Age in Love

by Jacqueline Vanhoutte

  109. Quoted in “Dudley Bear and Ragged Staff,” 68; entry dated September 7, 1588 (Galloway, Records of Early English Drama, 90).

  110. Walsingham to the Earl of Leicester, September 29, 1584, in Leicester’s Commonwealth, 285.

  111. Proclamation 672, in Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, 2:506–8, 507.

  112. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 192; Sidney, “Defense of Leicester,” 252–53.

  113. Peck, introduction to Leicester’s Commonwealth, 9.

  114. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 186; Warner, 69.

  115. Peck, introduction to Leicester’s Commonwealth, 7–8.

  116. Privy Council to the Mayor of London, “in defense of the Earl of Leicester,” June 1585, in Leicester’s Commonwealth¸ 283–84.

  117. Bevington, Endymion, 195–96n1–9. The barking wolves are mentioned repeatedly; e.g., Endymion denies being a wolf who barks at Cynthia (2.1.34). According to Pincombe, the expression “He barks at the moon that endeavours to disparage truth” was proverbial (Plays of John Lyly, 83).

  118. See also Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, 799–800.

  119. Efforts to connect the play to Leicester’s marriage to Lettice Knollys or Oxford’s affair with Anne Vavasour are unpersuasive because these events predate the play by many years; see Bond, Works of John Lyly, 198; Hunter, John Lyly, 187; and Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 27. By 1588, Elizabeth had forgiven both noblemen for their amorous trespasses. Bevington proposes instead that the play refers to suspicions surrounding the Earl of Oxford’s loyalties (27–35).

  120. Perhaps Lyly intended Endymion to distance Oxford from his fellow Catholics Henry Howard and Charles Arundell, suspected of having coauthored Leicester’s Commonwealth. Peck makes a persuasive case for Arundell’s coauthorship; see his introduction to Leicester’s Commonwealth, 13–26. Oxford accused Howard and Arundell of treason at Leicester’s behest (Peck, 19–20). On Oxford’s complicated relationships with these noblemen, perhaps referenced in Endymion’s dream, see also Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 30–32.

  121. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 75.

  122. The epilogue accounts for the fact that some critics have identified Endymion with Lyly; see, e.g., Hunt, Shakespeare’s Speculative Art, 125; or Pincombe, Plays of John Lyly, 77–87.

  123. Sir Walter Ralegh, in his ascendancy at the time, was thirty-four in 1588. Essex was twenty-three. Leicester died later that same year.

  124. The number depends on whether all the characters age along with Endymion, a subject on which there is critical disagreement.

  125. Berry characterizes as “fairly comical” scholarly attempts to “fit real names to characters” (Chastity and Power, 116). Bevington reviews the most important arguments in his introduction to Endymion; examples identifying Endymion as Leicester include Halpin, Oberon’s Vision, 49–77; and Bond, Works of John Lyly, 9–10 and 81–103. Although these interpretations are often excessive, it is clear to me, as it has been to most recent commentators, that Lyly invites what Dutton calls “analogic” readings (Licensing, xi).

  126. For the old man as Burghley, see, e.g., Bennett, “Oxford and Endimion,” 354–69.

  127. Bond and Halpin agree on Shrewsbury; Halpin argues for Sussex and Bond for Sidney.

  128. For Gabriel Harvey, see Bond, Works of John Lyly, 10; for Philip II, see Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 43.

  129. For Corsites as Sir Henry Lee, see Bennett, “Oxford and Endimion,” 367. Paulet was notoriously unsympathetic to his charge; for Corsites as Paulet, see Bond, Works of John Lyly, 10.

  130. For Endymion as James IV, attempting to distance himself from Mary, Queen of Scots (Tellus), see Feuillerat, John Lyly, 141–90. For Endymion as Oxford, see Bennet, “Oxford and Endimion”; and Bevington, who complains about “the unsatisfactoriness of such topical readings” (introduction to Endymion, 27) but nonetheless proceeds to make the case for Oxford, on different grounds than Bennet’s.

  131. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 89.

  132. As Le Comte notes, “anyone of Elizabeth’s leading courtiers might be called Endymion.” He cites a passage in William Browne’s Brittania’s Pastorals (1613–16), which identifies Endymion with Ralegh, Leicester, and Essex (Endymion in England, 70–71). On the play’s applicability to Elizabeth’s courtiers, see also Dutton, Mastering the Revels, 65; and Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 50–51.

  133. Sallie Bond, “John Lyly’s Endimion,” 189–90. This perceptive essay emphasizes aging, even though it also argues that Lyly’s “approach to the drama . . . tends to remove Endimion from any pointed comparison with the English realm” (191).

  134. Bartholomeaus, Batman upon Bartholome, 71.

  135. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 24v.

  136. Castiglione, Courtier, 335. Endymion’s general debt to Castiglione is widely recognized; see Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 12, 15–21; Hunter, John Lyly, 128; and Dust, “Kiss.”

  137. On the various strains of the myth, see Le Comte, 1–39; Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 10–14; and Thomas, “Endimion and Its Sources,” 35–52. My comments about Lyly’s use of his sources reflect information made available by these scholars.

  138. Arden of Faversham, 14.150–54. Tantalizingly, this passage suggests that Elizabeth I’s taking of favorites might provide a model for emulation.

  139. Allen, Admonition, xv; see also Leicester’s Commonwealth, which repeatedly accuses Leicester of having “rise[n] and mount[ed] aloft from base lineage” (174).

  140. On Lee as Endymion, see Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 64; Spenser, Epithalamion, 21.378–382; Poetry, 636.

  141. On these rumors, see Levin, Heart and Stomach, 77–90. Although Le Comte does not mention the connection to contemporary rumors, he notes that Spenser’s “apostrophe [to Cynthia] is perfectly in tune with the occasion, except for the esoteric reminder that Cynthia had been seduced with a fleece of wool” (Endymion in England, 42).

  142. Bacon, “Endymion, or the Favourite,” in Wisdom of the Ancients, 717–18.

  143. Sullivan, Sleep, Romance, 74.

  144. Although Adams describes Leicester as “practically” Elizabeth’s “surrogate husband” (“Robert Dudley”), it might be more accurate to say that the earl functioned as a surrogate wife.

  145. Shephard, Meanings of Manhood, 74.

  146. Allen, Admonition, xxi.

  147. Hatton to Elizabeth I, undated, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 21.

  148. “A Letter from Robert, Earl of Leicester,” 25. The editor, Conyers Read, argues that the letter was written to Lady Sheffield, around 1573.

  149. Hatton to Leicester, July 21, 1584, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 381.

  150. Leicester to Hatton, July 23, 1584, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 383.

  151. This correspondence substantiates Adams’s claim that faction did not play as great of a role as is sometimes assumed at the Elizabethan court (Leicester and the Court, 60). See also Hammer, “Absolute and Sovereign Mistress,” 40–42.

  152. I am grateful to Jo Carney Eldridge, whose paper “Elizabeth’s Courtships and the Great Chain of Being” at the 2009 Queen Elizabeth I Society meeting first alerted me to the relevance of the queen’s nicknames.

  153. Sir Thomas Heneage to Hatton, December 29, 1582, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 297–98.

  154. See, in contrast, Bond, who claims the “overall effect” of Lyly’s style “would be to take the audience far away from the frustrations of everyday life in Elizabeth’s court” (“John Lyly’s Endimion,” 192).

  155. Hatton to Elizabeth I, September 19, 1580, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 158; Hatton to Elizabeth I, undated letter, in Harris, Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, 28.

  156. Dutton, Licensing, xi.

  157. Other court writers likened the power that monarchs wield over subjects to the power that humans wield over animals. For Sidney, “the do
g” who “was in his collar taught his kind” emblematized the reluctant monarchical subject (Old Arcadia, in Major Works, 42–138, ll.137–38).

  158. A famous anecdote recounts that Elizabeth referred to Leicester as her lapdog, “as soon as he is seen anywhere, the people say that I am coming” (quoted in Kendall, Robert Dudley, 87). For the bridling metaphor, see her 1566 speech to a joint delegation of Lords and Commons, where she refers to members as “bridleless colts” who “do not know their rider’s hand” (Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 93).

  159. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 14.297.

  160. In a related move, “Endymion intentionally conjures the witch” Dipsas (Neufeld, “Lyly’s Chimerical Vision,” 193). Audience members versed in mythology would know that Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft, invoked by Ovid’s Circe and his Medea, “was identified as the third, waning face of the moon” (Berry, Chastity and Power, 131). Cynthia is also implicated in Endymion’s enchanted sleep because “the moonwort covering the bank on which he reclines links it to the moon goddess” (Hunt, Shakespeare’s Speculative Art, 111). On the three faces of the moon, see also Pincombe, Plays of John Lyly, 97–98; Purkiss, Witch¸186; and Hackett, Virgin Mother, 182–86. Although Neufeld mentions Circe, she follows Purkiss and Pincombe in identifying Medea as the classical figure most relevant to the play’s depiction of its major female characters.

  161. Betts, “Image of this Queene,” 176.

  162. Chapman, “Hymnus in Cynthiam” (1594), Poems, 31–45, ll.10, 494, 516–18; Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 49.

  163. Gascoigne et al., Princely Pleasures, C5r.

  164. Harington, Nugae Antique, 1:358–59.

  165. Gascoigne et al., Princely Pleasures, C6r.

  166. Another line that recalls Leicester’s appearance as Deep Desire is Tellus’s description of Endymion as a plant that “pricks” (3.1.37).

  167. Neufeld, 195, 204.

  168. Castiglione, Courtier, 339. Ralegh, “The Sheepheards Praise of his Sacred Diana,” 17–18, in Poems, 4–5.

  169. Vickers, “Diana Described,” 273.

  170. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.302; Golding, “Prefatory Epistle,” 99. Actaeon is a recurring figure in court literature and in anticourt propaganda. Leicester’s Commonwealth puts an interesting spin on the Actaeon myth by claiming that those who know of Leicester’s perfidies cannot reveal them, since “it would have been as dangerous unto them as it was to Actaeon to have seen Diana and her maidens naked” (100). A picture of this scene was among Leicester’s substantial collection displayed at Leicester House (Goldring, Robert Dudley, 225, 302).

  171. Verstegan, Declaration, 30.

  172. Platter, Travels, 195–96.

  173. Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 18.

  174. Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 55. Dares, in a conversation with Samias about what Eumenides has just said, refers to Geron as “the other old man” (5.1.3). Although the implication is that Eumenides is old, Bevington argues that the reference is to “Geron, the other man besides Eumenides, and who is old (as Eumenides is not; the play employs a double sense of time)” (Endymion, 163n3). This seems an attempt to make the evidence square with the theory. Bond suggests sensibly that having the characters age would reinforce “visually the theme of Cynthia’s immutability” (“John Lyly’s Endimion,” 196). Bond is unique in pointing out that fifty-five-year-old women can be worthy objects of amorous desire (196n7).

  175. Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 11.

  176. Sullivan, Sleep, Romance, 17.

  177. For Lettice Knollys, see Bond, Works of John Lyly; for Lady Sheffield, see Halpin, Oberon’s Vision, 61; for Anne Vavasour, see Bennet, “Oxford and Endimion”; for Mary, Queen of Scots, see Berry, Chastity and Power, 129. Bevington takes Tellus to be an embodiment of the Catholic Church (introduction to Endymion, 32–33).

  178. Lyly’s other plays testify to his familiarity with this distinction. Allegorical readings of Endymion echo discussions of the queen’s two bodies; see, e.g., Saccio, who writes that “Cynthia and Tellus clearly offer to Endimion higher and lower kinds of love, rapt adoration of a goddess or pursuit of ordinary earthly beauty” (Court Comedies, 173); or Purkiss, who writes that “Cynthia is goddess and a queen” where Tellus “is seductress and figure of the world” (Witch, 188).

  179. Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 54.

  180. Although Sullivan never discusses Endymion, the pattern here is consistent with the one he describes, where the “male hero is lulled asleep by the blandishments of a female enchantress (or her nymph)” (Sleep, Romance, 11).

  181. Allen, Admonition, xxi.

  182. Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 45.

  183. A possibility sometimes posited by readers who identify Tellus with Anne Vavasour, who bore Oxford an illegitimate child; or with Lady Sheffield, who bore Leicester an illegitimate child. Tellus discusses the picture she has made of Endymion in 4.1.1–31; see Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 19–20.

  184. Quoted in Cressy, Dangerous Talk, 70–71.

  185. Castiglione, Courtier, 350.

  186. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 23v-r; Purkiss, “Medea,” 41. Hackett characterizes this as an “audacious” eroticized moment, “Dream-Visions,” 50; however, the Neoplatonic valence of the kiss here trumps its erotic one.

  187. De Villanova, Defence of Age, B2v.

  188. See, e.g., Grigsby, Pestilence, 35–44.

  189. Edward Blount added the song in the 1628 edition. Whether the songs are Lyly’s own or “is a matter of debate, but prevailing opinion” is that “the songs, written by Lyly himself, were copied out separately for the boy choristers and were then held back from original publication as part of the boy actors’ repertory” (Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 2).

  190. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, VII.718–19. On Tophas’s ancestry, see Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 14; and Deats, “Disarming of the Knight,” 284. On Tophas, Thopas, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, see Pincombe, Plays of John Lyly, 101–105; and Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 51, 55.

  191. Wyatt, “Mine Own John Poyntz,” in Complete Poems, 186–89, ll.50–51.

  192. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 92.

  193. Bevington, Introduction to Endymion, 14; on Lyly as a satirist, see also Berry, Chastity and Power, 113, 116, 130–31.

  194. Fleetwood, Itinerarium, 31; Endymion, 5.2.34.

  195. Hunter, John Lyly, 316.

  196. Oddly enough, Pincombe finds Tophas “not at all a parody of Endymion” since the former is “emasculated” while the latter a “supervirile warrior” (Plays of John Lyly, 104).

  197. “bandog, n.” OED online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/15158 (accessed November 3, 2017).

  198. Purkiss, Witch, 187. That Dipsas provides a reflection of Elizabeth was first put forward by Berry, who notes that the “misogynistic representations” of Dipsas and Bagoa “contaminate by their proximity the icon of Elizabeth” (Chastity and Power, 133). Tophas is rarely seen as a vehicle for such allegory, although Deats does note that his “descent into absurdity” lampoons Endymion’s deterioration (“Disarming of the Knight,” 288).

  199. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 89.

  200. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 51v.

  201. Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 13.

  202. Hunter, John Lyly, 94.

  203. Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 58.

  204. Hunter, John Lyly, 97. Hunter thinks Tophas was played by a boy (237) but some critics, taking references to Sir Tophas’s age and stature literally, argue that an adult actor may have been used in the part (Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 57).

  205. Halpin suggests that the epilogue, by begging for the queen’s protection from “the malicious that seek to overthrow us with threats,” recognizes that the powerful men at court might take exception to the play (Oberon’s Vision, 51).

  206. As Hunter memorably put it, Lyly remained in his “posture of painful supplication for the rest of his life,” without obtaining the p
referment that he claimed the queen had promised him (John Lyly, 78).While Hunter and others have cast Lyly as a “victim of fashion,” Scragg proposes that he may have fallen afoul of the queen instead (“Victim of Fashion,” 221).

  207. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 21, 25–26.

  2. Falstaff among the Minions of the Moon

  1. Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth, 23–30.

  2. Rowe, Life of Mr. William Shakspear, ix. Dennis has an earlier version of the anecdote in Comical Gallant, A2r.

  3. Bradley, “Rejection of Falstaff,” 77–78.