Age in Love
Page 25
Through his divided catastrophe, Shakespeare also allows Cleopatra the last word on “age in love,” ceding the stage to the queenly perspective on such matters for the first time. Ever since Bottom first dreamt of his fairy queen, the playwright had allowed rational considerations to overcome the seductive appeal of his deviant old lovers. Like Hal, Titania turns her countenance from her monstrous minion, after a painful disillusionment, in which her “visions” are punctured, and she recognizes that she was “enamor’d of an ass” (4.1.76–77). Once her “eyes . . . loathe his visage” (4.1.79), she resumes her submissive position in patriarchal culture, which means deferring to male judgment about the differences between a proper man and a “hateful fool” (4.1.49). A Midsummer Night’s Dream toys with the idea that masculine merit might look quite different from a feminine perspective—Hermia does not look with the same eyes as Egeus, either—but it works hard to contain the subversive implications of that idea. Antony and Cleopatra makes no such efforts. Cleopatra remains faithful to her vision of Antony to the end, offering us “Nature’s piece ‘gainst / fancy, condemning shadows quite” (5.2.99–100). Here, she recalls the epilogue of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as if making amends for all those old shadows that have now come to offend.
Harnessing the emotions released by the play’s echoes and resemblances, Cleopatra makes us wish Antony ours again in the fifth act. Twenty years after Leicester’s death, and four years after Elizabeth’s, another old adulterer devoted to a “terrene moon” becomes a figure of mythic “bounty” and generosity, an “autumn” that paradoxically grows “the more by reaping” (5.2.86–87). Besides endowing him with the power to confound all manner of convention, Antony’s Bacchanalian properties have kept the possibility of a resuscitation alive all along, “if only as desire,” in Barbara Bono’s haunting phrase.176 It is a desire that Cleopatra’s final tribute expertly fans. Co-opting the Circe myth to feminocentric ends, her “eyes . . . so royal” (5.2.318) render Antony’s immersion in delight “dolphin-like,” showing his “back above / The element they liv’d in” (5.2.88–89). His face “like the heavens,” his voice like “rattling thunder,” his “bounty” without winter in it, all testify to the outsize feelings of wonder, admiration, and gratitude that Antony (through Burbage) inspires in others (5.2.78–92). Like Dolabella, those of us who are susceptible to Cleopatra’s eulogy apprehend far more than we can comprehend in this description. That our feelings may be out of proportion to the youthful body of the boy playing Cleopatra or to the aging body of the actor playing Antony matters little—indeed, this contradiction may even be an asset. As Elizabeth I had demonstrated, performances that overcome bodily weaknesses associated with age generate the impression of virtuosity and greatness. Those of us who have felt Antony’s power to overcome misogynistic prejudices must therefore needs approve Cleopatra’s claim that “t’imagine / An Antony were nature’s piece ‘gainst fancy.”177 There have been such men—we have seen them, onstage if not in life—and Cleopatra’s dream urges us to believe there “might be such” men again (5.2.93). Even Caesar thinks that Cleopatra looks “like sleep / As if she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace” (5.2.346–48). By calling attention to the performer who only looks like death, the medium who has just so successfully revived the dead, he reminds us that Cleopatra will rise again, and again, and again. In a utopian future, every man may learn through such repeat performances to think himself another Antony.
Epilogue
The baffled Hamlet, holding two miniatures before his mother, demanding to know how she could have stooped to Claudius, expresses a whole generation’s resentment about the vagaries of queenly judgment. In Margaret Atwood’s “Gertrude Talks Back,” the unrepentant Queen of Denmark confronts her miniature-wielding son, summarily dismissing his claims about his father’s superiority to Claudius. Gertrude tells Hamlet that every time she wanted to “warm up” her “aging bones,” Old Hamlet would react as if she had “suggested murder.” The queen prefers Claudius, whose more generous approach to aging, female sexuality, and the pleasures of the flesh allows her to stop “tiptoeing around.”1 With characteristic insight, Atwood identifies the idea that women might have different criteria for determining masculine excellence as a significant source of Hamlet’s trouble. Gertrude had eyes and she chose Claudius.
The works discussed in this book all concern themselves with women like Gertrude, who elect unorthodox men to high places, including their beds and their thrones. When Puck finds his “mistress with a monster is in love” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.2.6), he gives comic expression to pervasive reservations about this scenario, shared by the common people who gossiped about Leicester’s sexual proclivities, the exiled courtiers who complained about them, and the three generations of playwrights who restaged them. And yet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and Antony and Cleopatra show that the dream of election by a powerful woman could also be enthralling, a “most rare vision” to which theatrical audiences succumbed time and again (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.2.204–5).
Shakespeare kept offering new and improved versions of the age-in-love figure associated with that dream, attesting to its enduring popularity and commercial viability. Only when women are in power does their perspective on masculine excellence become such a source of widespread hope, anxiety, and fascination. The possibility that feminine ideas regarding masculine merit might alter the basis of society took root in the Elizabethan imagination, I have argued, because of Elizabeth I’s alleged preference for “subtile, fine, and fox-like” men like Claudius, who defied patriarchal norms and who enjoyed a bit of theatrical sport while doing so.2 On the one hand, Elizabeth’s less favored subjects felt with Hamlet that her favorites usurped proper men, without having “merited . . . to be so highly favored of [her Majes]tie.”3 On the other hand, male subjects hoped that they, too, would have their deserts graced one day, as Shakespeare did.
After Antony and Cleopatra purged the age-in-love trope of its negative associations, the dream of election by a powerful woman continued to haunt English culture (as indeed did the ghost of the woman who had inspired that dream).4 Not all newer versions embrace the transformational possibilities glimpsed in Antony’s relation to Cleopatra, but some do. Webster’s Duchess “stains time past, lights time to come” when she chooses the steward Antonio purely for what she takes to be his merits.5 And in Cymbeline, Imogen surrounds herself with tapestries celebrating “Proud Cleopatra, when she met her Roman, / And Cydnus swell’d above the banks” (2.4.70–71). Emulating this example, she chooses Posthumous against her father’s wishes, lighting the time to come in her own way. When a choric gentleman approves Imogen’s choice of a husband, arguing that “By her election may be truly read / What kind of man” Posthumous is (1.1.53–54), he shows himself far more tolerant of “men of this kind” than Bacon was.6 Like Imogen, women from Margaret Cavendish to Willa Cather to Janet Adelman have loved Antony and Cleopatra for keeping alive alternative ways of thinking about men and women. One “would think that [Shakespeare] had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman,” Cavendish wrote with wonder, “for who could Describe Cleopatra Better than he hath done?”7 It helped that Shakespeare had known a “wonderful piece of work” (1.2.154–55), who was a cause of change and inspiration to him throughout her long reign.
One measure of how little attitudes toward female rule have progressed over the last four hundred years is the account given by some biographers of Elizabeth’s elder favorites, which hews closer to Elizabethan anticourt polemics than to Shakespeare’s late plays. For example, John Guy, Elizabeth’s most recent biographer, proposes that “dashing” men were the queen’s “main weakness,” and that “these could, and sometimes did, cloud her judgment.” When Guy describes the capable Sir Christopher Hatton as “an unctuous flatterer” for declaring “himself to be Elizabeth’s ‘everlasting bondman,’ seemingly without a hint of hypocrisy,” he sounds nearly as outraged as a Vindice or a Hamlet.8
Notably, what Guy finds intolerable is not the possibility that Hatton was a hypocrite, but the possibility that he was not. Hatton loved the queen he served and believed in her superiority. This apparently is harder for Guy to accept than it was for Shakespeare, who embraced alternative ideals of masculinity in Antony and Cleopatra. To some extent, antimonarchical biases explain the contempt with which scholars often treat Hatton and Leicester, and the correspondent enthusiasm they feel for the Earl of Essex, who showed this “ageing spinster” a thing or two about masculine indomitability.9 If the Elizabethan period teaches us anything, however, it is that progressive sentiments expressed in relation to female leaders can mask deeply misogynistic impulses. Years ago, Peter Erickson warned against the elevation of Essex as a “proto-democratic” figure because his “resistance to Elizabeth has a strong masculinist and misogynist aura that should not recommend it as a model and inspiration for our own ideal of subversion.”10 And Carole Levin denounced attacks on Hatton and Leicester as attacks on Elizabeth’s judgment.11 Yet we continue to privilege Essex’s career over those of his elders when trying to understand how Elizabethan men felt about their queen.
Although the queen’s elder favorites were uniquely memorable to their contemporaries, we have all but forgotten them. This is evident in the lack of political value that historicist readings of Shakespeare assign to a Claudius or an Antony. I have focused in this book on contemporary perceptions of the elder favorites, many of which were unflattering. I would like to conclude by remembering the debt we owe to Leicester, who patronized, employed, and inspired artists like Kempe, Burbage, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. English Renaissance culture was made immensely richer by men of his kind, in ways hard either to describe or to overestimate. According to Erickson, “Instead of making more of Essex’s, or Shakespeare’s, radical potential, we must . . . look elsewhere to more contemporary literature for possible images of subversion.”12 I can understand this impulse, but I think it misguided. This book started as an investigation of dated material but it ended up feeling strangely timely. The 2016 American election showed our democracy to be stubbornly hostile to female politicians, for all too familiar reasons. I cannot be the only student of Elizabeth’s reign who found the vitriolic attacks on Secretary Clinton’s judgment uncannily reminiscent of those on Elizabeth I’s. We might do worse than turn to the Elizabethan past for ideas on how to overcome this present hostility and make our future more hospitable to female rule.
Notes
Introduction
1. All quotations from Shakespeare are from Riverside Shakespeare.
2. Vaughan, Approved Directions, 113. Bartholomaeus Anglicus defines the “striplyng age” as between 14 and 28 years of age, although he notes that some “phisitions” extend it to “the end of thirtie or five and thirtie,” the time in life “to get children.” The characters I examine in this book would have fallen in the age known as “Senecta”—“old men” who not yet reached the state of “Senium,” or extreme old age (Batman upon Bartholome, 70v). The division into stages was commonplace, although there was disagreement about the chronological age signaling the advent of a new stage. Functionality played as much of a role as chronology in staging life; see, e.g., Shahar, Growing Old, 12–18; and Alexandra Shephard, Meanings of Manhood, 54–55, 215–17. The disagreements derived partly from the different paradigms for staging life—Aristotelian, Galenic, Ptolemaic, and Christian; see Burrow, Ages of Man; and Bruce Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, 71–82. Shephard argues for “the use of 50 as the milestone from which to approach ageing in the early modern past” (216). Beam agrees that the individual lifespan “was divided into three to twelve stages, with the first stage of old age “beginning anywhere from 40 to 65, but typically located around age 50” (“Female Old Age,” 99). Men in the “green” old age were especially suited to governance and public service; see Thomas, “Age and Authority,” 211; and Shephard, 41–42, 231–32.
3. Ralegh, History, 127–28. This task confronts men in the sixth stage, with the seventh stage reserved for extreme old age. Ralegh also identifies the “third age,” which follows infancy and school years, as the time for amorous pursuits.
4. The sonnet speaker’s sense that his age exposes him to judgment is shared by other aging males in the lyric tradition; see, e.g., Donne, “Canonization,” where the lover feels others “flout” his “five grey hairs” (3).
5. Klause, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” 306. Other critics who consider the issue are Hallet Smith, “Bare Ruined Choirs,” 233–49; and Martin, Constituting Old Age, 113–25.
6. Fiedler, “Eros and Thanatos,” 235, 238. Anthony Ellis concurs “that the laughter this figure provokes has a timeless quality,” although his own analysis is “grounded in the distinct social and political contexts” (Old Age, Masculinity, 3, 9).
7. Adams, Leicester and the Court, 28.
8. Thomas, “Age and Authority,” 211. In 1597, the thirty-four-year-old Robert Sidney was too young for a position in the queen’s entourage.
9. Roser, “Life Expectancy”; Oeppen et al., “Measurements of Late Medieval Mortality,” 162.
10. Quoted in Klein, “Tim Kaine’s Feminism.”
11. For the “debilitating” effect of erotic desire on rational masculinity see Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, 9.
12. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 73; Rosenberg, Leicester, 26. The earl’s regal aspirations were much discussed; if he was “little inferyor to a kynge in atoritye and superioritye,” he conducted himself as the “emperor in [his] owen desiers” (News, 144).
13. Castiglione, Courtier, 340.
14. Levin, Heart and Stomach, 45–47, 66–90. See also Robert Shephard, “Sexual Rumours,” 101–22; and Cressy, Dangerous Talk, 69–75.
15. Adams notes that scholars underestimate Leicester’s importance as favorite because Essex has eclipsed his stepfather in the historiographical imagination (Leicester and the Court, 46–67). One exception is Perry, who examines the Jacobean tradition on Leicester (Literature and Favoritism). For theatrical allusions to Leicester, see Jones and White, “Gorboduc,” 3–16; Lake, “From Leicester His Commonwealth,” 128–61; and Tricomi, “Philip, Earl of Pembroke,” 332–45.
16. Quinn, “Celebrity,” 156, 159.
17. Levin observes, “Rumors about Elizabeth’s sexual misconduct . . . centered on her relationship with Dudley” (Heart and Stomach, 45).
18. Cressy, Dangerous Talk, 62–67.
19. Adams, “Dudley, Robert.”
20. Middleton, Revenger’s Tragedy, 1.1.34–36. All references to Middleton are to Works.
21. Middleton, Mad World, My Masters, 4.2.18–21, 31. The fashion extended to poetry; see Achileos, “Youth, Old Age,” 39; and Martin, Constituting Old Age, 100–136.
22. See, e.g., Guy, “The 1590s,” 1–19.
23. Middleton, Mad World, My Masters, 4.4.51–52.
24. Bruster, Question of Culture, 64.
25. Essex’s claims about his intentions are a famous instance of this ploy, used also by the Wyatt rebels against Mary Tudor in 1554 and by the participants of the Northern Rebellion against Elizabeth in 1570. For the queen as the victim of a conspiracy of “evil counsels,” see Lake and Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 6–7. Indirect means were favored because treason and sedition laws made speaking openly against the queen a crime; see Levin, Heart and Stomach, 68–69; and Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason, 137. Like Perry, I am skeptical of the idea that “attacking the king’s servants provides a way to voice dissent while maintaining” loyalty to the monarch (Literature and Favoritism, 10).
26. Goldring, “Portraiture, Patronage,” 170–74.