By the simple expedient of naming the object of all that monstrous senescent lust Gloriana, after Elizabeth I’s public persona, Middleton teases out Hamlet’s latent political implications. According to Adelman, “the subjection of male to female” is “the buried fantasy of Hamlet.”8 While she reads this submerged fantasy in psychoanalytic terms, Middleton’s brilliant coup de théâtre emphasizes its historical, political, and cultural dimensions instead. The skull that Vindice brandishes functions simultaneously as a memento of Shakespeare’s haunted play and of the deceased queen, identifying one with the other. Historicist scholars have long linked Shakespeare’s masterpiece to the Elizabethan succession crisis, but Hamlet’s particular investments are sometimes hard to discern, because analogies between the Danish and the English court are woefully imprecise.9 Emboldened by Elizabeth’s death, Middleton evokes her court more directly than Shakespeare does. Where the sexually active Gertrude is an imperfect match for the Virgin Queen, for example, Gloriana’s “purer part” resisted the “palsy lust” of the Duke (1.1.33–34), like Lyly’s Cynthia stayed Endymion’s passion, or Elizabeth Leicester’s. By withholding Gloriana’s name until the climactic third act, Middleton makes the connection between memories of the queen and memories of Hamlet a retroactive one, inviting audiences to participate in a historically informed revision of the opening soliloquy and the old play it recalls. No wonder critics have found The Revenger’s Tragedy to be a “dramatized interpretation” of Hamlet’s “Elizabethan undertones.”10
The villainous old man in lust who plays a starring role in this interpretation epitomizes the deceased Gloriana’s troubling powers over her men. Blazoning his beloved in the Petrarchan tropes of the court, Vindice claims that even the “uprightest man” would break “custom” under the influence of her “two heaven-pointed diamonds” (1.1.19–24). Vindice also repurposes Hamlet’s favorite metaphor to describe how Gloriana made even “a usurer’s son / Melt all his patrimony in a kiss” (1.1.26–27). In keeping with such themes, The Revenger’s Tragedy depicts a world in which “place is governed by ambition” and sexual charisma “rather than the proprieties of due succession,” a world of “carnality and licentiousness” familiar from Elizabethan anticourt polemics.11 Like Cardinal Allen’s Elizabeth I, who reduced English noblemen to “effeminate dastardie,” Gloriana casts such a powerful spell over the nation’s sons that they lose masculine rigor and forgo patriarchal duty.12 Vindice acknowledges his complicity in this state of affairs, chiding himself “for doting on [Gloriana’s] beauty” (3.5.69–70). It takes him fully nine years to recover from the one he refers to ambiguously as his “poisoned love” (1.1.14).
By blending motifs of Hamlet with the topoi of anticourt polemics, The Revenger’s Tragedy exhumes the earlier play’s “buried” engagement with the Elizabethan court. True to the genre after which he is named, Middleton’s tainted protagonist struggles with putting that past behind him but ends up repeating it instead. Vindice’s revenge outdoes Hamlet’s in both the sharpness of its allegory and “the quaintness of [its] malice” (3.4.109). Where Gertrude is collateral damage in the earlier play’s finale, the “form that living shone so bright” (3.5.67) becomes the favored means of punishment in the later one, showcasing Vindice’s posthumous control over Gloriana’s maidenhead, and, by extension, Middleton’s over the queen’s.13 A potent Petrarchan relic, Gloriana’s “quaint piece of beauty” (3.5.54) retains enough charisma to lure the “slobbering Dutchman” (3.5.164) to his death. The Revenger’s Tragedy stages a macabre parody of Elizabethan courtship, in which the poisonous skull, dressed like “an old gentlewoman in a periwig,” puts the “old surfeiter” (3.5.113, 53–54) to sleep, permanently, with a kiss. For good measure, Vindice and his brother Hippolyto then assault this latter-day Endymion, while forcing him to watch his illegitimate son replace him in the arms of his duchess. Three different young men contribute to the extended “hell” endured by the “old Duke” (3.5.184, 208). Modern police procedurals would call this overkill. The Revenger’s Tragedy’s infernal scene of punishment—with its emphasis on cross-generational violations, its violent contempt for the “poor lecher” (3.5.158) at its center, and its grotesquely material caricature of Neoplatonic claims about the spirituality of kisses—clarifies that, like the anonymous writers of Leicester’s Commonwealth, Middleton was no fan of Gloriana’s aging court.
Although Vindice dies at the end of The Revenger’s Tragedy, Richard Burbage returned shortly thereafter to the Globe in yet another play about a judgmental young man and a dissipated older man. This time, however, Burbage played the “amorous surfeiter” (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.1.33) who fills his “vacancy with his voluptuousness” even though “the dryness of his bones / Call on him for’t” (1.4.26–28). Regular theatergoers must have wondered at the migration of the age-in-love role from the clown Will Kempe, who first played Bottom and Falstaff, to the burly player John Lowin, who had recently played Claudius and Falstaff, to the lead actor Richard Burbage, who played Antony (and had probably played Orsino).14 Burbage, who turned forty in 1607, was just entering the stage of life known as green old age. While he may have forfeited the role of Octavius because he gained weight as he aged, the casting of the company’s lead player in the role of Antony also signals a radical shift in perspective and values.15 As Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern note, the “heroic ‘type’” for which Burbage was known constitutes “an invitation to command the stage, and more often than not the audience’s sympathies.”16 Antony and Cleopatra pits generational opposites against one another, as Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy do. Deviating from established pattern, however, Shakespeare assigns the central male role to the aging lover, not the eager “young man” (3.11.62) who orchestrates this surfeiting elder’s “declining day” (5.1.38).
While historicist critics have long identified in Cleopatra a distorted reflection of Elizabeth I, they have little to say about Antony. Theodora Jankowski examines the political uses that Cleopatra makes of her sexuality and her theatricality, for example, but dismisses Antony as having “no talent for regal spectacle.”17 Arguing for “a perceived shift from Elizabethan magnificence to Jacobean ‘measure,’” Paul Yachnin reconstructs a seventeenth-century Antony and Cleopatra rich in topical meanings—all deriving from the confrontation between Cleopatra, a version of Elizabeth, and Octavius, a version of James.18 Katherine Eggert, too, finds a play constituted of “Cleopatran displays” and “Roman reactions,” in which Antony plays the passive role of a privileged “playgoer.”19 Like Claudius or Middleton’s old Duke, Antony is near invisible to critics interested in reconstructing the historical context of the play.20 Yet he shares top billing with Cleopatra, and the other characters speculate and gossip about him as much as they do about her. If we accept that the political resonances of Antony and Cleopatra “must mean something” in context, then Antony must have a part in this meaning-making process.21 Reading Antony in light of the Elizabethan tradition on lecherous old men, I show that his connection to the dead queen’s court is more encompassing than previously suspected. The “greatest soldier in the world,” Antony is also its “greatest liar” (1.3.38–39) and its greatest lover, a composite made out of Shakespeare’s favorite materials, and designed to recall other “scene[s] of courtship,” actual and theatrical.22 Through its male protagonist, Antony and Cleopatra puts into play a whole range of memories about Elizabeth and her favorite men, including the oft-repeated allegations that these provided her with sexual services.
As we have seen, the Elizabethan senex amans shared his affinity for the theater with Elizabeth’s courtiers, who, according to Ben Jonson, borrowed “play-particles” to woo the queen.23 Shakespeare makes this theatrical approach to courtship, evident also in Falstaff or Malvolio, a defining feature of Antony. Cleopatra highlights her lover’s theatrical agency, by directing him both seriously and mockingly in his scenes of “excellent dissembling” (1.3.78–79). Although she exerts control over these ad hoc performances, s
he also acknowledges her deep dependence on Antony’s sexual, military, and theatrical virtuosity—she needs his “inches” to show “there were a heart in Egypt” (1.3.39–40). Like Elizabeth I at Tilbury, whose legendary speech she here echoes, Cleopatra recognizes the gendered constraints that require her to use a male proxy, who can act in her stead. She wishes “as the president of [her] kingdom” to “appear there for a man” (3.7.16–17), but cannot do so without the “soldier, servant” who “makes peace or war” as she affects (1.3.70–71). Most scholars nowadays agree that Elizabeth assumed “the heart and stomach of a king” so as to outrank her men and that Cleopatra’s desire for a male body politic reflects this rhetorical strategy.24 Read in its entirety, the Tilbury speech also compensates for the perceived failings of the queen’s body natural by proposing a male substitute, Elizabeth’s “lieutenant general,” the Earl of Leicester. “Never” has a “prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject,” Elizabeth asserts, identifying their collaboration as an essential feature of her rule.25 Under patriarchal conditions, the “heart” of female rule can only manifest through such “noble” performances, although these may take the individuals involved to the “heart of loss” (4.12.29), because they violate normative standards of masculine behavior. While Antony and Cleopatra’s Roman characters sound like the antigovernment pamphleteers of the 1580s and 1590s in their strident denunciations of the protagonists, the play itself wonders if defect might not generate perfection, in the form of new and more expansive notions of masculine excellence.
The rest of this chapter focuses on Shakespeare’s remarkable final contribution to the theatrical “fashion” for “old man’s venery,” the great general who loves a queen whom “no other of nature can match or of art imitate,” like the Earl of Essex’s Elizabeth.26 During the Jacobean vogue for elegies of Elizabeth, Shakespeare was berated for offering no public comment on her death.27 A few years later, he wrote Antony and Cleopatra, a play that Eggert and Leonard Tennenhouse describe as an “elegy” in dramatic form.28 While Antony and Cleopatra does indeed celebrate “queenship with the full weight of nostalgia,” it distinguishes itself from other elegies by emphasizing the prospective aspects of this longing.29 A generic hybrid, which blends elegy and other modes, Antony and Cleopatra situates the utopian possibilities of queenship not just in the past, as I have argued Twelfth Night does, but also in the “new earth, new heaven” (1.1.17) of the future. It achieves this turn to the future by revising the overdetermined figure of the aging lover, normally used to satirize the “limited performances” of Elizabeth’s courtiers, into an unlikely model for masculine mimesis. Rather than being merely elegiac, Shakespeare’s approach to his male protagonist has the immediate force of a eulogy, a rhetorical genre with deep associations to Antony and his classical forebear, who both use Caesar’s funeral oration to reshape Rome’s political future. Antony and Cleopatra is characteristically Shakespearean in its interrogation of its own generic impulses; a play about a man famous for giving a eulogy, in which characters obsessively eulogize one another, it cautions against the emotions that make people “good, being gone” (1.2.126), even as it summons these emotions to redefine key historical figures from the recent and the classical past.
Plutarch’s Elizabethan translator, Sir Thomas North (yet another client of Leicester’s) urged his readers to turn to the Parallel Lives for the analogues that might help them achieve sound political judgments about the past.30 As its title indicates, this work pairs descriptions of Greek and Roman worthies to clarify their individual contributions and achievements. In his dedicatory letter to Elizabeth I, North extends these comparisons to contemporary English persons, asking the queen “who is fitter to revive the dead memorie of their fame, than she who beareth the lively image of their vertues?”31 While not specifying whose “dead memorie” and ancient virtues the “lively image” of Elizabeth revives, the prefatory materials present Plutarch’s biographies as a rich trove of political knowledge. The “Scholemistresse of Princes,” ancient “historie” is relevant to all those interested in “publike . . . affairs” and eager to achieve “judgement and knowledge,” regardless of rank. Inviting his readers to play the role of the prince, North emphasizes civic and political applications; in contrast to the “private” knowledge generated at “Universities,” the Parallel Lives produce the more “profitable” knowledge fit for “cities.” Plutarch’s “stories” should be valued for what we might anachronistically call their public-making potential—they “reach to all persons, serve for all tymes, teache the living, revive the dead.” Because they promote the ability to forge connections over time while imparting political competency, these “examples past” teach readers “to judge of things present & to foresee things to come.”32 Like the “fantasies of the past” that Svetlana Boym describes, North’s translation, “determined by needs of the present,” aims for “a direct impact on realities of the future.”33
Shakespeare took the invitation to profit from the Parallel Lives to heart. Plutarch’s Lives was one of the playwright’s favorite books, and “The Life of Marcus Antonius” was his favorite part of that book, providing source material for three different plays and numerous allusions. James Shapiro speculates that Shakespeare returned to Antonius late in his career “because he was discovering in it connections to new cultural preoccupations, or because he found himself identifying with the character of Antony.”34 At this stage in his life, the forty-four-year-old Shakespeare may indeed have identified with the aging Roman general rather than with his youthful opponent, the “scarce-bearded Caesar” (1.1.21), especially given Antonius’s proclivity for all things theatrical. Caesar’s favorite “passed away the time in hearing of foolish plays” (Plutarch, 183), surrounding himself with “tumblers, antic dancers, jugglers, players, jesters and drunkards” (195).35 Plutarch describes his subject as a real-life braggart soldier, moreover, famous for his “Asiatic” eloquence and “full of ostentation, foolish bravery, and vain ambition” (175). Like Antony, the mature Antonius played “many pretty youthful parts” to entertain the women in his life (185). Shakespeare presents Antony in more positive light than Plutarch does, by glossing over some unsavory aspects of Antonius’s career, like his responsibility in Pompey’s murder.36 Given this tendency to idealize the male protagonist, we might expect him to downplay Antonius’s histrionic tendencies, which consistently arouse Plutarch’s condemnation. Instead, Shakespeare magnifies them, making theatricality a defining feature of his Antony.
That Antonius sacrificed his reputation to this love of theater had become a commonplace by the time the playwright first took up the topic. Stephen Gosson illustrates the pitfalls awaiting playgoers by describing how “Antonius . . . gave him selfe daily to beholding Playes, for which he grewe into contempte among all his friendes,” for example.37 In Julius Caesar Brutus evinces the conventional contempt toward Antony, regarding his rival as no threat because he is “given / To sports, to wildness, and much company” (2.1.189–90). Brutus’s judgment is famously shortsighted, however, and the funeral scene shows Antony’s embrace of theater to have been neither vain nor foolish. Most critics would agree with Palfrey and Stern when they describe Antony’s eulogy of Caesar as “about the power of the theatre to move great assemblies.” Where Brutus appeals to reason in his funeral oration, Antony channels his audience’s grief to political purpose, in a superb display of Ciceronian eloquence. Although we might find in Antony’s “demonic Shakespearean charm” evidence of troubling demagoguery, Caesar casts a positive light on his favorite’s theatrics, basing his preference for Antony over Cassius on the fact that the latter “loves no plays / As thou dost, Antony” (1.2.203–4).38 Mocked by some, feared by others, Antony’s love of the theater is valued by his Roman superior, as it is later by the Egyptian queen, and by his English creator. To Shakespeare, Antonius was first a lover of plays, a man who patronizes theater by sponsoring it, attending it, performing in it, and applying its lessons to politics.
/> As he grew older, Shakespeare glimpsed in Antonius’s biography other resemblances that had escaped him at an earlier age. Plutarch presents Antonius’s love of Cleopatra, “the last and extremest mischief of all” (199), as an extension of the general’s lifelong enthusiasm for the theater; together, they fashion the queen’s identity as “a new Isis” (243) and indulge in “foolish sports” and “fond and childish pastimes,” including amorous role-play (206–7). Antonius is at once a theatrical artist and the lover of a queen, which explains why he and Cleopatra became identified with Elizabeth I and her men by the turn of the seventeenth century. The general’s willingness to play the lover to a self-styled moon goddess conformed to a pattern that Shakespeare had used throughout his career to think about the court. When he returned to “The Life of Marcus Antonius” life near the end of his own, this pattern came to dominate his presentation of the ancient Roman and his love for a mercurial queen.
While she was still alive, the Virgin Queen had welcomed the turn to the classics for a parallel that might bring into perspective her unorthodox reign. Besides assuming the guise of various classical goddesses, including Venus and Diana, the English queen also promoted an association with the historical Cleopatra, renowned as Elizabeth was for her “voice and words,” which “were marvelous pleasant; for her tongue was an instrument . . . which she easily turned to any language” (Plutarch 203).39 The Blessedness of Brytaine or a Celebration of the Queen’s Holyday (1588), a panegyric poem dedicated to the Earl of Essex and “published with Authoritie,” celebrates this quality in Elizabeth, praising her as
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