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The Forest and Social Change in Early Modern English Literature, 1590–1700

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The Forest and Social Change in Early Modern English Literature, 1590–1700 The Forest and Social Change in Early Modern English Literature, 1590–1700 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Elizabeth Marie Weixel IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. John Watkins, Adviser April 2009 © Elizabeth Marie Weixel, 2009 i Acknowledgements In such a wood of words … …there be more ways to the wood than one. —John Milton, A Brief History of Moscovia (1674) —English proverb Many people have made this project possible and fruitful. My greatest thanks go to my adviser, John Watkins, whose expansive expertise, professional generosity, and evident faith that I would figure things out have made my graduate studies rewarding. I count myself fortunate to have studied under his tutelage. I also wish to thank the members of my committee: Rebecca Krug for straightforward and honest critique that made my thinking and writing stronger, Shirley Nelson Garner for her keen attention to detail, and Lianna Farber for her kind encouragement through a long process. I would also like to thank the University of Minnesota English Department for travel and research grants that directly contributed to this project and the Graduate School for the generous support of a 2007-08 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. Fellow graduate students and members of the Medieval and Early Modern Research Group provided valuable support, advice, and collegiality. I would especially like to thank Elizabeth Ketner for her generous help and friendship, Ariane Balizet for sharing what she learned as she blazed the way through the dissertation and job search, Marcela Kostihová for encouraging my early modern interests, and Lindsay Craig for his humor and interest in my work. My family deserves my heartfelt thanks and appreciation. My parents Norbert and Peggy Weixel and brother Joel Weixel have given me unending support (and countless hours of dog-sitting Greta) as I indulged in what must seem to them an excessive inclination for school. I would not have begun nor finished this endeavor without them. ii My in-laws, Milton and Katheryn Anderson, have displayed gratifying interest in and tolerance for my constant reading and writing work. I have at times been struck by the pride and faith in me held by all my family, and their confidence has worked to increase my own confidence and happiness in completing this project. Finally, my greatest thanks go to my husband, Josh Anderson, whose patience, love, and talent at making me laugh have sustained me through this project and through the years. He is truly my best friend. iii For my grandmothers, Evelyn Butterfield Halvorson and Veronica Myers Weixel iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. i Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iii Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter One “No wood no Kingdome”: The Early Modern Social Struggle over the Fading Forest ....14 Honor in the Forest: Social Rank and Landscape ..................................................19 Staking Claims: Woodland, Genre, and the Marginalized Aristocracy ................35 Chapter Two Dukes of the Wood: Nobility in the Forests of Shakespearean Comedy ........................... 57 The Forest on the London Stage: A Cultural Geography of Wildness .................57 Tenuous Authority and the “Palace Wood” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ......65 “Men of great worth resorted to this forest”: As You Like It and the Forest as Judge .......................................................................................................79 Chapter Three Squires of the Wood: The Decline of the Aristocratic Forest in The Faerie Queene ......100 Squires in the Aristocratic Forest of Romance ....................................................104 A Fork in the Path: Spenser’s Forest and Genre ..................................................128 Chapter Four A Table in the Wilderness: The Great Hall Grove of Milton’s Paradise Regained ........ 141 From Wild Woods to Country Estates: The Forested Legacy of Book 2 ............141 Country House Woodlands ..................................................................................152 Empty Authority: Country House Hospitality in Paradise Regained .................167 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................183 1 Introduction Forests, Parks, and Chases, they are a noble portion of the King’s Prerogative: they are the verdure of the King; they are the first marks of honour and nobility, and the ornament of a flourishing kingdom. You never hear Switzerland or Netherland troubled with forests. —Francis Bacon, notes for a speech to Star Chamber, 1614 (88) According to one of its leading thinkers, England was both blessed and troubled by its forests. Even as he defends James I’s exclusive hunting privileges in royal forests, Bacon reveals the difficulty of the kingdom’s forests: they are treasured and troublesome precisely because of their role as sources and symbols of English honor rooted in the land. Although royal forests were the king’s alone, others—the aristocracy, the gentry, and sometimes the commons—wanted a share of that honor. They laid claim to the forest by various methods and according to their means, gaining royal favor to hunt in the king’s forests, building private hunting parks, or poaching. It was a case of deer-stealing that brought Bacon to the Star Chamber to stress the value of forests not only to the king and to England as a nation, but to notions of social status. He goes on to write of sport hunting, “It is a sport proper to the nobility and men of better rank; and it is to keep a difference between the gentry and the common sort.” The theft itself is inconsequential; the crime is found in transgressing social boundaries. The story of England’s forests has been figured as a “counter-narrative to that of modernisation” (Langton 7), making them places of “strong resistance and contradiction” to new economic and social models in which “forests were a distinctive landscape expressing pre-modern attitudes and activities” (Langton 9). Forests and woodlands had 2 always been places of conflict, but the early modern period witnessed, in combination with the pressures of social and economic change, growing worries about the survival of forests. Fears about the widespread destruction of forest resources and the desuetude of royal forest law led many men to believe that English forests faced imminent demise. The heightened sense of urgency as forests faced destruction—or modernity—makes them charged indices to the slow process of social change. Early modern English literature, and the study of it, has also harbored a deep and abiding interest in forests. Ubiquitous across genres and throughout medieval and Renaissance writing, the forest is charged with myriad complementary and conflicting cultural connotations that are tied to historical forests as well. In 1965 Northrop Frye proposed in A Natural Perspective the existence of a distinct space he called the “green world” in Shakespeare’s “forest comedies.” This green world—a space of escape, freedom, and renewal opposed to the court or city—depicts the forest in allegorical and metaphysical terms as a setting that creates and fosters the potential for human transformation. His conception of the forest drew attention from setting as backdrop to the symbolic power of space and its dramatic intervention in plot and character. Frye’s green world formulation has in many ways directed literary criticism’s approach to forest spaces, and his legacy endures. Scholarship since then often views the forest as primarily symbolic of human passions or as representative of the human psyche. Building on Frye’s foundation are works like Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests: The Shadow of Civilization , which proposes to explain the antagonism between Western civilization and a wild nature as embodied in forests by tracing a “genetic psychology of the earliest myths and fables” of forests (3) and interrogating the concept of the forest as 3 a cultural “birthplace.” Jeanne Addison Roberts’s broad survey of the pastoral and Virgilian-inspired “mixed” and “wild” forests in Shakespeare’s works captures the often contradictory and ambiguous nature of forests. In other studies, the forest is subsumed into literary modes and their dominant landscapes. For example, David Young’s The Heart’s Forest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays appropriates woodland into the larger category of pastoral, thereby erasing its distinct character as a historical and literary space. Undeniably, the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inherited from that of the preceding centuries the forests of exile, wandering, licentiousness, and chivalry found in Malory, Chaucer, and continental romance. A literary turn of mind helps capture the ideological and metaphorical force of forests as cultural institutions, and literary studies have illuminated the deeply resonant force of the forest on the human imagination and psyche. Such an approach is also true to the mindset of early modern people who often thought about forests in imaginative terms and as places of escape, desire,
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