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Subjects of Advice: Drama and Counsel from More to Shakespeare

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Subjects of Advice: Drama and Counsel from More to Shakespeare Subjects of Advice: Drama and Counsel from More to Shakespeare Ivan Lupić Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Ivan Lupić All rights reserved ABSTRACT Subjects of Advice: Drama and Counsel from More to Shakespeare Ivan Lupić The dissertation focuses on the relationship between political thinking and dramatic expression in the early modern period, especially in England. I approach this topic by considering what political historians have termed “the problem of counsel”—a vexed issue situated at the very center of Renaissance moral and political philosophy and informing in multiple ways the relationship between sovereign power and its subjects. Because of drama’s central concern with the transformation of speech into action as well as its focus on the moral making of the individual, dramatists found in counsel a powerful instrument with which to develop specific kinds of dramatic character, create tension within individual scenes, and provide motivation for dramatic plots. Counsel also proved a convenient, familiar space within which to think through different, often controversial, political ideas and to give them reality and shape in the embodied representations of the stage. By analyzing and contextualizing plays ranging chronologically from Tudor interludes, such as those by Henry Medwall or John Redford, to Jacobean tragedies, notably Shakespeare’s King Lear, the dissertation shows how significant counsel was as a shaping force in the construction of different kinds of plays in the period. It also demonstrates how this varied dramatic material itself contributed to the early modern understanding of the theory and practice of counsel. TABLE OF CONTENTS Prologue Subjects of Advice 1 Chapter 1 The More Part: Playing Good Counsel 15 Chapter 2 Counsel’s Tyranny: The Instructive Case of George Buchanan 75 Chapter 3 Counsel from History: Exemplary Advice in Cambyses and Gorboduc 123 Chapter 4 Imperious Friendships: Reclaiming Counsel in Damon and Pythias and Edward II 181 Chapter 5 Out of Season: Language, Politics, and Counsel in Shakespeare’s King Lear 232 Epilogue Drama and Counsel 279 Bibliography 284 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The topic for this dissertation emerged from the work I did as a graduate student at Columbia University, particularly while preparing for the oral examination that took place at the end of the third year of the program. My oral examination committee and my dissertation defense committee were identical: David Kastan, Jean Howard, Alan Stewart, Anne Prescott, and Jenny Davidson. To all of them I owe gratitude, which I here acknowledge prompted less by a sense of duty—of which I hold no high opinion—than a sense of pleasure. All of them were always at my disposal and always cheerfully so; that I have profited from their learning and from their intellectual brilliance less than I perhaps could have done only shows the extent of my inveterate stubbornness. David Kastan kindly agreed to direct the dissertation despite the fact that his change of institutional affiliation could have easily freed him from this obligation. All that is ill- advised here should be blamed on the inordinate quantity of coffee that I consumed through his generous ministration. The dedication, I should perhaps clarify, was penned in perfect sobriety and with considerable help from a very chaste poet. My six years at Columbia were supported by a Marjorie Hope Nicolson fellowship in the English and Comparative Literature Department. I had the privilege of working with some of America’s best faculty and graduate students. I learnt from what they said and what they did, in and out of the classroom. I always felt at home. The Early Modern Dissertation Seminar proved a productive place for the occasional testing of my ideas, and I would like to thank its past and present members for being there. András Kiséry, who moved on soon after I arrived, nonetheless continued to show interest in my work and to comment on it with characteristic optimism. ii Ashley Streeter (formerly Brinkman) organized with me a scholarly conference on “The Reading of Books and the Reading of Literature,” which made my thinking about the relationship between books and literature less obscure. The Columbia Renaissance Seminar, part of the University Seminars, for over three years both fed me and paid me once a month to do what I would have done anyway; its members and administrators made my life both easier and more comfortable. The Global Supplementary Grant which I received in three consecutive years from the Open Society Foundation enabled me to maintain academic contacts with my European colleagues and to visit my family once a year. Grants from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library helped me both formulate and enrich the project. While at Columbia, I knew I was exploiting the best library system in the world; I regret not being able to take it away with me. I also regret not being able to take away the whole wonderful City of New York with me. The friendship, faith, and learning of Irena Bratičević, never discouraged by distance, made everything better; it made Chapter 2 noticeably so. The friendship, insight, and humor of Vesna Bogojević, never discouraged by closeness, made everything more enjoyable. iii Castane, tibi: namque tu solebas meas esse aliquid putare nugas iv PROLOGUE Subjects of Advice Don’t criticize. Don’t condemn. Don’t complain. These pithy pieces of advice are not meant just for those who wish to have long and successful academic careers; they are addressed to all success seekers, to all those whose business it is to communicate with and to handle people. The advice comes from the first chapter of a major twentieth-century success story, Dale Carnegie’s best-selling book How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1936, often reprinted, several times updated, and recently issued in a version adapted to the digital age. Among many other things, the book advises you to “arouse in the other person an eager want,” to smile as often as you can, and to remember that “a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Never say to another person “you’re wrong,” Carnegie admonishes; instead, “get the other person saying ‘yes, yes’ immediately,” and, finally—this is, for obvious reasons, my favorite—“dramatize your ideas.”1 Carnegie’s book should always be read with what we might call its ancient antidote, Plutarch’s essay “How a Man May Discerne a Flatterer from a Friend,” as the title was rendered in English by Philemon Holland early in the seventeenth century.2 Prior to this date, the essay was known to Renaissance England primarily in a Latin translation executed by Erasmus and dedicated to Henry VIII in 1513.3 Carnegie and Plutarch approach the idea of the friend, and 1 Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People, rev. ed. (New York: Pocket Books, 1981). My quotations are taken from the summary reminders appearing after every chapter. 2 Plutarch, The Philosophie, commonlie called, the Morals, trans. Philemon Holland (London: Arnold Hatfield, 1603), sigs. G6r-K4v. 2 PROLOGUE SUBJECTS OF ADVICE consequently the idea of advice, from diametrically opposed viewpoints. The friends Carnegie wishes you to win are the same friends whom Plutarch is anxious to warn against the likes of Carnegie. To be criticized, to be told the truth however unpalatable it may be, and to have one’s faults exposed or one’s opinions corrected is, according to Plutarch, what one should expect, and indeed desire, from a friend. If one is flattered, one’s access to truth is blocked and the central project of ancient philosophy—to truly know oneself—is thwarted. If, as Bacon observes in his essay “Of friendship,” there is “no such flatterer as is a man’s self,” then self-knowledge can be obtained only in the presence of another person, through one’s subjection to acts of what in Greek was called parrhesia and in Latin licentia, the freedom to speak plainly, fearlessly, truthfully.4 The task of telling the truth, of saying what one really thinks, acquires in the Renaissance a renewed urgency and becomes, for various historical, political, and cultural reasons, extremely complicated. We find it closely linked not just to the question of ethos, of character or moral subject, but to the question of the commonwealth and its central political relations. In the largely monarchical context of early modern Europe, the problem of frank speech in relation to moral character on the one hand and to politics on the other finds its dominant articulation in the idea of counsel.5 Trained in textual wisdom and equipped with experience, the humanist counselor 3 Fred Schurink, “Print Patronage, and Occasion: Translations of Plutarch’s Moralia in Tudor England,” The Yearbook of English Studies 38.1/2 (2008): 86-101, at p. 88. 4 Francis Bacon, “Of Frendship,” in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan, The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 15 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000 [1985]), p. 85. 5 For an informative survey, see John Guy, “The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England,” in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 292-310. Guy explains the gradual disappearance of counsel from the center of political discourse in the course of the seventeenth century as a result of the increase of parliamentary powers. It remains an issue that is of interest to dramatists in England even after the 3 PROLOGUE SUBJECTS OF ADVICE engages in a dialogue with the prince in order to help him shape the best kind of sovereign subjectivity but also to participate himself in the shaping of political outcomes.
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