What Persius Really Thought About Virgil, C. 1600

International Journal of the Classical Tradition (2021) 28(2):139–158 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-020-00557-0 ARTICLE What Persius Really Thought about Virgil, c. 1600 Anna‑Maria Hartmann1 Published online: 28 January 2020 © The Author(s) 2020 I. Persius 1.97 on the Early Modern Stage In 1607, Lording Barry wrote a racy city comedy entitled Ram Alley, or Merry Tricks for the Children of the King’s Revels, a children’s company which occupied the Whitefriars Playhouse for a little more than a year from 1607–8.1 Ram Alley was central to the company’s repertory, which, as Mary Bly has shown in her spir- ited monograph Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage, was ‘strikingly abnormal’.2 One outstanding linguistic feature of their plays was the so-called Whitefriars pun. Five of the seven comedies specifcally written for this troupe showcase female leads who freely voice their desires with a degree of obscenity that is unusual for early modern comedic heroines. Because these charac- ters were played by boys, Bly argues, their phallic jests had a meta-theatrical efect that directed the audiences’ attention to the body of the actor: 1 Since 2000, a growing body of scholarship has discovered the critical potential of Ram Alley: M. Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage, Oxford, 2000; C. Cathcart, ‘Plural Author- ship, Attribution, and the Children of the King’s Revels’, Renaissance Forum, 4.2, 2000, pp. 1–36; id., ‘Authorship, Indebtedness, and the Children of the King’s Revels’, Studies in English Literature, 45.2, 2005, pp. 357–74; E. Hanson, ‘“There’s Meat and Money Too”: Rich Widows and Allegories of Wealth in Jacobean City Comedy’, English Literary History, 72.1, 2005, pp. 209–38; A. Grifn, ‘Ram Alley and Female Spectatorship’, Early Theatre 9.2, 2006, pp. 91–7; S. Mukherji, Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 174–84; M. Bly, ‘Playing the Tourist in Early Modern London: Selling the Liberties on Stage’, PMLA, 122.1, 2007, pp. 61–71; J. Lopez, ‘Success the Whitefriars Way: Ram Alley and the Negative Force of Acting’, Renaissance Drama, 38, 2010, pp. 199–224; R. D. Fraser, ‘Ram Alley, or Merry Tricks (Lording Barry, 1611): A Critical Edition’, PhD diss., University of Sussex, 2013; J. Watson, ‘Ram Alley and the Staging of Locality: An Innsman goes to the Playhouse’, in Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience, Performance, ed. S. Smith and E. Whipday, Cambridge, forthcoming c. 2021. 2 Bly, Queer Virgins (n. 2 above), p. 3. I am grateful to Raphael Lyne, Aaron Kachuck, Philip Hardie, Michael Reeve and the anonymous reviewers for their learned and generous comments on earlier versions of this article. * Anna-Maria Hartmann [email protected] 1 Trinity College, Cambridge, UK Vol.:(0123456789)1 3 140 A.-M. Hartmann When a boy actor, dressed as a young woman, puns on ‘her’ beloved’s sexual organs, may he not also reference his own equipment? When Peg in the Whitefriar’s play Cupid’s Whirligig announces, ‘I am of my selfe a rare bit’, in response to her friend Nan’s kindly remark that Peg needs some ‘Cram- ming’, the character ofers a double-edged pun on sexual genitalia. ‘Bit’ refer- ences the ‘crammable’ vagina. But ‘bit’ was a pun applicable to the genitalia of both genders. On a physical level, Peg has a phallic bit, since ‘she’ is played by a boy actor. The gendered ambiguity of her response (‘I am myself a rare bit’), could be explained as a cross-dressing pun. Pen is/has/boasts of two bits, self-lovingly stacked. In a doubly transgressive manoeuvre, she undresses her female character (down to a crammable bit), but at the same moment, she also renders her femaleness into maleness, admitting to ownership of a rare, and phallic, bit.3 The sexual double entendre in such puns thus resonates with hetero- and homo- erotic desire, blending female and male sexual organs. Crucially for Whitefriars puns, ‘words that gained their obscenity from adherence to one sexual organ are transferred to a mediatory position between the male and female body. … Queer puns ricochet between one body and another.’4 The text of Lording Barry’s comedy abounds in such puns, but its title seems to disappoint the expectations this company so carefully cultivated. True, there is some wordplay in it. Critics have long been aware of the English-Latin homophone in the subtitle: merry tricks/meretrix (‘prostitute’).5 This bilingual pun was common in the period.6 The main title ‘Ram Alley’ referred to a real-life alley close by the Whitefriars theatre and notorious for its prostitutes. ‘Ram Alley’ could thus be taken as slang for a ‘rammable vagina’.7 But if we put this together, the result is the monotonous ‘Whore, or Whore’. There is little comedy in this. Does Barry’s title lack the male ‘bit’ that complicates gender assignations into the unruly gaiety of a Whitefriars pun? He did not. It is we who have missed the joke for the past few hundred years. Luckily, there is independent evidence that allows us to reconstruct it: a fuller instance of the same pun was told during the Christmas revels at the Middle Temple in the winter of 1597/8.8 This ‘solemn’ Christmas season lasted several weeks and 3 Ibid., p. 13. 4 Ibid., p. 14. 5 See, e.g., Mukherji, Law and Representation (n. 2 above), p. 185. 6 A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, ed. G. Wil- liams, 3 vols, London, 1994, 2, pp. 586–7. 7 See the entry for ‘ram’, ibid., 3, pp. 1135–8. There is no entry for ‘alley’, but an analogous example would be ‘road’ for ‘vagina’ (3, pp. 1162–3). 8 The best account of these revels is still P. J. Finkelpearl, John Marston and the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting, Cambridge MA, 1969, pp. 45–63. Most of the visual and oratorical displays were scripted, and, in the case of the 1597/8 revels, some of these scripts have survived. They were published by the printer William Leak, who entitled the collection The Prince d’Amour, or the Prince of Love: With a Collection of Several Ingenious Poems and Songs By the Wits of the Age, London, 1660. Despite the late publication date, the printed collection is a reliable, if incom- plete, collection of scripts used during the Middle Temple Christmas revels of 1597/8; see Finkelpearl, John Marston, p. 48, n.10; H. H. Hudson’s introduction to ‘The Fustian Answer’ in J. Hoskins, Direc- 1 3 141 What Persius Really Thought about Virgil, c. 1600 consisted of a mixture of speeches, mock trials, processions, masks, dances, music and banquets, which ranged from lofty ceremonialism to ribaldry. One of the enter- tainments that winter was the mock trial of one Carolus Asinius Bestia, an ofender against the rules of courtship. It was held in Middle Temple Hall, the spiritual heart of the institution. Bestia was accused of three ofences against love. First, he insulted his mistress’s beloved pooch Jewel. Second, he stank mightily of garlic, which made kissing him unpleasant. And, third, he turned innocent words into wanton wordplay. As it says in his indictment: And moreover, thou art farther indicted for that thou in the frst of the Dog days after Midsommer Moon was then lately passed, in the heat of thy brain, in the frst year aforesaid, in Ram-Alley in the County aforesaid, in a certain house at the sign of the Daw, didst wrest, turn, pervert, misconster, and Cat- achrestically abuse the honest, civil, chast, pure and incorrupt meaning of divers words following, As Standing, Members, Dealing, Trunchion, Quiver, Evidences, Weapons, Lapland, Vicegerent, and suchlike, into a wicked, wanton, lascivious and leud sense.9 The setting of this crime is as important as the crime itself. Bestia’s abuse of language took place in Ram Alley, the very same locale after which Barry later named his play. As the placeography of The Early Modern Map of London informs us, this street claimed right of sanctuary and was thus able to ofer refuge to debtors, prostitutes, illegal aliens and other undesirables in London.10 Men and women who needed to make a swift escape from the city authorities could duck into the Mitre Inn on Fleet Street and run out by the back door into the freedom of Ram Alley. It was less than a fve-minute walk away from the Middle Temple and other Inns of Court, and deeply familiar to the law students who mingled with the criminal element there when they patronized the infamous Maidenhead Pub or brought their dirty linen to the local ‘laundresses’.11 As it happens, the Whitefriars playhouse was part of the same neighbourhood. An Innsman taking a stroll from the Middle Tem- ple, through Ram Alley to the Whitefriars theatre would cover a total distance of less than 500 meters.12 But Ram Alley is more than just a ftting backdrop for Carolus Asinius Bestia’s crime. The prosecutor explains to the jury: Footnote 8 (continued) tions for Speech and Style [1599], ed. H. H. Hudson, Princeton NJ, 1935, pp. 108–13 (108–9); Memories of Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, Knt., ed. J. A. Manning, London, 1891, pp. 9–18. 9 ‘Le Prince d’Amour alias Noctes Templariae’, in Records of Early English Drama: Inns of Court, ed. A. H.

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