (145–46), a nod to the mysterious fever that killed Leicester, and to the fiery torments that await him.

  In its depiction of these torments, News reconfigures the familiar device of bearbaiting to draw attention to Leicester’s violations of gender and generational norms. The author’s tongue-in-cheek construction of heaven as situated near the “orb of the moone” equates Leicester’s failure to enter the pearly gates with his misguided attempts to enter the “bewtifull venirus dames” who had “dazeled him on earth” (146). Escorted by Sarcotheos, the god of flesh whom he worshipped in life, “Munsur Fatpanche” finds himself put on “triall” by St. Peter for his lechery and his “wantonnes of flesh” (148–49). Where the portly ghost repents other sins—the author offers a lengthy list of these, including various murders and “the robbing and stearving of pore souldiers” in the Netherlands (152)—he confesses that he holds lechery “no sinne”: “it was so swete and I accustomed to it even from my youth” that he “could never repent me of it nether in youth nor age” (154). After clarifying that he disdains the conventional distinction between youthful “lustynes” and the “gravitye” proper to old age, the ghost volunteers for castration to avoid damnation. He begs “to have the member only punnished that hath only offended” (154).66 Instead, St. Peter has this “bellye claper marked with an L”; far from signifying that “he had bene a great lorde,” it brands Leicester a lecher (154). The pun on Leicester’s name designates the earl’s conversion of sexual service into political capital as his supreme offence.

  Chained by his branded member to an “iron brake,” his “privites” made to “enduere” such abuse that he made a “dolfull sight for any his beawtifull ladies . . . to have beheld,” his “Robinships” is then carried off to hell, where

  a naked feind in the forme of a lady with the supported nose should bend this bere whelp in an iron cheane by the middle and . . . she should be so directly placed against him that the gate of hir porticke conjuntcion should be full oposit to the gase of his retoricke speculation, so that he could not chose but have a perfit aspect of the full pointe of her bettelbroude urchin in the triumphant pride and gaping glory thereof. Now there was no doubte made but that this pleasant sight, togeather with the remembrance of his wounted delight, would make his teath so to water and geve him such an edge that he could not forbeare . . . to geve a charge with his lance of lust against the center of her target of proffe, and rune his ingredience up to the hard hiltes into the unserchable botome of her gaping gullfe. . . . Thus was his paradice
turned into his purgatory, his fine furred gape into a flaminge trape, his place of pleasure into a gulfe of vengeance, and his pricke of desire into a pillor of fier. (155–58)

  This scene of pornographic bearbaiting translates into infernal terms Castiglione’s contention that those who give in to “unbridled desire” soon return to it, experiencing once more “that furious and burning thirst.”67 Where most early modern scenarios of sexual abandon focus on the transgressions of the female partner (e.g., Spenser’s Acrasia), this one highlights the male’s culpability. With his head below the fiend’s “bettelbroude urchin,” the ghost reenacts his violation of normative heterosexual relations in which the man functioned as the head to the woman’s body.

  By depending on familiarity with preexisting materials for its humor, News illustrates the ways in which satire “near and familiarly allied to the time” draws on its readers’ memories to constitute them as an “adjudicating public.”68 The ghost’s “pricke of desire,” for example, glances back at the Kenilworth entertainments, where Leicester had presented himself as the holly bush Deep Desire, animated by “the restlesse prickes of his privie thoughts.”69 That this same “pricke” is now turned to a “pillor of fier” frames the earl’s courtship of the queen as a cause of damnation. Although the identity of the “lady with the supported nose” is ambiguous, paradoxical references to her demonic double’s “gaping g[u]llfe” and “bottomeless barrell of virginnitye” evoke the woman who was ever the “center” of Leicester’s ambitious and amorous designs; who had costarred in the bearbaiting in Leicester’s Commonwealth (see chapter 1); and who had endured controversy about her own “gaping gulf” (157).70 Multiple allusions to the Dudley badge further establish the earl’s bestial nature, while singling out his phallus—described in prosthetic terms, as a pillar, lance, or staff—for condign forms of punishment. The discursive detachment of the earl’s penis from his body proper culminates in his fiery castration, an emasculation reinforced by the ghost’s narrative status as the feminized object of the readers’ gaze and the satiric butt of the readers’ laughter. By provoking derisive laughter, the author positions his readers as knowing and authoritative collaborators in the castigation of the deceased earl. News from Heaven and Hell offers a compensatory fantasy of empowerment, in which the sexual and generational inversions of the Elizabethan court are avenged through the immolation of this old lecher/Leicester, forced “to offer dayly to his god Priapus . . . a burnd sacrifice,” and reduced in the process to a mere “feminine suppository” (157).