Becoming Youth: Coming of Age in Shakespeare and Marlowe by Rachel Prusko A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English and Film Studies University of Alberta © Rachel Prusko, 2014 Abstract While studies in Renaissance childhoods, literary and historical, are becoming more prominent, this work has failed to distinguish between children and adolescents, leaving youth, as such, largely unexamined. My project attends not to the children of early modern drama, but to post-pubescent characters in their teen years, and argues that many plays literalize the ‘re-naissance’ of teenagers (‘adolescents’ or ‘youths’ in early modern England), reimagining what it meant to be young during a period when discourses surrounding youth were already clearly, yet crudely, defined. This thesis is a historicized analysis of young characters in several plays: Marlowe’s Edward II, and Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. I argue that these plays intervene in the standard definitions so frequently applied to teenagers during the early modern period. The perception, on the one hand, of youthful behavior as violent, reckless, and rash was commonplace: Protestant preachers and moralists of the day insisted that young people were naturally prone to sin, rebelliousness, and unruly behavior, and so required strict regulation. On the other hand, optimistic portrayals of youth abounded as well: the age of youth was associated with hope and beauty as often as it was with folly and sin. These dual perspectives were rudimentary types, broadly construed and indiscriminately applied. My dissertation works to account for the presence of highly nuanced, individuated, and agential teenaged figures in the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe in the context of this widespread yet limited perception of youth. The ii literary text, I claim, both participates in and works to disable discourses of youth in the period. iii Preface Part of Chapter Two of this dissertation, “Youth and Gossip: Prince Hal and Anne Page,” is forthcoming as a chapter in The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays (eds. Evelyn Gajowski and Phyllis Rackin, Routledge, 2014). The chapter is entitled “’Who hath got the right Anne?’: Gossip, Resistance, and Anne Page in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives.” iv For my mother and For Emma and Malory, Blessed, and mine own v I wish to thank my parents, Linda Woodbridge and Roland Anderson, for loving me, supporting me, and reading everything I ever tried to write my husband, David Prusko, for assuming I could do it and cheering me on my daughters, Emma Prusko and Malory Prusko, who light up my days my supervisor, Jonathan Hart, for making things possible my committee members, Rick Bowers, Garrett Epp, Patricia Demers, Massimo Verdicchio, and Marianne Novy, for their insight and encouragement my many teachers, and especially John Orrell, Garry Watson, Betsy Sargent, and Larry McKill, for teaching me to think and to write and my students, for being the point I gratefully acknowledge the support I received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in undertaking this research. vi Contents Introduction: Becoming Youth 1 Chapter 1: Youth Made Strange: Resistance, Self-Fashioning, and Marlowe’s Boy King 28 Chapter 2: Youth and Gossip: Prince Hal and Anne Page 63 Chapter 3: Youth and Privacy: Romeo and Juliet 104 Chapter 4: Youth and Oral Narrative: Teenaged Girls of the Late Romances 139 Conclusion 183 Works Cited 187 vii Introduction Becoming Youth I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting . (The Winter’s Tale 3.3.58-61) Shakespeare’s old shepherd in The Winter’s Tale voices a complaint commonly heard in early modern England: that the age of youth spells little but trouble. Elsewhere in this play, Antigonus offers a similar but more specific critique of the young, speaking of his three daughters, the eldest of whom is eleven. Should Queen Hermione prove false, he tells Leontes, he’ll “geld ’em all. / Fourteen they shall not see, / To bring forth false generations” (2.1.149-50). Despite the belief, frequently asserted today, that early moderns had little concept of the age of youth, the period’s drama suggests otherwise: people had plenty to say about this age group: often, that the young were a rebellious bunch who required containment and strict subordination, and sometimes, that they were emblems of hope and joy. Such perceptions, though, tended to function as rudimentary types, broadly construed and indiscriminately applied. Youth was perceived merely as a choosing time, as Paul Griffiths explains, a stage in life when one opts to pursue a difficult path to heaven or to secure a certain fall into hell. The representation of youthful behavior as violent, reckless, and rash was commonplace: Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos describes a point made insistently by Protestant preachers and moralists of the day: that young people were naturally prone to sin, 1 rebelliousness, and unruly behavior, and so required strict regulation. Encapsulated in the familiar narrative of the prodigal son, the sin-and-redemption pattern proliferated in the didactic literature of the period. Sixteenth-century morality plays, such as the anonymous Interlude of Youth (c. 1513) and R. Wever’s Lusty Juventus (c. 1547) depict the redemption of the stock character Youth from the clutches of such foes as Riot, Pride, and Abominable Living. The interlude Nice Wanton (c. 1547) advocates the subjugation of youth to parents and to God, as the Messenger’s Prologue makes clear: The prudent Prince Solomon doth say, ‘He that spareth the rod, the child doth hate.’ He would youth should be kept in awe alway By correction in time at reasonable rate, To be taught to fear God and their parents obey . (1-5) Similarly, conduct literature about youth, bearing such titles as Anthony Stafford’s Meditations and Resolutions, Moral, Divine, Political, Written for the Instruction and Bettering of Youth (1612), also stressed the importance of moral and religious instruction, along with strict subjugation, in the shaping of young people. The old men of The Winter’s Tale, then, articulate a view commonly held and expressed by early moderns, but in this play and several others, Shakespeare and Marlowe do much to destabilize this view. Youth, while extant as an age category, was yet only crudely defined; I suggest that the playwrights invent, in their dramatic renderings of teenaged characters, new ways of thinking about the 2 young. The plays depict teens coming of age on their own terms, engaging in self-definition outside the usual narratives established in conduct literature and morality plays. This project explores characters in their teen years in Marlowe and Shakespeare, focusing on Marlowe’s Edward II (1594), and Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V (1598-99), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1598), Romeo and Juliet (1599), Pericles (1607), The Winter’s Tale (1609), and The Tempest (1611). Studies in Renaissance childhoods, literary and historical, are becoming more prominent, but this work has failed to distinguish between children and adolescents, leaving youth, as such, largely unexamined. Scholars in this field tend to subsume children, teenagers, and young adults under a single category, reading them in terms of their shared subordinate status. Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy’s Shakespeare and Childhood (2007) and Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore’s Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe (2006) collect important essays on early modern childhood, essays that work to reintroduce the agency of children into the construction of childhood, but also conflate children and teens. My project attends not to the children of early modern drama, but to post-pubescent characters in their teen years, and argues that the plays in question literalize the ‘re-naissance’ of teenagers (‘adolescents’ or ‘youths’ in early modern England), reimagining what it meant to be young during a period when discourses surrounding youth were already firmly in place. The plays intervene in those discourses, concretizing abstractions; they sharpen, refine, and destabilize existing ideas of youth. 3 Like Diane Purkiss, who has written of teenaged girls in Shakespeare, I sometimes apply, self-consciously and anachronistically, the term ‘teenager’ to the youth of early modern drama: Purkiss does so “because of the way the word ‘between’ is echoed in it” (“Fractious” 57). Teenagers are ‘between’ in the sense that they are neither children nor adults; they exist between cultures, liminal and marginal.1 Purkiss’ idea of the liminal teen helps inform my readings of young characters; however, with my own use of the word ‘teenager’ I mean also to suggest that Marlowe and Shakespeare invented the youthful subject we claim now for our own: their destabilized renderings of young people are perhaps responsible for the version of ‘the teenager’—that creature who is resistant to authority, emotional, prone to peer pressure, and above all impossible to understand— that we recognize today. The term ‘teenager’ is today freighted with signification, and by invoking the word in analyses of early modern drama I want to acknowledge this