Dreaming the English Renaissance This page intentionally left blank Dreaming the English Renaissance Politics and Desire in Court and Culture Carole Levin DREAMING THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE Copyright © Carole Levin, 2008 All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the US - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-6089-4 (hardcover) ISBN-10: 1-4039-6089-5 (hardcover) ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60261-8 (paperback) ISBN-10: 0-230-60261-4 (paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levin, Carole, 1948– Dreaming the English Renaissance : politics and desire in court and culture / Carole Levin.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-6089-4 ISBN-10: 1-4039-6089-5 ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60261-8 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-230-60261-4 (pbk.) 1. Dreams—England—History—16th century. 2. Dreams—England— History—17th century. 3. England—History—16th century. 4. England— History—17th century. I. Title. BF1078.L469 2008 154.6'3094209032—dc22 2008012159 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Westchester Book Group First edition: October 2008 10987654321 Printed in the United States of America. Dream of family tree. Private collection. This page intentionally left blank A dream will tell the truth, but not to everyone. Russian proverb This book is for John Watkins, dear friend and intellectual companion, and for Anya, Alexander, and April Riehl and HtB, who help me have sweet dreams This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 1 1605, the Year of Three Dreams 9 2 Theorists and Practitioners: Dreaming about the Living and the Dead 33 3 Religion and Witchcraft 61 4 Sexuality, Power, and Dreams of a New Dynasty 93 5 Sacred Blood and Monarchy 127 Afterword 159 Notes 161 Bibliography 189 Index 205 This page intentionally left blank List of Illustrations 1.1 Richard Haydock 15 3.1 Thomas Cranmer 63 3.2 Martyrdom of Agnes Potten 67 5.1 Hogenberg, St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre 133 5.2 Hogenberg, Death of Henry II of France 134 5.3 Death of William II 136 5.4 1607 painting of head of Mary Stuart 144 5.5 William Clarke, Death of Elizabeth I 156 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments I first started thinking about this book in the early 1990s when I was com- pleting my study of Elizabeth I, The Heart and Stomach of a King, and came across dreams about the queen. I decided I wanted to do a book on dreams in the English Renaissance, and to make the material accessible, the spelling of early modern sources has been modernized. I have had much help in cre- ating this book. John Watkins, Jo Carney, and Linda Shenk each read the entire manuscript. Lynn Botelho, Debbie Barrett-Graves, and Al Geritz read portions. I appreciate their generous and helpful feedback. I want to espe- cially thank Ruth Elwell for her professional index. Indeed, so many people have been so generous that I have thought all I had to do for research was tell people my project and then wait for the won- derful examples that they shared with me. I was fortunate to be able to do research for this book at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2003. I want to thank Carla Zecher and the staff of the Renaissance Studies Program for their help and support. Fellow scholars Susan Sleeper-Smith, Jeanie Brink, Stephanie Leitch, and especially Tilar Mazzeo and Anna-Lisa Cox helped create a won- derful working environment. Above all, I am grateful to Dina Kalman Spoerl, who made working at the Newberry a delight. I was also so fortunate that year to have time with Robert Bucholz, Gina Buccola, and Jonathan Walker, who not only provided help and support on the project but great friendship as well. The summer of 2004, I held a short-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. I was indeed fortunate that Lynn Botelho was there at the same time; she helped me in the reading of manu- scripts and has been a wonderful friend ever since. The 2006–2007 year at the Folger Shakespeare Library allowed me to complete the research and much of the writing of this book. My year at the Folger was magical. Georgianna Ziegler is the queen of reference librarians. Carol Brobeck takes great care of the fellows. I am deeply grateful to other readers and fellows, most especially Tim Harris and Paul Hammer who read sections of the manuscript and provided me with fascinating dream refer- ences. Also, Andrew Fleck, Melissa Smith, Julian Yates, Rebecca Winer, Jim Bono, Susan Wabuda, Kimberly Hossain, Kim Coles, Denise Walen, Margaret Hunt, Patrick Tuite, Katie Crawford, Marissa Greenburg, and Jay Zysk offered me wonderful friendship and great dream references. Those on the Folger staff generously do the work that allows those of us who come as xiv A cknowledgments readers to produce our scholarship. Gail Kern Paster is a great scholar who understands what scholars need. Betsy Walsh makes the reading room the best place in the world for scholars, with the help of Harold Batie, LuEllen Dehaven, Dragan Gill, Karen Kettnich, Rosalind Larry, Nicole Murray, and Camille Seerattan. I am so deeply grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for the two long-term fellowships that allowed me to do research and writing at these two premiere libraries. I also wish to thank Charles Beem, Patricia Crawford, Susan Doran, Erin Kelly, Tom Freeman, Tom Hanks, Bruce Janacek, Gwynne Kennedy, Karolyn Kinare, Rebecca Larouche, Sara Mendelson, Andrew Murphy, Susan O’Malley, Lois Schwoerr, Martha Skeeters, Pamela Starr, and Retha Warnicke for offering me dream references or encouragement when I needed it, or sometimes both. I presented my research at a number of scholarly conferences and universities and am grateful for the questions and comments that allowed me to refine my arguments. My current, former, and future graduate students graciously listened to many accounts of dreams, and I am particularly grateful to Amy Gant, Matthew Hansen, Joy Currie, Michael Hewitt, Shawndra Holderby, Hesham Khadawardi, Amber Harris Leichner, Nathan Martin, Shannon Meyer, Cassie Olsen, Nate Probasco, Mark Reuter, Lisa Schuelke, Christine Stewart- Nuñez, and most especially Timothy Elston, who even shared with me his dream about the game show “Name That Monarch,” hosted by Henry VII. Carolyn Biltoft spent her year before entering graduate school helping me with research. I am deeply grateful to my home institution, the University of Nebraska, for all the support I have received for this project. Love Library’s holdings are excellent, and the Interlibrary Loan office at Love Library also facilitated research I needed with efficiency and grace. Kathy Johnson is a gifted refer- ence librarian who truly loves books and seems to know everything. I partic- ularly wish to thank Prem Paul, the Vice Chancellor for Research, and Laura Damuth, the director of the undergraduate research program, UCARE. My UCARE research assistants Jarrod Brand, Lindsay Kerns, Natasha Luepke, Cassie Olsen, and Erica Wright not only provided great help to the project, but also are wonderful, brilliant students with whom I was greatly privileged to work. The staff at Palgrave treat their authors really well; I am especially grateful to Michael Flamini, who believed in this project at the beginning, and to Chris Chappell, who shepherded it through at the end. Certain people have been steadfast in their support of this project and no one could dream of better friends than Pamela Nickless, Lena Orlin, Michele Osherow, Anya Riehl, Lynn Spangler, Pat Sullivan, Rick Cypert, Jody Stoneking, and especially Elaine Kruse. My thanks to all of you. I ntroduction4 Why do dreams matter so much to us? Dreams themselves, and the way we interpret them, take us into the deepest part of our individual as well as cultural psyches. Dreams indicate to us the ways in which we are fundamentally the same as peoples of earlier times and also the ways in which we are deeply dif- ferent. Dreams—and discussions of dreams—can give us information about the most significant issues of a historical period, especially the sites where religion and politics, as well as death and power, intersect. Popular literature and his- torical documents from early modern England include a remarkable number of recorded dreams and a considerable discourse on their meanings. But if we have difficulties in understanding our own dreams and those of our contem- poraries, we have to be especially careful in our investigations of the dreams of peoples from centuries ago. Anthony Stevens cautions that interpreting “the dream of someone long dead presents impressive difficulty because one cannot ask the dreamer for his associations or the products of his active imagination.” Clearly, we must deal carefully with dreams as cultural evidence since “dreams are,” as Charles Carlton notes in his own work on the dream life of seventeenth- century Archbishop William Laud, “ephemeral” sources.1 Some early modern dreams sound strikingly similar to those we have today. The dream that so many academics admit to having of finding them- selves in a classroom completely unprepared to teach parallels a dream the seventeenth-century clergyman Ralph Josselin had of a similar lack of prepa- ration.