19. Lyly, Endymion, 1.1.5–7. All references are to this edition.
20. Castiglione, Courtier, 145. See below for some examples of “deformity” used in this manner.
21. According to Jensen, “Falstaff’s siege on the marital, sexual, and economic values of Windsor . . . are punished in the same way [as] Malvolio’s attack on ‘cakes and ale’” (Religion and Revelry, 158). Given the similarities, however, these characters may suffer for the same crime.
22. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 247.
23. On Malvolio’s madness and class, see Kamps, “Madness and Social Mobility.”
24. According to this false etymology, the word “satire” derives from sat irae, meaning “full of anger” (Gurr, Playgoing, 159).
25. On Jonson’s medicinal views of satire, see, e.g., Craik and Pollard, “Imagining Audiences,” 13.
26. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 41, 13. Boym sees nostalgia as a modern phenomenon; however, she also explores its roots in Renaissance melancholy, and cites Hamlet and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (5). Although the word “nostalgia” was not coined until later in the seventeenth century, “the feeling of nostalgia was voiced” in many early modern texts (Karremann, “Passion for the Past,” 152). Mullaney identifies a “sadness” closely related to nostalgia, “a kind of homesickness in reverse,” as one of the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation (Reformation, 31).
27. Critics apply these adjectives repeatedly to the play; see Schiffer, “Taking the Long View.”
28. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 54.
29. Malcolmson, “What You Will,” 166. See also Jensen, who argues that Feste and Toby are “complementary” (Religion and Revelry, 177); and Hollander, who sees Viola and Sir Andrew as analogues (“Morality of Indulgence,” 233).
30. On Malvolio and Orsino as baited bears, see Dickey, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy”; and Scott-Warren, “Bear-Gardens,” 66. That Twelfth Night focuses on eroticized forms of social mobility is a commonplace; see, e.g., Malcolmson, “What You Will”; and Schalkwyck, “Love and Service.”
31. In this context, Peter Smith describes the “linguistic essentialism” that informed early modern attitudes towards names and anagrams (“Alphabetical Position,” 1211).
32. Malcolmson, “What You Will,” 171. On the significance of names, see also Arlidge, Prince of Love, 85–95.
33. Plato, Symposium, 30–31.
34. See the epigraph and dedication of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, 1799.
35. Schiffer, “Taking the Long View,” 9. Critics who link Sir Toby to Falstaff include Jensen, Religion and Revelry; Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 249–50; Barton, “Sense of an Ending,” 107–8; and Arlidge, Prince of Love, 89.
36. Jensen, Religion and Revelry, 160.
37. News, 157.
38. See, e.g., Endymion, Cynthia’s Revels, or Every Man Out, where the courtier Fastidious Brisk dreams of being “graced” by court ladies (2.3.231).
39. Greenblatt contends “this was a career that Elizabeth herself, let alone her male subjects, could not tolerate in any woman of lesser station” (Shakespearean Negotiations, 69). On Olivia’s use of miniatures, see Levin, Heart and Stomach, 134. Hotson, who speculates that Elizabeth I commissioned Twelfth Night to entertain Duke Bracciano in 1601, claims that Orsino represents the Italian duke, while Olivia is “a romanticized and youthful shadow” of the queen (First Night, 121).The portrait of Olivia is not an entirely flattering one, however; see below. Other critics have noted the analogy with the queen (e.g., Suzuki, “Gender,” 141).
40. Hotson, First Night, 126. Notably, in Emanuel Forde’s The First Part of Parismus the Renowmed Prince of Bohemia, one possible source for Twelfth Night, the character named Olivia is a middle-aged queen; see Staniyuković, “Masculine Plots,” 116.
41. Tennenhouse, “Power on Display,” argues that “the absence of desire in Olivia is tantamount to political disruption” (85), with evident topical applications in late Elizabethan England.
42. In Peele’s Arraygnment of Paris, Diana describes England and Elizabeth: “The place Elyzium hight, and of the place / Her name that governs there Eliza is” (5.1.67–68). The pun was still current at the time of Elizabeth’s death; see Petowe, who finds that “sweet Eliza in Elizium lives, / In joy beyond all thought” (Elizabetha quasi vivens, A4r).
43. Levin, Heart and Stomach, 136.
44. On Orsino and the Actaeon myth, see also Smith, “Alphabetical Position,” 214–15, and Dickey, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy,” 274. Hotson points out the parallels between Orsino’s rhetoric and Ralegh’s First Night (125).
45. Blundeville, Profitable Treatise, title page.
46. According to one witness, the entertainment caused all manner of analogic readings, and the disgruntled queen “said that if she had thought there had been so much said of her, she would not have been there that night” (Rowland Whyte to Robert Sidney, November 22, 1595, Letters, 88). A marginal note Bacon wrote explains to Essex that it was “the Queen’s unkind dealing, which may persuade you to self-love” (Guy, Elizabeth, 255).
47. “Letter of Estate,” 31. Cynthia’s Revels extends a pattern also evident in Every Man Out; indeed, Jonson’s appropriation of Lyly’s allegory might have been a consequence of the negative reactions to the earlier play (Dutton, Mastering the Revels, 132). “Actaeon” is usually read as Essex; see, e.g., Clare, “Comical Satires,” 39; and Dutton, 133. The fountain may refer to the one at Nonesuch palace, which depicted Actaeon’s fate as a warning against “the fruits of an evil mind and an evil spirit” (Platter, Travels, 196). See also chapter 1.
48. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 8.
49. Laneham, Letter, 42. Since the nineteenth century, the captain’s line has been identified as an allusion to Kenilworth. Belsey disputes the allusion, chiefly because Greenblatt and other biographical critics have speculated that the eleven-year-old Shakespeare attended the entertainments in 1575 (Future for Criticism, 47). As I note in the previous chapter, however, Shakespeare need not have a prodigious memory to refer to the Kenilworth dolphin, since the accounts of the Kenilworth entertainments were reprinted in the mid-80s.
50. Ralegh, “Cynthia,” 23.10, in Poems, 46.
51. Allen, Admonition, xxi.
52. Greville, Sir Philip Sidney, 183.
53. Paster, Body Embarrassed, 33.
54. Callaghan, “Body Politics,” 140. On Olivia’s humiliation, see also Paster, Body Embarrassed, 30–34.
55. News, 155.
56. Malvolio is frequently identified with Jonson’s satires; see Hollander, “Morality of Indulgence”; Malcolmson, “What You Will,” 182; and Bevington, “Shakespeare vs. Jonson.”
57. “This was how . . . Hatton had first attracted the Queen’s attention” (Clare, “Comical Satires,” 40).
58. The song “Ah, Robin” is attributed to Sir Thomas Wyatt; see Poems, CXXXIX, 175–76. Others have connected Feste’s alias to Lyly’s play but without being able to make much of it. So Arlidge notes only that both Twelfth Night and Endymion link “love and misrule” (Prince of Love, 14). Jensen argues that “Maister Parson,” the title given “Sir Topas,” alludes to the “bad” Sir John in Sir John Oldcastle and “should be seen as a theatrical in-joke that signals this scene’s return to the earlier Oldcastle controversy” (Religion and Revelry, 164).
59. Knox, First Blast of the Trumpet, 11.
60. Smith notes Malvolio’s resemblance to Bottom but not to the other two characters (“Alphabetical Position,” 1213).
61. Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 245.
62. “The Ballad of Constant Susanna” (1624); see also Hotson, the only critic to have noted that Malvolio is repeatedly teased about his age (First Night, 100–111). Hotson proposes that Shakespeare satirizes the elderly Sir William Knollys, the Controller of the Royal Household—one of five royal offices that came with a staff—for having made a fool of himself over a maid of honor (103–8). I think anot
her surfeiting old man the better candidate. Notably Sir Toby sings snatches from the ballad “Three Merry Men We Be,” in which Robin and Arthur—two names associated with Leicester—beat one another with “a Staff of another Oak-graff.” Knollys had a pattern of falling for much younger women; however, the young women who captured his interests had no power to advance his career. He could and did rely for that purpose on his blood-ties to Elizabeth. As Leicester’s brother-in-law and Essex’s uncle, Knollys might well have been associated with the phenomenon of royal favoritism. Leicester married Knollys’s sister Lettice in 1578. Knollys and Leicester were friends and allies; Leicester had knighted his brother-in-law in 1586 during the ill-fated campaign in the Netherlands. See Stater, “Knollys, William.” Hotson’s argument about Knollys rests in part on his belief that the play was commissioned for a court performance, a position few other critics or editors have accepted.
63. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 43r; Castiglione, Courtier, 334. Cicero writes about such old men that their “service” is better than young men’s, since “matters of great waight, are not done wyth bodily strength, nimbleness, celeritie . . . but wythe counsaile, wisedome, authoritie and pollicie” (11r).
64. Castiglione, Courtier, 334. Petrarch subscribed to similar beliefs (Secret, 130–31).
65. See, e.g., Callaghan, who deems that stockings are “incongruous” because Malvolio is a servant wearing the costume of a gentleman (“Body Politics,” 136). While the saffron used for yellow dye was indeed a luxury associated with court fashions (Jonson’s courtiers wear yellow garments), Malvolio is a “gentleman” in his own right (4.2.82, 5.1.280). Jonson’s Philautia wears yellow, so it may have been associated with self-love more specifically. Jones and Stallybras demonstrate attacks on yellow clothes featured prominently in anticourt polemics later in the seventeenth century (Renaissance Clothing, 67). On the associations of Malvolio’s stockings, see also Linthicum, “Cross-gartered Yelllow Stockings.” Schalkwyck argues persuasively that Malvolio and Cesario may be “of equal rank,” and that stewards, who “occupied critical positions of authority and trust” could “be drawn from the yeomanry, the lesser gentry, and in some case the upper gentry” (“Love and Service,” 87). For Malvolio as a gentleman, see also Berry, who notes that there are “twenty-two references to ‘gentleman’, more than any other play in the canon. . . . And all sixteen of the references that precede Malvolio’s are to Cesario” (“Twelfth Night,” 116n10). Some critics think Orsino’s reference to Sebastian’s “right noble” blood suggest a higher rank (5.1.264); see Kamps, “Madness and Social Mobility,” 240; and Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 71–72. This ambiguous reference cannot much alter an impression created over the four previous acts, however, nor are Viola, Sebastian, or their father ever identified by title.
66. Elyot, Castel of Helthe, 41.The medical definition of “obstruction” was dominant in the sixteenth century; see “obstruction, n.,” OED online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/129985 (accessed March 24, 2018), where all examples prior to this one are drawn from discussions of health or diet.
67. An equivalent comic effect might be obtained in a modern-dress production by having Olivia’s steward dressed in tight bell-bottoms.
68. A director “who elects, as Bill Alexander did in the 1987–88 RSC staging of the play, to chain Malvolio (Anthony Sher) to a stake during the dark-house scene is likely to be chided” even though “the connection is powerfully supported by the evidence of one early ‘reading’ of Twelfth Night,” Ben Jonson’s Epicene (Scott-Warren, “Bear-Gardens,” 66). Notably, the baiting metaphors in Epicene involve Mrs. Otter and her husband, and reproduce the gendered pattern that I have identified. Insofar as Mrs. Otter insists on treating her husband as her subject, and on being herself called a princess, she is modeling her relationship on that of Elizabeth I and her favorites.
69. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 22r.
70. Dickey notes the association with bears, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy,” 268. For works that made comic capital of Leicester’s position as Lord Steward, see previous chapter.
71. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 93.
72. As Kamps observes, “The Lady of the Strachy has never been successfully linked to a historical person, but it is clear in the context of the play she is supposed to be a real person, suggesting that Malvolio’s mad desire is already a historical reality” (“Madness and Social Mobility,” 237). Although no direct source has been found for the Malvolio plot, critics often speculate that he is “modeled on a real person” (Schiffer, “Taking the Long View,” 9). Hopkins finds that “Twelfth Night has a number of references” to Elizabeth’s court, which “despite many attempts to elucidate them, remain entirely opaque to us” (Drama and the Succession, 102). She includes the possible allusion to the ring given by the queen to Essex and the famous anecdote about the queen’s desire for a dog (5.1.6–8). Hopkins thinks that Malvolio’s being a steward refers to the Stuart succesion (105). Interestingly, Malvolio has also been seen both as a representation of Shakespeare himself (Greenblatt, Will in the World, 82–83), and as Shakespeare’s representation of Jonson (Riggs, Ben Jonson, 84).
73. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 131; Hotson, First Night, 126.
74. Smith, “Alphabetical Position,” 1220.
75. Harington, Ajax, 162. This passage, too, might have occasioned the queen’s displeasure.
76. Paster, Body Embarrassed, 32. Paster cites Harington in her analysis of this scene, but without noting the possible allusions to the pamphlet in the play.
77. Harington, Ajax, 61–62.
78. Arlidge and Gras argue the play was commissioned for the Middle Temple performance, a proposition that Harbage had previously rejected because we have no evidence of professional companies being commissioned in this manner (Rival Traditions, 116). As Gras points out, though, to say that “that Twelfth Night was written for performance at Middle Temple is not to say that the play was written only for that purpose” (“Twelfth Night,” 546). That the Templars’ taste for satire extended to plays is attested to by Jonson’s dedication of Every Man Out to the “Noblest Nurseries of Humanity and Liberty in the Kingdom, The Inns of Court” (appendix D to Every Man Out, Works, 1:427). Jonson adapted aspects of verse satire to the stage in the wake of the Bishop’s ban (Dutton, “Jonson’s Satiric Styles,” 59).
79. Betts, “Image of this Queene,” 162. According to Hunt, all early modern pornography contained elements of political satire (Invention of Pornography, 11).
80. There has been some debate about whether the ban aimed to suppress satire or pornography, with McCabe making an argument for the former (“Elizabethan Satire”), and Boose arguing the latter position (“Bishops’ Ban”). Boose makes a compelling case that the censorship of Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573) set a precedent for the 1599 ban; what the authorities objected to was the dissemination “to a mass readership” of a book that “sexualized” the “politics of courtly discourse” (191).
81. Bruster, Question of Culture, 92.
82. On Twelfth Night’s use of legal terminology and the reference to the windows, see Akrigg, “Middle Temple”; and Arlidge, Prince of Love, 26–27, 37–40.
83. Arlidge, Prince of Love, 47.
84. On Dudley and Gorboduc, see, e.g., Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, 39–45; Jones and White, “Gorboduc,”; Vanhoutte, Strange Communion, 111–34; and Astington, Actors and Acting, 70–71. The Revels Prince at the Inner Temple was the “Prince of Sophie,” which helps make sense of Fabian’s comment that “I will not give up my part of this sport for a pension of thousands to be paid from the Sophy” (2.5.179–80; Arlidge, Prince of Love, 58–61). On Hatton, see MacCaffrey, “Hatton, Sir Christopher.” Hatton participated in several festivities for the queen put on at the Inner Temple, and may have coauthored another tragedy put on for the queen (Tancred and Gismund [1568]).
85. Every Man Out may have been performed at the Middle Temple in 1598–99; like Twelfth Night, it makes u
se of material—including the device of the fake letter—from the Middle Temple revels of 1597–98 (Gras, “Twelfth Night,” 552–54). On Ralegh, see Nicholls and Williams, “Ralegh, Sir Walter”; Guy, Elizabeth, 74; and Arlidge, Prince of Love, 71, 83–84. According to Guy, traditionally Elizabeth had first Leicester and then Essex sit next to her at Twelfth Night festivities (268).
86. Arlidge, Prince of Love, 6.
87. Privy Council to the Mayor of London, June 1585, in Leicester’s Commonwealth¸ 283.
88. As Clare notes, Jonson’s disclaimer “contradicts the initial boast of Asper that he would expose the follies of the time” (“Comical Satires,” 32).
89. Paster, Body Embarrassed, 34. On Olivia as the “real threat to the hierarchical gender system,” see also Howard, “Crossdressing,” 43.
90. Berry, “Twelfth Night,” 111–12. See also Hollander, “Morality of Indulgence,” 222.
91. Barton, “Sense of an Ending,” 110.
92. Riverside Shakespeare, 444n73.
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