Ari Friedlander
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Promiscuous Generation: Rogue Sexuality and Social Reproduction in Early Modern England by Robert A. Friedlander A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Professor Valerie J. Traub, Chair Professor Michael C. Schoenfeldt Associate Professor Helmut Puff Associate Professor Douglas Trevor To Stephanie ii Acknowledgements It is a great pleasure to acknowledge my debt to Valerie Traub, whose confidence in myself and my work sustained me at those moments when the dissertation seemed both too much and not enough. I will be forever grateful for all that she has taught me about being a scholar, a mentor, a colleague, and a friend. My dissertation committee deserves thanks for their gracious generosity and incisive engagement with my work. In the forest of the dissertation, an enthusiastic and exacting Michael Schoenfeldt always reminded me to keep looking for the trees. Doug Trevor offered both precise criticism and profoundly nourishing optimism. Helmut Puff brought twin advantages to this project: a historian’s sensitivity to social conditions and a critic’s appreciation of language. In various classrooms, offices, hallways, and homes, I have been inspired by conversations with my professors at Michigan, especially Linda Gregerson, David Halperin, Barbara Hodgdon, Scotti Parrish, Bill Ingram, Jeffrey Knight, John Kucich, Arthur Marroti, Jeffery Masten, Steven Mullaney, Cathy Sanok, and Ralph Williams. From the first week of graduate school, Marjorie Levinson made me feel like I was in the right place by balancing her fearless intellect with sparkling bonhomie. I would like to thank Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities for funding a wonderful year of intellectual exchange and espresso consumption. I am grateful to all the participants in our weekly seminars, but owe a special debt to Danny Herwitz, Valerie Kivelson, Keith Mitnick, and Claire Zimmerman for their friendship and support. For intellectual and emotional support, I have to thank my friends and fellow students at Michigan: Yanina Arnold, Stephanie Batkie, Kenston Bauman, Andrew Bozio, Katie Brokaw, Christina Chang, John Cords, Topher Davis, Heidi Gearhart, Daniel Hershenzon, Gavin Hollis, Monica Huerta, Alan Itkin, David Lavinsky, Joanna Patterson, Bob Rich, Amy Rodgers, Marjorie Rubright, Guillermo Salas, Jonathan Smith, Stephen Spiess, Chad Thomas, Mike Tondre, Katie Will, and Rebecca Wiseman. Ori Weisberg and Ilana Blumberg kindly welcomed me into their wonderful family, and their house became my home away from home. During two years spent in Philadelphia, the English department at the University of Pennsylvania offered an extraordinary level of hospitality and camaraderie. For warmly welcoming me into their intellectual community, I would like to thank Urvashi Chakravarty, Scott Enderle, Rachael Nichols, Rosemary O’Neill, Mearah Quinn-Brauner, and Thomas Ward. The early modern faculty at Penn – Margreta de Grazia, Zachary iii Lesser, Ania Loomba, Melissa Sanchez, Peter Stallybrass, and David Wallace – were also extremely gracious in listening to questions and offering advice. I had the outrageous good fortune to begin my studies in the Renaissance under the tutelage of three marvelous teachers: Julie Crawford, Frances Dolan, and Jean Howard. Their continued friendship and guidance has meant the world to me. My immediate family – Dad, Mindy, Eric and Sima – deserve special thanks for accepting my at times single-minded devotion to the Renaissance with more good cheer than puzzlement, and for continuing to love and support me during my scholarly peregrinations. I am grateful to the Elsky clan for incorporating me into their family and enriching my understanding of friendship, family, and feasting. This dissertation is dedicated to Stephanie Elsky, my autem mort, who has the miraculous ability to give my life and my work both shape and meaning. Finally, I would like to remember my mother, Frances Friedlander. Her vivid tales of work at the criminal division of the Bronx County Supreme Court prepared me for this dissertation, and this life, better than she knew. iv Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii List of Figures vi Abstract vii Chapter 1. Introduction: Desire and Increase 1 2. “This Untoward Generation of Loose Libertines”: Sexual Crime and Criminal Sexuality in Early Modern English Rogue Literature 29 3. Pressed Men: Biopolitics and Sodomy in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV 77 4. Mastery, Masculinity, and Sexual Cozening in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene 105 5. Barricadoes for Bellies: Sexual Regulation and Communal Reproduction in The Winter’s Tale 134 6. Coda: The Vice is of a Great Kindred 164 Bibliography 169 v List of Figures Figure 1. Title Page of Robert Greene’s A Notable Discovery of Coosenage (London, 1592) 9 2. Frontispiece to Robert Greene’s The Second Part of Connie-catching (London, 1592) 11 3. Title Page of Robert Greene’s A Disputation Betweene a Hee Conny-Catcher, and a Shee Conny-catcher (London, 1592) 12 4. Title Page of The Defence of Conny Catching (London, 1592) 13 5. “A readie forme for a speedie inspection of the poore,” from An Ease for Overseers of the Poore (London, 1601) 86 6. Woodcut of Cross-biting, here called Fool-taking, title page to Robert Greene’s The Thirde and Last Part of Conny-Catching (London, 1592) 112 vi Abstract This dissertation argues that early modern popular pamphlets, moralist literature, legal statutes, and stage drama consistently represent the criminal underclass – or “rogues,” as they were called – in sexualized terms, as a “promiscuous generation” consumed by “sensuall lust.” These texts construct a causal connection between the supposed immoderate sexuality of the vagrant poor, the deceitful conman, and the wily prostitute and their alleged prodigious fertility, forging tight links between sexual activity, biological reproduction, and the increase of the criminal poor. While literary and cultural critics have commonly consigned rogues to the margins of early modern culture, where they are thought to mark the boundaries of their society, my dissertation demonstrates that rogue sexuality can be found at the center of stage depictions of the English court, capital, and nation. The first half of my dissertation focuses on the biological threat posed by rogues in a range of popular literatures and in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV. The second half examines the role of rogue sexuality in the performance of masculinity and femininity in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. By tracing the movement of rogue sexuality from a criminal to a more normative register, my project challenges the sharp distinctions that literary critics and historians of sexuality tend to draw between early modern discourses of orderly and disorderly sexuality; instead, it illuminates the often-unstable interplay between licit and illicit vii sexuality, thereby redefining the relationship between the normative and the criminal in early modern England. The analytical category of rogue sexuality also provides a new framework for interpreting the cultural logic of sexual reproduction in early modern England. That is, the early modern panic over the reproductive consequences of promiscuous rogue sexuality charts a movement from thinking about individual sexual sin to the social ramifications of reproductive behavior writ large, comprising part of the pre-history of the modern state’s interest in human reproductive life that Michel Foucault calls “biopower.” viii Chapter 1 Introduction: Desire and Increase Shakespeare’s sonnets, published in 1609, open with seventeen poems exhorting a young gentleman to marry and reproduce. This theme is established immediately, as the first line of the first poem reads “From fairest creatures we desire increase.”1 “Fair” appears to mean “beautiful” here, since the next line explains that we desire the reproduction of fair creatures “that thereby beauty’s Rose might never die” (1.2). “Fair” also means “gentle,” however, and like that word, it carries similar connotations of social difference – fair as opposed to coarse or vulgar.2 This line thus signals not only a conservationist approach to beauty, but also a propagandistic promotion of elite reproduction.3 Later in the sequence, this position is reinforced with a critique of lower class reproduction, advising “Let those whom nature hath not made for store,/ Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish” (11.9-10). The “ideological force of the imperious first line,” as Margreta de Grazia has described it, thus not only endorses rising elite reproduction, but as the lines from Sonnet 11 make clear, advocates a reduction in the 1 William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 1.1. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically. 2 Margreta de Grazia writes “Fair is the distinguishing attribute of the dominant class” (emphasis in the original). See de Grazia, “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets” Shakespeare Survey 46 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 35-49, esp 45. 3 Lars Engle stresses the conservational aspect of the sonnets in Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of his Time (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993), 27-53. 1 numbers of the unfair, as well.4 This contrast also implies an inverse relationship between the two populations: the increase of the fair is as good as the decrease of the rude. That there are some people from whom we desire decrease is also articulated in the procreation sonnets’ antecedent, Thomas Wilson’s translation of Erasmus’s “Epistle to Persuade a Young Gentleman to Marriage” (1553), which advises that those “whose kyndred is suche that it were better for the commune weale, they were all deade, than that any of that name shoulde be a lyve” should not marry.5 Erasmus expresses this reproductive calculus in ethical terms – the good of the commonwealth is hindered when evil men reproduce. Shakespeare’s “procreation” sonnets, however, reduce the ethics of reproductive fitness to a question of social status. To be fair is to be reproductively justified; to be otherwise is not.