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The Moral Basis of Family Relationships in the Plays of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: a Study in Renaissance Ideas

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The Moral Basis of Family Relationships in the Plays of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: a Study in Renaissance Ideas The Moral Basis of Family Relationships in the plays of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: a Study in Renaissance Ideas. A submission for the degree of doctor of philosophy by Stephen David Collins. The Department of History of The University of York. June, 2016. ABSTRACT. Families transact their relationships in a number of ways. Alongside and in tension with the emotional and practical dealings of family life are factors of an essentially moral nature such as loyalty, gratitude, obedience, and altruism. Morality depends on ideas about how one should behave, so that, for example, deciding whether or not to save a brother's life by going to bed with his judge involves an ethical accountancy drawing on ideas of right and wrong. It is such ideas that are the focus of this study. It seeks to recover some of ethical assumptions which were in circulation in early modern England and which inform the plays of the period. A number of plays which dramatise family relationships are analysed from the imagined perspectives of original audiences whose intellectual and moral worlds are explored through specific dramatic situations. Plays are discussed as far as possible in terms of their language and plots, rather than of character, and the study is eclectic in its use of sources, though drawing largely on the extensive didactic and polemical writing on the family surviving from the period. Three aspects of family relationships are discussed: first, the shifting one between parents and children, second, that between siblings, and, third, one version of marriage, that of the remarriage of the bereaved. The moral bases of all these relationships are derived in part from explicit precept, such as the requirement to honour parents, in part from cultural mores which shaped expectations about, for example, the treatment of elderly parents, and in part from a largely undefined sense of how things should be and were in the world. This last brings into play the concept of nature, an elusive but crucial point of reference for the moral basis of family life and often perceived as the drive behind behaviour. A play, therefore, may be a dynamic representation of the coming together of multiple ethical strands in specific circumstances in which sometimes conflicting ideas and impulses are worked out. The thesis is informed by the conviction that literature can yield understandings that are beyond the reach of linear reasoning and accessible only by an imaginative transcending of rationality. So, for example, when a homeless old king is bewildered by the breakdown of family morality as he sees it, and casts about for reasons, he must try out different explanations none of which is satisfactory on its own, and has therefore to attempt a synthesis of incompatible ideas which can be achieved only intuitively through the medium of poetic drama. CONTENTS. Chapter 1: Introduction: What the Study is about. Page 8. Chapter 2: A Culture of Obedience? Page 38. Chapter 3: “A Crutch to Leane on in my Second Infancie”: Responsibility for the Elderly in Early Modern England. Page 76. Chapter 4: “Let them Anatomise Regan”: the Enigma of King Lear. Page 102. Chapter 5: Brothers and Sisters, Sex and Death. Page 144. Chapter 6: The “Smell of the Nurses Maners” and the Corruption of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Page 168. Chapter 7: “A Kind of Lawful Adultery”: Remarriage in Renaissance Drama and Prejudice. Page 208. Chapter 8: Envoi. Page 237. Appendix 1: Siblings in Context. Page 240. Appendix 2: Sisters and Brothers in Measure for Measure and its Source. Page 258. Bibliography. Page 275. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. I am grateful to the University of York for taking in an unusual student. David Wootton has overseen the resultant project with fortitude and endless intellectual stimulation which I'd not have missed for anything. Mark Jenner and Kevin Killeen were beguiled into membership of my advisory panel, and their daunting scholarship has been ever friendly and available. In the wider university community I have found a particular welcome in the Finnegans Wake reading group, a disparate group of people with little in common except an addiction to perplexity. At home, there's no point in thanking my beloved wife, Lorraine Hemingway, for words are inadequate. Lottie, an elderly mongrel, has lived with us for the whole time this project has taken and contributed in her own way, as have the cats and a horse with whom we share our lives. Finally, an impersonal thanks must go to “the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears” for keeping away. CONVENTIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS. Usage. Honorary titles are presumed to have died with their owners, so Philip Sidney's knighthood expired with him at Arnhem. It would be pedantic to call Dr Johnson anything else. Modernisation is sparing. I have transcribed the texts I used, and modernised only by changing vv to w and u to v when appropriate, persuaded by hearing of an American student spending a miserable semester wondering what “loue” could possibly be. Although there seems to be a modern tendency to use the word “ethics” about money and “moral” about sex, I treat the words as synonyms and use them interchangeably. I have assumed a familiarity with Shakespeare's plots, but have summarised those of more obscure plays. Editions. Except where otherwise identified, all references to Shakespeare are to The Complete Works. Edited by Alfred Harbage. London: Allen Lane at the Penguin Press, 1969. The texts of other plays have been chosen mainly on the basis of convenience of access. Quotations from the Bible are from The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition; with an Introduction by Lloyd E. Berry. Madison ; London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. Abbreviations. BCP: Cummings, Brian, ed. The Book of Common Prayer : The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.Bullough: Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 1957. DNB: Dictionary of National Biography. Eliz. BCP: The Prayer-Book of Queen Elizabeth, 1559, To Which Are Appended Some Occasional Forms of Prayer Issued in Her Reign. London: Griffith Farran, 1890. Florio's Montaigne: Montaigne, Michel de. The Essayes of Michael, Lord of Montaigne. Edited by Henry Morley. Translated by John Florio. London: Routledge, 1893. OED: Oxford English Dictionary. Partridge: Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare’s Bawdy : A Literary & Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968. Schmidt: Schmidt, Alexander. Shakespeare Lexicon : A Complete Dictionary of All the English Words, Phrases and Constructions in the Works of the Poet. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1902. Schoenbaum: Harbage, Alfred Bennett. Annals of English Drama, 975-1700 ... Revised by S. Schoenbaum. London: Methuen & Co., 1964.Williams: Williams, Gordon. A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. London: Athlone Press, 1994. Tilley: Tilley, Morris Palmer. A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. A Collection of the Proverbs Found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period. Ann Arbor, 1950. A German ambassador once told me he cdn't bear St Paul he was, he said, so hard on fornication. Ezra Pound, Canto LXXI. JOHNSON: “Now had I been an Indian, I must have died early: my eyes would not have served me to get food. … I should have been dead before I was ten years old. Depend upon it, Sir, a savage when he is hungry, will not carry about with him a looby of nine years old who cannot help himself. They have no affection.” BOSWELL: “I believe natural affection, of which we hear so much, is very small.” JOHNSON: “Sir, natural affection is nothing: but affection from principle and established duty, is sometimes wonderfully strong.” LOWE: “A hen, Sir, will feed her chickens in preference to herself.” JOHNSON: “But we don't know that the hen is hungry … .” Boswell's Life of Johnson, 20 & 21.iv.1783. CHAPTER ONE. WHAT THE STUDY IS ABOUT. When Lear is pretending to auction his kingdom in the opening scene of King Lear, he has laid down that the currency in which the bids are to be made is that of love: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most … ?” What is actually at issue, it soon turns out, is language, descriptions of affection in the flattering style of a masque, brought out by the constant reiteration of “speak … says …. speak”, and then, when Cordelia is silent, “Mend your speech a little”.1 The two older daughters enter into the spirit of the occasion and describe their love, as Lear prompts them to, in terms of quantity, of comparatives and superlatives, and their hyperbole uses the language of commerce (“dearer”, “rich”, “worth”, “short”). Cordelia is unable, or refuses, to outbid her sisters, but makes her response not using the language of feeling but of morality, drawing on concepts of duty, gratitude, obedience, and honour.2 In the ensuing dialogue, Lear interrogates her about the interaction of morality and emotion: “Goes thy heart with this? … so untender?”, and she replies with a further ethical appeal: “true”. Her “trueness” has an immediate market valuation put on it (“Thy truth then be thy dower”) and a second auction ensues, between her two suitors now that she brings with her no substantial landholding. Up to this point the only sincere emotion has been anger, that of Lear and of Kent, but as the long opening episode of the play draws to a close, what looks like genuine affection makes an appearance. Appropriately enough in the paradoxical situation, love is caught in a series of oxymorons spoken by the king of France to his bride: Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor; Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised … .
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