The Eroticisation of Religious and Nationalistic Rhetoric in Early-Modern England

A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details i ‘Harlots and Harlotry’: The Eroticisation of Religious and Nationalistic Rhetoric in Early Modern England Catherine Anne Parsons Submitted for the qualification of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature University of Sussex September 2010 ii I hereby declare that this thesis has not been, and will not be, submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Signature iii I would like to acknowledge the help and support of my supervisor, Dr Margaret Healy in the task of researching this thesis. Thanks are also due to Dr Paul Quinn, a source of consistent help and advice, and a number of my fellow Doctoral Students at the University of Sussex, notable amongst them Barbara Kennedy and Janis Darvill. iv University of Sussex Catherine Anne Parsons Submitted for the examination for Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature ‘Harlots and Harlotry’: The Eroticisation of Religious and Nationalistic Rhetoric in Early-Modern England Summary This thesis explores gendered embodiment in early-modern England as a „semiotic field‟ onto which were transcribed anxieties about the contingent nature of individual and national „masculine‟ identity in an era of social and religious change and flux. I examine how the construction of an emergent „Englishness‟ is articulated through the employment of eroticised metaphors of religious and national opposition. Anxieties about the threat to English national stability are feminised in order to contain and distance them, where the trope of the „worrying feminine‟, in the Biblical archetype of the ambitious and sexually promiscuous Whore of Babylon, becomes an „overcoded‟ entity representing a spectrum of anxieties surrounding internal and external religious threats to the self-constituted identity of English Protestant masculinity. In contrast to this, chaste female virtue in the form of the Bride of Christ is used, frequently in conjunction with the trope of the „motherland‟, to privilege the righteousness of the Protestant masculine agenda against a perceived lack of proper monarchical rule. Together with the insights of literary criticism and history, I draw on models from gender and identity theory and cultural theory of the body, to engage with a series of six „moments‟ from 1530 to 1640. Plays by Bale, Sackville and Norton, Shakespeare, Dekker, Heywood, Middleton, Davenport, Brome, Richards and Quarles are analysed in conjunction with Spenser‟s poetry and polemical works by Knox, Aylmer and Stubbes. I explore the ways in which the antithetical tropes are employed and how this reflects, interacts with and works against shifting social and cultural preoccupations. I conclude that the elaborate and over-insistent emphasis upon individual and national masculine supremacy is undermined by the irreconcilable contradictions inherent in its gendered construction. I argue that these disjunctures are nonetheless revealing, since the disentangling and examination of their complexities enables new and productive insights into the cultural climate of the period. v Notes on the text and abbreviations The Early English Books Online texts cited were all accessed through the University of Sussex Library Website. The Unique Resource Locator for all is identical, apart from the individual EEBO citation number, and for reasons of brevity I have simply cited this number in the footnotes and bibliography. The full address is http://gateway.proquest.com/ezproxy.sussex.ac.uk/openurl?ctx- ver=Z39.88-203&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation: All online journal articles cited were accessed through the University of Sussex Library Website. I have cited the database on which they are held, the URL (unique resource locator) or DOI (digital object identifier), with the unique number of each article, and the publisher of the journal. If no URL is given, I have looked at the original article in the file copies held in the University Library or British Library. All the Shakespeare plays cited, and the dates for them given, are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (London: W. W. Norton & Company Ltd, 1997). STC refers to the Short Title Catalogue. Wing refers to the Wing Catalogue. Where possible I have tried to give the original date of publication for each early- modern document cited, but where it has not been possible to establish this with any degree of certainty, I have cited the date of publication of the text I have used. I have retained the original spelling and emphases from primary texts as far as possible, including unmodified i/j and u/v spellings, with the exception of the long „s‟, and have expanded contractions. Dates are given New Style (i.e. with each year assumed to begin on 1 January rather than 25 March). vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction 1 Chapter 1 ‘Lewdness’ and ‘idolatry’: religious stereotyping 30 and John Bale’s construction of the English Protestant identity. Chapter 2 ‘Women on Top’: the sexualised rhetoric of 64 female rule. Chapter 3 Virginity, idolatry, pornography: the later reign 97 of Elizabeth. Chapter 4 The early reign of James: ‘theological kingship’ 135 versus ‘godly Protestantism’. Chapter 5 James’s later reign: witchcraft, corruption, 173 Papistry. Chapter 6 Charles I: religious disputes, Papist ‘conspiracies’, 209 social schism. Conclusion 248 Bibliography 256 1 Introduction „Myriad discourses echo through the body‟.1 „Recurrent tropes are dynamic phenomena, which change meaning over time in a way that reveals “the emotional and volitional dimensions” present in social contexts‟.2 This thesis explores the ways in which gendered embodiment in post-Reformation England became a „semiotic field‟ onto which were transposed important and shifting cultural meanings related to the construction of English identity and nationhood. Anxieties about national security and safety in a time of religious and cultural change were transferred onto the site of the „worrying feminine‟ in order rhetorically to contain and distance them. Traditionally, female „embodiment‟ was a central trope in mediating political ideas, not least because Law, Justice and Truth were gendered female in Latin. The early-modern era, however, was characterised by the somewhat different use of the female body in the frequent recourse to the „overcoded entity‟ of the Biblical trope of the Whore of Babylon.3 A flexible metaphor, it was employed in Reformation England to articulate Protestant antipathy to the Roman Catholic Church; in the mutual „mudslinging‟ of Elizabethan and Jacobean Protestant factional polemic; in bellicose English patriotic rhetoric; and in the anti-Laudian and anti- monarchical debate of the immediate pre-Civil War period. Later in the 17th century it would also figure large in the near-hysteria of the post-Restoration „Popish plot‟. This was frequently countered, in this era of growing English „separateness‟ and nationalistic sentiment, by the depiction of both the „motherland‟ and the English 1 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (London: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 118. 2 Jacqueline Vanhoutte, „Elizabeth I as Stepmother‟, in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 39, Issue 2, (May, 2009), pp. 315-335. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475- 6757.2009.01049.x, accessed 02.03.10. Vanhoutte is citing Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982) p. 22. 3 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, Ill.: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 134. 2 Protestant Church as a virtuous but vulnerable woman threatened by despoliation and violation. This thesis examines the causes of this greatly increased rhetorical reliance upon these traditionally-based epitomes of femininity and female embodiment in the articulation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century anxieties about national religious and cultural change. The evidence for an emergent English nationalistic sentiment during the Reformation period has been the subject of repeated examination in recent years. Benedict Anderson‟s location of the origins of „true‟ nationalism in nineteenth- century print culture has been countered by those who point, rightly in my opinion, to an earlier genesis for this phenomenon and maintain that the adoption of Protestantism as the national religion under Henry VIII was the catalyst for the creation of a „national identity‟.4 The increased availability of literature in the vernacular, above all the Protestant emphasis on Biblical translation, led to the growing sense of national separation characterised by what has been described an „amalgam of biblical fundamentalism and insular patriotism‟.5 It was this reliance upon the native tongue as a medium for „writing the nation‟ through the articulation of the new national religious identity that underpinned the rhetorical construction

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