Homo-Heroic Love: Male Friendship on the Restoration Stage

by David Weston

M.A. (English Language and Literature), Queen’s University, 2012 B.A (English), Simon Fraser University, 2011

Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of English Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

© David Weston 2018 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Fall 2018

Copyright in this work rests with the author. Please ensure that any reproduction or re-use is done in accordance with the relevant national copyright legislation. Approval

Name: David Weston Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Title: Homo-Heroic Love: Male Friendship on the Restoration Stage Examining Committee: Chair: Clint Burnham Professor Diana Solomon Senior Supervisor Associate Professor Betty Schellenberg Supervisor Professor Peter Dickinson Supervisor Professor Lara Campbell Internal Examiner Professor Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Jean Marsden External Examiner Professor Department of English University of Connecticut

Date Defended/Approved: November 16, 2018

ii Abstract

“Homo-Heroic Love: Male Friendship on the Restoration Stage” asks why, while sodomy and homosexuality were still criminalized, did the London Restoration stage depict men in love? Scholars have resisted reading these male friendships—where men kiss, hug, and declare their constancy to each other—as exhibiting same-sex desire, an approach that overlooks these texts’ importance as historical sites of non-normative sexual expression.

In order to combat the denial of same-sex desire within these tragedies, I coin the term

“homo-heroic love” to describe male relationships that are physically demonstrative, emotionally intimate, and socially revered. For example, in Nathanial Lee’s The Rival

Queens (1677), Hephestion hierarchizes male love above heteronormative affection, transforming homoerotic desire into something that is honourable and revered: “Such is not Womans love, / So fond a friendship, such a sacred flame, / As I must doubt to find in

Breasts above.” Combining queer theory and performance studies, I demonstrate how homoeroticism was appropriated as an advantageous tool in reinforcing patriarchal power, and how the promotion of “homo-heroic” love was a response to concerns about

Charles II’s newly restored, but unstable, monarchy.

Keywords: Restoration and eighteenth century; heroic tragedy; homoeroticism; queer theory; performance studies; John Dryden; Nathanial Lee; Thomas Otway; Edward Ravenscroft

iii Dedication

To my parents—for their unwavering support.

iv Acknowledgements

This dissertation would not exist if it were not for the tireless work and support of many people. I want to thank my primary supervisor, Dr. Diana Solomon, for the years of support, guidance, expertise, and most importantly, friendship. Dr. Solomon and I met eleven years ago when I was an undergraduate student, and since then, I have had the privilege of working with her as a student, as a research assistant and conference co- organizer, as a travel and theatre watching companion, and as a colleague. Her commitment to research, to students, and the broader academic community continue to inspire me. I also want to thank Dr. Betty Schellenberg for her exceptional generosity; for the past six years, Dr. Schellenberg has modelled academic kindness while undertaking meticulous and inspiring scholarly work. Thank you as well to Dr. Peter Dickinson for introducing me to performance and queer theory and providing thoughtful, kind, and helpful suggestions at all stages of this project. It is not lost on me how lucky I am to have worked with such generous and accomplished scholars.

Simon Fraser University has been my home for close to ten years and I thank all who supported me along the way. Thank you to the graduate chairs who were always looking out for me: Dr. Carolyn Lesjak, Dr. Jeff Derksen, Dr. Michelle Levy, and Dr. Clint Burnham. I would also like to acknowledge the faculty members who provided mentorship, advice, and wonderful hallway chats, especially Dr. Ronda Arab, Dr. Paul Budra, Dr. David Coley, Dr. Stephen Collis, Dr. Leith Davis, Dr. Nicky Didicher, Dr. Michael Everton, Dr. Anne Higgins, Dr. Christine Kim, Dr. Paul St Pierre, Dr. Tiffany Werth, and Dr. Sean Zwagerman. I must also express my gratitude to Dr. Stephen Guy- Bray and Dr. Jess Battis for their mentorship, and Dr. Leslie Ritchie and Dr. Frederick P. Lock for their feedback during the early stages of this project. A huge thank you to the SFU English staff: Maureen Curtin, Wendy Harris, Elaine Tkaczuk, Christa Gruninger, Joseph Tilley, and Laura Walker.

v I am blessed to have been supported by so many incredible colleagues and friends. To Samantha MacFarlane, Kimberly O’Donnell, Kandice Sharon, Taylor Morphett, Stefan Krecsy, Dr. Nico Dicecco, and Dr. Nathan Szymanski—thank you from the bottom of my heart for the endless words of encouragement and for providing feedback on this dissertation. Your friendship has meant a great deal to me. I also thank Dr. Rob Bittner, Dr. Sarah Creel, Dr. Erin Keating, Dr. Jennifer Scott, Dr. Katherine Allen, Dr. Taryn Beukema, Dr. Natalie Knight, Dr. Ryan Fitzpatrick, Dr. Erin Weinberg, Kelsey Blair, Ben Hynes, Emily Seitz, Anna Burn, Allie Goff, Nicky Pacas, and Nicole Slipp.

Thank you to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for their support of this project. I also thank the SFU English Department for the many private awards that made working on this dissertation possible. Thanks to Cameron Duder for his help in preparing the final version of this dissertation. I also want to respectfully acknowledge that SFU is on unceded Tsleil-Waututh, Skwxwú7mesh, and Musqueam lands.

Thank you to my colleagues at Beach House Theatre and Capilano University for their patience.

My family has been incredibly helpful and understanding over the years, especially Matthew and Sarah Weston, Andrew and Leah Weston, Caitlin Weston, Claire Moseley, and William Weston. Also Sandy and Ron Hall, and Kirsten Hall and Jason Wexler.

I would like to acknowledge my friends, who checked in regularly and who understood that ordering pizza was often the best course of action: Kate Parisotto, Claire Fenton, Ariana Astle, Mark Bradshaw, Melinda Lee, Craig David Long, Stephanie Werner, Sean McKenna, Scott Lansdowne, Richard McGraw, Laura Stewart, Stevie Benisch, Steve Nowk, Ashley Collins, and Geoff Manton.

Claire Wilson and Michael Megalli—this process would have been so lonely without you. Thank you for constantly being there even when it seemed that I did not need it.

vi Dr. David Hall –Thank you for everything, but especially for reminding me that I could do this.

And finally, I thank my parents. Despite the growing popularity in recent years of the so- called “applicable degree,” they have remained steadfast in their belief that the arts and the humanities have value. My freedom in studying queer Restoration and eighteenth- century dramatic texts is the result of their support and openness. This dissertation is dedicated to them.

vii Table of Contents

Approval ...... ii Abstract ...... iii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgements ...... v Table of Contents ...... viii

Introduction ...... 1 The Performance of Friendship ...... 6 The Sodomite and the Friend ...... 14 The Heroic Genre and Politics ...... 17 Performance Studies and the Repertoire of Friendship ...... 24 Chapter Outline ...... 31

Chapter 1. Homo-Heroic Love and the Performance of Friendship ...... 34 The Rival Queens (1677) and the Disruption of Male Space ...... 36 The Stability of Male Bonds in All for Love; or, The World Well Lost (1677) ...... 59

Chapter 2. Queerly Conservative: Male Love and Patriarchal Power in Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (1682) ...... 75 Male Friendship and the Embrace ...... 77 The Repertoire of Same-Sex Intimacy ...... 99

Chapter 3. The Menace and Merriment of Male Love: Homo-Heroic Parody .... 108 Sodomy and Social Stability in Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery (1684) ..... 112 Meaningless Gestures and Comedic Drag in Colley Cibber’s The Rival Queans (1710) ...... 125

Chapter 4. She-Tragedy and the Decline of Homo-Heroic Love ...... 144 Homo-Heroic Failure in Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia (1679) ...... 146 “My Best Friend’s Wedding”: Heterosexuality in Congreve’s The Mourning Bride (1697) ...... 165

Coda...... 179

Bibliography ...... 182

viii Introduction

When Alexander appears on stage for the first time in Nathanial Lee’s The Rival

Queens (1677), he calls out to Hephestion, his close friend and favourite, urging the young man to display how devoted he is as a friend. Hephestion acquiesces to

Alexander’s will, performing his affection with a homoerotic desire that is unexpected by modern standards, but normative for tragedies of the late seventeenth century:

ALEXANDER. Rise all, and thou my second self, my Love; O my Hephestion, raise thee from the Earth Up to my Breast, and hide thee in my Heart, Art thou grown cold? why hang thine Arms at distance? Hugg me, or else by Heaven thou lov’st me not.

HEPHESTION. Not Love, my Lord? break not the Heart you fram’d and moulded up to such an Excellence; Then stamp’d on it your own Immortal Image. Not love the King? Such is not Womans love, So fond a friendship, such a sacred flame, As I must doubt to find in Breasts above.1

Characterized as something that must be publicly declared—“Not love the King? Such is not Womans love”—, physically demonstrative—“Hugg me, or else by Heaven though lov’st me not”—, and emotionally intimate—“Break not the Heart you fram’d Then stamp’d on it your own Immortal Image”—, male friendship is described here as something that contains the same power as, and perhaps more than heterosexual love.

Public vow, embodied practice, and intimate connection are three of the main components of what I define as “homo-heroic love”: male relationships that appropriate homoerotic affection as a means to further empower men at the expense of women. The

“heroic” of “homo-heroic” stems both from the name applied to the genre and the

1 Nathanial Lee, The Rival Queens, ed. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cook (New Brunswick: Scarecrow Press, 1954), 97–106.

1 grandness of these male relationships. As a result, these portrayals appear to model idealized male expressions of same-sex desire. In homo-heroic relationships, men proclaim their love for each other and show their affection in order to construct male love as something extraordinary: “Such is not Womans love, / So fond a friendship, such a sacred flame, / As I must doubt to find in Breasts above.” In this moment, Hephestion asserts male love as heavenly and “sacred,” and that it exists above the love men have for women. The most intense examples of homo-heroic love appear in John Drdyen’s All for

Love (1678), Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens (1678), and Thomas Otway’s Venice

Preserv’d (1682). However, elements of homo-heroic love recur to some degree in

Dryden’s The Indian Queen, A Tragedy (1665), and The Indian Emperor, or, The

Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards (1667), The Conquest of Granada By the

Spaniards: Part 1 (1672), Amboyna: A Tragedy (1673), Lee’s Sophonisba, or Hannibal’s

Overthrow (1675), Mithridates, King of Pontus (1677), Caesar Borgia (1679/1680), The

Massacre of Paris (1682), and Otway’s Alcibiades. A Tragedy (1675), and Don Carlo

Prince of Spain. A Tragedy (1676).2

2 John Dryden, The Indian Queen, A Tragedy Vol. 8, ed. John Harrington Smith and Dougald MacMillan (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 181–234. The Indian Emperor, or, The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, in The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 9, ed. John Loftis (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 1–112. The Conquest of Granada By the Spaniards: Part 1, Vol. 11, ed. John Loftis and David Stuart Rodes (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 1–100. Amboyna, Vol. 12, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 1–77.Nathanial Lee, Sophonisba, or Hannibal’s Overthrow in The Works of Nathaniel Lee, ed. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cook (New Brunswick: Scarecrow Press, 1954), 75–144. Mithridates, King of Pontus: A Tragedy, in The Works of Nathaniel Lee, ed. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cook (New Brunswick: Scarecrow Press, 1954), 287–365. Caesar Borgia; Son of Pope Alexander the Sixth, in The Works of Nathaniel Lee, ed. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cook (New Brunswick: Scarecrow Press, 1954), 67–145. The Massacre of Paris in The Works of Nathaniel Lee, ed. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cook (New Brunswick: Scarecrow Press, 1954), 3–63. Thomas Otway, Alcibiades. A Tragedy in The Works of Thomas Otway: Plays, Poems, And Love-Letters Vol II, ed. J. C. Ghosh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 95–167. Don Carlo Prince of Spain: A Tragedy, in The Works of Thomas Otway: Plays, Poems, And Love-Letters Vol II, ed. J. C. Ghosh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 177–249.

2 The above excerpt from Lee’s play contains the principal elements crucial to the argument I make in the coming chapters. Heroic tragedies, plays centred on political men struggling to maintain their integrity, honour, and bravery against personal and political challenges, attempted to model what some playwrights viewed as an ideal of male behaviour. The plots of these tragedies, which often included mischievous usurpers and conspirators, love triangles, and contested positions of power, were unimaginable situations for most seventeenth-century Londoners, but the code of honour glorified within the plots was intended to be instructive or an ideal for some in the audience. As

Eugene Waith argues, “So far as heroic drama is concerned, the essential point may be that it appealed to the aristocratic leanings of an audience, many of whom were not nobly born. Heroic drama encouraged its audience to feel capable of refined perceptions and high aspirations, as had the poetry of the troubadours, chivalric romances, and, a fortiori, the vast romances. . . . That a noble audience for heroic drama existed we know; that its boundaries did not exactly coincide with the peerage is a reasonable supposition.”3

Regardless of how aristocratic the audiences were or were not, some playwrights wrote with moralistic motives; Dryden, for example, worked to mythologize the Stuart monarchy through the presentation of noble and aristocratic rightful heirs.4

The aspirational quality of these tragedies transforms the portrayal of homoerotic male friendship into something more than just a theatrical curiosity. When Alexander calls to Hephestion and the two express their love for each other, they invoke erotic desire and devotion to heighten and distinguish their bond as exceptional. In having

3 Eugene Waith, Ideas of Greatness: Heroic Drama in England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 207. 4 Elaine McGirr, Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660–1745 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010), 19.

3 Alexander and Hephestion declare their love publicly and subsequently secure their pledge through physical action, the play suggests that male friendship was a public performance with known cultural markers and meaning. Playwrights like Lee, Dryden, and Otway invoke pre-Restoration ideals of male friendship and draw on a repertoire of male friendship gestures to advocate for, and reinscribe, patriarchal power and control.

While homoerotic desire during the Restoration was, in certain cases, viewed with suspicion, the men in these plays are considered normatively masculine because of their male friendships, not despite them.5

The premise of my argument, which is that heroic tragedies of the late seventeenth century eroticize male friendship and rely on culturally understood gestures of friendship to perform male power, rests on examining canonical Restoration tragedies as historical artifacts and as sites of embodied practices. As historical artifacts, the political tragedies of this period represent anxieties and ideals that held currency during

Charles II’s reign. Notably, there were political benefits to reproducing male-centric ideologies against the threat of foreign mistresses and lack of legitimate heirs. By taking this political context into consideration, I attempt to make visible how male power and homoeroticism, at times, worked to buttress and sustain each other, rather than oppose each other. Homoerotic friends did not undermine notions of masculinity, but

5 I understand that the term “normatively masculine” is problematic, because as George Haggerty points out, there was not one type of masculinity in the Restoration, just as there is no one type now in the modern day. But there are suggestions throughout Restoration literature that some form of a masculine norm existed. For example, in Lee’s The Rival Queens, Clytus complains the men are “unmanned” by the women around them, made weak and indecisive. This trope appears in Dryden’s All for Love as well. I consider “normatively masculine” to speak to the idea that men are supposedly physically and emotionally strong, authoritative, and homosocial. This definition stems from how characters in the heroic plays discussed in this dissertation discuss and define masculinity, and is discussed in chapter 1 and chapter 2. George Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 5.

4 homoeroticism could be appropriated to emphasize the importance of male relationships.

I follow Eve Sedgwick’s use of “homoerotic” to describe the male relationships in these plays, and not “queer,” because the male relationships contribute to patriarchal structures.

In her discussion of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Sedgwick argues that “the sonnets present a male-male love that, like the love of the Greeks, is set firmly within a structure of institutionalized social relations that are carried out via women: Marriage, name, family loyalty to progenitors and to posterity.”6 To describe these relationships as queer would be to suggest male-male desire that troubles hetero-normative coupling, which as I argue throughout this dissertation, is absolutely not the case in these heroic plays.

By additionally considering these heroic tragedies as blueprints for expressive embodiment and physical performance, I argue that a performance-based perspective on the portrayal of homoerotic male friends productively expands our understanding of the relationship between masculinity, homoeroticism, and power. I use the term “embodied” to suggest performances that include gesture, movement, physicality, and the physical expression of a certain kind of a gendered presentiment. The dialogue in the plays of Lee,

Dryden, and Otway describes physical performance and conceptualizes a repertoire of friendship gestures that draws on pre-Restoration aristocratic ideals. Recognizing how the physicality of male friendship is developed and performed brings into focus the ways that male homosocial bonds work to subjugate and oppress women; for example, in Lee’s The

Rival Queens, Alexander accepts that he finds the embraces of men empowering and the embraces of women defiling. The title of this dissertation, “Homo-Heroic Love: Male

Friendship on the Restoration Stage,” stems from these two major approaches:

6 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 35.

5 questioning homoeroticism’s role in the canonical heroic tragedies of Dryden, Lee, and

Otway, and using embodiment to demonstrate the performative implications of male forms of love. Before turning to the examples of “homo-heroic love” on which my argument rests, I will first detail seventeenth-century ideas of male friendship and sodomy and then describe the link between heroic drama and monarchical politics. Next,

I will outline my methodology, using contemporary theories of gender, sexuality, and performance studies, to demonstrate how embodiment and performance allow for new queer readings of these canonical Restoration plays. Finally, I will provide a summary of each chapter, outlining the progression of the argument of my dissertation.

The Performance of Friendship

The intensity and importance of friendship in heroic drama of the period indicate that in the seventeenth century male bonds signified more to the historical public sphere than they might now to modern readers. Jeremy Taylor’s Discourse of the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship (1657) showcases how friendship between men was a fundamental aspect of seventeenth-century politics and culture. Taylor calls friendship

“the greatest bond in the world” and justifies his position by saying, “for it is all the bands that this world hath,” and that there is no society without it.7 Friendship, in his mind, is “transcendent, and signifies as much as Unity can meane, and every consent, every pleasure, and every benefit, and every society is the mother or daughter of

7 Jeremy Taylor, “A Discourse of the Nature, Offices, and Measures of Friendship with Rules of Conducting It / Written in Answer to a Letter from the Most Ingenious and Vertuous M. K. P. by J. T.,” in Jeremy Taylor: The Whole Works, ed. Reginald Heber (New York: Georg Olms Verlag Hildesheim, 1969), 86.

6 friendship.”8 Taylor articulates friendship as one of society’s central features and says that without it, society and culture cannot exist. The words “bonds” and “bands” suggest forms of binding that bring people into close proximity with each other, and even more importantly, keep people together. This image is almost physical in how strong a connection friends must have and how fundamental friendship was during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In French philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s essays on friendship (1580), he describes male friendship in romantic and devoted terms that invoke a connection between men that is physical and metaphysical. He writes:

In the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again. If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.9

The language of unity returns here, as the seam that connects the two men cannot be found or distinguished. Moreover, Montaigne imagines a situation where the two men love each other more than anyone else: “Because it was he, because it was I.” In referencing human intimacy and the bonds of society, both Taylor and Montaigne’s definitions of friendship are dependent on the language often used to describe the unifying bond of marriage.10

In linking friendship to the greater good of society, Taylor’s Discourses implies that friendship’s significance is created and cultivated through its very public nature.

8 Taylor, “A Discourse of the Nature,” 86. 9 Michel de Montaigne, “On Friendship,” The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1943), 138. 10 Raymond Stephanson similarly argues that “there existed a public discourse which encouraged them to imagine their friendships with men in ways similar to their experience of affection for wives or female lovers.” Stephanson, “Epicoene Friendship: Understanding Male Friendship in the Early Eighteenth Century, with some Speculations about Pope.” The Eighteenth Century 38, no 2 (Summer 1997), 159.

7 Alan Bray, in his foundational study of male friendship, also identifies publicness as a motivating component of the patriarchal system of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

Europe. In asking why men were buried together and memorialized in ways that evoke marriage, Bray offers the most illuminating explanation of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century male friendship that I have encountered: not only is friendship of the period a public act, but at “the heart of these cultural practices” the “ethics of friendship operated persuasively only in a larger frame of reference that lay outside the good of the individuals for whom the friendship was made.”11 Bray’s argument not only accounts for how friendship is public but also describes the larger system to which friendship was contributing; it could not be private because it had to reinforce the alliances at work within this system of male power. In this sense, friendship is a performative act in the

Austinian sense of constituting a “doing” that at all times is visible to those around it and is sustained by its repeated enactment.12 Bray further argues that there was a system of signs that helped promote, manage, and enforce the network of alliances in which that culture was required to function. Courtiers, military men, and the aristocracy depended on hugs, kisses, dining together, sharing a bed, and laughing to negotiate the world of political and social alliances.13 These practices, however, are the ideal manifestations of friendship and are not necessarily the only expressions of allegiance. As plays by Dryden,

Lee, and Otway demonstrate, men could fail to use the system fully or harness it properly. Failure to abide by the rules of the system did not fully undermine it though, and the embraces and kisses were still known markers.

11 Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 6. Emphasis in the original. 12 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 94. 13 Bray, The Friend, 146–58.

8 Clearly, friendship in the seventeenth century was an embodied experience. In

1615, when Robert Carr said his goodbye to James I before attending the commission of inquiry that would lead to his ruin, the two men kissed and hugged a number of times.

James I promised Carr that he would not eat or sleep until Carr returned safely. When

Carr left, however, James I, not intending to keep his promise, reportedly said in public to his servants “I shall never see his face more,” illustrating the formality of these sham gestures that were done for the “watchful ears and eyes of court.”14 The admission that he had no intention of fulfilling his promises even after publicly kissing and hugging Carr demonstrates how those gestures were expected to hold meaning in the system of signs that sustained male friendship. James I’s need to publicly clarify that his gestures were fake could be an effort to maintain and uphold the integrity of this system of performative gestures of friendship, or a move that undermines the system itself. Regardless of how this moment is interpreted, what is clear is that friendship was performed publicly with known signs and markers.15 Bray’s research takes Taylor’s initial classification of friendship as having public stakes and illustrates the broader network in which friendship played an important part. Restoration playwrights depict male bonds as public social performances because friendship held public significance.

14 Anthony Weldon, The court and character of K. James. written and taken by Sir A.W., being an eye, and ear witness (London: R. Baldwin, 1689),102–3. Alan Bray recounts this anecdote, suggesting that the moment is useful for social historians because it shows the embrace as a gesture “floating free as public signs with an understood meaning.” Bray, The Friend, 146–48. 15 Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 40, points out that threat was always a part of even the most idealized male friendships: “Given the precariousness of relations in the public sphere . . . even the best of friendships could be shadowed by suspicions of collusion, misuse, and enmity, imparting an ethical uncertainty to friendship even when it was most clearly a matter of love.”

9 Taylor and Bray also highlight how language complemented and cultivated the physical movement men used to perform their alliances. While Taylor’s lasting literary and ideological influence is difficult to ascertain, his Discourse on Friendship was reprinted at least four times throughout the Restoration, indicating a reasonably substantial success and readership.16 Even if Discourse on Friendship was not widely read, its language appears to be shared, not only in how friendship is fundamentally public, but also in how promises between men are the mechanisms that make friendship visible. John Dryden’s epilogue to Albion and Albanius (1685), where the speaker admits to providing the “moral of the play,” ends by proclaiming that the King “cannot break his word” and that:

He Plights his Faith, and we believe him just: His Honour is to Promise, ours to Trust. Thus Britain’s Basis on a Word is Laid, As by a Word the World it self was made17

The basis of Britain as a nation and the core of that society, according to Dryden, are dependent on the word as bond; without it, there is no trust or public unity.18 Explaining that “by a word the world” was made also proves that what J. Douglas Canfield calls the word as bond was seen as a fundamental building block of the world, of civilization, and

16 A search of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) lists four reprints: 1657, 1657, 1662, and 1671. 17 John Dryden, Albion and Albanius: An Opera, in The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 15, ed. H. T. Swedenberg Jr, Alan Roper, George R. Guffey, and Vinton A. Dearing, 2–55 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976). 18 Premiering soon after Charles II’s death in 1685 and intending to glorify the Stuart monarchy on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Restoration of the throne, Albion and Albanius was an allegory so clear, Dryden wrote, “that it will no sooner be read than understood.” In the Opera, Charles II is compared to King Arther, a move which underlies how Dryden invokes the traditions of feudal society, chivalric code, male bonds, and word as bond. The comparison also connects to the Heroic plays discussed here in how the Arthur legend blames Guinevere for disrupting the bonds of the round table and is blamed for its downfall. See Andrew Pinnock, “A Double Vision of Albion: Allegorical Re-Alignments in the Dryden-Purcell Semi-Opera King Arthur,” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 34, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Fall 2010), 55–57.

10 of Restoration culture. The word as bond, according to Canfield, refers to pledges between men that invoke loyalty, fidelity, constancy, and trust.19 Both Taylor and

Dryden’s vision of friendship and the word as bond as core concepts are based on the political ramifications of these relationships between men. It is because of that language and belief that Canfield proposes that the “various forms of the pledged word constitute a crucial part, a ‘master trope,’ of the ‘hegemonic code,’ invented to establish and maintain feudal Europe’s version of patriarchy, and literature embodies that code as much as any other form of discourse.”20 This notion of the word as bond occupying a central position in the creation and maintenance of male bonds contributes to Bray’s view that male friendship depended on a larger system of signs that lay outside the good of the individual.

The declarations of love between friends—these moments that perform what

Canfield calls the “word as bond”—are essentially performative speech acts. In J. L.

Austin’s terms, they are not “statements” but rather performatives because “to say something is to do something.”21 When a bride and groom utter “I do,” their promises are not just words, but actions. Furthermore, an important distinction is that performatives are not done solely for the two individuals who say “I do”; rather, they have a larger effect in society. It is useful to apply Austin’s speech act theory homo-heroic love, as the pledges men make to each other are done in order to maintain and publicly display their

19 J. Douglas Canfield, Word as Bond in English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Restoration (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), xi. 20 Canfield, Word as Bond, xi. 21 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 94.

11 alliance within a system of kinship that requires those performatives to give it meaning.22

Men use language, declarations, and gestures to confirm and perform their bonds to each other. The performative nature of friendship and the system in which these features are currency are crucial factors in understanding how that same power structure amplified male power while excluding women.23

We see in Taylor and Montaigne’s descriptions of idealized male relationships how women are diminished. Taylor accepts that female friendship is possible and may have many of the same qualities as its male counterpart, but it remains fundamentally different and less impressive. To make his point, he uses a phallic metaphor of a knife and a sword: “a Knife cannot enter as farre as a Sword, yet a Knife may be more useful to some purposes.”24 Granting that a “knife” may have some purposes is hardly an enthusiastic endorsement of female friendship. In comparing men to women, he further elevates men as the more capable sex and lowers women and their abilities: “I cannot say women are capable of all those excellencies by which men can oblige the world; and therefore a female friend in some cases is not so good a counsellor as a wise man.”25

Similarly, Montaigne unequivocally excludes women, reserving friendship mostly for men: “Besides to tell the truth, the ordinary capacity of women is inadequate for that

22 Austin’s theory was not meant to apply to theatre, since the actions that follow up the pledges are false and could be done repeatedly night after night: “A performative utterance will . . . be in peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem or spoken in soliloquy.” Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 22. However, if performatives have larger societal effects and implications, then we cannot say that performatives on stage are false; they are still performed by bodies and have consequences for both performers and spectators. In their introduction to Performativity and Performance, Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick address Austin’s strict view of speech acts and theatre to show how linguistic performativity depends on performance-like qualities. Parker and Sedgwick, Performativity and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1–4. 23 For more on the treatment of women in these plays, see pp. 17–22 of this introduction. 24 Taylor, “A Discourse of the Nature,” 94. 25 Taylor, “A Discourse of the Nature,” 94

12 communion and fellowship which is the nurse of this sacred bond; nor does their soul seem firm enough to endure the strain of so tight a durable a knot.”26 As described by

Taylor and Montaigne, the performance of friendship was primarily for men, and while women may have been able to access some of friendship’s features, their ability to fully replicate male friendship was limited.27

The performative nature of friendship and the act of making pledges to other men were foundational in pre-Restoration, aristocratic ideology. Linking aristocratic ideology to the descriptions of friendship I have just outlined is crucial, as I argue that homo- heroic love invokes these older ideals in order to champion male power. J. Douglas

Canfield views new dramatic texts in the Restoration and leading up to the Glorious

Revolution as attempting to reassert conservative and aristocratic principles as the values of the ruling class were brought under attack by disloyalty, inconstancy, and ingratitude.

In contrast, late European feudal society was nostalgically viewed as founded on noble allegiance and honour, underwritten by divine authority. Canfield’s calls this code “the word as bond,” which invokes the concepts of “loyalty, fidelity, constancy,” and

26 Montaigne, “On Friendship,” 138. 27 In a section titled “The Silence between the Lines,” Bray accepts that within his research women do not have much of a place. This is not, he argues, because women did not have friendship, but because the records of their friendships are harder to find, or do not exist at all; when there are records of how women factor into notions of friendship, women are painted as the enemies to male bonds (which certainly fits with the plays discussed in this dissertation). See Bray, The Friend, 174–76. Lillian Faderman also accepts that the lack of printed texts written by women contributes to this historical issue, but finds ample evidence to argue for what she calls “romantic friendship” between women of the period that was built on the same ideas from which male love drew its inspiration. This is important work; see Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1981). Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) studies the female spaces and objects that fostered female friendships in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although focused on the nineteenth century, Sharon Marcus’s Between Women elucidates various forms of intimacy between women that are not limited to binaries as heterosexual or homosexual. For discussions of friendship among women, see Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

13 “trust.”28 Vows of friendship, which are essentially what Taylor, Montaigne, Dryden,

Bray, and others describe, depended on the trust and loyalty between men. These vows or bonds were what developed patriarchal relationships and allowed the promotion of men at the expense of women.29 Further, Canfield’s view that tragedies of the early

Restoration “portrayed the aristocratic as naturally superior, born and bred and divinely appointed (if not anointed) to rule,” is effectively reinforced in Bray’s analysis, as the system of friendship gestures outlined in The Friend are centred on and around the court of Charles I.

The Sodomite and the Friend

The homo-heroic love I describe, upheld and portrayed as an expression of idealized aristocratic affection, crucially avoids being associated with the social spectre of the “sodomite.” Sodomy, a catch-all term and difficult to define, could be applied to almost anything not considered sexually normative, and it was used most often as a form of slander. Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, calls sodomy the “utterly confused category” because it was used so freely to slander anyone who was seen as being against the public good; Foucault further makes clear that sodomy was a label not necessarily applied to real sexual activity, but more to the accusation of those sexual

28 Canfield, Word as Bond, xi. 29 The patriarchal relationships described in this dissertation include both relationships that emphasize the loyalty of the inferior to the superior (as is the case in The Rival Queens), and relationships that are equal (Venice Preserv’d). I do not think that contemporary idealizations of male friendship saw all men as necessarily equal, but rather understood that some were more powerful or wealthier than others. What the system of male friendship promotes are the ideals of friendship relations that are expected to work even among men from different social backgrounds and powers.

14 acts.30 Because the term sodomy was used so freely, both Foucault and Alan Bray agree that it is impossible that someone of the period would have identified as a sodomite.31

Jonathan Goldberg, however, points out that if sexual acts led to accusations of sodomy, what was also required was an accusation of being someone who was not in the public interest.32 Alternatively, this logic could work in the other way: stigmatizing acts could go unnoticed if done by people not seen as dangerous. This suggests that those same acts

(anal intercourse, fellatio, masturbation, etc.) could avoid the stigma of “sodomy” while being performed under a different guise:

But if, on the other hand, sodomy named sexual acts only in particularly stigmatizing contexts, there is no reason not to believe that such acts went on all the time, unrecognized as sodomy, called, among other things, friendship or patronage, and facilitated by the beds shared, for instance, by servants or students, by teachers and pupils, by kings and their minions or queens and their ladies.33

Goldberg’s suggestion that friendship could operate outside the stigma of sodomy is supported by depictions of homo-heroic love, where men declare love to each other and express their relationships in ways that are deeply homoerotic, but never seen as stigmatizing. When two men hug in Otway’s Venice Preserv’d, another character

(Renault) expresses his dislike for men who embrace: “I never loved these huggers.”34 In vocalizing that men that embrace disgust him, Renault illustrates how gestures of male

30 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 101. 31 Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts Modern Sexualities (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press), 18–19, uses Bray and Foucault in this way to make this point. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 103, discusses how mollies became a type of social identity based around homosexual acts, while Foucault, History of Sexuality, 43, locates a homosexual identity in the nineteenth century, viewing earlier words like “sodomy” and “buggery” as devoid of identity markers. 32 Goldberg, Sodometries, 18–19. 33 Goldberg, Sodometries, 19. 34 Thomas Otway, Venice Preserv’d, or, A Plot Discover’d. A Tragedy, in The Works of Thomas Otway: Plays, Poems, And Love-Letters, ed. J. C. Ghosh (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 2.344. 197–289.

15 friendship could not be performed without the threat that they signify a more socially stigmatized form of male intimacy. The play, however, refuses to stigmatize or condemn the men for this physical expression because of their socially acceptable friendship and concern for the public interest. Renault’s line of dialogue demonstrates the tension between the threat of the “sodomite” and more appropriate forms of male affection.

The way male friendship avoids being associated with “the sodomite,” however, does not mean that the threat of being labelled a sodomite disappeared completely. As

Goldberg suggests, part of the challenge of studying homosexuality and sodomy in the period is that the gestures and markers are often the same. The only difference between two aristocratic friends who engage in sodomy and male-male affection and two lower- class London workers who do the same is that one couple is socially acceptable and the other socially dangerous.35 Alan Bray encapsulates this tension in identifying how “we see . . . the unwelcome difficulty the Elizabethans had in drawing a dividing line between those gestures of closeness among men that they desired so much and those they feared.”36 Restoration society appears to have shared this “unwelcome difficulty,” as heroic friendship is regularly defined against “the sodomite” despite appropriating homoerotic power through the use of hugs, kisses, and passionate declarations of love. As

I will explain in later chapters, the heroic tragedies I discuss in this dissertation acknowledge the spectre of “the sodomite” as a way of making clear that heroic friendship, while containing similar acts, is not sodomy. I argue that this technique of acknowledging that friendship is not sodomy, even though they look similar, is a cheeky

35 Haggerty, Men in Love, 5, similarly points out this class hypocrisy in his set-up for discussing libertine sexuality. 36 Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop Journal, 29, no. 1 (1990), 14.

16 wink at audiences that attempts to have it both ways; male friendships can appropriate the benefits of passion and love that may be called sodomy while avoiding its dangerous associations. This leaves us open to study and analyze these representations of homo- heroic love as homoerotic; they may not have been recognized as “sodomy,” but, as

Goldberg articulates, that does not mean they did not have qualities we now identify as same-sex love. For example, when Antony in Dryden’s All for Love compares his excitement about being reunited with Dollabella to that of a groom ready to consummate his marriage, their friendship and devotion are simultaneously physical, emotional, and sexual. This dissertation’s approach opens up the possibility of studying expressions of male love that are physical and emotional as containing the traces of queer desire.

The Heroic Genre and Politics

In this dissertation, I highlight the performative nature of friendship and argue that the spectacle of male love contributes to a pre-Restoration, aristocratic ideology.

While performances of male love have not yet been used to make this case, the ideology of heroic tragedies continues to be debated, with scholars reading popular plays as representing either Tory or Whig ideologies, or some combination of both. Susan Staves, in Players Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration, argues that heroic protagonists’ fate “reflects a dissolution of the older myths justifying constituted authority and the absence of any satisfying and generally acceptable new myths.”37

Staves demonstrates that after the exclusion crisis and into the 1680s, tragedies were unable to depict any good political ideas because there were no remaining, justifiable,

37 Susan Staves, Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 87–88.

17 political systems.38 Other scholars agree, coming to similar conclusions regarding a range of genres (tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies).39 More recently, on the other side of this debate, scholars have countered some of that earlier work, linking the monarchy and the popular theatre and illustrating how heroic plays functioned as successful royalist propaganda.40 J. Douglas Canfield, for example, characterizes most heroic elements as supporting the aristocracy: “These tragedies rigorously defend the old feudal aristocratic ideals, especially the code that the word—the avowed pledge of fidelity, constancy, loyalty, trust between friends, lovers, subjects and kings, man and God—is the very bond of human society, without which anarchy is indeed loosed upon the world”41 It should come as no surprise that this dissertation will not settle this debate. The belief that heroic tragedies of the 1670s and 1680s fail to deliver a cohesive ideological vision is a legitimate interpretation; however, reading these tragedies with a focus on male love offers a competing narrative. There may not be a unified Whig or Tory message, but homoerotic male love reinforces male supremacy, and it does so by harkening back to what Canfield asserts are feudal aristocratic ideals. In the final acts of Dryden’s All For

38 Staves suggests that protagonists in Venice Preserv’d and Lucius Janius Brutus appear stupid and without ideas: “They have no satisfactory political ideas because there were no satisfactory political ideas in 1680.” Staves, Players’ Scepters, 88. 39 Laura Brown, “The Divided Plot: Tragicomic Form in the Restoration,” ELH 47, no. 1 (Spring 1980), 75–76, follows Staves’ narrative, categorizing most of the decorous and formal, split plot tragicomedies of the early 1660s as the culmination of aristocratic impulses that disappear as comedies of the 1670s and 1680s move away from heroic features. Derek Hughes, English Drama 1660–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 240–41, similarly interprets heroic drama as failing to depict a unified vision of ideology after the 1660s, while Nancy Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5, sees heroic plays as undercutting the idealistic and royalist motives of the early Restoration heroic play. 40 Elaine McGirr, Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 5, says: “[Heroic plays] promoted kingship in the new circumstances by exonerating themselves of the execution of Charles I while celebrating the Restoration of his son.” 41 J. Douglas Canfield, Heroes & States: On the Ideology of Restoration Tragedy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), xxi. Canfield argues the same point in Word as Bond, xi, “The Ideology of Restoration Tragicomedy” ELH 51, no. 3 (Autumn 1984), 447–64, and “Royalism’s Last Dramatic Stand: English Political Tragedy, 1679–89” Studies in Philosophy 82, no. 2 (Spring 1985), 234–63.

18 Love, Lee’s The Rival Queens, and Otway’s Venice Preserv’d, political turmoil is depicted as the result of events that could have been avoided if men had trusted each other, listened to each other, and not let women distract them. Reading these plots in relation to patriarchal relationships, and not as exemplifying a detailed glorification of

Whig or Tory political ideology, reveals how friendship amplified male supremacy. For that reason, this dissertation argues that it is through performances of male love that we see the tragedies of the 1670s and 1680s cultivating their own ideological propaganda.

To support my claim that heroic plays emphasize homoerotic relations between men, I argue that male friendship and male love are depicted as noble and politically necessary, while women are oppressed and vilified for attempting to compete. No discussion of male love and male supremacy could exist without Eve Sedgwick’s theory of “homosocial desire,” which reveals how women are diminished and used when put in competition with male bonding.42 Sedgwick uses William Wycherley’s 1675 comedy The

Country Wife to illustrate how this triangular relationship functions, recognizing that women’s subordinate position is a necessary result of male-controlled politics. When

Sparkish in The Country Wife tries to be friendly with other men, he “understands correctly that, in the grand scheme of things, men’s bonds with women are meant to be in a subordinate, complementary, and instrumental relation to bonds with other men.”43 The way women are used and treated in the tragedies discussed in this dissertation exemplifies Sedgwick’s analysis that women often are devalued in the face of male friendship. Even when women are not devalued and exert power over their circumstances

42 Sedgwick, Between Men, 1–4. 43 Sedgwick, Between Men, 51.

19 and those around them, the plays’ final acts often reaffirm that women must be secondary to male culture.44

In her chapter on The Country Wife, the male relationships Sedgwick discusses are primarily heterosexual, and she notes the connection between male bonding and heterosexual masculinity:

What I mean to show, of course, is that men’s heterosexual relationships in the play have as their raison d’etre an ultimate bonding between men and that this bonding, if successfully achieved, is not detrimental to “masculinity” but definitive of it.45

It is crucial, however, to note that homosocial relations, while certainly a common feature of normative heterosexuality, function in relationships that may be homoerotic as well. In discussing Greek pederasty, Sedgwick observes that while heterosexuality may be a necessary component of patriarchy, “the continuum between ‘men loving men’ and ‘men promoting the interests of men’ appears to have been quite seamless.”46 The plays of

Dryden, Lee, and Otway reinforce Sedgwick’s assertion, as the plays accept homoeroticism as a means to promote patriarchal ideologies and to subjugate women.

44 This assertion is dependent on the play and the characters. Chapter 1 will show how women (Statira, Roxanna, Cleopatra) supposedly weaken men, while male bonding empowers them. Chapter 2’s discussion of Belvidera highlights how even though she is positioned as a virtuous and sympathetic tragic figure, Venice Preserv’d appears to treat her as a necessary casualty of male relationships. The she-tragedies discussed in chapter 4 focus on women and their suffering but still always make clear that within patriarchal society, women are harmed. 45 Sedgwick, Between Men, 50. 46 Sedgwick, Between Men, uses this example of Greek homosexuality to show how patriarchy does not require homophobia since Greek society was highly patriarchal (structured along class lines that enforced male power) and still allowed homosexuality. It is also important to note that Greek homosexuality was often between a powerful older man and a passive young boy, a power structure that mimicked normative male/female sexual relations. I quote Sedgwick not to claim that Greek love is similar to homo-heroic love, but rather to illustrate how homoeroticism and patriarchy can overlap (3–5). Roman homosexuality was similarly structured around normative power dynamics: “Roman men inherited a cultural patrimony that permitted, even encouraged, them to make sexual use of their slaves of whichever sex. . . . Roman men’s upbringing predisposed them to see anyone—girl or woman, boy or man—as an object that might potentially be subordinated to their phallic dominion.” Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010),, 84.

20 The Restoration stage was a complicated place for women, and while some recent work has explored the ways in which women were granted power in the male-dominated sphere, the tragedies I discuss here are often sexist.47 Female sexuality is depicted as dangerous and corrupting, and the female characters are generally seen as distractions that get in the way of the more important male relationships.48 In Fatal Desire: Women,

Sexuality, and the English Stage, 1660–1720, Jean Marsden demonstrates that even when women are placed as the central characters of a play, their roles often work in relation to men and are subjected to a male gaze and an assumed male spectator.49 Marsden’s observations influence my readings of Statira and Roxanna (The Rival Queens),

Belvidera (Venice Preserv’d), Fuckidilla (Sodom), and Almeria (The Mourning Bride). I demonstrate that even though each character has moments of influence and agency, they are consistently positioned as secondary to male love. In my readings of these tragedies, I draw on scholarship that outlines how playwrights used female characters as

47 Felicity Nussbaum argues in Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 72, that theatrical paratexts depict a Restoration theatre space that, while patriarchal, also represents moments of actresses’ agency and power: “The celebrated actresses who played these roles represented hard-won professional achievement and significant economic power: real women, albeit women impersonating characters, shaped these forms of female subjectivity beyond mere suffering heroines.” Deborah C. Payne, “The Restoration Actress,” in Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theatre, ed. J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne, 13–38 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), argues that the actress-as-whore formulation was not as influential as we may think and that actresses were admired for their skill and art. In researching prologues and epilogues and taking into account their performances, Diana Solomon, Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theater: Gender and Comedy, Performance and Print (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013), contends these paratexts were significant spaces for nonmonarchical women to voice their and others’ ideas in public (11). Also focused on actresses’ successes in the public sphere, Elizabeth Howe’s The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1992) establishes that actresses were able to cultivate public personas and fan bases, contributing to a system that allowed women to be paid for their work on stage. 48 This trope appears in both Dryden’s All for Love (1678) and Lee’s The Rival Queens (1678) and is discussed in chapter 1. There has been further work on women’s sexuality and villainy in Restoration tragedy by Jean Marsden, Elizabeth Howe, J. Douglas Canfield, and others. See Marsden, Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality, and the English Stage 1660–1720 (New York: Cornell University Press, 206), 5–6, Howe, First English Actresses, chapter 7, “The Angel and the She-Devil,” 147–70, and Canfield’s discussion of Lee’s Rival Queens, Heroes and States, 66. 49 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 3–4.

21 metaphorical vessels of the period’s political ideology: rape is used to represent political turmoil and a disregard for individual rights and property; female virtue in the face of suffering is a performance of idealized femininity; and sexualized women stand in as symbols for the destruction of social hierarchy.50 This last point is especially salient, as I maintain that the ideology of male love is distinctly aristocratic. Marsden points to John

Dennis’s disapproval of Dryden’s All For Love as an example of how moralists of the period worried that unchaste women could destroy the structure of inheritance society depended on, and thus invalidate the aristocracy.51 Feminist studies of women’s roles in

Restoration theatre are a fundamental part of my analysis as they help demonstrate how playwrights used men and women to promote male supremacy on stage.

In their treatment of heroic tragedy’s male friendships, many scholars avoid the underlying homoeroticism, treating the relationships as examples of non-sexual male friendship.52 This approach has been so prevalent that in his book Men in Love, George

50 Jennifer Airy, The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012), demonstrates how “Acts of Rape in political tracts and stage plays therefore transform the female body into a symbol of the suffering nation, a physical representation of the horrific consequences of Catholic, Cavalier, Whig, Tory, Dutch, or Stuart Rule” (12). Marsden, Fatal Desire, sees rape on the Restoration stage as a result of the newness of having women’s bodies on stage, and as a complicated site of the heroine’s sexuality, passivity, and desirability within a playhouse dominated by male spectator’s gaze (75–79). 51 Marsden quotes John Dennis as saying: “Is not the Chastity of the Marriage Bed one of the chief Incendiaries of Public Spirit, and the Frequency of Adulteries one of the Exinguishers of it?. . . For when Adultery’s become so frequent, especially among Persons of Condition, upon whose Sentiments all Publick Spirit chiefly depends, that a great many Husbands begin to believe, or perhaps but to suspect, that they who are called their Children are not their own; I appeal to you, Sir, if that Belief or that Suspicion must not exceedingly cool their Zeal for the Welfare of those Children, and consequently for the Welfare of Posterity.” John Dennis, The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore, John Hopkins Press, 1943), 163–64, quoted in Marsden, Fatal Desire, 3–4. 52 In describing the difference between Restoration era homosexual and homosocial male, Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, Vol. 1, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 394, asserts that the danger of welcoming a friend into the warmth of a couple’s “domestic intimacy” is the risk that the man’s wife and his best friend will fall in love. This scenario assumes that homoerotic friendship is a path to heterosexual love rather than considering what may happen if the man and his best friend became lovers instead. This assumption

22 Haggerty describes the genre as “betrayed by history,” with heroic friendships rewritten as “male bonding.”53 For instance, Derek W. Hughes states that Venice Preserv’d does not “imply homosexuality,” as “it seems fair to suggest . . . that the irrationality of

Jaffeir’s attachment to friendship is defined and reinforced by being drawn parallel to the more explicitly motivated irrationality which we see in the influence of Belvidera.”54 In this reading, homoerotic affection is dismissed as irrational and used as a comment against Belvidera’s motivation and actions, rather than analyzed on its own. Even in discussion of Sodom or The Quintessence of Debauchery, where the male characters engage in sodomy and proclaim their desire for young men, scholars have downplayed any readings of homosexuality by focusing instead on the play’s libertine ethos; in a move away from physicality, Albert Ellis describes Sodom as a “play of ideas.”55

George Haggerty demonstrates how friendship and homoeroticism operate together in Dryden’s All For Love and Lee’s The Rival Queens; in his discussion of male love more generally within the heroic mode, he states that it is not the transgressive potential of male love that interests him, but its seeming normativity.56 My dissertation is indebted to Haggerty’s astute observation. In developing my own ideas around “homo-

appears in discussions of Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d as well. Similarly, David R. Hauser, “Otway Preserved: Theme and Form in ‘Venice Preserv’d,’” Studies in Philology 55, no. 3 (July 1958), describes Jaffeir and Pierre consummating their reunion “in profound friendship” (493) rather than a form of sexual consummation, while Zenon Luis-Martinez, “‘Seated in the Heart’: Venice Preserv’d Between Pathos and Politics,” Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research 23, no. 2 (Winter 2008), avoids sexualizing the men’s relationship as well, seeing their suicide as a “symbolic re-appropriation of the heroic ideal that puts friendship and honour before private interest” (37). 53 Haggerty, Men in Love, 43. 54 Derek W. Hughes, “A New Look at Venice Preserv’d,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 11, no. 3 (Summer 1971), 446. 55 Albert Ellis, “Introduction. VII–VIII. Wilmot, John. Earl of Rochester,” in Sodom or The Quintessence of Debauchery, ed. Albert Ellis (California: Brandon House, 1961). See chapter 3 for a full discussion of how scholars treat male desire in Sodom. 56 Haggerty, Men in Love, 26.

23 heroic love” I have repeatedly asked how erotic male love could be so common, and what was its effect more generally? In thinking about the depictions of male love, I see my dissertation expanding Haggerty’s influential work, as performance studies offers a mode of analysis that takes into account not only oral declarations but also how bodies in performance are expressive texts that perform and carry with them cultural and historical associations. If, as Haggerty argues, “friends are physical, emotional, and psychological partners, who love and are loved in ways that heteronormative culture has always reserved for cross-gender relations,” then how do our readings of these tragedies change when we consider real bodies, physically touching and interacting on stage?57

Furthermore, when men hug or kiss or make promises to each other, what cultural associations are being brought into view? As I will demonstrate, the focus on embodiment extends our readings of these male relationships and suggests that patriarchal politics are reinforced through physical performances.

Performance Studies and the Repertoire of Friendship

This dissertation makes an original contribution to Restoration and eighteenth- century studies not only in its consideration of the homoeroticism of heroic tragedy as documented in dramatic texts, but also in using performance studies theories to reconsider how embodiment and performance further support studying male affection within these plays. I have already outlined Alan Bray’s argument that men in seventeenth-century England physically performed their alliances through a set of documented and socially known embodied practices, but now I’d like to build on this

57 Haggerty, Men in Love, 26.

24 valuable historical observation. The notion that men understood what physical demonstrations of affection (hugs, kisses, holding hands, etc.) signified in the public sphere is a historical example of what modern performance studies theories see as the power of embodiment: that physical bodies and expressive behaviours are valuable repositories of the transmission of cultural knowledge. This expressiveness manifests itself in two significant ways: first, the body as a marked entity inscribed with social meaning, and second, that physicality and movement invoke cultural history.

The human body in performance often makes visible how our bodies are historically created and marked with cultural associations. Judith Butler’s theory of

“gender performativity” begins to explore this phenomenon, as she argues that gender, as recognized by modern society, is a “stylized repetition of acts” that “bears similarities to performative acts within theatrical contexts.”58 For Butler, biology is separate from gender, and we must understand how gender performance is made up of the gestures and movements that “constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.”59 A key part of

Butler’s theory is how these gestures and movements are not natural fact, but are born out of historical situations: “In other words, the body is a historical situation . . . and is a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation.”60 The historical specificity of Butler’s argument is key, as the portrayal of masculine friendship I am

58 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988), 521. 59 Butler, “Performative Acts,” 519. It is significant that Butler’s conception of gender performativity does not suggest gender performance is created by the individual or is a process over which an individual has complete control. It is a negotiation between an act located within bodies that have some control of their performance and a larger systemic pressure that inscribes bodies with gendered expectations (520). 60 Butler, “Performative Acts,” 521.

25 examining is specific to the late seventeenth century, and allows us to reconsider how the bodies of men in the heroic tragedies are expressing historical qualities.

Whereas Butler sees the physicality of gender performance as stemming from historical situations, Joseph Roach theorizes how other forms of physicality, like that of law, mark individuals with societal expectations. Roach describes how French slaves were branded with the Fleur-de-lys, thus “enacting the body politic in the materiality of the natural body, wearing on his or her person the ineffaceable insignia of national memory.”61 While Roach’s analysis utilizes a physical mark (the brand) to represent the harmful power of the state on a subjugated body, his overall point that the materiality of physical bodies expresses forms of national memory can be applied more generally. Men in the heroic plays described in this dissertation do not appear on stage as blank ideologically free entities. Roach and Butler view bodies as types of texts, marked and influenced by their historical situations, and expressing cultural norms and ideologies. In other words, when men appear on stage in Restoration drama, they do not appear as blank vessels, but rather are already inscribed with cultural ideologies and meanings. It is crucial that we recognize what those meanings are in order to ascertain how friendship functions in these plots.

Alongside the body as socially marked, so too are physical performances and gestures. The performances of friendship, where gestures of affection were used within a

61 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 57–58.

26 system of sociability, are essentially what Joseph Roach calls “genealogies of performance.”62 These genealogies

draw on the idea of expressive movements as mnemonic reserves, including patterned movements made and remembered by bodies . . . and imaginary movements dreamed in minds, not prior to language, but constitutive of it, a psychic rehearsal for physical actions drawn from a repertoire that culture provides.63

In describing performances as a “genealogy,” suggesting a lineage or line of descent,

Roach theorizes a historical methodology that applies to movement and embodiment.

Furthermore, his suggestion that these actions stem from an embodied repertoire locates the power of these movements back in the human body. As Diana Taylor reveals, archival memory exists as “documents, maps, literary texts, letters . . . all those items supposedly resistant to change.” The repertoire, however,

enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge . . . the repertoire requires presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by “being there,” being part of the transmission.64

This distinction between the archive and repertoire is significant for my treatment of male friendship, as literary scholarship generally studies what stems from the archive.

These items are stable, enduring materials and, as Taylor argues, have been historically considered a more credible source of information than the repertoire because archival materials are supposedly unmediated and resist change.65 These assumptions are false, as

62 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 26. 63 Ibid. 64 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 20. 65 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 19. With a similar focus on embodiment, Mark Franko’s “Mimique” reads dance performance against deconstruction. In his analysis of the semiotics of gesture, he

27 archival materials represent the choices and biases of whoever selected and saved them.

Responding to Taylor, Rebecca Schneider usefully deconstructs this binary between archive and repertoire, noting that embodied interactions with archival materials are a form of reperforming the past: “‘remains’ might be understood not solely as object or document material, but also as the immaterial labor of bodies engaged in and with that incomplete past: bodies striking poses, making gestures, voicing calls, reading words, singing songs, or standing witness.”66 Like Schneider, I am working between the archive and repertoire, showing how they complement each other. What a focus on the repertoire and the archive facilitates is a form of queer historiography that does not only rely on what is written and documented in the archives of a heterogeneous society.

In setting up her study on indigenous Mestizo/Mestiza and Latino/Latinx culture,

Taylor asks if we are to pay attention to repertoire, to the stories, practices, and culture that is passed on through embodiment, “whose stories, memories, and struggles might become visible? What tensions might performance behaviors show that would not be recognized in texts and documents?”67 In the context of heroic tragedy, these questions can be reframed into asking what forms of homoeroticism, what tensions between heterosexuality and homosexuality might performance show when considering how bodies interpreted these texts. That gesture and behaviour are historical and that people foregrounds the significance of physical presence, arguing “Yet parity with the trace can prove problematic, for it removes another sort of presence from dancing: the presence of dancing subjects themselves in their gendered, cultural, and political distinctiveness.” Franko’s argument is important for me in considering how embraces and other physical expressions of male love are given meaning through the gendered, cultural, and political bodies that are performing them. As I argue above, men in these plays are inscribed with cultural associations that impact the reception of their gestures and performances. Mark Franko, “Mimique,” in Migrations of Gesture, ed. Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 245. 66 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011), 35. 67 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, xviii.

28 participate in, borrow, and perform cultural history through performance and a repertoire of embodied action is well represented in seventeenth-century depictions of male friendship. When Alexander in Lee’s The Rival Queens demands of Hephestion “Hugg me, or else by Heaven thou lov’st me not,” the hug is a socially marked action drawing on a repertoire of aristocratic and male embodiment.68 This repertoire was used, added to, and reinforced during the 1670s and 1680s in order to highlight an idealized performance of male friendship and male supremacy.

Furthermore, a repertoire of embodied same-sex gestures allows more opportunities to read Restoration tragedies with attention to homoeroticism. Taylor highlights how during the conquests of Mexico, indigenous people used embodied practices to preserve their history against colonial forces.69 When colonizers forced

Roman Catholic rituals onto indigenous people, they continued worshiping their old gods under the guise of the new Roman Catholic actions. Although the friars had hoped the imposition of their practices would eliminate the original practices and beliefs, “the recent converts . . . may just as readily have embraced these ambiguous behaviors as a way of . . . continuing their cultural and religious practices in a less recognizable form.”70

In this example, embodiment is not only a way of transmitting and preserving cultural knowledge and history but also points to how both can endure even while masked as something else. Indigenous rituals did not disappear but persevered within Roman

Catholic performances. Applying this argument to homoeroticism in the Restoration and eighteenth century, I propose that displays of male friendship that appeared normatively

68 Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.97–101. 69 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 43–46. 70 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 43–46.

29 heterosexual existed simultaneously with displays of homoeroticism. Homoerotic embodiment and passion could be preserved and transmitted while appearing as gestures and performances that were socially acceptable.71

Returning to Goldberg’s analysis of the sodomite, men were able to love and engage in sexual activity with other men while those relationships were masked as more socially appropriate ones such as friendship and patronage.72 The fact that men did not outwardly express or appear to perform same-sex affection does not mean it did not take place. As Taylor articulates through her example with indigenous people, there are multiple performances and actions happening at once. Just as indigenous people continued their original practices masked as Catholicism, same-sex affection could have continued to take place masked as friendship and patronage. Male love appeared as both a socially acceptable form of kinship and a potential cover for homosexual activity.

Through the analysis of the plays in this dissertation, I theorize a repertoire of homoerotic embodiment that playwrights of the 1670s and 1680s draw on in order to inscribe and re- perform pre-Restoration era notions of male privilege.

This dissertation argues that Restoration tragedies depict what I call homo-heroic love in order to appropriate male desire as a powerful and socially beneficial force.

“Homo-heroic love” is defined by marriage-like language, physical affection, word as bond, and male supremacy. Furthermore, even though women are often objectified and

71 Rictor Norton reports that in the text The Conspirators: Or, the Earl Catiline (1721), the main character, Catiline (who is said to represent to the Earl of Sunderland) is labelled a sodomite who has “unnatural tast in his Gallantries.” More important is the insinuation that the “Women were wholly excluded from his Embraces,” suggesting, as I have, that normative expressions of heterosexual male friendship (like the embrace) could be performed, or read, as simultaneously expressing same-sex desire. Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700–1830 (London: GMP, 1992), 41. 72 Goldberg, Sodometries, 19.

30 harmed in these configurations, homo-heroic love is depicted as a positive and ideal expression of male love. This positive depiction is crucial, as it fits into what scholars have noted is a blurry tension between expressions of male love that were celebrated and those that were not. Homo-heroic love acknowledges the dangerously blurred line between “the sodomite” and the friend, winking scandalously, while appropriating the power of this homoerotic situation all the same. In showing men who love other men, tragedies of the 1670s and 1680s drew on a repertoire of embodied practices, re- inscribing the cultural associations of a pre-Restoration ideal.

Chapter Outline

Chapter 1 demonstrates how gestures of affection were used within networks of male alliances intended to exhibit male power and privilege. In studying the intense and homoerotic relationships of Antony, Ventidius, and Dollabella, and Alexander,

Hephestion, and Clytus, I bring together performance theory and historical notions of male friendship in an analysis of the canonical plays All for Love (1677) by John Dryden and The Rival Queens (1677) by Nathanial Lee. In theorizing that male friendship was a performative act, drawing on a repertoire of pre-Restoration gestures of friendship, and used to reinforce patriarchal power and control, my analysis highlights how these depictions of male love may have reinforced male supremacy at the politically tense time of the Restoration. This chapter also analyzes how female characters like Cleopatra,

Octavia, and Statira are harmed when men develop and maintain relationships with other men.

31 Chapter 2 extends my reading of performative male relationships to Thomas

Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (1678), revealing how, alongside male friendship, homoeroticism was appropriated as an advantageous tool in promoting patriarchal power.

Drawing on the work of Goldberg and Bray, I show how the relationship between Jaffeir and Pierre avoids the stigma associated with “the sodomite” and is positioned as an ideal form of homoerotic male love. In having Jaffeir flail between his wife, Belvidera, and his best friend, Pierre, Otway depicts Jaffeir’s commitment to patriarchal politics. Although the plot ends with Belvidera as an object of audience sympathy, discarded by Jaffeir and in ruin, Otway’s decision to have Jaffeir and Pierre reunite suggests that women are unfortunate but necessary casualties of male bonding. This queer reading counters existing scholarship that treats Jaffeir and Pierre’s relationship as primarily heterosexual, showing instead how homoeroticism was not seen as disruptive to notions of masculinity and male power.

In chapter 3, I draw on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of parody to throw into relief the sexual politics of Dryden, Lee, and Otway’s tragedies. I argue that Sodom or The

Quintessence of Debauchery (1680s) and Colley Cibber’s The Rival Queans

(1690s/1710) burlesque male love and affection, purposely associating passionate male love with the dangerous qualities of the sodomite. In depicting effeminate men whose same-sex desire is dangerous, Rochester and Cibber offer their own readings of male desire, countering the narratives of Dryden, Lee, and Otway’s popular plays. Through the use of comic physicality and performance, the parodies undermine the performance of friendship I define in chapters 1 and 2 and transform homoeroticism into something that is grotesque and effeminate.

32 Finally, chapter 4 focuses on the she-tragedy genre that began in the late 1670s, acting as a concluding point of reference for the argument from the preceding chapters.

Edward Ravenscroft’s adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy Titus Andronicus, and the

Rape of Lavinia (1677) and William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride (1697) share features with heroic drama (heroic ideals, conspirators, political instability), but reframe their tragedies’ political and pathetic power around central female characters, not male ones. Analyzing the men in these two she-tragedies reveals that while homoeroticism was avowed in the heroic genre, she-tragedies reconfigure tragic power around displays of heterosexual love. Whereas Lee, Dryden, and Otway tied the men’s identities to public modes of affection and defined their masculinity in relation to other men, she-tragedies redefine male gender performance as an expression of heterosexual affection and desire.

33 Chapter 1.

Homo-Heroic Love and the Performance of Friendship

John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, memorably satirized Charles II as being distracted, if not consumed, by his mistresses: “His scepter and his prick are of a length /

And she may sway the one who plays with th’other.”73 Rochester illuminates, albeit in a cruder way than most, a fear that Charles II was not only distracted from his official duties, but gave his mistresses more political power than was appropriate.74 This concern with the public political duties of men of power and the dangers of their private desires proved popular fodder for playwrights of the period, who represented leaders and monarchs fighting to maintain the political stability of their nations against the threat of private affairs. Nathanial Lee’s The Rival Queens, or the Death of Alexander the Great

(1677) and Dryden’s All for Love; or, The World Well Lost (1677) both demonstrate the incompatibility of powerful women and successful patriarchal governance. In Lee’s play, the titular rival queens, Statira and Roxana, distract Alexander from conspirators and cause him to betray his closest male friends, while in Dryden’s play, Antony is weakened by Cleopatra’s influence and is positioned as the central object of contention between

Antony’s male friends and the supposedly dangerous woman. Lee and Dryden also eroticize the male friendships, making the men appear more important than the female

73 John Wilmot, “Satyr,” in John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The Poems and Lucina’s Rape, ed. Keith Walker and Nicholas Fisher (UK: John Wiley & Sons), 86–87, lines 11–12. 74 Anne A. Huse, “Cleopatra, Queen of the Seine: The Politics of Eroticism in Dryden’s All for Love,” Huntington Library Quarterly 63 ½ (2000), 30, describes Louis de Keroualle as target of misogynist polemicists who used the duchess’s ongoing affair with the King to imply a dangerous connection to King Louis XIV, while Matthew Jenkinson, Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–1685 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010), 145, explains that Londoners were suspicious of Charles II’s French Catholic mistress Louise de Kéroualle and her possible influence on his political choices.

34 characters. In both plays, the female figures are granted agency, but Roxana and

Cleopatra are ultimately reduced to villainesses who disrupt male bonds and incite political and social instability. While the women in the plays are vilified in similar ways to Charles II’s real-life mistresses, Lee and Dryden appear to use the male characters to counteract perceived weaknesses—legitimate heirs, distracting mistresses—in Charles

II’s monarchy. Male bonds are the answer to the menace caused by royal mistresses, secret plots, and religiously motivated conspiracies.

In depicting male relationships as crucial to state stability and vilifying women as contributing to the supposed chaos, playwrights of the 1670s and 1680s drew on male friendship as a stabilizing historical precedent on which to lean. J. Douglas Canfield and others have read these plays’ focus on male friendship, honour, and what Canfield calls

“the word as bond” as depicting pre-feudal, aristocratic ideology.75 This chapter builds upon these readings by highlighting how this aristocratic ideology is cultivated through embodiment. Male friendship is performative, and when the men physically show their devotion to each other, they invoke what I call a gestural repertoire of male friendship. In other words, the actors’ bodies in performance draw on, and transmit, cultural knowledge and memory; in this case, the cultural memories invoked are pre-Restoration notions of friendship. Dryden and Lee idealize male relationships and debase women in order to reinforce the male political power structure that had been at work in Europe long before the English Civil War.76 This chapter argues that in response to the anxieties surrounding

Charles II’s rule, Dryden and Lee eroticize male relationships and depict the necessity of

75 Canfield, Word as Bond, xi. 76 Ibid.

35 male bonds to protect and exalt the traditional male power structures of the early seventeenth century.

The Rival Queens (1677) and the Disruption of Male Space

The Rival Queens (1677) uses male friendship as a stabilizing force against the supposed chaos of women. Alexander the Great has taken Queen Statira as his new love, leaving his first wife, Roxana, angry and vengeful. Clytus, Alexander’s faithful advisor, warns that the rivalry between the two queens could unsettle court and weaken

Alexander’s focus on plots and conspiracies against his rule. While Alexander continues to bounce between his two wives, Hephestion, the king’s favourite, and Lysimachus fight for Parisatis’ hand in marriage.77 Believing that Clytus no longer admires him, Alexander kills Clytus. In the end, Roxana kills Statira in a vengeful fury, Hephestion dies, Parisatis is given to Lysimachus, and the conspirators attack Alexander, killing him with a poisoned arrow.

In critical discussions of The Rival Queens, Alexander is portrayed as an inconsistent, emotional hero who fails to understand how personal politics are dangerous to state duties. While scholars tend to agree on this characterization, there is disagreement about the tragedy’s overall ideological message. Laura Brown characterizes Alexander’s inconsistencies as reflecting the fragmentation of the heroic model and a loss of

77 George Haggerty argues, “Dryden depicts a moment in classical history when friendship held this erotic potential, and he does so without embarrassment. . . . It is almost as if Dryden felt that his age was another that could condone erotic friendship between men, at least when they were articulated in the service of heroic cultural goals.” Haggerty, Men in Love, 29. For more information on homosexuality in the classical period, see Thomas K. Hubbard, Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

36 confidence in aristocratic ideals.78 Brown’s thesis follows Susan Staves’ line of thinking, as Staves argues that tragedies of the late 1670s and 1680s reflect a dissolution of older forms of political authority.79 In response to Staves and Brown, J. Douglas Canfield argues that The Rival Queens still reflects aristocratic ideology, but that its primary interest is in questioning how a state can remain legitimate under the threat of adultery and sexual inconstancy.80 While I agree with Staves and Brown’s characterization of

Alexander as inconsistent, my thesis expands Canfield’s articulation that the play depicts aristocratic bonds, demonstrating how homoerotic performances and embodiment worked to underscore that form of male privilege. On the homoerotic elements of the text,

Stephan P. Flores locates both Alexander’s homosocial and his heterosexual relationships as a source of political conflict, while George Haggerty views Lee’s play as both exalting and problematizing male desire.81 Both Flores and Haggerty agree that Alexander’s favouritism towards Hephestion is seen as dangerous. My approach follows Flores and

Haggerty’s goals to question the relationship between male desire and politics within the play, but I disagree that Lee frames male desire as a dangerous force. Alexander’s downfall stems from his inability to realize that male friendship, and more specifically, the performance of male friendship, is a stabilizing tradition.

The Rival Queens premiered at the New Theatre Drury Lane in March 1677, under the control of the King’s Company. The cast was made up of the repertory actors

78 Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660–1760 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 71–76. 79 Staves, Players’ Scepters, 87–88. 80 Canfield, Heroes and States, 64. 81 Stephan P. Flores, “Patriarchal Politics under Cultural Stress: Nathaniel Lee’s Passion Plays,” Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research 8, no.2 (Winter 1993): 1–28; Haggerty, Men in Love, 32–33.

37 and actresses, and it is believed that, like other playwrights of the period, Lee wrote the play with that particular group of thespians in mind.82 Mr. Hart played Alexander the

Great, Mr. Mohun played Clytus, Mr. Clarke played Hephestion, and Mr. Kenaston played Cassander.83 Charles Hart was revered and a well-liked leading man who achieved immense success as one part of the comedic “gay couple” alongside Nell Gwyn.84 In tragedies, he often played kings and other royal figures that required a dignified presence.

John Downes remarked that Hart’s Alexander had “grandeur” and “majesty,” and could be a model for how all royals should behave.85 Given that Alexander spends most of the play fainting and confused about who deserves his affection, Downes’s opinion that Hart conveyed a sense of grandeur and majesty clearly speaks to Hart’s commanding stage presence. Hart was, however, trained as a boy actress at the Old Blackfriars Theatre, a point that Nussbaum suggests could have contributed to gender ambiguity in his performance of Alexander and, as I show, the reception of embraces between him and other men.86 Michael Mohun, who played Clytus, appears an appropriate choice given how Clytus is the serious, unmovable voice for traditional male politics. Lee praised

Mohun’s forceful and commanding voice and called him “a little man of mettle.”87

82 “nearly all the major dramatists seem to have taken care over the casting of their plays.” Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 73. 83 Emmett L. Avery, ed., The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part 1, 1660–1700, 2 Vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960), 267. 84 Howe, The First English Actresses, 66–67. The gay couple is a pair of “lively, witty lovers whose love contains an element of antagonism.” 85 David Kathman, “Hart, Charles (bap. 1625, d. 1683), actor.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. August 28, 2018, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e- 12473. 86 Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 75. 87 Avery, The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part 1, 267.

38 Edward Kynaston, famous for being a beautiful boy actress, originated the role of

Cassander, who Nussbaum points out, momentarily lusts after Alexander’s soft skin:

“He’s a man, his flesh as soft and penetrable as a girl’s.”88 Finally, Thomas Clarke played

Alexander’s favourite Hephestion. Although there is not much known about Thomas

Clarke, we do know that he played Dollabella to Charles Hart’s Antony just a few short months later. I will come back to this point in my discussions of All for Love, but Clarke must have been successful playing the handsome boyish object of more powerful men’s attentions.

Lee uses proclamations of love throughout The Rival Queens to heighten the emotional and physical connection between men, highlighting to audiences the supposed distinctiveness of patriarchal relationships. These proclamations are also examples of the word as bond, as they depend on men proclaiming their loyalty, constancy, and trust to each other.89 When Alexander comes upon Hephestion, the dialogue between the two is not only romantic in a way that modern readers might expect between opposite-sex couples, but in fact exalts male bonds higher than those between heterosexual couples.

Alexander calls Hephestion his “second self” and “my love,” and he moves him into a hug so that he can “hide thee in my Heart.”90 All three descriptive terms evoke emotional and physical unity, making the two men so intimate that they are essentially one person.

This reoccurring notion of “unity” echoes Jeremy Taylor’s consideration that friendship signifies as much as unity can mean.91 The declarations of endearment could suggest a

88 Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 75–76. Lee, Rival Queens, 1.2.266–67. 89 Canfield, Word as Bond, xi. 90 Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.1.96–98. 91 Taylor, “A Discourse of the Nature,” 64.

39 form of paternal love, but as the play goes on, the language becomes more passionate and more sexual. Hephestion’s response illustrates the passionate love that defines male friendships of this period:

Not Love, my Lord? Break not the Heart you fram’d And moulded up to such an Excellence; Then stamp’d on it your own Immortal Image. Not love the King? Such is not Womans love, So fond a friendship, such a sacred flame, As I must doubt to find in Breasts above.92

Hephestion credits Alexander for his development and uses the image of his heart to illustrate his friend’s deep influence on him. In saying that Alexander “stamp’d” his own immortal image there, Hephestion accepts the everlasting quality this friendship is supposed to have. Like an image stamped on a coin, there is a level of permanence and durability invoked in saying that Alexander’s best qualities are imprinted on his heart.

Lee makes an economic argument here as well, as the value of their friendship is compared to the monetary value of currency, which itself helps drive the social and political world. Stability, success, and influence are dependent on gaining wealth, and in using this coin metaphor, Lee draws readers’ attention to the ways friendship in the network of signs and alliances offers social and political access not unlike monetary wealth.

The most remarkable description of male friendship, however, comes from

Hephestion’s assertion that their love is “not woman’s love,” a move that categorizes and hierarchizes this bond. It is as if Lee is reaffirming Montaigne’s thoughts on friendship.

92 Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.1.102–5.

40 Montaigne is not subtle in elevating male friendship above that of women, saying that it is impossible for women to sustain the “sacred bond” of friendship and that there is no example of women attaining a friendship that is as strong as the knot of everlasting male friendship.93 What Lee promotes is that love between men is unlike heteronormative love and even more powerful and important. Their friendship is a “sacred flame” that is grand, exclusively for them, and above all else, not “woman’s love.”94 Any possibility that

Hephestion views male love in a parallel way to female love vanishes when Alexander responds: “Thou dost, thou lov’st me, Crown of all my Wars, / thou dearer to me than my

Groves of Lawrel.”95 The friendship between the two of them is more important to

Alexander than his own kingship, the “groves of Lawrel” being a metaphorical device representing the wreath of laurels on a monarch’s head.96

Considering the physical possibilities of this scene alongside the oral declarations that J. Douglas Canfield reads as “word as bond” reinforces the play’s feudal ideology.

This ideology, as Canfield explains, is organized around maintaining male power:

Organizing itself first around tribal leaders and later around local barons with their retinues and dependents, medieval society relied upon the (fiction of the) pledge of allegiance for political continuity and upon the

93 Montaigne, “On Friendship,” 137–38. 94 The word “sacred” is used in other homo-heroic relationships to demonstrate how special male bonds are. In Otway’s Alcibiades Patroclus positions his relationship with Alcibiades within a sacred male friendship traditional, saying “You, Sir, that taught me friendship, taught me too, / How much is to that Sacred Title due. / No Sir, if your Life is at Hazard lye, / Though thousand deaths should are me I’l fly, / And conquer all, or bravely with you dye” (3.1.137–41). The two men then embrace publically confirming their bond. Tissaphernes, disgusted at his son’s attachment to Alcibiades, demonstrates his understanding of the gestural repertoire of male friendship by crying out “Hell! Sure my blood is grown degenerate. / Can this my Son Embrace the man I hate? (3.1.146–48). 95 Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.1.108–9. 96 OED Online, s.v. “laurel, n.1,” accessed August 12, 2016, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/106301?rskey=Z682Ck&result=1&isAdvanced=false.

41 (fiction of the) pledge of betrothal for both political alliance and genealogical continuity.97

It is not only that men make promises and bonds to each other to reaffirm patriarchal ideals, as Canfield argues, but in The Rival Queens, their bodies do that same work.98

This is why thinking about embodiment helps extend our understanding of the patriarchal politics of the play.99 When Alexander tests Hephestion’s dedication—“hug me, or else by Heaven thou lov’st me not”—he accepts that the physical performance of the hug is just as important as the oral pledge. Saying that he loves Alexander is not enough;

Hephestion must embody their bond as well. It is for this reason that I theorize friendship as an embodied public act. The hug is a signal moment within the system of male friendship that requires Hephestion’s love to be broadcast to those around them.100

Alexander does not reserve his embraces or his physical devotion just for Hephestion, however, as he instructs Clytus to “Come to my hands, thus double Arm the King.”101

Acting manuals of the period tell us that embraces were a noted theatrical movement that required thought and practice. In The Art of Gesture: The Practices and

97 Canfield, Word as Bond, xxi. 98 Staves, Players’ Scepters, 191, also demonstrates how in the late seventeenth century oaths and vows were signs that legitimated obligation and “create obligation where it did not exist before.” I add to Staves and Canfield’s observations by highlighting how the physical does the same work. 99 Lee’s The Massacre of Paris depicts the word as bond as a tool to maintain male power against the destruction women bring to male-centric structures. As the Admiral is being pursued, he cries out “The King has giv’n his Warrant for my last; / His vows, his Oaths, and Alter-Obligations Are lost; / The Wax of all those Sacred Bonds Runs at the Queens Revenge, the Fire that melts ‘em”(5.4.3–7). 100 Lee’s Mithridates features a number of embraces as well. When welcoming his friend Andravar, Pharnaces pulls him into an embrace: “But see the brave Lieutenant! come to my Arms” (1.1.107). Thomas Otway’s Don Carlo Prince of Spain (1676) similarly describes the embrace as a confirmatory physical action: “Oblig’d to none but whom I call my Friend. / And if that title you think fit to bear, / Accept the Confirmation of it here” (4.140–42). 101 Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.128.

42 Principles of 18th Century Acting, Dene Barnett summarizes that eighteenth-century acting “used a vocabulary of basic gestures, each with an individual meaning known to all in advance, and all performed in accordance with given techniques and precepts of style.”102 Of course, the degree to which a gesture’s meaning could be “known to all in advance” is difficult to ascertain, but Barnett’s argument nevertheless suggests that some audiences and actors alike were familiar with the conventions of theatrical movements and meanings.103 Moreover, Barnett discovered that multiple acting manuals offer the same depiction of the physical movement and passion required for successfully performing an embrace. Gilbert Austin, C. F. Michaelis, J. J. Engel, and J. Jelgerhui instruct actors to step back on one foot, in a slight lean backwards, while stretching towards their friend in an open and heartfelt embrace.104 Based on this information, it is likely that when Alexander calls for his men to embrace him, it is not an abrupt or tight embrace, but rather an unhurried, large, open-armed physical moment. Stepping the foot back appears to help stabilize the body against the enthusiastic power of the friend moving in for the embrace, while the arms are wide so as to be inviting and accessible. In attempting to imagine how gestures of affection may have been performed, these acting manuals help us conceptualize what would have happened on stage. Clearly, embraces were not meaningless physical moments, but purposeful choices deployed by actors intended to enrich audiences’ understanding of the characters.

102 Dene Barnett, The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of 18th Century Acting (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag, 1987), 7. 103 Henry Siddons, who I discuss below, similarly suggests that audiences would have known that embraces between men were intense performative markers of affection. Siddons remarks that most children know “the value of an embrace” and perform it only when the situation requires it, a move that saves the embrace from being degraded into a meaningless gesture. Siddons, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action (London: Benjamin Blom, 1968), 9. 104 Barnett, The Art of Gesture, 68.

43 Acting theories of the period further illustrate why actors believed that these noted gestures helped convey their characters’ inner feelings. Seventeenth-century acting theories were built upon the belief, as Joseph Roach summarizes, that emotions were conveyed through the body: “What orators and stage players do, then, is to discover the passions of the mind with their bodies—larynx, limbs, torso, and head together—thereby transforming invisible impulses into spectacle and unspoken feeling into eloquence.”105

The outward physical manifestation must still be controlled, which is why the acting manuals outline how a certain passion should be performed. To appear so passionate as to lose control of your body was seen as not being in control of your craft.106 Studying embraces and other physical forms of friendship as both culturally known gestures and as expressions of inner passion encourages reconsidering moments where men perform their fealty.107 Henry Siddons’s Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action characterizes the embrace as a staple of actors’ craft and an expression of emotion:

105 Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 42. 106 Roach, The Player’s Passion, 52. “His art requires him to set his bodily instrument in expressive motion, not by freeing his actions, but by confining them in direction, purpose, and shape.” 107 As I indicated above, this question of being “culturally known” is challenging; however, there do appear to be visual representations of friendship and love that promote closeness and embraces as a fundamental element of male relationships. K. J. Dover’s Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975) prints examples of Greek art that depict homosexuality. Images B16, B538, R27, R59, R196a, R283, and R520 show men embracing and kissing. Given the classical settings for both The Rival Queens and All For Love, one wonders if these images of male love were influential in both playwrights’ conceptions of embodied male love. Regarding iconography from the seventeenth century, Bray outlines through his examination of graves and monuments that friendship was visually represented within the medieval and early modern periods. One such representation is the shared tombstone of Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe (1391), which depicts two knights’ helmets arranged as if they are kissing. Bray interprets this representation as that of “sworn brothers,” which purposely invokes marriage imagery. The monument of Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Bains in the chapel of Christ’s College, Cambridge similarly visualizes “a marriage of souls.” Bray, The Friend, 13–16, 141. Another visual representation appears in Richard Brathwaite’s The English Gentleman (1633), which is a guidebook of how men should behave. The written section on “Acquaintance” is paired with an image of two seemingly aristocratic men embracing. Brathwaite, The English Gentleman (Amsterdam: Walter J. Johnson, 1975), 5.

44 The squeeze of the hand, the kiss, and the embrace, are three different modes of expressing amity and affection.—the first is the weakest, because it simply joins two extremities of the human body to each other. The last is the most forcible, because it in a manner draws together and incorporates the object with oneself . . . when the heart is really concerned, he is all fire, all energy, all force.108

When the actors who played Alexander, or other men discussed in this dissertation, go for an embrace, they rely on a known acting gesture that was cultivated and performed in order to demonstrate the “fire,” the “energy,” and the “force” that men have for other men. It is the successful performance of inner passions extending and appearing on the body. This understanding of acting theories and the manuals that depict these actions enhance our understanding of male intimacy in these homo-heroic relationships.

The patriarchal space developed in Lee’s play is overwhelmingly exclusionary to women and is so in order to privilege male power. Roxanna’s physicality, for example, is depicted as just as dangerous as she is. In contrast to how male embraces are empowering physical movements that perform constancy, Roxanna’s are supposedly contaminating and disgusting: “Her curs’d embraces have defil’d your body.”109 This contrast illustrates how within the play’s ideology, embraces between men legitimize friendships and female embraces destroy them.110 In extending “the gift” of his embrace, to borrow Bray’s

108 Siddons, Practical Illustrations, 8–10. 109 Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.362. 110 In Otway’s Alcibiades, Patroclus highlights how male embraces legitimize male bonds. After pledging his honour to, and embracing Alcibiades, Patroclus is horrified to learn that his own father does not accept this friendship. More importantly, Patroclus is shocked that Tissaphernes embraced a man that he did not intend to honour: “Protect me Heav’n! can you command that I / Should break that knot you did so lately tye! / Was’t not your love that did our friendship joyn? / Did not your kind imbraces second mine?” (3.1.209–12). Tissaphernes’s response legitimizes the network of male bonding and attempts to undermine it: “Embraces! Love! And kindness! what are these? / The outward varnish that our hearts disguise”

45 terminology, Alexander once again demonstrates that male friendship is an embodied experience and its performance has public significance.111

When men pledge their allegiance to each other and then physically perform it, they reaffirm patriarchal politics. As Sedgwick articulates and I quote in the introduction of this dissertation, the “continuum between ‘men loving men’ and ‘men promoting the interests of men’” can be quite seamless.112 Lee’s play reaffirms the political and ideological significance of watching men physically love other men. Theatre spectators may assume that Lee’s depiction of friendship is unique to his play, but there is a history of embodiment that is being invoked and remixed. It is undoubtedly a patriarchal spectacle, and it does not appear on stage without a history. These gestures of friendship are a repertoire, and what Diana Taylor calls performances of embodied memory.113 For example, when men hug each other in The Rival Queens, they draw on an inventory of embodiment that brings with it cultural memory and associations. Bray, intentionally or

(3.1.213–15). Lee similarly uses an embrace as a performance of patriarchal devotion in The Massacre of Paris. The King calls to his Admiral, “Let then the World be witness, / All that is Honest, Sacred, Good, and Just, / Be witnesses the powers of Heav’n and Earth, / With this embrace I pardon thee thy Errors . . . O! and while I hold thee thus, / Methinks I press my Father in my Arms” (3.3.42–48). The Queen subsequently reaffirms that the embrace is a powerful symbolic performance, stating that “when I saw the King and you embrace, / My wounded heart did not weep blood for joy” (3.3.65–66). In Lee’s Caesar Borgia, Borgia also calls for a performative embrace among male friends, “My Equals all, Nor shall this Homage be, / I swear it shall not; Rise my Lords; Your Arms; / Let me imbrace you round” (1.1.477–79). Caesar Borgia and Orsino also pledge friendship and embrace while discussing how Borgia will marrying Orsino’s daughter Bellamira. Orsino suggests that all their previous discord be “buri’d ever in this strict Imbrace,” while Borgia directly connects the embrace with their new found homosocial relationship: “Since you will have it so, forgive my Duty; / Let me grow bold, and as a friend imbrace you” (1.1.469– 72). 111 Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.1.97, 121, 128. Bray, The Friend, 146–50. Dryden uses this language of friendship as a “gift” in Amboyna. When Towerson accepts Harman Jr.’s false apology, Towerson “receiv[es] the friendship of a Man, of whom I did not willingly embrace an ill opinion” (3.2.116–18). What makes Harman Jr. a villain, however, is his disregard of the sacred bonds of friendship and the word as bond. When he betrays Towerson, Ysabinda expresses surprise that he has not put aside his lust for her in the name of male friendship: “When you renew’d your friendship with my Towerson, / I thought these vain desire were dead within you” (4.3.8–9). 112 Sedgwick, Between Men, 4. 113 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 22.

46 not, details what a repertoire of friendship may have looked like. If embraces, kisses, hand-holding, and other forms of publicly displayed intimacy were “material gifts” and a form of “symbolic capital” in the early seventeenth century, then we can see how a repertoire of friendship allows Lee to appropriate these pre-Restoration ideals in his portrayal of Alexander’s relationships.114 This analysis helps us understand that the directive of “hug me, or else by Heaven thou lov’st me not,” is not a call for friends to privately show their affection, but rather is a purposeful public demonstration of male supremacy that draws on a repertoire of pre-Restoration ideals to give it meaning.115

When the two men hug, the play establishes that male love is performative, powerful, and politically and socially necessary.

Along with heightening Hephestion and Alexander’s friendship with romantic language, an assumed hierarchy, and an invocation of a repertoire of male supremacy,

Lee appears to use the homoerotic threat in order to, again, highlight the men’s supposed superiority. Alexander offers Hephestion his hand and proclaims: “Give me thy hand, share all my scepters while I live.”116 Given the earlier proclamations of love, this initially appears as a generous offer for Hephestion to share in the power and status of his ruler. At the same time, it is difficult not to view the erotic possibilities of this statement with the similarities between Alexander’s offer and Rochester’s Satire on Charles II:

“His scepter and his prick are of a length / And she may sway the one who plays with

114 Alan Bray. The Friend (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 150. 115 Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.101. 116 Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.1.121.The notion that friendship allows men to share power, alliances, and influence, appears in other plays of the period. In Dryden’s The Indian Emperour, for example, Cortez announces to Guyomar, “Live, and enjoy more than your Conqueror: / Take all my Love, and share in all my power” (5.2.356–57).

47 th’other.”117 In Sodom, the parody play often attributed to the Earl of Rochester and discussed in chapter 3, the king’s penis is described as his sceptre: “my pintle shall my only scepter be.”118 The established comparison between a kingly sceptre and his prick allows for a suggestive reading of Alexander’s words; Hephestion can, if he desires, delight in both the social and physical benefits of their close relationship.

George Haggerty contends that Alexander’s devotion to Hephestion is one of the play’s central problems, as Alexander is willing to sacrifice his duties for his love of

Hephestion and violates social hierarchy by sharing his throne. The couple can be read as sodomitical friends.119 While I agree with Haggerty that “this violation of the social hierarchy marks Alexander’s love as sodomitical as clearly as any keyhole testimony of physical penetration would,” I do not agree that the play presents this as a source of conflict.120 In fact, I contend that it is the opposite, with women demonized as the central problem and male love as its answer. The Rival Queens still privileges, idealizes, and ranks male love above all else and blames Alexander’s fall on the women around him.

Alexander’s male friends are offered as a more stable alternative to the relationships he seeks with women.

117 Wilmot, The Poems and Lucina’s Rape, L11–12. 118 John Wilmot, Sodom or The Quintessence of Debauchery, ed. Albert Ellis (California: Brandon House, 1961), 57. For discussions of authorship, see chapter 3. 119 Haggerty, Men in Love, 32–33; Goldberg, Sodometries, 119, discusses sodomitical friends in Edward II arguing that labeling friends as “sodomitical” was a marker of the switching point between appropriate male friendship and forms of male intimacy that threatened social roles. Flores, “Patriarchal Politics under Cultural Stress,” argues that the play promotes a patriarchal ideology, but also notes that Alexander’s affection for Hephestion is problematic and is emblematic of how the play shows how homosocial bonds both bind and destroy the relationship between kings and subjects (7). 120 Haggerty, Men in Love, 33.

48 Throughout The Rival Queens, women are framed as the most dangerous force to male friendship and debased as competing forces.121 In the opening, Hephestion, and

Lysimachus enter fighting for Parisatis’s hand in marriage. Lysimachus has the better claim in loving her, and the two men duel to show their dominance and suitability for marriage. Clytus, who is described as the father of war and their culture’s most famous soldier, stops the two men and chides them for their behaviour, asking why they have resorted to such childish methods:

And what’s the noble Cause that makes this madness? What big Ambition blows this dangerous fire? A cupids puff, is it not Woman’s breath? By all our triumphs in the head of Youth, When Towns were sack’d, and Beauties prostrate lay, When my Blood boil’d, and Nature work’d me high, Clytus ne’re bow’d his body to such shame: The brave will scorn their cobweb arts—The Souls Of all that whining, smiling, coz’ning Sex Weigh not one thought of any Man of War.122

Clytus first assumes that Hephestion and Lysimachus could only be fighting about a

“noble Cause,” likely a matter of war or state. If not that, he offers that it be at least a demonstration of their “ambition” as men of politics and of Alexander’s entourage. The

121 Although women are not the depicted as enemies in Dryden’s The Indian Queen in the same way Lee develops Statira and Roxanna, men’s love for women is still seen as an oppositional force to male friendship. When Montezuma and Acacis fight for Orazia’s love, they suspend the title of friend in order to be rivals: “But Friendship bars what Honor Prompts me to. / Friends shou’d not fight . . . I forfeit Friendship” (4.3.16–18, 38). Dryden still upholds the sacred bonds of male friendship, however, as the men reunite under the title of friendship at the end of the play. After fighting for Orazia, a dying Acacis makes amends with the passionate language we see in All for Love, Rival Queens, and Venice Preserv’d: “Dear Montezuma./ I may be still your Friend, though I must dye/ Your Rival in her love; Eternity Has room enough for both, there’s no desire, / Where to enjoy is only to admire: / There we’l meet friends, when this short storm is past” (4.1.162–67). Friendship as requiring unity appears again in Dryden’s Indian Emperour (1667), as Montezuma urges his battling sons to “let your unseemly discord cease, / If not in friendship live at least in peace” (1.2.169–70). 122 Lee, The Rival Queens, 1.1.27–36.

49 pomp of the first two lines is deflated by the incredulity at the suggestion that it be

“cupids puff” or a “woman’s breath” that has come between these two friends. Clytus configures the first two options as public and thus acceptable motives for the duel, a categorization in line with Jeremy Taylor’s description of the publicness of friendship:

“and there is no society, and there is no relation that is worthy, but it is made so by the communications of friendship, and by partaking some of its excellencies.” 123 The publicness of their fight is a performance of their heterosexuality and masculinity, as they attempt to show their dominance over each other and their passion for one woman. Being in love, however, is private and not worthy of these two heroic men.124

In this didactic way, Clytus uses himself as the model of how to retain and build masculine integrity. The “brave,” he says, will scorn women’s deceitful ways, creating an identity that values relationships with men at the expense of those with women. Even in the wild of his youth, when his blood ran warm, he recognized the dangerous influence of women around him. While his contemptuous description of women as “whining, smiling, and coz’ning” is stereotypically sexist in describing women’s seductive and supposedly dishonest tactics, the use of “smiling” suggests women’s delight in trapping men in their cobwebs or duplicity in their kind appearance. Clytus views women as unworthy of the attention Hepthestion and Lysimachus give them. Women, in his opinion, purposely undermine male bonds and enjoy doing it; after all, they even smile and delight at the thought.

123 Taylor, “A Discourse of the Nature,” 86. 124 In Lee’s Sophonisba, or Hannibal’s Overthrow (1675), Scipio, like Clytus from The Rival Queens, positions women as dangerous to male friendship and glory: “Yet, for a Woman, and a false one too, / Your Fame, your Faith and Friendship you forego” (2.1.120).

50 While male friendship empowers male bodies, women’s bodies are described as weak and dangerous. Clytus’s moralizing speech takes this sexist language even further, implying that strong men ignore women precisely because they can be so dangerous.

When he brags that “Clytus ne’re bow’d his body to such shame,” he is insinuating that women’s bodies are gross and disruptive and have an almost contaminating effect. He makes this point again when Hephestion questions why men fall in love at all, to which

Clytus offers “Because unmann’d,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as

“deprived of courage; made weak or timid.”125 The OED definition is illuminating given

Clytus’s previous declaration that women, and their bodies, somehow have a direct physical ability to infect and soil, and here it makes their bodies weak or timid. This description of women’s bodies as weak and dangerous stands in contrast to how often male friendship is performed through male bodies. Lee continues to develop the rift between public and private by using Hephestion and Lysimachus’s fight to move into the play’s primary plot: Alexander’s indecisiveness between Statira and Roxana. Clytus offers a simplistic before and after, where Alexander was brave and now is weak:

Not so he lov’d when he at Issus fought; And join’d in mighty Duel great Darius, Whom from his Chariot flaming all with Gems He hurl’d to Earth and crush’d th’ imprerial Crown, . . .

‘Twas not the shaft of Love that did the feat, Cupid had nothing there to do, but now Two Wives he takes, two Rival Queens disturb The Court; and while each hand do’s beauty hold Where is there room for glory?126

125 OED Online, s.v. “unmanned, adj.2,” accessed August 12, 2016, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/215339?rskey=mzXvMV&result=2&isAdvanced=false. 126 Lee, The Rival Queens, 1.1.59–68.

51

When Alexander did not have heterosexual love in his life, he was strong, decisive, and manly, in comparison to how he is now, distracted and weak. Lee once again utilizes the language of contamination and illness to construct the queens’ disruption of court, suggesting that it was a pure, masculine space that they have infiltrated and made feminine. Now that women have disturbed the court, where is the room for male glory?

While the answer to that question will come from the central plot between Alexander,

Roxana, and Statira, the opening duel between Hephestion and Lysimachus establishes women as the enemies of male bonds and threatening forces to court and politics.

The play’s treatment of women is complicated because although Statira is expected to be a sympathetic character and Roxana the villain, the play’s focus on male- male love still blames them both for disrupting male friendship and weakening

Alexander. In an important reading of the gender dynamics of the play, Felicity

Nussbaum argues against scholars who read Statira and Roxana’s influence in the play as secondary to the male characters. With attention to performance history, Nussbaum illustrates how “real women” with immense cultural influence performed the two roles, transforming the stage into a complicated gendered space.127 With a similar focus on performance, Jean Marsden suggests that Elizabeth Barry as Roxana was able to use female distress to bring audiences to tears.128 Both these readings are important in thinking about how performance and celebrity helped make Lee’s tragedy one of the most revived plays of the period, but while I agree with Nussbaum and Marsden’s

127 Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 68. 128 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 84–85.

52 analysis, I think Lee’s play does still privilege the male characters. In performing the repertoire of male friendship, the play attempts to show how men must pledge allegiance to each other. Statira spends much of her time devastated that Alexander has reassumed his affair with Roxanna, performing her sadness over and over again. She is placed as the target of audience sympathy and the Queen we are expected to admire; she passively accepts her victimization, and as Alexander’s describes, is “sweet,” “melting,” “mild,”

“calm” and “the child of love,” and “born of smiles.”129

Roxana is the complete opposite to Statira’s positive and admirable qualities.

Alexander describes her as being powerful, forceful, and dangerously seductive: “My

Reason gone, seduc’d me to her Bed / . . . . Though that Enchantress held me by the Arm,

/ and wept, and gaz’d with all the force of love.”130 In Alexander’s view of the situation, he was powerless before this woman with dangerously overt sexual powers. Roxana, of course, owns her villain status by the end of the play by murdering Statira, while Statira dies an innocent and passive victim. But in the same way that Clytus was the mouthpiece of the play’s conservative moral message, he sums up once again how the women are to be blamed for Alexander’s struggles: “This comes of Love, and Women, ‘tis all madness.”131 Between the two, Statira is the sympathetic Queen, but the men in the play view both women as enemies to political stability and male friendship.

Clytus, another example for male friendship and an already established agent for conservative patriarchy, delivers the clearest articulation of the play’s belief in male

129 Lee, The Rival Queens, 1.350–54. 130 Lee, The Rival Queens, 1.336–42. 131 Lee, The Rival Queens, 1.405.

53 space and bonds: masculine culture comes before all else. In comparing Alexander to his father Philip, Clytus draws on a masculine past that no longer exists, using Alexander’s sexual inconstancy to humiliate him and disgrace his masculine sense of honour.

Your Father Philip,—I have seen him March, And fought beneath his dreadful Banner, where The stoutest at this Table would ha’ trembl’d. Nay frown not, Sir, you cannot look me dead. When Greeks joyn’d Greeks, then was the tug of War, The labou’d Battle sweat, and Conquest bled. Why shou’d I fear to speak a truth more noble, Then e’re your Father Jupiter Ammon told you; Philip fought men, but Alexander women.132

When Clytus builds up Alexander’s father Philip as the ideal man and soldier, who fought bravely and ruled with temperance and power, he draws on the past in an attempt to stabilize a court in crisis. The comparison is not subtle in chiding Alexander for not being like his father. If Alexander were more like his father, who held everyone’s respect, the affairs of the court would not be such a mess. Lee saves the last line as the most powerful, with Clytus’ devastating insult that while Philip fought men, Alexander fights women, referencing his ongoing indecisiveness between Queen Statira and Roxana: “Is then my Glory come to this at last, / To vanquish Women?”133 Alexander’s defence uses typically sexist comparisons: he highlights how women are weak, and, since he is nothing like them, he must be strong and “manly.” Clytus’ harsh statement is a turning point for the play precisely because it reinforces the male-centric argument the play has made since the opening duel between Hephestion and Lysimachus. Alexander’s, and by

132 Lee, The Rival Queens, 4.1.417–25. 133 Lee, The Rival Queens, 4.1.427–28.

54 extension all other men’s, political and masculine honour is tied to male culture, and in focusing on his weakness, Clytus argues that women disrupt male culture. Women cause social turmoil and men must resist in order to maintain political and social stability and strength.

Clytus’s brashness in degrading Alexander’s “manly glory” for ignoring his state duties makes clear how Lee intertwines politics and masculinity, with the resulting violence between Alexander and Clytus showcasing the importance of male solidarity.

Enraged that his longtime companion and advisor would question his masculine qualities,

Alexander grabs a spear and stabs Clytus. Alexander’s guilt kicks in, however, and he fears the long-term repercussions for his ability to bond and enjoy the company of other men. Bray’s analysis of the performance of friendship helps us understand why immediately after killing his loyal friend, Alexander would be most concerned about how no one will eat or drink with him anymore:

The poor, the honest Clytus thou has slain! Are these the laws of Hospitality? Thy Friends will shun thee now, and stand at distance, Nor dare to speak their minds, nor eat with thee, Nor drink, lest by thy madness they dye too.134

Alexander spends the first part of his speech lamenting the loss of his advisor and the admirable qualities Clytus demonstrated during his life, but in the second part, he is consumed by the public repercussions of his actions.135 In Bray’s analysis of the

134 Lee, The Rival Queens, 4.1.515–20. 135 Richard Brathwaite, in The English Gentleman, uses Alexander’s behaviour to reinforce how an English gentlemen should respect his patriarchal network: “We reade of two distinct conditions in Philip and Alexander, when they were in drinke; for the one shewed his rage and furie towards his foes, the other to

55 performance of friendship, the dining table was a fundamental element in displaying, creating, and fostering close kinships in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He suggests that the principal difference between modern friendship and that of the seventeenth century was that “friendship was dangerous, and it was so because friendship signified in a public sphere,” an argument that Lee and other playwrights certainly follow.136 Friendship was “dangerous” because it was the foundation of social and political relationships, and men used friendship to negotiate their standing in patriarchal society. As a result, friendship existed within a system of signs that were publicly performed and were meaningful for those participating. One “sign” of friendship was eating together, as it is the “table that perhaps most of all transformed the stranger into the friend.”137 The commonality of eating together was a major element, but so too was hospitality and the act of sharing: “those at the high table ate first, and so on down the social chain; but the dish was the same, and your restraint was the gift that passed on.”138

Part of the dynamics of the dining table is the element of restraint in caring for and respecting those around enough to leave them enough food to enjoy. The act of eating and sharing a table was a fundamental aspect of male bonding that was publicly known and cultivated in the seventeenth-century system of friendship.

Alexander realizes that by breaking the male code of honour and hospitality, he risks alienating himself within the network of male bonds his society depends on to

his friends: the one whereof participates of more true generous spirit than the other. For as nothing can be imagined more ignoble, than to triumph over our friend, so nothing relish of more resolution, than to shew our spirit (so it be upon equall termes, and without braving) upon our Enemie.” Brathwaite, The English Gentleman, 54. 136 Bray, The Friend, 59. 137 Bray, The Friend, 150. 138 Bray, The Friend, 152.

56 function. He voices his fears of being socially ostracized, pinpointing the dining table as a space where he will no longer be welcome: “Thy Friends will shun thee now, and stand at distance, / Nor dare to speak their minds, nor eat with thee, / Nor drink.”139 Alexander appears devastated by his actions, as he lies down next to Clytus and cries, and yet, it is most telling that his immediate concern is more about being shunned from the network of male bonding. The fact that he offers this fear in the aftermath of his rash actions demonstrates its centrality in the patriarchal framework of the play and the power structure of male friendship.140 Not only does Lee configure women as dangerous elements that contaminate male space, but he also depicts one of the elements that allow that space to function. Alexander’s fear that he has lost his place in the system of male friendship illustrates how power and honour were manifested and maintained through male bonding and male spaces.

The play’s tragic climax and denouement, which includes the deaths of Clytus,

Statira, and eventually, Alexander, reinforces the sexist message the play develops from the opening argument between Hephestion and Lysiamachus: Statira and Roxana have distracted Alexander, leaving him vulnerable to the rebels who poison him. Alexander

139 Lee, The Rival Queens, 4.1.517–20. 140 Thomas Otway’s Aliciades also depicts the network of friendship through a dining scene. Tissaphernes, hoping to poison Alcibades, expects the King to show his friendship for Alcibades by letting him drink first. This backfires, however, and the King asks Tissaphernes to drink first. Although the presence of poison makes this scene more dangerous than most dining situations, the King’s choice to share the wine exemplifies Bray’s analysis. The King highlights the kindness and honour that is bestowed on a friend while sharing food: “To shew how strict a Reverence I have / For ev’ry thing that Loyal is, and brave, / This signal Honour only due to me, / Thus Tissaphernes I confer on thee. . . . / It is the offering of a grateful heart: / Come drink to such a depth as may express / Thy wishes for their Joy, and Sparta’s happiness” (2.1.243–46, 249–51).

57 has also broken the bond of male friendship by killing Clytus.141 The male power system is in shambles, and, as Canfield explains, Alexander’s “broken vows are the emblems for the breakdown of the allegiance that is expected to solidify the state, and Roxana turns out to be the “Fury” that represents retribution.”142 All three of the play’s major outcomes are the result of supposedly dangerous women: if Alexander had not been distracted, if he had recognized that the male bonds of his court were more important than either of his women, he and his kingdom might still be intact. Alexander foreshadowed this early in the play: “I fear betwixt Statira’s cruel Love, / and fond Roxana’s Arts, your King will fall.”143

Lee’s The Rival Queens reveals that the greatest form of risk to the political structure is the disruption of male space and bonds and the potential inclusion of women in the political sphere. In his summation of the play’s moral, Canfield argues that

“Alexander’s adultery is a trope for the inherent fragility of genealogy as a system for transmission of power, subject as it is to the centrifugal forces of desire and liable to result in aristocracy’s failures to perpetuate itself, of heroes to perpetuate states.”144 If women showcase this fragility, then the spectacle of male friendship is one technique of stability. Aristocratic power could perpetuate itself through embodiment and male supremacy, and the dangers of women risk destabilizing a patriarchal form of

141 J. Douglas Canfield ties Alexander’s indecisiveness to the law of succession and state stability by asking, “how can the state retain legitimacy when sexual inconstancy invites discontinuity?” Canfield, Heroes and States, 64. 142 Canfield, Heroes and States, 66. 143 Lee, The Rival Queens, 1.410–11. 144 Canfield, Heroes and States, 66.

58 governance. Lee is also not alone in depicting these dangers, as John Dryden in All for

Love offers the same moral warning.

The Stability of Male Bonds in All for Love; or, The World Well Lost (1677)

The incompatibility of women and male friendship is similarly developed in John

Dryden’s All for Love; or, The World Well Lost (1677). While the central love story between Antony and Cleopatra remains intact from previous incarnations of the story,

Dryden uses Antony’s body as the contested central object in the physical and mental tug of war between Antony’s male friends and Cleopatra, the seductress. In a similar fashion to The Rival Queens, All for Love vilifies women for their intrusive role in disrupting male friendship and suggests that the state and the characters would have been better off relying on male bonds rather than female love. In order to combat the supposedly dangerous influence of women, the male characters rely on a repertoire of male friendship that reasserts aristocratic male power.

Recent criticism on All For Love has often tied the gender dynamics of the play to the politics of the late 1670s, framing Antony and Cleopatra’s relationship as expressing

Dryden’s political leanings. Tanya Caldwell, for example, suggests that the homoerotic language, or what she calls “the sexuality of politics,” attempts to stabilize male aristocratic bonds against the perceived disintegration of the monarchy.145 George

Haggerty similarly surmises that Dryden must have felt that his age could accept erotic

145 Tanya Caldwell, “‘Sacred Bonds of Amity’: Dryden and Male Friendship,” University of Toronto Quarterly 80, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 24–48.

59 male friendship as long as it appeared in the service of heroic goals.146 For Caldwell and

Haggerty, the homosociality of the text is the locus of the play’s political ideology. In contrast, Anne A. Huse insists that Dryden’s sympathies remain not necessarily with

Antony and his men, but with Antony and Cleopatra, suggesting an openness to international, rather than domestic, politics and leaders.147 Like Huse, Maria Jose Mora and Michael Yots focus on Cleopatra, using performance history to demonstrate that actresses and their celebrity transformed Cleopatra into a sympathetic character.148 While

I agree with these scholars that Cleopatra may have been depicted sympathetically, my argument builds on the works of Caldwell and Haggerty analyzing the relationship between homoeroticism and patriarchal politics. Unlike these scholars, I concentrate on embodiment; I believe that one way Dryden reinforces aristocratic privilege is through the performance of a gestural repertoire of male friendship.

When All for Love debuted in December 1677, the King’s Company used many of the actors from The Rival Queens, and significantly, used them in similar roles. Charles

Hart played Antony, Mohun played Ventidus, and Thomas Clarke played Dollabella.149

Using these actors again makes sense given that the company knew their strengths. But the casting so directly parallels Lee’s play that it is difficult not to compare the two and speculate how this casting would have impacted its reception. Millhous and Hume question this as well, commenting that Clarke’s first appearance as Hephestion provides

146 Haggerty, Men in Love, 29. 147 Huse, “Cleopatra, Queen of the Seine,” 23–25. 148 Maria Jose Mora, “Type Casting in the Restoration Theatre: Dryden’s All for Love, 1677–1704,” Atlantis 27, no. 2 (December 2005): 75–86; Michael Yots, “Dryden’s All for Love on the Restoration Stage,” Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research 16, no. 1 (May 1977), 1–4. 149 Avery, The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part 1, 265.

60 “an interesting background” for his role as Dollabella.150 We can consider The Rival

Queens and All for Love as “linked plays,” a term Holland uses to describe plays where casting the same actors over and over again was a way of selling tickets.151 Holland takes this further and considers the effects of “linked plays” on audiences: “The casting of the linked plays shows how the use of normative casting establishes patterns that the audiences used as patterns of expectations, anticipations of form dependent on the relation of actor, genre and part.”152 Based on The Rival Queens, audiences may have walked into All for Love anticipating Hart to be commanding and effeminate, Mohun to be forceful and traditional, and Clarke to be beautiful and soft. The homoeroticism of The

Rival Queens and the cast of All for Love could already have framed audiences’ expectations of the male relationships before they even saw them.

The play begins with Ventidius, Antony’s former general, coming to Egypt to try to win back his mentor. What he finds is not the strong decisive man he remembers, but a weak and confused shadow of his former friend. Over the course of the play, Ventidius attempts to persuade Antony to leave Cleopatra by using Dollabella, Antony’s favourite, and by parading Antony’s wife Octavia and his two children in front of him. These stunts almost work, and on both occasions, Antony is convinced to return home and leave

Cleopatra. But Antony cannot give up Cleopatra and bring himself to leave her. In the end, Antony falls on his sword believing Cleopatra has died, Octavia leaves, Ventidius dies in an attempt to save his friend, and Cleopatra poisons herself having lost Antony.

150 Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, Producible Interpretation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 135. 151 Holland, Ornament of Action, 69. 152 Ibid.

61 While Dryden romanticizes Antony and Cleopatra’s love, the play encourages readers to view Roman male characters as honourable and Cleopatra’s Egyptian entourage as the enemies. Ventidius, Dollabella, and the male social structure they embody are respectable and necessary, while Cleopatra is configured as the dangerous force that causes ruin for the men in the play.153

Ventidius’s first attempt to convince Antony to come back to Rome establishes the play’s social and masculine stakes, with Cleopatra’s influence blamed for Antony’s current effeminate status. Ventidius immediately warns Alexas that he can tell Cleopatra that “Ventidius is arrived to end her charms. / Let your Egyptian timbrels play alone, /

Nor mix effeminate sounds with Roman Trumpets.”154 This is a thesis statement of sorts, with Ventidius vowing to break Cleopatra’s influence. More important, however, is the implication that Egyptian music is effeminate, and to such a degree that Ventidius does not want it to mix with the strong masculine trumpets of Rome. Right from the beginning, readers and audiences recognize that not only will the play present a fight for

Antony’s heart and allegiance, but also that the tug of war will come with clearly gendered implications: Rome is strong and masculine, Egypt is corrupting and effeminate. These insinuations continue once Ventidius finds Antony, with the two regularly invoking the supposed effects of women on their masculine personas. They use the past tense in describing Antony’s greatness, making the clear association that he was

153 Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra configures Cleopatra in a similarly enticing way, with Antony expressing the “strong Egyptian fetters” he must break. He also worries he will lose himself in dotage. However, he does not appear as physically harmed by Cleopatra’s influence as the Antony in All For Love. In Dryden’s play, Antony is so weakened and distressed he can barely walk. William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1.2.113–14. 154 John Dryden, All for Love: or, The World Well Lost, in The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 13, ed. Alan Roper and Vinton A. Dearing (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 1–111. 1.1.194–95.

62 once a man, but is now more feminine than before: “I have been man,” Antony accepts, with Ventidius jumping in, “yes, and a brave one, but—.” Antony, understanding the implication, remarks, “I know thy meaning. / But I have lost my reason, have disgraced / the name of soldier with inglorious ease.”155 As I illustrated in the case of The Rival

Queens, the degradation of women is not uncommon in the sexist culture of the

Restoration, but it is significant how it is used to insult and subsequently build men back up. Describing Antony as effeminate or as “woman’s toy” is the motivational force for him to reconsider his position among the men and women in the play.156

After vocalizing the play’s thesis and demonizing the feminizing effect women have on masculine men, Antony physically reacts to the positive energy and influence of his male friend. Antony makes his stage appearance in a “disturbed motion,” unable to walk and eventually, according to the stage directions, throwing himself on the ground.

While lying down, he offers that he is a “shadow of an emperor” and that he must “soothe my melancholy till I swell / And burst myself with sighing.”157 This is not a man enlivened by his love for Cleopatra, but one who suffers because of it. It is no coincidence that throughout the scene, Ventidius’s love and attention metaphorically and physically lift him up. As we have seen, male love is an embodied experience:

Oh, thou hast fir’d me; my Soul’s up in Arms And Mans each part about me: once again, That noble eagerness of fight has seiz’d me: That eagerness with which I darted upward To Cassius’s camp. In vain the steepy Hill Oppos’d my way; in vain a War of Speares

155 Dryden, All for Love, 1.1.292–96. 156 Dryden, All for Love, 1.1.177. 157 Dryden, All for Love, 1.1.204, 215–16.

63 Sung round my head; and planted all my shield: I won the Trenches, while my foremost Men Lag’d on the Plain below.158

Ventidius’s love and affection motivate Antony again and physically and metaphorically empower him. Dryden even uses the play on the word “man” to further reinforce the masculine success Ventidius has had; Ventidius’s soul “mans” each part of him again, taking control like a crew mans its battleship, but also highlighting how in finding kinship with his male friend again, he feels more like a man.159

Cleopatra is constructed as an enemy not only because of her corrupting influence on Antony’s masculine Roman reputation, but also because of her dangerous sexuality.

This fear of female sexuality parallels public suspicion of Charles II’s mistresses:

Cleopatra is identifiable as a foreign mistress whose sexuality threatens the established structure.160 As Ventidius says, her beauty and linguistic skills are unmatched in the way she can control men:

She’s dangerous; her eyes have powe’r beyond Thessalian charms To draw the moon from heav’n; for eloquence, The sea-green sirens taught her voice their flatt’ry.161

158 Dryden, All for Love, 1.1.438–46. 159 “Man:” To make manly or courageous; to brace up; to fortify the spirits or strengthen the courage of.” OED Online, s.v. “man, v,” accessed June 18, 2018, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/113203. 160 Huse “Cleopatra, Queen of the Seine,” 24, contends “Dryden invokes the French mistress’s cultural identity to question the assumption that, in flirting with an outside influence rather than remaining wed to native alliances alone, a national leader has necessarily chosen foreign intrigue over domestic duty.” 161 Dryden, All for Love, 4.1.233–35.

64 Ventidius’s invocation of Thessaly’s witchcraft and sorcery and the life-threatening influence of the sirens make visible the misogynistic way Cleopatra’s sexuality is thought of, and described, as dangerous to men. Although both Antony and Dollabella could be blamed for being easily distracted and sexually available themselves, Cleopatra receives the blame.162 Her sexuality is used again to degrade her when Ventidius brings Octavia,

Antony’s wife, to tempt him back to Rome. Jean Marsden’s contention that female sexuality was destructive to rules of inheritance and state unity is fully on show with this duel between Octavia and Cleopatra, in which Dryden has Octavia bring Antony’s children to the encounter, depending on the full heterosexual image of the family being torn apart by this apparently wanton woman.163

Look on these: Are they not yours? Or stand they thus neglected As they are mine? Go to him, children, go; Kneel to him, take him by the hand, speak to him, For you may speak, and he may own you, too, Without blush, and so he cannot all His children. . . . Go, I say, and pull him to me, And pull him to yourselves from that bad woman.164

Octavia initially places the blame on Antony, attempting to get him to recognize his responsibility for his children, but soon abandons that and instructs her children to “pull him to me” and “pull him to yourselves,” indirectly referring to Cleopatra as the force that holds him back. This tableau displays the traditional family unit at the core of

162 Ventidius could be read as a suspicious figure in the text, attempting to take Antony away from his love Cleopatra. However, the play consistently shows how Antony suffers when paired with Cleopatra: he is indecisive, his body motions are disturbed, and his masculinity is in question. Ventidius, in comparison, appears to empower Antony and he is at his most focused when supported by his male friend. 163 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 6. 164 Dryden, All for Love, 3.1.548–57.

65 patriarchal modes of inheritance, which, according to Dryden, Cleopatra has ruined.

Octavia spells out to audiences and readers that Antony is the object that is being controlled by that “bad woman,” and Cleopatra must be stopped.165

The sexist treatment applied to Cleopatra demonstrates how homo-heroic love depends on recognizing that women come second to patriarchal politics. In addition to the image of the heterosexual nuclear family that is paraded in front of Antony and audiences, Cleopatra is criticized for what men perceive to be her sexual availability.166

In this play, men devalue Cleopatra’s influence and character by attacking her sexuality and the supposed influence she has on Antony. The confrontational scene that is now famous in Restoration drama between Cleopatra and Octavia depends on the binary of what Elizabeth Howe categorizes as the angel and the she-devil: “one would be chaste and gentle, the other wild and passionate.”167 Octavia assumes the role of the angel, with her desire to have her husband back, while Cleopatra is the wild and passionate she- devil.168 But that scene is not alone in how Cleopatra’s sexuality is used against her, even though the men should be held equally culpable. Part of Ventidius’s plan in wrestling

Antony away from Cleopatra depends on poisoning his friend’s view of the Egyptian beauty. He heavily implies that she is unfaithful to him and that Dollabella is competing for her attention: “Then he obeyed your order. I suppose / You bid him do it with all

165 Ibid. 166 Cleopatra is essentially “slut shamed,” a modern term used by feminists to highlight how society attacks women based on perceived or real sexual activities. 167 Howe, The First English Actresses, 147. 168 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 92, analyzing Congreve’s The Mourning Bride, argues that the two heroines “become the exemplars of proper feminine virtue and of an exotic dangerous zeal,” which was the foundation of the “duel heroine model” where one is passionate and the other passive.

66 gentleness, / All kindness, and all-love.”169 He follows up that scandalous insinuation with the even clearer form of shaming, correcting Antony for calling her his Cleopatra:

“Your Cleopatra; / Dollabella’s Cleopatra; / Every man’s Cleopatra.”170 In saying that

Cleopatra is sexually available, Ventidius reinforces the label of sexual availability already applied to her by parading the more sexually acceptable Octavia and her family in front of audiences and readers.

Octavia is not a threat to the male bonds in the same way as Cleopatra because she works alongside Dollabella and Ventidius in convincing Antony to return home. She does not compete with them for his love. This performative showcase negatively affects

Antony’s masculine identity as he is supposed to hold ownership over Cleopatra and her sexuality, and he is once again “unmanned” by her power and sexual desire. This sexist classification feeds into the overall representation of masculinity and friendship, wherein homo-heroic love depends on masculine friends understanding that women are secondary to male bonding. Slandering Cleopatra’s honour is a necessary step in promoting male love, which George Haggerty proposes is part of Dryden’s plan: “Dryden seems to be saying here that the female must be commodified as an object to exchange and not mistaken as a competing subject.”171 Cleopatra’s sexuality is so strong that the men in the play must diminish it in any way possible and battle it by promoting their male love above everything else.

169 Dryden, All for Love, 4.1.266–68. 170 Dryden, All for Love, 4.1.295–97. 171 Haggerty, Men in Love, 31.

67 In a similar fashion to Lee’s Rival Queens, male love in Dryden’s play is elevated to such a degree that proclamations of love between men use the imagery and language of heterosexual marriage to prove its significance. Once again, language and proclamations of love between men are the primary means by which the patriarchal power of male friendship is performed and made visible. In J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, one of the clearest examples of how language is performative is the declaration of “I do” during the marriage ceremony.172 Dryden capitalizes on the publicness and performative nature of a marriage-style vow by having Ventidius ask, “May I believe you love me? Speak again” to which Antony responds, “indeed I do. Speak this, and this, and this,” during which on each “speak this,” they hug.173 The conflation of the utterance “speak” and the physical hug demonstrates how performative the utterances are. They do not just declare love to each other as private friends but understand that their words and actions contribute to the larger system of male kinship, with the hug outwardly performing the connection to those around them. This type of language is not limited to this single set of friends and is just as passionate when Antony is reunited with his favourite, Dollabella:

He loved me too: I was his soul; he loved not but in me. We were so closed within each other’s breasts, The rivets were not found that joined us first That does not reach us yet; we were so mixed, As meeting streams, both to ourselves were lost;

172 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 94. See note 23 in the introduction of this dissertation for discussion of how Austin’s work applies to theatre and performance. 173 Dryden, All for Love, 1.1.416–18. The repeated embrace is a performative physical act that reinforces Antony’s supposed attachment to Ventidius. Lee, in The Massacre of Paris, uses hand shaking to a similar effect: “O, my brave Friends? My dear la Rochfaucalt, / Your hand; and yours, my rough Colombier; / My gallant Piles; and thine, my plain Langoiran” (2.1.240–42).

68 We were one mass; we could not give or take But from the same, for he was I, I he.174

Antony’s description of his friendship with Dollabella depends almost entirely on their unity, and as in The Rival Queens, draws on pre-Restoration ideas that true friendship was the experience of physical and emotional harmony.175 Antony invokes images of wholeness—they are one person, joined so closely at the heart that they cannot find the edges or the rivets that hold them together, or like streams of water, once mixed, indistinguishable from each other. 176 The final line of Antony’s speech, “For he was I, I he,” constructs the two as soulmates destined to be together. Expressing a similar sentiment, Montaigne said, “If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.”177 The similarities in Dryden and Montaigne’s wording suggest that these descriptions of unity were a shared language within male friendship. In All for Love, the male friendship is not complementary, but singular; Antony cannot imagine their relationship outside the framework of a companionship. Antony even admits that separately they are lost, but together they are “one mass.” The strong language further suggests a sexual unity. In fact,

Antony references marital sex a few lines later when he proclaims:

Are thou returned at last, my better half? Come, give me all myself. Let me not live,

174 Dryden, All for Love, 3.1.91–98. 175 Antony and Dollabella’s relationship in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is not homoerotic. They do not proclaim their love, use marriage type language, or embrace or touch. The inclusion of homoerotic desire in Dryden’s All for Love suggests homo-heroic love is culturally and historically specific to the Restoration period. 176 Montaigne, “On Friendship,” 138. 177 Montaigne calls friendship “one soul in bodies, according to Aristotle’s very apt definition” (“On Friendship,” 141).

69 If the bridegroom, longing for his night, Was ever half so fond.178

When he calls to Dollabella to “give me all myself,” he sees their hug and reunion as having a piece of him back. Marriage is used again in calling to Dollabella as his “better half, “ which the OED lists as a husband, wife, or lover, alongside a dear friend more generally.179 Not only that, but he parallels his excitement at having been united with that of a groom, waiting for “his night” to take his bride to the marital bed and consummate their new marriage. Given the marital language already used, this statement should not be read only as a comparison used to define his excitement; the reoccurring arc of friendship as marriage suggests that this comparison of being like a groom about to sexually consummate his marriage is intended to invoke similar feelings about his male friend.

The homoerotic language of the play is affirming to society, not dangerous to it.

The language between the two men is homoerotic and suggestive, with Ventidius not only declaring his love openly, but also accepting that it might be a sin to say more.

VENTIDIUS. Sir, I love you, and therefore will not leave you

ANTONY. Will not leave me? Where have you learnt the answer? Who am I?

VENTIDIUS. My Emperor; the man I love next heaven: If I said more, I think ‘twere scarce a sin; Y’are all that’s good, and god-like180

178 Dryden, All for Love, 3.1.119–22. 179 OED Online, s.v. “better half, n,” accessed August 12, 2016, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/398403?redirectedFrom=better+half. 180 Dryden, All for Love, 1.2.249–55.

70 The open declaration of “Sir, I love you,” is fairly common for the genre, but Ventidius’s even more passionate follow-up of “the man I love next heaven,” hierarchizes their love and makes it something heavenly and untouchable. Antony, who is already singled out as the target of Ventidius’s attention, is praised for being just as important as heaven and the lord. This statement certainly could be seen as blasphemous to audience goers.181 Perhaps that is why Ventidius acknowledges it would be sinful to say more. His speech recognizes and reinforces that while male friendships continue to use love and passion as their primary currency, there is a homophobic limit that dictates a level of social acceptability. It is a signal moment that proves Bray’s observation that society had a difficult time distinguishing the line between the forms of male love they admired and those they feared.182 While the imaginary line of homoerotic acceptability is referenced, it appears more as a wink of suggestibility than as a warning—a quick “let’s get this out of the way” moment from Dryden, as the play continues to focus on passionate male love.

In fact, if this tame moment is meant to raise suspicion in audiences of same-sex love, then what would they have thought of the scene with Dollabella later in the play? I suggest that this moment can be read instead to indicate that Dryden understood the danger of borrowing passionate and sexual language to enliven male relationships. This signal moment speaks to audience members who might themselves question the acceptability of such romantic language and reassures them that when used within male

181 William Prynne, in his Histrio-Mastix: The Player’s Scourge (London: M. Sparke, 1633), thought that acting on stage was already an effeminate act that threw suspicion on actors: “Yea, men are unmanned on the stage; all the honour and vigour of their sex is effeminate with the shame, the dishonesty of an unsinued body.” Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth Century Players and Sexual Ideology (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992) also demonstrates that actors were subject to concerns about effeminacy and homosexuality (25). 182 Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship,” 14, states that Elizabethans had trouble with this too: “We see in them rather the unwelcome difficulty the Elizabethans had in drawing a dividing line between those gestures of closeness among men that they desired so much and those they feared.”

71 relationships, it is completely acceptable.183 The erotic love in the play is treated as satisfactory and is used in the “service of heroic cultural goals”: reinforcing and protecting male forms of power. 184

The final scene of All for Love follows the pattern Lee used in The Rival Queens, with the characters meeting their tragic end in a tableau with clear moral implications.

After failing to convince Antony to leave Cleopatra and rejoin the masculine world of politics and male bonding, Ventidius kills himself. Antony dies too, but Dryden makes sure to underscore his failure as a man of power and conviction by having him fall on his sword and miss:

I’ve missed my heart. Oh unperforming hand! Thou never couldst have erred in a worse time. My fortune jades me to the last, and death, like a great man, takes state, and makes me wait for my admittance.185

The symbolic sword suggests a form of penetration and immediately situates Antony in an effeminate position, but combined with Antony’s failure to kill himself, Dryden does not leave his main male character in a particularly masculine or powerful place. In a metaphor for the failure of male friendship to overcome corrupting female influence,

Antony fails to be penetrated. In personifying death as a “great man” making him wait his turn, Antony excludes himself from the label, diminishing his reputation as a weak person who must wait for a greater man. Invoking Antony’s disturbed physicality from

183 This “wink” as I have described it also appears in George Etherege’s comedy The Man of Mode (1676) when the Orange Woman expresses disgust at Medley and Dorimant’s hugging and kissing. Etherege, The Man of Mode, ed. John Barnard (London: A & C Black, 2007), 1.1.61–63. Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d also has this moment, outlined on page chapter 2 of this dissertation. 184 Haggerty, Men in Love, 29. 185 Dryden, All for Love, 5.1.347–51.

72 the beginning of the play, Dryden stresses how little development Antony has had. He is still “a shadow of a man” and still suffers from Cleopatra’s love. The only moments in the play when he regains the composure for which the other characters have admired are when his love for Ventidius and Dollabella lifts him up. Whereas the play ends in a gruesome and glamorous tableau of Antony and Cleopatra dead, together for the ages, the last line of the play reads more as a mockery of Antony than an elegy: “No lovers lived so great, or died so well.”186 After floundering indecisively for the entire plot, abandoning his military duties, betraying his friends and wife, and dying of a botched suicide attempt, did Antony really live and love so well?

In answering that question, it strikes me that Cleopatra’s love is not enough to overcome his failures, and what Dryden leaves for us to interpret is how Antony could have regained the honour he supposedly had before falling in love. In the face of this disruptive foreign mistress, the bonds of male love would have saved him. He participates in the performance of friendship and physically uses the signs that work as currency in patriarchal networks (hugs and kisses), but he crucially fails to fully degrade and commodify Cleopatra as required. Her influence was too strong for his homosocial relationships to survive, and the ending of the play focuses on his failures. Although one of Dryden’s creative goals may have been to secure the reputation of the monarchy, All for Love, like The Rival Queens before it, reads both as a warning and a solution. The warning is that challenges to Charles II’s legitimacy, suspicion about his mistresses, perceived or real threats of Popish Plots, and a parliamentary move to exclude James II could mark a return to civil war era politics. The solution is to draw on and enshrine the

186 Dryden, All for Love, 5.1.517.

73 traditions of male power—monarchy, divine right, and male authority in the unstable political climate—and showcase how stabilizing those can be.

74 Chapter 2.

Queerly Conservative: Male Love and Patriarchal Power in Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (1682)

This dissertation was born out of my desire to do a queer reading of Thomas

Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (1682). I was struck by how Jaffeir and Pierre act like lovers: they openly declare their dedication, they embrace and touch, and they demonstrate ease and comfort in sharing in each other’s emotional distress. In an especially passionate moment, Jaffeir accepts that he finds it easier to love his best friend than his wife, offering: “Oh Pierre, were thou but she, / how I could pull thee down in my heart” and

“gaze on thee till my Eye-strings cract with Love”187 I naively thought this play was surely an early historical example of queer affection and desire broadcast in the London public sphere. Furthermore, I was excited by the possibility that this performance of male love could alter our notion of masculinity and sexuality of the period. As my research progressed, I realized the play might not be the queer historical text I had hoped: first, as demonstrated in chapter 1, male friendship of the period was viewed in erotic terms; second, the play is misogynistic towards Jaffeir’s wife, Belvidera; and third, the harmful effects of the plot’s homosociality makes it difficult for modern audiences to align themselves fully with Pierre and Jaffeir. As the reader will see in this chapter, rather than forcing me to abandon my original view of the play, these factors have influenced my argument productively. While the same-sex relationship in Thomas Otway’s Venice

Preserv’d is not a positive historical example of queer affection or a progressive display

187 Thomas Otway, “Venice Preserv’d, or A Plot Discover’d,” in The Works of Thomas Otway: Plays, Poems, and Love-Letters, ed. J. C. Ghosh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 2.1.424–26.

75 of sexual freedom, it is still a performance of male love and sexual desire. The play offers a model of how male sexual desire could exist within the repertoire of male friendship.

This same-sex affection requires the subjugation of Belvidera, however, suggesting that their love does not disrupt the period’s notions of masculinity or sexuality, but contributes to existing forms of patriarchal power and control.

To make this argument, I draw on the analysis from chapter 1 that male friendship of the period was a public performance that relied on a system of known cultural markers.

The performances that make up this system are a repertoire of male friendship gestures that characters draw on to promote male supremacy. In Venice Preserv’d, Jaffeir and

Pierre also invoke this repertoire to heighten their bond and prove their solidarity. But while scholars have read the two men’s relationship as heterosexual and homosocial, this chapter will extend our understanding of the repertoire of male friendship to include same-sex desire. My approach follows Jonathan Goldberg’s observation, in his book

Sodometries, that acts of sodomy could have taken place disguised as more socially appropriate relationships, such as patronage or friendship.188

More broadly, this chapter questions what forms of same-sex desire were broadcast or performed, unrecognized or recognized, within the repertoire of male friendship. Part of this approach analyzes Belvidera’s victimization, as she is subjugated as a competing interest to Pierre and Jaffeir’s love, consistently the victim of the play’s homosocial framework. While Jaffeir and Pierre undeniably harm Belvidera, the plot curiously fails to hold them accountable for it, suggesting that male same-sex desire is acceptable if it upholds patriarchal ideals and power structures. By modern standards, this

188 Goldberg, Sodometries, 19.

76 is problematic, to say the least. This chapter demonstrates how the repertoire of male friendship contains performances of same-sex desire that do not disrupt patriarchal or homosocial relationships but in fact further promote them. Even though the play’s homoerotics are not exactly progressive, gender and performance theories offer a methodology in considering how performances of male friendship could have been used to promote other forms of social intimacy. In other words, while the same-sex desire in

Venice Preserv’d rests on sexist and damaging homosociality, the repertoire of male friendship could still have served audiences as a model of same-sex intimacy. Venice

Preserv’d is an ideal case study for homo-heroic love because the male relationship exhibits all the features outlined as part of my subgenre: passionate and erotic language, embodied actions, and the reinforcement of male supremacy.

Male Friendship and the Embrace

It is thought that Venice Preserv’d premiered Thursday, February 9, 1682. It was performed by the Duke’s Company, and William Smith played Pierre, Elizabeth Barry played Belvidera, and Thomas Betterton played Jaffeir.189 William Smith was an appropriate choice for Pierre, as he was handsome and dashing; it is also remarked that his specialties were noble and heroic characters.190 In the text, Pierre’s dedication to the uprising, despite the violence it requires, comes off as intense and unsympathetic.

Smith’s noble qualities and general handsomeness may have helped soften this portrayal, or as Milhous and Hume offer, it would have allowed Pierre to appear “genuine” and

189 Avery, The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part 1, 306. 190 Judith Milhous, “Smith, William (d. 1695), actor and theatre manager,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, August 28, 2018, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e- 25925.

77 “elegant.”191 Elizabeth Barry, by many accounts, was a theatrical force and likely generated audience sympathy in her role as the suffering Belvidera. As Elizabeth Howe summarizes, “Barry seems to have excelled in the tragic technique of harmonizing suitable expressions, tones of voice and emotions.”192 In many ways, it is no surprise that

Thomas Betterton originated the role of Jaffeir. Now recognized as one of the greatest

English actors, Betterton was considered at the time to be a studious craftsman who excelled in powerful and heroic leading roles. In particular, his voice was strong and articulate, and his physicality was energetic and forceful. This physicality, according to

Joseph Roach, was influenced by the belief that “the magical force of the spirits, conducted to the appropriate muscles and organs, could effect spectacular physical transformations.”193 Despite Jaffeir seeming inconsistent in the text, Betterton is described bringing a forceful and dignified quality to the role.194

Venice Preserv’d, like The Rival Queens and All For Love, is a linked play, joining those two others in cultivating audience expectation and reception by casting the same actors in similar roles. Starting in the 1680s, and after the deaths of Charles Hart and William Montfort, Thomas Betterton began performing All for Love’s Antony and

The Rival Queen’s Alexander.195 Undoubtedly, Betterton brought his own flair to these roles; however, he also took care to include elements of the original performances. David

191 Milhous and Hume, Producible Interpretation, 177. 192 Howe, The First English Actresses, 114–15. 193 Roach, The Player’s Passion, 43. 194 Milhous and Hume, Producible Interpretation, 177. 195 Judith Milhous, “Betterton, Thomas (bap. 1635, d. 1710), actor and theatre manager,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, August 2, 2018. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e- 2311.

78 Roberts, in his work on Betterton, recounts the following anecdote that was originally printed in T. Davies’s Dramatic Miscellanies (1784):

Betterton . . . acted Alexander with as much éclat as any of his other characters. This accomplished and yet modest player, when rehearsing his character was at a loss to recover a particular emphasis of Hart, which gave a force to some interesting situation of the part: he applied for information to the players who stood near him. At last one of the lowest of the company repeated the line exactly in Hart’s key. Betterton thanked him heartily and put a piece of money in his hand as a reward for so acceptable a service.196

This moment, according to Roberts, demonstrates how the theatre company members were the “custodians of their performance traditions.”197 For me, this is further proof that gestural, and in this particular case vocal, repertoires were significant in the seventeenth- century playhouse. This repertoire further links these plays and performances: not only did audiences become accustomed to seeing actors develop similar performance qualities in different plays, but it illustrates how a repertoire of male same-sex affection could have endured. Betterton may have taken the dignity and honour associated with male friendship within the originals and extended its influence. Moreover, audiences who may have seen Betterton as Anthony or Alexander could have expected Jaffeir to be similarly focused on male affection and supremacy.

Otway’s play highlights how patriarchal relationships must not be broken and how women are secondary to male concerns. The play begins with Jaffeir and Belvidera being cast out of their home by Belvidera’s father and senator, Priuli. In Priuli’s mind,

196 T. Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, III, 399 (1784). David Robert, Thomas Betterton, the Greatest Actor of the Restoration Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 141. 197 Robert, Thomas Betterton, 141.

79 Jaffeir has unfairly stolen his daughter as the two married without his consent. In retaliation, Jaffeir joins his friend Pierre and a group of conspirators who plan to overthrow what they see as the corrupt senate (which includes Priuli). The conspirators, however, are not as noble as they appear and after Jaffeir gives them his wife as a physical and symbolic token of his constancy, she is almost raped by Renault. The assault against Belvidera leads Jaffeir to betray his friends, and the remainder of the play depicts his indecision regarding who deserves his alliance the most. Is it his male friend Pierre, or his wife Belvidera? In a telling choice, Jaffeir abandons his pregnant wife to die side by side with his friend Pierre. As Belvidera cries about the loss of her husband, she is taunted by Jaffeir and Pierre’s ghosts and dragged to the underworld with them.

Jaffeir and Pierre’s first on-stage meeting illustrates how the two men publicly perform their constancy. Jaffeir has been cast out of his home and Pierre is upset that the

Senator Antonio is involved with his mistress, Aquilina. They appear on stage together before the audience sees Belvidera, and the two embrace, with Pierre calling out, “My

Friend good morrow! / How fares the honest Partner of my Heart?”198 The use of

“honest,” which the OED defines as “distinguished” and “noble,” paired alongside

Pierre’s acceptance that they are partners of love, or of the heart, demonstrates their intense and unique bond.199 In addition to the reference to them being partners of the heart, Otway further connects the two men’s friendship to the pre-Restoration ideal of word as bond, the dynamic J. Douglas Canfield uses to describe the belief in pledges and oral declarations between men. Pierre calls Jaffeir “honest” and sees their relationship as

198 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 1.120–21. 199 OED Online, s.v. “honest, adj. and adv.,” accessed May 29, 2017, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/88149?rskey=mqMf81&result=1&isAdvanced=false.

80 a counterpoint to the “pow’rfull Villainy” of the corrupt men of Venice.200 In Pierre’s rant that Venice is corrupt and honest men are taken advantage of, he reinforces his own honesty: “I pay my debts when they’r contracted; / I steal from no man; would not cut a throat / to gain admission to a great man’s purse, / or a Whore’s bed; I’d not betray my friend, / to get his place or Fortune.”201 It is telling that Pierre’s list builds to constancy to his male friend as the fundamental feature: “I’d not betray my friend.” Sarah McCollum notes how the term “honest” is gendered in the Restoration period and when used for men indicates “an honest man is one who does good for society, and a dishonest man is one who harms society.”202 McCollum’s observation supports Canfield’s belief that the pledges men make to each other are crucial in a functioning patriarchal society.203

Pierre’s appropriation of “honest” and its implications to describe their relationship illustrates his belief that male friendship is a public performative act.

Pierre and Jaffeir’s “honest friendship” is detailed in order to highlight their unique and intense bond, and the play builds from this moment in having Pierre and

Jaffeir reaffirm their constancy in ways that are both declarative and physically demonstrative. These moments of oral pledges and physical performances are crucial elements in what I call the repertoire of male friendship: an inventory of embodied

200 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 1.125. Canfield, Word as Bond, xi. 201 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 1.143–47. 202 Sarah McCollum, “The Double Standard of Honesty in Venice Preserv’d,” Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research 22, nos. 1–2 (2007), 108. 203 The way vows and oaths between men work to reinforce patriarchal relationships is seen in all plays discussed in this dissertation, but specifically in Lee’s The Rival Queens, Dryden’s All for Love. See chapter 1. Patroclus, in Otway’s Alicibiades, frames friendship as a sacred important tradition: “You, sir, that taught me friendship, taught me too / How much is to that sacred title due” (3.137–39).

81 actions that Diana Taylor argues facilitate the transmission of cultural knowledge.204 In this case, the male characters on stage animate traditions of male friendship.205 As outlined in chapter 1, Bray argues that early modern friendship was a performance, and at

“the heart of these cultural practices” the “ethics of friendship operated persuasively only in a larger frame of reference that lay outside the good of the individuals for whom the friendship was made.”206 Bray’s argument describes the larger friendship network system: it could not be private because it had to reinforce the alliances at work within this system of male power. After discussing the conspirators’ plan to overthrow the Senate,

Pierre demands that Jaffeir make an oral pledge to confirm their bond to each other:

PIERRE. Swear then!

JAFFEIR. I do, by all those glittering Stars and yondr’ great Ruling Planet of the Night! By all good Pow’rs above, and ill below! By Love and Friendship, dearer than my Life! No Pow’r or Death shall make me false to thee

PIERRE. Here we embrace, and I’ll unlock my Heart.207

204 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 20–21. 205 Bray, The Friend, 150, calls physicality between men during the early modern period “physical intimacy” from “which wider intimacy could be read.” See also chapter 1, where I read J. Douglas Canfield’s articulation that “the pledged word” established and maintained patriarchal power as including physical performances between men. Canfield, Word as Bond, xi. 206 Bray, The Friend, 6. Emphasis in original. 207 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 2.2.177–83. The “I do” also recalls J. L Austin’s main speech act example of the wedding vows. Eve Sedgwick queers this wedding example by showcasing the implicit and explicit power of heteronormativity of the act. The “I do” is “constituted in marriage through a confident appeal to state authority” and “like the most conventional definition of a play, marriage is constituted as a spectacle that denies its audience” and especially queer people, “the ability either to look away from it or equally to intervene in it.” Parker and Sedgwick, Performativity and Performance, 9–10.

82 Jaffeir’s use of “I do” is the affirmation that he loves and that is dedicated to his friend.208 The oral declaration and embrace are confirmation of male bonds, as I discussed in chapter 1 with Alexander demanding that Hephestion rise to his breast.209 It is almost as if Jaffeir is performing a type of vow, as he uses passionate declarations to prove both his love and devotion. If audiences thought that comparing the scope of his love to the “glittering stars” and the “pow’rs above, and ill below” was grandiose, Otway outdoes himself by ending Jaffeir’s proclamation by pledging on his life, “By Love and

Friendship, dearer than my Life!” They end this vow with an embrace, sealing the deal almost like a modern day groom and bride might with a kiss: “Here we embrace, and I’ll unlock my Heart.” They have made their pledge and physically performed it. In this sense, friendship is a performative act that at all times is visible to those around it and is sustained by its repeated performance.210 As Pierre and Jaffeir demonstrate through the play, friendship is an embodied experience and a significant performative act.

The physically demonstrative qualities of friendship and the word as bond extend beyond Pierre and Jaffeir’s relationship and are on full display during the conspirators’ meeting, once again demonstrating how the network of male bonding is created and

208 The confirmation between Jaffeir and Pierre is an example of what Staves notes was common for the period: “Oaths and Vows are signs that legitimate obligation is recognized.” Although modern readers may recognize the particular marital language of “I do,” that phrasing is a more modern convention. However, Staves draws a parallel between the vows men make to each other and those uttered in a wedding ceremony because they create obligations: “For a woman, to utter the marriage vows is to give the authority of a husband to a man who previously had no particular power over her.” Staves, Players’ Scepter, 191. Jaffeir and Pierre’s vows similarly work like seventeenth-century marriage vows. 209 The embrace as a unifying performative gesture is discussed in chapter 1, but is on display most significantly when Ventidius asks Antony “May I believe you love me? Speak again,” to which Antony responds by embracing him three distinct times: “indeed I do. Speak this, and this, and this.” Dryden, All for Love, 1.1.416–18. The embrace functions similarly in the passage from Lee’s The Rival Queens (1.997– 101) I quote in the introduction and throughout this dissertation. 210 Bray, The Friend, 140–56.

83 maintained. After quickly discussing their plan to overthrow the corrupt senate, Bedamar has his fellow conspirators, some of whom are strangers, unite under this new cause:

Tis thy Nations Glory, To Hugg the Foe that offers brave Alliance. Once more embrace, my friends—we’ll all embrace— United thus, we are the mighty engine Must twist this rooted Empire from its basis211

In describing how an embrace makes a “foe” a “friend,” Bedamar’s speech illustrates the significance of the embrace as a performative gesture able to unite a group of men around their declarative promise. It is key as well that when calling for the men to embrace and thus unite as a group, Bedamar does so under the rallying cry of national glory, interpreting male solidarity and the performance of male friendship as an empowering social force. This embrace, in Jeremy Taylor’s words, “signifies as much as Unity can meane” and functions as a way that men come together and unite under a single cause.212

While the men in the play use embraces in the way that was typical for the period, there is an underlying threat that these actions are more overtly queer than the typical network of friendship may have allowed. In his book Men In Love, George Haggerty calls for reconsidering these moments, noting that “heroic friendship has been betrayed by history,” especially in how it has been “rewritten as male bonding,”213 further suggesting that Restoration tragedy is an “untapped source for the acculturation of sodomitical

211 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 2.2.235–39. 212 Jeremy Taylor, “A Discourse of the Nature, Offices, and Measures of Friendship with Rules of Conducting It / Written in Answer to a Letter from the Most Ingenious and Vertuous M. K. P. by J. T.,” Jeremy Taylor: The Whole Works, ed. Reginald Heber (New York: Georg Olms Verlag Hildesheim, 1969), 86. 213 Haggerty, Men in Love, 43.

84 relations.”214 I agree with Haggerty and hope to demonstrate that Otway’s play is one such “untapped source” for an analysis of same-sex desire. As Venice Preserv’d demonstrates, the men in the play use embraces to reinforce their alliances; however, there is an underlying threat that these actions are more overtly homoerotic than typically suggested in the network of friendship. After the conspirators have met and discussed the plan, Renault sees two men embrace and voices his disgust:

BEDAMAR. Pierre! I must embrace him, My heart beats to his Man as if I knew him

RENAULT. I never loved these huggers215

In accepting that he does not like, or is perhaps disgusted by men who embrace,

Renault codes this desire for audiences and illustrates that gestures of male friendship could not be performed without the threat that they might signify something more. The men’s hug switches between being interpreted as a reinforcement of patriarchal relationships and as a threat of male same-sex desire, or as Goldberg suggests, it “is that

Friendship and Sodomy are always in danger of (mis)recognition since what both depend upon physically—sexually—cannot be distinguished.”216 Restoration playhouses were notoriously boisterous, as audiences chatted, orange sellers yelled, and audiences reacted loudly to what they saw on stage. Jocelyn Powell characterizes the mix between audiences’ love of the theatre and the busy environment as a type of “involved

214 Haggerty, Men in Love, 26. 215 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 2.342. 216 Goldberg, Sodometries, 119.

85 detachment.”217 Knowing how boisterous Restoration playhouses were, I wonder if

Renault’s mention of “huggers” might have been interpreted or heard as “buggers,” the term for “a person who engages in penetrative anal sex.”218 It seems conceivable that while audiences were, as Powell offers, involved but detached, this moment could have been understood as a threat of sodomy. Furthermore, the casualness of “these” and

“huggers” sounds derogatory and sexually suspect; it is perhaps significant that the OED cites Venice Preserv’d as the first instance of “Huggers” as “one who hugs.”219 Renault’s disgust suggests not only his suspicion of the embrace as an action, but also the of type of man who would “hug.” Kristina Straub, building from the work of Randolph Trumbach, identifies how “men with male lovers were increasingly being identified—not simply as behaving in a ‘deviate’ manner—but as being ‘deviate’ in their preferences for male sexual partners.”220 This movement away from judging actions and behaviours to labelling the individuals themselves further suggests that Renault’s line of dialogue could have been read as suggesting that men who embraced held ‘suspect preferences.’

Regardless of how audiences may have interpreted this moment, Renault’s apparent disgust encourages us to consider moments of seemingly typical male gestures of friendship as sexual and not to mask moments of queer desire as primarily heterosexual. The acknowledgement that an embrace could signify something more than friendship urges us to read Pierre and Jaffeir’s desire as homoerotic, and to consider how

217 Jocelyn Powell, Restoration Theatre Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 13–14, 24. 218 OED Online, s.v. “bugger, n.1,” accessed June 21, 2018, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/24365. 219 OED Online, s.v. “hugger, n.1,” accessed June 24, 2018, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/89178. 220 Straub, Sexual Suspects, 47.

86 the play uses that homoeroticism in promoting male solidarity. Renault’s expression of disgust suggests audiences may have known what was considered effeminate or sodomitical, and yet the play does not shame the men for this expression. Rather, it is still presented as a successful moment of men coming together and solidifying their bonds to each other: “I must embrace him, My heart beats to his Man as if I knew him.”221 The threat of male same-sex relations is neutralized because it ultimately promotes male supremacy and homosocial behaviour; after all, Bedamar only wants to hug Jaffeir after confirming that Jaffeir can help the conspirators overthrow the corrupt senate. It is a moment of successful male allegiance.

Moreover, viewing embraces as containing sexual opportunities helps more clearly define the central conflict between Jaffeir, Pierre, and Belvidera that is crucial to the play. Jaffeir struggles between choosing his wife or his best friend, and embraces and passionate declarations mark the men’s relationship as decidedly more sexually suggestive than the network of friendship implies. Early in the play, Jaffeir, while describing being banished and thrown out of his home, leans into Pierre for support, proclaiming: “Bear my weakness, / if throwing thus my Arms about thy Neck, / I play the boy, and blubber in thy bosome, / Oh! I shall drown thee with my Sorrows.”222 Jaffeir’s comfort in using his best friend as his emotional confident and the embrace they share signpost their closeness.223 This coalescence of physical touch and emotional support demonstrates the pair’s love for each other, but Jaffeir’s line “if throwing thus my arms

221 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 2.340–41. 222 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 2.2.274–77. 223 Montezuma and Acacis, in Dryden’s The Indian Queen, also use devotional language and attempt to help each other’s emotional state: ACAIS. “You wrong me, my best friend, not to believe / Your kindness gives me joy, and when I grieve, / Unwillingly my sorrows I obey; / Showers sometimes fall upon a shining day.” MONTEZUMA “Let me then share your griefs” (2.3.1–5).

87 about thy neck” is also a clear signal to actors and audiences. Jaffeir’s need to use his friend to bear his “weakness,” and subsequently physically empower him is analogous to how Antony in Dryden’s All for Love cannot hold himself up until Ventidius comes to help him. Both Dryden and Otway’s play proposes that male friends are physically and emotionally energizing.224 The embrace is outlined as a crucial part of this scene and of the pair’s friendship. When read alongside the historical evidence of how embraces had been used as performance of alliances and friendship, discussed in the Introduction of this dissertation, moments when Pierre and Jaffeir embrace become more suggestive of male same-sex desire. They touch to perform their friendship and constancy to each other and to others, but also as a crucial personal reassurance.

Otway relies on this performative gesture again after Jaffeir leaves Belvidera hostage to the conspirators. Jaffeir embraces Pierre and, in the sexually charged speech I quoted earlier, Jaffeir conflates his love for his friend with that for his wife:

Oh Pierre, were thou but she, How I could pull thee down in my heart, Gaze on thee till my Eye-strings crackt with Love, Till all my sinews with its fire extended, Fixt me upon the Rack of ardent longing, Then swelling, sighing, raging to be blest, Come like a panting turtle to thy Breast, On thy soft Bosom, hovering, bill and play, Confess the cause why last I fled away225

In beginning the speech by writing “were thou but she,” Otway encourages audiences to view Pierre as a figure parallel to Belvidera. Jaffeir clearly places Pierre in the place of

224 See chapter 1. Dryden, All for Love, 1.1.438–46. 225 Otway, 2.2.424–34.

88 his wife and in doing so retains all the passionate and sexual language traditionally reserved for a heterosexual couple. It also transforms the content of this speech into something more socially acceptable, as saying “were thou but she,” Jaffeir uses Belvidera as the cover for publicly proclaiming his love for Pierre. Once he has publicly declared that Pierre is almost like Belvidera, he is free to express his desires without ramifications.

His eyes are “crackt” with “love” and “longing,” crackt according to the Oxford English

Dictionary suggesting “a sharp blow” or a “somewhat deranged” infatuation with someone.226 The forcefulness of this adjective encourages us once again to consider their love as extending beyond friendship. Jaffeir goes even further, describing to audiences a physical connection akin to sexual intercourse. Instead of imagining Belvidera and Jaffeir together, audiences are subjected to the extremely suggestive image of Jaffeir and Pierre

“sighing” and “swelling” until they “come like a panting turtle” to each other’s breasts, invoking the affection and devotion of cooing turtle doves.227 There is little ambiguity in the sexual explicitness of this language, and if Pierre and Jaffeir appeared as good friends initially, they are now emotionally and physically bonded sexually and romantically.

Otway weaves in more sexual metaphors in describing the two men, coding their relationship and attachment to each other as more intense than friendship. The dagger, in particular, becomes a phallic object used in the promotion and maintenance of male love.

226 OED Online, s.v. “cracked, adj.,” accessed September 07, 2017, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/43640?redirectedFrom=crackt. 227 The turtle dove as symbol invokes devotion that is not necessarily sexual. The OED lists turtledoves as expressing a type of “conjugal” affection or that of lovers. Jaffeir’s speech, however, appears to mix this idea of constancy and affection with sexual language: “sighing,” “swelling.” In Dryden’s Conquest of Granada Part II, Almahide parallels two turtle doves surviving a storm to the love and support she gives her husband: “So, two kind Turtles, when a storm is nigh, Look up; and see it gath’ring in the skie: Each calls his Mate to shelter in the Groves, leaving, in murmures, their unfinishe’d loves. Perch’d on some dropping Branch they sit alone, and Cooe, and harken to each others moan” (1.2.128–33). OED Online, “turtle-dove, n.,” accessed May 29, 2017, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/207792?rskey=KDC89n&result=2&isAdvanced=false.

89 Susan J. Owen views Jaffeir’s dagger as a symbol of patriarchal power and violence, as

Belvidera is forced to confront the forces that subjugate her: “this dagger becomes a token of the consummated male friendship exchange, then is carried to the marginalized woman to bear witness to the fact.”228 While the dagger stands in as a symbol of patriarchal violence and friendship, it also demonstrates how this violence and subjugation are justified under the umbrella of male love. Jaffeir’s desperation to join the conspirators causes him to use his wife as the means through which to prove his honesty.

In a homosocial move, he willingly trades Belvidera’s physical body to gain a closer relationship with Pierre and the men. “To you, sirs,” Jaffeir tells the men while handing over his wife and his dagger, “and your honours, I bequeath her.”229 Belvidera’s body is not only given to the men, but her life is offered to them as well; Jaffeir promises that if he betrays them, they can kill Belvidera (“And with her this, when I prove unworthy— / you know the rest: Then strike it to her heart”230). The dagger, a symbol of male violence, is also a phallic representation of the intensity of Jaffeir’s attraction to Pierre and the limits to which Jaffeir will go to please Pierre.

For the remainder of the play, the dagger is used and referenced in ways that code it as a symbol of same-sex desire and of Jaffeir and Pierre’s attachment. After Pierre and the conspirators have been sentenced to die for attempting to overthrow the senate,

Jaffeir’s guilt at turning them in causes him retaliate and blame Belvidera. He threatens

228 Susan J. Owen, Perspectives on Restoration Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 142. 229 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 2.392. 230 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 2.394–95.

90 her with the dagger, justifying this violence against her because of his love for Pierre. He pulls out the dagger, saying:

Where’s my friend? My friend, thou smiling mischief? Nay, shrink not, now tis too late, though shouldst have fled. When they guilt first had cause, for dire revenge, Is up and raging for my friend. He groans, Hark how he groans, his screams are in my ears Already; see, th’have fixt him on the wheel, And now they tear him—murther! Perjur’d Senate! Murther—oh!—Hark thee, Traitress, thou hast done this.231

Jaffeir already unfairly blames Belvidera in assuming she is the cause of Pierre’s imprisonment and that she enjoys it, calling her “smiling mischief” and “traitress.”

Moreover, Jaffeir’s repeated invocation of “my friend,” appearing three times within the monologue, and the mimicry of what he imagines is Pierre’s distress, “hark how he groans, his screams are in my ears,” reminds audiences that Jaffeir is tormenting

Belvidera in the name of his friend. Pierre, even while physically not on stage, is placed in the foreground of this moment. The visual presence of the dagger is also significant, as it stands as a symbol of the two men’s powerful attraction and awful deeds. Even though

Pierre is not physically on stage in this scene, he is present all the same.

The dagger’s role as a phallic object is foregrounded even more when Belvidera pleads with Jaffeir to end her life, but in a metaphor for his failures as a husband, he cannot bring himself to penetrate her. After Renault attempts to rape her, she asks Jaffeir to “fetch, fetch that Dagger back, the dreadful dower / Though gav’st last night in parting

231 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 4.488–95.

91 with me; strike it / Here to my heart. . .” but Jaffeir does nothing.232 When Jaffeir blames

Belvidera for her role in sealing Pierre’s fate, he almost stabs her three times; he

“fumbles for the dagger,” “draws the dagger, offers to stab her,” and finally “Offers to stab her again, Kneeling.”233 The language used in relation to the dagger is evocative of sex and penetration as Jaffeir tries to “stab” his wife. As the stage directions make clear though, Jaffeir can never follow through, coming up short in what is configured as his spousal duty; he should be steadfast in his conviction to kill his wife and end her suffering: “I am, I am a Coward; Witness’t, Heaven, / Witness it, Earth, and every being

Witness.”234 These failed moments of penetration are significant for two reasons: they are outlined as stage directions, which suggests the playwright’s or printer’s belief that it was important to the action; and because the stage directions are recurring performances of

Jaffeir’s lack of sexual attraction to Belvidera.235 In a metaphor for his failure to commit to his wife, he cannot bring himself to penetrate Belvidera in the same way he will end up penetrating his best friend.

This metaphor of penetration becomes more pronounced as the play climaxes with Jaffeir abandoning Belvidera completely and running to reconcile with Pierre.

Otway begins the extended scene of reconciliation with emotional and physical foreplay.

As Pierre prepares for death, he asks Jaffeir to prove his love, asking directly, “Dost thou

232 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 3.2.68–70. 233 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 4.479, 495, 503, 515. 234 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 4.520–21. 235 Tim Keenan, Restoration Staging, 1660–74 (New York: Routledge, 2017), 52, writing on Restoration theatre culture, argues that while “published texts of staged plays do not necessarily record specific performance—individual stage directions may or may not have been realized exactly as written—they do, however, provide excellent indication of what a playwright hoped to see on the stage, and therefore, in most cases, what was possible and likely.”

92 love me?” Jaffeir’s response demonstrates his love and devotion: “Rip up my heart, and satisfy thy doubtings.”236 The use of “rip up my heart” suggests that Jaffeir might physically rip open his shirt to reveal his chest while urging Pierre to look at his chest and see for himself that there is only love. With Belvidera gone, the two characters express their love physically and emotionally. Here Pierre weeps as he says “curses on this weakness” for crying and not keeping his emotions in control. It is easy to imagine Jaffeir affectionately wiping tears from Pierre’s face, as Jaffeir comments: “Tears! Amazement!

Tears! / I never saw thee melted thus before.”237 This public affection functions as foreplay in performing the two men’s love and desire, a move that is essential in setting up the execution as an act of reconciliatory sex.

In having the two men emotionally reconcile, the play then moves to the final consummating act of their love. Jaffeir resolves to kill Pierre before he and the other conspirators will be hanged at the gallows for conspiring against the government, thus killing him in honour and denying the state the satisfaction of its punishment:

PIERRE. Now, Jaffeir! Now I am going. Now; [Executioner having bound him. Stabs him. Then stabs himself]

JAFFEIR. Have at thee, Thou honest heart, then—here— And this is well too.

FATHER. Damnable Deed!

PIERRE. Now thou hast indeed been faithful. This was done Nobly—We have deceiv’d the Senate.

236 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 5.3.438–39. 237 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 5.3.438, 440.

93 JAFFEIR. Bravely.238

In stabbing Pierre and turning the dagger on himself, Jaffeir physically consummates their relationship.239 What began with passionate declarations and physical markers of love is finally completed; they have emotionally reconciled and now are physically connected. In contrast to the moments where Jaffeir did not want to stab

Belvidera, here he is eager to use the dagger and finally penetrates Pierre. As they “dye” together, their bodies intertwined, the play appears to accept the association with, and suggestion of sex; in Restoration culture and dramatic texts, to “dye” was a pun on achieving orgasm. Jaffeir understands the implications of his choice of dying with Pierre, telling the executioner that he leaves behind a wife and child and to bring them his dagger as a reminder of his patriarchal commitments. In leaving Belvidera the dagger, a move

Susan J. Owen calls “a mockery of her hopes,” Jaffeir cruelly reminds her of her subjection to the men in the play and the same-sex desire that has demanded her subjugation and pain.240

With Jaffeir casting off his wife and reconciling with Pierre, the play suggests that homoerotic love, even if it includes same-sex desire, is more important than heterosexual love. In having Jaffeir flail between Belvidera and Pierre, Otway tests Jaffeir’s commitment to male bonding and patriarchal politics. Scholars have debated whether or not the play reinforces forms of male supremacy. For example, J. Douglas Canfield

238 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 5.3.460–70. 239 Towerson and Beamont from Dryden’s Amboyna say goodbye to each other before Towerson’s death with passionate language and physical actions not unlike this moment between Pierre and Jaffeir. The two men embrace three times, “Oh my dear friend,” “Let me embrace you while you are a man,” and “a long and last farewell,” before kissing “Last, there’s my heart, I give it in this kiss—[kisses him]. Do not answer me; Friendship’s a tender thing, / And it would ill become me now to weep” (5.1.327, 346, 396–406). 240 Owen, Perspectives on Restoration Drama, 142.

94 asserts that by the end of the play, “the code of the word as bond . . . has been destroyed, replaced by meaningless gestures, mad ravings, and nonsense,” while Susan Staves argues that Jaffeir’s downfall reflects “the break down of the new Tory myths” and the crumbling of older systems of political authority.241 In treating the moral message of the play, I argue, in contrast to Staves, that Jaffeir’s dishonesty as it relates to Pierre certainly represents a break from “the word as bond” as Canfield sees it, but that the moral requires that audiences recognize Jaffeir’s mistakes: He should not have listened to Belvidera and he should not have betrayed Pierre. Part of the tragedy is his inability to correctly understand who deserves his allegiance the most. Jaffeir’s eventual understanding of this code comes too late for him to fix, but his and Pierre’s mutual suicide and tragic ending act as a reminder to audiences about the inherent superiority of men, the performative nature of male love, and the necessary subjugation of women.

While undeniably placed within a homosocial triangle that requires her objectification, Belvidera exerts control and power within the plot. Elizabeth Howe notes how Belvidera does not passively allow her subjection and fights it the best she can.242

For example, Belvidera articulates the human cost of the uprising and her initial distrust of the conspirators comes from their belief that social and political change will only come about through violence and bloodshed: “Save the poor tender lives / Of all those little

241 Canfield, Heroes and States, 101–10; Staves, Players’ Scepters, 43, 110. For discussion of Venice Preserv’d as Tory or Whig see: Phillip Harth, “Political Interpretations of ‘Venice Preserv’d,’” Modern Philology 85, no. 4 (May 1988): 345–49. See also David Bywaters, “Venice, Its Senate, and Its Plot in Otway’s ‘Venice Preserv’d,’” Modern Philology 80, no. 3 (February 1983): 256–63; Harry Solomon, “The Rhetoric of ‘Redressing Grievances’: Court Propaganda as the Hermeneutical Key to Venice Preserv’d,” ELH 53, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 289–310; Jessica Munns, Restoration Politics and Drama: The Plays of Thomas Otway, 1675–1683 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 201; Susan Owen, “Restoration Politics and Drama: An Overview,” in A Companion to Restoration Drama, ed. Susan Owen (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 126–39, 134; John Loftis, The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 18–19. 242 Howe, The First English Actresses, 52.

95 Infants which the Swords / Of murtherers are whetting for this moment.”243 She provides a much needed moral interjection at moments where political ideology risks overshadowing the human cost, and she demonstrates a sharp understanding of her own persuasive force in using erotic language and her body alongside her moral arguments to entice and ultimately persuade Jaffeir that she is right.244 She is also momentarily successful in convincing Jaffeir to snitch on Pierre and the conspirators. Katherine M.

Rogers agrees that Belvidera is an empowering figure, arguing that Otway’s moral message is that feminine values and qualities crucially balance the masculine ones.

Rogers also sees the values Belvidera represents—“love,” “compassion”—as granting her audience sympathy. This is an important consideration, as it offers a reading that highlights how Belvidera may have been a competing presence on stage, rather than a secondary feature to the male relationship.

Rogers’ belief that Belvidera could be an object of audience sympathy hints that we can study her as an early she-tragedy heroine and a focus of audience attention. The extended torment that Belvidera must endure likens her to a victim in early she-tragedy, the subgenre of tragedy from the late 1680s through to the 1700s that depended on the visible performance of female suffering.245 A prominent feature of the she-tragedy genre is the main female character’s nobility in passively accepting the horrible deeds inflicted upon her; I discuss the she-tragedy genre in more depth in chapter 4 of this dissertation.

Venice Preserv’d’s treatment of Belvidera, however, is complicated: Priuli, Jaffeir, and

243 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 4.48–50. 244 For Belvidera’s role in the play, see Katherine M. Rogers, “Masculine and Feminine Values in Restoration Drama: The Distinctive Power of Venice Preserved,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 24, no. 4 (1985), 393. Owen, Perspectives on Restoration Drama, 131. 245 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 60–65.

96 the conspirators objectify her; she has an active role in attempting to change her fate, all while acting as a potential audience focal point of pathos for stoically accepting the torment. While she is an active participant in the events, and the play certainly appears to sympathize with her struggle, as Roger contends, it is also crucial to recognize how the play refuses to demonize the men who shaped her fate.246 She is portrayed as a victim, but a necessary one. Jaffeir could have gone back to Belvidera and reconciled his marriage; however, he chooses to ignore his wife once again and kill himself to remain faithful to Pierre. Their deaths are not their punishment, but their access to glory. Before dying, Pierre announces, “This was done Nobly—We have deceiv’d the Senate,” and in response, Jaffeir agrees, “Bravely.”247 The play could have portrayed their deaths as foolish, out of touch, or deserved, a fool’s errand that has left all around them dead or in ruin, and yet it champions what they have done. Their reconciliation reinforces that male relationships come before everything else, and their strategy to die by their own hands and not that of the state transforms them into martyrs. As the officer who witnessed this spectacle remarks, “Heav’n grant I dye so well,” essentially ending the scene by idealizing the men for their honourable and noble actions.248

As if to really punish Belvidera for disrupting Jaffeir and Pierre’s love, Otway underscores how male desire has led to her subjugation by having both Jaffeir and Pierre

246 In making this assessment, I am suggesting that Pierre and Jaffeir dying in what the play considers an honourable death demonstrates that Otway decides not to blame them or their love for Belvidera’s outcome, but so too does the parallel storyline between Antonio the senator and Aquilina. In the now infamous “Nicky Nacky” scene, Otway portrays the lust between Antonio and Aquilina, who whips Antonio and has him bark like a dog, as entirely comedic. Their expressions of desire are to be laughed at rather than championed. If the homoerotic, or simply dangerous, outcomes of Pierre and Jaffeir’s love were intended to be bad, Otway could certainly have depicted it in that way. 247 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 5.467–68. 248 Otway, 5.481.

97 return after their deaths to gloat at her pain. As she begins raving mad, calling for a now dead Jaffeir to “come come come come come. Nay, come to bed!” pleading for a sexual unity she knows he was unable to provide, she sees his ghost return.249 Excitedly she gasps:

Oh, Are you return’d? See, Father, here he’s come again, Am I to blame to love him! Oh though dear one. [ghost sinks] Why do you fly me? Are you angry still then? Jaffeir! Where art though!” [The ghost of Jaff. and Pier. Rise together both bloody] Hah, look there! My husband bloody, and his Friend too! [. . .] [ghost sink] Here they went down, oh I’ll dig, dig the Den up.250

Belvidera’s initial hope to reunite with Jaffeir is dashed with the arrival of Pierre by his side. If audiences needed a final reminder that Jaffeir and Pierre would be together in the afterworld, Otway obliges with this final tableaux.251 Belvidera does end up dying, claiming Jaffeir and Pierre are dragging her to her death. She is not truly reunited with her husband, even if they will share the same space in the afterworld; Pierre’s influence on Jaffeir and ultimate success in capturing his heart demonstrate that this grave will be a crowded one. Although the three of them presumably share this after-world space, we understand that Jaffeir chose Pierre as his preferred partner. Jaffeir and Pierre died honourably within their control and together. In contrast, Belvidera dies tragically alone

249 Ibid. 250 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 5.488–509. 251 In a like manner to how the play suggests that Jaffeir and Pierre’s friendship continues well after death, Dryden in The Indian Queen has Montezuma acknowledge that the dead Acacis lives on through him: “O that you would believe Acacis lives in me, and ceases to grieve” (4.1.284–85).

98 and tormented. Venice Preserv’d’s depiction of male friendship, at the expense of women, re-appropriates same-sex desire as a means to further promote male solidarity and power.

The Repertoire of Same-Sex Intimacy

One of the unexpected discoveries of this chapter, as I indicated earlier, is that the same-sex desire portrayed in the play is disappointingly conservative; Jaffeir and Pierre’s same-sex attraction does not disrupt Restoration era notions of traditional masculinity, it does not appear to imagine social relations outside of heterosexuality, and it participates in a homosocial exchange that requires the subjugation of a competing woman. It is for these reasons that I have argued that the repertoire of friendship gestures could have masked or included same-sex desire as long as those performances continued to participate in the normative patriarchal power structures of the period. Although I believe that is how the same-sex desire functions within the text and that it is consistent with what research has shown us about male friendship of the period, I think it is important to theorize a bit more about what the spectacle of male friendship suggests for the period and for us studying it now. In thinking about reception and the impact of homo-heroic love, I wonder if it is possible that audiences saw friendship, and the repertoire of same- sex gestures, as a possible cover for same-sex desire and intimacy? Furthermore, despite plots that included heterosexual desire, did audiences find homoerotic friendships a source of inspiration?

99 As I previously indicated, one of the issues with analyzing homo-heroic love as a mask or cover for same-sex desire is that the original portrayals are problematic by modern standards. This chapter demonstrates how Jaffeir and Pierre’s relationship relies on objectifying and harming Belvidera and, in the end, does very little to alter stereotypes around gender and sex. Queer theorists have struggled with studying the conflicting and problematic historical expressions of same-sex desire, and, in a more recent methodological turn, advocate for accepting these problematic representations. Heather

Love, in Feeling Backwards, details almost the exact experience I had in thinking Venice

Preserv’d was going to be a positive historical example of male desire:

As queer readers we tend to see ourselves as reaching back towards isolated figures in the queer past in order to rescue or save them. It is hard to know what to do with texts that resist our advances. Texts or figures that refuse to be redeemed disrupt not only the progress narrative of queer history but also our sense of queer identity in the present. We find ourselves deeply unsettled by our identifications with these figures.252

Venice Preserv’d, with its mix of sexism, homosocial behaviour, and male same- sex desire, disrupts, as Love contends, “not only the progress of queer history but also our sense of queer identity in the present.”253 Pierre and Jaffeir cannot be described as

“queer,” but their relationship is homoerotic, and we must accept the complicated way that male desire is depicted in these plays and what effect that might have had. Despite its problematic representations, Jaffeir and Pierre’s relationship must still be viewed as a possible influence in the public reception of same-sex desire. Jack Halberstam (formally

252 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (London: Harvard University Press. 2007), 8–9. 253 Love, Feeling Backward, 8.

100 Judith Halberstam) similarly accepts that queer historical projects must reckon with potentially unpleasant truths, stating that their goal is to “push towards a model of queer history that is less committed to finding heroic models from the past and more resigned to the contradictory and complicit narratives that, in the past as in the present, connect sexuality to politics.”254 Venice Preserv’d is one such “contradictory and complicit” narrative, demonstrating how same-sex desire was avowed in the promotion of male power and supremacy.

Despite my belief that Jaffeir and Pierre’s relationship is conservative, there are opportunities to theorize about more positive effects of portraying homo-heroic love. One of the methodological challenges of studying Restoration theatre is the sparseness of its archive; audience reception is especially difficult to gauge since the majority of audiences did not record their impressions. Asking what audiences may have thought about the spectacle of male love is practically impossible. As I stated in my introduction, however, using performance studies theories about embodiment and the transmission of cultural knowledge creates opportunities to look beyond the sexist, racist, and homophobic documents stored in the archive and explore a form of queer historiography through the body. As Diana Taylor articulates, “Whose stories, memories, and struggles might become visible” through performed, embodied behaviours?255 I have attempted to do this by exploring how the texts describe physical actions that could be thought of as a repertoire of same-sex gestures. This repertoire was seemingly well known enough that

Dryden, Lee, and Otway all use the same markers in their plays. Moreover, as I describe

254 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 148. 255 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, xviii.

101 in the next chapter, playwrights who wanted to parody male love burlesqued that same repertoire. But is it possible that the repertoire of male friendship gestures promoted other forms of social intimacy? Did homo-heroic love encourage male same-sex relations?

Before I continue, I need to stress once again that it is impossible to know the impact of homo-heroic love; however, queer and performance studies theorist José

Estaban Muñoz’s theory of “disidentification” offers a way to theorize what may have been possible. In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics,

Muñoz builds on Freud, Pecheux, and Althusser, questioning how minority subjects (and in particular, queers of colour) identify in a public sphere that excludes them. His theory proposes that minority subjects interpret cultural information that does not include them and transform that information into sources of power and pride. In other words:

Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and disidentifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking up the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture.256

Minority subjects, according to Muñoz, recognize the exclusionary ideology of dominant society but recycle those potentially abject and harmful messages into something that could be empowering. Muñoz cites performance artist Marga Gomez’s 1992 production

Marga Gomez is Pretty, Witty, and Gay, as an example of disidentification. In the

256 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 31.

102 performance, Gomez recounts watching “lady homosexuals” on the television show Open

End. Disguised in raincoats, dark glasses, and wigs, the three lesbians described surviving homophobic culture.257 Although the narrative of the show suggested Gomez be shocked or disgusted by the women, she reclaimed this image as a source of inspiration: “It was the wigs that made me want to be one.”258 Gomez’s delight at the “lady lesbians” despite the homophobic TV presentation suggests that disidentification as a receptive strategy could be thought of as a knowing misreading, or reading against the narrative. Minority subjects interpret the dominant ideology and recycle it as an unlikely source of inspiration and empowerment.

It is possible that seventeenth-century audiences interpreted homo-heroic love through a process similar to disidentification. Despite heterosexual love plots, sexist language, and patriarchal ideology, audience members could have read against the narrative. Even though Jaffeir professes love to Belvidera and his anger at the state is in reaction to how the two of them have been treated, what if audience members paid more attention to his devotion to Pierre? My analysis of heroic tragedies centres on the repertoire of male friendship because I believe the visual effects of these embodied performances matter and could be used by audience members in imagining expressions of same-sex intimacy. In Venice Preserv’d, for example, the scene where Pierre attempts to console Jaffeir after he has been expelled from his home is a display of same-sex emotional companionship.259 They cry, comfort each other, and embrace. Despite understanding that the plot was depicting a passionate and homoerotic male friendship,

257 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 1–4. 258 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 3. 259 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 1.274–77.

103 someone could have interpreted this image as queer, recycling it for his or her own empowerment. After all, the gestures that signalled same-sex desire were the same for heterosexual friendship, which is why Alan Bray observes that the Elizabethans had a hard time deciding which gestures of closeness they admired and which they feared.260

That blurriness, to me, opens up more possibility for theorizing how some audiences may have reacted. Embraces, kisses, hand-holding, and passionate declarations of love all could have been part of a disidentifying process where individuals recycled these gestures and appropriated them for their own sense of same-sex intimacy.261

Once again, although depicting same-sex intimacy was likely not Otway’s intention, I would argue that it is important to recognize how a historical text like Venice

Preserv’d contains expressions that could be interpreted as same-sex intimacy. Otway may have intended to highlight how male friendship, drawing on a tradition of friendship gestures, could include the homoerotic in the service of patriarchal power, but the ideological effects of these live performances on audiences would have been uncontrollable. To return to Diana Taylor, she elucidates how embodied performances make visible an entire range of audience attitudes and values: “The multicodeness of

260 Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop 29 (Spring 1990), 14. 261 It is difficult to know how such gestures may have become part of a recognizable embodied queer argot, but depictions of men who love other men often describe or depict men who embrace, hold hands, and kiss. In the Women-Hater’s Lamentation (1707), a broadside about Mollies—the first gay subculture—men are shown embracing and kissing. Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House, 53. After a covert visit to Mother Clap’s Molly House in 1725, Samuel Stevens noted that the men kissed “in a lewed Manner” and “then they’d hug” (quoted in Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House, 55). Finally, it appears that holding hands was used as a way of soliciting sex. Thomas Newton was a hustler who became a police informant in 1725. He acknowledges that he is “no stranger to the Methods they used in picking one another up” and goes on to describe how he stood next to a gentlemen he was hoping to entrap: “Tis a very fine Night, says he. Aye, says I, and so it is. Then he takes me by the Hand, and after squeezing and playing with it a little (to which I showed no dislike, he conveys it to his Breeches. . .” Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House, 58. Hand holding appears again in records of Captain Edward Rigby’s 1698 sodomy charges, where Rigby took another man “by the hand, and squeez’d it” before putting his hands down the other man’s breeches. Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House, 44–45.

104 these practices transmits as many layers of meaning as there are spectators, participants, and witnesses.”262 Although I can only theorize about Restoration-era audiences and suggest these depictions may have been fodder for disidentificatory practices, one thing is for sure: the original performances would have created what Taylor articulates as “layers of meaning.” These layers would have facilitated performances of male friendship to appear simultaneously as performances of male same-sex desire. Not to all audience members, of course, but perhaps to some.

This minority is significant, however, because all audience members play a role in shaping what happens on stage and off. In her study of theatre audiences, Susan Bennett considers spectators “co creators” of the performance, bringing their own cultural ideologies with them and modifying the performances through their presence.263

Restoration audiences certainly played their part influencing what happen on stage through their buying power, their applause, their catcalling, and their attendance.264 These actions are what Bennett configures as social interactions that involve audience members as a larger group, whereas my line of theoretical inquiry is more invested in what Bennett sees as the “private capacities” of individuals.265 Cultural backgrounds already influence those individuals and frame their reception before they sit down in the theatre.

Performance theorist Richard Schechner establishes how such elements as traveling to and from the theatre, where spectators sit, what physical elements they encounter, all

262 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 48–49. 263 Susan Bennett, Theatre Audience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 21. 264 Powell, Restoration Theatre Production, 16–17. 265 Bennett, Theatre Audience, 21.

105 contribute to their experiences of the performance and are therefore important to study.266

As this relates to possible disidentification with same-sex affection on stage, Restoration audiences arrived at the theatre aware of public discourses around same sex desire, effeminacy, and sodomy. Kristina Straub describes how in the late seventeenth century, male actors were essentially “sexually suspect.” Early modern anti-theatrical writings slandered male actors for both appearing publically on stage, a choice they likened to women who sold their bodies, and for dressing up in women’s clothing, an act that could lead to sodomy.267 The actor’s body as gendered and sexualized, real or imagined, suggests, as Straub does, that “the sexual identity of the actor was in fact important to his audience appeal, just as the sex lives of Hollywood personalities figure large in modern tabloid representations.”268 If an audience member believed the anti-theatrical writings of the period that attempted to depict male actors as sodomites, at worst, or “sexually suspect,” at best, this may have impacted their reception of male desire on stage. If they had heard those rumours before the theatre, and witnessed intense depictions of male love on stage, the result could have been a disidentificatory reading where the play privileged and promoted same-sex affection.

In the introduction to this chapter, I described how the historical context of male friendship and the text’s misogyny and homosociality influenced my argument productively. I want to return to these observations because I believe they speak to the two goals of this chapter: to offer a queer reading of Otway’s text that demonstrates the

266 Richard Schechner, Essays on Performance Theory, 1970–1976 (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1977), 122. 267 Straub, Sexual Suspects, 24–25. 268 Ibid., 25.

106 connection between same-sex desire and patriarchal power and to theorize a way to reclaim this troubling portrayal of male love. Jaffeir and Pierre’s attachment to each other suggests male same-sex attraction could be tolerated as long as it appeared in the service of patriarchal control. Belvidera is harmed by their relationship, placed in a homosocial configuration that requires her subjugation. Otway highlights how even in the afterlife, she must come second to male love. The sexual politics of the play are an example of what Halberstam, within the study of queer history, calls complicated, complicit, and contradictory. While we must acknowledge those inconsistencies, there is also value in thinking about what Muñoz offers as a disidentificatory strategy: that depictions of male love offered audiences an alternate model of same-sex desire. The embraces of friendship and those of lovers are indistinguishable, and one can be performed while looking like the other.

107 Chapter 3.

The Menace and Merriment of Male Love: Homo-Heroic Parody

As a theatrical form of propaganda, the homo-heroic depiction of male love functioned to bolster patriarchal state power. In Dryden’s All for Love, Ventidius and

Dollabella repeatedly remind Antony of his greatness, and a major part of Antony’s expected redemption is reassuming his role as the virtuous soldier. It is the same for

Alexander in Lee’s The Rival Queens and Jaffeir in Venice Preserv’d; there is no mistaking that the tragedy of their deaths is the result of supposedly great men ignoring their patriarchal duties. The didacticism of the plays is in part only successful because tragedy was considered a serious genre that had the power to instruct.269

While heroic tragedies certainly were popular, the Restoration period is better known for its comedies and parodies, and to understand how male-male love was privileged and performed for audiences we must also take into account the other theatrical events available to them. Analyzing homo-heroic parodies, in particular, helps demonstrate what features of homo-heroic love audiences understood and recognized; much of the humour of these plays requires an understanding and awareness of the original. Homo-heroic parodies appropriate the heroic drama’s noble and idealized male love and burlesque it, attacking both Charles II and the heroic genre’s power as political propaganda. If performances of homo-heroic relationships attempt to strengthen

269 Eugene Waith contends that “As far as heroic drama is concerned, the essential point may be that it appealed to the aristocratic leanings of an audience, many of whom were not nobly born. Heroic drama encouraged its audience to feel capable of refined perceptions and high aspirations.” Waith, Ideas of Greatness, 207.

108 patriarchal power, parodies in one way undermine that attempt, and in others, potentially reinforce it. In burlesquing the monarchy, trivializing the feats of heroic men, and lampooning male-male desire, the plays attack the heroic genre for promoting male love and extending patriarchal power while reinvigorating the sexism in which homo-heroic love participates. The parodies’ critique only goes so far, though, and while they successfully attack the heroic genre’s high aspirations and the normativity of male-male eroticism, they remain invested in the patriarchy, relying on humour and plots that continue to degrade women.

Parodies expose the qualities and features of heroic drama that held currency in

Restoration culture. After all, successful parodies require audiences to recognize the elements that are being burlesqued. If audiences are not “in on the joke,” the parody fails to reach its primary goal. The OED defines parody as “a literary composition modelled on and imitating another work, esp. a composition in which the characteristic style and themes of a particular author or genre are satirized by being applied to inappropriate or unlikely subjects, or are otherwise exaggerated for comic effect.”270 This definition’s focus on imitation, style, and themes accounts for the major elements of Cibber’s parody

The Rival Queans (1710) and the closet drama parody Sodom; or the Quintessence of

Debauchery (1684), which humorously imitate homo-heroic love, the repertoire of male friendship, and the heroic dramas of Dryden and Lee. 271 What is missing from that

270 OED Online, s.v. “parody, n.2,” accessed February 07, 2017, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/138059?rskey=qk2JgL&result=2&isAdvanced=false. 271 The authorship of this play continues to be debated. Some scholars, like Carver and Johnson, believe that Rochester is the likely author, while Love, Haggerty, and McFarland are less certain. Webster does not decide either way, but demonstrates that Rochester’s libertine persona made it likely the text would be attributed to him. The argument of this chapter does not depend on the author of the play, so I treat the play as written anonymously. See Larry Carver, “The Texts and the Text of ‘Sodom.’” Papers of the

109 definition, however, is the purpose or effect of that imitation of style and exaggeration of subject. Linda Hutcheon argues that parody is “repetition with difference” and that the irony that stems from the trans-contextualization of multiple texts can be “playful as well as belittling” and “critically constructive as well as destructive.”272 In this reading, parody depends on a referential reading practice where an original text is measured and understood in relation to the new one.”273 Hutcheon’s theory accounts for how both parodies constantly refer to, and reuse, elements from the repertoire of friendship, and in the case of Dryden’s and Lee’s plays, layer comic and critical distance in the comparison between the originals and the new. Parody, according to Hutcheon, is also a politically and socially motivated form of critique: “Through a double process of installing and ironizing, parody signals how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference.”274 This understanding of parody works to demonstrate the complicated way representations can reinforce and subvert the ideology of their targets. Cibber and the anonymous playwright of Sodom imitate and invoke the style of heroic drama, parodying and critiquing the earlier depictions of male love while simultaneously extending the original play’s misogyny.

Biographical Society of America 73, no. 1 (1979): 19–40; J. W. Johnson, “Did Lord Rochester Write ‘Sodom’?” Papers of the Biographical Society of America 81, no. 2 (June 1987): 119–53; Harold Love, “But did Rochester ‘Really Write Sodom’?” Papers of the Biographical Society of America 87, no. 3 (September 1993): 319–36; Haggerty, Men in Love, 24; Cameron McFarland, Sodomite in Fiction and Satire 1660–1750 (New York: Columbia Press, 2002), 81–82; J. Webster, Performing Libertinism in Charles II’s Court: Politics, Drama, Sexuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 171–74. 272 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 32. 273 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 31. 274 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Post-Modernism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 89.

110 Sodom; or the Quintessence of Debauchery (1684) and Colley Cibber’s The Rival

Queans (1690s) are valuable counterpoints in evaluating how homo-heroic love functioned to extend patriarchal power, in that they potentially emphasize what features and qualities audiences understood about the heroic genre. This is especially the case for the repertoire of male friendship gestures. In Sodom; or the Quintessence of Debauchery, male love is the most dangerous force to political and social stability. In particular, the act of sodomy causes the male figures to ignore both the women and their duties, resulting in the ruin of their society. The playwright takes the moral of the earlier heroic plays, twisting and exaggerating it to highlight how male love does not work in the way the heroic genre depicts it. He further parodies the genre by using the language of marriage, not to empower male friendship, but to burlesque and ridicule it. In depicting

Charles II as a sodomite whose male-male love ruins the kingdom, the playwright exposes how homo-heroic love as a method to bolster state power is a convenient fiction.

Colley Cibber’s The Rival Queans similarly refuses to legitimize the significance of male friendship.275 Line by line, Cibber mocks Nathanial Lee’s The Rival Queens, taking the homoerotic proclamations between men and exaggerating them to such an extreme that they become nonsensical. Cibber keeps the performative gestures that were currency in the network of friendship, but he repeats them so often, and in such a vulgar way, that they become meaningless. Finally, by having the female roles performed by men in drag, Cibber guarantees that much of the play’s comedy stems from having men proclaim love to other men, even while performing as women. The parodies are valuable

275 Although The Rival Queans was not performed until 1710, after new heroic work fell out of favour, it is thought Cibber wrote the play in the 1690s, placing its conception closer to the heroic genre’s original popularity. Lee’s The Rival Queens continued to be popular in revivals, suggesting that the play’s ideology continued to be relevant up to, and after, Cibber’s parody premiered.

111 in the study of heroic tragedy because they offer an alternative reaction to the period’s most popular plays, crucially highlighting how audiences may not have taken at face value the objective of Dryden’s and Lee’s tragedies. In particular, when it comes to male relationships, the parodies suggest the representation of male friendship in heroic tragedy was not always seen as non-sexual.

Sodomy and Social Stability in Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery (1684)

Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery (1684) provides some suggestion that some audiences may have understood that heroic drama’s focus on male friendship was not entirely without cause for suspicion. While the representations I outlined in chapters 1 and 2 are certainly homoerotic, there is very little evidence to suggest they were seen as

“sexually suspect,” to borrow Straub’s term, in part due to a lack of evidence of audience reception, but also because of the deeply entrenched notions surrounding male friendship; male friendship was intense and described in romantic terms but did not denote same-sex relationships.276 Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery gives us some reason to question this assumption. It is important to recognize, however that Sodom was not performed and was intended to be read. Marta Straznicky outlines how closet plays are complicated texts: “In appearance they resemble stage plays but were never professionally performed, they are the products of aristocratic leisure but are permeated with the traditions of commercial drama, they are charged with political purpose but their

276 See Straub, Sexual Suspects, chapter 1.

112 reception has no apparent bearing on the exercise of power.”277 We see these dichotomies in Sodom; it resembles stage plays and describes physicality and performance, but its reception history is unknown and drastically different than dramatic texts performed in the commercial theatre. Although my argument about homo-heroic love rests primarily on analyzing and considering the embodiment of characters in the London commercial theatre, I believe that Sodom remains an important text in speaking to contemporary critiques of homo-heroic love. The play describes the physicality between men and the parody suggests that aristocratic readers would also have recognized the homo-heroic love depicted in Dryden’s plays.

In the play, King Bolloxinion outlaws heterosexual sex and encourages the kingdom to engage only in buggery. This leads the women in the play, including Queen

Cuntigratia, to be sexually unsatisfied. After the royal dildo maker cannot make a dildo big enough to please the Queen, she dies sexually frustrated and ignored by her husband.

While Bolloxinion and the men in the kingdom have enjoyed their same-sex encounters, the play ends with God destroying the kingdom after Bolloxinion refuses to give up his beloved sin.

In thinking about Sodom as heroic parody, and more specifically, as a parody of

Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada (1670), scholars have focused on the political satire of Charles II and his court as the primary object of ridicule. Albert Ellis argues that the plot and action of the play should not be taken completely seriously and the play is more about ideas, likening the sexual drives of the characters to those of animals and the court

277 Marta Straznicky. Privacy, Playreading, And Women’s Closet Drama, 1550-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1.

113 of Charles II to a pleasure palace.278 Harold Weber also brings the play’s moral message back to Charles II, arguing that the “erotic apocalypse” the playwright portrays suggests the extent of fears about Charles’ self-indulgent and antic sexual behaviour.279 Jeremy

Webster focuses more on the pornographic elements of the play and argues that Sodom praises libertine values.280

These readings are fundamental to our understanding of the play, but they have the effect of downplaying what I think is the play’s largest locus of critique: the male friendships and the repertoire of friendship. In depicting a King and court obsessed with indulgence, the playwright does take aim at Charles II, but, more generally, he takes fundamental elements of homo-heroic love and burlesques them. The buggery in the play is not only a pornographic taboo-busting element, but also a critique of men who may love each other too much. Although Sodom is a parody of Dryden’s Conquest of

Granada, the play’s humour extends from homo-heroic love elements also found in Lee’s

The Rival Queens and Dryden’s All for Love. This must not be ignored, as the playwright’s choice of homo-heroic love features to satirize demonstrates what audiences would have recognized and found amusing. In addition to targeting Charles II and his court, the play mocks the elements that promoted the monarchy and the male friendships that were much valued.

278 Ellis, “Introduction,” 1961. 279 Harold Weber, “Carolinian Sexuality and the Restoration Stage: Reconstructing the Royal Phallus in Sodom,” in Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theatre, ed. J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne, 67–88 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), argues that the play’s misogyny is a crucial part of an attempt to “reconstruct the monarchy and the patriarchal structures that the king represents” (69). I agree that the play upholds these patriarchal structures, but I depart from Weber’s analysis in highlighting how, when read alongside “homo-heroic” love, the play satirizes male homoerotic relationships in order to privilege heterosexual unions. 280 Webster, Performing Libertinism, 176.

114 In Sodom, the passionate declarations of affiliation, or what I described earlier in this dissertation as examples of the word as bond, are ridiculed through association with sodomy. Whereas Ventidius in All for Love understood the line between so-called appropriate and inappropriate performances of male love, offering “My Emperor; the man I love next heaven: / If I said more, I think ‘twere scarce as sin,” King Bolloxinion and his male courtiers interact with no regard to expectations or regulation.281 When King

Bolloxinion begins looking for male partners, his courtiers take on the task as if it is a royal duty: “I could advise you, Sir, to make a pass / Once more at Loyal Pockenello’s arse.”282 Borastus’s use of “advise” and “loyal” make it seem as if King Bolloxinion is evaluating a soldier, a matter of war, or an issue related to state stability. Pockenello’s response continues the joke, hoping to prove he is “dutiful and kind” and that his “arse /

May still find favour from your Royal Tarse.”283 Despite being entirely about sodomy, their exchange is played as if the characters’ desires to be dutiful and kind are earnest.

Underneath the bawdy jokes are the foundations of patriarchal exchanges and the word as bond. Pockenello’s constant flattery of the King, read without context, could have been lifted entirely from The Rival Queens or All for Love. Hephestion passionately proved his dedication to Alexander by reaffirming his duty to his monarch and friend and accepting that friendship is ordained by heaven. Pockenello’s is similarly about understanding a subject’s duty to their monarch and praising the awe-inspiring qualities of God-granted leadership.

281 Dryden, All for Love, 1.1.277–80. See analysis in chapter 1. 282 Wilmot, Sodom, 60. 283 Wilmot, Sodom, 61.

115 Oh Sir, you honour us too much, As harbingers in to your mighty Lust, It was enough, that us you did intrust: But as from heaven, you can make us blest Tho we’re unworthy, when we have done our best284

Pockenello’s speech is an example of what Hutcheon describes as “repetition with difference”; Pockenello praises his monarch and pledges to serve him, but the play twists the intended result by having this service be sodomy.

To draw attention to the male relationships and parody of homo-heroic love, the play incorporates and makes fun of the use of marriage-like language to describe male friendships. Sodom; or the Quintessence of Debauchery has not been studied for its parody of male heroic relationships, and the use of marital language stands out as one of the biggest links between the parody text and the originals. After picking Pockenello as his sexual partner, King Bolloxinion calls him his mate and considers Pockenello’s ass his “spouse”:

BOLLOXINION. Now Pockenello for a mate I’ll choose His arse shall for a moment be my spouse

POCKENELLO. That spouse shall, mighty Sir, tho it be blind Prove to my Lord, Both dutiful and kind, ‘t Is all I wish, that Pockenello’s Arse May still find favour with your Royal Tarse285

Bolloxinion’s reference to Pockenello as his “mate,” although more causal, is reminiscent of Pierre calling Jaffeir the “honest partner of my heart,” except in this case Pockenello is

284 Wilmot, Sodom, 61. 285 Wilmot, Sodom, 61

116 more the partner of Bolloxinion’s “Royal Tarse.”286 It is also telling that the playwright has the two characters playfully personify Pockenello’s ass as a “spouse,” invoking the language of marriage from previous heroic plays. Antony in All for Love compares his love for Dollabella to that of a groom for his bride, and his excitement at being reunited is like that on their first marriage night.287 Jaffeir and Pierre mimic vows between lovers by reinforcing their love for each other by saying “I do.”288

Part of emphasizing in heroic drama why male friendships are important is the public performance that indicates to others that certain men have strong bonds. In

Bolloxinion and Pockenello’s case, they not only engage in sodomy but also perform the act of being spouses, albeit in an unexpected and bawdy way. In order to highlight the silliness of marital language for male friendship, the playwright divorces the people from the equation and describes a marriage of genitals. It is Pockenello’s ass that will be King

Bolloxinion’s spouse, and Pockenello discusses his own bottom as if he has no control over it. He hopes his bottom, while blind, will be “dutiful and kind” and will still do its duty to the King. The whole exchange is farcical and depends on audiences recognizing homo-heroic love and finding male-male love silly. Sodom critiques homoerotic male relationships by debasing the language of dedication that Dryden and Lee invoked to distinguish male friendship.

286 Wilmot, Sodom, 61. Mate appears more casual, but the OED still defines it as a “friend,” “fellow,” and “companion.” Friend and companion in particular contain similar level of commitment as “partner.” OED Online s.v. “mate, n.2,” accessed June 13, 2018, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/114905?rskey=GCaUxl&result=2&isAdvanced=false. 287 Dryden, All for Love, 3.1.131–36. 288 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 2.2.178–79.

117 Sodom’s critique of male friendship, however, does not mean that the play imagines relationships with women are any better. Sodom is extremely sexist and uses every opportunity available to demean women’s bodies, suggesting, as did homo-heroic love plays, that women and male-male love are in conflict with one another. My reading in part contrasts with Weber’s treatment of the play, where he links Sodom’s patriarchal ideology and misogyny as an affirmation of patriarchal politics that requires annihilating women from the public sphere.289 I agree with Weber’s thesis that the play’s misogyny reaffirms patriarchal politics and degrades women and attempts to exclude them, and yet,

I believe this representation is itself an exaggeration of the homo-heroic love plays that depicted how women must come second to male love. As Hutcheon points out, often parodies are complicit in that which they attempt to subvert, and Sodom clearly reinforces misogynistic behaviour while simultaneously revealing how women are harmed within homo-heroic love.290 Lee’s The Rival Queens, although not as overtly misogynist, demonized women as a justification for glorifying men, and Clytus often voiced his belief that women’s bodies were contaminating and dangerous.291 The prologue for Sodom similarly suggests men are weakened by women’s influence:

Buggery we chose and Buggery we allow For none but fops alone to cunts will bow The wenches parts expos’d at ev’ry door And she that hath a cunt will be a whore292

289 Weber, “Carolinian Sexuality,” 69. 290 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 89–90. 291 In Lee’s The Rival Queens, for example, Clytus’s views. The Rival Queens, 1.1.59–68; 2.362. 292 Wilmot, Sodom, 55.

118 The initial explanation that they will allow buggery makes sense as a form of royal proclamation and is not, necessarily, misogynist. In fact, even for a moment, the royal allowance for male penetration might suggest sexual freedom. The second line that references fops, however, changes any sense that this is a progressive choice and makes the line clearly about masculine power. The playwright achieves this by degrading women as the less desirable sexual partners, calling them “wenches” and “whores” who are “exposed” and freely available, but also by implying that if anyone would degrade himself to have sex with women, it would be a fop. During the period, fops were considered suspicious for their effeminacy, supposed lack of reason, and their allegedly shallow social pursuits and over-the-top outer apparel.293 This dialogue creates two types of men, those who are masculine enough to engage in buggery, and those who are not, and the implication is that women are a central cause and factor in determining that lack of masculinity.

As the men continue to enjoy and benefit from the declaration of buggery, the focus on women’s bodies demonstrates how the play demeans and humiliates them. Since their husbands cannot sexually satisfy them, the women are forced to resort to humiliating means. The women are one-dimensional, and their purpose in the play is to demonstrate the effect of the buggery law. As the names “Cuntigratia,” “Clytoris,” and

“Fuckadilla” make clear, they are defined only in sexual terms and by their female anatomy. Part of that is standard for the play, and the men, “Bolloxinion,”

“Buggeranthos,” and “Pickenello” do not escape it either. The women, however, have no

293 Philip Carter, “Men about Town: Representations of Foppery and Masculinity in Early Eighteenth Century Urban Society,” in Gender in Eighteenth Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, ed. Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (New York: Longman, 1997), 41–42.

119 agency or power in the plot. So while all characters are in some way defined by their genitalia or their sexual abilities, it is an unequal representation.

The degrading treatment the women in the play must endure further intensifies this inequality. In Act Two, Queen Cuntigratia fails to find a dildo big enough to satisfy her and must accept that her desires will go unfulfilled. In contrast, the men’s sexual exploits bring them complete pleasure, which Bolloxinion admits: “Since I have bugger’d human arse, / I find Pintle to Cunt is not so much inclin’d.”294 Cuntigratia, however, cannot even find a dildo big enough: “You do not make it spirt— / You frigg, as if you were afraid to hurt.”295 Cuntigratia’s inability to find a big enough dildo and the fact that she is sexually unsatisfied defines sex as completely phallocentric. Without a penis, real or created, she cannot receive pleasure. This plot requires we recognize that women cannot pleasure themselves, or other women, and that a “real man” is the only thing that will do. The royal dildo maker, Virtuoso, boasts making the best dildo ever: “the copy doth exceed the original.”296 The copy is not a good substitute for the real thing, and when Virtuoso shows Queen Cuntigratia and lady-in-waiting Fuckadilla his penis,

Fuckadilla reinforces the notion that only a real penis will do:

Damn silly dildoes, had I but the bliss Of once enjoying such a Prick as this, I would his will eternally obey And every minute cunt shall tribute pay297

294 Wilmot, Sodom, 91. 295 Wilmot, Sodom, 70. 296 Wilmot, Sodom, 106. 297 Wilmot, Sodom, 106.

120 The inability to find a dildo that will do the job likewise insinuates that the simulated penetration the women attempt is not “real,” so much so that Fuckadilla is willing to

“obey” any penis that can do its job, glorifying men and their anatomy. The dildos cannot approximate a man closely enough, and the women’s sexual desire and appetite is once again reduced to being phallocentric and male dependent.

In order to show how women suffer when men love other men, the play has the characters resort to desperate and grotesque forms of sexual pleasure. In her desperation,

Swivia convinces her teenage brother Pricket to consider having sex with her. She admits not having seen his prick since he was nine, and now he is fifteen, she is excited that he is prepared and able to help her desires: “By h . . . en’s a neat one, now we are alone, I’ll shut the door and you shall see my / thing.”298 His inexperience proves challenging for

Swivia, and Pricket finishes too early, leaving her unsatisfied again: “No Resurrection yet, Prithee let’ feel, / Poor little thing is as cold as steel.”299 Queen Cuntigratia interrupts this session and tries as well, to no avail, to have Pricket satisfy her.

Swivia’s reference to her brother’s youth and sexual attractiveness is uncomfortable and predatory by today’s standards, and the incest of this scene would have been taboo even for Restoration audiences. Jean Marsden illustrates how “as a dramatic convention, incest operates on a symbolic rather than visual level. By violating ancient sexual taboos, incest suggests the disintegration of larger social structures.”300

While the dramatic trope of incest was used more often on women and their bodies,

298 Wilmot, Sodom, 76. 299 Wilmot, Sodom, 82. 300 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 73.

121 Swivia is the aggressor here. As was the case with the dildo scene, the women’s identities are reduced to being located within their vaginas, and they are stripped of even the typical task of reproduction they would usually have been granted. The women’s desperation, resorting to incest even, illustrates how the buggery proclamation has led to a complete disregard of social structures. Through Swivia’s engagement with incest, the playwright depicts how buggery contributes to the destruction of social and moral structures that society depends on.

While all the women suffer because of the buggery law, Queen Cuntigratia is the biggest victim of her husband’s newfound male love, ultimately dying because of a lack of penetrative sex. While others have tried to warn the King, he refuses to listen and indulges even more as he receives forty young boys as a gift: “Come my soft flesh of sodom’s dear delight, / To honoured lust thou art betray’d this night.”301 Soon after, he discovers his inattention has left his Queen dead. Queen Cuntigratia returns from the dead to deliver the epilogue, telling audiences to avoid the actions that left her dead:

You see Gallants, the Effects of Letchery Why will you suffer cunts by hands to die? Curse on the fop, the first devis’d the way Pumping to spend, and frigg the soul away. Can arsehole fire, tho it be fierce and great Infuse more than a cunt’s immortal heat?302

In posing the question to audiences, asking if they want women to die and if sodomy can really rival vaginal penetration, Queen Cuntigratia delivers the moral of the play. Of course, the audience does not want that, especially not if the suspect Fop leads the way.

301 Wilmot, Sodom, 102. 302 Wilmot, Sodom, 117.

122 In the end, sodomy kills the Queen, and the only way to have saved her is to supply traditional heterosexual sex. As she notes in the final lines of her epilogue: “Then foot not nature with your silly hand, / But come to us, whene’er your Pricks do stand.”303 Male love and sodomy are positioned as the enemy to women, their sexual desires, and their health. Given how misogynist the play is in its treatment of women, this turn towards heterosexuality is not an attempt to advocate for women; rather it is a reaffirmation of male heterosexuality.

Sodom takes the suffering female victim of the heroic play and makes the depiction even more absurd. Queen Cuntigratia’s tragic ending mirrors the endings of many of the heroic plays, in which women were configured as the enemies of male friendship. In Otway’s Venice Preserv’d, Belvidera’s subjugation and treatment by the men allow her to be the passive victim, bravely forging on against harsh and unfair treatment. Belvidera’s passive body symbolizes how women must be commodified and eliminated as a threat to patriarchal relations. Queen Cuntigratia’s treatment reinforces the same point. In this parody, Queen Cuntigratia is not as passive as Belvidera; she actively attempts to change her fate and goes outside her marriage to try to find sexual satisfaction. In Queen Cuntigratia being unable to find a sexual substitute for men’s penises and dying completely unfulfilled, the play parodies passive and suffering female victims. Queen Cuntigratia is without a doubt a suffering woman, but instead of being subjugated by her husband in the name of male friendship and state stability, she is passed over in favour of sodomy. She does not endure scenes of having her husband flip- flop between personal desire and duty; rather, all she needs is someone to penetrate her.

303 Wilmot, Sodom, 118.

123 The ridiculousness of dying of lack of sex is positioned alongside the trope of female suffering, and through the comparison, female hardship is made to seem even more absurd. This parody of the woman in distress also comments on how male friendship requires the harmful domination and control of women.

An essential element of most heroic tragedies is the inability to decide between public and private affairs, and while King Bolloxinion does not find the choice between the two as fraught as characters in other plays, the play ends in chaos with him making the wrong choice. While Alexander, Antony, and Jaffeir realize they should have cared more about their male friendships than their female companions, the realization comes too late. Male friendships and patriarchal power structures provide societal stability, while women create trouble. The playwright of Sodom inverts that expectation by ending the play advocating for heterosexual behaviour: women are not the cause of trouble, the men are. Crucially though, part of this narrative still pinpoints King Bolloxinion’s poor judgment as a major cause, as did Lee and Otway’s plays. Even with evidence that “he . .

. n doth all these grievous pains inflict,” Bolloxinion refuses to stop buggery, accepting he has let heaven destroy his nation: “Let heaven descend, and set the world on fire— / we to some darker cavern will retire.”304 The “we” Bolloxinion refers to includes a beautiful boy that he is dedicated to sodomizing. His male-male love is legitimately the cause of the destruction of his kingdom. Bad judgment and women may have sunk

Alexander and Jaffeir’s plans, but the playwright reconfigures the plot to blame bad judgment and men for this downfall. Male love is not the stable option, heterosexual love

304 Wilmot, Sodom, 116.

124 is.305 Men are still expected to understand how society must function, except instead of realizing male bonds are the key, the characters fail to realize heterosexual relationships are.

Meaningless Gestures and Comedic Drag in Colley Cibber’s The Rival Queans (1710)

Colley Cibber’s The Rival Queans, likely written in the 1690s, but not performed until June 1710, aims to deflate the grandness of the original while highlighting the silliness of heroic aims.306 The play follows Lee’s plot closely but swaps the exotic East for the low and common contemporary London streets. Statira and Roxana are transformed into prostitutes, while Alexander and his men are flighty fops whose obsession with snuff and booze is in clear contrast to Lee’s stately men of politics and business.307 As was the case with Sodom, much of the humour of Cibber’s play relies on the intertexuality of comparing the new slightly altered version with the old well-known play.308 This intertexuality suggests that homo-heroic love plays were prominent for some time in Restoration and eighteenth-century culture. Cibber does not risk his audience

305 Weber, “Corolinean Sexuality,” 83–84. I agree with Weber on how the play promotes maleness and heterosexual love, but I disagree about the level at which male love is erotized and used: “For all of its rhetorical celebration of buggery, the play cannot eroticize the sexual relationship of men, reveling instead in a conventional heterosexuality that possesses all the predictability of a pornographic movie.” 306 The original cast was as follows: Cibber as Alexander, Estcourt as Clytus, Bullock Sr. as Roxanna, and Bullock Jr as Statira. Emmett L. Avery, ed., The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part 2, 1700–1729 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960), 226. 307 While the first recorded performance was in 1710, there is textual evidence to suggest a written date of the late 1690s. Latin expressions appear in The Rival Queans and in Cibber’s early Love’s Last Shift (1696) and Love Makes a Man (1700), and as Viator and Burling contend, many of Cibber’s successes were between 1696 and 1700. See Timothy Viator and William Burling, The Plays of Colley Cibber (London: Associated University Press, 2001), 421. 308 This would not have been hard for audiences since The Rival Queens remained popular in rival stagings and was performed three times in the 1708–1709 seasons and once again in July 1710, just one month after Cibber’s Rival Queans premiered. Avery, The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part 2, 226.

125 being completely out of the loop, however, and to ensure the audiences laughed even without knowledge of the original, he had the female roles played by men in drag. This choice has significant ramifications for the play’s performance of gender and sexuality, which I will discuss in more depth later, but the final result is a play which functions both as heroic parody and as bawdy comedy. While scholars have analyzed the play as heroic parody and discussed its depiction of foppish fun, Cibber’s treatment of the homosocial and homoerotic male relationships has yet to receive attention.309 The Rival Queans, like

Sodom, suggests a certain level of recognition of the heroic genre’s attempts to use male forms of love to promote patriarchal state power. Not only are the men portrayed as effeminate fops, but Lee’s already passionate language is exaggerated to the point of complete ridicule. If heroic plays proposed male love as the answer to social, political instability and dangerous women, Cibber purposely shows the silliness of this ideology, bankrupting male love’s success as propaganda.

When Alexander makes his first appearance in Lee’s play, he proclaims love to his male friends in a way that I have argued displays the patriarchal framework of the play. Cibber keeps the same scene almost line for line but exaggerates the proclamations and the men’s gestures in a way that makes them look silly and effeminate, not masculine and devoted. Lee’s Alexander states his love for Hephestion but uses their hug has a performance of social and political devotion within the network of signs of friendship and alliances:

309 For discussions of heroic parody and foppery, see Cheryl Wanko, “Colley Cibber’s The Rival Queans: A New Consideration,” Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research 3, no. 2 (Winter 1988): 38–52. For discussion of gender and actresses, see Nussbaum, Rival Queens and Vivian L. Davis, “A Comedian on Tragedy: Colley Cibber’s Apology and The Rival Queans,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 26, no. 4 (Summer 2014), 553.

126 Rise all, and though my second self, my Love; O my Hephestion, raise thee from the earth Up to my Breast, and hide thee in my Heart, Art though grown Cold? why hang thine Arms at distance? Hugg me, or else by Heaven thou lov’st me not.310

The hug Alexander demands is not a personal gesture, but a public one that the other men recognize as part of their network of friendship. Hephestion must publicly and without reservation show his devotion and in extension, reaffirm his patriarchal pledge to his leader and his friend. Cibber takes the network of gestures and the performance of friendship and transforms both into an excessive display of romantic physical love:

O my Hephestion, raise thee on thy legs, Up to my lips, and jump into my mouth, Why hang thy arms so like a changeling! Kiss me, or else by heaven thou lov’st me not.311

The dialogue follows Lee’s original, but Cibber’s alterations dramatically alter the effect.

In taking out the references to Alexander’s “second self” and his “heart,” Cibber eliminates the idea that the two men have an attachment to each other. Instead of a political show of allegiance, or a display of heartwarming piety, the dialogue is bawdy in its physicality. The simple hug is reconstructed as a suggestive kiss, and in asking

Hephestion to “jump into my mouth,” Alexander displays not only a strong homoerotic

310 Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.97–101. 311 Colley Cibber, The Rival Queans, in The Plays of Colley Cibber, ed. Timothy Viator and William Burling (London: Associated University Press, 2001), 43–48.

127 passion, but an energetic bawdiness that is in opposition to the earnest declarations of love in Lee’s original.312

Cibber further attacks the noble depiction of male love by making male bonds seem unimportant, limited, and common. Friendship in Lee’s play is not common, and he describes “fond friendship” and the “sacred flame” as heavenly and not often found on earth.313 In comparing friendship to something that “I must doubt to find in Breasts above,” Lee constructs their bond as significant, untouchable, and extraordinary.314

Cibber’s take on male friendship is distinctly quotidian:

HEPHESTION. So fond of fooling, such a swealing flame, As I must doubt to find in lamps of oil

HEPHESTION. I read thy passion in thy manly eyes, And glory in those planets of my life, Above the glaring lights that shine to Kensington315

In calling their friendship “fooling,” Cibber begins by trivializing the relationship as something humorous or at least not to be taken seriously. Moreover, the “swealing flame,” changed from a “sacred flame” suggests something small or modest, or as the

OED proposes, a flame that is guttering and about to go out.316 Cibber finishes this sad image by invoking an oil lamp, an everyday object that has none of the awesome qualities

312 Lee’s Mithridates may have been a model for this language of eating and consuming. After being welcomed back to his father’s graces (“Come to my Breast once more, my dearest Son / . . . Thus, with a Father’s bowels, I receive thee.”), Ziphares proclaims, “Let me devour your hands with filial dearness” (2.1.323–25, 331). 313 Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.106. 314 Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.107. 315 Cibber, Rival Queans, 2.90–98. 316 OED Online, s.v. “ˈswealing | ˈswaling, adj.,” accessed February 3, 2017, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/195604?rskey=J0qgIf&result=3&isAdvanced=false.

128 of the stars or heaven. Cibber repeats this tactic, taking Lee’s grand statement that

Hephestion’s passion and glory sit “above the Rival Lights that shine in Heaven,” and comparing it alternatively to the “lights that shine to Kensington.” In citing a newly developed part of London about three miles or so from the original city walls, Cibber makes clear that this friendship’s span does not go very far.317

Alongside diminishing the importance of friendship through the characters’ dialogue, Cibber exaggerates the gestures that make up the repertoire of friendship, increasing their frequency to the point that they become essentially meaningless. Lee’s

Alexander hugs Hephestion to demonstrate their kinship and offers his hand to Clytus to make the same point: “Hugg me, or else by Heaven thou lov’st me not.”318 Cibber’s

Alexander takes these gestures of friendship and repeats them so often they become excessive, bankrupting their meaning. As previously discussed, Alexander does not hug

Hephestion in Cibber’s version, but offers two bawdy kisses: “Kiss me dear rogue, thou dost, / I know Thou lov’st me more, than Clytus does a beau.”319 Alexander further takes both Hephestion and Clytus’s hands, holding them while he praises his friends, and

317 John Bowack states in The Antiquities of Middlesex: “This town standing in wholesome Air, not above Three Miles from London, has ever been resorted to by Persons of Quality, and Citizenz. . . . Since which time it has Flourish’d even beyond Belief, and is Inhabited by Gentry and Persons of Note: there is also abundance of Shop-Keepers, and all sorts of Artificers in it, which makes it appear rather like part of London, than a Country Village” (20). Bowack, John. The antiquities of Middlesex; being a collection of the several church monuments in that county: also an historical account of each church and parish; with The Seats, Villages, and Names of the most Eminent Inhabitants, &c. Part I. Beginning with Chelsea and Kensington. Now in the Press, part II. Will Contain the Parishes of Fulham, Hammersmith, Chiswick, and Acton. Printed by W. Redmayne for S. Keble at the Great Turk’s-Head in Fleetstreet, D. Browne at the Black Swan and Bible without Temple-Bar, A. Roper at the Black Boy in Fleetstreet, R. Smith at the Angel and Bible without Temple-Bar, and F. Coggan in the Inner-Temple-Lane, MDCCV. [1705]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online, accessed February 1, 2017, find.galegroup.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&docLevel=FASCIMILE&prodId=E CCO&userGroupName=sfu_z39&tabID=T001&docId=CW3302665390&type=multipage&contentSet=EC COArticles&version=1.0. 318 See chapter 1 for more analysis of this moment. Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.101. 319 Cibber, Rival Queans, 1.2.56–57.

129 eventually offers even more kisses: “come buss me both and let me hug you close” and

“Kiss me dear rogues, my heart, my lungs, and guts are ever yours.”320 The Oxford

English Dictionary describes “buss” as a kiss that is vigorous or loud, reinforcing my previous analysis that the kisses are excessive and made slightly vulgar. The act is exaggerated to the point that any notion of devotion is gone and what is left is an over the top gesture, accompanied by the rude noise of them smacking their lips. It is performative, not in that it is a sign that reinforces a network of friendship, but rather because it is meant to be gross and the subject of the audience’s laughter. Alexander’s other call for kisses is accompanied by his dramatic assertion that he will give his heart, his lungs, and his guts, drawing on the physiological to highlight how Lee’s proclamations of affection are silly statements with no possibility for practical adherence.

Any lingering associations from Lee’s use of gestures to symbolize male kinship networks and the repertoire they were a part of are made silly in Cibber’s play. The kisses become so common they symbolize nothing but a sloppy smacking of lips, and their pairing alongside hyperbolic declarations of love make them appear even less significant.

In one of the pivotal moments of Lee’s Rival Queens, Alexander fights with

Clytus and kills him, representing his failure to understand the importance of patriarchal politics. Alexander realizes he has betrayed his male friends and will be excluded from the network of male bonding. Cibber’s interpretation of this scene maintains the basic plot elements, but once again trivializes the situation and makes it appear absurd.

Clytus’s moralizing attack slanders Alexander for being distracted by his women and degrades his masculinity by saying that while his father fought men, Alexander wastes

320 OED Online, s.v. “buss, n.2,” accessed February 3, 2017, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/25257?rskey=8BVhri&result=2.

130 his time fighting women. Here, Clytus contends that “Tommy kicked men, but Alexander whores,” lowering the honourable war-like conquests to the base act of kicking a man.321

Even Alexander’s wives, the supposed distractions, are belittled. They are not called his wives or his lovers but instead are called “whores,” a term which suggests they should be treated with very little respect and are not worth the amount of attention they have already been given. Whereas the Lee original is dramatic and ends with Alexander murdering Clytus by stabbing him with a javelin, Cibber’s version reads more like a barroom brawl right out of a modern-day sitcom or a Henry Fielding novel: Alexander comically and melodramatically “throws drink in his face” and ends up killing his best friend by running “a mop in his face,” a domestic item and potentially feminized weapon not usually known for being fatal.322 Clytus’s dying speech, “But you have mauled me, and so it’s as well as it is—goodbye to ye-” relies on the contrast between the word

“mauled” and the image of the mop and surely would have had audiences laughing at the juxtaposition between his dramatic final goodbyes and the everyday cleaning item that brought about his doom.323 The parody takes a scene that originally illustrates the significance of homosociality and the dangers of ignoring male relationships and turns it into a superficial showpiece of slapstick comedy.

The scene does not end there; it builds to a comedic climax rife with sexual innuendo. Alexander’s dialogue reflects the marriage language of All for Love, The Rival

Queens, and Venice Preserv’d but skillfully negotiates giving it any symbolic power. It is the same technique used earlier in the play, where the high and aspirational lines of

321 Cibber, Rival Queans, 4.2.243. 322 Cibber, Rival Queans, 4.2.268–69, 299–300. 323 Cibber, Rival Queans, 4.2.312–13.

131 dialogue are deflated and bankrupted of their meaning by the low and bawdy ones that come after:

None dare to touch him, For we must never part. Here will I lie, Close by his bleeding side, thus kissing him, These black furred lips, that have so often joked with me Thus clasping his cold body in my arms, ‘Till death like him has made me stiff and staring324

Alexander’s order that none can touch the dead body implies ownership over Clytus and when read alongside “for we must never part,” it is almost as if their bodies are reserved for each other like a married couple. The implied stage direction that has Alexander lying down next to Clytus is also initially an image of love and devotion, like a couple wrapped in each other’s arms. The image is ruined, however, by suggesting that Alexander must lie in his friend’s blood and snuggle up on his injured side. We also have another kiss, which I have described up to this point as having been employed mostly as a comedic technique, and here it is no different. This is not a soft romantic kiss, but one that is bound to cause the audience to laugh in thinking about kissing Clytus’s moustache, or as he calls it: “these black furred lips.” Finally, the image of the two men embracing until death makes them “stiff” is overlade with clear sexual innuendo. In mixing the serious with the comedic, the text takes what the heroic attempts to bolster and make serious and turns it into an opportunity for ridicule and laughter.

The choice of having the female characters played by men in drag is also part of the overall task of undercutting the genre’s aspirational and serious aims. Since actresses

324 Cibber, Rival Queans, 4.2.322–28.

132 could legally perform on stage since 1660, roles where men played women were rare, especially after a 1662 patent that outlawed men in the habit of women.325 While Edward

Kynaston remained known for his female roles and had some overlap in playing female and male roles between 1600 and 1662, the draw and popularity of actresses became a significant component of the newly renewed theatre culture.326 In fact, Cibber, in his

Apology, praises actresses and their bodies for creating new theatrical possibilities and drawing in more audiences:

The other Advantage I was speaking of is, that before the Restoration no Actresses had ever been seen upon the English Stage. The Characters of Women on former Theatres were perform’d by Boys, or young Men of the most effeminate Aspect. And what Grace or Master-strokes of Action can we conceive such ungain Hoydens to have been capable of? This Defect was so well considered by Shakespear that in few of his Plays he has any greater Depen-dance upon the Ladies than in the Innocence and Simplicity of a Desdemona, an Ophelia, or in the short Specimen of a fond and virtuous Portia. The additional Objects then of real, beautiful Women could not but draw a Proportion of new Admirers to the Theatre.327

Cibber’s remarks illustrate how successful actresses were, in his opinion, in interpreting dramatic texts and using their physical performances to entice audiences. In contrast, the boy players are described as boorish and inelegant, “hoydens” that even Shakespeare understood limited the dramatic power of his plays. It is telling how Cibber refers to

325 Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660–1737 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 32–34. Also quoted in Howe, The First English Actresses, 25. 326 Howe, The First English Actresses, 25. 327 Colley Cibber, An apology for the life of Mr. Colley Cibber, comedian, And Late Patenter of the Theatre-Royal. With an Historical View of the Stage during his Own Time. Written by himself, ed. Robert W. Lowe (London: AMS Press, 1966), 90–91.

133 actresses as “objects then of real, beautiful women,” detailing their bodies and their beauty as part of their success.328

Cibber’s remarks reinforce that the choice of having men in drag for The Rival

Queans was a comedic choice, not a progressive example of gender fluidity. In revivals of Lee’s tragedy, the battling Statira and Roxana, played with acclaim by Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle, helped make the play a success.329 In particular, Elizabeth Barry as Roxana is detailed as having brought audiences to tears in sympathy even after her character just moments earlier brutally murdered Statira. Edmund Curll reports:

I cannot conlude without taking notice that tho’ before our Eyes we had just seen Roxana with such Malice murder an innocent Person, because better beloved than herself; yet, after Statira is dead, and Roxana is following Alexander on her knees, Mrs. Barry made this Complaint in so Pathetic a Manner, as drew Tears from the Great Part of the Audience.330

The accounts of Barry and Bracegirdle’s skill alongside Cibber’s acknowledgement that actresses held impressive performative power make an even larger contrast between

Lee’s original and Cibber’s parody. The choice to use actors in drag indicates that the play will make no similar attempt at pathetic power and will focus on the comic incongruity between the visibly male body and the performative female character.

329 Howe, The First English Actresses, 157. 330 Thomas Betterton, The history of the English stage, from the Restoration to the Present Time. Including the Lives, Characters and Amours, Of the most Eminent Actors and Actresses. With Instructions for Public Speaking; wherein The Action and Utterance of the Bar, Stage, and Pulpit are Distinctly considered. By Mr. Thomas Betterton. Adorned with Cuts. London: printed for E. Curll, at Pope’s-Head in Rose-Street, Covent-Garden, 1741. Eighteenth Century Collections Online, accessed May 14, 2018, http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&docLevel=FASCIMILE&prod Id=ECCO&userGroupName=sfu_z39&tabID=T001&docId=CW3316537038&type=multipage&contentSe t=ECCOArticles&version=1.0. 22–23. Also cited in Howe, The First English Actresses, 157–58.

134 Contemporary scholarship on gender and drag helps demonstrate how Cibber’s play uses the comic drag performance to insult women and degrade homo-heroic love. In her discussions of drag, Judith Butler expands her theory of gender performativity—the belief that gender is constituted through a stylized repetition of acts—to argue that drag showcases that very performativity. Butler contends that if gender is a fabrication, and there is no true inner gender that guides the body’s physical expressions, then drag mocks that system. The ease with which men could perform as women, or women as men, highlights how gender is a performative act. As Esther Newton argues, drag “is a double inversion that says appearance is an illusion . . . my outside appearance is feminine, but my essence ‘inside’ [the body] is masculine. At the same time it symbolizes the opposite inversion; ‘my appearance ‘outside’ [my body, my gender] is masculine but my essence

‘inside’ [myself] is feminine.”331 The incongruity between physical presentation, physical body, and interior essence is why scholars view drag as representing a type of gender fluidity. Discussing cross-dressing, Marjorie Garber argues that drag questions categories like “male” and “female,” putting into question the binary of sex and gender.332 While cross-dressing and drag can demonstrate a type of gender fluidity, Cibber’s men in drag do not blur gender lines as much as they reinforce them. In her discussions of the film

Paris is Burning (1990), bell hooks highlights how drag can encourage gender stereotypes and work to sustain misogyny.333 hooks’ argument about drag in the film is specifically about the intersection of race, sexuality, and class, but her overall point is

331 Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 103. 332 Marjorie B. Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 10. 333 bell hooks. Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 146–47.

135 applicable to Cibber’s treatment of drag. hooks argues that when black comedians use drag as part of their acts, the female characters they perform are held up as objects of ridicule, scorn, and hatred.334

In Cibber’s The Rival Queens, women are similarly constructed as stereotypes that invite audiences and readers to laugh and delight in the misogynistic portrayal. My argument contrasts Vivian L. Davis’s recent reading of the play, where she argues that

Cibber utilizes the drag performances to undermine existing notions of gender, finding pleasure and humour in the breakdown of gender binaries and hierarchies: “In Cibber’s production, generic hybridity calls attention to itself as such, as does the play’s gender confusion, in order to create an atmosphere of bawdy merriment that the actors play for laughs.”335 In her reading of the drag performances, Nussbaum argues that Cibber attempts to remove women from the play completely, which paradoxically reinforces their importance. This absence, according to Nussbaum, would have been felt by audiences who knew the popularity of the original actresses and the star power they brought to their roles.336 While drag certainly allows for gender fluidly and I am convinced by Nussbaum’s analysis that audiences would have felt the absence of the famous original actresses, I maintain that Cibber’s play is less interested in pushing against the boundaries of gender and more in using existing stereotypes for comedic potential. Statira and Roxana are played for laughs, much of which extends from audiences recognizing the supposed hilarity of viewing masculine actors pretend they are feminine women.

334 hooks, Black Looks, 146. 335 Davis, “A Comedian on Tragedy,” 553. 336 Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 84–85.

136 This comic incongruity is on full display when Statira and Roxana argue over

Alexander’s love, with both throwing insults intended for audience delight and laughter.

Each insult uses unfeminine descriptors and encourages audiences to compare the male body against the imagined female one. Roxana calls Statira “hatchet face,” invoking the masculine weapon to degrade her supposedly thin and ragged face, before calling attention to her swine-like body and gruff voice.337 Statira retaliates by insulting

Roxana’s “lantern jaws,” all while Roxana admits she has “mutton fists.”338 These descriptors are intended to be amusing both because the two women are fighting in a low and bawdy way and because the insults make reference to their masculine features. A

“lantern jaw” implies thick and heavy features, while “mutton fists” are large, manly hands. The insults stand in as signal moments that force audiences to confront the dissonance between the male actors’ masculine features and the characters’ feminine costumes and appearances. The result is comic and alters our understanding of Lee’s original: by burlesquing the two female characters that made the play so popular, the drag performances use misogyny and exaggeration to degrade the characters. Felicity

Nussbaum asserts the same point, saying that any sympathy the female characters could have received is bankrupted by the drag performances.339 The performances further reinforce feminine gender standards by making it funny that a woman could be anything other than beautiful and feminine. When Roxana recounts her childhood, sensually talking about playing “girlish games of man and wife,” the male actor dressed as a woman is centred as an object of comic lust and sexual desire. This comedic choice is

337 Cibber, Rival Queans, 3.76–79. 338 Cibber, Rival Queans, 3.121, 3.84. 339 Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 81–85.

137 confirmed by Roxana’s male co-conspirator, who in awe proclaims, “her look, her words, her every motion fires me.” In beginning his line by pointing to her looks, he too encourages audiences once again to laugh at how absurd it would be that this manly woman would “fire” anyone up.

These drag performances further connect Cibber’s The Rival Queans to Sodom, in that both plays use male relationships and homophobia as the butt of the joke, essentially ridiculing the original plays for their empowerment of the homoerotic. Sodom used sodomy and the image of men having sex to make its point; Cibber’s parody uses the drag performances. Whereas early seventeenth-century boy players were highly skilled and, as Elizabeth Howe demonstrates, were believed and admired by audiences in their female roles, it was no longer the case in 1710 for The Rival Queans premiere,340 especially since, as I have illustrated, much of the play’s humour depends on actively not believing the theatrical fiction that they are women. The result is that even when men proclaim love to women on stage, the audience sees men proclaiming love to other men; this is a clear spectacle of male homoerotic desire. Take for example Roxana’s description of her first sexual encounter with Alexander, which unsurprisingly depends again on comic sexuality:

What said he not, when on the couch i’th’dark, He clasped my yielding body in his arms And offered me a guinea to be his? Then talked, and kissed, and swore and lied341

340 Howe, The First English Actresses, 20. 341 Cibber, Rival Queans, 3.41–44.

138 She suggestively encourages audiences to imagine herself, a performer in drag, and

Alexander holding each other and kissing. The reference to being paid is a reminder of her prostitute status and a marker for them having had sex. The humour from Roxana’s speech, like Cassander’s earlier line that Roxana’s every motion turns him on, stems from recognizing these moments as homoerotic and homophobic spectacle. The play is written and performed so that audiences laugh at the prospect of two men having sex or showing affection.

This homophobic spectacle appears even more dramatically in the scene where

Alexander and Statira reunite, teasing audiences with a “will they, won’t they?” dynamic that relies on once again finding the idea that men could love other men hilarious. The dialogue is hyperbolically sexualized, and the comic dissonance between male performer and female character is on full display:

STATIRA. O I could beg my bread with you, kiss me, nussel Squeeze me, rogue, till I’m black in the face

ALEXANDER. O thou dear teasing toad! This night I will revenge me on thy body! Thou shalt not sleep nor close thy eyes, The idle hours shall all be joked away; We’ll play the fool all night, and do the same all day342

The two characters build on each other’s descriptions of what they want to do to each other, beginning with Statira’s “kisses” and nuzzling, ending with Alexander’s offer to sexually “revenge” himself on her body. While the two characters up their dirty talk game, and by extension force audiences to imagine the two having sex, they also build the anticipation of what the performers might have to do to make this funny and

342 Cibber, Rival Queans, 3.221–28.

139 convincing. Will they hug when Statira offers to “ramp into his arms” or calls for him to squeeze “till I’m black in the face?”343 Even more controversially, will they bring their bodies in close and potentially kiss? Due to lack of stage directions, it is impossible to know, but regardless of what the actors did during this scene, the humour of having the two characters talk in such a passionate way relies on the tease that the performers could, at any time, break expected sexual norms and kiss and touch in ways not accepted for men. This is not, however, a progressive moment of gender confusion or fluidity. The humour of the “will they, won’t they” tease is dependent on a homophobic reaction that it is hilarious and potentially objectionable that men interact sexually.

Historical records about the cast of the original June 1710 production potentially disprove that the play’s drag was a progressive take on gender fluidity and give us an indication of how the play’s drag performances may have worked. Christopher Bullock, billed as “Bullock Jun,” originally played Statira.344 He is described as quite tall, and he was known for being able to employ a comedic voice that exhibited a “shrillness of tone.”345 In the scenes where Statira is romantic with Alexander, it is easy to imagine the comic possibilities of his height and how it worked to highlight his male body.

Furthermore, the shrillness of his voice could have been used to great effect to reduce

Statira to a comic female stereotype.

Interestingly, Bullock Jun also portrayed Hephestion just one month later in the

July 10, 1710 revival staging of Lee’s The Rival Queens, meaning that audiences

343 Cibber, Rival Queans, 3.219, 223. 344 “Jun” appears in the original listing to refer to Junior. Avery, The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part 2, 226. 345 London Chronicle, December 9, 1758, 567, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015014656485.

140 witnessed Bullock Jun perform as Statira, romantically teasing Alexander in Cibber’s parody, before becoming the object of Alexander’s homoerotic proclamations as

Hephestion. In the summer of 1710, Lee’s original and Cibber’s parody became “linked plays” with a casting pattern that shaped audiences’ expectations and reception of both works.346 That audiences could have watched Bullock perform erotic and romantic scenes as two characters back to back reinforces my argument that the erotics of Lee’s original were not lost on audiences, and that Cibber’s parody exposed and capitalized on that awareness.347

William Bullock, Christopher Bullock’s father, played Roxana, and the Spectator of April 20, 1711, and November 6, 1712, both suggest some of William’s comedic charms stemmed from his height as well.348 His trademark appears to have been playing the clown, and in the Tatler of April 25, 1709, Steel remarked that “Mr. Bullock, who, though he is a person of much wit and ingenuity, has a peculiar talent of looking like a

346 The term “linked plays” comes from Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action, 69. 347 Another factor that may have influenced audiences’ reception of this play was the emergence of Mollies, the London men that made up what Rictor Norton calls the first gay subculture. Norton describes that molly houses—taverns and private homes where homosexual men gathered to drink, dance, and have sex— became more popular after 1700. In 1707, two publications brought the molly house into public view: John Dunton’s The He-Strumpets: A Satyr on the Sodomite Club and the broadside The Women Hater’s Lamentation. Both texts depict homosexual activity as shameful and suggest that when caught, Mollies cut their throats or hang themselves out of shame. Soon after the publications of The He-Strumpets and The Women’s Hater’s Lamentation, Ned Ward published The History of London Clubs (1709), where he says mollies “are so far degenerated from all Masculine Deportment that they rather fancy themselves Women, imitating all the little Vanities that Custom has reconcil’d to the Female Sex, affecting to speak, walk, talk, curtsy, cry, scold, & mimic all manner of Effeminacy.” The degree to which audiences would have been aware of the molly subculture is impossible to ascertain; however, their activities were published and remarked on, and many of men’s trials and subsequent executions were public. It is possible that when Cibber’s The Rival Queans premiered in 1710, audiences were more suspicious of male-male love and men in drag because of what they heard about molly culture. See Rictor Norton. Mother Clap’s Molly House, 50–51, 97. 348 Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 410.

141 fool.”349 In 1709, William Bullock was forty-two and would have been competing for

Alexander’s heart as Roxana against his nineteen-year-old son’s portrayal of Statira. The two actors’ height and the notes about their individual comedic tools allow us to imagine, in conjunction with the text, how they may have performed these roles. The resulting suggestion is that their physicality and comedic specialties would have augmented the humorous dissonance I have already discussed and played into existing gender stereotypes.

In using male drag performers, reversing the norm of having women perform female roles, Cibber makes his final and strongest critique of Lee and Dryden’s heroic plays. While Lee’s Alexander ends tragically, didactically championing male friendship and patriarchal culture as the source of political and social stability and power, Cibber’s parody finds no such glory in male-male relationships. Line by line, he utilizes similarly homoerotic language but robs the proclamations of their power by exaggerating them to the point of silliness. He keeps the same gestures of love—hand-holding, hugs, and kisses—but repeats them so often and performs them with such vulgarity that they become meaningless signs, divorced from the public network of friendship that Lee uses in his original play. Finally, much of the comedy of Cibber’s lampoon comes from the comic incongruity of male performers playing female characters. The play reinforces gender stereotypes by making audiences laugh at how clearly ugly and masculine the women are and uses the understanding that men are in drag to criticize the heroic mode’s admiration of male love. By having men announce and perform their love to men in

349 Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, Tatler & Guardian, 1831, 347.

142 female apparel, the play makes a mockery of male forms of love and finds humour in the idea that men could have loved each other as heterosexual couples do.

143 Chapter 4.

She-Tragedy and the Decline of Homo-Heroic Love

My discussions of The Rival Queens (1678), All for Love (1677), and Venice

Preserv’d (1682) demonstrate that queer affection was an integral part of the homosocial relationships depicted on stage. In questioning why, while it was deemed suspicious in other realms of society, male-male love was promoted on the London Restoration stage, I argue that the tragedies of Lee, Dryden, and Otway and the parodies of the unknown playwright and Cibber demonstrate that the heroic mode used homoerotic love to reinforce male supremacy. While newly written heroic dramas and revivals of previously popular dramatic works remained on stage throughout the 1680s, many dramatists’ new tragedies had more of a female focus. She-tragedies, as the title implies, were tragedies that focused on the extended suffering of a main female character. In most cases, the violence used against the female characters was rape or other forms of sexual violence and, as Jean Marsden has argued, relied on a voyeuristic relationship between audience and actress.350 She-tragedies, while undeniably produced under patriarchal and sexist conditions, and at times complicit in both, also offer extended scenes of female suffering that make visible how women are victimized under male control. These scenes are not entirely dissimilar from the earlier depictions of female suffering (Statira and Belvidera come to mind), except with one major difference: homo-heroic love is rarely depicted in she-tragedies, and women do not suffer because of male love, but because of patriarchal forces in general.

350 Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Marsden demonstrates how she- tragedies develop a male gaze that transforms women into desired objects. Marsden, Fatal Desire, 7–9.

144 Comparing heroic drama’s and she-tragedies’ treatment of the homosocial is productive for this chapter because it marks a shift in the sexual politics of Restoration tragedy. Notably, she-tragedies do not upend the homosocial, but they do the homoerotic.

Men continue to dominate and subjugate women, but masculine power is redefined around normative heterosexuality. Edward Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia (1678) and William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride (1697) share features with heroic drama, but male friendships are no longer the driving force of these tragedies.

Edward Ravenscroft’s redux of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus does not depart drastically from the 1594 tragedy. Ravenscroft modeled his version after the original and much of dialogue remains the same.351 What makes Titus Andronicus or the Rape of the

Lavinia a useful text for this dissertation is how Ravenscroft augments Lavinia’s role, transforming her into an early she-tragedy victim.352 While Ravenscroft maintains much of Shakespeare’s dialogue, his addition of stage directions and dialogue that highlights

Lavinia’s body signals an interest in depicting the power of female suffering.353 The play contains a homosocial dynamic between brothers Chiron and Demetrius as they fight

351 Barbara A. Murray, explains how Ravenscroft rearranges and renumbers many of the early scenes, but keeps most of Shakespeare’s dialogue. The final act is where Ravenscroft adapts the most; Aron murders the nurse looking after his child, Junius traps Chiron and Demetrius with gold, and the final banquet scene is made more gruesome (Tamora stabs her and Aron’s baby and threatens to eat it and Aron is burned alive onstage). Shakespeare Adaptations from the Restoration.(Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), xxxi. 352 The premiere date of Ravenscroft’s adaptation is also an important factor here. The play appears in 1678, during the early months of the Popish Plot. In his address to “To the Reader,” Ravenscroft articulates why Shakespeare’s play was relevant to his current moment; the play “shewed the Treachery of Villains, and the Mischiefs carry’d on by Purjury, and false Evidence; and how Rogues may frame a Plot that shall deceive and destroy both the Honest and the Wise.” Shakespeare Adaptations from The Restoration, 5. As I argue throughout this chapter, this tragedy depicts the breakdown of homo-heroic love and the word the bond. Ravenscroft’s “To the Reader” appears to support this claim, as his interest during this politically tense moment was to show the dangers of treachery. He borrows Shakespeare’s words and makes them relevant to the mid-Restoration political climate. 353 Barbara Murray argues this point as well, noting that many of Ravenscroft’s alterations are stage directions and moments that highlight the characters’ bodies. Shakespeare Adaptations from The Restoration, xxxv.

145 over Lavinia, but their relationship does not adhere to any of the defining features of homo-heroic love. In fact, the ideals of homo-heroic love—constancy to male friends and belief in the word as bond—are shown as ineffectual. Bassianus best represents this older style of patriarchal relationships but fails to gain power, while his brother Saturninus ignores homo-heroic ideals in favour of violence. In a notable turn away from the physicality of male friendship, Titus Andronicus locates the pathetic power of the tragedy in Lavinia’s body.

In The Mourning Bride, Osmyn describes his best friend Heli as a man he loves more than life, setting the stage for a passionate homo-heroic friendship.354 Congreve, however, does not follow Dryden, Otway, or Lee’s formulae and instead focuses entirely on the more heteronormative plot with Almeria showing her devotion to her husband

Osmyn. The differences between the heroic plots and she-tragedies are made clear at the end when Osmyn and Almeria survive torture and imprisonment and run off together:

Almeria never comes between Osmyn and Heli, and Osmyn is never forced to choose between male duty and his love. In the she-tragedies of the late seventeenth century, the values of homo-heroic love that allowed homoerotic forms of affection are replaced by displays of heterosexual love.

Homo-Heroic Failure in Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia (1679)

The opening scene of Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia depicts the breakdown of homo-heroic love. In The Rival Queens, Venice Preserv’d, and All for

354 Edward Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia. Shakespeare Adaptations from the Restoration, ed. Barbara A. Murray (Maidson: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 1–88, 1.407.

146 Love, the male characters champion forms of closeness as an empowering political and social force that draws on a repertoire of performative gestures and associations. In particular, these plays draw on an older ideal of male friendship, specifically the “word as bond,” and the belief that fidelity, constancy, and honour are central to patriarchy.355 In

Ravenscroft’s tragedy, Titus returns from war with Tamora and the Goths as prisoners. In revenge for the death of his sons, Titus sacrifices Tamora’s first-born son, and this begins the main action of this revenge play, as Tamora seeks retribution for what was done to her and the Goths. Tamora and her lover Aron, the Moor, convince her sons Demetrius and Chiron to rape Lavinia and cut off her limbs and tongue so she cannot tell who committed the crime against her. Much of the play follows Shakespeare’s plot with a minor addition of a subplot concerning Aron’s half-black child and a neighbouring mixed-race family. The final scene is altered to make it slightly more dramatic, where

Ravenscroft augments the horror and spectacle of the banquet, including the cannibalistic feast and deaths of Lavinia, Tamora, Titus, and the Emperor. In Ravenscroft’s adaptation, the desecrated remains of Chiron and Demetrius are revealed behind a curtain, Tamora stabs her own child, and Aron is tortured and burned alive on stage. While the politics of the tragedy contain similar elements to the heroic plays discussed earlier, the tragic power of Titus stems not from homo-heroic love, but from heterosexual desire.

In Ravenscroft’s first scene, Bassianus appropriates homo-heroic ideals, following the expected script; however, in revering aristocratic ideals and attempting to bond with the men around him, Bassianus fails to realize how empty those ideals have become. In addressing Titus Andronicus and the senate about his candidacy, he utilizes the word

355 Canfield, Word as Bond, xi.

147 “friend” over and over again to create a link between himself and those he hopes to rule.

Furthermore, he directs his pleas for a fair and honest society to the men around him:

Romans, friends, followers, favourers of my Right, If ever Bassianus, Caesar’s Son, Was Gracious in the eyes of Royall Rome, Keep then this passage to the Capitoll, And Suffer not dishonours to approach The Imperiall Seat, consecrate To Justice, Continence and Nobility. But let desert in pure Election, shine And Romans fight for freedom in your choice.356

Bassianus’s speech highlights the ideals of aristocratic feudal male friendship. He respectfully addresses his followers as “friends” and correctly reveres, or at least pretends to revere, the “imperiall seat.”357 In specifying that he will also consecrate “justice, continence, and Nobility,” Bassianus invokes the ideals of aristocratic power and participates in a tradition of idealized male honour. In a moment that will appear familiar to audiences who have seen All for Love or The Rival Queens, Bassianus targets Marcus

Andronicus to help establish his claim to power:

Marcus Andronicus I do rely, On thy uprightness and Integrity. And So I Love and honour thee and thine, Thy noble Brother Titus and his Sons358

The language is not as homoerotic as Venice Preserv’d, for example, but it engages in homo-heroic language all the same. It begins with flattery and praise—“I do rely, on thy

356 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.1.11–19. 357 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.1.11, 16. 358 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.1.46–49.

148 uprightness and Integrity”—in order to establish a bond between Bassianus and

Marcus.359 In then saying “And So I Love and honour thee and thine, thy noble Brother

Titus and his Sons,” Bassianus utilizes the erotic passion that stems from love to call for male solidarity.360 This is similar to the language Ventidius deploys to sway Antony away from Cleopatra in All for Love: “My emperor; the man I love next Heaven.”361 Men in the earlier heroic plays view love and affection as a way of cultivating personal attachment and favour, and Bassianus engages in this tradition hoping it will succeed. What he does not realize is how these old-fashioned ideas no longer contain the power they once held.

In contrast to Bassianus’s feudal aristocratic tactics, his brother Saturninus ignores homo-heroic ideals completely, seeing violence or the threat of violence as a more powerful ideological tool. Whereas Bassianus looks to men of power as equals, believing that the system of word as bond would prevail, Saturninus deviates from the code of honour the heroic plays made such an effort to cultivate and perform. The difference between him and his brother Bassianus is clear:

Noble Patricians, Patrons of my right, Defend the Justice of my cause with Arms; And Countrymen, my Loving Followers, Plead my Successive Title with your Swords: I am his first-born Son, who last Wore the Imperial Diadem of Rome. Then Let my Fathers Honours Live in me, Nor Wrong my Birth with his Indignity362

359 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.1.46–47. 360 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.1.48–49. 361 Dryden, All For Love, 1.1.252. The “next heaven” makes the dialogue in Dryden’s play more passionate than Bassianus’s, but the intent of their dialogue is similar. 362 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.1.1–10.

149 Instead of reaching out to other men to collaborate or using the language of love and affection to promote male solidarity, Saturninus fixates on entitlement and violence. His justifications rest on him: it is his “right,” his “birth,” and his “successive title.” Even when using the word “loving” it implies a hierarchy: they are his “loving followers,” contrasting and betraying the sense of equality that Bassianus cultivates.363 Finally, rather than appeal to honour, integrity, or the ideals of homo-heroic love, Saturninus views power as obtained and maintained through violence, threatening twice to “defend the justice of my cause with Arms” and to “plead my successive title with Swords.”364

Within the first few moments of dialogue, Ravenscroft portrays two conflicting modes of consolidating power: the first, the performance of male love that recalls homo-heroic love, the second, a new, and clearly shocking, turn to violence. It does not take long to understand that Saturninus’s approach is dangerous, but in a move that undermines the homo-heroic values, Ravenscroft allows Saturninus to succeed. Saturninus’s victory over the worthier Bassianus illustrates a more violent alternative to the idealistic values of homo-heroic love, even if both are still rooted in notions of male supremacy.

Titus Andronicus’ major flaw is his inconsistency, and his bad judgment further depicts the breakdown of homo-heroic ideals. He technically follows the formality of the code of honour, granting Saturninus the throne because he is the eldest son and, therefore, has the best claim. But while following tradition in picking Rome’s new leader, he simultaneously overlooks the details that give this system meaning. Does Saturninus believe in the word as bond? Does Saturninus follow homo-heroic ideals? Titus is

363 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.1.1–10. 364 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.1.2–4.

150 described, for example, as being a “friend in Justice” and a friend to “the People of

Rome,” and Bassianus again, in attempting to negotiate male bonds, pledges his life to him and suggests that Titus is a man of honour with a noble mind.365 These descriptions appear to situate Titus within the network of male friendship, but Titus appears blind to how the system must function. If, as Alan Bray argues, the gift of friendship is a gift of alliance and partnership, founded on a public performance that includes oral pledges and physical intimacy, then Bassianus should have appeared as the correct choice. Bassianus, after all, follows the homo-heroic ideals. In ruling in favour of Saturninus, Titus highlights Saturninus’s position as eldest son: “Tribunes I thank you, and this Sute I make, / That you Create your Emperours Eldest Son, Lord Saturninus.”366 This choice is the appearance of tradition, however, and not the real thing. As we recognize, Bassianus performs correctly, treating the men as equals, speaking to their belief in fairness, and trusting that they are participating in the existing system of male power. Saturninus’s proclivity to violence and disregard of these codes should have signalled to Titus that the eldest son was the wrong choice. Titus’s inability to fully understand his failure signals that the performances of male friendship that gave the previous tragedies their power are not at work here.

Homo-heroic love’s failures are also represented in the depiction of homosociality as a harmful social force. Whereas Otway in Venice Preserv’d highlighted Belvidera’s suffering and neglect, his choice to have Jaffeir and Pierre reconcile in honourable death suggested that while women are harmed by male friendship, they are unfortunate but

365 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.3.39. 366 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.3.50.

151 necessary casualties of male power.367 Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of the Lavinia unambiguously condemns male friendship by showing how it harms women. As

Sedgwick’s theory of homosociality illustrates, a key feature of patriarchal relationships is the commodification of women, a move that degrades their autonomy.368 Lavinia, while augmented as a clear focus of audience attention, is still commodified like the women from earlier heroic plays. She is depicted as an idealized female character, desired by most of the men on stage and marked as an object of desire. This treatment was not unusual for women on the Restoration stage and was certainly a voyeuristic technique that was used throughout the period to benefit from the newness of having women’s bodies on stage. Here, the victimization of women is clearer and more central, and the desirability of the main female character is set up to allow the horror and torment to appear even more unjust.

Lavinia’s desirability is established first by the male characters who describe her as an object of desire and treat her as something to possess. She enters on stage as an idealized woman, kneeling in front of her father and demonstrating her passive role as devoted daughter and servant to the men in her life. Her pledge that “in peace and honour live lord Titus long” demonstrates her paternal devotion before she offers her “tributary tears” for her brothers.369 There is little ambiguity about the gender hierarchy of the play:

Lavinia is subservient to the men in her life. Her passivity and devotion are configured in the play among the prime qualities that make her desirable. The men objectify her and describe her in ways that rob her of her agency. Lavinia’s lover, Bassianus, publicly calls

367 See chapter 2. 368 Sedgwick, Between Men, 51. 369 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.2.100, 101.

152 her “Romes bright Ornament,” while Saturninus calls her the “trophee of the day,” further confirming her object-like status and suggesting that she is an accessory, decorative, beautiful, an adornment but nothing more.370 In contrast, in the same breath

Bassianus calls her father, Titus, and her brothers, “noble,” invoking their virtue, character, or exploits.371 The contrast is clear; the men are championed for their actions and behaviours while Lavinia’s skill is her desirability. The language of commodification continues with the other men as well, illustrating how Lavinia is seen as something to be won and owned.

Ravenscroft depicts a male culture in which Lavinia is objectified and fought over, transforming her into a contested object in a patriarchal tug of war. This is not dissimilar from the previous heroic plays, but while homo-heroic relationships in those plays were idealized and depicted positively, male patriarchal violence here is seen as harmful. Although Lavinia is in love with Bassianus, when Saturninus becomes emperor he orders that she become his wife. Titus accepts the demand, almost excitedly, using her as part of a homosocial relationship where he benefits from the exchange of his daughter to this more powerful man.372 As the men fight over who will have her, Lavinia is not granted a single line of dialogue. Instead, she must endure as they physically grab her and describe her as their property. She is physically traded from Titus to Saturninus and then stolen and grabbed by Bassianus. In the altercation, they talk about her as if they are fighting over an object that has no feelings and is not on stage. As Bassianus runs off with Lavinia, Titus’s brother Marcus justifies the action by saying that she does indeed

370 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.1.51, 1.3.109. 371 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.1.46–48. 372 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.3.70–76.

153 belong to Bassianus, “the prince in Justice seizeth but his own,” while Titus shouts,

“traytor, Restore Lavinia to the Emperour.”373 Both declarations downplay Lavinia’s agency, but Ravenscroft uses words that make it seem as if they are talking about an inanimate object. Seize, as the OED describes, implies legal ownership and possession of something, while “restore” is to give back or make up for loss of or damage to something.374 When Bassianus and Saturninus finally come face to face, they justify their treatment of Lavinia by invoking the law that grants men power over women as their possessions:

EMPEROUR. Traytor, if Rome have Law, or we have Power, Thou and thy Faction shall repent this Rape.

BASSIANUS. Rape call you it to seize my own, ye Gods! My true betrothed Love, and now my Wife: But let the Laws of Rome determine all, Mean while am I possest of what is mine.375

Saturninus’s invocation of Roman law and power, and the use of “rape” to define what he clearly sees as his brother’s theft, demonstrate Lavinia’s lower social position and lack of agency among these men. Even her lover, Bassianus, participates in the sexism, repeatedly justifying his actions by saying he owns Lavinia. Her physical movement between the men and the way they talk about her as an object establish her as a pawn in their patriarchal game and showcase how women suffer under male control.

While men work in homosocial configurations to successfully diminish Lavinia,

Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of the Lavinia does not view these homosocial

373 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.3.125, 109. 374 OED Online, s.v. “seize, v.,” accessed January 4, 2018, .http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/174979?rskey=PwnAkf&result=2&isAdvanced=false. 375 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 2.1.132–37.

154 relationships as empowering social relations. Lavinia’s suffering and torment are made clearer as Chiron and Demetrius fight over her body, extending the male-dominated tug of war from the opening scene and making it more violent and graphic. They do not use marriage-like language to describe their friendship, nor they do hug or kiss in ways that speak to a broader network of friendship or alliances. They do, however, objectify and diminish Lavinia because she comes between the two as an object of competition, but this is never rewarded and or seen as anything other than despicable. As Chiron and

Demetrius fight about which one of them will try to conquer Lavinia, Aron reminds them that this discord has serious ramifications: “So near the Emperours Pallace dare you draw? / And maintain such a Quarrell openly . . . / This petty brabble will undo us all.”376

Aron’s primary concern is that they will undo his and Tamora’s plan to ruin the

Andronicus family. This is similar to Dryden’s All for Love and Lee’s The Rival Queens, which both focused on a united male front against potentially dangerous women, moralizing again and again how male solidarity is solidarity against women.377 This is why, after explaining to Chiron and Demetrius how they must work together and rape and mutilate Lavinia, Aron comes back to this language of unity in justifying the violence he is promoting:

Ay, now the work is likely to go forward; be friends and joyn to compass the Main End. Tis policy and stratagem must do, that which you cannot as you wou’d obtain, you must per-force accomplish as you may.378

376 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 2.1.281–83. 377 Joyce G. MacDonald, “Public Wounds: Sexual Bodies and the Origins of State in Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 23 (2003), 237. 378 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 2.1.326–30.

155

Aron’s speech borrows the language of male love, reinforcing how the period valued collaboration between men, but perverts the ideals of that language, transforming bonds between men into something dangerous. His speech builds from the existing trope that disrupting male bonds invites chaos and brings the two men back together, united and empowered. In mentioning unity and friendship, Aron’s speech could almost have been in an earlier heroic play, but the shift from homo-heroic to she-tragedy is on full display in the results of this scene: Chiron and Demetrius do come together and diminish Lavinia as the competition between them, but the play refuses to grant this action any positive power. This moment of male bonding is not idealized or performed as a positive moment of moral interjection, and there is no ambiguity that their actions are truly repulsive.

Women are unambiguously victimized by male bonding in Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia.

Lavinia’s victimization reveals a departure from the sexual politics of homo- heroic love in that male relationships contain no homoerotic qualities. Not only did All for Love, The Rival Queens, and Venice Preserv’d avow same-sex desire as part of male relationships, but in some moments, the plays appropriated it as a benefit.379 Aside from

Bassianus’s failure in utilizing features of the homo-heroic, the male characters in Titus

Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia use each other in what Sedgwick would suggest is a typical homosocial configuration. Sedgwick argues that “in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship

379 See chapters 1 and 2.

156 founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence.”380 The homo-heroic plays discussed in this dissertation included the “homosexual” part of homosocial, as

Sedgwick notes, but Titus Andronicus does not.

These male relationships, while containing homosocial desire, are about heterosexual-seeming men using their male power to harm a woman. Saturninus’s dependency on Titus Andronicus is, in part, for homosocial promotion, but more importantly, it is a technique to acquire Lavinia as his wife: “And Titus, to advance Thy

Name, and Honourable Family, / Lavinia will I make my Empres, / Romes Royal

Mistress, Mistress of my heart.”381 As the object of exchange, Lavinia is traded to advance the Andronicus name but is also a symbol of Saturninus’ masculine prowess. He trades and takes her as a display of his heterosexual strength and virility. In asserting his dominance over Lavinia, Saturninus essentially performs his superiority over his brother

Bassianus as well. Bassianus is emasculated by the loss of his companion and acknowledges that his masculinity has been degraded: “Shall he the Empire have? Why let him, but let him leave Lavinia then: To be at once depriv’d of Power and Love is more than Mortal sure can bear.”382 In the previous plays, women are traded and used to bolster male reputation or solidarity. Here, Lavinia is utilized in an exchange that degrades

Bassianus in the promotion of his brother. This is a competition between two heterosexual men, whose masculine identities rely on using Lavinia as their weapon, not as a form of attachment.

380 Sedgwick, Between Men, 25. 381 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.3.66–68. 382 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 1.3.85–88.

157 This conflation of male friendship, heterosexuality, and power is further developed as Chiron and Demetrius rape and mutilate Lavinia, using their newfound unity to dominate and degrade her. Ravenscroft stages an extended scene of suffering to capitalize on audience sympathies and titillate audiences with sexually suggestive violence. This mix of violence and sexuality is common in she-tragedies. Elizabeth Howe describes women’s bodies on stage as being “offered to the audience as a piece of erotic entertainment—a kind of pornographic painting brought to life.”383 Jean Marsden outlines how she-tragedies set up a desirable female object and subject them to sexual violence and torment to titillate audiences, allowing the female character to showcase their virtue in the face of violence.384 As the brothers kill her husband, Lavinia attempts to kill herself, showcasing once again her loyalty as a dutiful wife. When this fails, the two brothers’ taunt her with an uncomfortable mix of sexual and violent threats:

CHIRON. Come Lavinia

DEMETRIUS. Lay by this Modesty, and dye they cheeks with red, They look too pale—warm them with hot desires, And let them gloe with Lust and appetite

LAVINIA. Empress. –

CHIRON. Nay, be not shy to go, you will but put us To the pleasure to grasp your tender Limbs, And bear you in our Arms to Covert.385

383 Howe, The First English Actresses, 46. 384 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 60–61. See also Kara Reilly, “Lavinia’s Rape: Reading The Restoration Actress’s Body in Pain in Ravenscroft’s Titus,” in Staging Pain 1580–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theatre, ed. James Robert Allard and Matthew R. Martin, 139–50 (New York: Routledge, 2016). 385 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 3.1.138–45.

158 Lavinia’s suffering is undoubtedly distressing, as she is held captive and taunted by the two men. The scene is sexually suggestive, with Demetrius telling Lavinia to forget her modesty and give in to her desires, invoking a sexist assumption that she will enjoy her rape and that her petitions are out of modesty, not from an objection to the violence that they will perpetrate against her. The use of “dye,” which in other contexts is suggestive of an orgasm, and the use of “red,” “hot desires,” “lust,” and “appetite” all are erotically charged and could have been titillating for audiences watching Lavinia become victim to these men.386

In threatening Lavinia, Chiron refers to himself and his brother as a single cooperative force, using the pronouns “us,” “our,” and “we’ll” to describe their power and enjoyment of her: “Nay, if you rail, we’ll stop your Mouth.”387 The “success” in attacking Lavinia is the result of the two men’s unification, a moment that is reminiscent of the way Ventidius and Dolabella are credited as enlivening Antony. Dryden depicts the ways men rejuvenate other men:

He loved me too; I was his soul; he lived not but in me: We were so closed within each other’s breasts, The rivets were not found, that joined us first. That does not reach us yet: we were so mixt, As meeting streams, both to ourselves were lost; We were one mass; we could not give or take, But from the same; for he was I, I he.388

386 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 3.1.138–45. 387 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 3.1.189. 388 Dryden, All for Love, 3.1.90–97.

159 Dryden views this “meeting of streams” as positive, a coming together that emotionally and physically empowers Antony.389 The way in which Antony categorizes himself and

Dolabella as “one mass” prefigures Ravenscroft’s depiction of Chiron and Demetrius as

“friends . . . [who] joyn to compass the main end,” but with a significant alteration:

Chiron and Demetrius’s unity is only seen as destructive and harmful. Alongside the violence enacted upon Lavinia, this rape is once again a further form of competition against Titus Andronicus. This is harmful homosocial bonding.

Whereas Lee, Dryden, and Otway showcased their male characters’ physical bodies and repeated performative gestures of affection to empower male friendships,

Ravenscroft draws audiences’ attention to Lavinia’s body and pain as the main way of representing the moral of the play and showing the degree to which she is harmed by patriarchal relations. Ravenscroft’s choice to change the title of the play to include

Lavinia’s name highlights how male-male bonds are not a focus of the tragedy. The original Shakespeare title, The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, marks Titus as the primary character and indicates to audiences the political aspects of the tragedy.390 However, Ravenscroft’s adaptation reads as Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia, a change that augments Lavinia’s role, putting her within the title, a character equal to her father. The title of the play further advertises the sexual violence used against

Lavinia and is not simply her name. In Shakespeare’s original title, the tragic and sorrowful events that are hinted at through the use of “Most Lamentable . . . Tragedy” are acted upon Titus’s name. In this adaptation, Titus’s name stands alone, and Lavinia’s sad

389 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 2.1.327. 390 William Shakespeare, The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, ed. Alan Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

160 situation is highlighted. The title advertises not only Lavinia as a character, but also the act of rape that is carried out against her.

In performance, Lavinia’s presence would be clear and powerful. To ensure readers understand this, Ravenscroft includes a number of stage directions and builds references to Lavinia’s suffering into other characters’ dialogues. When Titus sees his daughter for the first time, his lines direct audiences to remember her pain: “Speak

Lavinia, what accursed hand, hath made thee handless in thy fathers sight.”391 In referencing hands twice and her lack of ability to speak, Titus signposts her injuries, highlighting them again and again for audiences who already see the violence played out on her body. The stage directions also ensure the actors remember to fully embody this suffering victim, as they specifically dictate the suffering heroine’s physical performance:

“Lavinia makes signs of sorrow lifting her eyes and then hangin down her head and moving her stumps; Lavinia shakes her head and points at Martius’ handkerchief as refusing to have her eyes wip’d.”392 This focus on her mutilated body and the specificity with which Ravenscroft outlines the physical performance illustrates how integral the actress’s body is to the pathetic power of the play, or as Marsden explains, “the cult of suffering enabled playwrights to represent truth visually rather than verbally.”393 Lavinia must physically represent and continually re-perform her victimhood to draw tears from the audience and to emphasize her subjugation.

391 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 4.1.66–67. 392 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 4.1.127–40. 393 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 61.

161 As the play progresses to the violent final showdown, the tragedy centres on

Lavinia’s pain. This choice is once again in contrast to earlier heroic plays. In Venice

Preserv’d, Belvidera’s suffering is pushed aside so that Jaffeir and Pierre can have their final moments together, while All for Love remains focused on Antony’s many failures.

Although Titus plots his revenge, killing Chiron and Demetrius and baking them into pies to later feed to their mother, Ravenscroft maintains his narrative focus on Lavinia. When

Titus captures Chiron and Demetrius, he summarizes the horror of the play, essentially justifying his final act of revenge. In a telling choice, Ravenscroft has Titus describe the plot of the play as rotating around Lavinia:

Come, come Lavinia, look, thy foes are bound. Stop close their Mouths, let ‘em not speak to me; But let them hear what fearfull words I utter. Oh Villains! Chiron and Demetrius! Here stands the Spring whom you have stain’d with Mud; This goodly Summer with your Winter mix’d. You kill’d her Husband, and for that vile fault, Two of her Brothers were Condemn’d to death, My hand Cut-off, and Subject made of Mirth. Both her sweet Hands, her Tongue, and that more dear Then Hands or Tongue, her spotless Chastity, . . . Whilst that Lavinia ‘twixt her Stumps does hold The Bason that receives your Guilty Blood. Then shall your flesh be torn off with hot Pincers, And your bones scrap’d ‘till you are Skellitons. For worse then Philomel you us’d my Daughter, And worse then Progne I will be reveng’d. . . .394

In speaking to the two brothers while they are bound and in audience view, and inviting

Lavinia to witness it, Titus locates his daughter as an object of audience sympathy. She stands on stage, physically representing the violence they have enacted upon her. It was

394 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 5.2.26–50.

162 “her husband” they killed, “her brothers,” “her hands, her tongue, and that more dear than hands or tongue, her spotless chastity.”395 Lavinia’s presence in this scene and the repeated use of “her” to describe Lavinia as the centre of the narrative mark her as the character on which the play’s pathetic power rests. This play does not amplify male gestures or end with morals about male relationships; rather, it ends showcasing how patriarchal forces worked to harm this innocent woman.

Considering how often men performed their loyalty through embraces, kisses, and hand holding in the works of Dryden, Lee, and Otway, there is a noticeable elimination of references to embodied displays of affection in Ravenscroft’s play. Corpses and body parts are described throughout, but there are no major moments of embrace or other physical expressions of love between men. Bassianus’s attempt to solidify male bonds does not include any references to a gestural repertoire of male friendship, nor do Chiron or Demetrius engage in homosocial physicality. There is exactly one moment where men embrace; it takes place late in the play after Lavinia has been raped and mutilated, and the Andronici men promise to enact revenge against Tamora, Chiron, and Demetrius.

Titus’s son Lucius embraces his family members as he prepares for his exile: “Lucius

Embraces them all as they go out.”396 In contrast to the earlier plays, this embrace is not entirely a confirmation of male bonds, but an embrace of goodbye. Lucius also does not reserve the embrace for the men alone, throwing his arms around his sister. The lack of physicality surrounding the men is significant and is telling given how Lavinia’s body becomes a central factor in the play’s pathetic power.

395 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 5.2.26–50. 396 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 4.1.444.

163 Analyzing Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia against the heroic plays I discussed in my earlier chapters is certainly a challenge. After all, Ravenscroft was not attempting to write a heroic play, and so his play does not adhere to any of the significant features. This is a case, however, where what is missing is more important than what is represented. Ravenscroft’s play could have remained focused on Titus and his political and familial failures: how he breaks the bonds of male solidarity in murdering his own son, how he fails to see Bassianus is the more promising emperor, and how he is unable to outmanoeuvre Aron’s mischievous and dangerous revenge. All these elements remain as a part of the play, but they are not chosen as the main tragic element as they might have been in a heroic tragedy. Lee’s The Rival Queens is a model of how Titus’s failures could have been configured as a moral tale of the downfall of a singularly powerful, but flawed man. For Alexander, Lee suggests that male friendship could have been the stabilizing force that allowed him to avoid ruin; friendship and male bonds are not similarly configured as the source of redemption for Titus.

Rather than depicting an economy of stabilizing male friendship, Ravenscroft’s vision of heroic ideals is far more pessimistic. With Titus, Lavinia, Bassianus,

Saturninus, Tamora, and Aron all dead, the play ends with no glory, success, or optimism. In a moment that reflects the loss of belief in the ideology of male patriarchal governance, Titus’s remaining son, Lucius, ends the play in a melancholy and feeble call for leadership: “When these sad Ceremonies be perform’d, Lead me to Empire, Crown me if you please, But nothing this afflicted heart can ease.”397 After all, Bassianus best represents the traditional modes of male honour, but he fails to secure his leadership and

397 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, 5.291–93.

164 is left dead halfway through the play. Titus technically abides by the code but is blind to how the values are now meaningless and empty, while Saturninus undermines and relegates the heroic values to the past by privileging violence over honour and word as bond. To further demonstrate the breakdown of homo-heroics, Chiron and Demetrius invoke the language and power of unity so prevalent in the plays of Dryden, Lee, and

Otway but use it for destruction rather than improvement. Finally, while heroic plays recognized queerness as a part of male love, Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia transforms male friendship into a competitive homosocial display that does not include same-sex desire.

“My Best Friend’s Wedding”: Heterosexuality in Congreve’s The Mourning Bride (1697)

In analyzing William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride, Charles Gildon cannot help but compare Congreve’s she-tragedy to the heroic plays of the past. He notes that the play does not reach the height of Otway’s tragedies and contains similarities to Dryden’s

Aureng Zebe, the Indian Emperor, and Nathaniel Lee’s Cesar Borgia.398 Gildon is certainly not to be blamed for reaching back to Dryden, Lee, and Otway for his comparison since their work dominated the stage for so long. Gildon’s comparison demonstrates that heroic tragedy continued as a point of reference even as new work moved away from the existing genre and helps justify my choice in using she-tragedies as a coda to this project. The Mourning Bride, as Gildon suggests, contains heroic tragedy features, and yet, the plot’s departures speak to the significant shift between heroic plays

398 Charles Gildon, “Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets,” in William Congreve: The Critical Heritage, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill and Alexander Lindsay, 170–74 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995). Accessed January 4, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central.

165 and tragedies with a female focus. Like Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia, The

Mourning Bride is a political play, and the plot could have easily glorified male love and demonstrated how patriarchal control stabilizes political and social upheaval. Congreve represents a male relationship that has homo-heroic possibilities: Osmyn and his best friend Heli declare love for each other in ways audiences and readers may find familiar.

And yet, Congreve does not grant them any pathetic or moral message. They are friends, and that is all. Almeria is also never configured as a threat to the male relationship, and her suffering and her love for her husband are what gives the play its pathetic power. If

Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia presents the failure of homo-heroic dynamics,

The Mourning Bride promotes its replacement.

The play opens with Almeria mourning the death of her husband, Osmyn

(originally Anselmo). Osmyn is from Valentia, which Almeria’s father, King Manuel, has just conquered. They were betrothed in secret, and Osmyn appears to have died while attempting to flee. Almeria and Osmyn will soon be reunited, but he spends the play in disguise. Almeria must then fight her father’s wishes for her to marry Garcia. King

Manuel has also captured a Moorish Queen, Zara, who falls in love with Osmyn and passionately and ruthlessly attempts to win his affections.

Congreve includes the early stages of a passionate male friendship, but he does not capitalize off this love or locate it as a source of meaning within the tragedy. Now a captive of King Manuel, Osmyn mourns for Heli (Antonio) whom he believes is dead.

Zara, answering on his behalf, describes the men’s relationship as close and passionate:

“The Gallant Moore in Battle lost a Friend, / Whom more than Life he Lov’d; and the

Regret, / Of not revenging on his Foes that Loss, / Has caus’d this Melancholy and

166 Despair.”399 Zara’s response invokes the men’s closeness in referencing that Osmyn loved Heli more than his life, and further suggests the dedication and unity that Taylor and Montaigne describe as a fundamental feature of male friendship.400 Pierre and

Jaffeir’s pledges of constancy in Venice Preserv’d, and their agreement that friendship and the word as bond are more important than their individual lives, mirrors Zara’s description of the men’s intimacy. Osmyn’s belief in the importance of male bonds is made even clearer with his anger and response that he now does not have the chance to avenge his best friend: “Because captivity Has Robb’d me of a dear and just Revenge.”401

His open declaration states that revenge in the memory of his friend is more important than surviving his current capture. His loyalty to Heli and Heli’s memory reflects well on his character, and audiences and readers are expected to admire his steadfast dedication to his friend.

After demonstrating how Osmyn performs the expectations of male friendship,

Congreve depicts Heli’s dedication as well. These two opening scenes read as potential homo-heroic displays of male friendship. Garcia explains to Heli that he has seen Osmyn sulk since being captured, and he admires how the men mourn for each other, configuring the men’s bond as a performance of appropriate male affection. Heli’s subsequent speech about his joy in discovering Osmyn is alive, is passionate and emotional, but not erotic:

399 William Congreve, The Mourning Bride, in The Works of William Congreve, ed. D. F. McKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1.6.48–50. 400 Jeremy Taylor locates friendship as a central unifying force in human society: “as transcendent, and signifies as much as Unity can mean, and every consent, and every pleasure, and every benefit, and every society, is the mother or daughter of friendship.” Taylor, “A Discourse of the Nature,” 64. Montaigne echoes Dollabella’s passionate speech to Antony in describing friendship as a unity without a seam: “In the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again.” Montaigne, “On Friendship,” 139. 401 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 1.6.44–45.

167 Let Heav’n with Thunder to the Centre strike me, if to arise in very deed from Death, And to revisit with my long-clos’d Eyes This living Light, cou’d to my Soul, or Sense Afford a Thought, or show a glimpse of Joy, In least proportion to the vast Delight I feel, to hear of Osmyn’s Name; to hear That Osmyn lives, and I again shall see him.402

His use of “thunder” and “living light” is grandiose and hyperbolic, but he remains focused on his emotional state and joy. This is not to suggest that emotions cannot be erotic, but in focusing on his “soul” and his “sense,” he eliminates their bodies from the situation.403 Tellingly, they do not embrace or touch. This absence is significant, since playwrights previously located the power of male friendship through forms of embodiment. In comparison, this passage from Dryden’s All for Love suggestively mixes the emotional and the physical to empower Antony’s love for Dolabella:

He loved me too: I was his soul; he loved not but in me. We were so closed within each other’s breasts, The rivets were not found that joined us first That does not reach us yet; we were so mixed, As meeting streams, both to ourselves were lost; We were one mass; we could not give or take But from the same, for he was I, I he.404

Dryden’s speech references “souls” and the emotional but ties it to the physical; the two men are close within each other’s breasts, and they are “one mass.” This physically reflects how friendship of the late seventeenth century was embodied, but it also

402 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 2.1.4–11. 403 Ibid. 404 Dryden, All for Love, 3.1.99–106.

168 suggestively forces audiences to consider the two men touching. Even Heli’s delight that

“Osmyn lives, and I again shall see him” is chaste in comparison to Dryden’s prose.405

The performance of male friendship remains part of the drama, but it is no longer as erotic or as physical as it was previously.

While friendship in the plays of Dryden, Lee, and Otway was public and participated in a spectacle of male solidarity, male friendship in The Mourning Bride is seen as private. Alan Bray’s foundational historical analysis of seventeenth-century friendship is rooted in the understanding that friendship was public and was a system whose benefits existed outside of the individual.406 That meant that one maintained friendships not only because they brought one any personal satisfaction but also because friendship performed to others your place in society, your alliances, and your connections.407 As Garcia and Heli look for Osmyn, Heli suggests that he should do it alone because Osmyn’s temper makes him unpredictable and as his best friend, only he will be able to manage Osmyn’s emotions. Garcia’s response emphasizes how male friendship is now a private mode: “go, gen’rous Heli, and relieve your friend. / Far be it from me, officiously to pry / Or press upon the Privacies of others.”408 We have not seen this before; Garcia’s belief that he should not “pry or press upon the privacies of others” reveals that the play does not see this friendship as having public social stakes.

Furthermore, Garcia’s desire to leave them alone and not pry or press transforms male friendship into something that is not only private, but also possibly secretive. At no point

405 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 2.1.11. 406 Bray, The Friend, 6. 407 Ibid. 408 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 2.1.31–33.

169 did The Rival Queens, All for Love or Venice Preserv’d represent what happened between

Alexander and Hephestion, Antony and Dolebella, and Jaffeir and Pierre as private. In fact, in The Rival Queens, Alexander unambiguously demands that Hephestion publicly display his affection.409 The demand for physical affection is a public move so that other men recognize their friendship. As I described in chapter 1, Hephestion must publicly, and without reservation, reaffirm his patriarchal pledge and dedication to his leader and his friend. Furthermore, it is this form of public demand that is burlesqued in Cibber’s

The Rival Queans, suggesting a critique of how male friendship functioned:

O my Hephestion, raise thee on thy legs, Up to my lips, and jump into my mouth, Why hang thy arms so like a changeling! Kiss me, or else by heaven thou lov’st me not410

While Cibber’s play deployed the publicness as a joke in order to undermine it,

Congreve’s play just eliminates it. Garcia’s belief that what happens between Heli and

Osmyn is private illustrates how the play refuses to develop or capitalize on the powers of male friendship for political purposes, and how distinct a change that is from the mid- seventeenth-century dramatic texts.

Although Osmyn speaks passionately of his friend, Heli, laying the groundwork for what in earlier plays what would have been a homo-heroic display of male love, the depiction of their relationship as private demonstrates Congreve’s focus on the heterosexual relationship. When Almeria, Osmyn, and Heli discover they are all alive, the scene is remarkably equitable in describing their love for each other. Almeria is not

409 Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.97–101. 410 Cibber, The Rival Queans, 43–48.

170 subjugated as a competitor or forced to watch as her husband expounds love for his male friend, and they are all thrilled with this happy reunion:

HELI. Most happily, in finding you thus bless’d

ALMERIA. More Miracles! Antonio too escap’d!

OSMYN. And twice escap’d, both from the Rage of Seas And War: for in the Flight I saw him fall.411

The lack of competition between the three is a significant departure from other homo- heroic relationships, as Almeria is just as excited as Osmyn to have found Antonio alive:

“more miracles, Antonio too escap’d!”412 Osmyn also does not spend time praising his best friend, and he wraps the discovery of Almeria and Heli into the same blessing, praising heaven for its “open hand” of kindness. Congreve groups these three characters together almost as if they are a love triangle but departs from previous plays and eliminates any suggestion that this is a competition. Osmyn loves Almeria first and foremost, and Heli does not compete. He is a friend, and that is all.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this difference, as it illustrates a fundamental shift in dramatic texts’ depiction of the relationship between friendship and heterosexual love. The rest of the play confirms that Heli is not meant as an attractive alternative to Almeria, as Heli does not animate Osmyn’s motivations or come between the lovers; rather, he facilitates their union. In the only remaining scene in which Osmyn and Heli share the stage, Heli serves as messenger, updating Osmyn about his bride and plot:

411 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 2.7.106–9. 412 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 2.7.107.

171 OSMYN. How does Almeria? But I know, she is As I am. Tell me, may I hope to see her?

HELI. You may; anon, at Midnight, when the King Is gone to Rest, and Garcia is retir’d, (Who takes the Privilege to visit late, Presuming on a Bridegroom’s Right) She’ll come.413

In this friendship, Heli appears to understand that his role is to help and support Osmyn’s love for Almeria. There is no hint of competition with Almeria, and he comes off more as an assistant than anything else, going between the couple and arranging this midnight meeting: “You may; anon, at Midnight when the King / is gone to Rest.”414 In this same encounter, he also warns Osmyn that Zara is jealous and dangerous, showcasing a general concern for his friend.415 The early seventeenth-century performance of friendship is no longer on display here, and Montaigne and Taylor would likely not recognize this relationship: it is not a marriage-like union, nor is it privileged over heterosexual relationships.416

The two men’s relationship is not defined or described in physical terms, a contrast to heroic depictions of male friends. I noted earlier that Heli’s delight in finding

Osmyn alive was passionate but not erotic, primarily because it does not contain references to, or innuendoes about, the body. This remains true throughout The Mourning

Bride, as there are also no implicit or suggested references to physical male affection. In

413 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 3.2.4–9. 414 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 3.2.6. 415 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 3.2.50–61. 416 See chapter 1. Montaigne firmly believes, as Hephestion does in The Rival Queens, that male friendship is not the same as “woman’s love,” for to “compare this brotherly affection with affection for women . . . it cannot be done.” Woman’s love “is an impetuous and fickle flame, undulating and variable, a fever flame, subject to fits and lulls, that holds us only by one corner.” Montaigne, “On Friendship,” 137.

172 Venice Preserv’d, Otway included dialogue that described stage directions highlighting the physicality of male friendship: “Here we embrace, and I’ll unlock my Heart.”417 The

Rival Queens has equivalent moments, where Alexander demands “Hugg me, or else by

Heaven thou lov’st me not.”418 There are no suggested stage directions in The Mourning

Bride, and Heli and Osmyn textually never touch. Tellingly, the only embraces within the play are between Osmyn and Almeria.

The lack of physicality in The Mourning Bride is noteworthy given how often male-male relationships are described as being physically empowering.419 In All for Love,

Antony spends the first few scenes on the ground, lying down in a metaphor for how

Cleopatra weakens him. Ventidius’s support, however, provides Antony with the power he needs: “Oh, thou hast fired me; my soul’s up in arms / And mans each part about me.”420 When Osmyn is dejected and melancholy, it is not Heli’s support that helps him, but the larger political concerns and his wife, Almeria:

HELI. where many of your Subjects, long opresse’d With Tyranny and grievous Impositions, Are risen in Arms, and call for Chiefs to head And lead’em, to regain their Rights and Liberty.

OSMYN. By Heav’n thou’st rouz’d me from my Lethargy. . . . What not Almeria could Revive, or raise, my People’s voice has awken’d.

417 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 2.2.183. 418 Lee, The Rival Queens, 2.101. 419 Jean Marsden, Fatal Desire, 95, in her analysis of Almeria, points out how the erotics of the play also downplay physicality: “It is typical of Congreve’s emphasis on the verbal that he uses Osmyn’s words to urge the spectator to re-create this imagined scene in his mind’s eye rather than attempt to represent any such scene.” 420 Dryden, All for Love, 1.1.519.

173 O my Antonio, I am all on Fire, My Soul is up in Arms, ready to Charge421

Osmyn begins his response by saying to Heli, “thou’st rouz’d me” but undermines the credit he gives his friend in saying that Almeria is mostly responsible for it—“what not

Almeria could revive, or raise”—, and the rest is the result of his “people’s voice.”422 The next line of dialogue is “O my Antonio, I am all on Fire,” but it does not appear to suggest that Heli (Antonio) is the cause of this fire; rather, the two statements are separate, with Osmyn referencing his friend’s name and then describing his own emotional state. Once again, this focus on Almeria highlights more interest in the power in heterosexual couples than in homosocial pairs. Furthermore, when read alongside

Heli’s initial speech about the tyranny enacted on Osmyn’s subjects, the “thou’st rouz’d me” is a clear reference to Heli’s speech, rather than Heli himself.423 Male friendship, or at least this friendship, does not have the physical benefits of previous heroic plays. This plot focuses instead on the power that stems from Osmyn and Almeria.

The term “friend” has had different associations in each play I have explored in this dissertation. In Dryden’s All for Love, Lee’s The Rival Queens, and Otway’s Venice

Preserv’d, “friend” is depicted as parallel or akin to lover. This is expressed in the way men passionately and erotically declare their love to each other, in the way they use marriage-like language to elevate their bond, and finally, in the way they often subjugate and eliminate women as competitors to their relationships. In The Rival Queens,

421 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 3.2.27–39. 422 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 3.2.31, 37. 423 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 3.2.31.

174 Hephestion calls his relationship with Alexander “So fond a friendship,” pairing “fond” meaning “affectionate, loving, tender” with friendship in general.424 In the final scene that Osmyn and Heli have together in The Mourning Bride, Osmyn categorizes the two men’s relationship as a private and secondary mode of friendship: “My friend and

Counsellor.”425 The OED defines “counsellor” as someone who advises, which suggests a secondary or complementary role, not a fundamental one.426 Heli helps his friend by warning him about Zara and organizing Valentia’s rebellion, but he is not the most significant person in Osmyn’s life.

As the scene ends, rather than reinforce the power of male friendship, it shifts focus to the significance of patrilineal relationships. Osmyn, having found a letter from his father, emotionally recounts how the letter is an expression of paternal love: “Such

Sanctity, such Tenderness, so mix’d With Grief, as wou’d draw Tears from

Inhumanity.”427 It is not Heli that causes this emotional performance, but Osmyn’s father, a move that suggests a patriarchal familial lineage of men. In contrast, the final scene between Venice Preserv’d’s Jaffeir and Pierre has them crying together in an expression of their love: “Hold: Eyes, be dry” and “Tears! Amazement! Tears!”428 Osmyn and Heli’s final scene is not a culminating performance of their love or friendship, and it ends chastely with Osymn’s wish that all “the Good thou dost deserve attend thee.”429 In the

424 OED Online, s.v. “fond, adj. and n.1,” accessed January 4, 2018, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/72599?rskey=igW5Aw&result=4&isAdvanced=false. 425 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 3.3.62. 426 OED Online, s.v. “counsellor | counselor, n.,” accessed January 4, 2018, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/42613?redirectedFrom=Counsellor. 427 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 3.3.72–73. 428 Otway, Venice Preserv’d, 5.393, 439. 429 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 3.3.80.

175 absence of erotized male friendship, the scene ends by reinforcing Osmyn’s lineage and his potential as male ancestral heir.

In a choice that confirms the play’s focus on heterosexual relationships and power, Congreve removes Heli from the play entirely. The audience is told that he has fled to join the resistance, and he does not appear in the play again. Whereas in earlier plays, the women are eliminated as competition, here Heli is removed to allow audiences to focus on Osmyn and Almeria since they are the primary couple in the play and the locus of audience pity and attention. As Congreve’s tragedy ends, he punishes the sinful characters Zara, Manuel, Selim, Gonsalez, and Alonzo, by killing them, allowing the virtuous Osmyn and Almeria to live. This somewhat happy ending further exhibits how

Almeria and Osmyn’s love is the focus of the tragedy. Their reunion is passionate, and parallels the speeches where male friends discuss animating or motivating each other.

Here Almeria and Osmyn’s are each other’s source of power:

OSMYN. Away, stand off, where is she? let me fly, Save her from Death; and snatch her to my Heart.

ALMERIA. Oh-

OSMYN. Forbear; my Arms alone shall hold her up, Warm her to Life, and wake her into Gladness. Oh let me talk to thy reviving Sense, The Words of Joy and Peace; warm thy cold Beauties, With the new-flushing Ardour of my Cheek; Into thy Lips, pour the soft trickling Balm Of cordial Sighs; and reinspire thy Bosom With the Breath of Love430

430 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 5.7.1–10.

176 Osmyn’s act of catching Almeria (“Forbear; my Arms alone shall hold her up”) and promising to always hold her up is almost a parallel moment to when Ventidius does the same for Antony early in All For Love. Whereas Ventidius’s love and physical presence

“fired” Antony up, Osmyn’s love and devotion animates a struggling Almeria. Osmyn’s speech describes his love as if it is an antidote, and he is bringing her back to life. His arms “warm her life” and “revive her senses” in a way that suggest he is almost giving her the medicine that she needs.431 In saying he will pour “trickling Balm of cordial sighs” into her lips, he compares his love to medicine or ointment that will soothe, heal, and restore her.432 Osmyn becomes the medicine that is crucial in Almeria’s recovery and sustained health. Congreve reinforces the two characters’ connection and ends the play by illustrating their dependence on each other. No male friendship came between them.

The play’s desire to underscore the importance of this heterosexual couple is on full display when Almeria exclaims, “This is my Lord, My Life, my only Husband,” ending the plot with a reaffirmation of normative gender politics.433

We also know that this focus on Almeria and Osmyn was part of Congreve’s overall goal, as his response to Jeremy Collier’s criticism of the play pinpoints the couple’s love as a major moral takeaway. In his 1698 “Short View of the Immorality and

Profaneness of the English Stage,” Collier complained that instead of a chaste and refined love, Almeria and Osmyn touch, call out for each other, and describe their love as an

431 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 5.7.1–10. 432 OED Online, s.v. “balm, n.1,” accessed December 29, 2017, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/15016. 433 Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 5.7.22.

177 embodied experience.434 When Congreve responded to Collier’s attacks on The Mourning

Bride, he defended himself by underscoring the moral of the play:

The Reward of Matrimonial Constancy in Almeria, of the same Virtue, together with filial Piety and Love to his Country in Osmin; the Punishment of Tyranny in Manuel, of Ambition in Gonzalez, of violent Passions, and unlawful Love in Zara: These it may be were Parts of the Poem as worthy to be observed, as one or two erroneous Expressions.435

Congreve’s rebuff explains how he sees the play, with the moral championing Almeria for her virtue and marital constancy and vilifying those who participated in horrible deeds. The good are rewarded and the bad harmed. After exiling Heli from the play

(essentially confirming that he was no competition at all), Congreve’s choice to focus on

Almeria and Osmyn signals a significant departure from plays that relied on, and deployed, homo-heroic love as their moral core. If we take Congreve’s summation as a reflection of his general view, then it is telling that the bonds of male love are not described as one of the play’s central features. Homo-heroic love has been replaced by normative heterosexual desire, and male friends are seen as a private, complementary feature of men’s lives.

434 Jeremy Collier, “A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage,” in William Congreve: The Critical Heritage, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill and Alexander Lindsay, 108–9 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995). Accessed January 4, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central. 435 Congreve, William. Amendments of Mr. Collier's False and Imperfect Citations (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey 1999), 36.

178 Coda.

In a 2009 article titled, “Does Performance Studies Speak to Restoration

Theatre?” Deborah Payne Fisk questions why Restoration drama and theatre scholarship has been hesitant to embrace performance studies as a possible methodology. Fisk suggests that this trepidation stems from a belief that performance studies’ focus on activism and social change, non-scripted events, and empowering those in the margins, is an uneasy fit with the scripted and mostly elite seventeenth-century playhouse. While this belief is understandable, Fisk points out that it is misguided, and calls on Restoration

Theatre Studies to consider the fertile performance studies fields that await our scholarly cultivation.436 After advocating for a number of possible interventions, Fisk ends the article with this question: “And, finally, why are we not thinking about the pleasures of embodied action on the Restoration stage – surely the great attribute of the theatre – as well as the embodied play of language?”437 Homo-Heroic Love: Male Friendship on the

Restoration Stage has attempted to fill this gap by studying the embodied representations of male friendship and male-male love.

I have explored how, from the 1670s to 1680s, friendship of the period was a public act that was performed with a set of culturally known gestures and actions.

Handholding, kissing, and most importantly, embracing, were signs that held currency in a patriarchal system of alliances. These gestures of affection make up a repertoire of male fealty that when embodied by politically and culturally marked bodies reinforce male

436 Deborah Payne Fisk, “Does Performance Studies Speak to Restoration Theatre?,” Literature Compass 60, no 3 (2009): 668–679. 437 Deborah Payne Fisk, “Does Performance Studies,” 676.

179 supremacy and the benefits of homosocial relationships. Although passionate declarations of love and homoerotic physicality were normative expressions of male friendship, it is possible that these relationships became models of other forms of male intimacy.

Otway’s Venice Preserv’d is one such model, and it is possible that through a disidentificatory process, queer audience members were empowered by these normative, but homoerotic expressions of male friendship. While Chapters One and Two highlighted how a repertoire of male friendship gestures could simultaneously reinforce patriarchal power and be a form of queer identification, Chapters Three and Four show how in other genres, homoeroticism and male power are incompatible. Heroic parodies, like Sodom and Cibber’s The Rival Queans, depict how male-male love is comical and grotesque. In a notable turn away from the importance of men’s bodies, the she-tragedies of

Ravenscroft and Congreve focus on women and their ability to represent virtue and ideal femininity in the face of physical suffering.

There have been moments in this dissertation where I have hinted at how the homo-heroic ideals often portrayed in the newly written tragedies of the 1670s and early

1680s appear to become less prevalent in the years preceding the turn of the century. As my analysis demonstrates, passionate declarations of love and homoerotic embodiment help define many of those tragedies. However, I have been hesitant to provide a historical narrative because there are so many other factors that deserve consideration. While newly written she-tragedies focused on women’s bodies and their suffering, The Rival Queens,

All for Love, and Venice Preserv’d remained some of the most popular tragedies of the period and were brought to the stage regularly through revival stagings. The extended afterlives of these plays and their representations of male love suggest a more

180 complicated public representation of male homoeroticism in the 1680s and 1690s.

Throughout this dissertation, I have also offered a method for understanding how a repertoire of pre-Restoration friendship gestures worked as a powerful visual presence.

This method suggests to me new ways to embrace Fisk’s call to attend to embodied action; for example, what about a repertoire of female friendship gestures? What other embodied meanings can we excavate from the pages of seventeenth-century dramatic texts? I hope others continue to embrace this approach and find more opportunities to study the cultural and political ramifications of embodied performances in the

Restoration playhouse.

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