Age in Love

by Jacqueline Vanhoutte

  As News shows, Leicester’s death, far from quieting his critics, reenergized them. Elizabeth’s councillors were right to think that far more was at stake (so to speak) in “the slanderous devices against the said Earl” than the personal animosity and angry grumblings of a Catholic minority.71 A. N. McLaren argues that Elizabeth I’s gender helped men like Leicester arrogate unprecedented power. It also made them vulnerable to the chastening attacks of inferiors. The perceived sexual subjection of the queen’s aging favorites authorized other subjects to speak against and about them by virtue of their own conformity to gender and generational norms, a process that contributed to the emergence of a public sphere during this period. Leicester’s “legend” belongs to the “gossip about public figures” better described as scandal, in that it circulates among strangers and “has both reflexivity . . . and timeliness.”72 Knowing references to the earl as a man whose “experience in chamberwoorck exceeded his practize in warr” survived him for many years.73 The longevity of Leicester’s “black legend”—the paradox of its enduring timeliness—indicates that it addressed a range of concerns about early modern government, as Perry shows. The age-in-love trope contributed to this phenomenon by drawing the unseemly body of the queen’s “amorous minion” into public discourse for the purposes of ridicule, a process that encouraged subjects to think themselves more discerning than their queen, and that established the authority of communally held social norms over that of the monarchy. Such factors explain why as late as 1593 the author of “The Dead Mans Right” accused the “ungratefull Malecontents” who spread “rebellious and seditious Libells” about the dead earl of having “an aspiring minde,” and felt an obligation to defend the queen, who had “wisely judged of [Leicester’s] vertues, and worthily rewarded his loialtie and paines.”74 Notably, the last installment of the Elizabethan tradition, Leicester’s Ghost (ca. 1602–04, printed in 1641), reproduces the usual charges about the lascivious earl, who used “strange drinks and Oyntments . . . [to make] dead flesh to rise” when he “waxed old.”75 Loath to let such fat meat go, writers imagined the elderly Leicester/lecher postmortem, like so much dead flesh irrepressibly rising from the beyond.

  Polemical works on Leicester show how a masculine, disembodied ideal of public life emerges in response to the embodied and sexualized modes of publicity at the Elizabethan court.76 Although the buffoonish figure of Leicester-in-lust first appeared in works opposed to the Elizabethan government on ideological grounds, it proved portable and entertaining enough to cross the divisions that separated the Catholic authors of Leicester’s Commonwealth in Paris from the Protestant author of News at court (News makes scoffing references to the Pope and papists that establish its Protestant bona fides). The cultural mobility of this figure indicates that, rather than conveying narrowly partisan positions, the age-in-love trope had a catalytic effect, encouraging those who encountered it to form and voice opinions of their own. In describing an old ghost damned in hell for being lecherous, News emphasizes the politic pleasures attendant on debating Leicester’s transgressions. Pluto gathers a “solemn assembly,” whose members model deliberative processes by discussing the earl’s punishment: “sum were of opinion that his harte should be pressed through,” while “sum that his hands and fete should be loked in a paier of stokes and manackels which should be made all fiery, of purpose becase his handes had bene always geven to rapine,” and still others that hot sulfur be poured down his throat, that “gaping gulfe of all gluttony, drunkenness, and riott” (156). Leicester’s Ghost also references such a divergence of opinion by noting objections to its narrator’s claims; in familiar terms, he denounces those “Doggs that at the Moone doe fondly barke.”77 Joining the conversation initiated by Leicester’s Commonwealth, these later tracts imagine themselves as contributing to an ongoing and highly entertaining debate about the controversial earl (one that allows, moreover, for surreptitious glancing at other royal favorites). The “slanderous devices” aimed at Leicester by the polemicists of the 1580s had conjured a public eager to consume satiric representations of their government, a public whose members enjoyed discussing and passing judgment on the sexual misbehavior of their superiors. This phenomenon was bound not just to erode the authority of the ruling class but also to attract the notice of playwrights like Shakespeare, “whose main business,” according to Paul Yachnin, consisted of “marketing popular versions of elite cultural goods to public audiences.”78

  The association of the surfeiting old man in love and the Elizabethan court was fostered on the common stages by the publication, in 1591, of Lyly’s Endymion, which advertised on its title page that it had been performed “before the Queen’s Majesty at Greenwich,” and which is an acknowledged source for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595–96), as well as for the Falstaff plays.79 Bottom, Falstaff, Malvolio, Orsino, Claudius, and Antony all follow Endymion in lusting after female characters modeled on Elizabeth I.80 And several of these characters follow Sir Tophas in being hybrids of the miles gloriosus and the amans senex, who violate gender and generational boundaries.81 Where Lyly offers distinct idealized and satiric representations of Elizabeth’s favorites, Shakespeare often confounds the two modes, presenting us with characters who defy easy categorization and who challenge our faculties of judgment. In privileging problems of sovereignty and judgment, Shakespeare’s experiments with aging male characters engage the later tradition on Leicester, and come to altogether different conclusions about the theatrical possibilities inherent in the figure of the lusty old man than his theatrical predecessor did. If, as I argue above, age-in-love tropes function as vehicles for the political empowerment of “aspiring minde[s],” they also provide aspiring playwrights with a means for artistic self-assertion. Indeed, Shakespeare’s repurposing of this inherited material is deeply competitive—he embraces the escalation inherent in anti-Leicestrian discourse by outperforming his models.

  An early version of this tendency to confound, recycle, synthesize, escalate, and aestheticize is discernible in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Bottom’s amorous encounter with a fairy queen make him into something more than “an ass” (3.1.120). Leonard Barkan argues that the precedent for the meeting between Bottom and Titania is “the story of dangerous eye contact between Diana and Actaeon,” a myth that, as we saw in the previous chapter, came preloaded with courtly associations.82 Like the Leicester of antigovernmental lore, and like Lyly’s Tophas, Bottom deceives himself into thinking that all parts suit him, including that of the lover. The object of his amorous attentions is an infantilizing fairy queen who charms her lover to sleep on a flowery bank: a combination of Spenser’s Gloriana and Lyly’s Cynthia, who shares a name and a taste for “lion, bear, or wolf, or bull” (2.1.180) with Ovid’s Circe.83 In his depiction of this mercurial queen bestowing “sweet favors” on a “hateful fool” (4.1.49), Shakespeare alludes to Elizabeth’s alleged preference for theatrical upstarts and her tendency to emasculate her courtiers. The incongruous “meddling monkey” on which Titania might dote (2.1.181) even recalls one of the queen’s more controversial pet names. Although Ovid’s Circe has no simian creatures dancing attendance on her, Elizabeth had dubbed Jean de Simier, the go-between in her last courtship with the Duc d’Alençon, her monkey. The “sweet favors” she showed that meddling gentleman had enraged a jealous Leicester, causing tongues to wag throughout the country.84

  Like Diana and Circe, the Fairy Queen appears in works connected with Leicester’s courtship of Elizabeth, including the Kenilworth entertainments and the Woodstock entertainments (1575, published in 1585).85 Because of such factors Stephen Greenblatt endorses the critical tradition that casts the entertainment at Kenilworth as the inspiration for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he characterizes as a “gorgeous compliment to Elizabeth.” If Shakespeare’s play attends to “the charismatic power of royalty,” however, it also manifests an abiding interest in those touched, translated, or “transported” (4.2.4) by that power.86 The phallic
image of “Cupid’s fiery shaft, / Quench’d in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon” (2.1.161–62) pays a Lylean compliment to Elizabeth, praising her ability to raise and to stay male desire.87 But it also reformulates in high poetic terms the lurid image of Leicester’s “pillor of fier” vainly drowning itself in the “gaping g[u]llfe” and “bottomeless barrell of” female “virginnitye.” And, more intriguingly still, in its attention to the swerve of Cupid’s “bolt,” which falls on the “little western flower, / Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound” (2.1.166–67), it locates the origins of Oberon’s transformative magic in erotic energies misdirected at the Virgin Queen. As we have seen, Leicester was associated with “ointment[s]” meant to “provocke . . . filthy luxury,” similar in kind if not in effect to the “juice” that Oberon uses to make “man or woman madly dote / Upon the next live creature that it sees” (2.1.170–71).88 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by replaying such familiar motifs in a higher register, renders ambiguous homage to Leicester, relating his role as the queen’s failed lover to his role as the patron who commissioned Golding’s translations of Ovid, the poet renowned for confounding misplaced erotic desire and the “desire with externall fame above the starres to mount.”89

  The unorthodox suggestion that the rechanneling of vain desires for the queen enabled a flowering of magical or creative powers—that brutish sleep might lead to a substantial dream—is confirmed by Bottom’s experiences in the play. An ass who falls asleep on stage as Lyly’s Tophas does, and who dreams up an erotic encounter with a fairy queen as Spenser’s Arthur or Chaucer’s Thopas do, Bottom also expresses desires and ambitions that Shakespeare shared. By revising the Actaeon myth to have Bottom’s physical transformation precede his visionary experience, Shakespeare fuses “metamorphic exaltation and degradation into a single, causally connected act.”90 The transformation becomes the enabling condition of Bottom’s “rare vision” of the Fairy Queen, which inspires him “to write a ballet of this dream” entitled “‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom” (4.1.214–16). A Midsummer Night’s Dream thus parallels Bottom’s experiences with the playwright’s own, encouraging us to find artistic value in the amorous ambitions that the Fairy Queen inspires. Bottom’s encounter with bottomlessness produces radically different results than Munsur Fatpanche’s; to “have been the lover of the Fairy Queen” in this play, Helen Hackett explains, is to have had “a metaphysical experience, a transformatory revelation.”91 Bottom is not, or not only, a satiric butt, since the behaviors that he renders ridiculous are rewarded with improved status by play’s end, when he becomes a “made” man (4.2.18).92 Richard Dutton finds in A Midsummer Night’s Dream “a perfect allegory of relations between the acting companies and the court” at century’s end.93 In Bottom this allegory conflates the role of the actor-playwright with that of the royal favorite. Bottom may become “the privileged vessel” of aesthetic “experience,” but only because he willingly subjects himself to the degraded and degrading desires of a queen.94

  Not coincidentally, Bottom is the play’s most memorable character. Shakespeare himself remembers Bottom throughout his career, and endows the characters that derive from Bottom with the same haunting quality, the result of their preposterous violations of social expectations on the one hand and their status as reconstructions of preexisting materials on the other. These two functions are related; according to Patricia Parker, the “Shakespearean preposterous,” a category in which she includes both Bottom and Falstaff, is a means of “breaching” the topic of “responsibility for actions in the past or what had gone before.”95 A Midsummer Night’s Dream concerns itself with conflicted reactions generated by the queen’s leading favorites, the hateful fools who had risen to preeminence by preposterously humbling themselves to please court ladies. Having, in the popular imagination, traded sexual services for high political status, these men were as much a contradiction to the Elizabethan “sex/gender system” as the queen herself.96 A Midsummer Night’s Dream emphasizes the role that individual perception plays in the evaluation of such protean creatures; as Barkan puts it, “that the Fairy Queen sees Bottom as the incarnation of beauty transforms him upward just as surely as the physical change imposed by Puck transforms him downward.”97 Although many, like Francis Bacon, recoiled from “men of this kind,” Shakespeare found that the strange mixture of praise, condemnation, and mockery they elicited made for theatrically compelling material.98

  That Shakespeare found much to say on behalf of the men made, or remade, by his queen is best evidenced by his “corpulent” and narcoleptic knight, Falstaff (1 Henry IV, 2.4.422), to whom we are now ready to return. Fat, sweaty, cowardly, drunken, lecherous, hypocritical, and eager to exploit his status as a royal favorite to social advantage, Shakespeare’s “reverent Vice, that grey Iniquity . . . [and] vanity in years” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.453–54) is constituted of the same materials as the Leicester of opposition literature, that greedy figure of “intolerable licentiousness” who became “old in iniquitie.”99 A lying “round man,” who disregards the safety of the soldiers under his command, and who urges his prince to become “for recreation sake . . . a false thief” (2.4.140, 1.2.155–56), Falstaff has been given short shrift by recent literary critics interested in stage representations of royal favoritism, presumably because Hal terminates the relationship when he ascends the throne.100 For the length of two plays, however, Falstaff’s fantasies of social elevation by means of his prince’s ill-judged favor are given free play: “the laws of England are at my commandment,” he gloats when Hal is crowned, “Blessed are they that have been my friends, and woe to my Lord Chief Justice!” (2 Henry IV, 5.3.136–38). When Hal at last turns his countenance from “that vain man” (2 Henry IV, 5.5.44), Hal’s own past is not the only “foil” that sets off his “reformation” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.213–15). Shakespeare’s prince accomplishes a task at which Shakespeare’s queen had signally failed.

  The possibility that Shakespeare’s surfeiting “town bull” (2 Henry IV, 2.2.158) glances at the “common bull of the court” need not preclude other well-established “pastimes,” including the identification of Falstaff with Lord Cobham, or his connection to the Marprelate controversy.101 On the contrary, the layering of possibilities contributes to the celebrated richness of Falstaff’s character. A quintessentially theatrical creature, Falstaff never fails to generate “the uncanny but inescapable impression . . . that ‘we are seeing what we saw before.’”102 Throughout the Falstaff plays, Shakespeare urges audiences to recognize that they are revisiting familiar ground. Falstaff famously refers to the recent kerfuffle over his original name (offensive to Cobham because Oldcastle was an ancestor by marriage), for example, when he assures us that Oldcastle is “not the man” (2 Henry IV, epilogue, 32), in effect publicizing the Cobham reading while quashing it.103 He also encourages further speculation regarding the intended target: if Oldcastle is not the man, who is? Meanwhile, the new name signals a renewed emphasis, in the wake of the Cobham affair, on the conjunction in Falstaff of the amorous minion and the “aged counselor.”104 Where “Oldcastle” evokes an elderly courtier (as in the phantom reference to “my old lad of the castle” [1 Henry IV, 1.2.41–42]), “Falstaff,” with its familiar pun on detumescence, highlights that character’s sexuality, the subject of knowing jokes in the plays that feature him.105

  The characterization of Falstaff as a hypocritical Protestant is consistent with both the Cobham controversy and the materials of Leicester’s black legend. In A Briefe Discoverie’s view, the “infamous libels” about the earl “secretly cast out and spred abroad” were motivated by the fact that he was “one of the greatest, & principall patrons of true religion.”106 Perhaps, then, Shakespeare turned to Oldcastle, the proto-Protestant leader accused of treason, because of his commonalities with Leicester, another Protestant leader accused of treason.107 Consider the woodcut in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, which shows Oldcastle chained to the gallows, yet another sweaty old man subjected
to fiery baiting.108 The “image of the grotesque puritan” that Falstaff evokes, while popularized by the Marprelate controversy, first gained currency when Leicester was depicted as an “icon of bacchanalian revelry,” given to “overmuch attending his pleasures” and excessive “drinking and belly chere,” nearly a decade before Shakespeare’s fat knight disgraced the English stage.109 A “roasted Manningtree ox” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.452), a “whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig,” who needs to leave “foining a’ nights” and “patch up” his “old body for heaven” (2 Henry IV, 2.4.231–33), Falstaff appears destined to suffer a familiar fate for his defiance of age and nature. When he recoils from “remember[ing]” this promised “end” (2 Henry IV, 2.4.235), his odd locution suggests a kind of textual déjà vu, as if the self-conscious fat man remembers always already being dismembered.

  Over the course of the three plays in which he appears, the entire “dictionary of slanders” devised for Leicester is leveled at Falstaff.110 The correspondences between “Munsur Fatpanche” in News and Shakespeare’s “fat paunch” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.144) are numerous: both sweat copiously enough to stain their shirts (2 Henry IV, 1.2.208–10, 5.5.24–25; News, 146); both are “greasy” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.228; News, 148); both are likened to a “Flemish drunkard” (Merry Wives of Windsor, 2.1.23; News, 148); and both stand accused of “gluttony, drunkenness, and riot,” as well as lust. Although we never see Falstaff in hell, we are repeatedly asked to imagine him there, by Hal’s references to him as a “devil” or an “old white-bearded Sathan” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.447, 463), or by his own wistful musings that “If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damn’d” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.471–72).111 Even Falstaff’s telltale name evokes anti-Leicestrian discourses: not only does News make jokes about the ubiquitous bear and ragged staff, it also imagines Leicester’s ghost letting “fall [his] staffe” of office for fear of being sent to hell (150). The falling staff was a favorite symbol for what we would now call Leicester’s erectile dysfunction—a tactic that Shakespeare exploits in his depiction of his “wither’d elder,” whose “naked weapons” form the constant object of his own as well as other men’s wit. “Is it not strange,” Poins asks Hal as they observe the old man flirting “that desire should so many years outlive performance?” (2 Henry IV, 2.4.258, 207, 260–61).112