Thomas Lodge The University Wits Series Editor: Robert A. Logan
Titles in the Series:
George Peele David Bevington
Thomas Nashe Georgia Brown
Christopher Marlowe Robert A. Logan
John Lyly Ruth Lunney
Robert Greene Kirk Melnikoff
Thomas Lodge Charles C. Whitney Thomas Lodge
Edited by Charles C. Whitney University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA with translations by Phillip John Usher, Barnard College
D Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
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Copyright © Charles C. Whitney 2011. For copyright of individual articles please refer to the Acknowledgements.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Thomas Lodge. - (The university wits) 1. Lodge, Thomas, 15587-1625. 2. Lodge, Thomas, 1558?-1625-Criticism and interpretation. 3. English literature-Early modern, 1500-1700-History and criticism. I. Series II. Whitney, Charles C. 828.3'09-dc22
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010926162
ISBN 9780754628750 (hbk) Contents
A cknowl edgem ents ix Series Preface xi Introduction xiii Catalogue of Authors xxxvii Additional Bibliography xxxix
PART I BIOGRAPHY
1 Charles J. Sisson (1933), ‘Thomas Lodge the Man’ from ‘Thomas Lodge and His Family’, in Charles J. Sisson (ed.), Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 149-64. 3 2 Eliane Cuvelier (1984), ‘Conclusion’, Phillip John Usher (trans.), Thomas Lodge: Temoin de son Temps, Paris: Didier Erudition, pp. 521-24 [19-22]. 19 3 Charles Whitworth (1966), ‘Thomas Lodge (1558-September 1625)’, Sixteenth- Century British Nondramatic Writers, in David A. Richardson (ed.), Dictionary of Literary Biography, Detroit: Gale Research, 172, pp. 136^19. 23
PART II GENERAL CHARACTERIZATIONS OF LODGE’S ACHIEVEMENT
4 Richard Helgerson (1977), ‘Lodge’, The Elizabethan Prodigals, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 105-23, 168-69. 39 5 Eliane Cuvelier (1984), ‘The Discontent of Elizabethan Society [Les Maux Sociaux]’, Phillip John Usher (trans.), Thomas Lodge: Temoin de son Temps, Paris: Didier Erudition, pp. 375-95 [61-82]. 61 6 Arthur Kinney (1986), ‘O vita! misero longa, foelici brevi: Thomas Lodge’s Struggle for Felicity’, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-century England, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 363^23; 502-505. 83
PART III ROMANCES
General Characterizations 7 Walter Davis (1969), from ‘Pastoral Romance: Sidney and Lodge’, and from ‘Nashe and the Elizabethan “Realists’” , Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 80-93; 194-202. 151 8 Katharine Wilson (2006), ‘From Arden to America: Lodge’s Tragedies of Infatuation’, Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives: Euphues in Arcadia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 138-65. 175 vi Thomas Lodge
Rosalynde and its Intertexts 9 Nancy R. Lindheim (1975), ‘Lyly’s Golden Legacy: Rosalynde and Pandosto\ Studies in English Literature, 1500- 1900, 15, pp. 3-20. 205 10 Charles Whitworth (1997), ‘Wooing and Winning in Arden: Rosalynde and As You Like It\ Etudes Anglaises, 50, pp. 387-99. 223 11 Clare R. Kinney (1998), ‘Feigning Female Faining: Spenser, Lodge, Shakespeare, and Rosalind’, Modern Philology, 95, pp. 291-315. 237 12 Steve Mentz (2008), “‘A Note Beyond Your Reach”: Prose Romance’s Rivalry with Elizabethan Drama’, in Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne (eds), Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare, New York: Routledge, pp. 75-90. 263 Robin the Devil and Shakespeare’s King Lear 13 Donna B. Hamilton (1974), ‘Some Romance Sources for King Lear. Robert of Sicily and Robert the Devil’, Studies in Philology, 71, pp. 173-91. 281 A Margarite of America 14 Joan Pong Linton (1998), ‘Sea-Knights and Royal Virgins: American Gold and its Discontents in Lodge’s A Margarite of America (1596)’, The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Formations of English Colonialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 39-61; 201-208. 303 15 Donald Beecher (2005), ‘Horror Fiction of the 1590s’ and ‘Romance and Revenge Tragedy’ from ‘Introduction’ to A Margarite of America, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, pp. 11-26. 333
PART IV POETRY
Lyrics 16 Donald Beecher (1997), ‘Poetic Interludes’ from ‘Introduction’ to his edition of Rosalind: Euphues ’ Golden Legacy Found After His Death in His Cell at Silexedra (1590), Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, pp. 56-64. 355 Scillaes Metamorphosis or Glaucus and Scilla 17 William Keach (1977), ‘ Glaucus and Scilla\ Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 36-51; 238^11. 367 18 Jim Ellis (2001), ‘Imagining Heterosexuality in the Epyllia’, in Goran V. Stanivukovic (ed.), Ovid and the Renaissance Body, Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, pp. 38-58. 387 19 R.W. Maslen (2003), ‘Lodge’s Glaucus and Scilla and the Conditions of Catholic Authorship in Elizabethan England’, open-access web journal, EnterText, 3, pp. 59-100 [409-32]. 409
PART V DRAMA
The Wounds of Civil War 20 Vanna Gentili (1984), ‘The Choice of Sources: Evidence and Justification for Appian’, from ‘Thomas Lodge’s Wounds o f Civil War. An Assessment of Context, Sources, Thomas Lodge vii
and Structure’, Real: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 2, pp. 139—44. 437 21 Andrew Hadfield (2005), ‘Thomas Lodge and Elizabethan Republicanism’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, 4, pp. 89-105. 443 A Looking Glasse for London and England 22 Pauline Blanc (2008), ‘Barbarism in Lodge and Greene’s A Looking Glasse for London and England’, in Zsolt Alvasi and Michael Pincombe (eds), Writing the Other: Humanism versus Barbarism in Tudor England, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 79-97. 463
PART VI PROSE
23 Alice Walker (1932), ‘The Reading of an Elizabethan: Some Sources of the Prose Pamphlets of Thomas Lodge’, Review of English Studies: A Quarterly Journal of English Literature and the English Language, 8, pp. 264-81. 485 24 Eliane Cuvelier (1984), ‘Renaissance Catholicism in the Work of Thomas Lodge [Le Catholicisme anglais de la Renaissance dans 1’oeuvre de Lodge]’, Phillip John Usher (trans.), Thomas Lodge: Temoin de son Temps, Paris: Didier Erudition, pp. 465-79 [503-18]. 503
Name Index 519
Acknowledgements
The editor and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material.
Cengage/Nelson for the essay: Charles W. Whitworth (1966) ‘Thomas Lodge (1558— September 1625)’, Sixteenth-Century British Nondramatic Writers, in David A. Richardson (ed.), Dictionary of Literary Biography, Detroit: Gale Research, 172, pp. 136^19.
Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies for the essays: Donald Beecher (2005), ‘Horror Fiction of the 1590s’ and ‘Romance and Revenge Tragedy’ from ‘Introduction’ to A Margarite of America, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, pp. 11-26. Copyright © 2005 Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies; Donald Beecher (1997), ‘Poetic Interludes’ from ‘Introduction’ to his edition of Rosalind: Euphues’ Golden Legacy Found After His Death in His Cell at Silexedra (1590), Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, pp. 56-64.
Edition Klincksieck for the essays: Eliane Cuvelier (1984), ‘Conclusion’, Thomas Lodge: Temoin de son Temps, Paris: Didier Erudition, pp. 521-24; Eliane Cuvelier (1984), ‘The Discontent of Elizabethan Society [Les Maux Sociaux]’, Thomas Lodge: Temoin de son Temps, Paris: Didier Erudition, pp. 375-95; Eliane Cuvelier (1984), ‘Renaissance Catholicism in the Work of Thomas Lodge [Le Catholicisme anglais de la Renaissance dans 1’oeuvre de Lodge]’, Thomas Lodge: Temoin de son Temps, Paris: Didier Erudition, pp. 465-79.
Harvard University Press for the essay: Charles J. Sisson (1933), ‘Thomas Lodge the Man’ from ‘Thomas Lodge and His Family’, in Charles J. Sisson (ed.), Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 149-61. Copyright © 1933 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Nordic Journal of English Studies for the essay: Andrew Hadfield (2005), ‘Thomas Lodge and Elizabethan Republicanism’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, 4, pp. 89-105.
Oxford University Press for the essays: Katharine Wilson (2006), “From Arden to America: Lodge’s Tragedies of Infatuation’, Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives: Euphues in Arcadia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 138-65. Copyright © 2006 Katherine Wilson; Alice Walker (1932), ‘The Reading of an Elizabethan: Some Sources of the Prose Pamphlets of Thomas Lodge’, Review of English Studies: A Quarterly Journal of English Literature and the English Language, 8, pp. 264-81.
Princeton University Press for the essay: Walter Davis (1969), from ‘Pastoral Romance: Sidney and Lodge’, and from ‘Nashe and the Elizabethan “Realists’” , Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 80-93; 194-202. Thomas Lodge
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 for the essay: Nancy R. Lindheim (1975), ‘Lyly’s Golden Legacy: Rosalynde and Pandosto\ Studies in English Literature, 1500- 1900, 15, pp. 3-20.
Taylor & Francis Group for the essay: Steve Mentz (2008), “‘A Note Beyond Your Reach”: Prose Romance’s Rivalry with Elizabethan Drama’, in Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne (eds), Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare, New York: Routledge, pp. 75-90.
University of California Press for the essay: Richard Helgerson (1977), ‘Lodge’, The Elizabethan Prodigals, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 105-23, 168-69.
University of Chicago Press for the essay: Clare R. Kinney (1998), ‘Feigning Female Faining: Spenser, Lodge, Shakespeare, and Rosalind’, Modern Philology, 95, pp. 291-315. Copyright © 1998 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
University of Massachusetts Press for the essay: Arthur Kinney (1986), ‘O vital misero longa, foelici brevi: Thomas Lodge’s Struggle for Felicity’, Humanist Poetics: Thought Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-century England, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 363^23; 502-505.
University of North Carolina Press for the essay: Donna B. Hamilton (1974), ‘Some Romance Sources for King Lear. Robert of Sicily and Robert the Devil’, Studies in Philology, 71, pp. 173-91. Copyright © 1974 University of North Carolina Press.
University of Toronto Press Inc. for the essay: Jim Ellis (2001), ‘Imagining Heterosexuality in the Epyllia’, in Goran V. Stanivukovic (ed.), Ovid and the Renaissance Body, Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, pp. 38-58. Copyright © 2001 University of Toronto Press.
Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. Series Preface
In 1887, the literary historian and critic, George Saintsbury, coined the term “University Wits” to apply to six, university-trained Renaissance writers: John Lyly (1554-1606), Thomas Lodge (1558-1625), and George Peele (1558-1597), all graduates of Oxford, and Robert Greene (1560-1592), Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), and Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), Cambridge graduates. Although Marlowe has acquired a reputation among scholars and critics as the most prominent of the group, this series seeks to give equal attention to all six writers, making clear how they were responsible for major improvements in the course of English drama and how their works provided Shakespeare with a context of theatrical possibilities that helped spur him to success. Although the details are sparse, there is clear evidence that these writers either knew or knew of one another, even if they never formally acknowledged themselves as a group of educated elite. To be sure, there are similarities in the University Wits that have had a lasting impact - for example, their heightened awareness of style and form, a likely stimulus for Shakespeare’s imaginative handling of stylistics. Moreover, in writing plays, the Wits learned to abide by the established aesthetic requirements and commercial demands of popular theater even as they sought to make changes that would permanently affect both conditions. The volume editors evince a healthy skepticism toward attempts to isolate these six figures from their early modem context, and yet, concomitantly, manifest a desire to draw most of them from the shadows where they have remained for far too long. Thus, the volumes attempt to illuminate the distinctive characteristics of each writer through selections of the most perceptive, wide-ranging scholarship and criticism written about them. The reprinted pieces in each volume are preceded by generous introductions that not only offer fresh perspectives on the biography and literary output of the writers but also give a sense of what has been achieved by scholars over time and, in some cases, what needs still to be done. These six volumes raise questions that bring into focus with fresh insight both familiar and new issues. For example: What do we know of the friendships among the six members of the University Wits and of the influence their bonds with one another, as well as their writings, may have had on each other’s works? What impact did the University Wits have on the rapidly developing course of English drama? To what extent did the Wits’ need to earn a living, along with the evolving standards and pressures of commercialism, determine the content and style of their compositions? How aware were the Wits of their status as university graduates? What were the personal and professional ramifications of Greene and Nashe’s unabashed snobbishness; was it the result of their status as university graduates? Are we able to detect the specific consequences of the Wits’ education in the substance and manner of what they write? What might Shakespeare have found in the behavior and plays of the University Wits to influence the mix of commercialism and aesthetics in his dramas? Are we able to detect any influence from the Wits on Shakespeare’s poetry? What longstanding myths about the University Wits do these volumes denounce? What patterns do we see in the criticism and scholarship on the University Wits? This six-volume series will provide answers to these xii Thomas Lodge questions and many others of interest to students, teachers, and scholars eager to contextualize the work of writers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A substantial portion of the leading scholarship on the University Wits has been published in scholarly journals and volumes of collected essays. The editors of the six volumes have winnowed these pieces, organizing them coherently into successive sections that, taken as a whole, present an up-to-date view of where the scholarship and criticism have brought us. Portions of book-length studies have sometimes been included. When it was impossible to include texts because of their length, editors have nevertheless directed readers to them, indicating what they are likely to find of value. In addition, the editors have provided their volumes with extensive bibliographies. Students, teachers, and scholars will find the series invaluable for both research and pedagogy. All the editors have carefully reviewed the expanse of articles and monographs written about their authors in order to make manifest the most advanced thinking about them and, thereby, to provide a resource of enduring value. Highly accessible and authoritative, these volumes represent the most important work done to date on the University Wits.
ROBERTA. LOGAN Series Editor University o f Hartford, USA Introduction
Life and Works
Thomas Lodge’s long, eventful and well-documented life makes him one of the most knowable and individualized figures of his age, although estimates of his character have varied widely. But the remarkable diversity of his experiences and writings, his pointed commentaries on London life and his penchants for both trend-setting and trend-following have also marked him as uniquely representative of his age. Lodge’s father, Sir Thomas, was a merchant prince who scandalized London by going bankrupt the very year of his mayoralty, 1562, when young Thomas was four years old. Nevertheless, starting with childhood residence with the family of Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby, the younger Thomas got the education, the connections and the financial backing to advance his family’s fortunes in trade or in law. But Lodge never finished his law degree, and instead joined the historical vanguard of struggling professional writers emerging at the time, eventually losing a sizeable but conditional inheritance from his mother. Without significant patronage, Lodge published prolifically in fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama; pioneered in several genres to bridge elite humanist and popular cultures; developed Catholic sympathies while at Trinity College, Oxford or perhaps earlier (sympathies that influenced his writing); went on two hazardous sea voyages; and emulated his father only in his imprisonment for debt and his fondness for lawsuits. Then at the age of 3 8 the writer made an abrupt turn, renouncing fiction and poetry, embracing Catholicism, studying medicine in France and practising it abroad and as a recusant in London. He married, and translated works of medicine, religion, and moral philosophy. Lodge died in 1625, perhaps while ministering to the sick during the plague. Lodge’s first book (1579 or 1580) was the first English defence of poetry and drama, and responded to the attacks of Stephen Gosson. Denied a licence, it was printed without a title page and is now sometimes called Honest Excuses.1 Its dedicatee Sir Philip Sidney soon followed with his famous defence, printed only posthumously. In 1584 Lodge published another pioneering work, An Alarum against Usurers, which gained some of its vitality of description from the debt-ridden author’s own experience as an unthrifty young gentleman of limited means who may himself have been victimized by London con artists. A satirical poem entitled Truths Complaint over England was also included in this volume, along with Lodge’s first romance, The Delectable History ofForbonius andPrisceria, an allegory that showed the author’s admiration of Sidney’s Old Arcadia, then in manuscript.
1 The list of Lodge’s publications here, including the spelling and punctuation of titles, comes from the bibliography in Cuvelier (1984, p. 525f). In subsequent references to these works, I generally use modernized spelling, except in the case of Rosalynde, where the original has usually, but not always remained, the standard. xiv Thomas Lodge
From 1584 to 1596 Lodge’s known literary output was impressive, the more so since he went on his two voyages during that period, the second an abortive circumnavigation of the globe that met catastrophe in South America. Like other professional writers of the time facing constraints of time or money and following humanist practices emphasizing imitation, he often borrowed others’ work with scant acknowledgement. The modem notion of the author as autonomous source of meaning as well as copyright laws installing that notion had yet to be established. But Lodge could take things far even for his own time. Within a few years after An Alarum for Usurers Lodge utilized Roman sources to produce the first commercial English classical history play, the Senecan The Wounds of Civil War, lively set forth in the true Tragedies of Marius and Silla, which was acted by the Admiral’s Men in the 1580s and published in 1594. Lodge has been mentioned as a possible author or co-author of some 23 other plays, as diverse as Mucedorus, King Leir, and Locrine (Cuvelier, 1984, p. 203). But it is only certain that he co-authored one other, the homiletic biblical play A Looking Glasse for London and England, with Robert Greene, possibly in the late 1580s for the Queen’s Men or by early 1592 when the play was definitely performed by Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose Theater. A Looking Glasse was published in 1594 and reprinted four times by 1617 - an indication of its popularity. In 1589 Lodge published the first English epyllion or Ovidian erotic narrative poem, Scillaes Metamorphosis, Enterlaced with the unfortunate love of Glaucus, with miscellaneous poems appended. (Its second edition in 1610 was titled A most pleasant Historie of Glaucus and Scilla.) In the following year Lodge’s masterpiece and one great commercial success, the pastoral romance Rosalynde, or Euphues Golden Legacy Found After His Death in His Cell at Silexedra (ten editions by 1642) appeared. In one of its dedications Lodge claims he wrote a draft of Rosalynde during a voyage, which may well have taken place as early as 1585 (Lodge, 1997, pp. 93, 229-30). Rosalynde transformed some version of the medieval Tale of Gamelyn, adding to its rival brothers an original plot centred on two enterprising young women on their own in a green world. Its style imitated and its plot picked up from the ending of the stylish Euphues (1578), the work of a fellow Oxford student, John Lyly. But Lodge’s focus on successful courtship and marriage swerved far from Euphues. Rosalynde later became the source of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The pace accelerated. In 1591 came an early example of a historicized romance, one based on medieval legend, The Famous, True, and Historical Life of Robert, Second Duke of Normandy, surnamed ... Robin the Devill, as well as a dialogue denouncing religious persecution in England, Catharos: Diogenes in his Singularitie ... his merrie baighting ... Christened by him A Nettle for Nice Noses. In 1592 Lodge published an unswerving Euphues sequel, the romance Euphues Shadow, the Battaile of the Senses, with additional appended matter. In 1593 appeared three titles. The first was another historical romance, The Life and Death o f William Long Beard, the most famous and witty English Traitor, borne in the Citty o f London, accompanied with manye other most pleasant andprettie histories. The second was a collection of love poems participating in the current vogue and heavily dependent on Italian and French models, Phillis: Honoured with Pastoral Sonnets, Elegies, and amorous delights, Whereunto is annexed, the tragicall complaynt of Elstred. (That complaint was modelled on Samuel Daniel’s recent Complaint of Rosamond.) The third was an anthology of poetry, The Phoenix Nest, for which the anonymous editor chose more of Lodge’s poems than those of any other writer represented. In 1594 the two plays were published along with a lost work, Thomas Lodge jcv
The Spider’s Web. In 1595 Lodge published the first book in England that used the word ‘satire’ in the title and that translated and imitated Latin satirical poets: A Fig for Momus: Containing Pleasant varietie, included in Satyres, Eclogues, and Epistles, giving him a claim to be the first English satirist, preceding that of Joseph Hall by two years (Cuvelier, 1984, pp. 340-343; see also Whitworth, Chapter 3, this volume). In 1596 Lodge made a break, abandoning the writing of original compositions and beginning a new life studying medicine in France and living more openly as a Catholic (Tenney, [1934] 1969, pp. 147-54). This change has been interpreted in many ways, from impatience with poverty to the prodigal son’s return. Lodge published four separate volumes that year. One was his last fiction, the unique tragic romance or anti-romance A Margarite o f America. Another was The Divel Conjured, which defended Catholic belief in non- demoniacal spirits. This was followed by an innovative social satire, Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse: Discovering the Deuils Incarnat of this Age, which developed Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penniless format of the Seven Deadly Sins and provided material for Ben Jonson’s comedy plays. Biographer Edward Tenney called this work a ‘literary paradox’, a satire that ‘smells of the tavern and the street as well as the lamp’ ([1934] 1969, p. 150). The last volume was a flaming expression of Catholic piety, its author identified only as T. L.: Prosopopeia containing the Teares of the holy, blessed, and sanctified Marie, the Mother of God. Yet even this publication, like all Lodge’s others, bore a London imprint. At least 14 of Lodge’s lyrics were featured in the miscellany Englands Helicon (1600), a number equalled or exceeded only by Sidney and translations of Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana. This was a tribute to Lodge’s accomplishments in pastoral over the previous decade. But with only one other exception, Lodge’s publications after 1596 consisted of translations in the diverse fields of history, medicine, philosophy and religion. (That exception was, from today’s perspective, a quaint and occasionally horrifying collection of medical remedies for treatment of the poor, The Poore Mans Talentt [1623]). Of course, the literary works were still being reissued - the retitled second edition of Scillaes Metamorphosis and further editions of Rosalynde and A Looking Glasse for London and England, for example. The first translation, from Latin, was of a popular writer’s conversion narrative, The Flowers ofLodowicke of Granado, in 1601. In 1602 came Lodge’s huge translation of Flavius Josephus, from Latin and French, reprinted many times throughout the seventeenth century and titled The Famous and Memorable Workes of Josephus, a Man of Much Honour and Learning Among the Jewes. Lodge had been working on this during the 1590s. The following year came A Treatise of the Plague, which actually turned out to be basically a translation of a French treatise (Cuvelier, 1968). Lodge’s greatest effort of translation was in philosophy, The Workes both Morall and Natural of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (1614) - 13 works (enlarged in 1620 to well over 900 pages). Several editions of all or parts of this rendering appeared throughout the nineteenth century. Another success was the translation of Simon Goulart’s summary of Du Bartas’s verse commentary on the biblical creation, La Sepmaine, which appeared in 1621 and had gone through three more editions by 1638: A Learned Summary Upon the famous Poeme of William ofSaluste, Lord Du Bartas. Wherein are discovered all the excellent secretts in Metaphysic all, Physicall, Morall, and Historicall knowledge ....Wherein nature is discovered, art disclosed, and history layd open. Several commendatory prefaces by Lodge were published in the works of others: Bamabe Riche, Robert Greene, Peter Bales and Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln. Some letters, xvi Thomas Lodge as well as an epitaph on his mother, Lady Anne Lodge, are also extant. All in all, Lodge’s is a remarkable, a singular record of Renaissance virtuosity, and herein can be found Charles Whitworth’s excellent and much more detailed survey of the life and works. Lodge’s background and literary production led to his classification as a University Wit. He had a number of connections with others so grouped. For most of his career as a writer of romance, Lyly - his contemporary at Oxford along with George Peele - was his most important stylistic model. Fellow dramatist and romance writer Robert Greene collaborated with Lodge on A Looking Glasse for London and England and was both his friend and competitor in the writing of fiction. Greene may have touched up Rosalynde for the press. Lodge’s Wit’s Misery and other prose writings show the influence of Nashe, who was probably another acqaintance. Christopher Marlowe’s play Edward II includes four lines borrowed from Lodge’s The Wounds o f Civil War2, which apparently preceded Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays and, if so, supplied a public-theatre precedent for Marlowe’s spectacle of kings drawing Tamburlaine’s chariot (Whitworth, 1975). There are clear parallels in the language of repentance in Lodge’s A Looking Glasse for London and Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, with precedence uncertain. But, as suggested by Paradise ([1931] 1970, p. 183), Lodge was the Wit who always signed himself as ‘gentleman’ and might have held himself at a bit of a distance from the others. In addition to Lodge’s own plays, the dramatization of Rosalynde by Shakespeare provides a prominent example of the University Wits’ contribution to enriching Renaissance drama by pitching humanist rhetorical and moral goals towards a relatively popular audience. Of course, professional writers of the time were acutely aware of one another’s work, whether or not they graduated from university. Henry Chettle and Lodge’s friend Bamabe Riche faced the same struggle as the Wits did, living in the dawn of the professional writer without consistent support from patrons. And Lodge’s schoolmate at the elite Merchant Taylor’s School in London, Thomas Kyd, apparently did not graduate, but Kyd’s hugely successful play The Spanish Tragedy also brought a learned, humanist and classical sensibility to the public theatre, just as the Wits did. Another former pupil at Merchant Taylor’s, Edmund Spenser, influenced Lodge significantly. Lodge’s comments suggest that he knew the poets Michael Drayton and the learned Samuel Daniel, whom he emulated. He must also have known popular players such as the dramatist Robert Wilson.3
Lodge Scholarship and this Collection
The history of scholarship on Thomas Lodge features three nodes or watersheds - short periods of time during which major contributions moved matters forward decisively. The first is defined by the 1883 publication of Edmund Gosse’s edition of the complete works, including the editor’s landmark, sympathetic ‘Memoir of Thomas Lodge’ (Lodge, 1963). Now outdated, this edition remains the only (near-)complete one. It also facilitated scholarly recognition of Lodge apart from his relation to Shakespeare and defended him against condemnations of his borrowings.
2 ‘Immortal powers ... Edward II 5.3, The Wounds o f Civil War 4.2. 3 For more on Lodge’s fellows and his classification as a University Wit, see Paradise ([1931] 1970, pp. 180-85); Cuvelier (1984, pp. 107-30) places the writer in his wider milieu. Thomas Lodge xvii
The second watershed featured the appearance of four scholarly biographies in the space of five years, 1931-35. Was it the Depression that sparked interest in Lodge - scion of privilege cast adrift, debtor, struggling writer, adventurer, exile, self-made and remade man? Two of the studies were developed from dissertations and the other two were the works of well-established scholars (Paradise, [1931] 1970; Sisson, Chapter 1, this volume; Walker, 1933/1934; Tenney, [1934] 1969). In those years also appeared Douglas Bush’s classic Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (1933), advancing most relevantly the understanding of the Ovidian tradition in relation to Lodge. Somewhat later, Bush’s survey found a counterpart featuring even more influential remarks on Lodge in C.S. Lewis’s Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 1944, later developed as English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954). Lodge’s copious life records, as interpreted in his many biographies, have played a major role in studies of his works. From the 1950s through to the mid-1970s a respectable, if modest, rill flowed, augmented by two more biographies (Ryan, 1958; Rae, 1967) and by Walter R. Davis’s admirable 1969 study of Elizabethan fiction, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction, discussed further below. But the 11 years from 1976 to the end of 1986 comprise a third watershed. Three influential works appeared that in different ways consolidated and redefined Lodge criticism (each excerpted in this volume). Ten years apart and engaging respectively with three and five of the Wits, along with Philip Sidney and others, Richard Helgerson’s The Elizabethan Prodigals (1976) and Arthur Kinney’s Humanist Poetics (1986) stand as complementary interpretations of Lodge and the others. Helgerson and Kinney probably remain the most referenced Lodge scholars today. In between them in 1984 appeared Eliane Cuvelier’s massive Sorbonne dissertation, Thomas Lodge: Temoin de son Temps (Witness of his Times), which today provides, and will provide well into the future, the one comprehensive review of both Lodge’s life and the works. If there has ever been a true Lodge specialist since Gosse, it is Cuvelier. Her trove exceeds what is available for most other Elizabethan writers of Lodge’s stature. It is accessible to those with modest French and, while indispensable, has sometimes been overlooked by Anglophone scholarship. The significance of this collection of selected scholarship is enhanced by first- rate, original translations from Cuvelier’s work by Professor Phillip John Usher of Barnard College. The pace of Lodge scholarship has increased somewhat since the mid-1980. The study of so-called prose romance and its cultural significance is now the most prominent area of investigation, represented in this volume by the work of Joan Pong Linton, Donald Beecher, Katharine Wilson, Steve Mentz and others. The glaring absence of a modem edition of Lodge’s work has been partly supplied through Beecher’s editions of Rosalynde and A Margarite of America for the Bamabe Riche Society (both excerpted). Those editions supplement other important modem ones of the last 40 years or so: the two plays The Wounds of Civil War and A Looking Glasse for London and England, Scillaes Metamorphosis, the romance The Life and Death of William Longbeard, and some of the satirical poems. During this period, work on Lodge has naturally included a number of contemporary literary approaches - feminist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, postcolonial, new historicist, cultural studies and queer theory; today, it also pursues topics and themes such as English Catholicism, Renaissance republicanism, gender studies and the history of reading, besides romance. All of these approaches and topics are referenced below and almost all are represented in the reprints. xviii Thomas Lodge
The selection and organization of material for reproduction in this volume has been complicated by the prominence of scholarship that is devoted to multiple works of Lodge. That prominence is partly due to the strong role of biography in Lodge criticism: scholars often approach this multifarious body of work according to their vividly realized conceptions of the author’s unifying character, interests and struggles. Such ‘general characterizations’, as I call them here, are naturally sometimes long, and they also make it a little more difficult to locate all the places in this book where a given work of Lodge is discussed. My introductions to each of the selected pieces will help, as will the catalogue of Lodge’s work appended to this Introduction. This collection does not cover works of textual scholarship. It sets a higher priority on original interpretation than on survey or background, although these categories are not always distinct. In a few cases, the potential to advance future study plays a role. Within those parameters, balancing the standard criteria for selection - excellence, influence and coverage - remains a matter of judgement. I have done my best, acutely aware that, on the one hand, my own prior involvement with Lodge scholarship has been limited and, on the other, that no one has ever preceded me in this task. And as far as coverage goes, there remain some noteworthy titles among Lodge’s prolific output for which I have either not located suitable secondary material or failed to find the space.
Biography
Part I includes a selection from the liveliest of the 1930s biographies along with Cuvelier’s brief ‘Conclusion’ to her Thomas Lodge. The contrast in assessments of Lodge could not be sharper. Also included is Whitworth’s contemporary biographical essay that elegantly distills earlier and later findings. Biography has usually been central to the study of Lodge. Chapter 1 comprises Charles J. Sisson’s ‘Thomas Lodge the Man’, the conclusion to Thomas Lodge and His Family, an outsized essay published in Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans. Sisson’s essay is a droll and richly imagined study based on research of law- court records. It appeared just a year after Sisson’s worthy predecessor N. Burton Paradise’s ground-breaking synoptic study of Lodge’s life and works which, in some respects, remains the most useful reference source of them all. Paradise never assumes the worst of Lodge; Sisson offers a contrast in both style and assessment. Had he been young Thomas’s wise uncle, we glean from ‘Thomas Lodge the Man’, Sisson might have steadied him enough for him to achieve worthy literary goals without facing penury. As it is, Sisson’s research leads him to adopt a somewhat disapproving view that partly aligns him with Lodge’s actual family - especially his caring mother of independent means - disappointed at Thomas’s headstrong apostasy from the respectable and promising life they offered him. To give all that up to become a struggling scribbler? Unlike Lodge’s actual relatives, though, Sisson is devoted to literature. He wishes to quell the idealization of Lodge perpetrated by Gosse. The selection here gives attention to Lodge’s defence of literature {Honest Excuses), as well as to An Alarum for Usurers and Rosalynde. It offers Sisson’s culminating, provocative judgement: Lodge was monstrously and often destructively wilful, but - like his overreaching father - a delicious example of the Elizabethan character. A biography of Lodge takes up almost a third of Cuvelier’s 574-page tome. The translated selection reproduced as Chapter 2, however, is the compelling general conclusion to the entire Thomas Lodge xix book. Cuvelier’s Lodge is an admirable, sometimes melancholy man of purpose and resolve guided by moral, political and religious convictions, overwhelmingly conservative ones. He is not really a prodigal. He is thoughtful and restrained, not wilful. Those characteristics and his need as a recusant author to remain circumspect were not ideal in the self-promoting world of the professional writer. Lodge patiently suffers exile with the calm courage of a Christian Stoic and displays nothing of Renaissance man’s infinite ambition. The final selection in Part I is Charles W. Whitworth’s admired 1996 essay ‘Thomas Lodge (1558-September 1625)’, Nimbly bringing to bear historical and literary contexts, Whitworth surveys the remarkable diversity of Lodge’s long life and multifarious achievements, notes his many innovations, imitations and influences, and calls for a major scholarly reassessment, especially for a new edition of Lodge’s work. It is unlikely that this particular essay’s conciseness, erudition, balance, detail and insight will be superseded, and it comes with lists of not only Lodge’s publications and papers, but also bibliographies and biographies.
General Characterizations of Lodge’s Achievement
Part II offers excerpts from the three studies published from 1976 to 1986 that remain essential reference points for Lodge scholarship today. In different ways these studies all find Lodge’s work important in that it engages with the fundamental social and intellectual uncertainties of the late sixteenth century, as consensus receded and the individual was both empowered and bereft. Page-for-page, Richard Helgerson’s chapter, ‘Lodge’ from The Elizabethan Prodigals (Chapter 4) is the strongest interpretive statement ever written on Lodge. It anticipates the new-historical emphasis on the shaping power of cultural context on authorial identity and purpose. Here, both Lodge’s work and life emulate the ambivalent pattern of prodigality and repentance typical of his generation of writers - George Gascoigne, Lyly, Greene and Sidney - in their search for ‘a reassembled self’ (p. 55) after suffering the abuses of a moralistic, patriarchal society. To justify his rejection of his parents’ aspirations for him, Lodge needed to write repentant, didactic fiction that warned against its own irrational seductions. Only Rosalynde succeeds in overcoming this obsessive pattern, by affirming both love and its irrationality. Like the other prodigals, the characters in Lodge’s fiction with whom he identifies are the ones who repent, and his work follows an ambivalent pattern that ends in his own form of rebellious repentance, ‘in Baroque Catholicism and particularly in the cult of the Virgin’ (p. 55). Helgerson considers at least a dozen of Lodge’s works to develop his argument. The other two selections in Part II, those of Eliane Cuvelier (Chapter 5) and Arthur Kinney (Chapter 6), do posit an effective authorial intention and focus on its pursuit of valid moral, intellectual and religious goals. Both make large, though contrasting, claims about the high- minded commitments Lodge generally pursued through his writings. Since the 1930s no scholars have immersed themselves in Lodge’s world as deeply as these two scholars have. Cuvelier’s 1984 volume has two parts, a biography and an exploration of Lodge the writer as he registers Renaissance thought and literary culture, on the one hand, and as he represents and critiques his society, on the other. Cuvelier refreshingly moves beyond the disciplinary limits of literary and rhetorical criticism within which Lodge’s work had often been immured. Even more than Kinney, she insists on taking Lodge seriously as a thinker and social critic, and discovers new significance in his engaged works on social and political abuses - works XX Thomas Lodge that have been neglected or disparaged like Truths Complaint over England and Catharos. Reprinted here is a translation of her chapter ‘Les Maux Sociaux’ (‘The Discontent of Elizabethan Society’) which surveys Lodge’s social critique, primarily as it appears in his satirical, philosophical and topical works (An Alarum for Usurers, Truths Complaint, A Fig fo r Momus, Catharos), but also in romances like Rosalynde and The Life and Death o f William Longbeard, as well as in his co-authored play A Looking Glasse for London and England and elsewhere. Cuvelier emphasizes the restrained outrage of Lodge’s fundamentally moral orientation towards the world and his consistent social conservatism, while bringing to bear a rich context of historical background and other contemporary critiques of social ills. In Rosalynde family and nobility have degenerated, and the hospitable forest setting affirms not just the conventions of pastoral romance but true virtue. An Alarum for Usurers4 and Wits Miserie go furthest in applying traditional values effectively and colourfully to specific abuses in contemporary society, especially to the usury that victimized Lodge himself. Cuvelier shows that Lodge’s exposes of widespread, legally sanctioned financial abuses emerge from a traditional Catholic perspective rather than from more moderate Calvinistic views. From the mid-1580s Lodge consistently affirmed that the brutality and selfishness of new-fangled trends were destroying a mostly favourable traditional system based on mutual obligation and religious faith. At 64 pages, Arthur Kinney’s broad and fine-grained survey, ‘O vita! misero longa, foelici brevi: Thomas Lodge’s Search for Felicity’, from his scholarly classic Humanist Poetics, is by far the longest selection in the volume. Kinney emphasizes Lodge’s romance fiction but considers the entire oeuvre as a humanist project related to the aspirations of Cicero, Tacitus, Plutarch, and others, including the Seneca that Lodge translated late in life. Kinney’s book includes Lodge in a century-long survey of humanist fiction writers beginning with Erasmus. His story starts from faith in the power of rhetoric and fiction to spur moral improvement and human perfection. His commentaries often reveal the enriching allusive possibilities that authors presented to humanist-trained readers. But by the time of Nashe and Lodge, doubt about eloquence, along with the search for Christian faith comes to the fore, altering the nature and means of the goal of true ‘felicity’ featured in Lodge’s long-time motto quoted in Kinney’s chapter title. Kinney’s chapter on Lodge traces part of the devolution of humanist poetics towards the end of the sixteenth century, when the extraordinary relationship between author and reader based on shared understanding of classical texts ceased to function securely. In Lodge’s earlier writings this poetics is stronger, and it allows us to appreciate the humanist exempla in Lodge’s bloody play on rulers’ cruelty, The Wounds o f Civil War, and to understand the didactic romance Forbonius and Prisceria as a ‘union of forensic humanist rhetoric with the power of faith and love’ (p. 91). Lodge’s consistent humanist programme is also visible in poetry such as the Ovidian Scillaes Metamorphosis and Horatian A Fig fo r Momus. And whereas Helgerson admires Rosalynde for undoing the burden of humanist expectations (p. 44), Kinney celebrates the romance as a triumph of the humanist ‘poetics of felicity as virtue in action’ (p. 136). It puts the basic ideas of Lodge’s early defence of poetry and plays into practice and reveals the title character as ‘an agent of grace’ (p. 102) aligning ‘humanist fiction
4 On An Alarum for Usurers as an early representation of London life, see Manley (1995, pp. 315-20). Thomas Lodge xxi with scriptural text’ (p. 101). Later, Lodge struggles to define the value and significance of his own fictional works. Their Christian element deepens (as in the ‘Augustinian poetics’ of Euphues Shadow (p. 135)) until Lodge becomes disillusioned after A Margarite of America, his grim ‘fiction on fallen man’ (p. 136). But Kinney demonstrates Lodge’s unmatched energy and resourcefulness in pursuing humanist poetics as well as in continuing to search for non-fictional ways to combine classical and Christian traditions, as demonstrated in his translations of Josephus and Seneca. In the former Lodge found historical and sacred, rather than fictional and secular, ‘models for humanist imitatio’ (p. 138); the latter offered him, as it did many other humanists, pagan exempla with profound Christian applications. Kinney’s historical sweep and learned, imaginative readings offer scholarship of exemplary quality and a Lodge of considerable stature and resonance. The great majority of Lodge’s works are addressed here. There has been little critical mention of Lodge’s editions of Josephus and Seneca beyond Cuvelier’s and Kinney’s. Two recent essays on the Josephus edition that are not reprinted here deserve note. Erin Kelly’s ‘Jewish History, Catholic Argument: Thomas Lodge’s Workes of Josephus as a Catholic Text’ (2003) shows how Lodge, like other translators of the time, could flout censorship by including tendentious marginal comments and extraneous texts. For instance, Lodge parallels the sufferings of the Maccabees and of English Catholics. Lodge’s Josephus was the source of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam. In keeping with Kinney’s humanist emphasis, in ‘Elizabeth Cary’s Historical Conscience: The Tragedy of Mariam and Thomas Lodge’s Josephus' (2007), Alison Shell argues that Lodge’s introductory remarks on the benefits of reading history parallel both Cary’s reading strategies and the kind of impact she aimed for in her historical drama. Knud Sorensen’s book, finally, compares Arthur Golding’s earlier translation of Seneca’s De Beneficiis with Lodge’s to understand how Latinisms gained ground in English during the intervening years (Sorensen, 1960).
Romance
Part III, the largest group of essays in the book, deals with romance which, in Lodge’s case, is synonymous with fiction. Lodge wrote six romances: Forbonius and Pr is ceria; Rosalynde; Robert, Second Duke of Normandy, surnamed ... Robin the Devil; Euphues His Shadow; The Life and Death of William Longbeard\ and A Margarite of America.
General Characterizations
The first subsection of Part III offers a classic and a contemporary statement, both from books on Elizabethan fiction. Walter R. Davis’s Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (1969) is a pioneering and still- useful source.5 It seconds Northrop Frye’s emphasis on genre and a self-contained literary system. Yet Davis’s findings often parallel and complement more historical work. One of the chapters from this book, ‘Pastoral Romance: Sidney and Lodge’, approaches that genre as the creation of an ideal world of wonder located within a larger quotidian one. That world employs the artificiality and disguise of pastoral as the means to insight, authenticity
5 Full citations of Davis’s sources can be found in the Additional Bibliography. xxii Thomas Lodge and ethical clarification. The excerpt from this chapter reprinted here (as part of Chapter 7) applies this approach to Lodge’s pastoral romances, Forbonius and Prisceria, Euphues Shadow and especially Rosalynde. It shows how characters develop and ideals are clarified in auspicious settings like the forest of Arden through disguises and play-acting. A second selection from Davis’s book reprinted here (Chapter 7) comes from another chapter, ‘Nashe and the Elizabethan Realists’ and offers a perspective on Lodge’s subsequent questioning of the value of romance’s figurations. It briefly considers his later, quasi-historical romances based on medieval legends, Robert, Second Duke of Normandy, surnamed ... Robin the Devil and William Longbeard. The factualistic nuances link Lodge’s romances to the history of the novel, but there has been a loss. The later works now offer a negative evaluation of motifs of disguise and play. Such motifs are now morally adverse, no longer enabling moral discovery and self-realization. Thirty-seven years later, in a changed scholarly world, Katharine Wilson’s Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives: Euphues in Arcadia (2006) brings to bear new- historical studies of authorship and publication concerning the uncertain and rapidly changing environment in which Lodge and other romance writers worked. Wilson could be said to de-idealize or materialize Davis’s generic perspective radically: here, romance has become a commercial product highly sensitive to changing fashions, produced for a wide spectrum of readers. At the same time, the romance commodity problematically claims respectability by advertising aristocratic sensibilities and moral uplift. Wilson de-idealizes Helgerson’s prodigal as well, pointing out that this figure can also serve as a shrewd authorial pose, part of ‘continuous career development’ (2006, p. 13). For Wilson that problematic status of Elizabethan fiction leads to its ironic self-reflection, and to characters who, as surrogates for authors and readers, figuratively explore the problematics of commercial publication. It also complements a general intertextuality that echoes and recombines elements among romances. Wilson’s method of analysis seems to model acts of reading performed by a savvy and voracious Elizabethan consumer of fiction. This way of reading encompasses the work’s intertextual entanglements with sources and analogues. It is the more free-ranging, narratorial cousin to the allusive and intellectual humanist poetics that Kinney explores and practises: both involve the creative discovery of ‘provocative connections’ (Wilson, 2006, p. 146) that complicate and deepen the experience of reading. But as far as Lodge goes, it was Donald Beecher who supplied the relevant theoretical statement on reading Elizabethan romance; Beecher (1998) also anticipated some of Wilson’s particular insights about A Margarite. Wilson’s chapter on those romances, ‘From Arden to America: Lodge’s Tragedies of Infatuation’ (Chapter 8)) offers such readings of all six, beginning with a brief introduction that positions Lodge among Sidney, Greene and Spenser. There it is noted that ‘the active loving woman is at the heart of Lodge’s works’ (p. 177) - meaning presumably at least Prisceria, Scilla, Alinda, Phoebe, Rosalynde and Margarite, the last two being among Lodge’s problematic author-figures as well. Wilson provides a fresh understanding of Forbonius and Prisceria's relation to the Old Arcadia. Tragedy is an important reference point for all the romances after Rosalynde, and even its desiring women find love painful (the discussion of Rosalynde is particularly good). Whereas some readers have found fault with the uncertain presentation of the title character in Lodge’s medieval historical romance, The Life and Death o f William Longbeard (‘tragic hero, prodigal poet, incarnate devil or Robin Hood’? (p. 194)), Thomas Lodge xxiii
Wilson seems to appreciate Lodge’s ability to trigger a range of possibilities. But A Margarite o f America is the most allusive: like a rare wine showing nature’s profuse flavours, it evokes some 15 separate intertexts, from the Aeneid to Locrine. The most complex relationship concerns The Faerie Queene, especially the relation of Una and Margarite, as if the former had remained faithful to the Redcross who is actually Archimago. Wilson demonstrates Lodge’s importance in the contemporary revival of romance studies.
Rosalynde and its Intertexts
Rosalynde is Lodge’s most admired composition and has already received a good deal of attention in the essays by Helgerson, Kinney, Davis and Wilson here. In this subsection, one essay concerns the work’s relation to Lyly’s Euphues and to Greene’s Pandosto, and three to its relation to Shakespeare’s As You Like It. It was between Forbonius and Prisceria and Rosalynde that Lodge embraced the elaborate, mock-homely parallelisms of Lyly’s Euphues, an emulation that persisted to some degree in all his later fictions. In ‘Lyly’s Golden Legacy: Rosalynde and Pandosto’ (Chapter 8), Nancy R. Lindheim compares the way in which Lodge loosened and reworked this style in Rosalynde with Greene’s stylistic imitation in his romance Pandosto. She performs what could be called a deconstruction of Rosalynde by explaining how the wry world-view implied by Euphuism does not fit the terms of Lodge’s pastoral romance: the Petrarchan inevitability of frustration does not fit the romance’s happy weddings and reconciliations. (Such mismatches would matter less to free-wheeling intertextualism.) Lodge’s compromise defines his distinctive character, but it remains imperfect. Unlike Davis’s and Kinney’s perceptions of harmony in this romance, for Lindheim the contradiction remains. And it finds a parallel in a basic disjunction other critics have noted between the patriarch Sir John’s cautions to his sons (for example, to shun love) and the idealized and pro-feminine world of Arden (see Pierce, 1971; Larson, 1977). When it comes to Shakespearean sources, there are none more crucial than Rosalynde to As You Like It. This relationship was the original issue in Lodge scholarship, well established by 1871 when Shakespearean Nikolaus Delius’s ‘Lodge’s Rosalynde und Shakespeare’s As You Like I f appeared. The romance’s three plots remain substantially intact in the play. The buoyant pastoral locus amoenus and its main attractions, the cross-dressed-pretend-yet-real wooing and the mock-wedding, remain central in the play, which does not affirm, but rather reaffirms, that disguise and performance can lead paradoxically to insight and fulfilment. Many of Shakespeare’s significant additions and changes also derive from hints appearing in Rosalynde (Smith, 1972, p. 75), including, it seems, even Rosalind’s delightful critique of male ardour and, arguably, the themes of sexual ambiguity and same-sex attraction.6 In a resource volume on Lodge, however, one is happy to overlook the majority of scholarship on this relationship because it has been written by Shakespeareans and others who tend less to serve the understanding of Rosalynde and more to serve the romance up as an
6 Rosalynde’s riposte to Rosader supplies a hint for Rosalind’s critique of Orlando’s amatory poetic flights: ‘Daphne, that bonny wench, was not turned into a bay tree as the poets feign, but for her chastity her fame was immortal, resembling the laurel that is ever green’, quoted in Smith, (1972, p. 79). See also Paran (1981, pp. 91-97). xxiv Thomas Lodge appetizer. Donald Beecher finds that the great bulk comprises ‘studies of Shakespeare’s craft in handling his source’, may include ‘serious misjudgments’ about that source, and that even the best contributions may contain ‘unhappy comparisons’ that privilege the Bard (Beecher, 1963, pp. 11, 15). Charles Whitworth’s ‘Wooing and Winning in Arden: Rosalynde and As You Like I f , Etudes Anglaises (Chapter 10) pushes the reset button. Whitworth admires both works and illuminates them through meticulous comparison. He emphasizes the differences stemming from the adaptation of a fiction to the stage and puts some of Shakespeare’s changes in the context of his other comic plots. He gives more attention to the contrasts in the two main love stories than to Shakespeare’s additional characters and ‘incidental satire’ (p. 234). The dramatist’s expansion of Rosalind’s role comes partly at the expense of the fiction writer’s Alinda, whose counterpart Celia is crimped, scant of lines and difficult to perform. Shakespeare’s Rosalind’s comparative predominance over her lover is secured by the play’s expansion of the original’s Ganymede disguise scenes. And the play’s switch to informal prose in those scenes enables more flexibility in developing wit and mood. The overall purpose of Clare R. Kinney’s virtuoso ‘Feigning Female Faining: Spenser, Lodge, Shakespeare, and Rosalind’ (Chapter 11) is to consider the development of ‘Rosalind the artist’ (p. 238) as a question of successive embellishments by writers who build on one another. The inquiry ranges beyond questions of source and influence: ‘the intertextual transformations [among the three writers] ... make Rosalind-the-lyric-object increasingly reimaginable as a reader, a critic, and finally a maker’ (p. 237). Rosalind is a composite traversing different works; Shakespeare’s happens to be the last.7 Lodge, for instance, endows Spenser’s silent Rosalind from The Shepheardes Calender with the poetry of a desiring lyric voice in dialogue, thereby launching ‘the brave new world of heterosexual pastoral intercourse’ (p. 238), a lyric breakthrough from which Shakespeare actually retreats, although his Rosalind, of course, develops the intercourse through prose. However, a fundamental and the culminating scholarly issue of the essay, ‘the possibility of female agency’ (p. 261) is addressed as a scholarly debate only in relation to Shakespeare. I offer here a brief digression, since subsequent to Clare Kinney’s essay, the under-examined topic of Rosalynde's representation of female agency has been furthered by Catherine R. Eskin (2001) and others. Alinda is Eskin’s focus, the only female in story or play who wields authority without cross-dressing. She deploys traditionally masculine, judicial rhetoric capably (if unsuccessfully) before her father, and in Arden gains authority, builds community, organizes the mock-wedding and woos with effective subtlety.8 Finally, Steve Mentz, in “‘A Note beyond Your Reach”: Prose Romance’s Rivalry with Elizabethan Drama’ returns us to the current romance initiative, which is militant about Bard- privileging.9 He approaches Rosalynde and As You Like It as part of a larger rivalry. Although writing for the popular Elizabethan press was hardly ennobling, it was more respectable than
7 For a psychologist’s Lacanian gleanings from a composite Lodge-Shakespeare ‘Rosalynd’ see Sharon-Zisser (2004, pp. 210-29). 8 Katharine Wilson’s discussion also concerns this issue indirectly; see also Hackett (2000) and Beecher (1962, pp. 32-43). 9 Mentz’s editors Lamb and Wayne observe, ‘scholars now question why texts known primarily as sources for canonical works should be consigned to such a subordinate status’ rather than considered along with them as subjects of an expanded field of romance studies (Lamb and Wayne, 2008, p. 1). Thomas Lodge xxv writing for the stage. Lodge, Greene and Nashe therefore present themselves as ‘university humanists who preferred elite to popular venues’ (p. 264) and present their work as an alternative to the stage. As You Like It cheerfully takes up the challenge and cleverly sends up prose fiction, perhaps even by parodying Lodge himself through the figure of Jacques. Mentz - at last - asks what Shakespeare’s dramatization tells us about Rosalynde. He focuses on elements in the romance that Shakespeare did not utilize, such as Sir John’s advice to his sons and aspects of the servant Adam and initially evil brother Saladyne. Together, these elements ‘present a microcosm of prose fiction’s cultural project in late Elizabethan England’ (p. 265).
Robin the Devil and Shakespeare’s King Lear
There are noteworthy discussions of all Lodge’s romances,10 but, besides Rosalynde and A Margarite of America, The Life of Robert, Second Duke of Normandy, surnamed Robin the Devil has attracted the most attention. Assessments range wildly. To Christopher Ricks on his breakneck tour of Renaissance English literature, this pseudo-history is one of the many annoying potholes:
... the Euphuistic orations stand around the blood and miracle of the legend with a strange composure which is almost interesting. Robert starts well by biting off his nurse’s nipples, and, grown to manhood, has a Mother Superior parade her younger nuns naked, selects and rapes the most beautiful one and rounds off the evening by amputating her breasts. Spectacularly converted, he vows to eat only food fed to dogs, and so takes up residence with one of the Emperor’s pet greyhounds. (Ricks, 1970, p. 357)
Yet John L. Selzer (1984) makes the case that Lodge’s medieval legend orchestrates a complex set of themes and subjects with admirable coherence. For Claudette Pollack (1976), the tale - though justly maligned - is redeemed when seen as an experiment in joining romance and history, prefiguring the novel. Brenda Cantar’s ‘Monstrous Conceptions in Lodge’s Robin the Devil’ (1997) provocatively combines psychoanalysis with both feminism and new historicism, showing, for instance, the relevance of the early modem tendency to blame mothers’ sinful thoughts for ‘monstrous’ births like that of Editha’s son, Robin. The reprinted selection here, however, is Donna Hamilton’s ‘Some Romance Sources for King Lear. Robert of Sicily and Robert the Devil’ (Chapter 13). Hamilton points out that the play follows the romance’s handling of the Proud King Abasement theme, and the romance also provides apt materials for aspects in the play of otherwise unknown origin. She concludes that all the many parallels suggest a need to reconsider the importance of the play’s romance contexts. R.A. Foakes’s Arden edition of King Lear (Shakespeare, 2001, p. 109) is one that acknowledges the importance of Hamilton’s observations.
10 Following are examples for each of the other three. Hornat (1964) traces the original source for Lodge’s story of Valasca in The Life o f William Longbeard to Bohemian mythology. He conveys a fine sense of the irony involved in Lodge’s use of one of Western Europe’s standard romance settings (Bohemia) to add an element of historical factuality to his fiction. Beaty (1968) offers stylistic analyses of parallel passages. Schleiner (1989) puts Euphues His Shadowe in the courtly, masculinist genre of misguided love and male bonding, and Rosalynde in a more female-centred one. xxvi Thomas Lodge
A Margarite of America
The first piece on this marvellous and grim tale is Joan Pong Linton’s ‘Sea-Knights and Royal Virgins: American Gold and its Discontents in Lodge’s A Margarite of America (1596)’ from her book The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Formations of English Colonialism (1998). Linton’s feminist and new-historicist chapter seconds Josephine A. Roberts (1980) in associating the setting of A Margarite with the New World, arguing that Lodge composed the fiction in reaction to his adverse experiences in South America on an aborted expedition of circumnavigation and plunder and that the story’s partial setting in ‘Cusco’ refers to a New World location. Linton develops the political implication that the romance comprises a warning against the imminent dangers of England pursuing a Spanish-style project of New World colonization. In that respect, the irony she finds in the parallel between the title character and Spenser’s Una is more pointed than Katharine Wilson’s. A Margarite’s dystopian world, in which love and community are destroyed by the perverse will of an evil man and the vulnerability of society to him, subverts the aura of romance, wonder and divine destiny on which accounts of America and colonization relied. The two opening sections from Beecher’s Introduction to A Margarite of America, ‘Horror Fiction for the 1590s’ and ‘Romance and Revenge Tragedy’ comprise the second selection on Lodge’s final romance (Chapter 15).11 Beecher’s introductions to editions of Lodge’s two major romances (that to Rosalynde is excerpted as Chapter 16) provide solid bases for future work. In Chapter 15 Beecher describes A Margarite as ‘a romance-tumed-revenge- tragedy’ (p. 333) and considers how it responds to ‘the Elizabethan aesthetic’ (p. 336). The romance addresses both fascination with and political anxieties about the profligate behaviour of powerful nobility also addressed by chronicles and history plays. In addition, as fiction writers had done for some time, it also adapts many aspects of Senecan revenge tragedy, such as atrocity and the vengeance that destroys the innocent with the guilty. The question is whether the plot’s horrors would excite readers to despair or whether they would grasp hope through the redemptive, though deluded, figure of Margarite. This was the choice Lodge set. Along the way Beecher includes critical engagements with several scholars, taking issue with Linton’s reading. Other sections of his introduction not reprinted here discuss A Margarite's place-names in the context of romance tradition, the game of love questions, the (ir)relevance of the work’s many insets of lyric poetry, and style.
Poetry
Lodge experimented with, and mixed, a wide range of poetic genres and modes. His earlier satirical poems - Truths Complaint Over England and, with its punning title, the dramatic monologue ‘The Discontented Satyre’, in which a discontented satyr praises the spirit of discontent - appeared among those miscellaneous supplements he habitually added to his books. But in A Fig fo r Momus (1595) imitations of Roman satire suited to the English scene take centre stage. Satire remains an important element in Lodge’s narrative and didactic The tragicall complaynt of Elstred, as well as in his pioneering epyllion, Scillaes Metamorphosis. His Phillis is a Petrarchan, pastoral and elegiac collection. Many lyric poems are embedded
11 Full citations of Beecher’s sources can be found in the Additional Bibliography. Thomas Lodge xxvii in the romances and anthologized in Elizabethan verse miscellanies; contemporaries set many of these lyrics to music. Part III consists of just two subsections, the lyrics (in the sense just delimited), and Scillaes Metamorphosis (that is, Glaucus and Scilla). Although Lodge the poet has been widely admired, his epyllion has received far more substantial scholarly attention than any other poem, only partly because it was emulated by Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Cuvelier’s slim chapter on the range of Lodge’s poetry includes an explication of Rosalynde’s lyric ‘Love in my bosom like a Bee’ (Cuvelier, 1984, pp. 322-24; see also Dorangeon, 1974). R.W. Maslen’s essay in this volume (Chapter 19) links Glaucus and Scilla to several other of Lodge’s works, including Truths Complaint. For a general characterization of Lodge’s poetry, C.S. Lewis’s brief remarks are matchless and have long been the most influential. They would be included here except that they consist of passages scattered in Lewis’s broad and widely available survey of sixteenth-century English literature, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954). In the chapter ‘Verse in the “Golden” Period’, Lewis discusses Scillaes Metamorphosis, the lyrics and Phillis, dismissing several of Lodge’s other poems (elsewhere in the volume he discusses A Fig for Momus, pointing out how its tone and its even meter prefigure eighteenth-century closed-couplet satire). Lewis’s well-known characterization of Elizabethan ‘golden verse’ may help explain why there has been little study of the lyrics: Lewis drops into a bit of the perverse tone of Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist, but in the opposite sense, when he declares that the ‘golden’ verse that Lodge writes cannot be much enhanced by commentary. It is pure, amorous, anonymous, male feeling shaped by art and lightly touched by intellect. Lewis also takes up an issue often broached in relation to Lodge’s poetry: the heavy, unacknowledged borrowing that scandalized some Victorian and later readers. His conclusion is Wildean: Lodge’s is ‘an offence, if at all, against morality, not against art’ (1954, pp. 494).
Lyrics
Tracking down the sources of Lodge’s lyrics was an important focus of Lodge scholarship up to the 1930s. But most of those who contributed, such as Alice Walker, would probably have agreed with Lewis, mingling delight and suspicion in their investigations. One of Walker’s studies, ‘Italian Sources for Lyrics of Thomas Lodge’ (1927)12 (not reprinted here), identifies models for lyrics in A Margarite, Phillis, William Longbeard and Lodge’s composition ‘If so those flames I vent whenas I sigh’, which was collected in The Phoenix Nest and which Walker calls ‘the first regular sestina in English’ (1927, p. 79). But source hunting, however appreciative, is not the same as commentary or interpretation. Lodge’s golden lyrics have been understudied in that sense, although they have not gone unadmired,13 as Donald Beecher points out in his ‘Poetic Interludes’ (Chapter 16).14 This excerpt contributes to critical interpretation and appreciation of the poetry, focusing on the scores of lyric interludes inserted in Lodge’s romances, which add powerful dimensions of subjective feeling, character development and theme. The practice of this basically pastoral
12 See also Prescott (1978). 13 Paradise had little to say about them, but judged them to be Lodge’s greatest achievement. See John J. McAleer’s catalogue of praisers, Thomas Lodge’s Verse Interludes’ (1962); and Garke (1972). 14 Full citations of Beecher’s sources can be found in the Additional Bibliography. xxviii Thomas Lodge
‘prosimetric style’ (p. 355), derived from ancient Greek eclogues, was developed in Italian fiction and drama and adopted in English fiction from Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F.J. (1573) onwards. It is related to opera. Lodge was at the centre of the wave of interest in pastoral in the last two decades of the century. In his romances he revelled in a tremendous variety of forms and metrical patterns, and Beecher uses Rosalynde to illustrate this. The 21 poems there display 18 different metrical patterns and suggest the Petrarchan lament, ‘eclogue, blazon, palinode ... complaint ... sonnet, canzone, echo ... folk refrain songs’ (p. 360), villanelle, ottava rima and various idiosyncratic types and measures. Beyond its functions in the romance, such a verse anthology also stands on its own, separate from the fictional world. And in some of Lodge’s other romances, the lyrics are only loosely anchored to the task of serving the narrative, inviting the reader to appreciate them also for themselves, including through recitation and possibly actual musical performance. On the subject of Lodge’s immoderate borrowings, Beecher points out that Renaissance readers (like scholars) enjoyed spotting sources and seeing how they had been emulated. Studies of Lodge’s romances today might benefit from more attention to the lyric register. The common designation ‘prose romance’ can involve erasure as well as shorthand. And before moving on, it is worth noting Elizabeth W. Pomeroy’s (1973) comments on Lodge’s verses in The Phoenix Nest, a miscellany that probably registered the taste of University Wits of its own time - that is, some 14 years after Lodge left Oxford. Lodge is the collection’s most well-represented author. Its first half consists of old-fashioned elegiac poems, many about Sidney. Lodge is featured in the up-to-date second part, where Pomeroy notes his use of setting as metaphor, his variety of verse forms, and his song-like effects.
Scillaes Metamorphoses or Glaucus and Scilla
The essays on the epyllion, reprinted in this subsection, contrast sharply in both approach and interpretation. The first by William Keach, ‘ Glaucus and Scilla\ offers sensitivity to poetic form, context and tone. In this essay Keach emphasizes the precedents this poem set for later writers of epyllia, including Shakespeare in Venus and Adonis, besides its sixain verse form. These include a good deal of irony and humour, a ‘self-conscious playfulness’ (p. 374) and sense of ‘the tragic self-frustration of love’ (p. 379). Further, Keach decisively separates narrator from author, arguing that the poem satirizes poetic love conventions and attitudes through its presentation of an obtuse and pretentious narrator and its way of addressing the narrator’s Inns of Court cohort (see also Hulse, 1981). Jim Ellis’s ‘Imagining Heterosexuality in the Epyllia’ (Chapter 18) offers a distinctive application of queer theory. Ellis argues that Lodge’s epyllion is a representative example of this subgenre’s special historical role in the installation of heterosexualism in early modem culture. He applies Judith Butler’s and Monique Wittig’s arguments that heterosexualism fundamentally concerns relations among men. Hence Lodge, in his epistle emphasizes his relationship with the predominant masculine aspect of his audience, the Inns cohorts. His poem posits an autonomous heterosexual subject eventually able to resist his own destmctive passion and Scilla’s blandishments, mastering desire through the ironic distancing of Ovidian rhetoric. It seems that Lodge’s poetry is only sometimes golden-plated. It can do some heavy ideological lifting. Thomas Lodge xxix
That surmise is a given in R.W. Maslen’s ‘Lodge’s Glaucus and Scilla and the Conditions of Catholic Authorship in Elizabethan England’ (Chapter 19), although Maslen’s Lodge probably has more awareness of his work’s implications than Ellis’s. For Maslen, Lodge’s erotic poem is not hegemonic but rather oppositional, in that it addresses the estrangement of Elizabethan authors under conditions of censorship.15 Lodge’s Catholicism and the censorship of his first publication, a defence of poetry and drama, added impetus and a personal dimension to his representation of the alienated author in the image of Scilla, cruelly transformed by capricious divinities who themselves figure arbitrary political power. The poet’s celebrated rendering of Scilla’s torment and mute suffering indicates that he identifies with her much more than he does with Glaucus. The representation of conditions of authorship also exemplifies the freer Elizabethan practice of allegory that Lodge furthered in this poem, as Ovid’s mythological narratives supply material for new myth-making and new ways of generating figurative meaning. Lodge’s signal development of the satirical possibilities of allegory in Glaucus and Scilla puts into practice his view of poetry’s function as developed in his early defence (which is a secondary focus of Maslen’s essay) and as already exemplified in An Alarum for Usurers. The tyrannical despot is a central figure in Lodge’s romances and plays, as well as in Truths Complaint and The Complaint of Elstred, and focuses these works’ satirical implications. Although he ignores Cuvelier’s work on Lodge’s Catholicism, Maslen makes a compelling argument for the importance of that faith commitment and of a satirical Glaucus and Scilla (along with the early defence) as keys to Lodge’s entire oeuvre.
Drama16
The Wounds of Civil War
Lodge’s only known single-authored play, the early blank-verse effort The Wounds o f Civil War, dates from the mid-to-late 1580s and concerns the conflict between Marius and Silla that punctuated the end of the Roman Republic and helped lead to the Empire. The two essays reprinted here on this play both emphasize Lodge’s initiative in offering audiences classical exempla for application to contemporary political issues. Both focus on a single such issue, the relative value of republican and monarchical forms of government, and both argue that the play takes sides on this issue. But they disagree on which side it takes. Vanna Gentili’s, ‘The Choice of Sources: Evidence and Justification for Appian’ is a short section from her long, loosely organized study ‘Thomas Lodge’s Wounds of Civil War. an Assessment of Context, Sources, and Structure’. She finds that The Wounds brings into relief a broad set of history plays that concern civil wars and that gesture significantly toward the sovereign’s absence, a set that includes works of Shakespeare. In the section reprinted as Chapter 20, Gentili argues that Lodge chose Appian’s Civil Wars as his primary source because he endorsed its pro-imperial viewpoint: both it and Lodge’s play point favourably towards an absent ‘monocracy’ (p. 441) that would supply the ultimate solution to civil war. This interpretation seems to emphasize the broad influence of England’s dominant monarchical
15 The argument’s context is Patterson (1984). 16 On Lodge’s two plays see also Whitworth (1973) and the chapters on each in Cuvelier (1984). XXX Thomas Lodge ideology as much as, or more than, a particular writer’s conscientious political judgement or desire to curry favour, and contrasts sharply with Maslen’s conception of a dissenting Lodge. Over 20 years later, Andrew Hadfield’s ‘Thomas Lodge and Elizabethan Republicanism’ (Chapter 21) brought The Wounds o f Civil War into the current broad discussion of early republican thought. Unfortunately, Hadfield fails to address Gentili’s work. He affirms that Appian’s history is Lodge’s source, but ignores Appian’s imperial slant. However, he demonstrates that at key moments Lodge departs from Appian and invents what appears to be pro-republican material, such as Junius Brutus’s speech. Hadfield argues that Lodge’s social views naturally tended to be citizen-centred, especially considering his father’s career in city government. The essay defines what ‘republicanism’ could mean in early modem England and argues that the play supports republican values. Like Lucan’s Pharsalia it depicts the collapse of the Roman republic as a catastrophe. Hadfield makes the largest claims ever for the value of Wounds - claims that challenge future scholarship. Its parallels between Rome and England not only expanded the theatre’s ‘range of political possibilities’ (p. 443), but, if it really did precede Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, ‘it has to be recognised as one of the most important plays in English literary history’ (p. 445). Hadfield also considers possible influences of Wounds on Shakespeare’s early plays. His thesis may actually offer less of a challenge to Cuvelier’s conservative Lodge than may Gentili’s since, during the period, traditional civic prerogatives were threatened by the progressive concentration of state power in the court and monarch. By the way, Chiaki Hanabusa’s exemplary 2002 essay on this play’s problematic text (‘The Printing of Thomas Lodge’s The Wounds o f Civil War') provides yet another substantial study.
A Looking Glasse for London and England
A Looking Glasse for London and England was written by Lodge and Greene in the late 1580s or very early 1590s. Despite being a minor stage success and going through four early reprintings, it has received less scholarly attention than The Wounds of Civil War. Its stage spectacles exploited a trend and its homely, retro-cool feel is just beginning to be appreciated again. Classified as a ‘biblical drama’ (Blackburn, 1970, pp. 161-71), it encompasses both moral interlude and mystery play with its lurid scenes of court corruption, abundance of low comedy, regular sermonizing, timely repentance, raging monarch and the prophet Jonah deposited onstage by a whale. Ninevah sins, Ninevah repents, and London must do the same, now. Our earnest moralist is likely to have written the many homilies of Osea and Jonah as well as the voyage, usury, prodigal and repentance scenes (Lodge, 1970, p. 26). Pauline Blanc’s recent essay ‘Barbarism in Greene and Lodge’s A Looking Glasse for London and England’ (Chapter 22), represents the first interpretive study known to me of any particular theme in the play. Blanc shows how ‘othering’ forms the logic of the play, as traditional gentlemanly values of Elizabethan civility are opposed to a range of barbarities, whether of culture, social rank or gender. Only when leaders become civil will the rest know their places and justice and order become possible. Blanc brings to bear a wide range of conduct books and other materials to explain how the play’s prominent religious themes of sin, punishment and repentance are presented through a social critique of barbarity against a standard of gentility. Less explicitly, but perhaps as important, she notes the tension in the Thomas Lodge xxxi traditional Elizabethan hierarchy between the goal of the common good and that of upholding gentility against baseness. The play offers at least two paradoxical and dramatic moments in this regard: it is the gross and uncivil belching of that whale that brings the possibility of redemption, and redemption finally begins to unfold, Blanc appreciatively notes, when a female pauper’s incontinent farting coincides with the revelation of God’s final warning. Blanc’s reading elegantly uncovers the author’s conservative religious and social views while suggesting how the play as a whole may qualify them.
Prose
Part VI is small partly because some works have been discussed elsewhere by Sisson, Whitworth, Helgerson, Cuvelier, Arthur Kinney and Maslen, and also because relevant scholarship has been patchy. The first essay is Alice Walker’s ‘The Reading of an Elizabethan: Some Sources of the Prose Pamphlets of Thomas Lodge’ (Chapter 23). Walker’s biographical research on Lodge yielded two original studies in the 1930s (Walker, 1933/1934) and, as discussed above, she discovered many of the often-obscure lyric sources he used substantially and often silently. The indispensable essay selected here distills a tremendous amount of research and provides a compact education in Elizabethan practices of reading and writing. It concerns four pamphlets: Catharos, or Diogenes in his Singularity, along with three from 1596: The Devil Conjured, Wits Miserie and Prosopopeia. But Lodge was not the only University Wit who translated entire passages of 20 or so pages and presented them his own original work. Other University Wits - Lyly, Greene and Nashe - did so as well. Of the four pamphlets, Wits Miserie includes the most original passages and also remains the most enjoyable. But its second part includes an astonishing mosaic passage of borrowings from over a dozen writers and florilegia, material encompassing a tremendous range in space and time, much of it medieval. Lodge may not really have read widely in the classics after college; he may have relied on compilations and commonplace books. Walker shows that Lodge is indeed the author of T. L.’s Prosopopeia by discovering in it some of his favourite rip-offs. Walker’s work, by the way, soon provided the basis for William Ringler’s elegant, wry piece ‘The Source of Lodge’s Reply to Gosson’ (1939) concerning Lodge’s early defence of poetry and plays. Lodge’s adversary was persistent and vicious, and Lodge was lucky that no one spotted his source. Instead, Ringler notes, the young writer discovered a reliable modus operandi. From the vantage-point of the twenty-first century, Lodge’s Elizabethan practice resembles to some degree the appropriation, sampling, collage and various other citational or derivative postmodern cultural forms that are thriving today. The second selection here, part of Eliane Cuvelier’s long final chapter of her 1984 work and titled ‘English Renaissance Catholicism in the Work of Lodge’ (reprinted in translation here as Chapter 24), anticipates today’s broad, ongoing re-evaluation of religious currents during this period. Cuvelier forcefully argues a strong claim: that Lodge’s religious convictions and accompanying conservative social values were long-standing, dominant influences on his works from his youth. They can be traced from his 1584 poem Truths Complaint over England although of course they only became overt 12 years later in Prosopopeia. Cuvelier’s essay evaluates evidence of Lodge’s recusant sympathies and his place in the contemporary struggle of oppressed Catholics. Many of Lodge’s works are considered, such as The Deafe Mans xxxii Thomas Lodge
Dialogue (1592, published with the romance Euphues Shadow) and Wits Miserie. But the excerpt focuses on the moral dialogue Catharos, in which Diogenes attacks the government oppressors of Catholics Francis Walsingham and William Cecil, Lord Burghley. The rest of the chapter (not reprinted here) traces Lodge’s attacks on atheism and Epicureanism and then focuses on Prosopopeia, an expressive confession of faith and commemoration of the Catholic martyr Robert Southwell. Before Cuvelier’s work appeared, Helgerson emphasized Lodge’s Catholicism, though as a function of the prodigal-son dynamic. Kinney’s appreciation of Lodge’s religious commitment was greater, though subordinated to his focus on humanism. Recently, as noted above (and apparently independently of Cuvelier), Kelly has uncovered the Catholic orientation in Lodge’s translation of Josephus, and Maslen has posited the centrality of Lodge’s Catholicism to his literary endeavor. Further, Mentz (2006) has associated the theme of penance in Lodge’s romances with his Catholicism. But Cuvelier’s book remains key to pursuing greater understanding of Lodge and his works in relation to religion, as well as to considering Lodge’s relevance to current, wide-ranging debates concerning the role of religion in a more secular, modem age.
Conclusion
This collection of Lodge scholarship validates the perceptions of Cuvelier and others that Thomas Lodge and his writings afford a unique vantage-point for understanding English literature, culture and society during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. In the span of Lodge’s life tremendous accomplishments and far-reaching transformations occurred. Although his life and works are fascinating and distinctive, they are also representative, dexterously registering and witnessing many contemporary currents. Likewise, although Lodge scholarship is limited in size, its quality and range give it the potential to contribute to major new insights concerning the nature and significance of the English Renaissance and of many of its remarkable figures. I hope this volume, surveying this scholarship and offering it for the first time as a distinctive body of work, will help realize that potential.
References
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Cantar, Brenda, (1997), ‘Monstrous Conceptions in Lodge’s Robin the DeviV, Studies in English Literature, 37, pp. 39-53. Clugston, George A. (ed.), (1980), A Looking Glasse for London and England, New York: Garland. Cuvelier, Eliane (1968), ‘A Treatise o f the Plague de Thomas Lodge’, Etudes Anglaises, 21, pp. 395- 403. Cuvelier, Eliane (1984), Thomas Lodge: Temoin de son Temps, Paris: Didier Erudition. Davis, Walter R. (1969), Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Delius, Nikolaus (1871), Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, 6, pp. 226-49. Dorangeon, Simone (1974), L ’eglogue anglaise de Spenser a Milton, Paris: Didier. Eskin, Catherine R. (2001), ‘Sit You Down Huswife and Fall to Your Needle’: A Woman’s Authority in Lodge’s Rosalynde’, Cahiers Elisabethains, 59(3), pp. 27-44. Findlay, Allan H. (ed.) (1983), The Life and Death o f William Longbeard, Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Garke, Esther (1972), The Use o f Song in Elizabethan Prose Fiction, Bern: Francke Verlag. Grandsden, K.W. (ed.), (1970), Tudor Verse Satire, London: Athlone. Hackett, Helen (2000), ‘Shakespeare’s Romance Sources’, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 143-47. Hanabusa, Chiaki (2002), ‘The Printing of Thomas Lodge’s The Wounds o f Civil War (1594)’, Shakespeare Studies (Tokyo, Japan), 40, pp. 1-47. Hayashi, Tetsumaro (ed.) (1970), A Looking Glasse for London and England, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow. Helgerson, Richard (1976), The Elizabethan Prodigals, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hornat, Jaroslav (1964), ‘An Old Bohemian Legend in Elizabethan Literature’, Philologica Pragensia, n.v., pp. 345-52 Houppert, J.W. (ed.) (1969), The Wounds o f Civil War, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hulse, Clark (1981), Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kelly, Erin (2003), ‘Jewish History, Catholic Argument: Thomas Lodge’s Workes o f Josephus as a Catholic Text’, Sixteenth Century Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies, 34(4), pp. 993-1010. Kinney, Arthur (1986), Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-century England, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Lamb, Mary Ellen and Wayne, Valerie (eds) (2008), Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare, New York: Routledge. Larson, Charles (1977), ‘Lodge’s Rosalynde: Decorum in Arden’, Studies in Short Fiction, 14(2), pp. 117-27. Lewis, C.S. (1954), English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Linton, Joan Pong (1998), The Romance o f the New World: Gender and the Formations o f English Colonialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lodge, Thomas (1959), Wits Miserie and the Worlds Madnesse, ed. Robert John Kearns, Diss. University of Michigan. Lodge, Thomas (1961), A Fig for Momus, ed. Wesley D. Rae, Diss. U. Wisconsin. Lodge, Thomas (1963), The Complete Works o f Thomas Lodge, 4 vols. ed. Edmund Gosse, New York: Russell and Russell. First published in 1883. Lodge, Thomas (1970), A Looking Glasse for London and England, ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi, Metuchen NJ: Scarecrow. Lodge, Thomas (1997), Rosalind, ed. Donald Beecher, Ottawa: Dovehouse. xxxiv Thomas Lodge
Lodge, Thomas (2005), A Margarite of America, ed. Donald Beecher, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. McAleer, John J. (1962), Thomas Lodge’s Verse Interludes’, CLA Journal, 6(2), pp. 83-89. Manley, Lawrence (1995), Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mentz, Steve (2006), ‘Fictions of Nostalgia: Lodge versus Greene’, in Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise o f Prose Fiction, Burlington and Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 151-71. Paradise, N. Burton, ([1931] 1970), Thomas Lodge: The History o f an Elizabethan, New York: Archon. First published in 1931. Paran, Janice (1981), T he Amorous Girl-Boy: Sexual Ambiguity in Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde’, Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts, 1, pp. 91-97. Patterson, Annabel (1984), Censorship and Interpretation: The Condition o f Authorship in Early Modern England, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Pierce, Robert B. (1971), T he Moral Languages of Rosalynde and^s1 You Like I f, Studies in Philology, 68, pp. 167-76. Pollack, Claudette (1976), ‘Romance and Realism in Lodge’s Robin the DeviV, Studies in Short Fiction, 13, pp. 491-97. Pomeroy, Elizabeth W. (1973), 'The Phoenix Nest: The Miscellany as Extended Elegy’, The Elizabethan Miscellanies: Their Development and Conventions, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, pp. 85-90. Prescott, Anne Lake (1978), French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rae, Wesley D. (1967), Thomas Lodge, New York: Twayne. Ricks, Christopher (1970), English Poetry and Prose 1540-1674, London: Sphere. Ringler, William (1939), T he Source of Lodge’s Reply to Gosson’, Review o f English Studies, 15, pp. 164-71. Roberts, Josephine A. (1980), ‘Lodge’s^ Margarite o f America: A Dystopian Vision ofthe New World’, Studies in Short Fiction, 17, pp. 407-14. Rollins, Hyder E. (ed.), (1969), The Phoenix Nest, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. First published in 1931. Ryan, Pat M. Jr (1967), Thomas Lodge, Gentleman, Hamden, CT: Shoe String. Schleiner, Louise (1989), ‘Ladies and Gentlemen in Two Genres of Elizabethan Fiction’, Studies in English Literature, 29, pp. 1-20. Selzer, John L. (1984), T he Achievement of Lodge’s Robin the DeviV, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 26(1), pp. 18-33; Shakespeare, William (2001), King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes, Arden 3 edition, London: Thomson Learning. Sharon-Zisser, Shirley (2004), T he Beginning that is Dead and Buried’: The Rhetorical Source of the Drive in the Rosalynd Texts’, Journal for Lacanian Studies, 2(2), pp. 210-29. Shell, Alison (2007), ‘Elizabeth Cary’s Historical Conscience: The Tragedy o f Mariam and Thomas Lodge’s Josephus', in Heather Wolfe (ed.), The Literary Career and Legacy o f Elizabeth Cary, 1613— 1680), New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 53-67. Sisson, Charles J. ([1933] 1966), Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, New York: Octagon. First published in 1933. Smith, Hallett (1972), ‘Rosalynde and As You Like If, in Shakespeare’s Romances: A Study of Some Ways o f the Imagination, San Marino CA: Huntington Library. Sorensen, Knud (1960), Thomas Lodge ’s Translation o f Seneca ’s De Beneficiis Compared with Arthur Golding’s Version: A Textual Analysis with Special Reference to Latinisms, Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Thomas Lodge xxxv
Tenney, Edward ([1934] 1969), Thomas Lodge, New York: Russell and Russell. First published in 1934. Walker, Alice (1927), ‘Italian Sources for Lyrics of Thomas Lodge’, Modern Language Review, 22, pp. 75-79. Walker, Alice (1933/1934), ‘The Life of Thomas Lodge’, Review of English Studies, 9, pp. 410-32; and 10, pp. 46-54 Whitworth, Charles W. (1973), ‘The Plays of Thomas Lodge’, Cahiers Elisabethains, 4, pp. 3-14. Whitworth, Charles W. (1975), 'The Wounds o f Civill War and Tamburlaine: Lodge’s Alleged Imitations’, Notes & Queries, n.s. 21, pp. 245-47. Wilson, Katharine (2006), Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives: Euphues in Arcadia, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Catalogue of Authors
The Introduction contains brief discussions of several additional works of Lodge and Whitworth’s biographical essay of virtually all of them. Below is a catalogue of Lodge’s works discussed in the reprints herein.
Honest Excuses (defence of poetry and drama) Sisson, Kinney, Maslen
An Alarum for Usurers Sisson, Helgerson, Cuvelier, Kinney, Maslen
Forbonius and Prisceria Helgerson, Kinney, Davis, Wilson
Truth’s Complaint over England Cuvelier, Maslen
The Wounds of Civil War Kinney, Gentili, Hadfield
Scillaes Metamorphosis (Glaucus and Scilla) Helgerson, Kinney, Keach, Ellis, Maslen
Rosalynde Sisson, Helgerson, Cuvelier, Kinney, Davis, Wilson, Lindheim, Whitworth, Claire Kinney, Mentz, Hamilton, Beecher
A Looking Glass for London and England Cuvelier, Blanc
Robert, Second Duke of Normandy, surnamed... Robin the Devil Davis, Wilson, Hamilton
Catharos: Diogenes in his Singularity Helgerson, Cuvelier, Walker
The Life and Death o f William Long Beard Helgerson, Cuvelier, Davis, Wilson, Maslen xxxviii Thomas Lodge
Euphues Shadow Kinney, Davis
The Tragical Complaint of Elstred Kinney, Maslen
A Fig fo r Momus Cuvelier, Kinney
A Margarite of America Helgerson, Kinney, Wilson, Linton, Beecher
Wit’s Misery, and the World’s Madness Cuvelier, Walker
Prosopopeia Helgerson, Kinney, Walker
The Famous and Memorable Works of Josephus Kinney
The Works of... Seneca Cuvelier, Kinney Additional Bibliography
Works Cited in Essays by Walter R. Davis and Donald Beecher
Addison, James C. Jr (1981), ‘A Textual Error in Thomas Lodge’s ^ Margarite o f America (1596)’, The Library, 6th series, 3, pp. 142-43. Baskerville, Charles R. (1965), The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama, New York: Dover, 1965. First published in 1929. Braden, Gordon (1985), Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bush, Douglas (1963), Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (2nd edn), New York: Norton. First published in 1932. Cuvelier, Eliane (1981), ‘Horror and Cruelty in the Works of Three Elizabethan Novelists’, Cahiers Elisabethains, 19, pp. 39-51. England’s Helicon (1973), Menston: Scolar Press. First published in 1600. Hamilton, A.C. (1984), ‘Elizabethan Prose Fiction and Some Trends in Recent Criticism’, Renaissance Quarterly, 37, pp. 21-33. Frye, Northrop (1976), The Secular Scripture: A Study o f the Structure o f Romance, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hallett, Charles A. and Hallett, Elaine S. (1980), The Revenger’s Madness: A Study o f Revenge Tragedy Motifs, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kaplowicz, Karen (1974), ‘The Function of Poetry in the Prose Fiction of Thomas Lodge’, Dissertation, New York University. Lever, J.W. (1971), The Tragedy o f State, London: Methuen. Levinson, Jerrold (1996), ‘Horrible Fictions’, The Pleasures o f Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 277-86. Lewis, C.S. (1954), English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Linton, Joan Pong (1998), The Romance o f the New World: Gender and the Formations o f English Colonialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McAleer, John J. (1962), ‘Thomas Lodge’s Verse Interludes’, College Language Association Journal, 6(2), pp. 83-89. Paradise, N. Burton (1931), Thomas Lodge: The History o f an Elizabethan, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pattison, Bruce (1948), Music and Poetry o f the English Renaissance, London: Methuen. Pollack, Claudette (1969), ‘Studies in the Novels of Thomas Lodge’, Dissertation, Yale University. Praz, Mario (1966), The Flaming Heart, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1974), ed. Alex Preminger, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rees, D.G. (1960), ‘Italian and Italianate Poetry’, Elizabethan Poetry, ed. John Russell Brown, London: Arnold. Roberts, Josephine A. (1980), ‘Lodge’s A Margarite o f America: A Dystopian Vision of the New World’, Studies in Short Fiction, 17, pp. 407-14. Salzman, Paul (1986), English Prose Fiction 1558-1700: A Critical History, Oxford: Clarendon. xl Thomas Lodge
Schlauch, Margaret (1963), Antecedents of the English Novel 1400-1700, London: Oxford University Press. Sells, A. Lytton (1955), The Italian Influence on English Poetry, London: George Allen and Unwin. Seltzer, John Lawrence (1978), ‘A Critical Study of the Fiction of Thomas Lodge’, Dissertation, Miami University of Ohio. Smith, Hallett (1968), Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. First published in 1952. Spenser, Edmund (1989), The Shepheardes Calender in The Shorter Poems o f Edmund Spenser, ed. William Oram et al., New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Tasso, Torquato (1924), Aminta: A Pastoral Drama, ed. Ernest Grillo, London: Dent and Sons. Tenney, E.A. (1935), Thomas Lodge, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Virgil (1979), Eclogues, trans. Paul Alpers in The Singer o f Eclogues: Study o f Virgilian Pastoral, Berkeley: University of California Press. Wilson, Katherine (2000), ‘From Arcadia to America: Thomas Lodge’s Literary Landscapes’, Imaginaire, 5, pp. 7-19.
Additional Lodge Scholarship
Baskerville, Charles Read (1932), ‘A Prompt Copy of A Looking Glass for London and England’, Modern Philology, 30(1), pp. 29-51. Berg, Kent Talbot van den (1975), ‘Theatrical Fiction and the Reality of Love in As You Like It, PMLA, 90, pp (1975): 885-93. Berry, Edward I. (1980), ‘Rosalynde and Rosalind’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 31(1), pp. 42-52. Braden, Gordon (ed.) (2005), Sixteenth-Century Poetry : An Annotated Anthology, Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. Daley, A. Stuart (1985), ‘Observations on the Natural Settings and Flora of the Ardens of Lodge and Shakespeare’, English Language Notes, 22(3), pp. 20-29. Davis, Walter R. (1965), ‘Masking in Arden: The Histrionics of Lodge’s Rosalynde’, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 5(1), pp. 151-63. Donovan, Kevin J. (1993), ‘Recent Studies in Thomas Lodge (1969-1990)’, English Literary Renaissance, 23(1), pp. 201-11. Falke, A. (1986), ‘The “Marguerite” and the “Margarita” in Thomas Lodge’s A Margarite of America', Neophilologus, 70(1), pp. 142-54. Halasz, Alexandra (2004), ‘Lodge, Thomas’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols, Vol. 34, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 284-89. Ruthof, Horst G. (1973), ‘The Dialectic of Aggression and Reconciliation in the Tale o f Gamelyn, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, and Shakespeare’s As You Like I f, University of Cape Town Studies in English 4, pp. 1-15. Houppert, J.W. (1973), ‘Thomas Lodge’, in Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith (eds), The Predecessors of Shakespeare: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 153-60. Houppert, J.W. (1965), ‘Thomas Lodge’s Letters To William Trumbull’, Renaissance News, 18, pp. 117-23. Mack, Peter (1994), ‘Rhetoric in Use: Three Romances by Greene and Lodge’, in Peter Mack (ed.), Renaissance Rhetoric: Warwick Studies in the European Humanities, New York: St Martin’s Press, pp. 119-39. Thomas Lodge xii
Pollack, Claudette (1976), ‘Lodge’s^ Margarite o f America: An Elizabethan Medley’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Reforme, 12, pp. 1—11. Tannenbaum, Samuel A. (1940), Thomas Lodge: A Concise Bibliography, Elizabethan Bibliographies 11, New York: S. Tannenbaum. Whitworth, Charles W. (1973),‘Thomas Lodge, Elizabethan Pioneer’, Cahiers Elisabethains: Etudes sur la Pre-Renaissance et la Renaissance Anglaises, 3, pp. 5-15. Whitworth, Charles W. (1977), ‘Rosalynde: As You Like It and as Lodge Wrote It’, English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature, 58, pp. 114-17.
Part I Biography
[1] THOMAS LODGE THE MAN Charles J. Sisson
Lady Anne Lodge was buried on 30 December 1579, and in the Stationers’ Register we find entered for printing an Epitaph of the Lady Anne Lodge, her son’s first piece of literature. This has been spoken of as a proof of filial devotion. It may be so — I hope it is — but it is an odd kind of grief that can be solaced by precipitate print. For the Epitaph was entered on 23 December, before Lady Anne’s death authorised even poetic grief. The facts seem to be consistent with an intention to be ready for the event, with a view to the market, though it may be that Lodge was not responsible for the entry. But it is a queer incident. And it shows us Lodge as an 'occasional’ poet in his beginnings, as in much of his Fig for Momus, the indication, on the whole, of an inferior literary talent. It points to a limited, less imaginative, more imitative type of mind at grips with art, as compared with his fellows of Oxford and Cambridge. There is not, by the way, any real reason for suggesting that Thomas was the favourite son of Lady Anne or grand son of Lady Laxton, though Sir Edmund Gosse urges it upon us that he alone was especially provided for by both, maintaining that ‘ he must have shewn some particular powers of intelligence to be thus selected among six chil dren as his mother’s sole legatee.’ The facts are that both ladies provided for all the children, and that Thomas, as second son, second in the line of Lodges, had to be given a reasonable landed estate, ‘ some convenient portion,’ as Lady Lodge put it. And even that was left to him on strict conditions, and so never came to him in the end. What Gosse is naturally apt to admire in Lodge was pre cisely what both his father and mother particularly de- 4 Thomas Lodge
1 5 0 THOMAS LODGE AND HIS FAMILY tested in him, knowing the normal accompaniments of the life of the young scholar or man-of-letters in London. Lodge’s real interests at this time are amply indicated by his next work, written in defence of the stage in 1579 or early in 1580 against Stephen Gosson, and called Honest Excuses, which was suppressed after printing. It was doubtless some similar escapade that brought Lodge be fore the Privy Council in June 1581. In the same year Lodge wrote a prefatory poem, before October 23, when the book was entered in the Stationers’ Register, to Bar- nabe Rich’s Don Simonides, in which he speaks of himself as dulled by his ‘long distress,’ ‘ breaking my pleasant vein.’ Gosse will have it that this must be illness, not mis fortune. But the facts surely are that Lodge had got into serious trouble, ending in imprisonment, had put himself irrevocably out of court with his father and his family, and was finding literature and the stage a poor support for wit and gallantry. Gosson wrote of him in 1582 as a man under heavy clouds, of a loose and worthless way of life, almost a vagrant. Such, says Gosse, is the ‘worthless testimony’ of Gosson, whose acrid zeal certainly seems excessive, com ing from a young man of twenty-seven, only two years older than Lodge. Gosson was only twenty-four1 when he wrote his first diatribe against the stage, and must have been very young when he himself wrote plays in his un- regenerate days. But there is no doubt he was right about Lodge. In February 1583, Lodge signed a Deed of Release to his brother William, freeing him of all his claims on lega cies, including the Nayland estate, in return for money advanced and debts paid in anticipation of his expecta tions. And by 4 November he had ready for the press a notable piece of work called An Alarum against Usurers.
I C 24/346/5, containing a deposition by Gosson which gives his age. Thomas Lodge 5
THOMAS LODGE THE MAN 151 Less than ten years later Lodge was extremely busy in Star Chamber and in Chancery seeking redress for the advan tage that, he argued, William had taken upon him in ob taining this Deed from him in his time of need. Of Lodge’s many and varied literary efforts, none per haps is more closely taken from experience than An Alarum against Usurers, in which he sets forth the normal process of the degradation and ruin of young gentlemen brought about by dissipation in London. And all points to the probability that Lodge is in a large measure drawing upon experience when he paints this picture, though he defends himself in the Epistle to the Gentlemen of the Innes of Court against the strictures of Stephen Gosson. In this pamphlet Lodge inveighs against that class of merchant which has taken to usurious practices, by whose means (the more is the pittie) the prisons are replenished with young gentle men. These be they that make the father carefull, the mother sorrow- full, the sonne desperate: . . . that can close with a young youth while they cousen him, and feede his humoures, till they free him of his farmes. He proceeds to explain how a young man with expecta tions or with land, but short of money, is exploited by a broker acting for a merchant. ‘ If you want money, you have creditt,’ the broker suggests, and after an investiga tion of the young man’s circumstances a loan is given on his bond. Not money is lent, however, but commodities to the value of the loan, which the young man has to turn into money. The broker kindly acts as his factor, and the young man finally receives in cash at best a half of the amount for which he has given his bond for repayment in full in three months, the penalty for forfeiture of the bond being at least double the nominal loan. It will be observed that this is precisely the procedure in the play, A Looking Glass for London and England, written 6 Thomas Lodge
1 5 2 THOMAS LODGE AND HIS FAMILY by Lodge and Greene. It was a well-known trick, of course.1 But there can be no reasonable doubt that the young lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn wrote the scene in which the Usurer deals in this fashion with Thrasybulus, having given him ten pounds cash and thirty pounds in lute strings, which he sold for but five pounds, fifteen pounds in all for his bond of forty pounds. Indeed, later on in the pamphlet this very transaction is given as an example of fraud, down to the details of the amounts involved, forty pounds the amount of the loan, ten pounds cash, and thirty pounds’ worth of lute-strings. The matter seems to stick in Lodge’s mind. The young man nevertheless repeats his indiscretion, and falls into more and more expensive dissipations.
Truly, gentlemen, this that I write is true: I myself know the pay master; naie, more, I myself know certainly that by name I can reckon among you some that have ben bitten, who, left good portions by their parents, and faire lands by their auncestors, are desolate now, not hav ing friends to releeve them, or money to affray their charges. . . . Thus, thus, alas! the father before his eies, and in his elder yeres, beholdeth as in a mirror the desolation of his owne house, and hearing of the profusenesse of his ungratious sonne calleth him home, rebuketh him of his error, and requesteth an account of his money misspended. There is not a word of this which is not strictly true when applied to Lodge’s own life. We may find further auto biographical hints in Lodge’s references to the young gen tleman who is obliged to seek his fortune abroad, with un happy results, bearing in mind his own adventures with Clarke and Cavendish, or to the man of money ousting the gentry, and ultimately feasting ‘ in the halls of our riotous
i Sir Thomas dealt with the Earl of Westmorland in this fashion in 1546, lend ing £560 in wares, ‘ the which being sold by the broker and converted into moneye was by the broker and the servants o f. . . Sir Thomas Lodge de- lyvered at the late Erls house in the Charterhouse churchyard' (C 24/72). We are not told what the Earl received in cash. We are, however, given a speci men of his conversation: ‘Yea, marye, quod the Erie, by Goddes faire footeM Thomas Lodge 7
THOMAS LODGE THE MAN 1 53 young spendthrifts.’ For Lodge came of a doubly knighted family, though merchants on both sides. There follows the discourse of the father, lamenting the evil ways of his once hopeful son. Sir Thomas Lodge, it may be observed, was probably a sick man when the book was written. He made his will on 14 December 1583, little over a month after the book was entered in the Stationers’ Register. He died on 28 February 1584, and I think these dates exclude the possibility of a sudden death from plague. The book bears all the signs of rapid writing, and we may wonder what lay behind the producing of it. Filial piety was no light sentiment and tradition among the Elizabethans, and there is something more than dramatic rhetoric in the speech here set down: O, my sonne, if thou knewest thy father’s care, and wouldest answer it with thy well dooing, I might have hope of the continuance of my pro geny, and thou be a joy to my aged yeres . . . my name shall cease in thee, and other covetous underminers shall injoye the fruites of my long labours. Sir Thomas had several sons, it is true, and this was a dra matic touch hardly justified in 1584. Yet, strangely enough, it was Thomas who outlived all his brethren and did, in the end, stand alone to represent the progeny of the old City knight, who goes on here to refer to the young man’s mother: How tenderly, good boye, in thy mother’s lyfe wast thou cherished! How deerely beloved! How well instructed!. . . Report, nay, true report, hath made me privie to many of thy escapes, which as a father though I cover, yet as a good father tenderly will I rebuke. Sir Thomas, as we have seen, was in fact less reticent about his son’s faults, in private at any rate. The father continues, reproaching his son with wasting an allowance of forty pounds a year, and in two years run ning a hundred pounds into debt, and with haunting ex- 8 Thomas Lodge
154 THOMAS LODGE AND HIS FAMILY pensive courtesans. I have no evidence upon this last charge. But there is the clearest evidence that within three or four years of his mother’s death Lodge had ex hausted the legacies left to him under her will, and had completed the process just a year before the printing of this book, in 1583. It is probable that the three enemies enumerated by the father here were all known to Lodge, as two of them certainly were: ‘ first prodigalitie, the enimie to continencie; next lasciviousness, the enimie of sobrietie; and thirdly, ill company, the decayers of thy honestie.’ Finally, having met his debts this time, the father warns him that if he falls again from virtue, ‘ I promise thee this, that as now I deale with thee as a father, so then will I accompt of thee as a reprobate.’ So the son returns to the Inns of Court, repentantly, but at once returns to his old ways, to his usurer and his mistress Minxe, and in the end is completely ruined, whereupon ‘his father refuseth him, dispossessing the ryghte heyre of what hee maye, and poore hee is left desolate and afflicted in prison.’ Lodge was in prison, in fact, in 1581, and his account runs close to the facts. His father, as we have seen, had no small share in preventing Lodge from coming into possession of the lands left him by his mother on condition of good behaviour. This may perhaps suffice to show that there was much more than mere literary art in the outcry of the young man that now follows: Alas! unhappie wretch that I am, that having a good father that did cherish me, a tried mother that tenderly nourished me, many friends to accompanie me, faire revenewes to inrich me, have heaped sorrowe on my owne head by my father’s displeasure, refused of my friends for my misdemeanour, and dispossessed of my land by my prodigalitie. We come closer than ever to the actual details of Lodge’s affairs, as they appear in the series of law-suits in which he was involved with his brother William, in certain sug- Thomas Lodge 9
THOMAS LODGE THE MAN 1 5 5 gestions which he makes for the remedying of usury and the removal of temptation from young gentlemen to have recourse to usurers. For, considering the case of such heirs as are ‘ wardes unto her Majestie, or else by the tender provision of their parents they are left to the discretion of their kinsfolke,’ he argues that if they are kept short of money they are likely to borrow. Either condition of wardship may stint the heir, ‘ for nowe a dayes kinsfolkes are as covetous as others, and as crafty as the best.’ Let such guardians be bound to supply the young man with the largest possible income, and they will then be satisfied with his conduct! Now it was precisely the condition of Thomas Lodge that the lands left to him by his mother were left under trustees, and that having been paid less than their value, as he maintains, he brought suit against William Lodge, his elder brother and one of the executors of his mother’s will, some nine years after the publication of this pamphlet in which he sets forth the unhappy career of just such an heir as himself. One cannot help feeling that some of the out rageously righteous indignation with which Lodge ends the pamphlet, calling upon the wicked usurer to repent, must have been composed to the address of his brother, who had lent him money, taker! his bond of release in re spect of his legacies, and usurped the estate left to him by his mother. At any rate, we may observe the strongly fraternal note struck in the concluding paragraph, wherein he ‘ for brotherly amitie counsailed’ the usurers, and does ‘ brotherly admonish’ them! Lodge’s reliance upon his own actual experiences throughout increases the possi bility that the pamphlets of Greene, for example, may be taken as genuinely autobiographical. It is characteristic, again, of Lodge, that he finds Gos- son’s strictures, to which he refers in this book, incompre- 10 Thomas Lodge
I56 THOMAS LODGE AND HIS FAMILY hensible. Nothing but prejudice, ignorance and unfairness can account for Gosson, or anyone, opposing Thomas Lodge. Lodge went his own way, secure in his own recti tude and the excellence of his motives, and convinced that he knew best. Sir Thomas died shortly after this book was published, and there is no mention of Thomas in his will, despite the excellent morality of the Alarum against Usur ers, which may have been partly meant to soften the old man’s heart towards his ill-used second son. But Thomas was deliberately excluded from the entail of the Lodge properties, as his succession to the Nayland estate had been deliberately withheld. It is probable that Thomas did now in fact go to sea to the Canaries. By 1588 or at latest by September 1589, he was back in London with a book ready for printing and no mean debt for wine to Peter Suckling, and probably another of £7 to a Strand tailor, Richard Topping. In 1596 Topping was still trying to get it out of Henslowe, who bailed Lodge in 1597.1 In 1590 his novel Rosalynde was printed, written before October 6, the source of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Has any one considered the choice of this theme by Lodge, and the working out of it? Yet it is most significant and apt to his career. It was written, he says, during his voy age with Clarke to the Canaries, and ‘ it is the woorke of a Souldier and a Scholler.’ It has a double moral, pithily put in the postscript: ‘Here Gentlemen may you see . . . that such as neglect their father’s precepts, incur much prejudice . . . that yonger brethren though inferior in yeares, yet may be superior in honors.’ The relations be tween Saladyne, the elder brother, and Rosader, the younger, are almost ludicrously parallel to those of Wil liam and Thomas. Saladyne is another picture of the ‘ covetous caterpillar,’ the Usurer in A Looking Glass. He is in Rosalynde the ‘ weeping hyaena’ who defrauds Rosader i Henslowe Papers, Arts. 21, 22, 23. Thomas Lodge 11
THOMAS LODGE THE MAN 1 5 7 of his dues, makes havoc of his legacies and lands, and spoils his manor houses. I need not labour the point. It is certain that the writ ing of Rosalynde must have been a great comfort to Lodge, and we may be sure that the underlying autobiographical facts in his life were not ignored by some of its readers. Rosader is therefore, in a measure, an artistic and idealised portrait of Lodge, and so Lodge served indirectly as a model for Shakespeare’s Orlando. I cannot believe that Shakespeare and his circle of theatre-folk were not aware of the affairs of Lodge. And I am certain that Lodge went to see it, took parties with him and led the applause and groans at the right moments, which I think may readily be found.1 I feel sure that Professor Dover Wilson, who sug gests 1593 as the date of Shakespeare’s first writing of the play, would rejoice to think that this fits in admirably with the year in which Thomas and William Lodge were fighting it out, Oliver and Orlando in Star Chamber and Chancery! At the end of the postscript Lodge anticipated Ben Jon- son’s defiant retort upon criticism,2 in the words ‘ If you like it, so:’ — words which surely gave Shakespeare his title, and which also are characteristic of Lodge. He is incurably self-sufficient, assertive of his own point of view, and impervious to any opposing point of view. This char acteristic runs through all his writings, and through all his law-suits. Does he write a treatise of the Plague in 1603? Then he warns readers against all the doings and sayings of all other doctors and their quackery, ‘ foolish Idiotes and ignorant Emperiques’ who are not, like himself, Physicians and Philosophers. Yet he can write, ‘Truly my resolution is to provoke no man, and those that know me inwardly of late time can witnesse . . . I thanke God I haue indured wrongs, 1 E. g., 1, i, 158 ff.; 1, i, 138 ff., respectively. 2 Cynthia's Revels, Epilogue. 12 Thomas Lodge
158 THOMAS LODGE AND HIS FAMILY tho I haue had power to revenge them.’ His object in writ ing this book is mainly to help the poor who suffer from plague and cannot afford doctors. And he calmly requests the Lord Mayor and City to buy his book up and distri bute it broadcast. For the first time, apparently, when there is something to be gained, he expresses here a belated sense of ‘ the duetie and loue which I owe to this Citie wherein I was bred and brought vp.’ Turn to his law-suits, to the ineffable self-righteousness of his complaints against William, which have a more per sonal and dramatic note than even the average Star Cham ber Bill. Here he is the friendly young innocent, hardly used, but anxious to do the right thing between brothers. See him again in a later character, the mature philosopher in a noble mood, being troubled by a vulgar-minded grazier, a peasant — George Raye, to whom he leased the Rolleston lands at a most satisfactory rent, on which Raye lost heavily when the Trent and the Greet overflowed his fields. Lodge’s Answer found Raye an easy mark. What has Raye to say? It is a source of grief to him that Lodge has made the best of his lands. He alleges that he paid too much, that is, he alleges his own negligence and really praises Lodge: ‘ that kinde of exception tendith rather to commende a mans providence then to impeach him of evill dealing.’ Besides, Raye is in the trade, he is a grazier, unlike Doctor Thomas Lodge, who has never practised anie such course of life but the Cleane contrarie and dwelte for the most parte of his life in the cittie of London, his practise of life hath been but studie and contemplation for the most parte. And Lodge ends with a peroration in good set terms: and this defendant doth admire that the plaintiff should saie that this defendant hath beene a great gainer by him and not acknowledge the goodnes of his owne bargaine and shewe his turbulent spirit to stirr up sute concerning that whereby he hath benefited himself and is behold ing to this defendant. Thomas Lodge 13
THOMAS LODGE THE MAN 1 5 9 I must say that, at this stage of Lodge’s litigious career, this picture of himself as the studious and contemplative man, withdrawn from meaner concerns in his pursuit of higher matters, excites a tickling of the midriff. It is his nearest approach to truly imaginative fiction. No doubt Lodge, at the age of sixty, looked the part admirably, and probably with a certain nobility and dignity. But it is strange how often our contemplative scholar, who had so recently, in 1614, translated Seneca’s Stoic Morals, was thus beset with turbulent spirits. It is also clear here that, when Lodge had an advantage, he drove it home, without any compunction. The turbu lent spirit of George Raye resided in the withered body of an aged man over eighty years of age,1 who could not even write his name. But Lodge, having overreached him, showed him no pity. The same bent of character led him into the obstinate rejection of compromise, and a refusal to admit defeat, which are strikingly shown in his last suit against Wilmore concerning the West Ham lands, that astute, unscrupulous, forlorn hope. When the case had been thoroughly heard, the Court, in Michaelmas, 1621, saw no cause to admit Lodge’s plea. Nevertheless the Master of the Rolls suggested to Wilmore that he should pay £30 to Lodge as a solatium. Wilmore agreed. Lodge refused, and demanded a second hearing. Again the Court, in February 1622, found as before, yet again moved Wil more to compromise, this time suggesting £io, to put an end to the matter. Wilmore, much protesting, once more agreed, but Lodge, ‘ being present in Court departed with out giveing any consent to accept the same,’ evidently in high dudgeon. And so the Court, upon this, clearly and absolutely dismissed the case, and Lodge got nothing. Was ever man so blind to the direction of the finger of i C 24/221/37. George Raye, of Highgate, yeoman, aged 55 on 10 June, 1591. 14 Thomas Lodge
1 60 THOMAS LODGE AND HIS FAMILY fate? It was not in Lodge, one would imagine, to conceive that he might be in the wrong, or that he might be unable to have his own way. And when things went inconceivably awry, he satisfied himself with a gesture of contempt and rebellion. When Lodge was a young man of twenty-one, and mounted his paper steed to tilt against Stephen Gosson, he could see nothing but error and animus in an incompre hensibly irreconcilable opponent. He had not changed forty years later, when he thought to carry away the Court of Chancery with an alia stoccata. I have no doubt he backed his own judgement against that of his counsel Mr. Stanwell in this matter. Indeed, this seems to be the dominant note of his whole life, the life of an incurably assertive individu alist vindicating self-will and private opinion against all the forces of environment. Born into a citizen family of wealth and standing, but with firm convictions upon its right and power to guide and dispose of its children, Lodge resisted the imposing influences leading him towards a steady, assured life of dignity and ease in the legal profession. Three generations of Laxtons, Lanes, Loddingtons, Lodges, Machells and Woodfords surrounded him in his youth, with two Lord Mayors and several Aldermen of London among them, all Grocers of name and fame, desirous of perpetuating the honour of the clan, and hoping great things from the sons of Sir Thomas and Lady Anne. From all this, Lodge turned away to join a group of young wits and scholars about town, regardless of warnings and threats, and un moved by entreaties, to exploit his genius and to follow the impulses of the moment. So doing, he forfeited his patri mony in the end. He paid a heavy price for the privilege of writing a few charming lyrics, a poor play or two, some second-rate satires, a few novels, and a pamphlet in defence Thomas Lodge 15
THOMAS LODGE THE MAN l6l of the stage. Spendthrift or improvident to the end, there is never any sign even in his riper years of that settled course of life that was the only demand his clan made of him. At twenty-one he was in the lists against Gosson; at twenty-three he fell foul of the Privy Council; and in mid dle age, still pursuing his bent, he turned Catholic, in the teeth of a time of most violent persecution of a faith that seemed to involve disloyalty to the State. He went his own way throughout, whether it were to the tavern in Fleet Street, to the Terceras or to Brazil, to France in pursuit of a degree in medicine, or when he turned upon his heel, spurning the Court of Chancery. It is significant that when he died in 1625, leaving behind him a wife of whom we know little, he died intestate, having provided for the moment and no further. We may well be moved by a sense of irony when we consider how this man, having refused to follow the profession of the law, a truant from Lincoln’s Inn, thereafter spent a notable proportion of his energies in an endless series of suits at law, involved in its processes in his very childhood, turning to it at intervals throughout a long life, till we finally see him resolute as ever in Chan cery at the age of sixty-four. But we need not feel any in congruity in this pursuit of the law in practice. For the law to Lodge was but one more field in that wide and var ied country which he explored with endless zest and per sistence, seeking lists wherein to challenge circumstance and to vindicate and assert his own wit, his own powers, and his own desires. There was never a truer Elizabethan. Let Lodge state the moral himself, in his comments upon the misfortunes of his young rake, in An Alarum against Usurers'.
Nature’s gifts are to be used by direction: he had learning, but hee applied it ill: he hadde knowledge, but he blinded it with selfe-opinion. 1 6 Thomas Lodge
162 THOMAS LODGE AND HIS FAMILY
APPENDIX I
W inchester’s Letter to the Privy Council 1 MS. Lansdowne 6, Art. 42
A f t e r my verry harty comendaton to yor good lordships. I haue receyved yor letts by thand^ of Sir thorns lodge, last yere maior of the Cite of london, pceyving, by the same that yor 11., vpon the hering of his cause, haue so considered of his good seruic at all tymes, that you haue moved the quenes matie therof. And thervpon induced her grace to haue gret pitty of the case. And that her highnes by yor mediacon is verry well inclyned to stay hym in his Credit. Wch shalbe a wurthy dede ffor that he is a wise man and a gret Occupier as any is in the Cite & shall wt the quenes favor and helpe, shortly recou this lakke. Wherof I pceyve the quenes highnes and yor 11 be moch desirous and so am I for my pt to th vttermost I may do/And of yor iij devices for his helpe I think the staplers verry good for that wilbe redy mony wherof he hath most nede/ And I think the Sparing of his Customes vpon euy of his shipping^ in six yeres shall cause hym ship the more to his increase And of that Custom the quenes matie to be paid in the ij yere wch will not helpe hym at this prsent nede And therefor there must be as moch more aboue the staplers mony as must make the full of vj m li and so he shalbe well holpen And if it please the quenes grace to graunt to this then the quenes prie Seale to me to pay to Mr lodge the Staplers mony to be paid to her grace vpon the last shipping & as moch therto as shall make the full of vj m li I shall shortly despatch the matt aggrehable to the quenes pleasure when I shall know the same by yor Ire: most hartely desiring yor good 11, to contynue yor favor to the said sir Thomas lodge that the quenes highnes may contynue her most gracious favor and ayde
I The letter and the second endorsement appear to be in Winchester’s own hand. The first endorsement is written by a clerk* Thomas Lodge 17
APPENDIX I 163 to the end of this matt Wch shalbe as honorable and as charitable as my hart can think of/ & thus fare you hartely well Westm this ffriday the iijd day of december 1563 yor 11 assured loving ffrend Winchester
(Endorsed) 3 10 bris. 1563 L. Tresr Sr Thoms Lodge maior of London, wanting a Supply of mony to keep vp his credit, obtained favour from sevral Lords, being a wise man & great trader, xviii To my verry good 11 and ffrendf therle of pembroke the 1. Robt Dudley and Willm Secill the quenes principall secretary at Windsor 18 Thomas Lodge
w h os e! co 2* I _ W 10 to S tOT M M ii • 8 0 . O c to *—) c X to Q.s Rt ■ O - • < t—» •—»O to^ S'S - a vo a — o IH tT 0 *3c 1 a <-*, to w o\ S o ►J V £ o X - < ! - 3 ^ Ii s « iT « 1 ^ -rt- £-* | d - « || ------| I U J :§<« P-I w to Jo ^ £ *2 00 £ II ------o ^ 3 ^ - M § M. ^3 £ " II ^ ► "U qs |g |g .b ^ oo i § «? °4r- <■Jw2s'sO«'o ^ ^ Oco^vo ^ 5 W ^ j •Si vo -SI iA 2 oL^ § *° 65 « h £; < £ ---- o “ « to M « M. gai 00 vn H 3 a § VO < C\ II to vo ^ Pi 5
Introduction
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Literature, 37, pp. 39-53.
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Cuvelier, Eliane (1968), ‘A Treatise o f the Plague de Thomas Lodge’, Etudes Anglaises, 21, pp. 395-
403.
Cuvelier, Eliane (1984), Thomas Lodge: Temoin de son Temps, Paris: Didier Erudition.
Davis, Walter R. (1969), Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Delius, Nikolaus (1871), Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, 6, pp. 226-49.
Dorangeon, Simone (1974), L ’eglogue anglaise de Spenser a Milton, Paris: Didier.
Eskin, Catherine R. (2001), ‘Sit You Down Huswife and Fall to Your Needle’: A Woman’s Authority in
Lodge’s Rosalynde’, Cahiers Elisabethains, 59(3), pp. 27-44.
Findlay, Allan H. (ed.) (1983), The Life and Death o f William Longbeard, Copenhagen: University of
Copenhagen.
Garke, Esther (1972), The Use o f Song in Elizabethan Prose Fiction, Bern: Francke Verlag.
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Lodge, Thomas (1963), The Complete Works o f Thomas Lodge, 4 vols. ed. Edmund Gosse, New York:
Russell and Russell. First published in 1883.
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NJ: Scarecrow.
Lodge, Thomas (1997), Rosalind, ed. Donald Beecher, Ottawa: Dovehouse. Lodge, Thomas (2005), A Margarite o f America, ed. Donald Beecher, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. McAleer, John J. (1962), Thomas Lodge’s Verse Interludes’, CLA Journal, 6(2), pp. 83-89. Manley, Lawrence (1995), Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mentz, Steve (2006), ‘Fictions of Nostalgia: Lodge versus Greene’, in Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise o f Prose Fiction, Burlington and Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 151-71. Paradise, N. Burton, ([1931] 1970), Thomas Lodge: The History o f an Elizabethan, New York: Archon. First published in 1931. Paran, Janice (1981), T he Amorous Girl-Boy: Sexual Ambiguity in Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde’, Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts, 1, pp. 91-97. Patterson, Annabel (1984), Censorship and Interpretation: The Condition o f Authorship in Early Modern England, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Pierce, Robert B. (1971), T he Moral Languages of Rosalynde and^s1 You Like I f , Studies in Philology, 68, pp. 167-76. Pollack, Claudette (1976), ‘Romance and Realism in Lodge’s Robin the DeviV, Studies in Short Fiction, 13, pp. 491-97. Pomeroy, Elizabeth W. (1973), 'The Phoenix Nest: The Miscellany as Extended Elegy’, The Elizabethan Miscellanies: Their Development and Conventions, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, pp. 85-90. Prescott, Anne Lake (1978), French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rae, Wesley D. (1967), Thomas Lodge, New York: Twayne. Ricks, Christopher (1970), English Poetry and Prose 1540-1674, London: Sphere. Ringler, William (1939), T he Source of Lodge’s Reply to Gosson’, Review o f English Studies, 15, pp. 164-71. Roberts, Josephine A. (1980), ‘Lodge’s ^ Margarite o f America: A Dystopian Vision ofthe New World’, Studies in Short Fiction, 17, pp. 407-14. Rollins, Hyder E. (ed.), (1969), The Phoenix Nest, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. First published in 1931. Ryan, Pat M. Jr (1967), Thomas Lodge, Gentleman, Hamden, CT: Shoe String. Schleiner, Louise (1989), ‘Ladies and Gentlemen in Two Genres of Elizabethan Fiction’, Studies in English Literature, 29, pp. 1-20. Selzer, John L. (1984), T he Achievement of Lodge’s Robin the DeviV, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 26(1), pp. 18-33; Shakespeare, William (2001), King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes, Arden 3 edition, London: Thomson Learning. Sharon-Zisser, Shirley (2004), T he Beginning that is Dead and Buried’: The Rhetorical Source of the Drive in the Rosalynd Texts’, Journal for Lacanian Studies, 2(2), pp. 210-29. Shell, Alison (2007), ‘Elizabeth Cary’s Historical Conscience: The Tragedy o f Mariam and Thomas Lodge’s Josephus', in Heather Wolfe (ed.), The Literary Career and Legacy o f Elizabeth Cary, 1613— 1680), New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 53-67. Sisson, Charles J. ([1933] 1966), Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, New York: Octagon. First published in 1933. Smith, Hallett (1972), ‘Rosalynde and As You Like I f , in Shakespeare’s Romances: A Study o f Some Ways o f the Imagination, San Marino CA: Huntington Library. Sorensen, Knud (1960), Thomas Lodge ’s Translation o f Seneca ’s De Beneficiis Compared with Arthur Golding’s Version: A Textual Analysis with Special Reference to Latinisms, Copenhagen: Gyldendal.
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English Studies 58 (1977): 114-17. [11] Feigning Female Faining: Spenser, Lodge, Shakespeare, and Rosalind C L A R E R. K I N N E Y University of Virginia
Toward the en d o f the six teen th century , th ree E nglishm en create th ree d iffe ren t versions o f pasto ral in w hich they rep re sen t a novice p o e t w riting poem s to a w om an called R osalind; each w ork (and in pa rticu la r th e two la te r ones) also records the w om an’s response to the lyrics m ade in h e r h o nor. This scenario appears in a cycle o f eclogues, a p rose rom ance , an d a rom an tic com edy: E d m u n d S p en ser’s Shep- heardes Calender (1579); T hom as L o d g e’s Rosalynde (1590), an d W illiam
S h akespeare’s As You Like It (ca. 1 5 9 9 -1 6 0 0 ).1 I p ropose to take a closer look at h ith e rto ig n o red filiations betw een L o d g e’s h e ro in e and
S p en se r’s alm ost invisible R osalind, before reconsidering the re la tio n ship betw een S hakespeare’s Rosalind an d h e r p recursors. This article will address the im plications o f the in te rtex tu a l transfo rm ations th a t m ake R osalind-the-lyric-object increasingly reim ag inab le as a read er, a critic, an d finally a m aker. It will also discuss som e o f the cu ltu ra l an d ex tra tex tua l forces an d the in tra tex tu a l gestures o f reco n ta in m en t th a t
I would like to thank Gordon Braden for his insightful and helpful com m ents on this article; I would also like to thank my readers at Modem Philology for their suggestions regarding its final revision.
1. M uch critical attention has been paid to the relationship betw een the second and third “responding Rosalinds,” som e to that betw een the first and third, and n on e at all to that betw een the first and second. D iscussions o f As You Like It in relation to Rosalynde include Albert H. Tolman, “Shakespeare’s M anipulation o f His Sources in As You Like It?
Modem Language Notes 37 (1922): 6 5 -7 6 ; Marco M intoff, “What Shakespeare Did to Ros alynde” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 98 (1960): 78 -89 ; Robert B. Pierce, “T he Moral Languages o f Rosalynde and As You Like It,” Studies in Philology 68 (1971): 167-76; Edward I. Berry,
“Rosalynde and Rosalind,” Shakespeare Quarterly 31 (1980): 4 2 -5 2 ; M ichael Shapiro, Gen der in Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Ann Arbor, M ich., 1994), pp. 126-30; and Paul Al- pers, What Is Pastoral? (C hicago, 1996), pp. 6 6 -67 , 1 9 7 -9 8 . For a b rief discussion o f As
You Like It in relation to The Shepheardes Calender, see Ju liet Dusinberre, “As Who Liked
It?” Shakespeare Survey 46 (1993): 9 -2 1 , esp. 16 -1 8 . 292 M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y delim it L o d g e’s an d S hakespeare’s (qu ite d ifferen t) reconstruc tions o f R osalind the artist. L o d g e’s Rosalynde was a best-seller o f the 1590s; after its initial p u b lication th ree fu r th e r ed itions ap p eared in 1592, 1596, an d 1598 (i.e., b efo re the p ro b ab le 1599-1600 com position o f As You Like It). E lizabe th a n au d ien ces seem to have fo u n d th e w ork a rew ard ing fic tion in its own righ t, b u t its ro u tin e dismissal by Shakespearian critics as a co n ven tional if e legan t pasto ra l exercise, whose one substantial invention is its h e ro in e ’s doub le disguise as G an im ede-“Rosalynde,” has fo re stalled the recog n itio n th a t Lodge m igh t have b een do ing m ore than p ro d u c in g a suggestive g ro u n d p lo t fo r S hakespeare’s in v en tio n .2 Rosa- lynde’s pub lica tion date in fact places it a t the very beg in n in g o f the fash ion fo r pasto ral p rose rom ance: Fulke G reville’s ed ition o f Philip S idney’s un fin ish ed “New ” Arcadia appears in the very sam e year, an d the w ork’s only p recu rso rs in the m ode are R obert G reen e’s less am bitious efforts in Pandosto (1588) and Menaphon (1589). If Lodge is conventional, he is h e lp ing to create conven tion ra th e r th an blindly follow ing it, an d o n e o f his m ost in te re s tin g innovations is his “ro m an c in g ” o f ce rta in aspects o f th e n o n n arra tiv e p arad ig m prov ided by S penser’s Shepheardes Calender:3 L odge’s revision o f the g en d e red dynam ics o f S penserian P e tra rch an pasto ra l g ran ts a voice to the si len ced R osalind o f S p en ser’s work, in tu rn p rovid ing a p ro to type for the talkative R osalind o f As You Like It. L odge allows his cross-dressed h e ro in e to p artic ipa te in lyric dialogue; Shakespeare, by contrast, fram es the a rt o f his disguised R osalind in prose. I will eventually be addressing the im plications o f S hakespeare’s rem oval o f R osalind’s art from the discursive universe o f m asculine lyric; my p re lim inary exam in a tion o f the brave new w orld o f he terosexual pastoral in te rcou rse begins, however, in L o d g e’s A rden. 2. W. W. Greg com plained that “little attention has ever been bestow ed upon [/tosa- lynde] for its own sake, and its own individual merits have been cast into the shade by the glory o f its own offspring” (Lodge’s “Rosalynde, ”ed. W. W. Greg [New York, 1907], p. ix). A few critics have discussed the rom ance on its own terms; see, e.g., Walter R. Davis, “T he H istrionics o f L od ge’s Rosalynde,” Studies in English Literature 150 0 -1 9 0 0 5 (1965): 151-63; Charles Larson, “L od ge’s Rosalynde: D ecorum in Arden,” Studies in Short Fiction 14 (1977): 117-27; and Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 155 8 -1 7 0 0 (O xford, 1985), pp. 7 2 -76; see also Charles W hitworth, Jr., “Rosalynde As You Like It and As Lodge Wrote It,” English Studies 58 (1977): 1 1 4 -1 7 . It is still the case, however, that readings o f Rosa lind tend toward the teleological: the work’s function as Shakespeare’s source “allows us to define with unusual precision som e o f the differences betw een skill and gen iu s” (Berry, p. 42). 3. On the issue o f L od ge’s conventionality, cf. Larson, p. 119. Clare R. Kinney o Feigning Female Paining 293 I. R E P R E S E N T I N G R O S A L I N D , R O S A L Y N D E ’ S R E P R E S E N T A T I O N S
L o d g e’s G anim ede-R osalynde an d A liena-A linda en c o u n te r the in h a b itan ts o f th e pasto ral universe by becom ing readers o f poetry. Looking fo r she lte r in A rden , Rosalynde rem arks, “I spie th e figures o f m en; fo r h e re in these trees be ingraven certa ine verses o f shep h eard s o r som e o th e r swaines th a t in h ab ite h e re ab o u t.”4 A fter p erusing two o f M onta- n u s’s com plain ts, she announces, “Seeing we have fo u n d h e re . . . the track t o f S hepheards by th e ir M adrigals an d R oundelaies, le t us fo r ward; fo r e ith e r we shall find som e foldes, sheepcoates, o r else som e co ttages” (p. 182). T he poetic “track t” (or trace) “figures” the pastoral m aker: characters an d readers are be ing in itia ted in to an em phatically lite rary landscape in w hich you stum ble over poem s before you find e ith e r sh ep h erd s o r sheep.
Shortly afterw ard, the travelers arrive at a conven tional locus amoenus w here two swains pe rfo rm a lyric d ialogue, w hich is set off typ o g rap h ically in the fram ing narrative with the subtitle “A P leasant Eglog
B etw eene M ontanus an d Coridon” (p. 183). T he read e r is given a very precise perspective on this in te rlu d e . H aving described the pastoral p ro sp ec t seen by his hero ines, L odge continues: “D rawing m ore n igh wee m igh t descrie the co u n ten an ce o f the one to be full o f sorrow e . . . an d his eyes full o f woes . . . Wee, (to h eare w hat these were) stole priv- ilie b eh in d the th ick e [t] , w here we overheard this d iscourse” (p. 183).
T h e u n ex p ec ted “w ee” conflates n a rra to r, read er, an d fem ale ch a rac ters as eavesdroppers w hen C oridon asks M ontanus w hat grieves h im an d M ontanus dilates on th e woes o f fru stra ted love. C oridon indicts love as “a sugared harm , a po ison full o f p leasu re”; M ontanus inform s h im th a t o ld age has n o th in g useful to say on the subject. C oridon re news his m oral advice, b u t M ontanus stops his ears against his saws.
U p to this m om en t, the read e r is u n d e r the im pression th a t Lodge is rep ro d u c in g w hat “w ee” overhear. But after M on tanus’s last line there is an add en d u m : u n d e r the ru b ric Terentius follows a q u o ta tio n from
The Eunuch describ ing the irra tionality o f love (p. 187).5 W ho speaks
4. Thom as Lodge, Rosalynde. Euphues golden legacie, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of to Rosalynde are to this ed ition and are n oted parenthetically, by page num ber, in the text.
5. L od ge’s citation (a free adaptation o f The Eunuch 1 .1 .1 4 -1 8 ) reads: “In am ore haec om nia insunt vitia, induciae, in im icitiae, bellum , pax rursum: incerta haec si tu postules ratione, certa fieri, n ih ilo plus agas, quam si des operam , ut cum ratione insanias” [In love all offenses are in clu d ed — truces, war, peace on ce again. If you subject all these u n logues, m uch less as com m en ta to rs on th e m .8 R eferences to R osalind’s b eh av io r tow ard C olin (an d its d ep ressing effects on his p o e tic pow ers) provide a co n tex t in w hich m ale speakers reaffirm the p o e t’s gifts, listen to o n e a n o th e r ’s rec ita tions o f C olin ’s lyrics, o r en co u rag e h im to ab an d o n love com plain ts fo r m ore am bitious projects. In n a rra tin g his h e ro in e ’s response to h e r in scrip tion in R osader’s P e tra rch an pastoral lyrics, Lodge translates S p en ser’s R osalind from tex tualized ob ject to responsive subject. A p p ro p ria tin g th e perspective an d voice o f E. K.,
Rosalynde the in te rp re te r-co m m en ta to r displaces R osalind the absen t p resence .
I am n o t th e first read e r to suggest th a t to nam e your h e ro in e Rosa lin d in th e years follow ing th e ap p ea ran ce o f The Shepheardes Calender is a s ign ifican t lite ra ry g estu re . In a re c e n t d iscussion o f As You Like
It, Ju lie t D usinberre identifies a Spenserian resonance in S hakespeare’s w ork .9 Invoking Louis M on trose’s acco u n t o f th e political inflections an d agendas o f E lizabethan pastoral, she proposes th a t S hakespeare’s signifier “Rosalind,” like S penser’s, inevitably shadows E lizabeth Tudor: the “Elisa, Q u een e o f sh ep h ea rd es” who displaces the putative ob ject o f desire from Colin C lo u t’s song in th e Aprill eclogue an d the su prem ely fru stra tin g an d pow erful m istress co u rted th ro u g h o u t the
P e tra rch an pasto ral passages o f S p en ser’s w ork .10 D usinberre argues th a t R osalind’s ro le in S hakespeare’s com edy “challenge [s] . . . Eliza b e th ’s elaborately co n stru c ted fictions o f chastity an d desire .”11 She does no t, however, address th e challenge o ffered to o th e r fictions o f chastity an d desire by S hakespeare’s source w hen L o d g e’s Rosalynde usurps E. K.’s position o n th e m arg ins o f pastoral discourse.
Lodge n o t only rep resen ts his Rosalynde as a know ledgeable read e r an d in te rp re te r o f pastoral lyric b u t also has h e r partic ipa te in the com position an d p e rfo rm an ce o f an eclogue. H arry B erger has o b served th a t “the com m unity o f [S penser’s] eclogues is a b ran ch o f the
Young M en’s Pastoral Association. W om en a t best serve in stru m en ta l functions in the YMPA . . . T h e ir jo b is to co n trib u te to the m ale b o n d ing w hich po e try celebra tes.”12 S p en ser’s pastorals are spoken only by 8. Spenser follow s the exam ple o f Jacopo Sannazaro, w hose Arcadia (1504) co n tains twelve pastoral ec logu es with prose links; beautiful shepherdesses are glim psed in passing in o n e o f the latter, and are the objects o f lyric celebration and com plaint in the form er, but are exclu d ed as participants or audiences from acts o f poetic m aking. 9. See D usinberre (n. 1 above), p. 16.
10. See Louis A. M ontrose, ‘“ Eliza, Q ueen o f shepheardes’ and the Pastoral o f Power,”
English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 153—82, and “O f G entlem en and Shepherds: T he
Politics o f Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” E L H 50 (1983): 4 1 5 -5 9 , esp. 4 4 0 -4 1 .
11. Dusinberre, p. 17.
12. Harry Berger, Jr., “Pan and the Poetics o f Misogyny,” in his Revisionary Play: Stud ies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley and Los A ngeles, 1988), p. 359. 296 M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y m en, an d th e sam e is tru e o f th e eclogues w hich p a rtitio n S idney’s Ar cadia (first pub lished , like Rosalynde, in 1590), w here the only “fem ale” speaker is the cross-dressed Pyrocles.13 B ut in the m iddle o f L o d g e’s rom ance we find “T he W ooing Eglogue Betwixt Rosalynde an d Rosader in w hich Rosalynde, playing herself, answers R osader’s lyric p e rsu a sions w ith h e r own verses a n d en d s by p lig h tin g h e r tro th to h im (pp. 2 1 1 -1 3 ). Lodge depicts his h e ro in e as a p o e t in h e r own rig h t in a d ia logue w here the beloved, instead o f m erely fu n c tio n in g as the p re tex t fo r poetry , is given a voice o f h e r own. I w ould argue th a t this revision o f S p en ser’s nonn arra tiv e parad igm is a t once innovative an d conservative. If L odge o p en s up the solip- sistic lyricism o f the P e trarchan -pasto ra list to the possibilities o f h e t erosexual poetic in te rcou rse , his Rosalynde nevertheless goes on to rep licate an em phatically m an-m ade discourse. Perusing M o n tan u s’s poem s, Rosalynde rem arks to A linda-A liena th a t th e ir do lefu l reco rd o f fru stra tio n bears witness to the shocking capriciousness an d cruelty o f “you w om en.” A liena re to rts, “If your roabes w ere off, w hat m ettall are you m ade o f th a t you are so satyricall against w om en?” H er frien d coun ters, “I keepe decorum : I speak now as I am Alienas page . . . P u t m e b u t in to a pe ticoate , an d I will stand in defiance to the u tte rm o st th a t w om en are courteous, constan t, vertuous an d w hat n o t” (p. 181). T he exchange suggests th a t Rosalynde has borrow ed “m ascu line” dis course a long w ith h e r clothes: G anim ede is “decorously” read ing from the p o in t o f view o f a m an. T he sam e keep ing o f d eco ru m inform s as well as licenses h e r acts o f m aking. Only w hen she coun terfe its m ascu linity in h e r own p erso n can she p ractice a n o th e r k ind o f priv ileged dissem bling. If the poem s o f A rden may be read , to borrow Rosa lynde’s own words, as the “figures o f m en ,” Rosalynde he rse lf m ust first figure a m an befo re she can engage in poesis w ith a m a n .14 In d e e d the discursive universe o f Rosalynde— even as it seem s to afford its w om en unusual access to the roles o f responsive re a d e r and 13. T here is a m ale-fem ale “m errie E c logu e” betw een the rustics D oron and Carmela in Robert G reen e’s Menaphon (1589), but it is a com ic perform ance: G reene consciously flouts pastoral decorum at every turn in this interlude. Sidney’s fem ale characters do com pose lyrics (alm ost always private com plaints) in the prose portions o f both versions o f his rom ance; however, the section o f the Old Arcadia in which Pamela and M usidorus after plighting their troth take turns in m aking songs for each other (the exchange is em bedded within the prose text and is n ot presented as an “official” eclogue) was n ot pub lished until the C ountess o f Pem broke’s com posite text appeared in 1593 (three years after the publication o f Rosalynde). See Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arca dia, ed. M aurice Evans (H arm ondsw orth, 1982), pp. 6 5 0 -5 3 . 14. Sidney offers a teasing m ultiple choice defin ition o f poetic mimesis as “a repre senting,” “counterfeiting,” or “figuring forth .” See Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. Jan Van Dorsten (O xford, 1966), p. 25. Clare R. Kinney o Feigning Female Faining 297 poetic m ak er— contains som e strikingly con trad ic to ry constructions o f fem ale agency an d o f “p ro p e r” fem ale speech. T he ro m a n c e ’s fram e erases the speaking an d read ing fem ale subject: Rosalynde is n o t only officially d irec ted tow ard “G en tlem en read e rs” b u t is p re sen ted as the
“legacy” o f J o h n Lyly’s E uphues to the sons o f P h ilau tu s .15 It opens w ith the d ea th b ed serm on o f R osader’s fa ther, w ho inform s his sons th a t a lth o u g h “w om en are w antons,” since “m en can n o t w ant o n e ” they shou ld choose one who is “chast, ob ed ien t, an d s ilen t”— the usual
Holy Trinity o f early m o d e rn fem ale v irtues (p. 163). Rosalynde may reveal h e r desire an d p lig h t h e r tro th to R osader in the w ooing eclogue, b u t A linda, m using o n how to deal with h e r own suitor, takes th e m o re o r th o d o x p o sitio n th a t she sh o u ld “ra th e r d ie th a n d is cover an ie desire: fo r th e re is n o th in g m ore p recious in a w om an, th an to conceale Love, an d to die m o d est” (p. 225). W hen the love- sm itten P hoebe writes poem s to G anim ede, she insists th a t “n a tu re h a th fram ed w om en’s eyes bashfull, th e ir hearts full o f feare, an d th e ir to n g u es full o f s ilen ce” an d th a t only love co u ld have m ade h e r act so unusually (p. 244). At its close, th e rom ance thorough ly downplays the significance o f the u n conven tiona l actions o f its w om en. A final passage o f Lylian m oralizing reinvokes the “g en tlem en read e rs” and sum m arizes th e w ork as if it has only involved m asculine agents (as if it were en titled Rosader, n o t Rosalynde) : the n a rra to r speaks exclusively o f the lessons his tale offers co n ce rn in g the p ro p e r du ties an d re sp o n sibilities o f good sons an d v irtuous b ro th e rs (p. 256).
Yet if Rosalynde opens an d closes w ith patria rch al o rthodox ies, its indub itab ly chaste an d v irtuous w om en are hard ly rep re sen ted as si le n t fo r m ost o f its course. R osalynde’s in filtra tion o f the YMPA is only the m ost striking exam ple o f w om en practic ing poetry. Rosalynde b e fore h e r exile responds to the realization th a t she is in love with
R osader by com posing a m adrigal (a lthough this is never c ircu la ted o r delivered publicly), an d P hoebe coun ters M on tan u s’s am orous lyrics w ith a song ind ic ting the duplicities o f love (p. 230). Fem ale ch arac ters are also shown critiqu ing m ale tex tual practices: ju s t befo re she takes p a r t in the w ooing eclogue, Rosalynde lam bastes “these Ovidians
(ho ld ing Amo in th e ir tongues, w hen th e ir th o u g h ts com e a t hap- h a z a rd e )” w ho “onely have th e ir h u m ours in th e ir in ck p o t” (p. 208).
N onetheless, a lth o u g h Lodge rep resen ts Rosalynde as wittily capa ble o f dem ystifying th e conven tional postu rings o f the love poet, his 15. T he first ed ition o f the work simply offers the subtitle “Euphues golden legacie: found after his death in his Cell at Silexda, bequeathed to Philautus sonnes noursed up with their father in E ngland” (p. 158). T he second (1592) ed ition adds a prefatory
“sch ed u le” written by Euphues to Philautus; see Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed. Meritt Law- lis (New York, 1967), p. 287. 2 9 8 M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y h ero in e ends up em bracing the practices she appears to reject. She repeated ly an d enthusiastically solicits h e r own conven tional lyric cel eb ra tion : “Tell m ee w hat [your m istress’s] perfec tions bee,” she says to R osader, an d receives in re tu rn a form al blazon o f h e r body rep le te with all the usual com parisons (pp. 201-2). W hen she finally p a rtic i pates in the w ooing eclogue, she is rep re sen ted as succum bing to very fam iliar b land ishm ents. R osader exclaim s, “O h Rosalynde th en be th o u pitifull, / For Rosalynde is onely b eau tifu ll” (p. 211), b u t Rosalynde fears h e r lover may be begu iling h e r with “deep e dissem bled doub le- n esse” (p. 212). R osader insists th a t his desires are p u re an d un d e- ceitful (p. 212), R osalynde says, “I w ould resist, b u t yet I know n o t why” (p. 213), an d R osader, ad u m b ra tin g his P e tra rchan com plain ts with less elevated lyric stratagem s, invokes the o ldest line in the book: “O h Rosalynde, be k inde , fo r tim es will change, / Thy lookes aye nill be faire as now they be, / T h in e age from b eau tie may thy lookes es trange: / Ah yeelde in tim e, sweet N ym ph, an d p itie m e.” As soon as he u tte rs the carpe d iem a rgum en t, Rosalynde succum bs, recap itu la ting R osader’s favorite rhym e w ords (and thus cap itu lating , qu ite literally, on his te rm s): “O h Rosalynde, th o u m ust be p itifu ll / For Ro sader is young an d b eau tifu ll” (p. 213). H aving b een won over— w ithin the co n tex t o f the ec logue— by the carpe d iem persuasion , she p ro ceeds to re-c ite it to scorn fu l Phoebe: “Love w hile th o u a rt young, least th o u be d isdained w hen th o u a rt olde. B eautie n o r tim e can n o t b ee re c a ld e ” (p. 232). H er “k eep in g d e c o ru m ” in re p ro d u c in g fam il iar tro p es is ap p aren tly contag ious; w hen P h o eb e woos G an im ede with h e r own verses, she com poses a lyric beg inn ing “My boate d o th passe the straights / o f seas incenst with fire, / Filde with forgetful- nesse” (p. 240), w hich is a close ad ap ta tio n o f T hom as W yatt’s “My galley ch arg ed with fo rgetfu lness” (itself a version o f P e tra rch ’s Rime Sparse 189). In L o d g e’s A rden , w om en characters may ap p ear to e n te r the brave new w orld o f poetic in te rco u rse in articu la ting th e ir desires, b u t they are n o t exactly speaking a new language. II. F I G U R I N G T H E W O M A N P O E T S p en se r’s R osalind is a sign o f absence, the m arker o f m ale fru stra tion , the p re -tex t fo r the hom osocial po e try o f The Shepheardes Calender. L o d g e’s Rosalynde is a m ore com plica ted signifier, rep resen ting , on the one h an d , the revisionary possibility o f a resp o n d in g fem ale read er w ho gains access to a discourse usually reserved fo r m ale voices and , on the o th e r, n o t so m uch a speaking fem ale subject as a m ale im p erso n a to r p a rro tin g a p re-scribed language. T he co n trad ic tions in L o d g e’s narra tive p o sitio n in g o f his h e ro in e ap p e a r to o ffer a n o th e r version o f the d iscon tinu ities C atherine Belsey identifies in the situation o f all Clare R. Kinney o Feigning Female Paining 299 early m o d e rn w om en w ho w ere “only in co nsisten tly id en tified as su b je c ts in th e discourses ab o u t th em w hich c ircu la ted p redo m in an tly am ong m e n .” 16 M ore specifically, L odge seem s to be ech o in g (o r a n tic ipating) som e particu larly m ixed signals em anating from a co n tem po rary rh e to ric ia n ’s in te rm itte n t “figuring fo r th ” o f a fem ale subject w ho is also a poe t, in a tex t th a t (like L odge’s) sim ultaneously concedes an d lim its the possibility o f fem ale poesis, 17 G eorge P u tte n h a m ’s Arte o f English Poesie (1589) appears a t first glance to d e p a rt from the hum an ist co m m en ta to rs’ usual fo rm u la tion o f the p ro p e r re la tionsh ip o f ed u ca ted w om en to the m aking o f fic tio n s . 18 J u a n Luis Vives’s p o p u la r 1523 co n d u c t book, Institutione Foe- minae Christianae ( rep rin ted in nearly forty E u ropean ed itions in several vernaculars b efo re 1600 an d first tran sla ted in to English as The Instruc tion o f a Christian Woman a ro u n d 1529), offers a reasonably liberal ver sion o f the o rth o d o x position . Vives distinguishes betw een “the study o f w isdom ”— the read in g o f im proving works, w hich is to be e n c o u r aged as p ro m o tin g fem ale chastity an d a “g ood an d holy life”— an d th e study o f “e loquence ,” w hich he p ro n o u n ces unnecessary fo r an ed u ca ted wom an: “W hen she shall lea rn to write, le t n o t h e r exam ple be void verses n o r w an ton o r trifling songs, b u t som e sad sen tences p ru d e n t an d chaste, taken o u t o f holy Scrip ture , o r the sayings o f p h ilo so p h e rs .” N o r shou ld she “speak a b ro a d ” in m ixed com pany; h e r lea rn in g shou ld be for the ben efit o f h e rse lf an d h e r c h ild re n . 19
A lm ost no lyrics w ritten by English w om en in th e six teen th cen tu ry actually survive, an d they do n o t usually resem ble the k ind o f poetry
Rosalynde an d P hoebe (or th e ir lovers) are rep resen ted as com posing in Rosalynde.20 W hen M ary W roth ven tu res to pub lish h e r pastoral - chivalric rom ance Urania (1621), a p rose narrative frequen tly in te r ru p te d by fem ale lyric perfo rm ances w hich concludes w ith a so n n e t 16. C atherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama
(L ondon, 1985), pp. 1 4 9 -9 1 , passim; quotation from p. 160. 17. Lodge could have anticipated Puttenham , because, although Rosalynde was pub lished in 1590 (after The Arte of English Poesie), its preface claim s the work was com posed on the privateering voyage L odge m ade in 1 5 8 5 -8 7 with Captain Clarke to the Canaries and the Azores. 18. O n the cultural lim itations on w om en’s literary production in this period, see
Valerie Wayne, “Som e Sad Sentence; V ives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman” in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Marga ret Patterson Hannay (Kent, O hio , 1985), pp. 1 4 -2 9 , as well as H annay’s introduction
(pp. 1 -1 0 ). 19. T he quotations from Vives are taken from The Instruction of a Christian Woman in
Daughters, Wives and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500—
1640, ed. Joan Larsen Klein (Urbana, 111., 1992), pp. 1 0 1 -2 .
20. Ann Rosalind J o n es’s The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620
(B loom in gton , Ind., 1990) d iscusses the work o f on ly o n e six teen th -centu ry fem ale 300 M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y cycle w ritten in the p e rso n a o f a fem ale lover, Sir Edw ard D enny u pbra ids h e r fo r h e r “lascivious tales an d am orous toyes” an d instructs h e r to follow “the p ious exam ple o f your vertuous an d lea rn ed A unt [M ary Sidney, the C ountess o f Pem broke], who transla ted so m any goodly books an d especially the holly psalm es o f D avid .” 21 Public fe m ale u tte ran ce o f any k ind tends to be linked to unchastity .22 W om en w riters are strongly en co u rag ed to restric t th e ir efforts to the transla tion o f devotional (and m ale-au tho red ) works: fem ale-au th o red poetic co u n terfe itin g is co n stru ed as m orally p rob lem atic , feignings ab o u t fa in ing even m ore so . 23 B ut if prevailing cu ltu ra l a ttitudes in s ix teen th -cen tu ry E ng land re n d e r the n o tio n o f the w om an p o e t highly suspicious, the m ost pow erful w om an in the country , E lizabeth Tudor, was nevertheless know n to have w ritten p o e try — an d h ad au th o red , in d eed , in h e r com plain t “O n M onsieu r’s D epartu re ,” a P e tra rchan excep tion to the unw ritten ru le enco u rag in g Englishw om en to steer clear o f love lyric .24 P u tten - h a m ’s m an u a l n o t only addresses E lizabeth d irec tly an d rep ea ted ly as a poe t, b u t also in term itten tly raises the question o f w h eth er o th e r w om en— w om en who can n o t be so easily th o u g h t o f as princely spe cial cases— may also claim the subject position o f poetic m aker. M on tro se ’s in fluen tia l discussion o f P u tte n h a m ’s work has em phasized its p re o c c u p a tio n w ith th e arts o f g racefu l d issem bling an d its e rasu re o f “the putative d istinc tion betw een cou rtsh ip an d poetry, courtiers an d poets, life an d a r t .” 25 I am particu larly in te rested in the fact th a t P u tten h am does n o t im agine his courtly aud ience (o r students) as ex clusively m asculine: “O u r chiefe p u rpose h e re in is fo r the learn in g o f Ladies an d young G entlew om en, o r idle C ourtiers, desirous to beEnglish “love poet,” Isabella W hitney, author o f a quasi-Ovidian com plaint (see pp. 4 3 52). However, w om en were m ore active in writing and publish ing erotic lyrics in other E uropean countries, notably Italy. G ordon Braden discusses the spate o f Italian w om en ’s writing as well as som e particularly striking instances o f “heterosexual poetic in tercourse” betw een Pietro Bem bo and fem ale correspondents in “A pplied Pe- trarchism: T he Case o f Pietro Bem bo,” Modem Language Notes 57 (1996): 3 9 7 -4 2 3 . For a useful overview o f sixteenth-century E nglishw om en’s poetry, see Betty Travitsky, ed., The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance (New York, 1989). 21. Sir Edward D enny to Lady Mary Wroth, February 27, 1622, in The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Joseph ine A. Roberts (Baton R ouge, La., 1983), p. 239. 22. See Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: T he Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modem Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, M aureen Q uilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago, 1986), pp. 1 2 3 -4 2 , esp. pp. 12 6 -2 7 . 23. Com pare Wayne, p. 27. 24. See Leicester Bradner, ed., The Poems of Queen Elizabeth I (Providence, R.I., 1964), p. 5. 25. M ontrose, “O f G entlem en and Shepherds” (n. 10 above), p. 451. Clare R. Kinney o Feigning Female Faining 301 com e skilful in th e ir owne m o th e r tongue, an d fo r th e ir p riu a te rec re a tion to m ake now & th en ditties o f p leasure , th ink ing fo r o u r parte n o n e o th e r science so fit fo r th em Sc the place as th a t w hich teach e th beau semblant, th e ch ie f profession as well o f C ourting as o f p o esie .” 26
T h e ladies an d gen tlew om en are classed with the “idle co u rtie rs” as s tu d en ts o f beau semblant. R ecen t critics o f The Arte o f English Poesie have analyzed P u tte n h a m ’s suggestive g en d erin g o f the various tropes described in his catalogue o f poetic o rn a m e n t an d addressed the play o f g en d e r in the exem plary anecdo tes he em ploys th ro u g h o u t his trea tise .27 N o t very m uch has been m ade, however, o f P u tte n h a m ’s d ictions as L o d g e’s fictional rep resen ta tio n o f the lyric ob ject tu rn e d speaking subject. P u tten h am repeated ly addresses a fem ale aud ience , an d he no tes th a t it is partly fo r the ben efit o f this aud ience th a t he freely transla tes m any o f his techn ica l term s from G reek in to the ver n acu la r . 29 Yet a t the sam e tim e th a t he an tic ipates a m ixed aud ience , the a u th o r m anifestly expects his ladies to be less serious poets. H e recom m ends the relatively trivial p u rsu it o f the “posie tran sp o sed ”
(the m aking o f anagram s) as a particu larly “m eete study fo r Ladies” an d later, d u rin g a m ed ita tion on the po ten tia l m isuse o f poetical o rn am en t, com m ents th a t “every surplusage o r p reposte rous p lacing o r u n d u e ite ra tio n o r darke w ord, o r doub tfu ll speach are n o t so n a r rowly to be looked u p o n . . . in the p re tie Poesies an d deuices o f La dies an d G entlew om en m akers, w hom we w ould n o t have too precise
Poets least with th e ir shrew d wits, w hen they were m arried , they m igh t becom e a little too phantasticall w iues.” 30 P u tten h am n o t only assum es his ladies will c reate relatively unassum ing “p re tie Poesies” b u t also
26. Puttenham (n. 6 above), p. 132.
27. See, e.g., Rosemary Kegl, ‘“ T hose Terrible A proches’: Sexuality, Social Mobility, and Resisting the C ourtliness o f Puttenham ’s The Arte of English Poesie,” English Literary
Renaissance 20 (1990): 179-208; Jacques Lezra, “ ‘T he Lady Was a Litle Peruerse’: T he
‘G ender’ o f Persuasion in Puttenham ’s Arte of English Poesie,” in Engendering Men: The
Question of Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph B oone and M ichael Cadden (New York,
1990), pp. 5 3 -6 5 ; Jonathan G oldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modem Sexualities
(Stanford, Calif., 1992), pp. 2 9 -6 1 .
28. G oldberg notes in passing that Puttenham im agines his text being read by w om en who are also prospective poets (p. 60); Kegl discusses certain passages in which
Puttenham talks about E lizabeth-as-poet (pp. 180, 1 9 6 -9 8 ), but her main concern is with the political and social im plications o f Puttenham ’s use o f “riddling disclosure” as he rhetorically m anipulates the q u een ’s “two b od ies” in his text.
29. Puttenham , p. 132; for his addresses to a fem ale audience, see, e.g., pp. 82, 129,
141, 144.
30. Ibid., pp. 82, 208. 302 M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y suggests th a t th e re is som eth ing m utually exclusive ab o u t the roles o f “precise P o e t” a n d g o o d wife. We are o ffe red a m ore playful version o f Vives’ insistence th a t the study o f e loquence will in te rfe re with w om en’s p ro p e r duties. P u tten h am pred ictab ly changes his tactics w hen addressing his m ost im p o rta n t fem ale reader. His survey o f the achievem ents o f co n tem p o ra ry English m akers a t the en d o f book I o f the Arte concludes: “Last in recitall an d first in deg ree is the Q u een e ou re soveraigne Lady, whose lea rn ed , delicate, nob le M use, easily su rm o u n te th all the rest th a t h au e w ritten before h e r tim e o r since, fo r sence, sweetnesse an d subtillitie, be it in O de, E legie, Epigram o r any o th e r k inde o f po- em e H ero ick o r Lyricke .” 31 T he fla ttery is p re tty egregious: E lizabeth ’s ex tan t oeuvre (or the hypo thetical fu tu re p rod u c ts o f h e r pen ) will o u td o any th ing h e r subjects can p ro d u c e .32 P u tten h am pays his q ueen the m ore solid com p lim en t o f using h e r own poem “T he D oub t o f F u tu re Foes” as his exam ple o f “Exargesia o r the G orgious,” a trope w hich he describes as “the last an d p rincipall figure o f o u r poeticall O rn a m e n t . . . w hich figure beyng as his very orig inal nam e p u rp o rte th th e m ost bew tifull an d g o rg ious o f all o th e rs , it asketh in reason to be reserved fo r a last co m p lim en t an d d esc ip h ered by the arte o f a Ladies p en n e , h e r selfe beyng the m ost bewtifull, o r ra th e r bewtie o f Q u een es .” 33 B ut P u tte n h a m ’s praise is d o ub le edged: the en co m iu m ’s final change o f focus shifts the re a d e r’s a tten tio n from the beau ty o f E lizabeth ’s tro p e to the beau ty o f its a u th o r— an d thus from h e r sub je c t position as c rea to r o f such a figure to h e r re in scrip tion as a figured objec t o f m ale com plim ent. T he artfu l co m p lim en t to the q u een th a t unm akes h e r as a m aker is an tic ip a ted a t the very b eg in n in g o f The Arte o f English Poesie. In ch ap te r 1 o f book I, P u tten h am proffers his treatise to E lizabeth, m ean while insisting volubly th a t he has n o th in g to teach her: “Your selfe b e ing alread ie , o f anie th a t I know in o u r tim e, the m ost excellen t Poet. F orsooth by your Princely purse fauours an d co u n ten an ce , m ak ing in m an e r w hat ye list, th e p o o re m an rich , the lewd well learned , the cow ard couragious, an d vile b o th nob le an d valiant. T h en fo r imi31. Ibid., p. 51. 32. For a useful discussion o f Elizabeth’s poem s, see Susan Bassnett, Elizabeth I: A Fem inist Perspective (O xford, 1988), pp. 5 0 -5 1 , 5 6 -5 8 . It is difficult to assess how m uch o f E lizabeth’s small oeuvre Puttenham m ight actually have read. H e quotes two o f her poem s ( “T he D oubt o f Future Foes” and “O n F ortune”) in his treatise; he was also no doubt familiar with “Written With a D iam ond,” reproduced in John F oxe’s Actes and Monuments (London, 1563), p. 1714; and also in Raphael H olinshed, The Chronicles of En gland, Scotland, and Ireland (L ondon, 1587), p. 1158; see Bradner, ed. (n. 24 above), p. 71. 33. Puttenham (n. 6 above), p. 207. Clare R. Kinney o Feigning Female Faining 303 ta tion n o lesse, your perso n as a m ost cu n n in g co u n te rfa ito r liuely rep resen tin g V enus in co u n ten an ce , in life D iana, Pallas fo r g ouerne- m en t, an d Iu n o in all h o n o u r an d regall m agn ificence .” 34 E lizabeth as p o e t o r m aker h e re is n o t a lite rary c rea to r a t all. P u tten h am glosses h e r poesis first as the a rt o f the m o n arch who can “m ak e” a m an, and second as th a t o f the “co u n te rfa ito r” who does n o t so m uch (to b o r row Sidney’s term s) “figure fo r th ” a “speaking p ic tu re ” as em body the various goddesses to w hom she is lik en ed .35 W hile he is presum ably speak ing to E lizab e th ’s own w e ll-docum en ted an d pub lic co n stru c tio n o f a personal m ythology— a fea t o f self-fashioning w hich does have som eth ing in com m on with an act o f poetic “im ita tio n ”— it is
P u tten h am h im self w ho plays the p o e t h e re .36 H e has transla ted the ce leb ra tion o f the fem ale p o e t in to a m ore o rth o d o x scenario o f co u rt(ie r)sh ip , in w hich the m ale m aker “co u n terfe its” a beloved (o r a q u een ) w ho is as lovely as Venus, as chaste as D iana. O u r E lizabethan subject is transfo rm ing his q u een from a p o e t to a tex t .37 II I . R O S A L I N D ’ S P R O S E P O E S I S
P u tten h am locates E lizabeth w ithin his putatively non fic tional tex t as a know ing read er, a m aker in h e r own righ t, b u t he also redefines h e r creative pow ers in term s th a t m ake h e r the fiction o f the m ale artist. L o d g e’s revision o f S penser’s silenced R osalind relocates the beloved as a read e r an d co m m en ta to r w ithin his fiction b u t m akes h e r a speaker w ho solicits h e r own rep re se n ta tio n in th e m ale p o e t’s a r t an d only jo in s h im in poetic d ia logue on his term s. Shakespeare c re ates a th ird R osalind w hose response to h e r lover’s p oe tic trib u tes sets in m o tio n th e com plex feign ings th a t lie a t th e c e n te r o f As You
Like It. Is this R osalind allowed to be a poet? Is she p e rm itted a voice o f h e r own?
34. Ibid., p. 2.
35. In A Defence of Poetry, Sidney adds to his description o f mimesis “— to speak m eta phorically, a speaking p icture” ([n . 14 above], p. 25).
36. See Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (L ondon,
1975); Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (L ondon,
1977) ; Louis A. M ontrose, “T he Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” in Literary
Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Q uint (Baltim ore, 1986), pp. 3 0 3
40; Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (O xford, 1993). It is difficult to determ ine exactly how m uch agency we should im pute to Elizabeth as far as her public representation in Petrarchan (and other) terms is concerned . Frye, however, mar shals som e particularly persuasive evidence concerning Elizabeth’s w illingness to inter vene in — and even rewrite— the scripts o f the entertainm ents in which her noble subjects may have tried to fix her identity for their own purposes.
37. I here borrow M ontrose’s term inology in “T he Elizabethan Subject and the
Spenserian Text,” p. 331. 304 M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y In As You Like It, th e th ird an d last o f O r la n d o ’s poem s rec ited in th e play recalls P u tte n h a m ’s d o u b le -ed g ed co m p lim en t to E lizabe th ’s pow er o f co u n terfe itin g . W hile P u tte n h a m has th e Q u een rec rea te in h e r own p e rso n a variety o f goddesses, O rlan d o com poses a k ind o f b lazon in w hich R osalind possesses the n ob lest qualities o f sundry classical hero ines: “H e le n ’s cheek, b u t n o t h e r h eart, / C leo p a tra ’s m ajesty, / A ta lan ta’s b e tte r part, / Sad L u cre tia ’s m odesty .” 38 W hen R osader blazons L o d g e’s Rosalynde, it only m akes h e r hungry fo r m ore o f his oeuvre (p. 203); in As You Like It, by contrast, O rla n d o ’s fab rica tion o f an idealized R osalind o u t o f the fragm ents o f o th e r paragons m arks the p o in t w here P e tra rch an pastoral begins to be transla ted in to a qu ite d iffe ren t form . Rosalynde deligh ts in the poem s b u t fears th e ir sen tim ents may be feigned; R osalind carps a t the “feign ings” th e m selves. L o d g e’s Rosalynde usurps E. K.’s ro le as in fo rm ed co m m en ta to r on a new p o e t’s m akings; S hakespeare’s R osalind becom es E. K. with an attitude . C onventional lyric p erfo rm an ce in As You Like It is, o f course, sub v erted from the very m o m en t R osalind an d h e r com panions arrive in A rden . Shakespeare rep laces th e form al eclogue betw een C oridon an d M ontanus with a b rie f exchange betw een C orin an d Silvius, w hich starts in m edias res an d ends com ically an d self-reflexively: Silvius: . . . if thou has not sat as I do now Wearing thy hearer in thy mistress’ praise, Thou has not loved. Or if thou hast not broke from company Abruptly, as my passion now makes me, Thou hast not loved. O Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe! [Exit] (2 .4 .3 4 -4 0 ) In Rosalynde, M o n tan u s’s com plain ts are trea ted en tire ly sym patheti cally by his listeners (p. 189); in As You Like It, Silvius’s g roans are fu r th e r u n d e rc u t by T ouchstone’s com petitive an d com ic reco u n tin g o f his own w oeful cou rtsh ip o f Ja n e Smile (2 .4 .4 3 -5 2 ).39 T ouchstone’s transla tion o f Silvius’s woes in to a witty an d self-conscious prose p e r fo rm ance an tic ipates R osalind’s recasting o f O rla n d o ’s solo plain ts w ithin h e r own version o f ec lo g u e— the prose d ialogue p resided over by R osalind, d isguised as G anym ede, playing “R osalind.” 38. W illiam Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Alan Brissenden (O xford, 1993), 3 .2 .1 4 0 43. Subsequent citations o f the play are n oted parenthetically by act, scene, and line num bers. 39. See also Alpers (n. 1 above), p. 124. Clare R. Kinney o Feigning Female Paining 305 L o d g e’s Rosalynde gets to reply to h e r lover’s lyrics b u t observes d e corum , answ ering in an d on his own term s. She offers imitatio u n co m p lica ted by inventio. S hakespeare’s R osalind answers w ith a d ifference; she may co u n te rfe it m asculin ity in h e r dress, an d h e r disguise may free h e r speech in m ixed com pany, b u t she does n o t rep licate m ascu line poesis. To be sure, the d iffe ren t in flec tion o f h e r “fe ig n in g ” reflects th e fact th a t Shakespeare has significantly revised th e first e n c o u n te r betw een h e ro an d h e ro in e , an d R osalind does n o t actually n eed to in vade the space o f m ale p o e try dressed as a m an in o rd e r to m ake h e r desires know n. A fter L odge’s R osader triu m p h s in his w restling m atch,
R osalynde, ad m irin g b u t n o t yet lovestruck, privately sends th e v ictor a jew el. R osader dashes o ff a poem to h e r in reply— an d it is as she reads this th a t Rosalynde realizes h e r affections are engaged (pp. 1 7 2 -
75). T h e coup le have n o t yet spoken a w ord to each o ther. In As You
Like It, by contrast, R osalind, in a public space w ith Celia for a witness, p resen ts O rlan d o w ith the chain from h e r neck. O rlan d o is struck d u m b an d can only curse his b lockishness as she d ep a rts (1 .2 .233 -
35), b u t R osalind p re ten d s th a t “he calls us back” (1.2.236) an d tells the speechless h ero , “Sir, you have w restled well, an d overthrow n /
M ore th an your enem ies” (2 .1 .238-39). R osalind articu lates h e r desire m ore frankly th an alm ost any o th e r o f S hakespeare’s virgin h e ro in es in a first en c o u n te r with the m an she loves.40 (H er d irectness is eq u a led only by M iran d a’s in The Tempest— b u t M iranda, un like R osalind, has h ad n o co u rt ed u ca tio n in the p ro prie ties o f m aidenly m odesty.) L o d g e’s Rosalynde first speaks h e r love to R osader w hen she plays h e rse lf in the w ooing eclogue; R osalind does n o t speak from qu ite the sam e position w hen, as “R osalind,” she accepts O rla n d o ’s love in act 4. H e r w ords in act 1, scene 2 also m ake n o n sen se o f O r la n d o ’s d esc rip tio n o f h e r in his first p o em as “the fair, the chaste, an d unexpressive sh e” (3.2.10). E ditors have glossed “unexpressive” as “inexp ressib le”— incapab le o f be ing expressed— b u t the w ord (especially in its significant pa irin g w ith “ch aste”) also suggests “expressing n o th in g , silent.” O rlan d o is, a fter all, hang in g tongues on every tree , “exp ressing” R osalind all over th e forest in co n ventionally idealizing term s. T he lyrical p rod u c ts o f his otium are, however, otiose: R osalind does n o t n e e d to be figured fo rth as the Pe tra rch an cruel, chaste “hun tress” (3.2.4), because this D iana has a l ready m ade h e r affections know n to h e r lover. O rla n d o ’s poe try simply does n o t signify: his copia copies the usual form s w ithou t rep resen tin g the R osalind he has actually en co u n te re d an d whose w ords he has h eard . 40. W hen Ju liet frankly declares her love for R om eo at the beg in n ing o f Romeo and
Juliet 2.2, she does so at first believing that she is speaking in soliloquy. 306 M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y All this may he lp to explain why Shakespeare does n o t have this R osalind reply to h e r lover in his own kind. L o d g e’s h e ro in e jo in s the sheep-co terie poets o f A rden, b u t h e r nam esake responds to O rla n d o ’s artifice by co u n te rfe itin g w ith a d ifference. In Rosalynde, the w ooing eclogue ends w hen “R osalynde” p ledges h e r faith; after A linda-A liena in itia tes th e m ock w edding cerem ony betw een the pair, G anim ede has no m ore ex ten d ed p e rfo rm an ce as “Rosalynde.” Rosalynde m arks h e r su rre n d e r to R osader with the w ords “T h en Rosalynde will grace thee w ith h e r love. / T h en Rosalynde will have thee still in m in d ” (p. 213). T he co rresp o n d in g p o rtio n o f S hakespeare’s revisionary dialogue runs as follows: Rosalind: . . . ask me what you will, I will grant it. Orlando: Then love me, Rosalind. Rosalind: Yes, faith, will I, Fridays and Saturdays and all. Orlando: And wilt thou have me? Rosalind: Ay, and twenty such. Orlando: What sayst thou? Rosalind: Are you not good? Orlando: I hope so. Rosalind: Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing? (4 .1 .103-11) R osalind’s discourse p roceeds by subversive su pp lem en ta tion : h e r ad ditive constructions disconcertingly u n d erm in e conventional sen ti m ents (and sen tim en tality ). T he perverse logic o f h e r “Fridays and Saturdays an d a ll” (i.e., “I will love you even on fast days”), h e r “ay, an d twenty su ch ” (can one desire too m uch o f a good thing?) will n o t allow h e r w ooer to take any u tte ran ce a t face value; com m onplaces are destabilized in h e r m ou th . O rlan d o is never to becom e com placent; even w hen the pa ir are “m a rr ie d ” by C elia— the p o in t a t w hich L o d g e’s in te rlu d e en d s— m ore rem ains to be said: Rosalind: Now tell me how long you would have her after you have possessed her? Orlando: For ever and a day. Rosalind: Say a day without the ever. No, no, Orlando; men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. (4 .1 .130-36) As R osalind chastens O rla n d o ’s sen tim en ta l idealism , Shakespeare takes the o p p o rtu n ity to question a certa in doub leness w ithin L o d g e’s w ooing eclogue. In Rosalynde, R osader insists his tro th is p lig h ted for ever— “L et deep e despaire pu rsu e m e w ithou t rest / Ere Rosalynde my Clare R. Kinney o Feigning Female Paining 307 loyaltie d isp roove” (p. 213 )— while sim ultaneously telling his lady to seize the day because she will n o t always be beau tifu l an d desirable.
S hakespeare relegates the conven tional carpe d iem sen tim en t (“A nd the re fo re take the p re sen t tim e”) to the lyric tex t o f “It was a Lover an d his Lass” sung by two pages in a scene on the m argins o f the m ain ac tion (5.3.29). B ut R osalind’s prose wit offers h e r own spin on carpe d iem w hen, con testing the certa in ties o f rom an tic lyricism, she seizes
O rla n d o ’s “ever” an d reduces it to a day, before h in tin g th a t m en , as well as w om en, may learn w hat it is to be no lo n g er desirable.
R ecen t fem inist read ings o f R osalind’s feignings as “R osalind” have em phasized th a t she rehearses, w ith a d ifference, som e very fam iliar versions o f “the fem in ine .” Je a n H ow ard com m ents: “T he figure o f
R osalind d ressed as a boy engages in playful m asq u erad e as, in play ing R osalind fo r O rlan d o , she acts o u t th e p arts scrip ted fo r w om en by h e r cu ltu re . D oing so does n o t re lease R osalind from patriarchy , b u t reveals the co n stru c ted n a tu re o f p a tria rch y ’s rep resen ta tio n s o f the fem in ine an d shows a w om an m an ip u la tin g those rep resen ta tio n s in h e r own in terest, theatrica lizing fo r h e r own purposes w hat is as sum ed to be in n a te , teach ing h e r fu tu re m ate how to get beyond ce r tain ideologies o f g en d e r to m ore enab ling o n es .” 41 W hile I find this a rg u m en t persuasive, I th in k it im p o rtan t to add th a t R osalind n o t only subverts the p re-scribed fem ale roles by playing them tongue in ch eek — by p u ttin g them in quo ta tions, as it w ere— b u t also sup p le m ents h e r scrip ts .42 W h eth er she is ex p an d in g on the fates o f Troilus an d L ean d er to prove they d id n o t die fo r love (4 .1 .89-98) o r am plify ing ad absu rdum the catalogue o f caprices “R osalind” will en ac t as a m arried w om an (4 .1 .133 -43 ), she exercises h e r own creative pow ers .43
N o r am I convinced th a t R osalind’s a rt is didactic; a lth o u g h th e re has
41. Jean E. Howard, “Crossdressing, the Theatre and G ender Struggle in Early M od ern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 4 1 8 -4 0 , quotation from 435; also see Bar bara J. B ono on R osalind’s “double-voiced d iscourse” in “M ixed G ender, M ixed G enre in As You Like It,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History and Interpretation, ed.
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), p. 194.
42. Dusinberre makes this suggestion ([n . 1 above], p. 9) in the context o f a rather different exploration o f As You Like It's intertextuality. She seem s to forget, however, that Rosalind is a representation, a m ale rendering o f a fem ale artist.
43. Martha Ronk Lifson, in “Learning by Talking: Conversation in As You Like It,”
Shakespeare Survey 40 (1987): 9 1 -1 0 5 , discusses R osalind’s rhetorical skills in terms o f
Erasmian n otions o f inventio and copia (pp. 97 —98). I am wary o f realigning Rosalind with yet another “m asculine” d iscourse— that o f the hum anist rhetorician. H er copia is ultim ately m ore copious and idiosyncratic than the schoolbook rules w ould warrant.
For a useful discussion o f Erasmus’s De Copia in the Shakespearean context (which takes no note o f As You Like It, how ever), see M arion Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians
(Chapel H ill, N.C., 1982), pp. 4 3 -5 5 . 308 M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y been p len ty o f critical discussion o f h e r “ed u c a tio n ” o f O rlan d o , it is n o t clear th a t O rlan d o ever escapes certa in ideologies o f g e n d e r .44 O rlan d o rem ains co n stan t to his idealizing vision, e ith e r staunchly insisting th a t his lady is an excep tion to m isogynistic stereotypes w ith o u t in te rro g a tin g those stereotypes o r (when R osalind’s version o f “Ro salind” gets a little too troub ling) tak ing to his h ee ls .45 M arjorie G arber suggests th a t R osalind’s in ten tio n is to teach h e r lover to “speak to h e r in the n a tu ra l language o f m en and w om en .”46 O rlan d o , however, never really jo in s h e r in a d ia logue betw een equals— an d a lth o u g h I believe th a t R osalind im provises a language o f h e r own, I am n o t sure th a t this m etadiscursive tongue is the in stinctive o r “n a tu ra l” p ro p erty o f b o th m en an d w om en in the w orld o f As You Like It. In L o d g e’s rom ance, the cross-dressed Rosalynde answers h e r lover in his own lan g u ag e— the p oe try o f P etra rchan p asto ra l— as fluently as if she h ad a d o u b le t an d hose in h e r d isposi tion; she th e n recycles his d iscourse in h e r e n c o u n te r w ith P hoebe. As if to em phasize th a t his h e ro in e speaks h e r own language, Shakes p eare has R osalind e n c o u n te r P hoebe before she first plays “Rosal in d ”; in the “w ooing ec lo g u e” o f As You Like It, m oreover, O rlando , u n like R osader, never gets to set th e term s o f th e exchange. Inv ited to re sp o n d to the coun terfe itings o f R osalind-G anym ede-“R osalind,” O rlan d o can n o t m atch h e r inventions an d generally plays the stra igh t m a n .47 Rosalind piles fe ign ing on feign ing in o rd e r to b reak th ro u g h the language o f convention: disguised as a m an, p re ten d in g to be h e r self, she offers a h e ig h ten ed , supp lem en ted , an d self-subverting re p re sen ta tion o f a cu ltu ra l fiction, the capricious m istress, whose speeches (since they u tterly co n trad ic t the frank revelation o f h e r feelings to O rlan d o in 1.2 an d to Celia in 1.3) are necessarily acts o f dissem bling. T he ap p earan ce o f com plete spon taneity th a t characterizes h e r im provisations (m ost ev iden t in the casual inventiveness o f h e r subver sive “addings o n ”) m akes h e r a m istress o f w hat P u tten h am calls the “artificiall well d issem bled .” 48 She has d em o n stra ted th a t by the stan dards o f S h akespeare’s courtly co n tem p o raries she has the sine qua 44. See, e.g., Marjorie Garber, “T he Education o f O rlando,” in Comedy from Shakes peare to Sheridan, ed. A. R. Braunm uller and Jam es C. Bulm an (Newark, D el., 1986), pp. 102 12 . 45. O rlando hastily announces he m ust leave just after Rosalind has cheerfully in sisted that a wom an will be able to defend herself with her tongue even w hen discov ered in her neighbor’s bed (4 .1 .1 5 7 -6 2 ). 46. Garber, p. 106. 47. In 4.1, e.g., O rlando m anages only two quips o f his own: see line 66 (“I would kiss before I sp ok e”) and lines 1 5 2 -5 3 (“A man that had a wife with such a wit, he m ight say, ‘Wit, whither wilt?’ ”). 48. Puttenham (n. 6 above), p. 257. Clare R. Kinney o Feigning Female Paining 309 n o n o f a poe t, p roving in h e r own fash ion T ouchstone’s assertion th a t the “tru est poe try is the m ost fe ign ing .”49
R osalind’s a rt o f im provisation is a pastoral po e try in the sense th a t it only begins to flourish once she has m oved from the co u rt to the co un try an d can m an ipu la te the m ask o f the swain G anym ede; the witticisms she an d Celia exchange on the topo i o f F o rtune an d N atu re w hen we first m ee t them at co u rt have a dusty schoo lroom air ab o u t them (1 .2 .28 -59 ). I find it in teresting , th ere fo re , th a t once his m ain ch aracters are all in A rden , Shakespeare n o t only m akes it clear th a t
P e tra rch an O rlan d o can n o t engage in R osalind’s linguistic gam es as an equal b u t also gives his h e ro in e the last w ord in h e r bou ts o f wit w ith the play’s clever co u rt fool an d its sen ten tious co u rt m oralis t.50
O rlan d o , T ouchstone, an d Jaq u es are variously fam iliar with the arts o f e loquence th a t are p a r t an d parcel o f a g en tlem an ’s ed uca tion b u t th a t Vives dec la red unnecessary to an ed u ca ted w om an (even the n e g lected O rlan d o seem s to have fo u n d a copy o f the Arte o f English Poesie som ew here)— an d all o f them are ou tw itted by R osalind. T h ere is, however, one fo rest “ec lo g u e” in As You Like It th a t unfo lds as if b e tween equals: the brilliantly energetic an d inventive exchange betw een
Celia an d R osalind th a t follows C elia’s en tran ce carrying b o th O r la n d o ’s th ird poem an d the news th a t she has sighted its au th o r
(3 .2 .158-242). In this d ia logue Celia does n o t play the stra igh t w om an to R osalind’s wit; b o th speakers display an equal capacity to in te rru p t, to im provise, to e labora te , to take an idea an d p u n with it. T h e ir co n versation may be th o u g h t o f as a prose equivalen t to the T h eo c ritean /
V irgilian singing m atch often im ita ted by E lizabethan pastoralists (for exam ple, in S p en ser’s August eclogue o r in S idney’s d ialogue betw een
Thyrsis an d D orus in the revised Arcadia).51 In such contests, m ale speakers ostensibly im provise in p oe tic c o u n te rp o in t; in As You Like
It, Celia an d R osalind sh a rp en th e ir wits on o n e a n o th e r in a freer, less agonistic e n c o u n te r .52 In S h ak esp eare’s A rden , you do n o t ju s t g e t to jo in th e Young M en ’s Pastoral A ssociation; you can in au g u ra te a Young W om en’s Pastoral Association.
Shakespeare is qu ite happy to offer his aud ience fast m ale-fem ale b a n te r betw een witty equals— R osaline an d Berow ne, B eatrice and
49. See also Sidney’s celebration o f the art which hides art {A Defence of Poetry [n. 14 above], p. 72).
50. See, e.g., 3 .2 .108-18 ; 4 .1 .1 -2 2 .
51. See Sidney, The Countess of Penbroke’s Arcadia (n. 13 above), pp. 183-8 8 .
52. For a suggestive discussion o f the C elia/R osalind relationship, which makes som e in teresting d istinctions betw een its am iable battle o f wits and the undercurrents o f m ale rivalry in the play, see W illiam Kerrigan, “Fem ale Friends/Fraternal E nem ies in As
You Like It,” in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Valerie Finucci and R egina Schwarz (Princeton, N .J., 1994), pp. 1 8 4 -2 0 6 . 310 M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y B en ed ic t— in o th e r com edies. H is decision n o t to m ake anyone b u t Celia qu ite speak R osalind’s A rdenic lan g u ag e— an d to d istinguish so strongly R osalind’s prosaic “p o e try ” from O rla n d o ’s lyricism — sugges tively inflects As You Like It's re-vision o f L o d g e’s re-vision o f Spenser: if Lodge m oved us from the all-m ale c lubhouse o f the YMPA to a m ixed-sex p layground, Shakespeare seem s to have ad d ed a fem ale c lubhouse to th a t p lay g ro u n d . 53 ‘A d d ed ’ is the key w ord here: we shou ld recognize th a t the discursive practices o f R osalind an d Celia, un like those o f S p en se r’s swains, are n o t p red ica ted on th e silencing o r absence o f an O th e r— O rla n d o ’s u tte ran ces in A rden are, indeed , essential to As You Like I t’s la rger in te rro g a tio n o f the ero tic codes he has em braced . T he new clubhouse is, however, a som ew hat exclusive one: Shakespeare u ltim ately im poses som e lim its on the fem ale critique o f the solipsism o f the m ale P etrarchan-pasto ralist, an d these lim its seem to be d e te rm in ed by class. Ju s t before h e r own w ooing eclogue with O rlan d o , R osalind w it nesses an e n c o u n te r betw een P hoebe an d the lovesick Silvius in w hich P hoebe insists on dem ystifying Silvius’s conven tional plaints: “M ine eyes, / W hich I have d a rted a t thee , h u r t thee not; / N or I am sure th e re is n o force in eyes / T h a t can do h u r t” (3 .5 .2 4 -2 7 ). P h o e b e ’s o b jec tion an tic ipates the m o m en t w hen R osalind-G anym ede-“R osalind” dis misses O rla n d o ’s hyperbolic assertion th a t his lady’s frown m igh t kill h im (4.1.100). B ut R osalind has no pa tience w ith this o th e r w om an’s subversive com m entary on poetry-as-usual; m aking com m on cause with Silvius the lover ra th e r th an with P hoebe the w om an, she launches an assault on the scornfu l sheperdess th a t is significantly m ore aggressive th an the equivalen t speech in L o d g e’s ro m an ce .54 Shakespeare com i cally e labora tes on L o d g e’s p lo t (in w hich P h o e b e ’s d isdain is d irec ted at Love, n o t a t Silvius an d his poetry) by m aking his own P hoebe an avowed an ti-Petrarch ist. H e r com eu p p an ce is all the m ore strik ing b e cause she so com pletely em braces the u tte ran ces she h ad sco rned in Silvius. H e r su d d en passion fo r G anym ede is expressed in verses th a t praise the pow er o f his eyes an d claim th a t she will “study how to d ie ” if he rejects h e r (4 .3 .45 -64 ), an d she is p e rm itted n o n e o f R osalind’s hum o ro u s d istance on h e r own feelings. P hoebe is the only fem ale ch a rac te r in As You Like It to com pose a love lyric, an d she can only m anage to echo the sen tim ents Silvius voiced to her. R osalind, however, refuses even to concede h e r this capacity: 53. I am indebted to G ordon Braden for the gift o f this conceit. 54. Com pare Rosalynde (L odge [n. 4 above], p. 232). L od ge’s heroine is prepared to pay tribute to P h o e b e’s very real charms; Shakespeare’s den ies that they exist. Clare R. Kinney o Feigning Female Paining 311 I saw her hand. She has a leathern hand, A free-stone coloured hand. I verily did think That her old gloves were on; but ’twas her hands. She has a housewife’s hand— but that’s no matter. I say she never did invent this letter. This is a man’s invention, and his hand. (4.3.25-30)
R osalind is obviously d e ligh ting in h e r extravagant im p erso n a tio n o f a co nce ited swain, b u t h e r language is nevertheless suggestive. P h o eb e ’s actual h a n d an d h e r handw riting becom e conflated , an d the im age of the w o rk -roughened h a n d — w rinkled like an old glove and im plicitly con trasted w ith the w hite h a n d o f the c o u rtie r— invokes a conven tional in d ex o f class. In L o d g e’s rom ance, P hoebe is d ep ic ted as a delicate A rcadian beau ty an d a co m p e ten t versifier. W heth er Shakes p e a re ’s P hoebe is really to be im ag ined (and p re sen ted on stage) as a ru ra l d ru d g e is im m aterial; w hat is im p o rta n t is th a t R osalind co n structs h e r as one. Rosalind argues th a t the possessor o f such a “h a n d ” could n o t possibly be lite ra te an d th a t h e r poem is a “m an ’s inven tion .”
P hoebe e ith e r can n o t m ake poetry a t all o r is simply ventriloquizing the P e tra rch an com plain ts th a t Rosalind has already in te rro g a ted : the po e try she p ro d u ces as a resu lt o f h e r passion fo r G anym ede wins h e r no m ore rig h t to use h e r voice w ithin the discursive universe crea ted by R osalind th an d id h e r previous satirical anatom izing o f Silvius’s love poetry. R osalind insists on outclassing Phoebe. She has already o rd e re d the ow ner o f the supposed “housew ife’s h an d ,” “Sell w hen you can. You are n o t fo r all m arkets” (3.5.61). T h ere is no p re ten se h e re th a t the O th e r Tongue in w hich R osalind an d Celia converse can be shared by all w om en; the shepherdess is b lackballed from w hat shou ld m ore p roperly be en titled the Young G en tlew om en’s Pastoral
Association. IV. R E C O N T A I N I N G R O S A L I N D
The Shepheardes Calender, a lth o u g h its pasto ral eclogues officially re p resen t a “low ” form o f poetic m aking, is an artifact o f h igh cu ltu re in w hich a conscious artist self-deprecatingly p resen ts his creden tia ls to courtly readers (and po ten tia l pa trons) w ho are assum ed to be fam il iar w ith V irgilian pastoral an d m ore re c e n t E u ro p ean experim en ts in the m ode. S p en ser’s nego tia tions are prim arily w ith an edu ca ted m ale aud ience; even w hen h e com plim en ts E lizabeth I by reh earsin g the song in w hich Colin C lou t leaves off his p lain ts fo r R osalind to cele b ra te Eliza, Q u een o f S hepherds, he rep resen ts h e r as, on the one han d , a silen t cynosure and , on the o th e r, his in s tru m e n t— “Syrinx 312 M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y d a u g h te r w ithou t sp o tte ” (Aprill, line 50) is b o th the ob ject o f his song an d the reed p ipe on w hich he plays. R osalind is figured as an ab sence, the u n q u o te d critic o f C o lin ’s pastoral w ho is ritually dism issed at th e close o f the December eclogue. L o d g e’s Rosalynde recasts certa in e lem ents o f The Shepheardes Calender w ithin a prose rom ance with lyric in te rludes, an d in so d o ing its a u th o r em braces a m ore p o p u la r lite r ary kind. (D isapproving early m o d ern com m entators, incidentally, reg ularly single o u t rom ances as b e ing the favorite un im prov ing read in g m ateria l o f lite ra te w om en . ) 55 L o d g e’s w ork opens u p the solipsistic lyricism o f the m ale P etrarchan -pasto ra list to the possibilities o f h e t erosexual pasto ral in te rcou rse , a lth o u g h the poetic voice he gives his Rosalynde is u ltim ately a lim ited one. S h akespeare’s adap ta tio n o f Rosalynde rep resen ts a fu r th e r d e p a rtu re from the priv ileged literary m odels o f E lizabethan h igh c u ltu re — a stage play th a t is accessible, in p erfo rm an ce, to the u n le tte re d o f b o th sexes. Given As You Like I f s fu r th e r transfo rm ation o f the speaking R osalind in to a figure who re sponds to h e r own lyric ce leb ra tion by way o f a poesis th a t d ifferen tia tes itself strikingly from h e r lover’s conventional lyricism, it is tem pting to claim th a t the m ore p o p u la r the gen re in w hich Rosalind-the-B eloved is inscribed , the m ore likely it is to figure h e r as an in d e p e n d e n t m a n ip u la to r o f artfu l language. Yet the suggestive m ap p in g o f class d ifference on the varying d e grees o f u n in h ib ited expression pe rm itted gentlew om en and sh ep h e rd esses in As You Like It m ust necessarily com plicate this assum ption .56 If Rosalind herse lf silences a lesser cynosure w ho talks back (an action th a t suggests th a t fo r her, as fo r P u tten h am , the responsive fem ale re a d e r m ust by defin ition be a c o u rtie r) , the play th a t con ta ins Rosa lind also circum scribes h e r revisionary m akings an d displaces them at the last with o th e r, m ore fam iliar discourses. S hakespeare’s rep re sen ta tion o f a fem ale m aker is eventually re in se rted in a p a tria rch al o rd e r w here h e r reco n ta in m en t is m arked , significantly en o u g h , by the re tu rn o f “m ale” lyric. 55. O n sixteenth-century attitudes toward rom ance and toward w om en as readers o f rom ance, see Tina Krontiris, “Breaking Barriers o f G enre and Gender: Margaret Tyler’s Translation o f The Mirour of Knighthood” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 1 9 -3 9 , esp. 2 1 -2 2 . 56. Judging from the adm ittedly som ewhat incom plete records o f Rosalynde and As You Like Ifs reception, early m odern audiences seem to have been m ore enthusiastic about the lim ited heterosexual pastoral intercourse offered by the form er than the revi sionism o f the latter. Rosalynde saw eleven ed itions betw een 1590 and 1642; there is no known evidence o f any seventeenth-century production o f As You Like It, and its subse quent popularity in the repertoire only begins with its first docum ented production in an unadulterated text in 1740. For the early stage history o f As You Like It, see the intro duction in Brissenden, ed. (n. 38 above), pp. 5 0 -5 3 . Clare R. Kinney o Feigning Female Paining 313
W hen R osalind faints a t the sight o f h e r lover’s b lood on the napk in carried to h e r by O liver, h e r h ea rtfe lt response shatters the a rt th a t conceals a r t . 57 A ttem pting to co u n te r O liver’s surprise a t the collapse o f G anym ede, R osalind insists th a t she was acting in ch a rac ter as
“R osalind”: “I pray you, tell your b ro th e r how well I co u n te rfe ited ”
(5.1.169). (N ot m uch sprezzatura he re .) Shortly after she draws a tte n tion to the fact th a t she is playing a part, h e r feignings e n d — she h e r self calls a h a lt to the “idle ta lk ing” w ith w hich she will “w eary”
O rlan d o no m ore (5.2.49). (We m igh t also no te th a t Celia, h e r best in te rlo cu to r an d aud ito r, has n o th in g m ore to say fo r h e rse lf after h e r own e n c o u n te r w ith O liver, h e r destin ed spouse.) R osalind may co n tin u e to p lo t, b u t the p lo t she organizes is one th a t will perfo rce sub sum e the h e ro in e w ithin the iden tity o f h e r husb an d an d silence h e r voice .58 She has relatively few lines in the play’s last scene, an d as soon as she exits to resum e h e r p ro p e r identity , T ouchstone assum es cen te r stage an d delivers his set p iece on the p ro toco l o f the duel. T he fool invokes (albeit comically) the g en d e red cu ltu ra l codes th a t conflate w ords w ith swords: wit, it seem s, has b een reap p ro p ria ted as a m ascu line w eapon.
W hen R osalind re -en te rs in h e r p ro p e r identity , she is p re sen ted to h e r fa th e r by the m ysterious figure o f H ym en; w hen the la tte r sings th a t “from heaven [he] b ro u g h t h e r ” (5.4.107), she is transla ted back in to the “heavenly R osalind” o f O rla n d o ’s courtly hyperbole (1.2.276).
H ym en has en te re d from n o w h ere— or ra th e r, from a d iffe ren t lite r ary universe, th a t o f the co u rt m asque. R osalind’s fem ale, prosaic, sub versive version o f pasto ral is rep laced by the form al lyricism o f the “god o f every tow n” who now speaks fo r h e r, giving h e r away even b e fore she does so h e rse lf (5.4.141). We m igh t recall a t this p o in t that, a lth o u g h aristocratic w om en partic ip a ted in co u rt m asques, fem ale speaking characters w ere im p erso n a ted by professional boy actors: la dies d id n o t assum e speaking p a rts .59 In act 3, R osalind h ad arrested
O rla n d o ’s lyric p ro d u c tio n s an d inv ited h im to p artic ipa te in a m in ia tu re d ram a on h e r own term s; h e re she is re -in serted w ithin various m ale, courtly discourses an d resto red to the position o f cynosure— “If
57. Alpers notes that, after the swoon, Rosalind “can n ot sucessfully feign that her body’s expression o f faining was m ere fe ig n in g ” ([n . 1 above], p. 127).
58. For a suggestive discussion o f the “con ta inm en t” o f Rosalind, see Louis A. M on trose, “ ‘T he Place o f a Brother’ in As You Like I t: Social Process and Com ic Form,”
Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981): 2 8 -5 4 , esp. 5 1 -5 2 .
59. O n the circum scribed role o f the noble fem ale participant in the court m asque, see, e.g., H eather L. W eidem ann, “Theatricality and Female Identity in W roth’s Urania,” in Reading M ary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modem England, ed. N aom i J.
M iller and Gary Waller (K noxville, Tenn., 1991), pp. 191 -2 0 9 , esp. pp. 1 9 4 -9 9 . 314 M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y th e re be tru th in sight, you are my R osalind,” says h e r lover (5.4.114; my em phasis). M arriage, g en d e red m ale in the perso n o f H ym en, has p u t R osalind in h e r socially p ro p e r place; a fter H ym en gives h e r to h e r fa ther, R osalind speaks only once m ore in the m ain action, saying first to the D uke an d th en to O rlan d o , “To you I give m yself for I am yours” (5 .4 .111-12). T h ere still rem ains the prose epilogue, w hich is p refixed by the ch a r ac ter nam e “R osalind” b u t w hich m akes explicit re fe ren ce to the fact th a t its sp eak er is a boy actor. D oes th e su rfac ing o f th e m ale player in the w ords “If I were a w om an” (Epil., lines 16-17) com plete th e re c o n ta in m e n t o f R osalind, u n d e rlin in g th e fact th a t “h e r ” act is in fact scrip ted by o n e m ale an d en ac ted by an o th e r? P e te r E rickson argues th a t w hen th e speaker, so liciting app lause fo r th e au th o r, says, “My way is to co n ju re you,” we are h e a rin g “S hakespeare u s[in g ] his a r t to take away R o sa lin d ’s fem ale id e n tity ” an d u n d e rc u t h e r own claim s to a m ag ician’s pow er (5 .2 .6 7 -6 8 ).60 O th e r critics have insisted th a t the shifting identity o f the “I ” rep resen ted here (Rosalind? G anym ede? T he actor? Shakespeare?) may be co n stru ed as a ce leb ra tion o f p lurality an d a co n tin u in g in te rro g a tio n o f socially co n stru c ted g en d e red id e n tities .61 It is in any case certa in th a t the constructedness o f R osalind- th e -ch arac te r is m ade explicit here ; the illusion th a t we have w atched a w om an o rch estra tin g the play o f m ean in g in the d ram a (ra th e r than a m ale a c to r’s rep resen ta tio n o f a m ale a u th o r’s rep resen ta tio n o f a w om an artis t a t play) is sh a tte red . N evertheless, th e m ore con v en tiona l endgam es o f th e p reced in g an d ostensibly final scene o f As You Like It are teasingly su p p lem en ted by the final instructions th a t “Rosa lin d ” gives to the aud ience “I charge you, O w om en, fo r the love you b ear to m en , to like as m uch o f the play as please you. A nd I charge you O m en, fo r the love you b ea r to w om en . . . th a t betw een you an d the w om en the play may p lease” (Epil., lines 1 1 -1 6 ). C om m enta to rs have te n d e d to focus on the second h a lf o f the directive: Phyllis Rackin no tes th a t the p u n on “play” h in ts a t “a sexual transaction betw een the m en an d w om en in S hakespeare’s aud ience ,” w hich is m ade analogous to the p leasure affo rded by the staged ac tio n — one th a t does n o t slight the exp erien ce o r suppress the subject position o f e ith e r sex . 62 I am m ore in te rested , however, in the possibilities o p en ed up by the asym60. Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama (Berkeley and Los A n geles, 1985), p. 35. 61. See, e.g., Phyllis Rackin, “Androgyny, M imesis and the Marriage o f the Boy H ero ine on the English R enaissance Stage,” PMLA 102 (1987): 2 9 -4 1 , 36; Howard (n. 41 above), p. 435; and Valerie Traub, “Desire and the D ifference It Makes,” in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), pp. 8 1 -1 1 4 , esp. 104. 62. Rackin, p. 36. Clare R. Kinney o Feigning Female Paining 315 m etry o f the sp eak er’s com m ands. It is the w om en alone w hom “Rosa lin d ” invites to “like as m uch o f the play as please y o u ”; they may selectively ap p lau d (as they like it) w hat they have ju s t seen. T hey are free, fo r exam ple, to p re fe r the a u th o r ’s rep resen ta tio n s o f R osalind an d C elia’s wit over his rep resen ta tio n s o f T ouchstone an d Ja q u e s ’s— o r to value the m arriage th a t R osalind o rchestra tes fo r h e rse lf in the scene w here O rlan d o woos R osalind-G anym ede-“R osalind” (4 .1 .119-
26) m ore th an H ym en’s paternalistic closing ce rem o n ies .63 T he fem ale aud ience o f As You Like It can “au th o rize” its own play tex t—ju s t as
Rosalind, the aud ience o f O rla n d o ’s verses, took it on h e rse lf to re w rite his P e trarchan -pasto ra list scrip t an d inven t h e r own love play. I w ould argue, th en , th a t the adm itted ly slippery discourse o f the ep ilogue does n o t absolutely foreclose the possibility o f fem ale poesis.
W hat is m ore, this final ap p ea ran ce o f S hakespeare’s Rosalind seem s to offer a last revisionary glance (this tim e u n m ed ia ted by Lodge) a t the tex t th a t figured an d silenced the first R osalind. T h e December eclogue o f The Shepheardes Calender concludes w ith C olin C lout saying,
“A dieu good H obbino l, th a t was so true , / Tell R osalind, h e r C olin bids h e r a d ie u ” {December, lines 155 -56 ). C olin bids farewell to love by way o f a priv ileged m ale frien d an d aud ito r, w ho has in d eed re p re sen ted h im self as a m ore faith fu l an d deserv ing lover th an R osalind
(see Aprill, lines 1 0 -1 1 ). R osalind is n o t even addressed directly. In As
You Like It, how ever, it is R osalind h e rse lf o r a t least h e r advocate w ho gets th e last w ord. W here the m ale p o e t dism issed the refrac to ry o b je c t o f his verse, the speaker o f S hakespeare’s ep ilogue, having invited the w om en in the aud ience to do exactly w hat they wish w ith the play th a t rep resen ts R osalind an d all h e r works, asserts R osalind’s rig h t to d istribu te h e r favors w herever she pleases: “If I were a w om an I w ould kiss as m any o f you as h ad beards th a t p leased m e, com plexions th a t liked m e, an d b rea th s th a t I defied no t. A nd I am sure, as m any as have good beards, o r good faces, o r sweet b rea ths, will fo r my k ind offer, w hen I m ake my curtsy, b id m e farew ell” (Epil., lines 1 6 -19 ).
M uch v irtue in If. In a thorough ly o ffh an d an d lig h th ea rted m an n er, the scrip t p rov ided for the boy acto r reinvokes the possibility o f fem ale agency. In an equally o ffh an d an d lig h th ea rted m an n er, this “Rosa lin d ” (whose last w ords arguably echo an d reverse the pow er dynam ic voiced in the final m om ents o f S p en ser’s December) takes charge o f the circum stances u n d e r w hich the aud ience o f As You Like It are to b id h e r adieu.
63. O n the preem ptive “w ed d in g” o f 4.1 and the significance o f R osalind’s “giving h e r se lf” in 5.4, see Susanne L. W offord, ‘“ To You I Give Myself, For I am Yours’: Erotic
Perform ance and Theatrical Performatives in As You Like I t in Shakespeare Reread, ed.
Russ M cD onald (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), pp. 147-5 9 . [12] “A Note Beyond Your Reach” Prose Romance’s Rivalry with Elizabethan Drama Steve Mentz Come foorth you witts that vaunt the pompe of speach, And striue to thunder from a Stage-mans throate: View Menaphon a note beyond your reach; Whose sight will make your drumming descant doate: Players auant, you know not to delight, Welcome sweete Shepheard; worth a Schollers sight. Thomas Brabine, Prefatory verses to Menaphon (Greene, Works 6:31)
I begin w ith the suggestion th a t we love Shakespeare too m uch. Early m odern literary criticism ’s longstanding institu tional and pedagogical affiliations w ith E lizabethan d ram a have led us to d is to rt and m isread the re lationship betw een dram a and prose fiction in this period , especially in the hybrid genre of rom ance. If, as D ouglas Bruster has argued , “Shake speare . . . is the center from w hich countless studies of early m odern tex ts and phenom ena take th e ir being” (186), one consequence of this d ram a-centered critical h isto ry is a long trad ition th a t separates the th e a ter from prose rom ance and o th e r p roducts o f the p rin ting p ress .1 N ow th a t scholarship is tak ing p rose fiction and p rin t cu ltu re m ore seriously, it should reconsider the dynam ic overlap betw een these m odes of literary p resen ta tio n .2 The separa tion o f d ram atic and prose rom ance, and the triv ia liza tion of the la tte r as m ere “sources,” m isreads bo th genres: we oversim plify o r ignore n arra tive rom ance, and idealize and overgeneral ize d ram atic tragicom edy. R ecovering the cu ltu ra l am bition of E lizabe th an w riters like R obert G reene, T hom as Lodge, an d T hom as N ashe can help correct these failings by recognizing in the p rin t publication of their prose works a considered challenge to d ram a (including their ow n dram a). As T hom as B rabine’s celebratory poem to G reene’s p o p u lar rom ance M enaphon (-1589) announces, the scholarly and literary excellence of these texts in tended to sham e “thunder[ing]” p layw rights and expose their dependence on mere players. A gainst these “drum m ing 76 Steve Mentz descants,” p rin ted prose rom ance positioned itself as an elite academ ic pursu it, “w o rth a Schollers sigh t.” M any w riters of E lizabethan prose rom ance, especially those who were also playw rights, treated this m ode of literary expression as distinct from and superior to dram a. M ost of these w riters defined this superiority in terms fam iliar from their hum anist educations (see Kinney). W riting for the press, not the stage, carried classical authority and critical bite. W orks of fiction and critical com m ents about fiction by Greene, Nashe, Lodge, and others articulate a running debate between the printed book and the theater in late sixteenth-century England. Self-consciously major works of E lizabethan,prose rom ance like M enapbon and Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590) carefully contrasted their output w ith the public stage. These books were very successful Elizabethan m edia events— M enapbon and Rosalynde each went through nine editions before 1640— and they presented themselves as a definable “b rand” of hum anist fiction in response to (and perhaps respite from) the stage .3 The argum ent for the printed page against the stage emerged as a strand of the so-called antitheatrical polem ic th a t saw defenders of literary culture like Sidney and Lodge engage detractors like Gosson and Stubbes. Defend ing “poetry ,” however, w as not always the same as defending dram a— even if in some cases (including Lodge’s) they overlapped. Attackers and defenders of the theater often shared a m utual veneration of classical learn ing and university scholarship. W riters like Lodge, Greene, and Nashe defined themselves as university hum anists who preferred elite to popular venues. (The traditional category “University W its” seems broadly appli cable, but th a t term and its critics seldom emphasized the tension between stage and page.) Greene proudly em phasized his academic pedigree on the multiple-title pages tha t proclaim ed him “Utriusque Academia in Artibus M agister.”4 H is colleague and one-tim e protege Nashe provides in his quasi- critical w orks the fullest and m ost complex articulation of the relationship between hum anist literary production , the m arket for printed books, and the less elite venue of the stage. N ashe’s view of p rin t culture was more complex th an Greene’s, but like Greene he disdained the theater even while w riting for it. In his first appearance in prin t, a long prefatory epistle to M enapbon , N ashe mocks then-current dram atic practices and praises by contrast the intellectual com m unity of his alma m ater, St. Jo h n ’s College. Despite his appreciation for Shakespeare’s H enry V I plays (which, perhaps, he in part wrote) and the acting of N ed Allen, N ashe’s career-long defense of the prin ted book consistently defended prin t culture against the public stage (see M entz, “Day L abor” ). N ashe may have draw n this point from Greene, and his works along w ith texts like Greene’s U pstart Crow letter (G roatsworth 8 0 -8 7 ) articulate a late E lizabethan attack on the stage too often obscured by our dram a-centered scholarly bias. In addition to recovering this sense of the page’s perceived superiority to the stage, this chapter will dem onstrate the value for m odern criticism of “A Note Beyond Your Reach ” 77 reconsidering prose rom ance by exploring those elements of Lodge’s Rosa lynde , one of the m ost popular prose narratives of the era, that Shakespeare did not use when he dram atized Lodge’s tale in A s You L ike It (1599).
Critical treatm ents tha t value Shakespeare’s transform ation of Lodge have long dom inated this in tertex tual relationship, but I suggest that a more evenhanded treatm ent can find new m eaning in the elements of Lodge’s rom ance that were not immediately translatable to the stage. Shakespeare downplayed tw o significant figures in Lodge’s narrative, the humble ser vant Adam Spencer and the evil brother Saladyne. Together these figures present a microcosm of prose fiction’s cultural project in late E lizabethan
England. By substantially replacing these figures w ith theatrical standards—
Touchstone the clown an d melancholy Jaques— A s You L ike It responds obliquely to the pro-prin t antitheatricalism of Lodge and Greene. W hile it seems quixotic to argue against Shakespearean dram a even in a critical climate more sym pathetic to p rin t than it has been for decades, reconsid ering these strains w ithin the R osa lynde-A s You L ike It relationship can clarify how narrative forms like rom ance were reconfigured through rival literary media.
DEFENDING POETRY A N D ATTACKING TH E STAGE
W hen writers of prose fiction entered the debate on stage plays, they d istin guished their authorial project th rough two m ain features: classical sanc tion and 'critica l attitude. The ideal author used his classical tra in ing to expose vice and produce v irtuous behavior. The m ost fam iliar statem ent of this activist program appears in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence o f Poetry , which celebrates poetry as an uarchitektonike . . . knowledge of a m an’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, w ith the end of well-doing and not of well-knowing only” (219). W hile the a rt Sidney celebrates w as a m anuscript practice, not a feature of p rin t culture, his celebration of the active qualities of literary discourse— “to bestow a Cyrus upon the w orld to m ake m any Cyruses” (217)— emphasizes its critical and creative functions .5
This version of literary culture m ade things happen in the world, rather than simply representing them on stage. Sidney’s hostility tow ard “mongrel tragi-com edy” (244), his copious classical citations, and his singling out of authors of classical prose fiction like Xenophon and H eliodorus (216-17) all connect the Defence w ith the strain of antitheatrical discourse tha t dis tinguished hum anist prose fiction from dram a. Unlike Greene, N ashe, and
Lodge, Sidney did not exploit popu lar print, but his civic-minded hum an ism shared key features w ith their attem pts to define prose rom ance as its ow n literary discourse .6
A nother defense of hum anist fiction appears in Thom as Lodge’s
D efence o f Poetry, M usic , and Stage Plays (1579), which like Sidney’s trac t replies to Stephen G osson’s School o f Abuse (1579). (Sidney’s pam phlet, 78 Steve Mentz published in tw o posthum ous editions in 1595 under the com peting titles The D efence o f Poesie and A n Apologie for Poetrie, was probably w ritten a few years after Lodge’s. Both Sidney and Lodge w rote in response to G osson’s pam phlet, which was dedicated to Sidney.) Lodge defends liter ary culture against G osson’s attack on the public theater by emphasizing classical content: “Seneca, thoughe a stoike, would haue a poeticall sonne, and, am ongst the auncientest, H om er was no les accompted then H um anus deus” (“Defence of Poetry” 64). G osson’s error, according to Lodge, is fundam entally interpretive: “you are hom o literatus, a m an of the letter, little sauoring of learning” (65). The point is not th a t Gosson is too literary, but th a t he has forgotten the hum anist reading practices he should rem em ber from university: “But you haue dronke perhaps of Lethe; your gram er learning is ou t of your head; you forget your Accidence; you rem em ber not that under the person of Aeneas in Virgil the practice of a dilligent captain is described” (65). Reading for the letter rather th an the spirit, Gosson has forgotten all he has been taught, and Lodge imagines his conflation of poetry w ith the stage as the despair of Gosson’s form er teachers: But our studientes by your m eanes haue made shipw rack of theyr la bors . . . the universitie is litle beholding to you,— al their practices in teaching are friuolous. . . . N o meruel though you disprayse poetrye, w hen you do not know w hat it meanes. (6 6 ) By describing G osson’s failure as an error of consum ption, not production, Lodge salvages a poetry tha t can appeal to better readers. T he second stage of L odge’s defense (which Sidney echoes in his Defence) suggests th a t w hile G osson’s poor reading habits can m ar any literary p ro d u ct, a properly critical w riting practice can forestall such m isguided in terp re ta tions. Lodge asks not only th a t p layw rights and poets be sufficiently classical, but th a t they also be critical and use their w riting to ro o t out fu rther abuses. Sounding very m uch like G osson him self (who includes his ow n plays in the list of those he condem ns), Lodge claims to “w ish as zealously as the best th a t all abuse of playinge w eare abolished; bu t for the th ing, the an tiqu itie causeth me to allow it, so it be used as it should be” (84). The pow er of classical au tho rity leads Lodge to celebrate the m odels of Roscius and Terence, but his real desire (which would bear dram atic fru it in the topical satire he cow rote w ith Greene, A L o o k in g G lasse for L o n d o n an d E ng land , 1586?) was for a public literature th a t w ould a ttack social vice: “If our poetes will nowe becom e seuere, and for prophane th ings w rite of v irtue, you I hope shoulde see a reform ed sta te in those th inges” (83). The critical a ttitu d e th a t Lodge recom m ends caused scandals w hen it reached the public stage in plays like the now lost Isle o f D ogs and o ther city com edies, but the hectoring style he favors had an E lizabethan precedent in the invectives of G reene, N ashe, and his ow n A larum against Usurers (1584). A lthough Lodge “A Note Beyond Your Reach ” 79 defends the stage against G osson, he advocates a kind of w riting th a t
E lizabethan literary cu ltu re saw m ostly on the prin ted page.
T H E CASE OF TH E UPSTART CROW
To recover this strain of literary culture that valued a classically sanctioned and critically active prose discourse over the hybridized public stage requires re turn ing to tw o fam iliar texts in the history of E lizabethan dram a: N ashe’s preface to M enapbon (1589), and Greene’s deathbed letter to his fellow dram atists, including Shakespeare (1592). These texts have been repeatedly cited as announcing the arrival of W illiam Shakespeare— N ashes preface cryptically dismisses then-current plays as “whole H am lets,” and G reene’s letter attacks a “Shake-scene” w ho has lately emerged in literary L ondon— but they speak more directly to the rivalry between different modes of liter ary culture than to the fam iliar narrative of the m aster’s debut (Nashe 3:315;
Greene, G roatsw orth 85). N ashe’s preface, w ritten by an as-yet-unknow n student just down from Cam bridge, defiantly announces prose rom ance’s challenge to dram a. Greene’s letter (perhaps ghostw ritten , certainly edited, by H enry Chettle) ends his career by rearticulating the distinction between page and stage and reasserting the superiority of the form er .7 In both cases these authors extend Lodge’s claims for the hum anist page: its classical her itage merits praise, and its critical bite attacks inferior forms and improves the social order in the process.
N ashe’s preface addresses itself “To the Gentlem en Students of Both
Universities” (311), but his polem ical style splits London’s literary culture into opposed camps. He attacks playwrights in general, particularly those w ho practice a style of dram atic oratory tha t many critics have linked to
M arlowe: But heerein I cannot so fully bequeath them to folly, as their ideot Art- m asters, that intrude themselues to our eares as the Alcumists of elo quence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) th ink .to out-braue better pennes w ith the swelling bom bast of bragging blanke verse. (311)
Like the rem arks in Brabine’s prefatory poem about “the pom pe of speech” and “drum m ing descant,” N ashe’s critique assails the perform ative aspects of dram atic rhetoric. W hat N ashe calls the “undiscerning iudgm ent” (314) of some writers makes their w orks undeserving. Rejecting “this kind of men th a t repose eternitie in the m outh of a Player” (312), Nashe implies tha t real poetic discourse has better vehicles through which it can speak .8 The problem is less a lack of learning on these (mostly unnam ed) au thors’ parts th an their m isapplication of learning. The style N ashe attacks is a threadbare hum anism of insufficient education and false classicism: 80 Steve Mentz It is a com m on practise now a dayes to u m n e through euery A rt and thriue by none, to leaue the trade of N o u erin t [scrivening], w hereto they were borne, and busie themselues w ith the indeuovors of A rt, tha t could scarcely Latinize their neck verse if they should haue need. (315) Such w riters produce bom bastic and derivative poetry, mere “English Sen eca read by C an d le ligh t. . . [with] m any good sentences, as B lood is a beg gar, and so fo rth ” (315). (Excessive alliteration draws the fire of both Nashe and Brabine [“drum m ing descant”], and it may be taken as an auditory symbol of stiff, pedantic verse, w hat C. S. Lewis famously term ed “drab poetry” 222-71 .) The problem w ith these w riters, says Nashe, is th a t they fail to appreciate the need for new poetry in m odern English. He repeatedly condem ns a too slavish form of translation in the writers he calls “our Eng lish Italians” (322) and “our triuiall transla to rs” (315). His m ost m em ora ble quotation in this vein comes from S tanyhurst’s oft-mocked translation of The A eneid (1582), w hich attem pts to replicate Virgil’s storm: “Then did he make heauens vault to rebound, / w ith rounce robble hobble / O f ruffe raffe roaring, / w ith thwick thwacke thurlerie bouncing” (320).9 Poetry like this is not simply incom petent; in N ashe’s view it trivializes the im pera tives to be both contem porary and classical. Unlike Sidney, Nashe does not reject generic hybridity or social m ixing (each of which he celebrates and practices elsewhere). He rejects an insufficiently intelligent classicism tha t lacks critical am bition. Against w riters like Stanyhurst and the English Italians, N ashe posits tw o related ideals: first, a particu lar brand of hum anist writing; and sec ond, G reene’s practice of prose rom ance. N ashe’s hum anist am bition orga nizes itself around a paean to his alm a mater, St. John’s College. As Nashe describes it, St. Joh n ’s in the sixteenth century produced a series of m ajor intellectual figures (including himself) because it modeled active learning. It was “tha t m ost famous and fortunate N urse of all learning, Saint Johns in Cambridge , th a t at tha t tim e was as an University w ithin it selfe, shining so farre aboue all other houses, H ailes, and hospitals w hatsoeure, tha t no Colledge in the Towne was able to com pare w ith the tithe of her Students” (317). L inking him self to adm ired Elizabethan authors and classicists such as Gascoigne and Golding (319) and also to “diune M aster Spencer” (323), Nashe advocates an English-centered hum anist program that would create (in Spenser’s phrase) “new poetes” rather than recycling Senecan tropes. He even cham pions the English trio of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Gower against their Italian rivals Petrarch, Tasso, and Celiano (322). It is in term s of this engaged, Anglicized hum anism that N ashe’s defense of Greene’s rom ance (itself an am algam of tropes from classical and C onti nental fictions) positions itself.10 He celebrates Greene in Ciceronian term s. “I come,” he w rites, “to thy Arcadian M enaphon , whose attire (though not so stately, yet comely), doth intitle thee aboue all other to that tem peratum “A Note Beyond Your Reach ” 81 dicendi genus which Tully in his O rator term eth true eloquence” (312). In addition to hum anism , Nashe values Greene’s facility w ith the new m edium of prin t; he emphasizes G reene’s speed as much as his erudition. H is book represents classical eloquence produced quickly, by a w riter whose “extem- porall veine in any hum our will excell our greatest A rt-m aisters deliberate thoughts” (312). To the young N ashe Greene represents a com bination of hum anist eloquence and streetw ise quickness; he is classical and critical at the same time. Like many m odern critics (see e.g., Ryan), I see N ashe’s cel ebration of extem porality as praising his ow n m ethods alongside G reene’s, but the celebration also dovetails w ith Lodge’s and Sidney’s defenses of hum anist learning. All these w riters, in their different ways, were a ttem pt ing to define a more elite version of literary culture th an the one playing on the public stage.
In this context, Greene’s deathbed letter (whether authentic or not) becomes not simply a dying w rite r’s jealous carping at a young rival but an attem pt to defend a strain of literary culture about to be overtaken by an am bitious theater industry. The letter’s discussion of M arlow e, N ashe,
Peele, and Shakespeare recapitulates the classical and critical stance that
Sidney, Lodge, and Nashe celebrated. Greene attacks the first three d ra m atists because they have abandoned this higher calling. As usual, M ar- lovian bom bast makes an easy target. M arlow e’s “pom pe of speech” (to use Brabine’s phrase) overreaches into atheism and “pestilent M achivilian pollicy” (Greene, G roatsw orth 80). But even N ashe’s “byting” satire has become too indiscrim inate in its attacks. “Sweet boy,” Greene suggests,
“be advisde, and get not m any enemies by bitter w ords . . . thou hast a libertie to reproove all, and nam e none” (82). Critical w riting, as Greene expounds it, should “reproove” public morals but not risk slander. (Greene here anticipates N ashe’s public quarrel w ith Gabriel H arvey, which w ould begin in earnest after H arvey m ocked Greene’s death in print.) Peele gets reprim anded for his poverty— “thou dependest on so m eane a stay” (83)— and his inclusion am ong the three w orthy w riters in danger of losing their status emphasizes that w hat Greene considered the high road of p rin t was not necessarily a money-m aking proposition. In the narrative tha t m akes up m ost of G roatsw orth , it is the Player, not the A uthor, who is rich.
W hile the invective a ttacking Shakespeare as an U pstart Crow is alm ost too fam iliar to quote, Greene’s sense of the debt players like Shakespeare owed to his generation of authors has often been overlooked. The key term is beholding . “Is it not strange,” w rites Greene, “tha t I, to whom they [i.e., the players] have all beene beholding: is it not like th a t you, to whome they all have been beholding, shall (were yee in th a t case as I am now) bee both at once of them forsaken?” (84). Greene claims a debt of status as well as literary material: Shakespeare owes G reene’s generation for the words in his m outh on stage and also for w hatever respectability (and m arket ability) the theater had earned by 1592. By usurping the au th o r’s role and
“supposing] he is as well able to bom bast out a blanke verse as the best 82 Steve Mentz of you” (84-85) the “Shake-scene” disrupts the authorial order as Greene, Lodge, N ashe, and others had begun to construct it. D uring the Jacobean period Shakespeare and others w ould develop a new construction of d ra m atic authorship as a public, even courtly pursuit, but in 1592 the printecl page still held itself apart. The central focus of Greene’s deathbed letter is not the a ttack on Shake speare but the im passioned plea th a t Nashe and Peele reform their careers. Unlike Greene him self and M arlow e, who died too young, these living authors could still redeem their authorial careers from the theatrical sink. W hile a large p a rt of Greene’s m oralizing (here and in his o ther repentance tracts) is theological, the career advice he gives Nashe and Peele unabash edly advocates preserving elite status: O that I m ight intreat your rare wits to be imploied in more profit able courses: and let those Apes im itate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them w ith your adm ired inventions. I know the best husband of you all will never prove an Usurer, and the kindest of them all will never prove a kind nurse: yet whilest you may, seeke you better M aisters; for it is pittie men of such rare w its, should be subject to the pleasure of such rude groomes. (85) The “more profitable courses” Greene advocates are the strategies of prin t authorship he pioneered. His fear about the encroaching stage (for which he had w ritten extensively) is explicitly about status inversion, in w hich play ers (“rude groom es”) lord it over authors (“rare w its”). H is dying wish, if these are his w ords, was for a reversal in the relative fortunes of page and stage. After m ore than four hundred years during which Shakespeare’s the ater has become the ideal model of English literary culture, Greene’s plea rem ains a difficult to hear. LODGE AGAINST SHAKESPEARE: A RIVALRY RECOVERED W hile Lodge’s Rosalynde was a bestseller of Elizabethan prose rom ance, its critical fortunes have long been overshadowed by As You L ike It. As W entw orth noted the “white light” (114) of Shakespeare’s play has often led scholars to misremember even basic features of Lodge’s w ork. D istinc tions between Lodge’s pastoral rom ance, w ith its focus on “patience” and anticipation of the Catholic pietism of Lodge’s later w orks, and Shake speare’s comedy of w it, w ith its urbanity and playfulness, are well-repre- sented in m odern criticism . 11 R ather than retread tha t fam iliar ground, I will explore tw o m ajor elements of Lodge’s romance that Shakespeare fails to emphasize: the despair of Adam Spencer, and the theologically inflected conversion of Saladyne. These features represent Lodge’s extension of the hum anist program that E lizabethan prose fiction began in the early 1580s. “A Note Beyond Your Reach ” 83
W hen Shakespeare turned to Lodge’s rom ance at the end of the 1590s, th a t cultural mom ent was gone: Sidney and Greene were dead; Nashe was embroiled in a public controversy w ith H arvey th a t led to a ban on both their works in 1599; and Lodge, no longer producing popular successes, was about to convert to Catholicism and leave for France. Shakespeare’s theatrical revision of Lodge’s rom ance nonetheless carefully responds to the stale challenge of print cu ltu re’s self-defined hum anism and elite sta tus. Through the melancholy wise m an and the courtly fool, Shakespeare’s play departs from Lodge’s rom ance by rem aking precisely the criteria that
Lodge’s generation had used to celebrate prose fiction.
The servant Adam Spencer’s monologue, spoken w hile he is starving in Arden, exemplifies the tropes and intellectual habits tha t Lodge’s gen eration of prose fiction w riters used to enter into hum anist and academic debates. Adam opens w ith a fam iliar hum anist trope d raw n from the Greek rom ance tradition of H eliodorus and standard texts like Erasm us’s 1525 colloquy on shipwreck: “O h, how the life of m an may well be com pared to the state of the ocean seas, th a t for every calm hath a thousand storm s”
(Lodge, R osalind 141). H is quasi-philosophic discourse blends Stoicism w ith a basically theological belief in m ankind’s co rrup t nature: “All our pleasures end in pain, and our highest delights are crossed w ith deepest d iscontents” (141). Like m any rom ance heroes, Adam debates the incon stancy of Fortune, which he castigates as “double-faced like Janus” (142).
A dam ’s (and Lodge’s) solutions to enduring inconstan t Fortune include
“patience” and “a resolute courage to pass over [F ortune’s] crosses w ith out care ,? (142). Adam exaggerates this Stoic-cum -C hristian pose when he offers to “cut my veins” to provide his m aster w ith “the w arm blood [to] relieve your fainting spirits” (143), but Lodge’s tone suggests that he values
A dam ’s quasi-academic philosophy.
W hen Shakespeare took up Lodge’s plot, he kept the contrivances of the story but pre-emptively signaled tha t his discourse of Fortune would be a m atter of comic banter, not philosophic weight. Rosalind claims early on th a t her preferred “sp o rt” will be to “mock the good hussif Fortune from her wheel, tha t her gifts may henceforth be bestowed equally” (Shakespeare
1 .2 .30-32). H er joke indicates the play’s desire to undercut the philosophi cal seriousness of Lodge’s Adam . The comic debate betw een Rosalind and
Celia about N ature and Fortune (1 .2 .39-45) gets in terrup ted by the arrival of Touchstone, one of Shakespeare’s invented characters. At the m om ent when Shakespeare’s play engages Lodge’s moral and intellectual debate, a theatrical addition to the story— the Fool— shifts the discourse. Paradoxes about the relative powers of N atu re and Fortune— “Indeed,” says Rosa lind, “there is Fortune too hard for N ature, when Fortune makes N atu re’s natu ra l the cutter-off of N atu re’s w it” (1 .2 .46 -48 )— cede the stage to
Touchstone’s comic and courtly display.
To a large extent, Touchstone’s role in A s You L ike I t disarm s the high m oral and hum anist am bitions of Lodge’s source tex t by parodying 84 Steve Mentz them. A dam ’s speech on Fortune, which concludes w ith the m oral truism , “despair is a merciless sin” (143), typifies Lodge’s am bition by functioning as w hat N ancy Lindheim has called a “m ajor-alternative soliloquy .” 12 In such a speech, a fictional character perform s like a hum anist orator, talk ing up a kno tty philosophical question and debating alternative outcomes. Even if the authorized conclusions usually seem foreordained (as in nonfic- tional versions of this trope like Erasm us’s C olloquies), the function of such a speech in Elizabethan prose rom ance is to reflect the m oral seriousness and topicality of the author. Touchstone mercilessly m ocks such rhetoric. He even takes the key term of the m ajor alternative conceit— “if”— as grist for his joke mill near the play’s end. Expounding the progress of a courtly quarrel, Touchstone recreates the counter-factual hypothesis as a means for a hasty retreat: I know when seven justices could not take up a quarrel, but when the parties were m et themselves, one of them thought but of an If, as, ‘If you said so, then I said so.’ And they shook hand and swore brother. Your If is the only peacem aker: much virtue in If. (5.4.97-102) Touchstone explicitly celebrates theatrical w it at the expense of its futile academic rivals; the “seven justices” who canno t patch up the quarrel are the d ram atist’s caricature of the high hum anist position Lodge and his gen eration w anted for prose fiction. Even Lodge’s medium (print) receives a subtle dig; Touchstone sets up his joke by rem inding Jaques tha t courtiers “quarrel in p rin t, by the book” (5.4.89). For Shakespeare, books like Rosa lynde cannot distinguish themselves from dram a by aspiring to hum an ist standards like those of N ashe’s idealized St. John’s College. Books and plays are simply rival forms of popu lar entertainm ent. In addition to Touchstone’s im plicit riposte to A dam ’s pen iten t m ono logue, the o ther m ajor aspect of L odge’s tale th a t Shakespeare m inim izes is the conversion of the hero’s evil brother. Saladyne (renam ed Oliver in the play) occupies the m oral center of Lodge’s rom ance. In three long set speeches— the first in jail, the second to his still-disguised brother, and the th ird to A liena— Saladyne dem onstrates L odge’s hope tha t lit erary rhetoric can actively facilitate evil’s conversion into good. In his first speech, after being jailed by D uke Torism ond,' Saladyne sounds the religious notes th a t Greene w ould plum b a few years later in his deathbed trac ts . “ There is no sting [like] to the w orm of conscience,” he lam ents, “no hell to a m ind touched w ith g u ilt” (147). In Lodge’s fiction this rhetorical pose reform s his character. D iscovering his sin leads Sala dyne to discover its solution: “Be peniten t and assign thyself some pen ance to discover thy sorrow and pacify his w ra th ” (147). The language anticipates the C atholic position Lodge w ould a rticu la te more clearly in Robin the D evil (1592), but the im port of such rhetoric for prose fiction w riters of L odge’s generation was its self-generating pow er. T heir books “A Note Beyond Your Reach ” 85 constructed a fantasy of generating public v irtue th rough the circu lation of literary narratives.
In A s You Like It, O liver’s conversion is both much shorter and largely unstaged. He narrates his encounter w ith his brother in m axim ally com pressed syntax. “’Twas I,” he tells Celia and Rosalind, “ But ’tis not I. I do not sham e / To tell you w hat I w as, since my conversion / So sweetly tastes, being the thing I am ” (4.3.135-37). He externalizes and rejects as “not
I” his former self, but the quintuple repetition of the word “I” highlights the variability o f his ow n identity. (The play’s cross-dressed m ain plot, of course, also emphasizes identity’s gender instability.) The “conversion” is so easy for Shakespeare’s play th a t he does not even stage it, w hereas in
Lodge’s tale it occasions pages of hum anist rhetorical display. The play presents Oliver in the semi-allegorical terms tha t Lodge uses for Saladyne— when O rlando first sees him he is a “w retched ragged m an, o ’ergrow n w ith h a ir” (4.3.106) and he carries a handkerchief stained w ith the lioness’s symbolic blood— but O liver’s narrative shift from th ird person (“Twice did he tu rn his back” 4.3.127) to first (“From this miserable slumber I aw ak’d ”
4.3.133) replaces the sustained intellectual labor of Lodge’s hero.
In Saladyne’s second and th ird conversion speeches Lodge makes even clearer his role as mouthpiece for hum anist am bition and critical piety. He echoes the repentance narratives tha t preachers like A rthur D ent and W il liam Perkins sounded from E lizabethan pulpits and tha t Greene w ould use to define his life story in the repentance tracts of 1592. Saladyne’s encoun ter w ith his brother in Arden tu rn s his repentance from internalized con tri tion to the recognition of divine order in the w orld, as he says: “The gods, not able to suffer such impiety unrevenged, so w rought tha t the king picked a causeless quarrel against me in hope to have my lands, and so hath exiled me out of France'forever” (176). W orldly exile becomes Saladyne’s ticket to spiritual reb irth , as he recognizes:
Passionate thus w ith m any griefs, in penance of my form er foilies, I go thus pilgrim -like to seek out my brother, th a t I may reconcile myself to him in all submission and afterw ard wend to the Holy Land to end my years in as many virtues as I have spent my youth in wicked vanities. (176)
Saladyne’s story presents both strands of the cultural am bition of Elizabe than prose rom ance; his prodigal fall chastises social vices, and his eventual reb irth presents the final trium ph of hum anist learning in a worldly setting
(Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals, Alwes).
Refusing Lodge’s sense of the self-as-pilgrim, Shakespeare’s play eschews conventional conversion narratives. A s You L ike It exports Sala dyne’s (finally abandoned) plans to m ake pilgrimage to the Holy Land to
Duke Frederick and Jaques, pointedly decentering repentance as a narrative device. Jaques cham pions the w isdom of “these convertites” (5.4.183), but 86 Steve Mentz the play rem ains focused on the com m unity of four m arried couples danc ing in H ym en’s masque. W hen Jaques de Boys describes D uke Frederick’s conversion, he emphasizes its abjuration of public matters: “to the skirts of this wild w ood he cam e, / W here, meeting w ith an old religious man* / After some question w ith him , was converted / Both from his enterprise and from the w orld” (5.4.158-61). But the world as Shakespeare’s play presents it is more theatrical space than hum anist proving ground. Even melancholy Jaques’s understanding of conversion glosses over Saladyne’s soul-searching and A dam ’s despair. For Jaques, conversion is a purely willed experience. He describes Frederick as having “put on a religious life / And th row n into neglect the pom pous co u rt” (5.4.180-81). For Jaques, it appears, these are things one can do simply by perform ing them. Jaques’s sm ooth transition from w ood to cloister matches his theatrical description of the progress of a m an’s life in the seven ages of m an speech. Com pared to the to rtu red reversals of R osalynde and other E lizabethan prose rom ances, Jaques’s easy narrative of the “m any p a rts” of a m an’s life from infancy to “second childishness and mere oblivion” (2.7.139-66) presents a th o r oughly dram atized early m odern biography. These are roles th a t a m an m ight play w ithout any conspicuous intellectual struggles. T h a t we th ink of Shakespeare’s “All the w orld’s a stage” as more typical of English Renais sance literary culture than Lodge’s “despair is a merciless sin” owes as much to our ow n internalization of Shakespearean dram a as to the relative intellectual vibrancy of the prose rom ance tradition. BEYOND TH E STAGE Reconsidering the rivalry betw een writers of prose rom ance like Greene, Lodge, N ashe, and (in a different medium) Sidney, and authors of public stage dram a like Shakespeare and Jonson can help advance the critical con versation about early m odern English culture in several ways. By way of conclusion, I’ll suggest three possible implications. First, the brief analysis I have sketched highlights how m uch early m odern literary culture was defined by rivalry— between media like page and stage, between subgenres like Greek rom ance and the Italianate novella, and between individual authors like Greene and Shakespeare (see M entz, Romance 1-45). Some rivalries, especially the so-called W ar of the Theaters, are fam iliar, but critical specialties and subfields tend to isolate different aspects of literary culture from each other, especially those that span the dram atic/nondra- matic divide. (This collection speaks directly to that oversight in p articu lar.) Som ewhat paradoxically, I’ll suggest that Shakespeare suffers from his “not of an age but for all tim e” isolation as much as figures like Greene and Lodge w ho linger in his shadow. Shakespeare’s career can be better under stood by return ing him to the T udor-S tuart milieu from which hypercan- onicity too often purports to liberate him. Jonson’s famous poem in the “A Note Beyond Your Reach” 87
1623 Folio is a case in point: it is better read not as isolating Shakespeare but as positioning his plays w ith in a seventeenth-century debate in which
Jonson had a clear stake. The poem makes tw o distinct claims about Shake speare’s plays: they displace “sporting Kid, or M arlow e’s m ighty line” in term s that recall Brabine’s praise of M enapbon , and their author should be lodged w ith classical authors like Euripides and Sophocles. Jonson’s point is tha t printed dram a (his and Shakespeare’s) can defeat its recent rivals and lodge with the ancients. W hat R ichard Helgerson has described as a com petitive “system of authorial roles” in early m odern England can profitably be expanded across such divides as dram atic and nondram atic authorship, m anuscript and prin t cultures, and even rivalries am ong different linguistic traditions (e.g., Italian vs. French vs. Spanish novelle; see Self-C row ned ; also Cheney, Spenser’s, M arlow e’s , Shakespeare). By broadening our sense of the literary discourses alongside and against w hich early m odern w riters positioned their w orks, we can create a more flexible, dynam ic, and accu rate understanding of the evolution of early m odern literary culture.
My second speculation concerns the distorting effects o f Shakespeare’s posthum ous fame. The com bination of the apotheosis of Shakespeare and the belated “rise of the novel” in the eighteenth century has m arginalized early m odern prose rom ance from tw o directions. These w orks neither p a r ticipate in the fully canonical genre of the novel nor serve as adequate rivals to Shakespeare’s transcendent genius. The counter-exam ple of Cervantes and Lope de Vega in early seventeenth-century Spain can encourage a thought experim ent abou t an alternative literary history in w hich the prose narrative became the m asterpiece and the theatrical career the poor second.
But it seems more practical to reconsider Shakespeare’s dom inance as a contingent, not necessary, historical development (which largely happened after the early m odern period). By granting E lizabethan prose rom ance its full counter challenge to Shakespearean dram a, we can recover a histori cal diversity of early m odern literature tha t often gets flattened by m odern reading habits, even if we canno t expect Greene, Lodge, or Nashe to grace
H ollyw ood billboards any time soon.
Finally, I w ant to speculate about w hat the debate between page and stage says about the genre bo th media shared, rom ance. These tw o rival technologies of literary circulation each saw the flourishing of a sim ilar kind of Hellenized rom ance in early m odern England* but at different times. Early m odern prose rom ance flourished in the 1580s shortly after the translation into English of the Greek rom ances of H eliodorus, Longus, and Achilles Tatius in 1569, 1587, and 1597, respectively, and it continued through N ashe’s The U nfortunate Traveler (1594) and Lodge’s A M arga rite o f Am erica (1596), skeptical w orks that signal a change in fashion. (A second round of post-Sidneian rom ance would develop in the 1620s in the works of M ary W roth, Anne W eamys, and others.) D ram atic rom ance, by contrast, appeared widely in early comedies like M ucedorus (1598) tha t drew on medieval sources and then reconfigured itself in late E lizabethan 88 Steve Mentz comedies like A s You Like I t and the dram atic rom ances by Shakespeare, Beaum ont, and Fletcher, and others th a t appeared after 1607 or 1608. (For a stim ulating “alternative genealogy” of rom ance th a t places the earlier plays in a central position, see Cyrus M ulready’s contribution to this vol ume.) The reasons behind these shifts in generic fashion, and the precise contours of the relationship between E lizabethan prose rom ance and Jaco bean dram atic tragicomedy, are only now being fully explored. Romance as a genre, even pastoral Greek rom ance in a narrow er sense, recurs as a liter ary fashion throughout early m odern English culture. The larger questions surrounding th is genre’s cultural m eanings should not be obscured by our failure to recognize w hat Shakespeare and his prose sources shared, as well as w hat the argum ent between them m eant to their ow n culture. NO TES 1. Bruster treats the cultural entity “Shakespeare” as a coniposite representing “the host of associations [his] writings have generated over centuries” (186); similarly I use Shakespeare’s name to represent early modern drama as a whole. 2. For recent studies of popular fiction, see Mentz (Romance), Newcomb, Reli- han, Hutson, Maslen, Alwes, and Hackett. For a recent attempt to reconnect Shakespeare with print culture, see Erne. A more measured consideration of the mutual interpenetration of literary and dramatic cultures can be found in Mowat. 3. On the printing history of these books, see Mentz (Romance 38-40 for Menaphon; 155-56 for Rosalynde). 4. Greene received his MA from Cambridge in 1583 and received a second MA as a courtesy from Oxford in 1588. 5. Sidney’s works were not printed during his lifetime; on his involvement with manuscript circulation, see Woodhuyson. 6. On Sidney’s revision of Heliodoran romance in the Arcadia, see Mentz (2006 73-103). 7. On the authorship controversy surrounding Groatsworth (and a forceful argument for Chettle’s authorship), see Carroll’s introduction. For a caveat, see Mentz (“Forming”). 8. On Nashe’s complex celebration of the printing press, see Mentz (“Day Labor”) and Yates. 9. McKerrow in his edition of Nashe notes that Peele, Hall, and Massinger also mock this passage, though Massinger ipay be alluding to Nashe as much as Stanyhurst (Nashe 4:456). 10. On Menaphon as part of Greene’s Heliodoran project, see Mentz (Romance 114-22). 11. See Mentz (Romance 155-61) for a recent survey. In what follows I draw on my previous treatment of Lodge’s romance, although the detailed compari son with Shakespeare is new. 12. Lindheim objects that Lodge does not employ these soliloquies, which she considers a major intellectual feature of Lyly’s legacy in humanist fiction. I have previously noted how well Adam’s speech (which she does not mention) fits this category (Mentz, Romance 159-60n.) “A Note Beyond Your Reach ” 89
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