REPRESENTATIONS OF GENTILITY IN THE DRAMATIC WORKS OF THE BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER CANON MARINA HILA THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE JUNE 1997 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS page Acknowledgments 4 Abstract 5 Abbreviations 7 INTRODUCTION 8 CHAPTER ONE 29 The Tra-qedvof Bonduca (1609-14): Stoic Gentility CHAPTER TWO 73 The Knight of Malta (1616-18): Chivalric Gentility CHAPTER THREE 105 The Humorous Lieutenant (1619): Kings and Ushers CHAPTER FOUR 129 The Nice Valour (1615-16): Gentility and Political Authority CHAPTER FIVE 150 The Queen of Corinth (1616-17): Gentility and Patronage CHAPTER SIX 171 The Elder Brother (1625): Educating the Gentleman CHAPTER SEVEN 193 The Noble Gentleman (1623-26): Theatre of the Absurd CHAPTER EIGHT 221 The Scornful Lady (c. 1608-1610): Christian Language, Fashionable Manners CHAPTER NINE 248 WitwithoutMone (c. 1614): Gentility and Gender: Masculine Bonding, Feminine Charity CHAPTER TEN 272 The Wild-Goose Chase (1621): Good Manners: Gentlemen and 'Gamesters' CHAPTER ELEVEN 306 The Little French Lawye (1619): Quarrelsome Gentility Conclusion 327 Notes 329 Bibliography 340 4 Acknowledgments I am very grateful to my supervisor, Michael Cordner, for his knowledge, expertise and understanding. Without his help, the obstacles I encountered during my work would have been insurmountable. I would also like to thank my parents, Evangelos Hilas & Maria Hila for their support. 5 ABSTRACT The aim of the thesis is to study the dramatization of the selfhood of gentility in the plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, mainly by focusing on issues of dramatic structure and language but also by examining the social or political context which may have generated a particular representation. Conduct books are used to illuminate this context. Chapter 1 ('Stoic Gentility') analyses The Tragedy of Bonduca in the light of Stoic views of the self and their influence on seventeenth-century ideals of gentility but also in the light of the political and military crisis of the period. Chapter 2 ('Chivalric Gentility) studies The Knight of Malta as a critique of contemporary upper-class mores through a contrast with a legendary past. Chapter 3 (Xings and Ushers') shows how The Humorous Lieutenant represents gentility as an awareness of one's position and the duties it entails; without this awareness, social order is lost and kings become equated with ushers. Chapter 4 (Gentility and Political Authority') and Chapter 5 ('Gentility and Patronage) deal with The Nice Valour and The Queen of Corinth respectively. Both are plays which attempt to delineate limits for the power of political authority to control social distinctions. In both plays, the good courtier is the one who has preserved the traditional marks of gentry identity. Chapter 6 ('Educating the Gentleman), which examines The Elder Brother, shows the failure of both the court and conventional gentry culture to educate their society and cultivate the inner life. Chapter 7 (Theatre of the Absurd') compares The Noble Gentleman to the twentieth-century Theatre of the Absurd. Chapter 8 ('Christian Language, Fashionable Manners') is a study of the tactics the gallant employs in The Scornful Lady in order to manipulate his environment; the gallant's success is due to the fact that he dresses up his arguments in the language of Christianity. Chapter 9 ('Gentility and Gender: Masculine Bonding, Feminine Charity) examines the relevance of the patronage ethic associated with gentility to contemporary town living in Wit Mone Chapter 10 ('Good Manners: Gentlemen without . and uGamesters"' examines conventional models of gentry education in accordance with their ability to develop self-knowledge or to encourage self-dramatization in The Wild-Goose Chase. Chapter 11 ('Quarrelsome Gentility) looks at the relationship between duelling, subjectivity and truth in The Little French Lawve It is concluded that the plays draw attention to the elusive nature of public constructions of selfhood and represent status in terms of inwardness. This can be seen in the terms associated with status, which refer to the mind, knowledge, self-knowledge, the inner life, learning, understanding, decorum. The reasons for this emphasis on the self are related to the two main influences in relation to which gentility is formulated in the plays: political authority and social living. Regarding the former, the plays register an anxiety about the monarch's claims to control over social 6 distinctions and use gentility as a subversive political discourse. In the case of the social reality, there is a reiterated fear of a hiatus between symbols and what they signify, on both a physical and a linguistic level. The emphasis of the plays on status as inwardness is significant in relation to a culture where external demarcations of status were becoming increasingly unreliable. Gentility is associated with the possession of an essential self and a unified consciousness; those who lack it are either empty or possess a dislocated subjectivity. Abbreviations IYNM James Cleland, r-HpwTTai66a: or, The Institution of a Younq Noble Man (1607) CG Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman (1622) EG Richard Brathwait, The English Gentleman (1630) 8 INTRODUCTION A. In Search of the Fletcherian Gentleman The aim of the thesis is to study the dramatization of the selfhood of gentility in the plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, mainly by focusing on issues of dramatic structure and language but also by examining the social or political context which may have generated a particular representation. Prior to describing how the parameters of the gentle self are represented in the theatre, it would perhaps be appropriate to point out that such selfhood does exist. New Historicist criticism insists, rightly I think, that the self is not independent of its social context. According to Greenblatt, there are no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity; the human subject is 'remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society. 1 Similarly, Jonathan Dollimore has challenged essentialism and has argued that the identities of Jacobean protagonists are shown to be 'precariously dependent' on the social reality which confronts them.2 They are not capable of defining themselves from within because there is 'no inner self into which one can withdraw'; stoic strategies prove unsuccessful because they posit 'a non-existentautonomous realm of being'.3 However,the plays he selects to prove that the quest for an essential autonomous self is 9 abandoned tend to be those which dissociate social rank from innate superiority, such as Middleton's The Changeling and Webster's The White Devil.4 There is no mention of the duchess of Malfi who remains 'Duchess of Malfi' still in the homonymous play. Such criticism seems to assume that the dependence of the self on the social context means that inwardness disappears and that the self is a vacuum filled only by the social context. This is often reflected in criticism which emphasizes the context at the expense of the text. Greenblatt claims that he found it impossible to focus on a moment of 'apparently autonomous self-fashioning' because identity was never freely chosen but a cultural artifaCt.5 He admits that self- fashioning and being fashioned by cultural institutions - family, religion, state - are inseparably intertwined, but takes this to mean that the latter can only take place at the expense of the former rather than in co- operation with it; if there remain traces of free choice, the choice is among possibilities whose range is 'strictly delineated by the social and ideological system in force'. '5However, although this system may provide a range of influences, these will be processed and collated by the individual subjectivity, and the end-product may be entirely different from the materials provided by the context. Identity may be formed in reaction as well as in response to a social and ideological system; and in the plays selected for presentation here the gentleman's sense of self is shaped in reaction to the political or social environment. Identity is enhanced rather than erased by an oppressive social or political context because it is forced 10 to develop a language of its own. The emphasis of the plays on status as a state of mind, a spiritual condition, knowledge, an awareness of duty, in one word as inwardness, is significant in relation to a culture where external demarcations of status were becoming increasingly unreliable. It is in these instances of divergence from convention that inwardness becomes most evident. The complexity and political and social significance which the representation of the gentleman achieves in drama are generated in relation to the conventions of his representation which already circulate in his cult6re; The Knight of Malta uses the ubiquitous language of chivalry to formulate a critique of contemporary social conditions. No social and ideological system is so well-proofed as to preclude the circulation of subversive discourses or discourses which can be manipulated by the individual in a subversive way. In the plays presented here identity becomes Greenblatt's 'cultural artifact' only in plebeians. The ability to shape a personal language, even if it employs terrps which already exist, presupposesthe existence of a core self and often becomes a social distinction. In The Nice Valour, The Queen of Corinth, The Noble Gentleman, The Scomful Ladv, Wit without Monev, The Wild-Goose Chase and The Little French LaMer, the gentleman is at ease with the discourses of his culture and is capable of shaping an individual identity by using their terms; but the plebeian adopts the same language because he lacks an essential self and is entirely filled by the social context. For instance, in The Noble Gentleman Marine adopts the forms 11 and language of status but his lack of inwardness results in absurdity; and in The Little French Lawyer, La Writ is perfectly capable of conforming to the code of conduct of the gallants but his lack of a central self means that he is incapable of manipulating its language and applying the code with an understanding of context.