4. All quotations from Shakespeare are from the Riverside Shakespeare. There are two major exceptions to my generalization about the critical tradition: the Oldcastle controversy raises the possibility that Falstaff satirized Lord Cobham (see below), while Merry Wives has been linked to the Order of the Garter (e.g., Erickson, “Order of the Garter”).
5. “minion, n.1 and adj.,” OED online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/118859 (accessed March 18, 2018). The word derives from the French “mignon.” It gained prominence in relation to the young men around Henry VIII (Walker, Plays of Persuasion, 66–72) and acquired sexual connotations in the Elizabethan period; see, e.g., Cardinal Allen’s use of it, below. Shannon surveys the meanings of this word, arguing that the more negative connotations it accrued “emerge within the same time frame in which the absolutist theory of kingship underwent such expansion” (Sovereign Amity, 144).
6. Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory, 136.
7. Lyly, Endymion, 1.1.40; Ralegh, “Ocean to Cynthia,” ll.271–73. For the moon as a symbol of constancy-in-change, see e.g., Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 16. The moon became the image “most closely associated” with Elizabeth during the final decade of her reign (Berry, Chastity and Power, 135). See also Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, 48.
8. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 190–91.
9. Allen, Copie of a Letter, 10, 27; Admonition, XVIII. On the latter passage, see also Levin, Heart and Stomach, 80–81; and Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 33.
10. Machiavelli, Prince, 77; Blundeville, Profitable Treatise, D2r-v.
11. Camden, History, 53.
12. Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 147.
13. Briefe Discoverie, 110.
14. Briefe Discoverie, 14; Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 4.
15. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 25–27.
16. De Certeau, Writing of History, 8.
17. “Letter of Estate,” 29.
18. “Letter of Estate,” 26.
19. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 193.
20. According to Shannon, “Hal’s dissimulation of mignonnerie raises the banner of impropriety from his very first appearance with Falstaff” (Sovereign Amity, 174). First-time spectators do not realizethat Hal is dissimulating until the scene ends and a solid basis for comparison is established. Only then does Shakespeare distinguish Hal from those genuinely in the grips of favoritism.
21. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 72–73.
22. Carlson, Haunted Stage, 7, 49, 46.
23. Castiglione, Courtier, 147.
24. Briefe Discoverie, 46; Leicester’s Commonwealth, 188.
25. Berger, Waking Trifles, 144.
26. “Letter of Estate,” 29. For Falstaff as Hal’s collaborator, see Berger, Waking Trifles, 144–45; and “Prince’s Dog,” 40–73. For rumors about Leicester, see Levin, Heart and Stomach, 47, 71–90, and previous chapters.
27. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 193; Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 90.
28. Peck repeatedly refers to the materials about Leicester as constituting his “black legend” (introduction to Leicester’s Commonwealth).
29. Yachnin, “Populuxe Theatre,” 38–68. Levin, Heart and Stomach, demonstrates that gender shaped perceptions of the queen; as McLaren shows, queenship encouraged “men—and not women: the exclusion is important—to image themselves as both citizens and subjects” (Political Culture, 8). Feminist critiques of Jürgen Habermas’s work show the bourgeois public sphere to be similarly premised on the exclusion of women; see, e.g., the essays by Fraser and Eley in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere. I think it no coincidence, therefore, that the gardener in Richard II stages “a type of politically engaged subjects” talking to a queen (Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity, 51); or that the “dream of the impersonal monarch” emerged during Elizabeth’s reign (Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 9).
30. Whitney, Early Responses, 92. On Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, and theatricality, see Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, 138–39.
31. Habermas defines the public as a collection of “private persons” who participate in the “public sphere” through discussion of political issues (Structural Transformation, 28). Early modern scholars have tweaked this to offer a “historically grounded conception of the public sphere” (Lake and Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 2). For how this idea pertains to early modern literature, see Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 3–4; Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity, 186–87; and Wilson and Yachnin, introduction to Making Publics, 5.
32. Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory, 123. See also Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 222–28; and Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, 143–54. In their eagerness to find in Falstaff a “plebeian, subaltern” resistance (Grady, 151), critics often disregard evidence of Falstaff’s social rank (including his fat, which marks him out as a man of leisure), or his appalling behavior as military commander. As Knowles notes, however, Falstaff clearly “belongs to the elite chivalric class” (“1 Henry IV,” 418).
33. See, e.g., Fraser, who writes that “deliberation” is associated with men and “can serve as a mask for domination” (“Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 119).
34. Camden, Annales, 3.287. Both descriptions suggest syphilis; however, Kendall suspects the fever resulted from malarial infection (Robert Dudley, 232), as does Adams (“Dudley, Robert”).
35. For synchronic and diachronic forms of celebrity, see Quinn, “Celebrity,” 159.
36. Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 24.
37. Castiglione, Courtier, 340.
38. On this, see also introduction and chapter 1.
39. Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels, vol. 1 of Works, 4.3.94–96. The character who speaks these lines, Philautia or Self-Love, is closely associated with the queen’s favorites. For more, see next chapter.
40. See Rosenberg, Leicester, for books; and Goldring, Robert Dudley, for the arts.
41. Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity, 189.
42. Because few play-texts survive, scholars have been unable to ascertain whether the earl used the traveling troupe to promote specific positions; “there is a strong possibility that on the one hand Leicester himself, or on the other the players and their writers, chose to present plays which supported the patron’s public activities” (Gurr, “Privy Councilors,” 230).
43. Maclean, “Tracking Leicester’s Men,” 259.
44. Jones and Stallybras, Renaissance Clothing, 8.
45. Entry dated September 7, 1588, Galloway, Records of Early English Drama, 90.
46. “Within any theatrical culture audience members typically see many of the same actors in many different productions, and they will inevitably carry some memory of those actors from production to production” (Carlson, Haunted Stage, 53)—and from troupe to troupe.
47. Susan Frye, Elizabeth I, 78. For the earl as a theatrical patron, see Maclean, “Tracking Leicester’s Men,” and Gurr, “Privy Councilors.” For the earl’s patronage and his courtship of the queen, see my “Itinerarium.” Two descriptions of the 1575 entertainments at Kenilworth appeared in print: The Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth (1576), reprinted in The Pleasauntest Workes of George Gascoigne Esquyre (1587); and A Letter, Whearin Part of the Entertainment unto the Queenz Maiesty, at Killingworth Castl . . . is signified (1575), purportedly written by Robert Laneham (which contains a description of a bearbaiting). Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595–96) and his Twelfth Night (1601–2) allude to the Kenilworth entertainments. On the speculations of biographical critics who place an impressionable eleven-year-old Shakespeare of prodigious memory at Kenilworth in 1575, see Belsey, A Future for Criticism, 47. On Gascoigne’s relationship to Leicester, see Rosenberg, 166–72.
48. Gascoigne, Noble Arte of Venerie, 133.
49. The Riverside editors conjecture that Mistress Quickly makes an error in consigning Falstaff to Arthur’s bosom, when she must have meant Abraham, but Falstaff is associated with Arthur elsewhere; see 2 Henry IV, where he enters singing about “When Arthur was first i
n court” (2.4.33). Leicester’s bear badge was an attempt to establish descent from Arthur through etymology (Arthur was thought to derive from the Welsh “Arth,” meaning bear, or from the Latin Arcturus, a star in the constellation of Ursa Major). After the chance of marrying Elizabeth evaporated, Leicester continued to use Arthurian iconography; in The Hague, for example, he entered through an arch decorated with the ragged staff, which included a representation of Arthur, and which announced that “we hope he proves a second Arthur” (Delineatio Pompae). Holinshed includes descriptions of this entry and of the banquets with “wine in abundance” attended by Leicester (Chronicles, 1426). Leicester’s recourse to Arthurian themes explains why the person posing as Elizabeth’s illegitimate son in 1588 identified himself as Arthur Dudley; see Cressy, Dangerous Talk, 72.
50. Quoted in Cressy, Dangerous Talk, 73.
51. Nashe, Pierce Penniless, 69. Nashe’s beast fable reproduces many features of anti-Leicestrian discourse; e.g., he endows the bear, a “hungrie usurper,” with insatiable appetites, a tendency to poison enemies, and the power to “blinde” the lion “as he liste” (69–74).
52. Charnes, Notorious Identity, 3.
53. “Dead Mans Right,” A3v.
54. The more than sixty surviving manuscripts indicate that Leicester’s Commonwealth remained in wide circulation throughout the early modern period. Most extant copies date to the seventeenth century. Although few Elizabethan copies of this proscribed book survive, it nevertheless must have spawned an underground tradition, making “the retailing of scandalous stories about” Leicester “a national pastime” (Peck, introduction to News, 141).
55. Perry, who examines the Jacobean tradition on Leicester, notes that these allusions form part of “mountain of evidence for the ongoing popularity of the libel” (Literature and Favoritism, 36). Dutton gives a persuasive account of the tendency to read analogically in Licensing; see also introduction.
56. “Epithaphium,” Leicester’s Commonwealth, 292, ll.5–6. This poem is sometimes attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh; see Poems, 120.
57. Bruster, Question of Culture, 81.
58. Untitled poem, in Leicester’s Commonwealth, 293, ll.13–22.
59. According to Scott-Warren, bearbaitings may have been popular because of local pride in the breed, for which the English had long been famous (“Bear Gardens,” 73–74).
60. Untitled poem, Leicester’s Commonwealth, 293, ll.29–30.
61. News, 145. Further references to this treatise are included parenthetically.
62. Briefe Discoverie, 46, 61.
63. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 94.
64. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 16.
65. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 129. News was inspired by this passage, which goes on to note that the earl will not be able to avoid being called to account in the next life.
66. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 21v.
67. Castiglione, Courtier, 338.
68. Jonson, Every Man Out, in vol. 1 of Works, 3.1.410–11; Lake and Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 6.
69. Gascoigne et al., Princely Pleasures, C6r.
70. The author coyly refuses to name Leicester’s paramours who “are yet liveing and may amend” (News, 154). The references to a gaping gulf allude to John Stubbs’s notorious 1579 pamphlet of that name. Based on an earlier reference, which describes Leicester as having as great a difficulty “to winde him selfe out of the Duke of Norfolk’s business as” he “had afterward to untwist [him] selfe from a lady of his name and blud” (151), Peck identifies the lady as Lady Sheffield, née Douglas Howard, cousin to Norfolk and mother to Leicester’s illegitimate son Robert Dudley. Peck suggests that the reference to her nose may reflect a failed treatment for syphilis but no other sources mention Lady Sheffield’s nose (News, 151n26). Although she was not of Norfolk’s name, Elizabeth was of his “blud” (they were cousins), and she was famously “high-nosed” (Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, 38). It is likely that the author wishes to call Elizabeth to mind as well as Lady Sheffield; according to the conjectures of Elizabeth’s more imaginative subjects, these two ladies had literally occupied the same position vis-à-vis Leicester. Other scholars who see the fiend as a stand-in for the queen include Betts, “Image of this Queene,” 155; and Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 203.
71. Privy Council to the Mayor of London, June 1585, in Leicester’s Commonwealth¸ 282–84, 283.
72. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 79.
73. Verstegan, Declaration, 30.
74. “Dead Mans Right,” A3v-A4r.
75. Leicester’s Ghost, 25. Its modern editor reviews the evidence for dating, arguing that parts of the poem were written while Elizabeth was still alive (Williams, introduction, xiv). The charge shows up in Leicester’s Commonwealth; see previous chapter, and “Letter of Estate,” 30.
76. On the gendered aspects of the “bourgeois model of ‘rational-critical debate,’” see also Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 51.
77. Leicester’s Ghost, 10.
78. Yachnin, “Populuxe Theatre,” 49.
79. See Bevington, introduction to Endymion, 1–7. For Lyly’s influence on Shakespeare, see Hunter, John Lyly, 298–349; and Montrose, Purpose of Playing, 162–68. 5.5 of Merry Wives riffs on scenes in Endymion, including the pinching of Corsites by fairies; see below.
80. See Montrose, Purpose of Playing, 151–78, on Titania; Levin, Heart and Stomach, on Olivia, 136–37; Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, on Gertrude and Cleopatra, 100–168; and Erickson, “Order of the Garter,” on the wives of Windsor.
81. Tophas is “an important Janus-faced figure” who “looks back to Chaucer’s Sir Thopas, Roister Doister, and Gascoigne’s Pasiphilo and forward to Falstaff, another braggart warrior” (Deats, “Disarming of the Knight,” 284).
82. Barkan, Gods Made Flesh, 262.
83. The name Titania was used by Ovid in reference to Diana and Circe; by the 1590s “the figure of the Fairy Queen was firmly associated with Elizabeth I” (Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 59). On the play’s “bestialized eroticism,” see Boehrer, “Economies of Desire,” 100. Boehrer thinks about the bestiality in terms of same-sex desire, where my argument relates it to transgressive heterosexual desire instead.
84. Leicester accused Simier of relying on magic potions to sway Elizabeth; by way of retaliation, Simier informed Elizabeth of Leicester’s secret marriage to Lettice Knollys; see Levin, Heart and Stomach, 60–61. The episode was a favorite source of gossip. The addition to the French translation of Leicester’s Commonwealth, for example, accuses Leicester of attempting to murder Simier (“Appendix B,” Leicester’s Commonwealth, 238).
85. See Woodcock, “Fairy Queen Figure.” Woodcock argues that the Lady of the Lake in the Kenilworth entertainment is a fairy queen (100). The fairy queen continued to be a favorite at court entertainments after Leicester’s suit had failed, and the association with Elizabeth proved perdurable. Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon (1607) identifies “Titania the Fairie Queene” as “our late Queen Elizabeth,” for example (Hopkins, Drama and the Succession, 53–54).
86. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 46–47.
87. On this aspect of the play, see Montrose, “Shaping Fantasies,” 52. For more recent takes on the play’s relation to Elizabeth, see Clement, “Imperial Vot’ress”; and Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 59–61.
88. “Letter of Estate,” 31.
89. Golding, “Prefatory Epistle,” in Ovid, Metamorphoses, 405, l. 4. On the possible homage to Leicester as patron, see also my “Itinerarium,” 99.
90. Barkan, Gods Made Flesh, 262.
91. Hackett, “Dream-Visions,” 60. Hackett goes on to argue that while Bottom as a commoner is elevated, Titania is degraded by the experience—an accurate assessment, which points to the play’s ambivalence regarding female rulers.
92. As Wilder puts it, “While parodying the player’s trade socially and affectively, Bottom nonetheless comes to embody many of these trait
s without parody” (“Changeling Bottom,” 46).
93. Dutton, Licensing, 34.
94. Although Grady identifies Bottom as the “privileged vessel” of the aesthetic because of his relationship with Titania, he subordinates Titania’s political associations to her status as a “personification of natural fertility and its associated properties of sexuality and maternity” (“Impure Aesthetics,” 287).
95. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 22, 42.
96. Montrose, “Shaping Fantasies,” 32.
97. Barkan, Gods Made Flesh, 261.
98. Bacon, “Endymion, or the Favourite,” Wisdom of the Ancients, 717. See also chapter 1.
99. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 191; Verstegan, Declaration, 53.
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