"In censure of his seeming": External marking, fashion and travel in the English Renaissance.

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Content INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microShn master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type o f computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. 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"IN CENSURE OF fflS SEEMING" EXTERNAL MARKING, FASHION AND TRAVEL IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE by LAURA SCAVUZZO WHEELER A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) December 1998 Copyright 1998 Laura Scavuzzo Wheeler Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 9930525 UMI Microform 9930525 Copyright 1999, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007 This dissertatioK written by ...................... under the direction of h.JZX. Dissertation Committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re~ quirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY V-' ... I Dean of Graduate Studies 9 /2 5 /9 8 Date DISSERTATION COMMITTEE Chairperson Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. II Contents One Utopia and External Marking Introduction 1-4 Sir Thomas More's UiO'gid. 4-13 Sumptuary Law 13-19 Sumptuary Law in Renaissance Studies 19-28 Non-Elizabethan Sumptuary Law 28-35 Implications fo r Reading Utopia 35-36 Two "Fantastical Forreigne Toyes": Guarding Against Fashion's Infections Introduction 37-40 Quippes, Class Distinctions, and English Simplicity 40-50 On Eve and Gendering 50-68 The Marketplace 68-75 Signs o f the Foreign 75-83 Cross-Dressing 83-86 "The Character o f a Painted Woman " 86-102 Protestant Re-fashioningsn 103-109 The Whore o f Babylon 109-119 Three English Self-Alienation The Case of Italy and the Strumpet of Rome Introduction 120-123 Part I: The Case Asainst Travel Abroad "The Glory o f a Perfect Breeding"? Reasons to Stay Home 123-137 "The Depravation o f Manners": The Moral Pitfalls o f Travel to Italy 137-143 A Female Italy: Circes’ Court 143-152 The Nature o f the Traveller's Metamorphosis 153-157 Case Study: A Fictional Englishman Abroad in Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller 157-172 A Traveller on the Stage: The Two Gentleman of Verona 172-177 Part II: Champions o f Travel Justifications fo r Risking the Beastly Metamorphosis 178-191 Ulysses' "Hearbe called Moly": Defenses Against Travel's Dangers and Critics 191-206 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ill Excursus John Wolfe: Printer, Pirate and Propagandist 207-218 Four Ornament: Language, Clothing, and Deportment in the Renaissance Introduction 219-226 The Style versus Content Debate 226-238 Dame Eloquence 238-248 Ink-Wasting Trifles 248-251 Puritans and the Plain Style— The Sign Signified 251-263 Understanding God's Signs 263-277 The Traveller in Faerie Land 277-287 Conclusion "These Troublesome Disguises that We Wear": A Miltonic Eden 2&g-29d Figures 297-301 Bibliography 302-320 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. IV List of Figures F i g u r e O n e F i g u r e T w o F i g u r e T h r e e F i g u r e F o u r F i g u r e F iv e F i g u r e S ix Andrew Boorde, The Fyrst Boke o f the Introduction o f Knowledge, 1542 Lukas de Heere, "The Englishman in his Native Dress," Sixteenth Century Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentlewoman, drawne out to the full body: Expressing, what habilliments doe best attire her, what complements doe best accomplish her, 1631 Frontispiece to Thomas Coryat's 1611 Coryat's Crudities Dialectic, History, and Rhetoric supported by Grammar. Joannes Sambucus, Emblemata, et aliquot nummi antiquie operis, Antwerp, 1616 Frontispiece to the 1649 Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture o f His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abstract Through an examination of the subjects of fashion and Continental travel, especially to Italy, this project investigates impulses toward external marking in early modem England and how those impulses are worked out in literature. The Reformation creates an enlivened desire to read, and clarify, markings of all sorts. In England, dissatisfaction with language becomes part of an insistent Protestant identity, in which inward religious experience is constantly validated by outward signs. The English Protestant project is played out in the question of external marking— of clothes, of character, of language, and of faith. There are four studies here, all examining the same problem o f external marking from various angles: first. Sir Thomas More's Utopia-, second, satiric verses, treatises, and conduct books on women's fashions; third, national concerns, as manifested in discussions of travel, especially to Italy; and fourth, literary debates over the nature of language in a fallen world. These four chapters represent different approaches to the same issue. By looking at discussions of fashion and travel, I examine, as did writers of the time, the perceptions of God’s outward signs in the world. One cannot read such perceptions fully unless they are seen as Protestant perceptions: the compunction to read within the search for God defines moralists of the age. My project attempts to address the paradox of the Protestants, who declared themselves both new and old at the same time, by examining four, apparently disparate aspects of this question of external marking. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter One Utopia and External Marking Two images of nakedness frame the disputes and disputations of the Protestant Reformation. One: In Sir Thomas More's 1516 dialogue t/fop/a, the well-travelled Raphael Hythloday proclaims the attributes of a far-off Utopian society in which citizens, denied chances for corruption, hiding places, or "lurking comers," live openly and honestly "under the eies of every man."' When choosing marriage partners, the Utopians seek to avoid surprises by displaying publicly the undressed bodies of the future couple. "For a sad and honest matrone sheweth the woman, be she mayde or widdowe, naked to the wower. And lykewyse a sage and discre<^e man exhibyteth the wower naked to the woman" (85). Another quite different image of newlyweds appears in 1667: without need of covering, Milton's Adam and Eve tend the Garden of Eden and serve food to the angel Raphael. Eve, "Undeckt, save with herself more lovely fa ir... Stood to entertain her guest from Heaven; no veil/ Shee needed. Virtue-proof'-; Adam greets the angel . . . without more train Accompanied than with his own complete Perfections; in himself was all his state. More solemn than the tedious pomp that waits On Princes, when thir rich Retinue long Of Horses led, and Grooms besmear'd with Gold Dazzles the crowd, and sets them all agape. (V.350-357) At "Table Eve! Minister'd naked" (V.443-444), her modest and unself-conscious nakedness a sign of the couple's innocence before the Fall. One of their first acts after the Fall, of course, is to cover themselves, "to hide/ The Parts of each from other, that seem most/ To shame obnoxious, and unseemliest seen" (IX. 1092- 1094). 'Thomas More, Utopia: A New Translation, Backgrounds, Criticism, trans. and ed. Raphe Robynson (London, Toronto, Paris: J. M. Dend and Sons, 1916), 65. Uohn Milton, Paradise Lost, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y Hughes (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957), V.379-384. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 The fallen innocents' scramble to cover their bodies stands in contrast to the Utopian bride and groom's eyeing of each others' physiques. Unabashed nakedness in Milton's Eden symbolizes lack of sin; nakedness in Utopia is a tool of the state to avoid secret deformities and failed marriages. Within the context of More's dialogue, which is often read as a critique of England and European society, the absurdity of the exposed bride and groom is as much an excess as are the extremes of fashion More criticizes in his own society. Milton's naked couple also serves to criticize the England of his time, though Milton's barbs are directed at targets different from More's. Utopia is a realm in which appearance is monitored to control citizens' behavior. Thomas More's presentation of the Utopians' solutions, however, suggests that their attempts to remove complexity lead to the absurd. More, writing within a humanist tradition of rich debate and polemical discussion, produces a model state that despite its reasoned policies, proves as full of contradiction as his own. The open society of Utopia is held up by Hythloday as a model of the perfectly rational nation. The Utopians note, for example, that before marriage in less cautious countries, "al the resydewe of the woomans bodye beinge covered with cloothes, they esteme her scaselye be one handebredeth (for they can se no more but her face)," neglecting that "so foule deformitie maye be hydde under those coverings... " (85).^ Yet the Utopians' attempts to impose, by rules, a country in which meaning is transparent, citizens appear to be what they ^Chaucer brings up a similar issue in the Wife of Bath's Prologue, vv. 285-91: "Thou seist that oxen, asses, hors, and houndes,/ They been assayed at diverse stoundes; . . . But folk of wyves maken noon assay,/ Til they be wedded. . . ." He (and Hythloday) may be echoing Jerome, who writes, "If she has a bad temper, or is a fool, if she has a blemish, or is proud, or has bad breath, whatever her fault may be-all this we learn after marriage. Horses, asses, cattle, even slaves of the smallest worth, clothes, kettles, wooden seats, cups, and earthenware pitchers, are first tried and then bought: a wife is the only thing that is not shown before she is married, for fear she may not give satisfaction" {Adversus Jovlnianum, cited by R. Howard Bloch in Medieval Misogyny and the Invention ofW estem Romantic Love (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 205 n.21). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 actually are, and no mysteries remain lurking beneath the surface, give rise to customs that even their admirer Hythloday must call "very fond and folyshe" (85). Only in the interchange of ideas and the embrace of complexity can solutions be found. More suggests; the attraction of a clearly-readable nakedness is illusion bom of oversimplification. Yet Milton, writing one hundred-fifty years later, presents an Eden in which, before the Fall, Adam and Eve are blessed by an "innocence, that as a veil/ Had shadow'd them from knov/ing ill"; they are naked in body, but such nakedness acts as a garment that preserves their purity (DC. 1054-1055). The perfection of the pre-lapsarian state is represented in the integrity of Adam and Eve's nakedness: as they are without clothes, so are they without shame or guile. Such nostalgia for a simple state of undress, in stark contrast to More's mocking of the Utopians' turn to nakedness to remove mystery, can perhaps be understood in terms of these two writers' relationship to what has come to be called the Reformation. One of the first acts of the Protestants was to reject the legitimacy of just such differences of opinion that More embraced. Tmth was to be found in the Bible, not in centuries of Church writings. Yet by the time that Milton was composing Paradise Lost, this Protestant quest for a self-evident tmth had become its own tradition of bickering over details of ceremony and controversies over church vestments. Milton's Paradise (his own utopia) is a place where a single transparent tmth is tenuous, yet possible. Adam and Eve's nakedness stands idealized. I begin with images of nakedness, but my study is concerned with just the opposite— with what such images of the unclothed speak of early modem attitudes toward clothing as forms of external marking in society. The years surrounding the Reformation reveal much concern over just such issues of external marking in a fallen world: More and Milton are merely two examples. Controversies over Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 4 fashion (both secular and ecclesiastical) and in a similar manner Continental travel, especially to Italy, spring from larger questions of what constitutes reality and truth in a Protestant universe. Individually these subjects have been studied in great depth. But no one has yet examined them together through the lens of the Reformation, during which fundamental philosophical debates— not necessarily new, but newly important— are played out in these two areas, and greatly affect how English society attempts to respond to the influences that it perceives as threatening to a Reformed English state. My project will investigate the functions of fashion and travel to Italy in Reformation English society. The intersections of these subjects, which reveal much about the status of women in Renaissance society and treatment of the foreign, are implicated in a number of other issues: Renaissance debates over style and content, a modem understanding of the Renaissance Englishman's self-definition, and an overlapping of humanist concerns, religious debate, and the uses of language. Sir Thomas More's Utopia More’ s Utopia proves an interesting way to approach early modem attitudes toward external marking because of More's critical and questioning view of his own model. The enforced openness of living, "under the eies of every man," that More's traveller Hythloday applauds extends to all manner of outward show in Utopia; despite its egalitarian and pragmatic purposes, such control performs contradictory functions. The practical and plain clothes which they have always worn— "one fashion . . . continueth for evermore unchaunged" (55)— announce Utopians' equality, although their dress is also used to highlight differences. The desire for equality cannot co-exist with the desire for transparency of meaning. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5 Such ambivalence about fashion, in which the virtues of plain, equalizing clothes are extolled at the same time that differences are deemed essential to the workings of the society, are by no means limited to More's imaginary island. More is skeptical of the Utopians' world, whose moves to control its citizens' appearance and thus, behavior, resemble efforts in English society. An examination of such contradictory impulses— to label and to remove all forms of labeling— yields a paradigm for reading many other Renaissance attempts at exterior marking. Utopia has long been read as a reproach to Europe, a rational answer to the inconsistencies of human behavior. As Robert C. Elliot wrote in 1963, "Hythloday's tale is of a realm that he finds ideal, where laws, customs, and institutions are designed to foster the good, and to suppress the wickedness, in m an.. . . the very presentation of Utopian life has a satiric function in so far as it points up the discrepancy between what is and what ought to be" (187).'^ The start of the dialogue establishes the traveller Hythloday as an authority to speak of the world due to his Ulysses-like quests for knowledge. But the narrator warns readers not to expect tales of "monsters, bycause they be no newes" nor of "barkyge Scyllaes, ravenyng Celenes, and Lestrigones devourers of people, and suche lyke great, and incredible monsters" (17). Instead, accounts of civilized, wise and "sensible" institutions fill the characters' discussions, and the model of Utopia is presented not for entertainment, but for edification. Much of the pointed commentary in Utopia on the depravity of the current state centers around extravagances of dress and unseemly desire for luxurious commodities, excesses most visible. For example, a problem exclusive to England, according to Hythloday, is the excessive hunger of English sheep, who in their quest for food in '‘Robert C. Elliot, "The Shape of Utopia," English Literary History, Vol. 30, no. 4 (December 1963): 317-334. Reprinted in Adams'translation, pp. 177-192. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 6 order to produce the "fynest, and therfore dearest woll" (23-24) are "Become so great devowerers and so wylde, that they eate up, and swallow downe the very men them selfes- They consume, destroye, and devoure whole fieldes, howses, and cities" (23). The foolish practice of keeping sheep for their wool rather than caring for the human inhabitants of an area is further compounded by the habits of the rich landowners: Nowe to amende the matter, to this wretched beggerye and miserable povertie is joyned greate wantonnes, importunate superfluitie, and excessive riote. For not only gentle mennes servauntes, but also handicraft men: yea and almooste the ploughmen of the countrey, with al other sortes of people, use muche straunge and proude newefanglenes in their appareil, and to muche prodigall riotte and sumptuous fare at their table. (25) Such behavior is condemned as not only a result of generally profligate customs, but as contributing to the downfall of society: large-scale thievery, desperately poor lower classes, and unjust treatment of criminals who have been driven to their crimes spring from the excesses of the upper classes. The absurdity of those who value fine clothes is thoroughly mocked in the persons of the Anemolian ambassadors, who arrive in Utopia dressed in all their finery, "determyned in the gorgiousnes of their apparel to represente verye goddes" only to be taken for slaves (69). The Utopians are held up as paragons of common sense in the matter of clothing: Or that anye man is so madde, as to count him selfe the nobler for the smaller or fyner threde of wolle, which selfe same wol (be it now in never so fyne a sponne threde) a shepe did ones weare: and yet was she all that time no other thing then a shepe. (70) Regardless of the delicacy of a cloth, they scoff, a sheep wore it once, and remained nothing but a sheep. In contrast to foreigners' ridiculous pursuit of fashion, Utopians wear the same style of clothing that they have always worn "for evermore unchaunged," caring only that the clothes are comfortable, attractive, do Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7 "no lette to the movynge and weldynge of the bodye," can be worn throughout the seasons, and can be made at home (55). The Utopians' refusal to be impressed by outward finery, and their own practical approach to dress, are set up as a response to the excesses of English dress. The horrendous inequalities created by the English desire for soft and expensive wool are avoided by controlling how Utopians dress and what they value in ornament. Elsewhere, "many vayne and superfluous occupations must nedes be used, to serve only for ryotous superfluite, and unhonest pleasure" (57), but in Utopia only that which is required is produced. Equality is created, in part, through dress. Hythloday lauds the unvaried simplicity of the Utopian dress code: Fyrste of al, whyles they be at woorke, they be covered homely with leather or skinnes, that will last vii. yeares. When they go furthe abrode they caste upon them a cloke, whych hydeth the other homelye apparel. These clookes through out the whole Hand be all of one coloure, and that is the natural coloure of the wull. They therefore do not only spend much lesse wullen clothe then is spente in other contreis, but also the same standeth them in muche lesse coste. But lynen clothe is made with lesse laboure, and is therefore hadde more in use. But in lynen cloth onlye whytenesse, in wullen only clenlynes is regarded. As for the smalnesse or finenesse of the threde, that is no thinge passed for. (59) In addition, "Nor the prince himselfe is not knowen from the other by princely appareil, or a robe of state, nor by a crown or diademe roial, or cap of maintenaunce" (88). Such lack of distinction in external appearance indicates the Utopians' admirable fairness: no such inequalities as those present in wool-crazed England plague Utopia. All cities have the same language, customs, institutions and laws, and "They be all set and situate alyke, and in al poyntes fashioned alyke, as farforthe as the place or plotte sufferethe" (49). Similarities in part create, and in part reflect, the Utopians' sense of equality. At the same time that Utopians impart equality through their customs and codes of dress, they seek transparency of meaning throughout their society, as in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 8 the case of the naked bride and groom. The exposed bodies of the intended pair indicate a desire to remove any hidden meaning and to form a society in which the external and internal match. Cosmetics ("payntinges") are spumed as "a vaine and wanton pride," because "they know, even by the very experience, that no comelinesse of bewtye doethe so hyghelye commende and avaunce the wives in the conceite of their husbandes, as honest conditions and lowlines" (87). To hide one's looks beneath the cover of cosmetics constitutes a form of untruthfulness; such art could also hide an unpleasant reality in the way that a woman's clothes can cloak deformity. The Utopians' distrust of anything concealed extends to the earth's features as well. Gold and silver are scorned because they are plentiful and because "nature hath geven no use, that we may not well lacke" (67). The Utopians' lack of regard for rich clothes, metals and other forms of ornament (and their inverse valuation of them) of course is a direct comment on the greed of Europeans. Hythloday points out that the Utopians are "just the other way" from Europeans: For where as they eate and drinke in earthen and glasse vesselles, whiche in dede be curiouslye and properlie made, and yet be of very small value: of golde and sylver they make commonly chaumber pottes, and other vesselles, that serve for most vile uses, not onely in their common halles, but in every mans private house. (68) Unlike those who occupy themselves with vain material concerns, Utopians are free from the service of the body, and devote themselves to the culture of the mind, where real happiness is to be found: [so] that what time maye possibly be spared from the necessarye occupacions and affayres of the commen wealth, all that the citiziens shoulde withdrawe from the bodely service to the free libertye of the minde, and garaisshinge of the same. For herein they suppose the felicitye of the liffe to consiste. (59-60) A love of the worthless trappings of the material world shows an enslaved, mundane existence. But besides their uselessness, the precious metals are further Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 9 disdained because of where they are found: "But of the contrarie parte, nature as a mooste tender and lovynge mother, hathe placed the beste and moos te necessarie thinges open abroade: as the ayere, the water, and the earth it selfe. And hathe removed and hyd farthest from us vayne and unprofitable thinges" (67). That which is concealed is to be distrusted. The urge to remove all hidden meaning inevitably must clash with the desire to create equality, in that not all members of the society are the same, and such distinctions must be obvious for the regimented society to operate smoothly. Contempt for hidden metals is transferred to the despised of society, and the lowest classes are identified clearly by their compelled ornamentation: the "greate chains, fetters, and gieves wherin they tie their bondmen" are gold or silver, while, Hythloday remarks, "Finally whosoever for anye offense be infamed, by their eares hange rynges of golde: upon their fyngers they weare rynges of golde, and aboute their neckes chaines of golde: and in conclusion their heades be tied aboute with gold" (68). Criminals who are to bear through life the mark of some disgraceful act are forced to wear golden rings on their ears, golden bands on their fingers, golden chains around their necks, and even golden crowns on their heads. Such adornment, a mockery of foreign values, serves not only to identify the slaves and criminals, but also to signify and reinforce the Utopians' disregard for the riches that other societies esteem. Hythloday notes that "Thus by al meanes possible thei procure to have golde and silver among them in reproche and infamie. And these mettalles, which other nations do as grevously and sorrowefullye forgo, as in a manner their owne lives: if they should altogethers at ones be taken from the Utopians, no man there would thinke that he had lost the worth of one farthing" (68). Children are urged to play with precious gems as if they were toys so that as adults, they will cast them off as worthless. The Utopians' posture toward what Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 10 other societies value is an open sign of their difference from them, just as the jewelry of slaves and criminals marks those members' exclusion from society. Vanity and extravagance of dress mark outside visitors as different and as fools (68-69). Other distinctions within this fair society are marked externally, as well. Citizens' clothing proclaims the wearer's sex and marital status. In church, all wear white except for the multi-colored garb of the priest, which "in workemanshipe bee excellent," although, as Hythloday is quick to point out, "in stuffe not verye prêtions. For theire vestimentes be neither embraudered with gold, nor set with precious stones. But they be wrought so fynely and conningelye with divers fethers of foules, that the estimation of no costely stuffe is hable to countervaile the price of the worke" (109). Significantly, the priest's clothing contains keys to his superior state: "in these birdes fethers, and in the dewe ordre of them, whiche is observed in theire setting, they saye, is conteyned certaine divine misteries. The interpretation wherof knowen, whiche is diligenrlye taught by the priestes" (109). In spiritual matters, it seems, the hidden indicates greater value and emphasizes the priest's difference from the laity. And indeed, the differences marked by such subtleties of dress reflect vast inequalities within the Utopian society. Wives must kneel before their husbands and children before their parents; slaves perform unsavory tasks— "all the particularly dirty and heavy work"— for citizens (63); the young are "generally" subject to their elders (61); citizens are confined to their locality unless able to display the prince's letter (65). Society is divided into various classes, of syphogrants, who "have geven a perpetual licence from laboure to leaminge" (58), scholars, craftsmen, and an elite group of ambassadors, priests, tranibors, and the prince. Because the society retains distinctions which are necessary for its organization and order, efforts to redefine signals which previously indicated Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 11 inequality simply render those signals meaningless. The Utopians' professed values and their actual values are in contradiction, and their plain, similar clothing provides a label of sameness for a reality that does not exist— no place, indeed. Thomas More is, of course, aware of such contradictions within his imaginary society. Even before he introduces Hythloday, who will praise the Utopians' escape from the burdens and vanities in external marking, the More character illustrates the practice of relying on appearance to label and to judge. After mass at "our Ladies Churche, which is the fayrest, the most gorgeous and curious Churche of buyldyng in all the Citie" of Antwerp (14), More spies the aged Hythloday. He immediately takes him to be a ship's captain for his sunburnt and bearded countenance and his dress, and a friend soon confirms his assessment (14-15). This brief preface to Hythloday's discourse serves to illustrate the role of external appearance in even chance encounters, and to suggest that Hythloday's recommendations will not necessarily translate to the outside world.^ Even the voice of More in the dialogue cannot always be taken to stand for More the author: when he comments that the Utopians' "communitie of their life and livynge, withoute anye occupieng of money, by the whiche thinge onelye all nobilitie, magnificence, wourshippe, honour, and majestie, athe true omamentes and honoures, as the common opinion is, of a common wealth, utterlye be overthrowen ^Disagreement appears on More's relationship to the character of Hythloday. For example, Robert C. Elliot points out that "Utopia argues for the ideal of communism by the best test available: More has given to Raphael Hythloday all the good lines" (192); he also references Russell A. Ames, who in Citizen Thomas More and His Utopia (Princeton, 1949), argues that "it should be no more necessary to prove that Hythloday speaks for More than to prove that the King of Brobdingnag speaks for Swift. 'In general, it should be obvious that no satirist will persuasively present at length major views with which he disagrees' (56)." Harry Berger, Jr., however, in "The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World," The Centennial Review IX (Winter 1965), pp. 63-74, claims that Book n of Utopia gives witness to More's "essential detachment" from the Utopian ideal, which More criticizes by portraying it as insular and closed-minded. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 12 and destroied" (114), the reader must wonder where More places himself— with Hythloday, the popular view, or neither. Certainly viewing Utopia in the tradition of social satire provides evidence for questioning More's allegiance to the suggestions laid out by Hythloday. But much of the criticism of English excesses and greed seems to be genuine in its biting tone and details, and the More character remarks dryly at the end of Book II, "so must I nedes confesse and graunt that many thinges be in the Utopian ewale publique, whiche in our cities I maye rather wiche for, then hope after" (115). In the "ideal" society that Hythloday presents, the excesses of English practices are matched by excesses in the opposite direction, to the point of absurdity. The satire cuts both ways. Although the abuses of English society may be reprehensible, to moderate them by attempting to control the complexities of meaning is equally mistaken. The humanist More thrived on ideas that grew from the multiplicities of texts and a diversity of ideas. Paul Kristeller has noted that "[i]n the history of philosophical thought, of science and learning, the Renaissance was an age of fermentation rather than of synthesis,"^ and More's writings fuel such intellectual fermentation. Utopia itself has provoked years of disputes over its intended meanings which continue today, "debate... endless and ultimately unresolvable. Was it medieval or modem? Serious or frivolous? Idealistic or practical? Basically Platonic or basically Aristotelian? Or all of the above?"'^ The very ambiguities of the work provoke discussion of its social criticisms and encourage thought. Much of More's writings illustrates his belief in the fruits of controversy. For example, in his long friendship with Erasmus beginning in 1499, More often defended ^Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, ed. by Michael Mooney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 197. ^Donald R. Kelley, Renaissance Humanism (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 64-65. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 13 Erasmus from his critics, advocating reform through a humanist program of learning. Erasmus's controversial translation of the New Testament, also published in 1516, was attacked in part because it corrected the Vulgate and allowed for differences of opinion in interpreting the Bible (ultimately providing material for Luther’ s assaults on the Church). Yet More defended the translation, as he had Erasmus's humorous \5\\P raise o f Folly, in which Erasmus purports to "mock, not to attack; to benefit, not to wound; to comment on men's manners, not to denounce them," although speaking jokingly.* The Folly, Erasmus admitted, was inspired by More himself, and his description of that satire could almost be applied to More's similarly biting Utopia.'^ Sumptuary Law More's own dialogue was inspired at least in part by contemporary events, and his description of Utopians' attempts to regulate external marking finds a close parallel in some legislation of early modern English society. One of the most *Erasmus discusses his work in a letter to the Dutch theologian Martin Dorp in May of 1515 as a form of public defense, and the letter was attached to many early editions of the Folly. Reproduced in Desideriiis Erasmus: The Praise o f Folly and Other Writings, trans. and ed. by Robert M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1989), 231. Erasmus wrote Folly while staying with More in England, and the Latin title of Erasmus's In Praise o f Folly is a pun on More's name: Encomium Moriae. ^Brian P. Copenahaver and Charles B. Schmitt, in Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), note that "the sources of More's perfect society, the Stoic-Epicurean ethics and the Platonic politics, are squarely in the humanist tradition, and the purpose of his book was to advance the Erasmian project of social and moral change, using irony and polemic to shame Europeans into becoming better Christians" (274-275). They add that More sent a copy of Utopia to Erasmus before its publication, and that when the book appeared in Louvain in 1516, More was "for all intents and purposes... still a free public intellectual, like Erasmus.. . . but a year later, when his role in quelling the xenophobic riots of Evil May Day enlarged his fame in London, More accepted Henry VTQ's invitation to become councillor, and by the summer of 1518 he was on the royal payroll," which caused him to examine as "genuinely perplexing" the question of how to speak the truth when in the role as advisor to the king, a topic broached in Utopia (277). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 14 obvious analogies to Utopian statutes is sumptuary law, made up of measures which "regulated the intimate personal conduct of men in distinction from their general political rights and duties," and which concentrated particularly on the fashions of citizens' clo th es.L iterary critics have recently focused attention on sumptuary laws as a way of understanding Elizabethan society, and much useful commentary on the movement of the middle classes in early modern England, as well as on Elizabethan negotiations over gender roles, power, and the figure of the transvestite, have sprung from examinations of these revealing sixteenth-century proclamations. In illustrating England's changing Renaissance society, the elaborate lists of sumptuary legislation often prove a powerful example for critics, in part because such lists seem so foreign to us today. We can little more imagine displaying brides and grooms naked to one another, Utopian-style, than we can imagine being subject to laws regulating each social class's right to wear fur or velvet or purple. But the lists were not so exotic to early modem society. The tradition of regulating dress and manners is a long and varied one, spanning centuries and cultures and decidedly not exclusive or new to sixteenth-century England. Despite this long history of sumptuary legislation, however, literary scholars whose interests center around Shakespearean society have tended to focus on only Elizabethan sumptuary laws, as if they were an independent phenomenon. Elizabethan sumptuary laws attract exclusionary interest for a number of reasons: because there are more of them, because they are well documented, because they occurred during the years that Shakespeare's plays were being performed, and because they seem to provide an easily-opened window into several of that society's concerns. Some of this attention may be justified, for as Frances Baldwin ‘^Frances Elizabeth Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1926), 9. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 15 points out in her extensive study of England's sumptuary law, the period from Elizabeth’ s accession to the throne until her death in 1603 was one of great activity in sumptuary legislation: numerous bills were presented seeking to regulate apparel and multiple proclamations dealing with dress were issued, some in a nev/ly- detailed and highly specific format which addressed every rung in the social ladder. And soon after Elizabeth's death and the start of James I's reign, in 1604, all acts regulating apparel were repealed, a move which "proved to be a death-blow to English sumptuary legislation" (249) and which suggests that attitudes toward such government oversight of fashion were undergoing change." Much of the recent emphasis on Elizabethan laws is found in studies which rely on Baldwin's 1926 work for historical information. But within Baldwin's own research there appears to be inherent contradiction, as she is concerned to define the Renaissance as markedly different from what preceded it despite her own evidence to the contrary. After spending nearly two hundred pages outlining the detailed and varied sumptuary legislation in England in the thirteenth century, during the Lancastrian and Yorkist periods, under Henry VU, Henry v m and Mary, Baldwin hails the reign of Elizabeth as unique. It is "a new chapter in English industrial history" and a new era of sumptuary legislation.*- The chapter ■ 'Few Elizabethan scholars have noted this disappearance of sumptuary law. Baldwin surmises that "such legislation was essentially mediaeval in its spirit— a manifestation of the mediaeval fondness for regulation. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, this spirit was commencing to die out. Perhaps the legislators had learned that such laws were very difficult to enforce" (249-250). Frank Whigham explains the repeal of the sumptuary laws as a response to a "fruitless waste of time," claiming "[t]he individual self-determination that such laws sought to restrict had become normative, and what many had wished to retain as differences in kind had finally become differences in degree only. At least in the realm of symbolic clothing, the chasm between ruling elite and subject classes had become permanently bridgeable." Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes o f Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 169. ‘-Baldwin reproduces in full one of the most famous of Elizabethan proclamations, "A Proclamation for the Redress of Inordinate Apparel," issued on October 21, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 16 on Elizabethan law, unlike previous chapters, begins with an encomium to E lizabeth.Elizabeth, Baldwin asserts, was a much more popular ruler than her predecessors, more selfless and balanced in her style: her subjects loved her "because of the prosperity which they enjoyed, and because they knew that she had the interests of the country, and not merely her own selfish desires, at heart" (192). Elizabeth I's era, free from the "mediaeval and feudal organization" of the past, was one in which, according to Baldwin, the "human mind with its increased activity was no longer content to work under the restrictions which custom, tradition and law had built up" (192-193). Baldwin then catalogues the sumptuary law produced during Elizabeth's reign, which, although more copious, does not differ conspicuously from what she describes for earlier periods. One can dismiss a certain element of this rhetoric as being part of the scholarly climate in which Baldwin wrote; conceptions of the Renaissance as "new"— originating perhaps with the Renaissance's own writers— govern how evidence is judged and presented. But seeing the Elizabethan period as decidedly distinct from earlier periods continues to 1559 (218-219). It should be noted that although this proclamation's fonnat was new, the order was merely reiterating earlier proclamations, 1 and 2 Philip and Mary and parts of 24 Henry VTH. Baldwin comments that "[m]ore royal orders dealing with dress seem to have been issued during Elizabeth's reign than at any other period in English history; at least, more o f them have been preserved" (220, my italics). Baldwin's chapter on Elizabethan sumptuary legislation, a principal source for most later literary critics' information, appears on pp. 192-247. Whigham speculates that frustration over the difficulties of enforcing sumptuary laws led to the large number issued under Elizabeth; "[t]he continuing variation in enforcement procedures in these restatements [of earlier proclamations] is also suggestive; such innovation implies a search for a solution to perceived ineffectiveness" (159). ‘^Although Baldwin's chapter on "Henry VII to Mary" does begin by lauding the character of the Tudor Henry VII, despite his place as ruler during a time of transition from chaos toward order: "Henry VH (1485-1509), the first of the Tudor kings,. .. was also the original possessor of the peculiar Tudor character, the union of immovable resoluteness with the highest degree of tact, by which those rulers accomplished so much" (120). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 17 be a popular critical move, and those who rely on Baldwin's views of sumptuary law may be unconsciously echoing her prejudices. David Aers has recently criticized what he describes as a New Historicist, Foucaultian tendency to find cultural mpture in the Renaissance. He derides the work "of those writing a history which claims to identify in the sixteenth century a new 'construction' of the subject and new socio-economic features which allegedly cause it" as a "systematic amnesia concerning economic and social organisation."'^ Aers points out that as early as the twelfth century, an inner sense of self is in evidence in multiple writings, although such an interiority is largely ignored or dismissed in much early modem scholarship, which places the "'emergence of the individual', bound up with the emergence of'a market economy' and 'liberal humanism'," confidently in the seventeenth century (189). Thus, "any account that tells us stories of transformations, whether in the 'construction of the subject' or in production for markets, will have to describe with great care, let me say it again, precisely that against which it is being alleged the changes are identifiable as •''"A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or. Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the 'History of the Subject'" (180-181). In Culture and History 1350- 1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 177-202. In her attempt to characterize the field of Renaissance/Early Modern Studies, Leah S. Marcus seems to support Aers' assessment, although she would locate the missteps he identifies in an earlier era: she writes, "Scholars of the Renaissance have generally been less concerned about when the Renaissance ends and much more concerned about how to date its beginnings— the magical moment, or set of moments, or epoch(s), in which European culture, or at least an elite segment of it, developed the capacity for objective consideration of other historical epochs, perceived itself as markedly different from its own immediate past, and identified itself more passionately and pervasively with the classical era than with the more recent past." Baldwin's desire to see the Tudors as distinctly better than their predecessors may fall into this critical movement. Marcus makes a distinction between the more traditional Renaissance studies and newer Early Modem Studies, which are concerned to avoid the "elitism and cultural myopia of an older 'Renaissance' history" (41-42). In Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation o f English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: The Modem Language Association of America, 1992), 41-63. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 18 decisive changes and raptures" (186). Singled out for criticism are Jonathan Dollimore, Catherine Belsey, Francis Barker, Terry Eagleton, and New Historicists led by Stephen Greenblatt, all of whom, in Aers' view, turn "the Middle Ages into a homogeneous and mythical field which is defined in terms of the scholars' needs for a figure against which 'Renaissance' concerns with inwardness and the fashioning of idenuties can be defined as new" (192). Although the works of many Renaissance scholars shed light on early modern texts, the decision to study Renaissance subjects in isolation from their history leads to misconceptions about earlier historical periods. Attention to the sumptuary laws of the sixteenth century without considering a larger historical context neglects to note that the widespread use of sumptuary law prior to the reign of Elizabeth, like Elizabeth's proclamations, also sought to control movement among social classes and of women. Medieval England and Continental Europe as well as the Ottoman Empire, for example, used sumptuary regulation to control specific members of their societies. To see sumptuary law merely as an explanation of England's responses to a changing class system, then, does not reveal unique aspects of the culture. Certainly a number of the works on women in the Renaissance and studies using sumptuary law could fit into the category of work Aers criticizes, as scholars take for granted that the sixteenth century marked a time of social change. I do not pretend to rectify the problem which Aers defines with any broad, transhistorical survey, but it is important to see that the approach he criticizes tends to use a class- based paradigm. With such an episteme, conceptions of women, for example, or sumptuary law are based only on power relations and are viewed through what ends up being an ahistorical approach. One of the reasons that scholars interested in women's roles in early modern society have turned to sumptuary laws is that the laws are an available text that make a clear and real statement about women in an era Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 19 that is largely male-authored, and in which records of women's lives can disappear. Studies that have examined sumptuary law and dress in the Renaissance use these regulations as a concrete example of society’ s attempts to limit women and the lower classes. The anxieties that appear to drive these measures reveal much about the society that creates them. But sumptuary laws can also be addressed in their own right as part of a larger philosophical debate over appearance and reality and the meaning of truth. As a form of external marking, sumptuary laws fit into a series of questions that, although not new, came to be taken more seriously in England during the years of what is now called the Reformation. The absence of a larger view of measures like sumptuary legislation may fuel the temptation to locate great social change in these acts of Elizabeth's govemment, without considering that they are examples of how old questions about reality and truth are confronted in Reformation society. Sumptuary Law in Renaissance Studies Lisa Jardine's well-known book Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age o f Shakespeare, first published in 1983, devotes an entire chapter to issues of women and rank suggested by Elizabethan sumptuary legislation. Jardine's approach to sumptuary law and, indeed, her choice of literary texts seem to have set the course for several later treatments of Renaissance dress.’® She ’®The chapter, entitled "'Make thy doublet of changeable taffeta'; Dress Codes, Sumptuary Law and 'Natural' Order," is found on pp. 141-168 of Still Harping on Dawg/zfgrj (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, 1989). Jardine reproduces in its entirety the tabulated legislation of 1597 which, as did Elizabeth's 1559 proclamation, outlined specifically the items allowed to each level of society for both men and women. She notes that the law "makes so apparent the tension between rank and wealth that it is appropriate to offer a generous example" (142- 144). ’®Her decision to examine the sumptuary acts of 1579, the pamphlets Hie Midier: or the Man-Woman and Haec-Vir (the womanish-man), Jacobean drama, and in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 20 points out that "[djress, in the early modem period, was regulated by rank, not by incom e.. . . control of dress (for individuals and their households) was seen as a significant control of real social power and influence" (141-142). As sumptuary laws thus attempted to control the social mobility of affluent burghers and other wealthy members of the middle classes, they also. Jardine argues, reflect a sense of the "natural" order of things, in which hierarchies are clearly established and women's place in society is carefully bound. Female dress becomes "immoral" when it flouts 'natural' order and rank, not necessarily when it is lewd or revealing (148). A woman's beauty and grace are determined by her adherence to dress appropriate to her station— a judgment which depends on tenuous reasoning, for as Jardine observes, only by arguing that sumptuous fabrics carry some intrinsic opulence can one "justify the right of the nobleman to wear specified fabrics [as in Elizabethan sumptuary law], not because he alone can afford them (which notoriously he cannot), but because he alone is made more gorgeous by them (the upstart looks outlandish)" (149). Jardine examines attacks on women for their squandering of wealth on luxuries as well as for adopting fashions which blur the distinctions between the sexes, and concludes, . . . we must return, I think, to the highly symptomatic relations between women, their dress and behaviour, and their place in the social hierarchy. Women bore the brunt of a general social uneasiness, I believe, because the fear of the inversion of authority between men and women has a primitive force which is not to be found in the threat of the upstart courtier to usurp his 'rightful' lord. To point a finger at women's affecting of the badges of male office— dress, arms, behaviour— was to pin down a potent symbol of the threat to order which was perceived dimly as present in the entire shift from feudal to mercantile society. (162) This purported shift from a medieval order to a new, more trade-driven economy plays an important role in Jardine's argument: she asserts, "Nowhere is the tension particular Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl is echoed by Mary Beth Rose and Marjorie Garber. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 21 between the old, outgoing feudal order and the new mercantile order more apparent than in the Elizabethan preoccupation with dress as status" (142).*'^ In Jardine's reading, Elizabethan sumptuary law is one sign of societal anxieties over these changes of order and economics, and women prove to be intimately involved in economic concerns because of their status as commodities within the marriage trade. Mary Beth Rose, discussing Jacobean drama in her 1988 book The Expense o f Spirit: Love and Spritiiality in English Renaissance Drama, also focuses on the Renaissance debate over women in men's clothes as evidenced in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's city comedy The Roaring Girl (c. 1608-16II) and the pamphlets Hie Mulier/Haec-Vir, as well as in Ben Jonson's misogynist Epicoene. Both Rose and Jardine locate societal unease in the attempts to control women's dress. In Rose's view, the debate over cross-dressed women represents "the figure of the woman in men's clothing as the symbolic focus of concern about sexual freedom and equality in Jacobean society."'® The female figure in men's dress. Rose argues, appears to challenge established social and sexual values, "an embodiment of female independence... [who] by the fact of her existence, requir[es] evaluation and response" (65). The response of the "mannish woman's" English society was mixed: in dramatic portrayals she is viewed with admiration and desire— she is often a pleasant, likable, and virtuous character despite her societal isolation— at the same time that she is loathed and feared as an offensively ludicrous and disruptive figure. Because of her interest in Jacobean drama. Rose is less concerned than Jardine with Elizabethan sumptuary law; Rose instead cites '^This is yet another re-hash of the old notions of feudality that are found in Baldwin and criticized by Aers. *®M ary Beth Rose, The Expense o f Spirit: Love and Spritiiality in English Renaissance Drama (fthcicdi: Cornell University Press, 1988), 91. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 22 James l's 1620 proclamation against women's "insolencie" in dress as more evidence of the era's being "a particularly heightened time of groping for resolutions" (69, 92). Issues of social status and hierarchy preoccupy writers of the period, who are concerned to preserve a traditional code of manners. Rose comes to a similar conclusion as Jardine as she points out that women bear the brunt of English society's anxieties over change. She notes that behind such arguments as that in the pamphlet Hie Muller is an implied norm, . . . a stable society that derives its coherence from the strict preservation of such essential distinctions as class, fortune, and rank. Not only do women in men's clothing come from various classes in society; they also have the unfortunate habit of dressing alike, obscuring both the clarity of their gender and the badge of their social status, and thereby endangering critically both unquestioned aristocratic ascendancy and the predictable orderliness of social relations. (73) The plots of the plays Rose examines inevitably introduce the disruptive figure of the mis-dressed woman in order to remove her threat, either by having her surrender her position or by being absorbed back into traditional societal roles. Through the romantic comic form. Rose concludes, writers were able to create a renewed traditional society "whose stability and coherence is symbolized by marriage and is based on the maintenance of traditional sexual roles" (88). Once again, the detailed regulation of sumptuary law and its accompanying moralistic declamations provide a way to understand women's position within early modem English society. Although Jardine and Rose focus their studies differently, they reach similar conclusions about how sumptuary regulations point to fears of women and of upward-striving social classes. Just as Jardine and Rose turn to the cross-dressed woman as a disruptive figure in Renaissance society, one who attracts attention revealing to literary critics, so Marjorie Garber examines the transvestite as a window into Renaissance society in her wide-ranging and amusing 1992 book Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 23 Cultural Anxiety. She, too, examines Middleton and the Hie Muller/Haec-vir pamphlets, and uses her understanding of Renaissance discomfort with cross- dressing to explicate Shakespeare's well-known games with disguised characters in Love's Labour Lost, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Two Gentlemen o f Verona, and Much Ado About Nothing. Unlike Jardine and Rose, who mention the transvestite woman as a means of understanding women's position in society, Garber focuses on the transvestite of both sexes as a key to the culture as a whole. She argues that "one of the most consistent and effective functions of the transvestite in [any] culture is to indicate the place of what I call 'category crisis', dismpting and calling attention to cultural, social, or aesthetic dissonances."'^ Garber reiterates Frances Baldwin's conclusions that sumptuary laws were ways to control conspicuous consumption by "those whose class or other social designation made such display seem transgressive"; they were designed to keep social climbers down, national boundaries well-demarcated, and women in their place (23).-° As wives, women become bound up in a society's commodities trade, and Garber calls attention to women's invariable involvement in issues of dress: '^Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 16. Garber's study ranges from Renaissance texts and historical figures up to present-day confrontations with the figure of the transvestite in popular culture. -“Baldwin's introduction sets out her understanding of sumptuary law in England, conclusions which have become commonplace: "at least three different kinds of motives seem to have led to [the] enactment [of sumptuary laws]. Among these may be listed: (1) the desire to preserve class distinctions, so that any stranger could tell by merely looking at a man's dress to what rank in society he belonged; (2) the desire to check practices which were regarded as deleterious in their effects, due to the feeling that luxury and extravagance were in themselves wicked and harmful to the morals of the people; (3) economic motives: (a) the endeavor to encourage home industries and to discourage the buying of foreign goods, and (b) the attempt on the part of the sovereign to induce his people to save their money, so that they might be able to help him out financially in time of need. Sheer conservatism and dislike of new fashions or customs might be mentioned as a fourth factor which led to the passage of the English sumptuary laws" (10). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 24 . . . when gender enters into such [sumptuary] codes, as, inevitably, it does, it is usually as a subset of class, status, rank or wealth— that is to say, as a further concomitant of either the subordination or the commodification of women. If women are conceived of as "status symbols" (or, more recently, as "trophy wives") in their dress, adding to the perceived social luster of their husbands or fathers, sumptuous dress for women becomes a desiteratum. If, on the other hand, it is deemed important to put women in their place, rules like 'no women in pants' or 'ladies must wear hats' or 'any woman entering a church must have her shoulders covered’ come into force. (23) But Garber is most interested in the figure of the cross-dressed, not overdressed, woman, and her analysis uncovers ways in which the presence of a transvestite figure in a society's literature (literature that may not seem to be concerned primarily with issues of gender) indicates a "category crisis elsewhere, an irresolvable conflict or epistemological crux that destabilizes comfortable binarity, and displaces the resulting discomfort onto a figure that already inhabits, indeed incarnates, the margin" (17). Renaissance society exhibits considerable concern over the distinctions between men and women and among social classes; in the realm of the theater, worries extend to the line between the real and the fictional. All of these anxieties, Garber argues, get displaced onto the transvestite. Thus the transvestite both incarnates and emblematizes the threats, while on the stage, a "privileged site of transgression," the figure of the transvestite allows Elizabethan audiences to confront anxieties running through their society. Although he is concerned not so much with issues of cross-dressing, Peter Stallybrass also locates in sumptuary legislation the tensions of early modem English society in his article "Patricrchal Territories: The Body Enclosed." He calls on sumptuary law to support his argument that a new conception of the body itself was developing during the Renaissance, and that this idea of the body was a function of the "antithetical thinking" of a burgeoning Renaissance state. Various early-modern attempts to articulate manners and to stress "bodily purity" in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 25 behavior suggest to Stallybrass that "[t]he enclosure of the body, the 'cleansing' of the orifices, emphasized the borders of a closed individuality at the same time as it separated off the social elite from the 'vulgar'."-* Measures such as Elizabethan sumptuary law sought to codify bodily definitions and to create categories of apparel not to be transgressed. Stallybrass points out that although earlier Elizabethan proclamations had targeted men's dress, it was not until 1574 that the details of women's apparel were spelled out.-- This "tardiness in the statutes," he argues, "should be seen as a sign less of women's liberties than of the implicit assumption that women's bodies were already the object of policing by fathers and husbands" (126). Stallybrass, like Jardine and Rose, finds much of the anxieties of Renaissance English society being played out on the female person. Under Elizabeth, a female head of state, the ideas both of a nation and of the female body - ‘Peter Stallybrass, "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed," in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses o f Sexual Difference in Early Modem Europe, ed. by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 125. — Stallybrass cites F. A. Youngs, Jr., The Proclamations o f the Tudor Queens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 163, 164. Apparently he is concerned only with Elizabethan proclamations; the claim that detailed regulation of women's costume is a new enterprise, however, would appear to be contradicted by Baldwin's research. Although Baldwin does note that the earliest-known English sumptuary measures, enacted in 1337, failed to distinguish between men and women, as early as 1355, the apparel of prostitutes was articulated clearly: they were to wear a red or striped hood, were forbidden to wear fur, and, in an unusual measure, were to wear their clothes turned inside out (33-34). A similar statute appeared around 1438, in which "it was ordeyned that all the comyn strompetes sholde were raye [striped] hodis and white roddis in her hondes" (94). In 1362, the dress of esquires and gentlemen below the rank of knights, and their wives, was spelled out in detail (49); a 1483 statute also regulated the dress of husbandry servants' wives, who were forbidden to wear "any kerchiefs costing more than 20 d. the plight" (115-116). Under Henry VU, an ordinance specified in exhaustive detail what "princes and estates, with other Ladies and Gentlewomen" could wear for mourning (124-126). In 1536, Henry V m issued an order to the Irish in which men's dress was limited, and women were not allowed to wear "any kilties or coats tucked up or embroidered or garnished with silk, etc., after the Irish fashion" (162). Thus, although Elizabeth may not have articulated distinctions between men and women's apparel before 1574, previous rulers, including her father, had. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 26 had to be refashioned to accommodate conflicting attitudes toward her and toward women in general. Stallybrass observes that women come to be the vehicle for manipulating both class and gender: "To emphasize gender is to construct women- as-same: women are constituted as a single category, set over against the category of men. To emphasize class is to differentiate between women, dividing them into distinct social groups" (133). It was in the interests of the upper classes, then, to differentiate between women and confer privileges accordingly, just as it was beneficial to outside groups to attack aristocratic rank by lumping women into one large category, undefined by class distinctions (often a feature of misogynistic discourse). Stallybrass continues with an analysis of the grotesque, something he sees as a way of rejecting the labels of class and gender operating in English society. He concludes that the female grotesque proves a bodily category that "could, indeed, interrogate class and gender hierarchies alike, subverting the enclosed body in the name of a body that is 'unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits'" (142). Less concerned with women as a separate category and more interested in what he calls the "crucial issue of social mobility," Frank Whigham examines tropes of social hierarchy, personal promotion, and the elite's claims to privilege in Elizabethan court culture. In his study of courtesy literature and the structures of power under Elizabeth I, Whigham reproduces the extensive lists of sumptuary prohibitions issued under Elizabeth as a way of understanding the court's relationship with its subjects.^ Unlike Stallybrass, who concentrates on society's attempts to create and control an image of the queen, Whigham studies the queen's own actions in sumptuary matters. He points out that she "herself crucially set the ^Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes o f Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), x-xii, 164-167. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 27 pace with her own excesses of apparel" (161), behavior which highlighted inconsistency in her policies seeking to control any imitations of her own extravagances. "Both her own indulgence in elaborate dress and her restriction of her subjects' sumptuary rights," Whigham notes, "were parts of the same project of controlling the forces of control, adjusting them to the uses of the established order, and making exceptions only when they might enhance its power" (160). The types of regulation issued under Elizabeth suggest to Whigham that most effort was aimed at "denying and punishing pretensions to gentry status" (162), again highlighting how sumptuary law relates to class hierarchies. Whigham cites an interesting objection to the laws, one which highlights class conflicts and economic concerns: London hosiers protested sumptuary legislation that they saw as meddling in their own businesses. In the view of the City men, Middlesex hosiers were treated leniently, and such leniency allowed those outside London to "pander to the London market for flashy clothing without the repression their London counterparts experienced.. .. this amounted to interference with a major market" (159). Objections to sumptuary law were not limited to the hosiers'; during her reign Elizabeth encountered significant resistance to the measures from within Parliament. The most interesting explanation, according to Whigham, is "that opposition from Parliament mirrored the aspirations and resentments of the socially mobile, who saw themselves being denied the very tools they were becoming conscious of needing. In other words, perhaps the changing social climate helped make it harder for the queen to get statutory reiteration of earlier sumptuary laws through Parliament" (159-160). In Whigham's narrative, Elizabeth fights an uphill battle in attempting to check the rise of the middle classes, while nevertheless manipulating her subjects through her control of the signs of the privileged. He summarizes: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 8 "False" ostentation had always existed, but legal efforts at repression by the central govemment reached an all-time high under Elizabeth, who was both personally instrumental in this effort and a selfish beneficiary of the same powers of the image the laws sought to restrict. The transgressions that seemed most offensive to her govemment were those which counterfeited the images of the goveming elite. The queen retained license to make useful exceptions, in order to get the maximum benefit from both the problem and its solutions. .. . But none of it worked too w ell.. . . (168-169) The age of Elizabeth, the pinnacle of sumptuary legislation, is also its ruin; Whigham sees English society, by the time of the accession of James I, as a realm in which individual urges toward self-expression can no longer be restricted to the elite classes. All of these writers focus on sumptuary law as an extension and illustration of class boundaries in early modem English society. In the cases of Jardine, Rose, Garber and Stallybrass, the study of these laws and of the drama and commentary of the age yields insights into the treatment of women as a type of class which both belongs to and is separate from social classes. An examination of sumptuary legislation as part of a larger movement to codify and control extemal appearances, however, shows how women often served to define the limits of the appropriate in the larger society. Issues of gender and class are imbricated in discussions of fashion, but they are bound up, as well, with debates over religion and the search for truth in an English Protestant world. Non-Elizabethan Sumptuary Law Although in modem criticism Elizabethan sumptuary law tends to be examined as if it were a unique phenomenon, sumptuary regulation was common elsewhere. A brief survey of the sumptuary legislation outside of Renaissance England illustrates the need to look beyond the obvious categories of gender and class to understand early modern society's treatment of clothing. Similarities Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 29 abound between the sumptuary laws of early modem England and very different societies. For example, in the Ottoman Empire of the late fifteenth century, numerous decrees on matters of dress were issued for religious as well as social and economic reasons. Unlike in England, the extreme variety of culture in Turkey gave rise to its sumptuary legislation, although despite the differing motivations, in many ways the laws of these diverse societies work similarly. Esther Juhasz notes that "Ottoman society, which was composed of numerous ethno-religious and social groups, attributed great social, religious and ethnic significance to modes of dress. A person's attire, or parts of it, testified to his or her occupation, social class and rights under the law."-'* A spectacular gold helmet manufactured in 1532 by Venetian goldsmiths for the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman's grand vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, illustrates on an obvious level that society's knowledge of the power of dress as display: the ceremonial helmet was "designed and commissioned specifically in order to announce to political opponents in westem Europe the might and imperial status of Suleim an.Q uadruple-crow ned, the helmet (as contemporaries noted at once) resembled the Pope's tiara with its three superimposed crowns; it also called on features traditionally associated with Alexander the Great and other leaders from antiquity, such as the seventh-century Byzantine Emperor Heraclius I. The helmet's four crowns were meant to signify to Western leaders the sultan's superior strength, as none of his rivals had more than three layers in his regalia (381-383).-^ For those living within Ottoman society. -'’Esther Juhasz, Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire: Aspects o f Material Culture, ed. by Esther Juhasz, trans. by Judith Levy (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1990), 121. ^ i s a Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History o f the Renaissance (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 380. -^Jardine points out that the Venetian goldsmiths sought to convey their commissioned message "with utmost clarity" by using "as their creative inspiration. .. [that] which most strongly connoted world dominion, a highly current and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 30 detailed laws on the styles of garments as well as their fabric and color were enacted in order to preserve traditional religious dress and to distinguish between the dress of Muslims and non-believers: "one of the chief distinctions in costume in Ottoman society was between a Muslim and an 'infidel'," signified by such particulars as the size of turban, width of cloak, and whether or not one could wear yellow shoes (Juhasz 121-122). These laws also sought to restrain Jews and Christians from dressing more sumptuously than Muslims, and to prevent the cost of clothes from rising as a result of Jewish and Christian demand.-"^ European travellers venturing to Turkey were able to differentiate among groups by their dress; costume books and illustrated travelogues reflect how easily read was the costume of the society, even by outsiders unfamiliar with its customs.-* widely distributed source of imperialistic imagery— the portrait medals which enthusiasts for antiquities from West to East avidly collected and displayed prominently in their cabinets" (381). -Tnterestingly, some of the restraints on dress may have been taken on voluntarily, for evidence exists that outsiders such as Jews and Christians feared provoking jealousy or dislike in local populations as a result of flashy dress. Juhasz cites evidence in rabbinic rulings as well as folktales and stories, in which "calamities and decrees are often blamed on ostentatious dress," especially that of women. An eighteenth century book locates the Sephardi Jews' problems on women's love of clothes, quoting a story which blames them for the Jews' expulsion from Spain ( 122). -* Although of course such records from European visitors prove unreliable. Painters have a "tendency to romanticize the East" and to depict such figures as the Jew in stereotyped images (Juhasz 123), and reliance on others' impressions often forms the travellers' view of what they see. Mandeville's Travels is an early illustration of the power of the traveller's tale told and re-told— the author, many suspect, never left the comfort of his home in France while "travelling" across the Continents in re-writing the tales of Boldensele, Friar Odoric, Vencent of Beauvais, Jacques de Vitry, Haiton and perhaps even Marco Polo. His stories and characters were taken to be accurate and resurface in many later travel narratives, informing how figures such as Chaucer, Columbus, Sir Thomas More and Sir Walter Raleigh viewed foreign lands. SetMandeville's Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: 1967); Josephine Waters Bennett, The Rediscovery o f Sir John Mandeville (New York: 1954); Donald R. Howard, Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and their Posterity (Berkeley: 1980); Kathleen Ann Kelly, "An Inspiration for Chaucer's Description of Chauntecleer," English Language Notes 30 (March 1993): 1-7; Malcolm Letts, 5/r/o/zn The Man and his Book (London: 1949). Also see Jonathan Haynes, T Z ze Trave/er.- George Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 31 Medieval European societies likewise enacted numerous sumptuary laws to control and regulate dress. The desire to differentiate among social classes as well as to "respect the primordial division" between men and women led to clearly articulated rules.-^ "[0]rdinances... read like fashion catalogs: the sumptuary laws instituted in Bologna in 1401 list sixteen possible categories of infraction of the dress code, including jewels, belts, rings, embroidery, fur, fringes, dresses, shoes, and buttons; these categories were themselves subdivided" (301). In assemblies and processions of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe, the result of such regimented dress was displayed publicly and re-affirmed the order of the society: "each segment of the populace had its own assigned role and place and could be identified by the nature and color of the clothing it wore.. . . God, the theory went, had established an intangible order of which costume was merely the expression" (569). Venetian senators wore a black costume, Jews a star, and prostitutes a yellow dress. Vice, in the person of the prostitute especially, was to be marked externally; measures such as Venice's regulations occurred also in England. For example, a gaudy apparel for prostitutes was articulated clearly in a 1355 proclamation: "no known whore should weare from thenceforth any hood, except reyed or striped of divers colors, nor furre, but garments reversed or turned the wrong side outward upon paine to forfeit the same" (Baldwin 33-34). A similar English statute appeared around 1438, in which "it was ordeyned that all the comyn strompetes sholde were raye [striped] hodis and white roddis in her hondes" (Baldwin 94). But medieval statutes regulated the ordinary citizen as well as those Relation of a Journey begun An. Dom. 1610. (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986), for a discussion of how a travelling humanist came to view Italy and the Holy Land through what he had studied when back home in England, rather than through what he actually encountered in his travels. -^Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, eds., A History o f Private Life II: Revelations o f the Medieval World, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), 526. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 32 outside the moral order. The Ottoman Empire sought through clothing primarily to distinguish religious affiliation, and medieval European states regulated dress as a reflection of God's order; both simultaneously achieved more practical social measures of control as well. In Europe, excesses in women's clothing were curbed in order to protect the business of marriage, in which the "display of luxury and the size of dowries" spurred "matrimonial competition, the stakes of which risked spiraling out of control" (Aries and Duby 576). Sylvia L. Thrupp points to acts in England from the mid-1300s through the mid-1400s which sought to prevent the blurring of social categories; they responded to complaints such as that of Bishop Brunton, who "was distressed that he could not tell the difference between a countess and the wife of a citizen."^" As Thrupp remarks. Wills and inventories show that London citizens had always loved to dress as richly as possible and to adorn themselves, as well as their wives, with gold and silver rings and buckles. Although feminine fashions called for brooches and bracelets and gold circlets, frequent changes in the colors of company liveries gave the men even more excuse for extravagance.. .. (148-149) Thrupp goes on to describe the rich opportunities for extravagant self-ornament available to members of medieval English society in areas such as their everyday fashions, holiday dress, liveries, the dress of their servants, and the cut of their hair (148ff). Such examples of an "overreaching" middle class, interested in elaborate fashions in dress and targeted by sumptuary laws, suggests that the behavior of the middle classes under Elizabeth cannot be seen as exclusive to that period in England. As critics have noted of Elizabethan laws, economic issues, questions of gender, and class concerns all seem to be tied up in the attempt to regulate dress. Diane Owen Hughes has argued that in Renaissance Venice, an increasing fear of women's power motivated sumptuary laws, and many restrictions were ^°Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class o f Medieval London: 1300-1500 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948, 1989), 148. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 33 passed to prevent women from squandering the paternal wealth they had inherited and on which their husbands' livelihoods often depended.^’ Indeed, sixteenth- century Venice provides an interesting counterpoint to Elizabethan England, in that despite the clear cultural and political differences between the two states, similar concerns over dress are voiced and similar sumptuary laws composed. As Margaret F. Rosenthal points out in her study of the courtesan and writer Veronica Franco (1546-1591), Venetian sumptuary legislation sought, not always successfully, to preserve social and gender categories in the face of transgressive figures such as the cortigiane oneste, who both used and flaunted traditional social categories within Venetian society. Courtesans' increasing wealth gave them access to elaborate and luxurious costumes, Rosenthal shows, and they became "visually indistinguishable from married women of upper classes" (68). This resemblance to the "respectable" members of society was not viewed favorably, and governmental authorities endeavored to reinstate clear social and class boundaries: complaints that Venetian citizens had difficulty telling the "good from the wicked" and that foreigners to the city were unable to distinguish noblewomen from courtesans prompted legal actions by the senate in 1543 (59). A ruling in 1578 forbade courtesans not only from dressing like married women or widows, but specifically from appearing at mass so dressed (71). Numerous other measures aimed at controlling courtesans'conduct and dress were passed in 1539, 1542, 1543, 1562, 1571, 1582 and 1613. Regulations were designed to curb the lavishness of the 3'Diane Owen Hughes, "Sumptuary Laws and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy," in Disputes and Settlements: Laws and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 69-99. Cited in Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 284 n.6. For further discussion of Venetian sumptuary law, see also Margaret Newett, "The Sumptuary Laws of Venice in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," Historical Essays by Members o f the Owens College, Manchester, ed. T. F. Tout and James Tait (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1907). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 34 courtesan's dress and to restrict her circulation in public. Yet such measures proved largely ineffective and were loosely enforced, perhaps because, as Rosenthal surmises, "the cortigiana onesta satisfied her society's need for a refined yet sexualized version of the aristocratic woman" (60). Not all Venetian sumptuary law targeted the excesses of courtesans alone, however. Rosenthal notes that [o]ne way to call attention indirectly to the dangers of patrician women's extravagant tastes was to prevent courtesans from displaying themselves in the same sumptuous attire as the upper classes. Like courtesans, patrician women had also been subject to strict sumptuary laws, in part because of a prevalent concern with the enormous expense of sumptuous clothing, which was seen to be wasteful, and in part because such dress challenged male authority. (69) Indeed, the literal text of the sumptuary laws does not always indicate fully the ways in which such laws were meant to operate. Laws purportedly monitoring courtesans also rebuke married women. And Diane Owen Hughes has argued that noblewomen's dress was periodically restricted in order to signal to courtesans and prostitutes the virtuous behavior they were to emulate and uphold.^- Yet several courtesans such as Veronica Franco proved skilled at exploiting their interstitial social position and using the written word to gain independence, resisting the strict categories Venetian society proclaimed. Rosenthal asserts that the "[hjonest courtesans' social m obility... was all the more compelling precisely in light of the often severe patriarchal injunctions that weighed so heavily upon aristocratic women, restricting the ornamentation of their dress and their freedom to circulate and participate in Venetian public life" (2-3). No such figure as the cortigiana onesta exists in early modem England; indeed, her foreign allure would incite many a travelling Englishman to brave the dangers of Italy for a look at this dangerously sensual creature. The English sumptuary laws naming prostitutes refer to a more 3-She also notes that prostitutes were allowed rich dress as a means of "shaming the virtuous into simplicity." Cited by Rosenthal, pp. 290-291 n. 27. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 35 common whore, whose vice should be signaled clearly for all to see. Yet in response to the social mobility the courtesans represented, the Venetian republic turned to codes of dress. Such measures were not dissimilar from Elizabethan sumptuary laws, which, as literary critics have pointed out, also sprang from resistance to changing social boundaries and the perceived threats of female figures in society. Implications for Reading Utopia More's Utopia may act as a convenient test case for much of the recent scholarship surrounding the subject of sumptuary law. The sort of class-based analysis which recent scholars have found fruitful may provide insight into the Utopians' regulation of clothing. Within Utopian society, slaves and criminals— the very lowest classes— are placed soundly outside the avenues of power by their ornamentation (just as in Elizabethan society, the elite classes show their natural superiority and privilege through more elaborate ornamentation). Just as Elizabeth I maintained her position of control in part through codifying fashion, so the Utopians, in reverse, subdue the dregs of their society through dress. Dress is used to signify the most extreme inequalities present within this "perfect" society, as well as to distinguish among the various classes making up Utopia: the Utopian hierarchy, which requires wives to kneel before their husbands and children before their parents, and citizens to be classified as syphogrants, scholars, craftsmen, or the elite ambassadors, priests, tranibors, and the prince, is maintained by governmental oversight. Despite More's implicit criticisms of Utopian society, one could argue, this model society of his, which improves upon Europe's excesses, remains at the same time bound by class and gender limitations. In correcting excess, Utopia does not remove the sumptuary regulations; instead it merely inverts Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 36 the values of clothing so that the most ornate comes to symbolize the greatest depravity. Even a society that champions equality and attempts to remove the abuses of luxury mirrors England's patriarchal and aristocratic social structure. Yet, although there is no question but that Utopia replicates many of England's ideologies in terras of class and gender, a class-based paradigm helps little in understanding the Utopian exhibit of the naked bride and groom before marriage. This odd scene in Hythloday's account may require a wider conception of such impulses toward display in society. Sumptuary laws, as revealing as they are, are not the only way of deciphering the English Renaissance treatment of citizens' appearance; the laws are only the most formal and visible reminders of the desire to create a transparent society. Of far greater interest in understanding Renaissance matters of extemal marking are writings that allow a subtler approach to the question of how Renaissance eyes viewed the visible. Moralists, quipsters, diarists, rhetoricians, humanists, literary figures and many others shed light on the anxieties provoked at the time by the shifting and unreliable exterior appearance— of clothes, of character, of words, of faith. Much of this anxiety evidences itself in literature of travel and in discussions of women. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 37 Chapter Two "Fantastical Forreigne Toyes": Guarding Against Fashion's Infections And when graue Matrons, honest thought with light heeles trash will crédité cracke: And following after fashions nought, of name and fame, will make a wracke, Might loue, and lip, a fault conceale. Yet act, and fact, would filth reveale. And when olde beldames, withered hagges, whom hungrie Dogges cannot require: Will whinnie still, like wanton nagges, and sadled be with such attire. A pacient heart cannot but rage. To see the shame of this our age. {Quippes for upstart newfangled gentlewomen, 1595) ' A survey of the minor work Quippes for upstart newfangled gentlewomen serves as an outline for many of the early modem treatises on women and their transgressions, for, in a few short pages, the author manages to touch on numerous frequently-mentioned concerns: class blurrings, commerce with foreign nations, and English identity, as well as more traditional misogynist anxieties about female power. The Quippes was issued in two editions, in 1595 and 1596, and its sentiments complement ideas circulating at the time in other genres. The text's ephemeral nature makes it ideal for a discussion of the topic of fashion, which of itself is changeable, transitory, and shifting— many of the qualities for which women and their clothes are condemned. This chapter uses the Quippes as an epitome of various attitudes and motifs concerning fashion found in multiple 'Erroneously attributed to Stephen Gosson in a Collier forgery, the full title of the anonymous work is Quippes fo r upstart newfangled gentlewomen. Or, a glasse to view the pride o f vainglorious women. Containing. A pleasant invective against the fantastical forreigne toyes, daylie used in womens appareil. London: Richard Jhones, 1595,4°. STC 20982 (2 editions). All citations here are taken from an edition edited by Edwin Johnston Howard (Oxford. Ohio: The Anchor Press, 1942). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 38 genres, then looks at how Protestants appropriate these traditional motifs to define their own identity. In tune with the frivolous character of his subject matter and purported audience, the author of Quippes presents his "pleasant invective against the fantastical forreigne toyes, daylie used in womens apparel!" in cleverly rhymed lines of verse. The Quippes admonishes women for "fashions fonde" which the poet sees all over England, and warns of the dangers of elaborate dress. The easy rhythm and glib rhymes of the poem offer the author's advice in a flippant tone which distinguishes Quippes from the forms of traditional moral tracts or sermons: with humor and gentle rebuke, the author suggests, he will show these "daintie Minions" the errors of their ways. Even sermons and treatises become more flippant and mocking when the subject is fashion. In discussions of fashion genre seems finally to be subordinate to theme: the theme often seeps into even serious genres by introducing a mocking, irreverent tone. Fiercely misogynistic portrayals of "the weaker kinde" lie underneath such amusing tones in the Quippes, however; the highly moralistic vein in which the verses move reveal that the author's concerns involve explicit cultural nervousness about women in Renaissance England, as well as their participation in the country's increasing commerce with foreign nations. Women's "wrangling" over "gawdes and toyes" (211) greatly excites the author's disapproval, and although the title of his work professes to address the very women he chastises, the poem constructs women as a foreign, dangerous Other who must be controlled. The poet speaks to "good men of skill" (283); the few addresses to women within the text serve as mere rhetorical strategy to back up his stance.^ The Quippes identifies women's fashion as a highly visible -Suzanne W. Hull categorizes the Quippes as one of a small group of writings on the controversy over women's worth which were directed to women (Chaste, Silent Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 39 site of national susceptibility to foreign infection. Its invectives against women reveal cultural uncertainty about England's identity as an inviolable nation ruled by a woman and about the transformative dangers of dress. The poem is not alone in its complaints: old arguments about and against women crop up repeatedly in early modem England, and holding forth on the problems women pose to men and to male society proves a popular pastime. Changing fashions provide material to moralizers in a number of ways, especially by giving an unwelcome voice to women through their dress. Censorious tracts indicate specific uneasiness about women's involvement in the highly public arena of fashion. Sumptuary law is just one vehicle of many which sought to solidify meaning and bring some sort of stasis to constantly-changing extemal forms of marking. Of course, women were not the only targets in diatribes against elaborate dress: Italianate Englishmen (pre-cursors to the full-blown eighteenth-century fop3), theater-goers, and players, especially crossdressing actors, also come under and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640, San Marino, California: Huntington Library Press, 1982), 119. The poem's claims that it is "for" women, however, are undermined not only by its misogynistic tone (which would not necessarily preclude its being directed to women), but, more importantly, by its repeated warnings and comments which directly address husbands and men of English society. 3Robert B. Heilman, in "Some Fops and Some Versions of Foppery," ELH 49 (1982): 363-395, examines the connotations of the word "fop," arguing that the word and its variants, "referring specifically to affectation and dandyism, do not appear until the 17th century but are steadily evidenced through the 19th. In the period of Restoration dram a... a new and limited concept of the fop came into existence alongside the traditional generalized concept [of the "fool" or one involved in folly]. The hyper-fashionable man about town, attitudinizing and often more mannered than well-mannered, a coterie type, flourishing an ostentatious with-it- ness, is set off from the rather large and amorphous society of persons who are called stupid and silly because they are so, or are thought so, or are simply displeasing to those who call them so. The vocabulary of foppism may point in either direction... fool in general, or new social flash in particular" (364-365). The fop is vain and appears to lack what Castiglione would have called sprezzatura: "wit becomes fop when he shows unabashed consciousness of himself as wit" (367). But, Heilman remarks, "more conspicuous than his vanity is his foppish Francophilia: after [Wycherley's "Monsieur" in the 1672 The Gentleman Dancing Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 40 attack for their sartorial display. These attacks— both the subject and the method— are not new to the Renaissance. Medieval sermons read like catalogues of many of the same complaints and dire warnings of the evils of women and the lures of fashion. But the changing social situation brought about by a Reformation emphasis on preaching gave new life to this medieval, and often classical, material. The printed sermon becomes a way for Protestants to declare themselves Protestant, and the attack on women or effeminate fashions, a genre in its own right, serves as an act of declaring oneself similar to the dress itself. Quippes, Class Distinctions, and English Simplicity As the title would indicate, in the Quippes fo r Upstart Newfangled Gentlewomen, much of the author's disapproval focuses on class distinctions. He laments that frivolous women "pretend their gentle blood" (230) and "True Gentrie they haue put to flight" (240) and expresses his disapproval over the presumption such fineries allow. He protests: And when proud princockes, Rascalles bratte, in fashions wil be Princes mate: And euery Gy 1 1 that keepes a catte, in rayment wil be like a State. If any cause be to complaine. In such excesse who can refrain. (31-36) Confusion over the trappings of class level— low-born brats dressing like princes' companions, for example— must be eliminated. The urge to "preserve class distinctions, so that any stranger could tell by merely looking at a man's dress to what rank in society he belonged,"'^ as codified most clearly in sumptuary law, Master has spent] three months in Paris he has returned affecting French dress, attitudes, and speech" (368)— calling to mind the ridiculed, and feared, Italianate Englishman who has become "too" Italian to maintain his Englishness. '^Frances Baldwin here delineates what she sees as the first and main motivation for sumptuary legislation (10). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 41 appears here as well. Of course, it is a woman's dress which the poet seeks to control, and in this case, such control is sought through ridicule. Both the motivation to exceed one’ s state ("in fashions wil be Princes mate") and the freedom afforded by clothes Ç'euery Gyll") are censured. Unlike the poem, Elizabethan sumptuary codes mandate in detail men's conformity to appropriate dress as well as women's compliance; by cataloging both men and women, the laws highlight class differences over gender divisions, thus exposing, as many scholars have pointed out, an aristocracy's fear of the encroaching lower classes. Karen Newman observes, however, that "the argument for 'class' as the hegemonic category of fashion analysis in the early modern period dismisses too easily the relation of gender to sartorial extravagance. Extravagant dress was not, of course, a feature primarily of women's behavior, but it does not therefore follow that gender was not significant in the analysis of the fashion system in early modem England."^ The Quippes "for" women, for example, concentrates on the transgressions of only women in fashion and the evils that result, equating excess in apparel with specifically female wickedness; Biblical and classical references are often invoked in diatribes to declaim against exculsively female fashions. Peter Stallybrass has remarked that "when the elimination of class boundaries is produced by the collapsing of women into a single undifferentiated group, that elimination is commonly articulated within misogynistic discourse."^ Undifferentiated within the group "Women," the Quippes' female figures are described outside of class, as a generic category of deceitful, untrustworthy, and frivolous creatures. Paradoxically, however, the text maintains that these creatures must preserve their ^Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 111. ^"Patriarchal Tenitories: The Body Enclosed," 133. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 42 virtue, and therefore they require close monitoring to ward off the many assailants who endanger this virtue J The generic weaker sex which the Quippes describes must constantly be protected from corrupt foreign influences and temptations. Concerned with England's vulnerability, the poet describes the nation as already having been invaded; through women's desires for "fashions wilde" (254), the country is filled with "garish pompe" from foreign countries. And this invasion has done harm, both financial and moral. So, too, Charles Bansley claims, in his A treaty se, shewing and declaring the pryde and abuse o f women now a day es, a rhymed set of verses which, similar to the Quippes, pairs a flippant tone with vicious attacks on women. "Bo pepe what have I spyed," Bansley asks in his first line, and answers, A bug I trow, devysing of proud knecks For wanton lasses and galant women, and other lewde noughty packes O cursed pride, th at. . . . . . thou hast brought thys wealthy real me, into moche payne and care And what maketh us to fall from God, and thus wyckedly to lyve as we doo But pryde, pryde thys curssed vyce, that hath banished welth, and brought us w oo.. There is real worry during the Renaissance over the passage of gold and silver from England to other countries as "trifles" are purchased, creating a specie shortage.^ ^Ania Loomba, in Gender, Race and Renaissance Drama (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989) asserts that not only is patriarchal thinking on women contradictory, it also seeks to confer upon women a duplicitous and changeable identity. Patriarchal writers, she argues, attempt to contain female change within a patriarchal stasis; female "instability" is invested with moral values, and a theory of instability is used in support of a universal female nature. ^Charles Bansley, A treatyse, shewing and declaring the pryde and abuse o f women now a dayes (London: Thomas Raynalde, -1550, 4°), Sig. AIL spbr more on the importance of coinage to society see Harry A. Miskimin, Money and Power in Fifteenth-Century France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984). By using extensive records available to him of the activity of the mints in France in the fifteenth century, Miskimin has constructed a series of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 43 The Quippes poet cautions men against this same trend on a smaller scale: "husbands... they intend to make you dawes ["fools"],/ in vain to spend your wealth and good" (229-32). But more than reluctance to spend money underlies the poet's vehement attacks against current female fashion. Women pose a threat to national defense through their penchant for foreign fashion: they are the weak spots which allow foreign entry into the country and thereby endanger their men. Once women have been invaded by the desire for fashion, they are (and thus leave men) vulnerable to other forms of invasion. English discussion of fashion had long been driven by the fear of a symbolic foreign invasion through clothes, and not only women came under attack for affecting foreign fashions in early modern England. Indeed, the lament that the Englishman had no costume of his own was a common one by the time of relationships between the patterns of monetary production and historical events. The extent to which the minting practices of the time were scrutinized made them well-documented operations; in his analysis Miskimin argues that there was a shortage of gold and silver during the fifteenth century caused by a technology incapable of mining local sources and an economy whose major export was raw currency. Such shortages affected not only countries' economies, but also their behavior in military conflicts and foreign policy, as well as relationships among tradespeople, the church, the populace, and the king. Frances Baldwin notes that "sumptuary laws reflected in many respects the prevailing economic thought of the period.. . . At the end of the fifteenth century, the mercantile doctrines became the ones most generally accepted The mercantilists taught that wealth and money were identical and regarded it as the great object of any community so to conduct its dealings with other nations as to attract to itself the largest possible share of the precious metals. In order to secure this favorable balance of trade, governments must resort to prohibitions of, or high duties on, importation of foreign wares, bounties on the export of home manufactures, and restrictions on the export of the precious metals. Naturally, men who held such veiws would be inclined to support legislation which forbade the wearing of foreign cloth" (246). Numerous laws thus were designed to protect the English wool trade, such as the 1337 dictum that no cloth made outside of England, Ireland, Wales or Scotland could be worn by any man or woman besides the royal family (30), or the proclamation on 27 December 1616 which prohibited Englishmen from wearing "outside" their gowns and other clothes any cloth of gold, silver, velvet, satin, or taffeta, except on Sundays, holidays and festivals, and which dictated that mourning gowns must be made of English broad cloth (258). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 44 Elizabeth's reign. The widely reprinted woodcut in Andrew Boorde's The Fyrst Boke o f the Introduction o f Knowledge (1542) depicts a nearly naked Englishman clad only in loincloth, holding aloft a pair of scissors and a length of cloth [Figure 1]. An anecdote provided by Bishop Pilkington in 1560 fleshes out this figure: I read of a painter that would paint every country man in his accustomed apparel, the Dutch, the Spaniard, the Italian, the Frenchman; but when he came to the English man, he painted him naked, and gave him clothe, and bade him make it himself, for he changed his fashions so often that he knew not how to make it; such be our fickle and unstable heads, ever devising and desiring new toys.^° Elizabeth I's homily against "excesse of Appareil," composed to be preached in the churches, recounts this same story, and concludes. Thus with our fantastical devices we make ouselves laughing-stocks to other nations; while one spendeth his patrimony upon pounces and cuts, another bestoweth more on a dancing-shirt, than might suffice to buy him honest and comely apparel for his whole body. Some hang their revenues about their necks, ruffling in their ruffs, and many a one jeopardizes his best joint, to maintain himself in sumptuous raiment. And every man, nothing considering his estate and condition, seeketh to excel others in costly attire. (219-220)** And the joke of the costume-less Englishman spread: the image would appear even in German versions above the caption "De Engelschman en zihn nationale dracht" [Figure 2].*- When not ridiculing English desire for Continental fashions. *°Cited in Newman, 112-114. Bishop Pilkington's comments appear in Philip Stubbes' wide-ranging Anatomy o f Abuses. * * "The sermon agaynst excesse of appareil" in Certain Sermons appoynted by the Queenes Majestie to be declared and read, by all Parsons, Vicars, and Curates, every Sunday and Holyday, in theyr Churches. .. 1569. The sermon, of which Pilkington is assumed to be the author, was probably composed -1561-1563. Later in the sermon, women are criticized for their immoral desire for elaborate dress and their use of cosmetics and hair dye. In Vested Interests, her study of cross-dressing, Marjorie Garber observes that in this passage from the Homily, the "crescendo of alliteration . . . mimics foppish affectation" (27). *-"The Englishman in his Native Dress," Lukas de Heere, sixteenth century. The costume book, which sought to represent peoples and clothing in emblematic images, became increasingly popular in the sixteenth century: between 1520 and 1610, over two hundred collections of engravings, etchings or woodcuts were published that were concerned with clothing or personal adornment. Travellers Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 45 moralists condemn it. In 1608, William Perkins laments that "This one sinne is so common among us, that it hath branded our English people with the blacke marke of the vainest and most newfangled people under heaven. If a stranger comes into our land, he keepes his ancient & customeable attire, without varying or alteration. We on the contrary, can see no fashion used either by the French, Italian, or Spanish but we take it up, and use it as our owne" (Gg3"'-Gg3^).'3 A tract written by one A. L. in 1629, "A Relation of Some Abuses which are Committed Against the Commonwealth," includes in the author's list of transgressions the "vanities of the people in smoking, drinking and apparel"; the author declares that his fellow often carried with them, and added to, hand-painted journals as they passed through foreign regions. In the second half of the century the first printed books appeared. The earliest known is Richard Breton's Recueil de la diversité des habits (Paris, 1562); other major costume collections were those of Ferdinando Bertelli (Venice, 1563); lost Amman (Nurember, 1577); Abraham de Bruyn (Cologne, 1577; the second edition contained 79 plates with over 500 costumed figures); Jean-Jacques Boissard (Mechlin, 1581); Bartolomeo Crassi (Rome, 1585); Pietro Bertelli (Padua, 1589, 1591 and 1596); and the best known, Cesare Vecellio's De gli Habiti antichi et modemi di Diverse Parti del Mondo (Venice, 1590), with 420 woodcuts, 361 in Book I representing Europe (including Turkey), and 59 in Book II for Asian and African costume. The second edition in 1598 included 500 illustrations. When Vecellio's collection was reprinted in Venice in 1664, Cesare Vecellio was misidentified as Titian's brother, lending more fame to the book. Vecellio's Englishmen and women appear soberly garbed, identified by age or occupation. The woodcuts have been reproduced more recently, with some re-arrangement and alteration of written text, under the title Vecellio's Renaissance Costume Book: All 500 Woodcut Illustrations from the Famous Sixteenth-Century Compendium o f World Costume by Cesare Vecellio (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1977). Barbara Burman Baines notes that Boissard's 1581 costume hook. Habitus Variarum Orbis Gentium helped to extend the horizons of English dress. Fashion Revivals from, the Elizabethan Age to the Present Day (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1981), 22. She also refers to J. Olian's "Sixteenth Century Costume Books," Dress, vol. 3, The Costume Society of America, 1977, as a well-illustrated, and the only, published source dealing exclusively with costume books. William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases o f Conscience, III.4 (Cambridge, 1608). Perkins was a prominent Protestant figure: his books and sermons expounded Calvinist divinity and applied it to the real world, and they sold well. In 1590, Perkins published his catechism. The Foundation o f Christian Religion, which was reprinted at least four times in that decade. Christopher Haigh argues in English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) that Perkins "set the pattern of piety" for thinking Protestants about 1590 (287). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 46 Englishmen have become "French apes," wearing nothing but French styles. The image of the primitive ape, foolishly modeling himself on others, frequents critics' writings, as do attacks on French and Italian influence. William Rankin, for example, who in 1587 wrote A Mirror o f Monsters as part of the controversies over the stage, published the English Ape in 1588, a typical assault on Italian dress in England. The narrative of Robert Greene's 1592 A Quip fo r the Upstart Courtier: Or, a quaint dispute between Velvet breeches and Clothbreeches (a work that may well have been the impetus for the 1595 Quippes fo r Upstart Newfangled Gentlewomen) takes the form of a dream about cloth and velvet breeches personified. At its close, the dreaming knight, to the delight of bystanders, declares Velvet breeches: an upstart come out of Italy, begot of Pride, nursed up by selfe-love, and brought into this countrie by his companion newfanglenesse, that he is but of late times a raiser of rents, and an enemie of commenwelth, and one that is not any way to be preferd in equitie before Clothbreeches, therfore by generall verdict wee adiudge Clothbreeches to have done him no wrong, but that he hath lawfully claimed his title of frank tenement, and in that we appoint him forever to be resident.*^ Elizabeth's sermon "agaynst excesse of appareil" less humorously attacks the woman who "By whiche her pryde... styrreth up muche envye of others whiche '^Ed. Sir Frederick Madden, in Camden Society Publications, no. Ixi. Cited in Baldwin, 256. ‘^G. F. Hartlaub, in what Anne Hollander calls "his unique Zauber des Spiegels," has a 1590 print of a male monkey in a huge ruff, holding up a mirror, and another of an idiot holding a mirror, with the motto proditor stultitiae. Cited in Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 411. ' ^Robert Greene, Ciceronis Amor: Tulles Love (1589) and A Quip fo r an Upstart Courtier (1592): Facsimile Reproductions with an Introduction by Edwin Haviland Miller, ed. Harry R. Warfel (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1954), Sig. H3C Miller points out the tremendous popularity of Greene's pamphlet, noting that "[f]ew, if any, tracts of the period, religious or secular, attained such popularity": six editions appeared in 1592, the year of publication by printer John Wolfe, which Miller estimates to amount to about 7,000 copies; four more editions appeared in the seventeenth century (8-9). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 47 be so vaynely delighted as she is," targeting the foreign source of her fashions as much as the pride with which the woman displays them: the homily proclaims that "She doth but deserve mockes and scornes, to set out all her commendation in Jewish and Ethnick apparel, and yet bragge of her Christianitie. .. " (223). These popular complaints over fashions do bear relation to real outside influence in dress and styles. In 1601 even a merchant adventurer comments on England's desire for foreign goods in a detailed catalogue of luxury items he brings back: Of the Italians, they buye all Kinde of silke wares, Velvittes, wrought and unwrought, Taffitaes, Satins, Damaskes, Sarsenettes, Milan fustians. Clothe of golde and silver, Grograines, Chamlettes, Satin and sowing silke, Organzie, Orsoy, and all other kinde of wares either made or to be had in Italie. ' ^ Yet such imports, of course, are given not just financial, but moral significance. Henry Peacham's 1638 advice book. The Truth o f Our Times, displays a sentiment analogous to that driving Greene's humorous pamphlet: outside styles are a contagion to be controlled. Peacham remarks on the excesses of dress which resemble "an epidemical disease, first infecting the court, then the city, after the I7ln her essay "Distinguishing Signs: Ear-rings, Jews and Franciscan Rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance City," Past and Present 112 (1986): 3-59, Diane Owen Hughes traces the connections made sartorially (and socially) in Italy among Jews, Christians, women, and prostitutes. She observes that according to the Franciscan friars who wielded great influence in the fifteenth century, "women's endless appetite for finery made them partners of the Jew. The demands they made on their families fed and nourished the Jewish usurer, whose gains at Christian expense put rich clothes on women... female extravagance so impoverished Christians that they were driven 'to pawn to the Jews for ten [solidi] a garment that he will resell for thirty. And so it is never redeemed, and the garment is lost. Whence Jews became rich and Christians paupers'" (28). Parallels were found to link various dishonourable groups— "Women hungry for fashions, prostitutes roving for clients, Jews greedy for interest"— on which, Hughes argues, Italian society was coming to depend (38). Such connections perhaps explain the reference to "Jewish and Ethnick apparel" in the Elizabethan homily. '^Quoted by R. H. Tawney, ed., Tudor Economic Documents (London, 1924), m , 284. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 48 country."’^ He derides fashion's inconstancy, calling attention to its cyclical tendency as a sign of the absurdity of the disease: The fashion, like an higher orb, hath the revolution commonly every hundred year, when the same comes into request again; which I saw once in Antwerp handsomely described by an he- and she-fool turning a wheel about, with hats, hose, and doublets in the fashion fastened round about it, which when they were below, began to mount up again, as we see them. Peacham is not alone in his disapproval. William Harrison, in his observations of English life for Holinshed's Chronicles, condemns in great indignation the changeable and foolish vice of current fashions: [T]he phantastical folly of our nation (even from the courtier to the carter) is such that no form of apparel liketh us longer than the first garment is in the wearing, if it continue so long, and be not laid aside to receive some other trinket newly devised by the fickle-headed tailors... and as these fashions are so diverse, so likewise it is a world to see the costliness and the curiosity, the excess and the vanity, the pomp and the bravery, that is in all degrees, insomuch that nothing is more constant in England than inconstancy of attire.-O Harrison, unlike the poet of the Quippes, does not distinguish between men's and women's sartorial excesses, instead decrying the folly of the nation in general. The insular elements of Harrison's complaints surface when he comments. Neither was it ever merrier with England than when an Englishman was known abroad by his own cloth, and contented himself at home with his fine carsey hosen, and a mean slop; his coat, gown, and cloak of brown, blue, or puke, with some pretty furniture of velvet or fur, and a doublet of sad tawny, or black velvet, or other comely silk, without such cuts and garish colours as are worn in these days. . . . (292) Not unlike the narrator of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, who praises the Utopian reliance on plain, home-spun wool, Harrison hearkens back to a time of woolen. ‘^Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, The Truth o f Our Times, and The Art o f Living in London, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962). -^William Harrison, A Description o f Elizabethan England written for Holinshed's Chronicles, 1577. In Chronicle and Romance: Froissart, Malory, Holinshed (New York: P. P. Collier & Son Company, 1910), 289-290. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 49 English simplicity.^* While the foreigner can be identified by his fancy clothes, fleeting fashions and effeminate preening, the Englishman remains steady and sober in home-spun wool. Or at least, he should remain so; Harrison's nostalgia looks back to a time when the Englishman's appetite for apparel remained homely, as well. Harrison articulates a common desire to have England establish its own identity rather than relying on imitation of foreign cultures. This desire would come to be seen as an expression of godliness in addition to Englishness. The turn away from the unwelcome foreign and toward proper Englishness finds root in a mockery of and discomfort with English travelers who affect Italian mannerisms and return fanicified and. effete. The Italianate Englishman, described as "un diabolo incamato,"-- represents the ultimate degradation of an honorable Englishman as a result of foolish travel, and provides material for numerous parodies and ridicule. The traveler to Italy who has become too Italian is often depicted as both ridiculous and as an opponent to English, Protestant values. -*In "Consumption in early modem social thought," Joyce Appleby remarks that in the 1680s and 1690s (nearly a century after Harrison wrote), "it was the critics of material abundance who seized the discursive high ground in England, appealing to classical republican texts to stigmatize novelty as the harbinger of social unrest. Using the essay form to inveigh against the new consuming tastes, these Augustan moralists read the goods they saw in haberdashery shops and food stalls as dangerous signs of corruption and degeneration. Against the delights of consumption, they pitted predictions of social disintegration. The only antidote: frugality and simple living for the people, austere civic virtue in their leaders. These alone could provide the social underpinnings for the Constitution, itself England's sole preserver from the terrors of history, that zone of irrational behaviour which made up the realm o ïfortuna." Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter. (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 165. An interesting invocation of the past in discussion of fashion occurs in an Elizabethan proclamation made on May 6, 1562, in which "use of the monstrous and outrageous greatness of hose" is derided and a call is issued for men to wear hose that "lie just unto their legs as in ancient time was accustomed" (Tudor Royal Proclamations, Vol. II The Later Tudors (1553-1587), ed. by Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 189. 22Jn English "a devil incarnate." Inglese italianato è un diabolo incamato was a familiar proverb, commented on by Roger Ascham in The Scholemaster, 1570. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 50 Thomas Nashe describes Italianate Englishmen as "taffeta fools with their feathers" and mocks their literary pretensions.-^ The prominence which Italian culture in particular assumes in the English court under Elizabeth earns it judgments both complimentary and derogatory. While the complicated place of Italy and the uneasy position of the English traveller to Italy will be discussed more fully in the next chapter, what concerns us here is the approach early modem writers take in particular to the fashions, often male fashions, brought out of Italy and into England. Stable, constant English dress is continually contrasted to the fickle ostentation of the foreign; plain and sensible is held up to effeminate, fancified garb.-'^ Englishmen who wear foreign fashions are attacked as ridiculous and weak, and skewered for their likeness to women; Englishwomen who don elaborate fashions open themselves, their men, and their country to a host of sins. On Eve and Gendering A familiar Biblical tradition informs the image of woman as the source of invasion. In Quippes fo r Upstart Newfangled Gentlewomen, women, attracted through vanity to gaudy clothes, are trapped by the devil's devices; "He fisher is. 23prom Nashe's preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon: Camillas alarum to slumbering Eupfiues, 1589. In Prose o f the English Renaissance, William J. Hebei et al., eds. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1952), 430. 34 A less vicious, but odd, example of the call for simplicity appears in a sermon preached at Whitehall on the occasion of the marriage of Lord Hay on January 6, 1607. The preacher Robert Wilkinson admonishes: "Of all qualities, a woman must not have one qualitie of a ship, and this is too much rigging. Oh, what a wonder it is to see a ship under saile, with her tacklings and her masts, and her tops and top-gallants;.. .Yea, but what a world of wonders it is to see a woman . . . so . . . deformed with her French, her Spanish, and her foolish fashions, that he that made her, when he looks upon her, shall hardly know her, with her plumes, her fannes, and a silken vizard, with a ruffe like a saile, yea a ruffe like a raine-bowe, with a feather in her cap like a flag in her top, to tell, I thinke, which way the wind will blow." Cited in Baldwin, 253, who accepts Wilkinson's comments as proof that overdressing was common in the seventeenth century. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 51 they are his baytes,/ Wherewith to hel, he draweth huge heaps" (89-90); fine cloth, "monstrous bones," buttons, pinches, and fringes— ail feminine "babies"— lead women into Hell. Once women have gone astray, they ensnare men through their revealing fashions: the poet denounces "These naked paps, the devils ginnes [snares],/ to worke vaine gazers painfull thrall" (75-6). The poem follows the Biblical account of the Fall from the Garden of Eden in the passage of temptation from Satan to woman to man, signified in the end by the turn to clothing: Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the L o rd God had made. And he said unto the woman. Yea, hath God said. Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent. We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said. Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman. Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. (Genesis 3:1-7)-^ Following Eve in her pride of wanting to "be as gods," Adam eats of the infamous apple and is aware immediately of his nakedness; the pair's first fallen act is to dress themselves. Eve's attraction to the pleasant appearance of the tree makes her more susceptible to the serpent's reasoning than was Adam; but once the serpent seduces her, Adam’ s position becomes vulnerable and, as we see, open to the serpent's workings. The concern with clothes which both Adam and Eve display in collecting the leaves, their need for God to provide them with clothes (Genesis 4:21) before they are sent down from Eden, are signs of the Fall which continue to All citations from the Bible are from the King James version; my emphases. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 52 hold their meaning in early modem society and are utilized in the sermonizing which surrounds fashion and its displays.-^ In the colorful 1593 tract Christs teares over Jerusalem, Thomas Nashe explicitly calls upon the Genesis story in his detailed condemnation of women, masked as an attack against "the second Daughter of Pryde... Gorgeous attyre.'-7 What the Quippes implies through clever and cutting rhymes, Nashe proclaims directly. Curiously, Nashe's tract begins with despair about the sinful state, not of England, but of Jerusalem, a stain which he points to as an indication of larger spiritual decay. He holds Jerusalem up also as a region which, like England, has been infected by foreign, non-Christian badness. "No hogstie is now so pollutionate as the earth of Palestine and Jerusalem," Nashe bemoans (Pol 28v), before turning, in terms of infection and disease, to "ulcerous," "fouled and soyled" conditions which can be found in English society. Nashe does acknowledge that both women and men fall into sartorial excess, noting early in his denunciations that -^Hollander claims that "the Christian theory that clothing is unnatural or profane in its very essence, the result of man's fall, undoubtedly grew out of... the erotic pull of dress— even modest dress. . . . Fashion is in itself erotically expressive, whether or not it emphasizes sex." She continues, "An image of the nude body that is absolutely free of any counterimage of clothing is virtually impossible" (85-86). Hollander notes that until the mid-nineteenth century, Adam and Eve are always depicted absolutely bare, with no cloth or clothing on their bodies (despite the occasional fig leaf) (185). In contrast to the view of clothing as being inherently sinful is Perkins view that God taught Adam and Eve the appropriate use of apparel upon their descent from Eden— and that therefore some clothing is right and proper {Whole Treatise III.4). Similar views are seen in colonial narratives (Linton, "Jack o f Newberry and Drake in California"). Thomas Nashe, Christs teares over Jerusalem, 1593, Pol 70r. Bansley, too, targets pride as the root of women's fashion evils, reasoning, "They saye that all the pryde is in the harte,/ and none in the garmentes gaye/ But surely yf there were no proude haïtes/ there woulde be no proude araye/ For scripture saith that your proud garments and behaviour/ do shewe playnely what you are wythin/ And therfore your fone blynd skuses wyl not serve,/ they are not worth a pyn" (Sig. AlO- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 53 "Both the Sonnes and Daughters of Pride, delight to goe gorgeously." He elaborates on the motivations for such conduct: The ende of Gorgeous attyre, (both in men and women,) is but more fully to enkindle fleshly concupiscence, to assist the devil 1 in lustfull temptations. Men thinke that women (seeing them so sumptuously pearled & bespangled,) cannot chuse but offer to tender theyr tender soules at theyr feete. The women, they thinke, that (having naturally cleere beauty, scortchingly blazing, which enkindles any soule that comes neere it, and adding more Bauines unto it of lascivious embolstrings,) men should even flash their harts, (at first sight,) into the purified flames of theyr faire faces. (Fol 70r-v) This initial gesture of assigning blame equally to men and women as he concedes that "gorgeous attyre" can be found "both in men and women," however, is tossed aside as, in the Biblical tradition, Nashe explains the real source of men's reprehensible behavior: Ever since Euah [Eve] was tempted, and the Serpent prevailed with her, women have tooke upon them, both the person of the tempted, and the tempter. They tempt to be tempted, and not one of them, except she be tempted, but thinkes herselfe contemptible. Unto the greatnesse of her Grand-mother Euah, they seeke to aspire, in being tempted and tempting. (Fol 70r) Elaborately dressed men, it seems, have fallen into sin only because of women's diabolical temptations: "But for you, men woulde nere be so proude, nere care to goe so gorgeously," Nashe chides (Fol 73r). And Nashe provides practical reasons, as well as Biblical, for women's acts of temptation. Besides their ties to Eve, women's desire to overthrow men motivates their sumptuous clothes and elaborate hairstyles. "Being but a ribbe of man," Nashe admonishes his female readers, "you will thinke to over-rule him you ought to be subject too." Such dangerous female power Nashe presents as excessive appetite, an example of women's urge to consume men. He warns. Women, as the paines of the devils shal be doubled, that goe about hourelie tempting, and seeking whom they may devoure, so except you soone lay holde on grace, your paines in hell (above mens) shal be Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 54 doubled, for millions have you tempted, millions of men (both in soule & substaunce) have you devoured. To you, halfe your husbands damnation (as to Evah) will be imputed. (Fol 72v) Thus the blame in Christs teares over Jerusalem for England's moral turpitude is shifted from society in general to women in particular— male sin and even excesses in male fashions are women's fault. A similar progression of sartorial sin's movement from women to men can be seen in William Harrison's lamentations over the state of England's fashions, in which he complains. What should I say of [women's] doublets.. . with sleeves of sundry colors,. . . their fardingals, and diversely colored nether stocks of silk, jerksey and such like, whereby their bodies are rather deformed than commended . . . It... is now come to pass that women are become men; and the men transformed into monsters.-^ Confusion reigns in the England of Harrison's descriptions, which, furthermore, attribute Circean qualities to the female temptations of dress. Nashe's eternal damnation is Harrison's monstrousness. As can be seen with both Christs teares and the Quippes, the rhetorical effectiveness of attacks on fashion has several roots: social conservatism; the moral force of a condemnation of Pride; established misogynist arguments; and the ever-changing particulars of the fashionable world which, because of their enticing and sometimes salacious detail, lend vigor to an attack. In Christs teares, Nashe supports his analysis of the situation with extensive, detailed catalogues of women's fashions, comportment, hairstyles, cosmetics, and daily conduct. These elaborate lists, often (at least ostensibly) addressed directly to women, serve by virtue of their detail as confirmation of -*107-113. Cited in Baldwin, 204. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 55 Nashe's overall argument.29 The proof is in the plenitude of examples. In a series of rhetorical questions, for example, Nashe queries. If not to tempt, and be thought worthy to be tempted, why dye they & diet they theyr faces with so many dmgges as they doe, as it were to correct Gods work-manship, and reproove him as a bungler, and one that is not his crafts Maister? Why ensparkle they theyr eyes with spiritualiz'd distillations? Why tippe they theyr tongues with Aurum potabile? Why fill they up ages frets with fresh colours? (Fol 70v) The evidence of women's ties to Eve lies in their fondness for fashions: women's self-omamentation indicates not only their own weakness in the face of temptation, but simultaneously shows their complicity in the act of temptation. As Nashe warns women, "looke the devill come not to you, in the likeness of a Tayler or Painter; that howe ever you disguise your bodies, you lay not on your colours so thick, that they sincke into your soules. That your skinnes being too white without, your soules be not al black within" (Fol 71r-v). This relationship between exterior appearance and internal virtue is extended as Nashe sets up a direct correspondence between the particulars of women's clothing and their eternal fate. "How will you attyre your selves, what gowne, what head-tyre will you put on, when you shall lyve in Hell amongst Hagges and devils?" Nashe demands, and warns darkly, As many jagges, blysters and scarres, shall Toads, Cankers and Serpents, make on your pure skinnes in the grave, as no we you have cuts, jagges or raysings, up on your garments.. . . Your mome-like christall countenaunces, shall be netted over, and (Masker-like) cawle-visarded, with crawling venomous wormes. Your orient teeth, Toades shall steale into theyr heads for pearle; Of the jelly of your decayed eyes, shall they engender them young. (Fol 7 Ir) As with the Quippes, Nashe's tract (which opens with a preface to a female patron: "To the most honored, and vertuous beautified ladie, the ladie Elizabeth Carey: Wife the the thrice magnanimous, and noble discended Knight, Sir George Carey, Knight Marshall &c.") purports throughout to address the very women it chastises as the source of the nation's sins; yet, as with the Quippes, Nashe slips back and forth between the third-person "they" and "You... Gorgeous Ladies of the Court" as he alternately describes women's evils and exhorts them to mend their ways. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 56 The luxury of gorgeous attire is contrasted with the putrefaction of the grave as a means not only of illustrating women's offenses, but also of frightening these female sinners from their ways. "The greatness of thy paynes I want portentous wordes to portray," Nashe reveals (Fol 71v-72r), and he makes a prediction: Wherein soever thou hast tooke extreame delight and glory, therein shalt thou be plagued with extreame & dispiteous malady. For thy flaring frounzed Periwigs, lowe dangled downe with love-locks, shalt thou have thy head-side, dangled downe with more Snakes then ever it had hayres.30 In the moulde of thy braine, shall they claspe theyr mouthes, and gnawing through every parte of thy scull, ensnarle their teeth amongst thy braines, as an Angler ensnarleth his hooke amongst weedes. (Fol 72r) 30 A reference, perhaps, to the famous snakes adorning Medusa's fearsome head. Nancy Vickers examines sixteenth-century readings of the Medusa legend in her essay "'The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's Lucrece," In Shakespeare and the Question o f Theory, edited by Geoffrey Hartman and Patricia Parker, 95-116 (London: Metheun, 1986), which studies the rhetorical battle over a violated female body in Shakespeare's poem, as well as implications of shield imagery in Lucrece. Vickers points to the description of Athena's Gorgon-bearing shield in Gerard Leigh's Accedence of Armorie (London, 1591) as a representative example of early modem views of Medusa; while her interest lies in the significance of Shakespeare's use of the shield, especially one bearing Medusa's image, Leigh's description and Vicker's analysis bear repeating here. Leigh writes: "Ye the sacred Temple of Minerva to practise her [Medusa's] filthy lust, with that same godde Neptune, wheof as she openly fled the discipline of womanly shamfastnes, she was by the godes decree for hir so foule a fault, bereft of all dame Bewties shape, with every comely ornament of Natures decking. The glyding eye framed to fancies amorous lust, turned was to wan and deadlie beholding. And for those golden and crisped lockes, rose fowle and hideous serpents . . . Thus everie seemelie gifte transformed into loathsome annoiance, of a beautiful Queene, is made a beastlie monster, horrible to mankinde, a mirror for Venus minions." Vickers notes that "Leigh, writing during the reign of a 'most gorgious and bewtifull' virgin queen, reports the story of Medusa as a moral tale, as a lesson about the dangers of straying from 'womanly shamfastnes' and, by implication, of frequenting women who do. Gifted with every 'comely ornament' of conventional Petrarchan beauty- bright eyes, curly golden hair— Medusa's fair face's field is metamorphosed in the name of punishment for a sin Leigh elsewhere refers to as an 'adulterie.' The Gorgon's face, then, stands as the reverse of Lucrece's face [a sign of "shamefastness"], and the act of defining that difference, in Leigh's rendition, would seem to be any unlawful expression of female sexuality" (109). Certainly Nashe's dire predictions appear reminiscent of the Gods' punishement of Medusa, just as his snake imagery invokes a moral judgment similar to Leigh's. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 57 The love-locks and brain represent merely the beginning, as Nashe itemizes the progression of bodily decay from a woman's hair through her brain and skull to her eyes, mouth, and breasts.^' Just as his descriptions of dangerous fashions focus on the particulars of women's bodies and their apparel— foreheads, necks, heads, breasts, caps, busks, "pinches" and "purles," so the descriptions of the spiritual consequences of such fashions remain with the flesh. In this way, Nashe produces a curiously inverted blazon, in which a poet praises separate parts of the female body in an idealizing list: rather than itemizing his subjects' bodies in order to describe their beauty, Nashe lays out their sins and future course of putrefaction. Nancy Vickers has argued that the traditional, Petrarchan blazon contains implications for the "female matter for male oratory," noting that "[t]he canonical legacy of description in praise of beauty is, after all, a legacy shaped predominantly by the male imagination for the male imagination; it is, in large part, the product of men talking to men about women."^- The female subject of male description in this case, dissected into her visible body parts and the ornaments of her clothing, is 3 'Hollander's claim that "For Christians the corruptibility of the body, dressed or undressed, lies in its fragile susceptibility to decay and sin, but the special corruptibility of nakedness among naturally clothed humans lies in its readiness to seem not only erotic but weak, ugly, or ridiculous" (84) appears relevant to Nashe's reveling in the putrefaction of the sinfully-dressed women's bodies. 32yickers, "'The blazon of sweet beauty's best," 96. In this essay, as well as in her essay "The Mistress in the Masterpiece," in The Poetics o f Gender, edited by Nancy K. Miller, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 19-41, Vickers discusses the power relations involved in male description of the female body, which becomes fragmented and scattered through its display, "confiscated" by the describer. She writes, "Description, then, is a gesture of display, a separating off and a signaling of particulars destined to make visible that which is described. Its object or matter is thus submitted to a double power-relation inherent in the gesture itself: on the one hand, the describer controls, possesses, and uses that matter to his own ends; and, on the other, his reader/listener is extended the privilege or pleasure of 'seeing'" ("The blazon," 96). In "Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme," Critical Inquiry 8 (Winter 1981): 265-79, Vickers more fully studies the fragmenting nature of Petrarchan poetry, especially in its idealized descriptions of female beauty. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 58 reduced to a segmented form which emblematizes female trespass. Her dangerous power to overstep her boundaries, which Nashe sees signaled in her "disdainefull majesticall carriage" (Fol 72v), and the corruption with which she, Eve-like, threatens man, are controlled by dismembering— even disemboweling— her through Nashe's ghoulish lists. One exception to this focus on the corporeal presents itself among the numerous bosoms and corpses of Christs teares. Nashe constructs a scenario in which on the Day of Judgment, God refuses to recognize a "painted sepulcher" of a woman and casts her into Satan's care, charging, "Thou hast so differenced & divorced thy selfe from thy creation, that I know thee not for my creature" (Fol 7Iv). The religious message is clear— that the vanity and pride of rich clothing represents a turn from God. A focus on earthly appearance suggests too little regard for the state of one's soul. It even, in the extreme, becomes a form of self idolatry: "Lyke Idole... they apparreile themselves. Blocks and stones by the Panims & Infidels, are over-gilded, to be honored and worshipped: so over-gilde they themselves, to bee more honoured and worshipped" (Fol 70r). But despite Nashe's concern with the post-mortem ramifications of women's dress, the tract remains grounded in the very carnal subject it decries. Even this scene set in Heaven returns in excruciating detail to the sinful woman's bodily, rather than spiritual, fate: God commands that Satan cast over with "blacke boyling Pitch" her "counterfeite red and w h ite ," 3 3 and directs with Dantean justice, "whereas she was wont, in Asses mylke to bathe her, to engraine her skyn more gentle, plyant, delicate and supple, in bubling scalding Lead, and fatty flame-feeding Brimstone, 33Describing, of course, the lady's use of cosmetics. Vickers turns her attention to the imagery of these colors in her analysis of Lucrece: the red and white of Lucrece's face— traditional Petrarchan descriptions of a female complexion— also call up heraldic terminology and allegorical associations (103-108). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 59 see thou uncessantly bather her" (Fol 71 v). Nashe closes his passage on pridefui apparel with an explanation for his focus on fleshly torment, arguing for the incongruity inherent in the act of dressing up an ordinary human body: Englishmen put all their felicitie in going pompously and garishly: they care not how they impoverish their substance, to seeme ritch to the outwarde appearaunce. What wise man is there, that makes the sace or cover of any thing, ritcher then the thing it selfe which it containeth or covereth? Our garments, (which are cases and covers for our bodies,) we compact of Pearle and golde, our bodies themselves, are nought but clay and putrifaction. (Fol 73r) Yet unlike this concluding passage, the diatribe against Pryde and Gorgeous Apparel in Christs teares over Jerusalem, as with other tracts which lay seige to fashion, centers around not Englishmen, but Englishwo/ne/z's bodies as the source of, and emblem of, infectious sin. Fashion serves as a vehicle to discuss the subversive dangers of women within the Englishman's society even as it masquerades as the subject. Furthermore, by reducing women to their fashionable- -and endangered— body parts, Nashe in Christs teares over Jerusalem dismantles female power even while warning against its influence. Nashe's diatribe is guided by Isaiah's similar condemnation of the women of Zion (Isa. 3:12-26), which includes detailed lists of the offending women's habits of dress and which elaborates on their resultant punishments. Isaiah too opens this passage with disaster. "Jerusalem is ruined, and Judah is fallen," he proclaims, "because their tongue and their doings are against the LORD, to provoke the eyes of his glory" (3:8). Yet women play a larger part than others in the transgressions of the people, apparently leading Zion astray in an unnatural position of leadership: "Woe unto the wicked!. . . children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths" (3:11-12). In his treatise Nashe, of course, refers to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 60 women's desire to overrule their men as a sign of the sinful disorder abounding in England. Pride of dress and pride of position go hand-in-hand. In Isaiah, further detail is furnished on the women's wrongdoings, again calling to mind Nashe's writing in its attack on women's comportment: "Moreover the LORD saith. Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the LORD will discover their secret parts" (3:16-17).^"^ The humiliation of Zion's women, which "shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem... by the spirit of judgment" (4:4), is achieved by an elaborate exposure of their bared "secret parts"— their garments, ornaments, and perfumes. The catalogue is noteworthy for its specificity in describing female dress^^ and for its obvious influence on Renaissance reformers' approaches to the evils of fashion. Isaiah provides an inventory: In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon. The chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers. The bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings. The rings, and the nose jewels. The changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins. The glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the vails. And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sack-cloth; and burning instead of beauty... And her gates ^^Diane Owen Hughes notes that, among the multiple sumptuary laws targeting prostitutes, "Florence went still further, and made prostitutes not only visible but audible, by attaching bells to their hoods or shawls. The bell was the sign of a leper, but on a prostitute it also surely summoned up memories of those daughters of Zion whom Isaiah would smite" (25). 35 At the time of Isaiah as well as at the time of translation. What the King James calls "stomacher," for example, the 1977 Oxford Annotated Bible calls "rich robe" (3:24); the 1611 "changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins" become in 1977 "the festal robes, the mantles, the cloaks, and the handbags" (3:22). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 61 shall lament and mourn; and she being desolate shall sit upon the ground. (3:18-26) The correspondence between the beautiful today and the hideous after-judgment is maintained here: sweet perfume signals future stink, lovely hair will be lost. Nashe's elaborate, condemnatory lists in Chists teares, as with many other moralizers' catalogues, have an obvious Biblical predecessor and model. Yet Isaiah also promises repentance, as he predicts that on that day "seven women shall take hold of one man, saying. We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name, and take away our reproach" (4:1). The sign of Zion's trespasses rests on the bodies of its women, who must suffer shame and be humbled for "the branch of the LORD [to] be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the earth [to be] excellent and comely for them that are escaped of Israel" (4:2). As in many Renaissance treatises, a woman's dress stands for far more than fashionable trends, her personal style, or taste in shopping— indeed, she wears the nation's salvation or damnation in her clothes. The Bible was, of course, the most common influence on Protestant writings, as reformers hearkened back to God's word, rather than the corrupted interpretations of the Roman Catholic church, for inspiration.^^ While Isaiah's 36 Eamon Duffy observes a spread of Protestant feeling in the 1570s, noting that "The English Bible certainly played a crucial role here. Even in the heat of the northern rebellion there are indications that many of those involved in burning the Protestant books from the churches baulked at burning the Bible, and did what they could to protect it. New pieties were forming, and something of the old sense of the sacred was transferring itself from the sacramentals to the scriptures" (586). The Stripping o f the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson remark, in their study of the Puritans, that the nub of the debate in the dispute between the Church of England and the Puritans was the authority of scripture. In the early 1600s the Catholic church argued that "if the authority of the Universal Church were disowned, the Bible would prove an inadequate substitute, because the Bible would become subject to interpretation, no two men would agree on what it meant, Protestantism would split into a hundred differing sects, each one twisting Biblical meanings to suit its own convenience, and thus scripture would Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 62 condemnation of the women of Zion provided a structure and vocabulary with which to attack contemporary fashions, constructing an argument within the framework of Eve's temptation of Adam allowed writers such as Nashe several other avenues of attack.37 As Joyce Appleby points out. In both Christian and classical thought the central unworthiness of human beings stemmed from their desiring things that were unnecessary, that is from their desire to consume.. . . Hebraic tradition, which gave English Puritans so rich a rhetorical resource for vivifying sin, identified luxury with desire and desire with disobedience. Eve indulged in luxury when she unnecessarily ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. (166) Disobedience through desire, a female sin: so within the Quippes fo r Upstart Newfangled Gentlewomen, as in Christs teares and other such attacks, the excesses lose all the necessary attributes of an authority" (41). While both the Puritan and Anglican turned to the Bible as an authority, "the difference between the Anglican and the Puritan. .. was that the Puritan thought the Bible, the revealed word of God, was the word of God from one end to the other, a complete body of laws, an absolute code in everything it touched upon; the Anglican thought this a rigid, doctrinaire, and utterly unjustifiable extension of the authority of scripture (43). Yet despite their differences, both factions remained actively hostile to the writings, and even methods of thinking (such as scholasticism) which had prevailed in the Roman church for centuries and which they believed to be "prostituted to the ambitions of the Papacy, and become the source of all the mischief and 'superstition' in the Church of Rome" (26). The Puritans, Volume I, ed. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Harper and Row, 1963% Thus the turn to scripture, the re-interpretation and re-presentation of scriptural arguments, came to be one sign of the reformer. 3^An interesting variation on the Edenic reference occurs in colonial discussions, as Joan Pong Linton examines in "Jack ofNewbery and Drake in California: Domestic and Colonial Narratives of English Cloth and Manhood," ELH 59 (1992): 23-51. Linton argues that in scenes of the civilization of the natives, "colonial fiction is reinforced by a Christian allegory constructing Englishmen as divine agents sent to civilize the savages... cloth appears on the scene as the crucial semiotic identifying Englishmen with gods" (39). The English offer to "couer [the Indians'] nakednesse,"— "unmistakable scriptural reference points to the moment after the Fall when Adam and Eve first know shame. Although they devise a garment of fig leaves to cover their nakedness, God teaches them instead the use of animal skins. The Edenic reference invokes a biblical typology in which God's clothing of the fallen couple finds repetition and fulfilment in the colonists' clothing of Indians" (40-41). Linton links such narratives to those written within England about the cloth trade, arguing that "domestic and colonial narratives operate analogously to define two realms of action for Englishmen: domesticating women at home, converting and civilizing savages abroad... The effect. ..is to universalize English bourgeois manhood" (37-38). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 63 or trespasses of fashion become a gendered issue. "[L]ight fisgigs" {Quippes 258), or flirting women all, women repeatedly become or are revealed in the poem as deceitful, ensnaring men and leading them to their downfall. Charles Bansley initially distinguishes between the good and bad among his purportedly female readers, stating, "I speake not agaynste no playne women/ as walke in godlye wyse/ But agaynst such wanton dyssemblers,/ as doeth goddes truthe despyse." Yet, because there are dissemblers, he warns, he cannot trust any women, so his defenses are up: "And therfore I truste no honest women," he finishes (Sig. A3v). Female seductions or cuckoldry are consistently aided or brought about by various "wanton" fashions, making women even more dangerous. Abbleby notes that "If represented graphically luxury, of course, is a woman— sometimes a powerful evoker of desire carrying the comb and mirror of cupidity and self-love; at other times an abject naked woman under attack from toads and snakes" (166). Nashe's words combine both images— vain temptress and festering body. The Quippes, too, elides classes of women, equating the actions of the upper classes to those of the lowest whores, to universalize the female sex through its behavior in dress. The brief disparagement of the blurring of class lines through fashion is soon forgotten in the poem's attack's on female display. Ostensibly addressing his female readers, the poet scoffs. You thinke (perhaps) to win great fame, by uncouth sûtes, and fashions wilde: All such as know you, think the same, but in ech kinde, you are beguilde. For when you looke, for praises sound. Then are you for light fisgigs crownde. (253-58) Women, united in their fascination for fashion, are gullible Eve, who falls for the serpent's seductive arguments merely at the sight of the tree's pleasant appearance. And their susceptibilty becomes a male problem because of their sex. Stallybrass Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 64 finds that whereas the Renaissance man's classical body presented no openings to the world, clearly closed off and separate from the world around him, "woman's body... is naturally 'grotesque.' It must be subjected to constant surveillance precisely because, as Bakhtin says of the grotesque body, it is 'unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits'" ("Patriarchal Territories," 126). Here, indeed, is "the Renaissance topos that presents woman as that treasure which, however locked up, escapes" (128). In discussions of fashion, however, women do not so much escape as allow foreign contamination into their already open and vulnerable bodies: the foreign and frivolous clothes, unhappily, actually touch their defenseless flesh. So the fashion which entices women and thereby enters into a man's property figures, of course, as the foreign serpent which invades the purity of the enclosed garden of (English) Eden and soils the innocence of Eve. But why would the serpent, which in terms of woman's open and penetrable body would seem to be any outside intruder other than the 'owner' of the woman, become the evil, specifically non-English foreign presence? In these attacks on fashion, the foreign often serves to define the native, the threat defines that which is threatened. Nearly every style of clothing which the Quippes denigrates in its very specific diatribe turns out to be of foreign origin: smocks which hide the horrors of venereal disease are "Holland smockes" (255); "priuie coates," or heavy undercoats made from cloth or leather and used to mould the figure, create "Amazones" from English "Dames" (144), just as they can urge mothers' infanticide in the tradition of the "Gyants" (145-50). "Hoopes that hippes and haunch do hide" originally, according to the poet, were designed for French whores with pox, to alleviate the pain from their diseases; they also helped them to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 65 hide unwanted pregnancies (151-70). Nashe, too, touches on the foreign taint of female fashions, remarking to his embattled female reader (slipping, however, from "you" to "they") that men would [n]ere fetch so many newfangles from other Countries, you have corrupted them, you have tempted them, halfe of your pride you have devided with them. No Nathion hath any excesse, but they have made it theirs [women's]. Certaine glasses there are, wherein a man seeth the image of another, & not his owne: those glasses are their eyes, for in them they see the image of other Countries, and not their owne. Other Countries fashions they see, but never looke back to the attyre of their fore-fathers, or consider what shape their own Country shold give them. (Sig. 72V) The image in the mirror should look English; like Harrison and others, Nashe hearkens back to an obscure, ideal fashion of the past. Interestingly enough, the Quippes poet never elaborates on proper costume for women, nor does he present an 'English' style for women to adopt. Nor does Nashe mention an acceptable dress, except to refer vaguely to the "wedding garment of fayth"; he adds helpfully that on Judgment Day, all will be clothed in "thyne owne skinne" (Sig. 7 1 v)3S_ 38In her study of Renaissance portraiture, Elizabeth Cropper observes that "the painting of a beautiful woman [unlike that of a man], like the lyric poem, may become its own object, the subject being necessarily absent.. . . Even as the portrayal of woman provided a figure for the beauty of painting, the very possibility of representing beauty was denied. Implicated in this paradox is the poet's claim that intrinsic beauty of character, upon which a true and virtuous identity is founded, cannot be communicated in the single beautiful moment of painting" (181, 182). She concludes, "the portrait of a beautiful woman belongs to a distinct discourse from which the woman herself is necessarily absent. In portraying his mistress, it is the art of painting that the painter desires to possess, even as the poet embraces his own laurels" (190). An interesting parallel, albeit inverted, can be seen in the tracts on fashion: the texts' subject is universalized into the single image of the trespassing female, just as the beautiful woman, as Cropper argues, is universalized into a common image of beauty; similarly, just as the beautiful woman, despite her presence on the canvas, remains absent from the portrait, so do women— good or bad— remain singularly absent from these tracts. Certainly the proper woman is undescribed in Nashe or the Quippes. Abstractions, instead, serve to represent womankind, and often the writer's cleverness, wit, or righteousness become the true subject of the tract. Cropper's essay. "The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture," appears in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses o f Sexual Dijference in Early M odem Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 66 Richard Brathwaite's prescriptive The English gentlewoman, drawne out to the full body: Expressing, what habilliments doe best attire her, what complements doe best accomplish her, a conduct book written thirty years after Christs teares and the Quippes, similarly relies on detailed descriptions of abuses of apparel paired with abstract notions of virtue.39 Although the genre of Brathwaite's book differs considerably from that of the Quippes or of Nashe's work— moving from satire to moralizing tract to conduct book— the change in genre does not significantly affect theme (or attitude toward that theme). As with many writings on women and fashions, the approach to the topic is pre-ordained. Despite Brathwaite's title which promises to draw the gentlewoman "out to the full body," a specific picture of the Englishwoman's attire does not appear— Brathwaite emphasizes, rather, that it is best to "wear" virtuous qualities. Brathwaite presents his book as a manual for women's "Appareil, Behavior, Complement, Decency, Estimation, Fancy, Gentility, and Honour," and addresses his advice, in a preface to the "Gentlewoman Reader," only to modest and virtuous Englishwomen [FIGURE 3 ]. Thus, unlike Nashe's tract or the Quippes, which posit a corrupt female ear in need of ridicule and reprimand, Brathwaite constructs a virtuous female reader for receipt of what he describes as a "female" book— the model gentlewoman of the title. Europe, ed. by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 175-190. ^^Richard Brathwaite (London: B. Alsop & T. Fawcet for Michael Sparke, 1631). The frontispiece presents in pictorial form the female qualities the book purports to cover, with a fold-out explanation of each quality. For the picture labeled "Appareil," Brathwaite writes, "Appareil being by a Curtaine first discovered, where shee appeares sitting in a Wardrobe richly furnished, is expressed in a comely or seemly Habit; holding a vaile in her hand; poudred with teares, implying the Necessity of that Livery to bee derived from the losse of her Originall purity; as one therefore, neither impenitent for her sinne, nor ignorant of her shame, but constantly tender what may best suit or sort with her same, shee delivers her mind in this Mott. Comely, not Gaudy." Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 67 Yet in his construction of this ideal reader, Brathwaite uses negative example and disparaging asides to create another, "loose," and "mercinarie" "Sister" whom he forbids to look upon the "Goodlinesse" of his gentlewoman. Brathwaite's counsel, for example, is not open to "such who sacrifice the Mome to their Glasse, the Afternoon to the Stage, and Evening to Revelling" (Sig. *1^). Neither, Brathwaite cautions, will his lady of a book provide frivolous material: . . . you are not to expect from her any guga-tyres, toy es, or trifles; love- scented gloves, amourous potions, perfumed pictures, or love-sicke pouders; so shee doubts not, but to finde in you an Bare, prompt to attention; a Tongue, cleare of invection; a Spirit, free from detraction— with an Heart apt to harbour affection. (Sig. *20 This is no Ovidian manual; rather, Brathwaite extols the virtuous qualities of a gentlewoman in a sober, English fashion. In his estimation— a recapitulation of common views on fashion from both sermonizing tracts and sumptuary law— "[a]pparell may be inverted to abuse" in several ways in English society. By wearing clothes above one's degree, such as purple and silk, gold, silver, and precious stones (particulars cited frequently in sumptuary law), a woman, Brathwaite explains— expanding the more pragmatic punishments of the legal system— is led into Hell. Thus legal injunctions are translated fluidly into moral terms. Soft clothes create soft minds, Brathwaite adds, just as foreign fashions and a "superfluity of appareil" constitute sin. He admonishes, "So her outward habit be pure and without blemish, values little her inward garnish" (Intro), and instructs that Modesty must be the rule: women must go "Not with braided haire, or gold, or pearles, or costly appareil. But, as becommeth women that professe the feare of God" (Sig. B3^). In the Quippes, one stanza only describes a woman positively, however grudgingly: The better sort, that modest are, whome garish pompe, doth not infect: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 68 Of them Dame honour, hath a care, with glorious fame, that they be dekt: Their praises, will for aie remaine. When bodies rot, shall vertue gaine. (259-64) Nashe’ s decomposing corpses, suitably punished for their vanity, reappear here. So what we find is that the best woman— she who is safe from the constant peril of invasion— is a dead one. Secure from the French- or Italian-speaking serpent in the guise of baubles or frills, and buried safely in English soil, the woman's body becomes closed off, and thus acceptable, in death. The Marketplace Many critics have noted the implied definition of women as a market commodity. The urge to contain the Englishwoman, to control her consumption of fashionable goods and to remove her body from view, highlights the contradictory role women played in commerce, at the same time that it shows their participation in the Englishman's act of self-definition.^^ Because the woman in Renaissance ^°Despite the negative connotations of a publicly-displayed female form, women were known to serve as decoration for their husbands' shops, thus literally promoting commerce as they became ornaments themselves (Newman, Fashioning Femininity 122). In her essay "Economy, Woman, and Renaissance Discourse," Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. by Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 192-208, Carla Freccero invokes a well-known passage in which Karl Marx, while discussing the anthropomorphization of commodities (which are exchanged among men), "remarks humorously that in a twelfth-century French text, 'femmes folles de leurs corps,' or 'wanton women,' were included in the list of commodities at the fair in Lendit. Indeed," Freccero continues, "Luce Irigaray literalizes Marx's personifications in her discussion of the exchange of women. She declares that 'heterosexuality is nothing but the assignment of economic roles'. . . . She suggests that, whereas her critics will say that she develops her analysis of the 'traffic in women' analogy with Marx's theory of commodities, in reality his theory of commodity exchange may have been developed by implicit analogy to the (socially determined) difference between the sexes" (192-193). The contradictory nature of this traffic in women, Freccero adds, again quoting from Irigaray, is exacerbated by the fact that, while daughters must be exchanged, mothers "must be private property, excluded from exchange... mothers cannot circulate in the form of commodities without threatening the very existence of social order" (204). In Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 69 society was already a commodity traded among men, very much a "part of the process of valuation and exchange,"'** she became an easy target of anxiety as property which "unlike most property," Stallybrass points out, "can bring dishonor to the landlord even as he possesses it" (128). In a society in which, Linda Woodbridge has shown, English Renaissance women "as bearers of social status and class distinction" used their apparel to advertise the prosperity of their fathers and husbands,*- the advantages for men of women's use of fashion became threatening to those very fathers and husbands if their literacy in "reading" the garments was endangered by confusing, foreign influences. The Quippes poet sees the excesses of fashion as most reprehensible, accordingly, when ".. .men, of lore and wit,/ and guiders of the weaker kinde;/ Doe iudge them for their mate so fit..." (19-21); if men don't realize what women's clothes indicate, the text implies, their own honor is at stake. For, as Carla Freccero illustrates in her study of Leon Battista Alberti's fifteenth-century Della famiglia (1428), There is always the threat of dispossession or expenditure through the woman's body and, more specifically, through one of her two mouths. This threat appears [in Alberti's treatise] first as potential betrayal within the sanctuary of the house. The public-private division must be constructed, again, within the house, which has now become the space of both economics and politics: a political economy.. . . The fear that women will talk is associated with their circulation. (201-202) her essay "City Talk: Women and Commodification, Epicoene (1609)," Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations o f Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 181-195, Karen Newman cites the same passage from Marx, to make her point that "Women's relation to commodities is multiple, even extravagant— we are at once goods, sellers of goods, and consumers of goods, and significantly, in Marx's formulation, the object-as-woman is defined in terms of lack. Goods 'lack the power to resist man'" (183). **Jardine, 163. Jardine continues, "Any marriageable well-born woman possessed a number of attributes which gave her a 'value': her dowry prospects, her title, her looks, her ability to produce heirs." *-Linda Fitz Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature o f Womankind, /540-/(520 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), cited in Rose, 74. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 70 And in tracts on fashion, the fear of how women will dress constitutes the danger of their circulation. In his attempt to remove such threats to interpretation, the Quippes poet calls into question the intrinsic value of women and of the clothing which covers (or reveals) their bodies; in a society which depends increasingly on trade, the relationship between women and commerce must be negotiated so that the men who control the trade can maintain the purity of their line, their honor, and the state.^3 Invoking a modest English history as a contrast to the wicked state of the present, Richard Brathwaite claims. The face knew not then what painting was, whose adulterate shape takes now acquaintance from the Shop. Then were such women matter of scandal 1 to Christian eyes, which used painting their skinne, powdring their hayre, darting their eye. Our Commerce with forraine Nations was not for fashions, feathers, and follies. (Sig. B5^) As with Nashe and in the Quippes, the Englishwoman is also criticized for her knowledge of the "Shop" and for her truck with foreign fashions and summoned instead to be, as Brathwaite puts it, "a beautie to her Nation" (1, my emphases). These writers define English precisely as that which is not foreign, developing a national identity by segregating England, morally and visually, from all others. The Englishwoman thus had to be segregated as well, forbidden from foreign markets, kept from ostentation, and prevented from acting as a spectacle. That the label "whore" is attached in these writings to any female act subjected to public view illustrates perhaps most strongly the uneasy place occupied by women in the marketplace. Marjorie Garber remarks on the "dissymmetry of ^3judith Butler, in Gender Trouble (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), cites Lévi-Strauss and his "notorious claim that 'the emergence of symbolic thought must have required that women, like words, should be things that were exchanged'.. ( 4 1 ) — an interesting observation in light of the exchanges over women's bodies here. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 71 reference in Spanish between a 'public man' (statesman) and a 'public woman’ (a whore)""*^; such dissymmetry in English appears notably in writings on fashion, in which the subject itself— women's public dress— declares the denunciatory nature of the conclusion, even as the text announces the male writer's righteous, public position. The putative influence wielded by the public Englishwoman lends strength to the attacks on her. And descriptions of men in their responses to female fashions construct them as curiously passive, or at least powerless, in the face of these ornamented women. Numerous metaphors for this imbalance of power appear in the Quippes, providing a copious display of the poet's descriptive powers as well as an exhaustive warning for the male reader. Just as the desire for fashions consumes and corrupts women, so, the poet fears, those 'infected' women will ensnare men: again. Eve leads Adam to the fruit. Apparently helpless Englishmen, for example, are drawn to elegant lace aprons as arrows fly toward a target. The poet elaborates: When shooters aime at buttes and prickes, they set vp whites to shew the pinne: It may be, Apomes are like tricks, to teach where rouers game may winne. Braue archers soone will finde the marke. But bunglers hit it in the darke. (175-80) "Rouers," or archers shooting at casual marks at uncertain distances, will apparently be drawn to the bull's eye— the "pinne," or peg in the center of the target- -by the mere sight of a foreign lace apron. And the "naked paps" which some fashions expose work as the devil's trap for fools who are deceived by the finery (75-6). But while most of the agency in these seductions is located within the clothes— the articles of clothing are the "nets" and "ginnes"; never do we see, for Vested Interests, 93. Margaret Rosenthal explores a similar dissymmetry in Italian between cortegiano, "courtier," and cortegiana, "courtesan," in her study of Veronica Franco, The Honest Courtesan. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 72 example, women's eyes or gestures enticing a man— the women in foreign fashions have certainly fallen into vice. They cuckold their husbands, ensnare defenseless lovers who cannot resist the attractions of their foreign fashions, and frequent public areas, allowing the public to view their "tempting ware" (57). The poet explains how, because high-heeled cork shoes are in style, women now ride through town in coaches. But his "reading" of their new transportation illustrates the only place their elegant shoes may take them: Some thinkes perhaps to shew their wealth, nay, nay, in them they pennance take. As poorer truls, must ride in cartes. So coatches are for prouder hearts. (193-98) 'All roads lead to Hell'— or, to be more specific, to whoredom. Just as bawds and whores were exhibited in carts, ladies in their finery display themselves in coaches."*^ The ladies are already caught by their desire for foreign fashion, just as whores were caught and displayed in shame. Fifty-six years later, Thomas Fuller's 1648 description of a harlot, like the Quippes, also provides specific details of public appearance which reveal inner nature: "she is commonly known by her whorish attire," Fuller writes, "as crisping and curling, making her hair as winding and intricate as her heart, painting, wearing naked breasts.'"*® So, too, the 1619 play Swetnam the Woman-hater, based on the controversy over a famous anti-feminist tract, presents the argument that women, in displaying themselves, participate in the public act of selling themselves. The character Misogenos remarks that "A Citie Tradesman" is aware that "garish setting ‘ ^SNewman remarks that "The slippage from the whore's thirsty mouth to her insatiable genitals is a commonplace. The talking woman is everywhere equated with voracious sexuality that in turn abets her avid consumerism: scolds were regularly accused of both extravagance and adultery" C'City Talk" 184). Once again, though, in tracts on fashion, the women's linguistic act lies in their wearing of finery. ‘ ^^The Holy State and the Profane State, 1648 (reprinted at London 1840) 73. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 73 out/ Of Beautie in their shops will call in Customers" (in.iii.154-157); for the same commercial reasons, he claims, women study the "mysterie of Painting, Curling, Powdring" (in.iii.176).^'^ The Quippes makes even more explicit its act of moral translation, as it focuses on interpreting the signs of ambiguous fashions for the dangerously naïve male viewer. Stallybrass notes that "The signs of the 'harlot' are her linguistic 'fullness' and her frequenting of public space" (127). The Quippes women certainly never speak; but their physical presence in common areas is implied by their wearing of fashions from far-off markets. Their linguistic act is in their fashionable dress, and their language is what the poet must translate for us. The obviousness of women's 'true' motives incites the poet to chide foolish husbands who allow such openness: You sillie men, of simple sence, what ioy have you, olde-Cookes to be: Your owne deare flesh, thus to dispense, to please the glance of lusting eie. That you should coutch your meate in dish. And others feele, it is no fish. (199-204) ^"^The original pamphlet, whose full title was The Araignment ofLewde, idle, froward, and vnconstant women: Or the vanitie o f them, choose you whether. With a Commendacion o f wise, vertuous and honest Women. Pleasant fo r married Men, profitable fo r young Men, and hurtfull to None. (1615), is listed in the STC as having ten editions before 1634; after that, editions appeared in 1690, 1702, 1707, 1733, and 1807. There were also translations into Dutch published in 1641 and 1645. The pamphlet provoked numerous responses in England, and the play Swetnam the Woman-hater (possibly by Dekker or Hey wood), purporting to assume a neutral position in the debate over whether men or women should be blamed for the first sin, was first performed by Queen Anne's players in 1619. Another Swetnam pamphlet on fencing provides warnings about drunkenness, cowardice, laziness, and complacency; The Araignment, which is abundant in proverbs and lessons, lists historical and Biblical reasons for women's wickedness, maintaining that (like the informative pamphlet on fencing) one of its motives is to warn young men against the dangers of women. Coryl Crandall, in Swetnam the Woman-hater: The Controversy and the Play. A Critical Edition with Introduction and Notes (Purdue University Studies, 1969) provides useful background on the controversy (2-20). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 74 Cuckolds offer their wives to the public like cooks selling meat. A woman clothed in items from foreign trade and traversing public markets resembles the items themselves which are being traded; so the poet translates the meaning of women’ s conduct to the men in his audience. Women may claim that they desire the clothes "pretending state and neighbors guise" (212), the poet cautions, but through this poem he uncovers their "play." Time and again the women who "play" in these fashions are reduced in the poem to whores. "Filthy" under their clothes and carrying "poxe & pyles," army Launderers, whores and "truls" in carts are equated with any "fine Gentles" and "graue Matrons” who wear foreign fineries."^^ In opposition to such vituperative ^^Mariana Valverde writes in "The Love of Finery: Fashion and the Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse," Victorian Studies 32 (Winter 1989): 168- 188, that in the Victorian period, female desire for clothes is linked to vice, prostitution, venereal disease, and urban decay. Valverde argues that these linkages are bound up in Victorian class prejudices: "the moral meaning attached to various kinds of clothes played a key role in the moral regulation of working-class women; this moral conceptualization of the problems of working-class women helped to legitimize their oppression in the home and in the work force" (169). Although Valverde does not examine any early modem writing (or, indeed, any pre-Victorian writing) on fashion, similarities abound between Victorian arguments and those of earlier eras (as they do between Renaissance and earlier periods). Valverde writes that for the Victorians, ”[t]he love of finery was in many ways seen as characteristic of the whole female sex" (170) and points out that outrage over women's dress had to do with the "desire to distinguish between virtue and vice through dress" and to limit both literal and "moral" cross-dressing" (172). She finds in Victorian writings on fashion a strong element of bias against the working class, as she claims that "the link between [the female sex's love of finery] and social fall is largely class- specific" (170). Renaissance tracts on fashion do also address class distinctions. A decree issued under Elizabeth on May 6, 1562, for example, ordered that "the meaner sort" should be especially punished for violating sumptuary laws {Tudor Royal Proclamations, 187); but invariably in writings on fashion women are classified as a generic category and reprimanded thus. In Valverde's reading of the Victorians, Victorian women's "'love of dress' is... linked to vanity and idleness, that is, to specifically female vices subversive of Victorian thrift" (178). Yet in the Renaissance, as well, finery is denounced as expensive and draining of a husband's and country's resources; for example, the Elizabethan homily "agaynst excesse of appareil," -1561-1563, castigates the woman who, because of her love of finery, "is the worse huswyfe, the seldomer at home to see to her charge, and so to neglect [her husband's] thrift, by getting great provocation to her housholde to waste and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 75 portrayals, the Quippes posits only "the better sort, that modest are,/ whome garish pompe, doth not infect" (259-60); and even these "modest" women are not safe until their "bodies rot" (264). The idea that women, with their "naturally" open and thus vulnerable bodies, can never escape the constant threat to their virtue, is tied inextricably to their role in the marketplace of marriage. "Female entrance into the sexual world, whether through body or mind, by choice or unwittingly, whether by reciprocating male affections or merely remaining the passive object of them, is equivalent to sin, is sin."^^ The value of a woman is located not only in her dowry, but in her family name, her beauty, and of course, her chastity; a woman "traded" in marriage holds her value only if she remains pure, her connections intact. The prostitute, when she interacts with men she does not know, allows her purity to be diluted and made common. Englishwomen's buying and wearing on their vulnerable bodies items about whose source they know nothing, then, becomes tantamount to a marriage with no connections, intimacy with the common. Thus all of the women the poet describes in his invectives against foreign fashions are whores, and their husbands who allow this dilatory traffic, "Cookes" selling meat or fools. Signs of the Foreign The poet's foreign 'serpent' of "fashions fonde" in Quippes does not always serve to define England negatively; however, the foreignness of items always confuses interpretation and blurs definitions which otherwise, the poet implies, would be clear. The vagaries of fashion present problems in reading wantonnes, whyle she must wander abroade to shew her owne vanitie, and her husbandes foolishnesse" (223). ^^Rose, The Expense o f Spirit, 18. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 76 signs. As the descendants of Adam and Eve who ate of the fruit which opened their eyes and allowed us to "know good and evil," we should be able to see good and separate it from the evil. Perkins avows that "the garments that we make to cover our bodies, must be such as may expresse the virtues of our mindes; specially the vertues of Modestie, Frugalitie, Shamefastnes. They should be as a booke v/ritten with text letters, wherein, at the first, anyman may read the graces that be in the hart" (Gg3v). Fashions should announce their meaning as clearly as if they were labeled with words, Perkins claims.^® The Quippes opens by declaring that if the "fashions fonde" which "amazeth" the writer were only in paintings, in stained glass windows, children's toys or antiques, "They should for me, go uncontrolde" (12)— unrebuked. The fashions would also be acceptable, he notes, were they used in disguise for masked balls, or if they were on stage (13-14): in those cases, "They would not then deserve such blame,/ Nor work the wearers half the shame" (17-18). If the clothes are working in obvious, declared deceptions, then the poet has no objection to them (here, at least)— indeed, he suggests that they are harmless and inconsequential. They would, in these artificial situations, label themselves with the clarity of which Perkins speaks. But because, in an England where these fashions can be seen everywhere, they allow the wearer to alter her appearance and 5°Diane Owen Hughes sees a larger significance to the Italian government's (and church's) ultimately failed attempts to establish means of 'reading' fashions by mandating that female Jews wear earrings, remarking, "Clothing forms an obvious semiotic system whose polyvalence challenged social organizers to manipulate its codes. The movement of ear-rings from a sign of concupiscence and mark of the outsider [worn only by Jewesses] to a sign of honour and mark of the entrenched brings to an end the long fifteenth-century struggle between ideals of civic wealth and Franciscan poverty in a victory of aristocratic codification.. . . In those golden cities of the despots, women's trinkets lost their association with concupiscence to become signs of family position and solidarity. Among the rich and noble, jewellery had always served this purpose. Often marked with family arms, it marked entering women as part of their husband's lineage, and might be taken from them when their incorporation was deemed complete" (48-51). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 77 so deceive the viewer without his realizing the deception, the fashions are disgraceful.^ * Like many other putative ladies' texts, the Quippes offers a translation: the poet teaches how to read foreign fashions and a foreign sex by finding origins and revealing the deceptions. This translation of the elusive signs of women's clothing provides men with a vocabulary to read the fashions, and thus character, of the opposite sex; in so doing the poem reveals anxieties about foreign 'contamination' of England and about the identity of the English male self, especially in regard to this female Other. On the most superficial level, the fashions allow women to deceive men about their appearance; the Quippes seeks to eradicate such confusion. The poet wants to know what he's looking at: The baudie Buske, that keepes downe flat the bed wherein the babe should breede: What doth it els but point at that. Which faine would haue somewhat to feede. There bellie want might shaddow vaile. The buske sets bellie all to sale. (121-26) 5 ‘A strange variation on the use of painting to decipher the meanings of fashions appears in Thomas Becon's 1563 The reliques o f Rome: searching for "the originall and beginning of the monasticall or monkish apparel," Becon explains, "at the laste I repaired unto the paynters," having had no success with the "Patriarches, or of the priests, or of the Prophètes, or of the Levites, no, nor yet Helias hymselfe," or any of a long list of New Testament writers. Finally, Becon finds "in picture, which I coulde never find afore in scripture" the origins of monks' vestments: "the devill appeared, and shewed himself clad in a coule. . . I meane, that the devill was the first author, inventor, and finder, out of the coule and Monkishe habite... the other Monkes and Fryers borowed their coules and disgysed appareil set forth in diverse coulours, some white, some blacke, some graye, some russet, some blewe, some blouncket &c. or elles paradventure they receaved and tooke the same as lefte unto them for inheritaunce form the devill their father (Fol. 76r-77r). Unlike the Quippes, which regard paintings as obvious deceptions, Becon chooses in this case to interpret his painting as a representation of God's truth not available elsewhere. As Becon's text illustrates, anti- Catholicism often runs through early modem attacks on excesses of display, a quality often attributed to the Roman Church. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 78 The buske, which flattens and exposes the stomach, the poet compares to a tester over a bed (here, covering the "bellie" with "shaddow"), which might hide a defect of the stomach while at the same time displaying the stomach to the public. He concludes his assessment of buskes with, "I guesse, Buskes are but signes to tell,/ Where Launderers for the campe do dwel" (137-38).^- Shying away from the ambiguity of an item of clothing which might mean something, the poet reduces the uncertainty to a simple equation: women who wear buskes label themselves as women who would do laundry for army camps, traditionally assumed to be whores.^3 A 1640 collection of portraits of Englishwomen, Omatiis miillebris Anglicanus or the severall habits o f English women, from the nobilitie to the country woman, as they are in these times, seems to present a pictorial version of what treatises on fashion seek.^^ The book, which contains no written text, is made up of twenty-six plates depicting women in dresses of different classes. The upper-class women, for example, show only the tips of their toes, while the ^-Hollander, in discussing archaic sculpture, observes that male figures are often naked, while female figures are always dressed. "The hidden archaic female body. .. a more static and simplified shape [than the male], was inseparable from its formal garments, somehow incapable of energy without the drapery. . . . The cloth, although fairly independent of the male body, thus had to be used expressly to help model female shapes" (11-12). The clothes make the woman, as we see in these Renaissance texts, as well. s^Sandy Feinstein, in her essay "Donne's 'Elegy 19': The Busk between a Pair of Bodies," SEL 34 (1994): 61-77, explores the ambivalences surrounding the female wearing of the busk, an undergarment worn by both men and women, as a means to understanding Donne's poetical uses of his lady's clothing in Elegy 19. Feinstein notes that "corsets in general, and busks in particular, were feared by some as one way women actually controlled their bodies" (66); "the 'covering' could be the appropriation of masculine eroticism by women made possible by devices such as busks and breastplates, devices that enabled a woman to control her body's shape, function, and even access" (72). Such a fear would explain the Quippes poet's (whom Feinstein mistakenly identifies as Stephen Gosson) disgusted rejection of the busk as meaning only one thing— whoredom. ^^Wenceslaus Hollar (London: H. Overton, 1640, 4°). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 79 country maid, with basket on her head, displays full shoe and ankle. Both gesture and dress are specific to class, and the pictures are detailed in showing hairstyles, ornament, and cut of cloth. Suzanne Hull describes the text as "an early forerunner of a fashion magazine" (177),^^ but such a description fails to convey both the text's stylized, deliberate attempt to classify women by their clothing, and the place such a collection would hold in the prevailing discourse on fashion. The emblematic quality of early modem portraiture, which Anne Hollander examines, may, too, play a role in the collection of pictures. Hollander notes that "the general habit of reading meanings into the details of portraits also made it possible for drapery to acquire some of the same emblematic significance carried by such trappings as skulls and mirrors" (37)^®; here, the drapery— and hats, ribbons, and other details— signify women's place in society. The book starts with an upper- class specimen, and page by page presents the signs of each "type" of Englishwoman to be found, as the classes descend from noblewoman to peasant. An interesting companion to the Omatus muliebris Anglicanus can be found in 55Hu1 1 , who refers to Hollar's collection as a "one-of-a-kind book," lists the book, appropriately, perhaps, among "practical guidebooks," a category that includes cookbooks, guides for housewives, medical treatises, garden guides, and needlework patterns, among other things (66-67). She notes that the book "also advertises another 'sett' of dresses of foreign ladies and women with forty-eight prints for the price of four shillings" ( 177)— a collection which would seem to indicate the same desire for a codified appearance— in this case, of foreign women— as does the first. ^"^Stephen Greenblatt presents a reading of the famous Holbein painting "The Ambassadors" in which he illustrates this emblematic quality of portraiture: each detail of the painting signifies some quality of the men depicted, and the death's head at the foot of the picture alters the meaning of the painting as a whole. The interpretation of the skull is, of course, debated; Greenblatt argues that the painterly ingenuity and skill displayed in the skull's unusual perspective invests the work with a larger significance: "For the painting insists, passionately and profoundly, on the representational power of art, its central role in man's apprehension and control of reality, even as it insists, with uncanny persuasiveness, on the fictional character of that entire so-called reality and the art that pretends to represent it." Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 17-21. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 80 another collection of Hollar's engravings, which presents, again without text, portraits of prostitutes, labeled with prices drawn in the margins of the image.^"^ The confusing signs which moralists deplore are eliminated by Hollar's careful engravings. While in the Quippes, the potential ambiguity of English women in foreign dress concerns the poet, in the engravings, all meaning of the women's dress is clear and thus unthreatening. Such clarity is exactly what the poet seeks through his translations of fashions and behavior, because the clothes which women are wearing in his era, his verses protest, do not allow him to "know" what is underneath them, do not allow easy discrimination between the virtuous and corrupt, or between the upper and lower classes. Many diverse attacks on fashions appear united in this complaint. In his anti-theatrical tracts written nearly ten years earlier, for example, Stephen Gosson cites the Deuteronomic code in his condemnation of boys' wearing women's clothes. While his purpose in Playes Confuted obviously differs from that of the poet in Quippes, the development of Gosson's argument is relevant. He declares. The law of God very straightly forbids men to put on women's garments, garments are set downe for signes distinctive betwene sexe and sexe, to take unto us those garments that are manifest signes of another sexe, is to falsify, forge and adulterate, contrarie to the expresse rule of the words of God.58 57The volume of ten engravings, which is catalogued at the Huntington Library under Collection o f Portraits, Wenceslaus Hollar, contains no written text at all. Physical evidence suggests that it is a nineteenth-century edition, although the original purpose of the portraits and the original intent of the collection remain a mystery. 58Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in five Actions, ed. Arthur Freeman (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1972), Sig. C3^. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 81 As Laura Levine points out, "Gosson’ s interest in clothing here is an interest in signs: by signs we are supposed to 'declare o u r s e l v e s ' . But the women who frequent the Quippes are precisely not declaring their status to the men who see them in their finery. Wearing "Holland smockes to white as snow," women appear attractive and, one infers, virginal. But the fashion is deceiving: These Holland smockes to white as snow, and gorgets brave with drawn worke wrought A tempting ware they are you know, wherewith (as nets) vaine youth are caught. But many times they rew the match When poxe & pyles by whores they catch. (55-60) Eve is still tempting Adam, leading him to fall; but in a fallen state, she does so by confusing the signs by which he tells right from wrong. In his 1608 The Whole Treatise o f the Cases o f Conscience, William Perkins chastises those women who, discontented with "that forme and fashion, which God hath sorted unto them, doe devise artificiall formes and savours, to set upon their bodies and faces, by painting and colouring; thereby making themselves seeme that which indeed they are not" (Gg7r). Again, Biblical authority is with the chastiser, as Perkins reminds us: "This practice is most abominable in the very light of nature, and much more by the light of Gods word; wherin we have but one onely example thereof, and that is of wicked Jesabel, 2 King 9.30 who is noted by this marke of a notorious harlot, that shee painted her face" (Gg7r). Swetnam uses a similar complaint about the deceiving nature of appearances in his warnings to young men, cautioning against marriage because women are wanton, selfish, and vain, and asserting that even when women are beautiful, "shewing pitty, yet their heartes are blacke, swelling with mischiefe, not much vnlike old trees, whose outward leaves are faire and 59Laura Levine, "Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-tlieatricality and Effeminization from 1579 to 1642," Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 2S (Spring 1986), 132. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 8 2 greene and yet the body rotten" (33). Even Daniel Tuvil's Asylum Veneris, or A Sanctuary fo r Ladies, which could be read as a response to Swetnam's disparaging views, praises women's appearance, but warns of the possibility that internal beauty may not match the external: "She that hath a faire body, but a foule minde, is like vnto him that hath a good Ship, but an ill Pilot."^° Thomas More's Utopians, with their emphasis on a clearly-readable society, speak out from the pages of these texts. Such criticisms of women and their dress operate on multiple levels. For example, the Quippes poet elaborates on the central theme of deceit from Genesis to express the strange operations clothes enact on the individual wearing them and on the spectator observing them. In Playes Confuted, Gosson argues that men's wearing of women's clothing is wrong because it is a lie, but he also implies that their wearing women's clothing is dangerous because it can become the truth. As Levine explains, "The claim is based on the belief that only signs can be perverted, not the essential genders they stand for. But, the fear is based on the idea that the signs themselves are constitutive, an idea which implies that there is nothing fixed underneath" (133). In her study of cross-dressing and the function of the transvestite in a culture's "cultural, social, or aesthetic dissonances," Marjorie Garber reiterates Levine's claim that "Renaissance antitheatricalists, in their debates about gender, cross-dressing, and the stage, articulated deep-seated anxieties about the possibility that identity was not fixed, that there was no underlying 'self at all, and that therefore identities had to be zealously and jealously safeguarded" (32). Controversy over cross-dressing, she argues, taps into other cultural anxieties; ûocited in Crandall's collection (21-22). The full title of Tuvil's 1616 pamphlet is Asylum Veneris, or A Sanctuary fo r Ladies. lustly Protecting them, their virtues, and sufficiencies from the foule aspersions and forged imputations o f traducing Spirits. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 83 Garber observes that "Clothing— and the changeability of fashion— is an index of destabilization, displeasing to the monarch as to the sermonizer, since it renders the Englishman [and, perhaps more importantly, Englishwoman] //legible, incapable of inscription" (27-28). Garber quotes John Rainolds' oft-cited objections to men's wearing of women's clothing, another example which illustrates the Englishman's belief in the power of dress: "Beware of beautiful 1 boyes," Rainolds warns, "transformed into women by putting on their raiment, their feature, lookes, and facions." In Rainolds' view, sodomy, homosexuality, sadistic flagellation, and male marriage could all result from such cross-dressing. Although somewhat different from Gosson's objections, Rainolds' discomfort with the male transvestite similarly illustrates the influence attributed to a person's dress. Garber cites Rainolds' comment from the Overthrow o f Stage-Plays, "because a womens garment being put on a man doeth vehemently touch and moue him with the remembrance and imagination of a woman; and the imagination of a thing desirable doth stirr up desire, " commenting that for Rainolds, "women's clothes act as transferential objects, kindling a metonymic spark of desire" (29). C ross-D ressing Much of the scholarship on cross-dressing has focused on the boy actors playing on the English stage. Stephen Greenblatt has argued that the all-male acting troupe was the natural product of what was, in the sixteenth century, an essentially male culture— women were regarded merely as imperfectly-formed men. He reviews early modem medical discourse on sexuality, and concludes, "The open secret of identity— that within differentiated individuals is a single stmcture, identifiably male— is presented literally with an all-male cast. Presented but not Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 84 represented, for the play— plots, characters, and the pleasure they confer— cannot continue without the fictive existence of two distinct genders and the friction between them."^ ' Lisa Jardine similarly sees the boy actors as the product of a male-centered society, but she views the public theater as an institution designed to gratify the male spectators, where cross-dressed actors aroused homoerotic passions in their male audiences.^- '"Playing the woman's part'— male effeminacy- -is an act for a male audience's appreciation," she asserts (63), and illustrates the importance of such dynamics between actors and audience when interpreting Shakespeare's comic h e r o i n e s . < ^ 3 contrast, Stephen Orgel has explained the persistence of boy actors by suggesting that homosexuality in cross-dressed boy actors probably posed less of a threat than heterosexuality, because of the smaller likelihood of its happening and because it would be easier to desexualize. From a slightly different angle, Mary Beth Rose has studied the figure of the cross-dressed woman as a means of understanding Jacobean drama's approaches to women and marriage^^; Jonathan Dollimore, in his study of sexual dissidence, sees the ^^Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 93. Greenblatt's third chapter, "Fiction and Friction," addresses cross-dressing in particular. G^Lisa Jardine, "Boy Actors, Female Roles, and Elizabethan Eroticism," Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 57-67. The fifth chapter of Jardine's 1983 book Still Harping on Daughters also addresses, briefly, Elizabethans' desire to differentiate sex through clothing. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), Vern L. and Bonnie Bullough remark, rather cryptically, that Jardine's thesis is suspect because "the implication that all the males' homoerotic passions were aroused does not correspond with what we know about human nature" (76). ^‘ ^The Expense o f Spirit (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), especially Chapter 2, "Sexual Disguise and Social Mobility in Jacobean City Comedy." Studies of the cross-dressed female (rather than the transvestite male actor) generally center around the debate between two pamphlets seen to represent the "high point" of the cross-dressing controversy: Hie Mulier: or The Man- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 85 Renaissance female transvestite as "perverting" the concept of masculinity without being a subjectively "different" being.*^^ Garber, taking a sweeping view, studies the transvestite as a trans-historical element of society that points to the society's epistemological quandaries, breaking down binary categories and borders The Quippes poet, like Nashe and many other writers on fashions, however, does not address the issue of gender cross-dressing; here, the cross- dressing transpires in crossing national or class boundaries. Regardless of their views on the boy actor or the mannish-woman, moralists are united in investing great power in the clothing itself. While these works argue against fashion because it is vague, or unreadable, like the snow-white smock (which deceives by covering vice), they also blame the fashion for creating vice, leading women, and thus the nation, to stray from virtue: You daintie Minions, tel me sooth, dissemble not, but utter plaine: Is not this thus of verie troth, thinke you I slaunder, lie, or faine: When you have all your trinkets fit. Can you alone in chamber sit? You are not then to carde and spinne, to brue or bake, I dare well say: Woman: Being a Medicine to cure the Coltish Disease o f the Staggers in the Masculine-Feminines o f our Times (London, 1620), a diatribe against women who cut their hair and adopt other "deformities"; and Haec-Vir: Or The Womanish Man: Being an Answer to a late Booke intituled Hic-Mulier (1620), which presented a dialogue between the womanish-man and the man-woman. Part 8, Chapters 18-20 of Sexual Dissidence (1991). In her essay "The Logic of the Transvestite: The Roaring Girl (1608), Staging the Renaissance 221-234, however, Garber focuses on Jacobean society in particular. She objects to readings which see the play as evidence of economic injustices within the sex-gender system and to critics who interpret female cross- dressing as "a metaphor for the changing conditions of women" (as, for example. Rose does). Garber claims that "the play's anxiety about clothing and fashion, which is omnipresent, is indeed conjoined with a related anxiety about sexuality, but that anxiety is not so much based upon women's emancipatory strategies as upon the sexual inadequacies of m en... [the female cross-dresser] opens the question of transvestism's relationship to the embodiment of desire" (221). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 86 No thriftie worke you can beginne, you have nought els to doe but play. To play alone were for a sot. It's knowne, you minions, use it not. {Quippes 241-52) Once they are wearing the signs of vice, it seems, women inevitably become of "vertue least" (280), incapable of maintaining the precarious chastity of their intrinsically open bodies. Thus deceit occurs on multiple levels: things themselves are misleading, because of the foreign contamination which has already entered England— clothes may be conveying messages from another language. Even gender may be confused in signals sent by dress. And since women have been infected by desire for "fantastical forreigne toyes," they themselves may actively participate in the deceptions first practiced by the serpent, and their outer beauty may disguise an inner ugliness. "The Character of a Painted Woman" An early example of the male-authored ladies' text appears in Ovid. In a famous passage of De Arte Amandi (c. 1 B.C.), Ovid provides advice to his female readers on cosmetics. The text models two prominent male approaches to the subject— one moralizing, one practical— though both patronizing. Ovid instructs women, in an early seventeenth-century translation,^^ to use cosmetics but to keep that usage hidden. He begins by praising his own advice: The Treatise is unto your generall graces How you by Art may best preserve your faces; You whose rare beauties have receiv'd a skarre, Seeke thence your helpe, receipts there written are. You may there find how to restore your bloods. My Art was never idle to your goods. "^^Ovidii Nasonis, De Arte Amandi or The Art o f Love, Book 3, trans. possibly Thomas Hey wood (London, -1625). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 87 Yet immediately a warning is given about the potential dangers that cosmetics present to the unwary or careless woman. Ovid cautions. Beware lest that by chance your boxes lie Upon the table, and your Loves passe by: Throw them aside. Art spreads her safest net When she is with most cunning counterfeit Too-intimate a knowledge of the artifice will ruin the effect, Ovid warns his female readers; the lover desires a "cunning counterfeit" so that he may maintain a picture of the beloved unsullied by reality. Yet Ovid goes on to furnish further detail of the turn-offs of cosmetics, so that, one presumes, the point may not be lost: Spill not thy drugs alike in every place. They will offend such as behold thy face. Corrupting the beholder with such motion. As should he see thy garments stand with lotion. How doth the greasie franke woolls smell offend. Though we for it as far as Athens send Yet it is good for use, not before men, Vse thou Deares marrow good for Medicine, Nor before men in presence, rub thy teeth; They both are good, yet harsh for them that seeth; Finally, Ovid admonishes his reader, Minde thou thy beauty when we thinke the[e] sleeping. Thy hand, thy boxe, thy glasse, their office keeping; Why should I know why thou art growne so faire? Shut fast the forge w[h]ere jad [^/c] beauties joined are. For many things there are men should not know. The greatest part of them if you should show. They should offend them m uch.. . . (73-74) Ovid cautions women never to let their lovers discover their beauty-aids, lest they cause physical disgust by revealing the artifice behind their looks. His voice throughout— male, yet privy to women's secrets— addresses the women with practical counsel at the same time that it lectures women prescriptively. It also conveys a voyeuristic pleasure in seeing behind the curtain (and revealing such sights to the reader). Paradoxically, a work seemingly designated as a technical Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 88 manual for women does not appear to cater to a female audience. Ovid's approach to women's beauty appears as well in early modem writings on fashion and cosmetics, which peer into women's lives with advice and instructions; yet both Ovid's titillating approach and Scripture's unforgiving and condemnatory stance toward women's vanity can be found in Renaissance tracts on cosmetics. In Isaiah, women's "secret parts" are exposed to view by a vengeful God to bring shame upon women and force repentance; in Ovid, the pragmatic advisor, these secrets are best kept hidden (aside from the titillating exposure provided in his text). Both attitudes inform Renaissance views of cosmetics. The Quippes poet is a combination of knowing voyeur and righteous judge. Unlike Ovid in his admiration of the well-kept secret, the Quippes poet often expresses simultaneous disgust with both the artifice and what that art may hide, and the disgust is moral as well as physical. While Ovid advises that women use cosmetics as long as they protect men from confronting the disgusting reality of the make-up, the Quippes poet expresses an overall distrust with the function of cosmetics, as another form of deceit: "These painted faces, which they weare,/ can any tell, from whence they cam ..." (63-4)— although he expresses little desire for the 'real' face beneath the cosmetics, which might be worse: "Might loue, and lip, a fault conceale,/ Yet act, and fact, would filth reveale" (47-8).^^ The poet is not ®^Both Ovid and the Renaissance poet display an apparent contrast to eighteenth- century practices: Roy Porter argues that in the eighteenth century, "Mutating from household managers into mannequins, ladies slipped into a femininity worn for the gaze of men, which had traditionally been the prerogative of actresses and whores. Ladies— respectable ladies— now made themselves up even more extravagantly with powder, paint, patches and puffs— such phrases as 'make up' and 'making a figure' convey the artifice of it all. Nature's faces were invisible behind painted ones— for eighteenth-century cosmetics were indeed largely caked, elaborate, and garish in their colours, rather like stage make-up— but also behind visors, wigs, jewels, masks, fans, lace, gauze, and other devices to conceal (age, wrinkles and pock marks) and tantalize all at once.. . . [The Georgian belle] was forever actually displaying herself making herself up, holding court en déshabillé in her toilette. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 89 alone in this distrust. "Disfygure not you re faces good honeste w om en/ wyth no lyghte horyshe fashyon," Charles Bansley admonishes in A treatyse, shewing and declaring the pryde and abuse o f women now a dayes, "Leste it brynge you into yil fam e/ and sclaunderous estemacyon/ For honeste women shoulde stycke to honestye,/ and upholde no harlottes guyse" (Sig. A30- Cosmetics, by hiding or by creating an artificial appearance, oppose honesty as well as the clearly-read exterior; thus they are condemned. They, like the frivolous fashion (and perhaps even more so), are linked to deceptive public display and w h o r e d o m .^ ^ Moralists show definite unease with the transformative powers of cosmetics and fashionable clothing— on both the wearer and the viewer."^° And even more problematic for where she would perform the rites of making her face (and the sexual innuendo was of course up front, for 'making faces' was slang for having sex)" (389). Porter claims that "it seemed at the dawn of the eighteenth century that fashion was undermining physiognomy, because fashion privileged appearance over essence, and allowed the fashion manipulator, the hypocrite, to win every hand. Yet by the close of the century, things had changed. Physiognomy itself was once more in fashion; and, more telling in the long term, Lavater's physiognomy was about to make a pact with fashion, through its belief in a gaze that pierced through the superficial mask of expression, revealing looks which were natural, structural and meaningful.. . . Through Lavater, looks again reflected self, and so the cult of looks could once more acquire moral respectability" (395-396). "Making Faces: Physiognomy and Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England," Etudes Anglaises (Oct.-Dec. 1985), 385-396. Max Beerbohm's 1^96 Defense of Cosmetics later sees the prejudice against cosmetics as "tristful confusion man has made of soul and surface." Cited in Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 356-357. ^^William Prynne, as Barish points out, links various evils such as "effeminate mixt Dancing. . . lascivious Pictures, wanton Fashions, Face-painting,. . .Love- lockes, Periwigs, womens curling, pouldring and cutting of their haire" and "over- costly effeminate, strange, meretricious, lust-exciting appareil." Barish comments that such lists show Prynne's aversion "to anything... that might suggest active or interested sexuality, this being equated with femininity, with weakness, with the yielding to feeling, and consequently with the destruction of all assured props and boundaries" (84-85). ^°The Quippes poet could again be invoking Ovid, although in this application his Metamorphoses: throughout the poem, the fashionable items the poet describes transform women into breasts. Old women "sadled.. .with such attire" become "wanton nagges" who "will whinnie still" (49-54); dressed up, women are "peacockes" (71-2); stockings and cork-heeled shoes make them into "heifers." Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 90 them is the possibility that through artifice, a woman's appearance could signal virtue, woman's 'inner beauty', where it is not7 ^ Not all Renaissance writers took this severe view of cosmetics, however. In Delightes for ladies, to adome their persons, tables, closets, and distillatories, Hugh Platt states mildly that "Arte might helpe where nature made a faile"; the volume, addressed "To all true Lovers of Arte and knowledge," contains a number of practical and detailed suggestions for the reader, among which are recipes for cosmetics.7- The book as a whole takes a decidedly less hostile approach to its Most interesting are the women who pose particular threats by cuckoldry: "These flaming heades, with staring haire/ these wyers tumde, like homes of Ram" (60-1). One wonders whether it is really the women's "faces homde" (267) about which the poet worries. References to the bestial nature of women's fashions are not uncommon or new to the period. A classic example appears in Giovanni da Capistrano's Trattato degli omamenti specie delle donne, probably written between 1434 and 1437: trains on dresses, which in Latin and Italian are called code or caude, "tails," are a sign of a beastly nature. The treatise describes discussions among lawyers and ecclesiastics of Ferrara in which dresses with trains are determined to be "indecent, irrational, and seriously excessive, the costume, in fact, of the prostitute," and are allowed only to prostitutes, to whom "they were natural." Cited on p.26, n. 74 of Hughes. Brathwaite, also, makes use of such bestial imagery when he refers to the "great sleeves, mishapen Elephantine bodies, traines sweeping the earth, with huge poakes to shroud their phantasticke heads" (112-113). ^ ' Hollander observes that in the seventeenth century, "there was . . . no lack of pictorial variations on the old theme of a beautiful woman looking in a mirror [the image called up, for example, by Ovid's passage and references to women's vainly making themselves up in cosmetics]. Such a woman, whether she is called so or not, seems always to be an image of Venus, in a dangerous aspect— the one that irresistibly lures men to destruction just by steadily looking in a mirror and perhaps arranging her hair; the Lorelei and the mermaid with comb and glass are versions of h er.. . . In the same century the opposite theme, showing the mirror confirming and intensifying the power of death, not love, is offered several times. .. " (400). In tracts on cosmetics, the two images appear to meld— the woman who lures men through her painted artifice seals also her damnation. ^-Hugh Plat, Delightes for ladies, to adome their persons, tables, closets, and distillatories (London: Peter Short, [1600?], 12°), Sig. A2L The work went through sixteen editions by 1636. The 1609 edition has each page printed within a decorative geometric border of squares, ovals, and circles (which changes by chapter), leaving only about two by four inches of text on each page. Suzanne Hull notes that Platt "compiled several popular works involving practical descriptions of his semiscientific discoveries" (43). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 91 female audience and to the subject of artifice than many texts dealing with fashions. In his introductory verses, Platt avers, But now my pen and paper are perfum'd, I scome to write with coppres, or with gall. Barbarian canes are now become my quils, Rosewater is the inke I write withal! : Of sweetes the sweetest I will now commend, Tos sweetest creatures that the earth doth beare.. . . Of musked sugars I intend to wright, . . . Affording to each Lady her delight. (Sig. A2^) Platt explains that, just as marzipan figures of fruits and birds can be molded "in formes of sweetest grace... As if the flesh and forme which nature gave,/ Did still remaine in everie lim and part" (Sig. A2^-A3"^, so, too, can ladies' appearances be "made by arte." He explains that his text will allow ladies to cure flaws in their looks: For Ladies closets and their stillatories. Both waters, ointments and sweet smelling bals. In easie termes without affected speech, I heere present most ready at their cals. And least with carelesse pen I should omit The wrongs that nature on their persons wrought. Or parching sunne with his hot firie rayes. For these likewise, relieving meanes I sought. (Sig. A30 Platt's "costly mysteries" will reveal how to remove skin damage from the sun's rays and other fine secrets. And Platt does provide detailed and practical advice on such subjects as "How to drie Rose leaves in a most excellent manner" (Sig. A ID ), "How to keep fresh Salmon a whole moneth in his perfect taste and delicacie" (Sig. GD ), and "Sweete Powders, oyntments, beauties, &c." For example, on how "To keepe the teeth both white and sound," Platt directs: "Take a quart of hony, as much of vinegar, and halfe so much white wine, boile them together, and wash your teeth therewith now and then" (Sig. GlOO- To "make haire of a faire yellow or golden colour," a woman is counseled. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 92 The last water that is drawne from honey being of a deepe red colour performeth the same excellently, but the same hath a strong smell, and therefore must bee sweetned with some aromaticall bodie. Or else the haire being first clean washed and then moistned a prettie while by a good fire in warm allum water with a spunge, you may moisten the same in a decoction of Turmerick, rubarb, or the barke of the Barberie tree, and so it will receive a most faire and beaudfull colour.. . . (Sig. HIO^-HIOV) To create "another minerall fiicus for the face," Platt provides a set of detailed, and demanding, instructions: Incorporate with a woodden pestle and in a woodden morter with great labour foure ounces of sublimate, and one ounce of crude Mercurie at the least sixe or eight houres (you cannot bestow too much labour herein) then with often change of colde water by ablution in a glasse, take away the salts from the sublimate, change your water twise everie day at the least, and in seven or eight dayes (the more the better) it will bee dulcified, and then it is prepared. Lay it on with the oyle of white poppey. (Sig. G11V)73 Part Ovidian manual, part cookbook, Platt presents his advice gently, the advisor "in on" female beauty secrets.7 " * He imparts his suggestions pragmatically, "relieving," as he says, "remedies of dearth" (Sig. A20 and celebrating his ability to help in women's sweet deceptions. The artifice of designing marzipan birds or beautiful women is presented equally as a paean to Platt's clever discoveries. Their civil tone and the absence of moralizing cause Platt's practical recipes for beauty, however, to stand out from many other works addressed to women and dealing with fashion. One possible reason for the difference in tone between these 73 Another recipe for mainting a white complexion, slightly less lethal although still unsavory by today's standards, appears in the 1611 A Closet fo r Ladies and Gentlewoman (London, Arthur Johnson, 12°): "Take fresh bacon grease and the whites of egges, and stamp them together, and a little powder of bayes, and annoint your face therewith, and it will make it white" (188). 7‘ ^Hull finds that "From the beginning to the end of the period under study (1475- 1640) all the practical guides except one appear to be written by men. The books concerned themselves with female activities... Yet only one woman admitted in print to writing a female guide" (34). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 93 two approaches to women's beauty may be that the audiences truly were different: while practical guidebooks belonged in the realm of the housewife, tracts on fashion occupied another readership, mostly maleJ^ "Throughout the sixteenth century as middle-class readers were growing in numbers and curiosity, a special kind of literature was published that seems at first glance to have been written for a female audience, but probably was meant more for men" (Hull 48)7^ Into this category, I would argue, fall such texts as the Quippes, Christs teares, and Thomas Tuke's unusual publication in 1616, A Discourse Against Painting and Tincturing o f WOMEN. Wherein the abonimable sinnes o f Murther and poysoning. Pride and Ambition, Adultery and Witchcraft, are setfoorth & discovered. Whereunto is added the Picture of a Picture, or. The Character o f a Painted Woman.'^'^ Tuke's text, a collection of scathing references to cosmetics and women's foolish vanity, compiles nearly every angle of the attack on cosmetics which can be found in other treatises of the time. The miscellany shows no attempt at organization beyond the ^^Hull concludes that the practical guidebooks addressed to women, such as Platt's, consistently dominated the field of female literature. Such practical guides generated multiple editions and appear to have been quite popular. From the end of the sixteenth century, she argues, "practical titles continued to account for half of all the books published for women" (35). Yet not all books ostensibly addressed to women, as can be seen with such texts as the Quippes, Nashe's Christs teares, and Bansley's diatribe, maintain their sensitivity to a female reader or can necessarily be called "female literature" in the same way that these guidebooks obviously are. ^^Hull here describes the marriage manual, which explained the purpose of marriage, duties of the wife, etc. (55ff). 7^Tuke inserts a woodcut of a woman above the phrase "picture of a picture." A second page adds more detail to the title provided on the first: A Treatise Against Painting and Tincturing o f Men and Women: Against Murther and poysoning. Pride and Ambition, Adultery and Witchcraft. And the Roote o f all these. Disobedience to the Ministery o f the Word. Whereunto is Added The picture o f a picture, or, the Character o f a Painted Woman. By Thomas Tuke, Minister of Gods Word at Saint Giles in the Fields. Rom.6. The wages of sinne is death. Quot vitia, tot venena. A deceitful heart hath deceived them: they consider not that a lie is in their face (London, Printed by Tho.Creed, and Barn.AIlsope, for Edward Merchant dwelling in Pauls Church-yard, neere the Crosse, 1616). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 94 general theme of women's immoral self-adornment. The introductory section of the text alternates between English and Latin, and classical, Spanish, Biblical, contemporary, and medical sources, among others, are quoted in support of Tuke's assertion that cosmetics signal, and lead to, most of the ills of society. Although Tuke proffers a seemingly endless number of reasons for his condemnation, an examination of a mere few of his arguments reveals the strange place cosmetics hold in the discourse on women's fashion. Cosmetics are often denounced along with ostentatious dress and for the same reasons; yet they differ from clothing because of the nature of the artifice they allow, as well as for the real physical effects they have on the women who wear them. Tuke's first objection, presented as a quote from an Arthur Dowton, has to do with the false change wrought by cosmetics: the artifice does not hold up. "To women that paint themselves," the passage begins, "A Lome wall and paintd face are one;/ For th'beauty of them both is quickly gone./ When the lome is fallen of, then lathes appeare/ So wrinkles in that face fro th'eye to th'eare./ The chastest of your sex contemne these arts,/ And many that use them, have rid in carts" (Sig. A30-^^ When cosmetics are removed, a woman's wrinkels appear— perhaps to cause the disgust against which Ovid cautions.^^ As with many attacks on fashion, the passage ends by calling up the spectre of the prostitute, the wanton woman who offers herself to the public gaze. Tuke adds to Dowton's passage verses from one Ed.Tylman to elaborate on this theme of the counterfeit woman. A mocking series A melding of these two images occurs in Shakespeare's Richard II, in which a man without his reputation is but "gilded loam or painted clay" (Li. 179). 79So, too, Tuke later adds DuBartas' criticism of "lezebel to painted Dames," another case of contempt for the attemt to hide wrinkles or to appear younger: "But besides all her sumptuous equipage,/ Much fittr for her state, then for her age,/ Close in her closet with her best complexions,/ Shee mends her faces wrinkle-full defections/ Her cheeke she cherries, and her eye she cheeres/ And faines her fond as wench of fifteene yeeres" (Sig. B2). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 95 of questions, reminiscent of the Quippes' dual address to female readers and their male critics, is addressed "To painted women," as the verses call women to realize their multiple errors. Women have transgressed in their clothing— their farthingales are too big, their breasts are exposed— but this is not the real problem: Stay women— Gallants, cast an eye aside. See where a mirrour represents your pride. Not that your fardingales fill too much roome. Nor that your loftie tires you misbecome: Nor paps embossed layed forth to mens view: (Though that be vaine too, if wise men say true) But that ye have renounc’ d your native face. Under a colour that paint adds a grace. To your intising lookes. But ist no sinne. When Vermeil blushes to belie your skinne? (Sig. A3'') The true female sin lies in women's counterfeit faces. Tylman then chides the women as he derides the false changes wrought by cosmetics: Alas what comfort can your looking glasse Yeeld you, fond creatures, when it comes to passe That o're the paint is blurd, which makes you fret. Or yee see nought else but a counterfet, A shadow of your selfe? Why should you seeme Fairer then women? Men oft misesteeme Your sweetest beauties: for because they know Some of you are lesse beauteous, then they show. (Sig. A3''-A40 The paint is a sham, and, the author assures women, because men know of their artifice, they distrust all women. Many of the arguments used against women's frivolous fashions, as we see, are marshalled against the similarly deceptive use of cosmetics. The woman who paints her face, like the woman who wears foreign styles or excessive finery, pretends to be what she is not, and thus must be denounced. But an imperfect counterfeit is, of course, not the main reason for attack. Cosmetics are deplored for their immorality and for their creation of the libertine woman. The sermonizing tone of diatribes against fashion is intensified in attacks Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 96 on cosmetics, similarly supported by scriptural and classical references but often even more biting.^o For example, Tuke cites Tho. Draiton's curious series of comparisons between the painted woman and all manner of things, a list which exemplifies the urge toward a stasis and the rejection of shifting appearances: To what may I a painted wench compare? Shee's one disguized, when her face is bare. She is a sickly woman alwaies dying. Her color's gone, but more she is a buying. She is a rainebow, colours altogether. She makes faire shew, and beares us all faire weather: And like a bow: shee's flexible to bend. And is led in a string by any friend. She is Medea, who by likelihood Can change old Aeson into younger blood. Which can old age in youth full colours bury. And make Proserpine of an hagge, or furie, Shee's a Physitian well skild in complexions. The sicke will soone looke well by her confections. Shee's a false coyner, who on brazen face. Or coper nose can set a guilded grace. And though she doth an hood, like Ladies weare. She beares two faces under't I dare sweare. When hosts of women do walke into the field, She must the Ancient be, we all must yeeld. For she doth beare the colours all men know. And flourisheth with them, and makes a show. And to conclude, shee'le please men in all places: For shee's a Mimique, and can make good faces. (Sig. B 1^-B2H The bawdy nature of the conclusion barely masks the denunciation of women's artifice. The woman who alters her appearance— the "mimique"— maintains, despite her changeability, a constant concupiscence which is announced through "the colours all men know"— cosmetics. The desire to be attractive to the eye, such moralists point out, can be interpreted only one way. 8®Despite the cutting nature of the criticisms, however, the flippant style in which fashions are often discussed remains evident, mocking, perhaps, women's frivolity. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 97 "[A] certaine sermon" of Latimer's in which the preacher, speaking of "face and haire-deceits," illustrates the link between the painted woman and the wicked one serves to introduce God's law explicitly to Tuke's compilation.^* Tuke quotes Latimer as saying, "They that leave truth, do leave the Lord:/ For God is truth, and all accord./ But th'native colour of face and hair/ Is true and right, altho not faire./ But's false and wrong, that's died by art,/ Worke of a lying, wanton hart. / Then 'tis a bad conclusion,/ That follows this illusion" (Sig. A4''). Altering one's "native" appearance in any way departs from God and truth. For such approaches to the evils of cosmetics, the early Church Father Tertullian (-200 A.D.) provides moral arguments adopted repeatedly by early modern sermonizers. Tertullian's rather sweeping condemnations afford Renaissance followers free reign in denouncing women's vanity.®- As John Knox proclaims in his 1558 attack on female power (in the person of Catholic Mary), The First Blast o f the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment o f Women, Tertullian in his boke of Women's Appareil, after that he hath shewed many causes why gorgious appareil is abominable and odiouse in a woman, addeth these wordes, speaking as it were to every woman by name: "Dost thou not knowe (saith he) that thou art Heva? The sentence of God liveth and is effectuall against this kind; and in this worlde, of necessity it is, that the punishment also live. Thou art the porte and gate of the Devil. Thou art the first transgressor of Goddes law. Thou diddest persuade and easely deceive him whome the Devil durst not assault. For thy merit (that is for thy death) it behoved the Sone of God to suffre the death, and doth it yet abide in thy mind to decke thee above thy skin ® * Latimer's execution under Mary, the central case in Foxe's Protestant martyrology, elevated this first-generation English Protestant as an authority; Tuke's use of Latimer thus, at the same time that it introduces morality to the discussion of cosmetics, invokes a specifically Protestant identity within Tuke's hodge-podge of sources. ®^Claude Lévi-Strauss remarks that the Church "Fathers— beginning with Paul, but even more intensely from Tertullian on— used the category of woman as a 'tool to think with'." R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention o f Western Romantic Love (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 90. Judith Butler also calls attention to this passage; see note 43 above. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 98 coates?" . . . [women] shulde avoide and abhorre what soever thing might exalte them or puffe them up in pride.. .. (381-382)^3 Knox, who seems to need little encouragement, follows Tertullian in using scriptural references to excoriate the female race. Attacks on cosmetics similarly vilify female artifice. Jonas Barish notes that "in his tracts on feminine dress and adornment, Tertullian attributes all cosmetics, all use of jewelry, all attempts of women to beautify themselves, to the promptings of the Evil O ne... This rival artist [to God, whom women imitate] is the Devil" (49-50). Barish further observes that Tertullian's "diatribe against feminine dress turns self-adornment into an ontological crime. Since 'Whatever is bom is the work of God. Whatever . . . is plastered on, is the devil's work'." The use of cosmetics becomes an affront to God, as, "[b]y painting their faces, women are announcing their dissatisfaction with what God has made of them, and seeking to improve His handiwork" (158).^"^ So, the Elizabethan homily commanded to be read in England's churches in 1563 exclaims in Tertullian fashion: Howe muche more ought Christian women, instructed by the word of God, to content themselves in their husbandes? Yea, how much more ought every Christian to content himselfe in our saviour Christe, thinkyng himselfe sufficiently garnished with his heaven lye vertues? But it wil be here objected and said of some myce and vaine women, that al which we do in paintyng our faces, in dying our heere, in embawming our bodyes, in decking us with gay appareil, is to please our husbandes, to delyght his eyes, and to retayne his love towardes us. O vayne excuse, and most shameful awnswere, to the reproche of thy husband. What couldest thou more say to set out his foolishnes, then to charge him to be pleased and delyghted with the devyls tyre? Who can paint her face and curie her B3John Knox, The First Blast o f the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment o f Women. 1558, The Works o f John Knox, ed. David Laing. Vol. 4 (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 363-420. 84Jn Tertullian one finds "an early instance of a long-lasting motif: prejudice against the theater coupled with prejudice against women, especially beautiful, ornamental, and seductive women.. . . As the theater is suspected of ill designs for its attractiveness, so are women. As the theater debases by its counterfeiting, so do women who affect a beauty not theirs by nature" (Barish 50). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 99 heere, and chaunge it into an unnatural I colour, but therein doth worke reprofe to her mtdcer, who made her? As though she coulde make her selfe more comely then God hath appointed the measure of her beawtie. What do these women, but go about to refourme that whiche God hath made? not knowing that all thinges natural 1 is the worke of God, and thinges disguysed and unnaturall be the workes of the devill.. . . (222) The woman's voice, plaintive and false, protests weakly in the sermon, arguing that her vanity exists to please her husband. But any alteration of appearance, in Tertullian's mode, constitutes an insult to God and therefore must be cast off as the work of the devil. As a gift of the devil, the transformation wrought by cosmetics must necessarily be ugly, regardless of deceiving appearances to the contrary. And apparently early modern cosmetology lends itself to the devil's work. Tuke quotes from "The Invective of Doctor Andreas de Laguna, a Spaniard and Physition to Pope luius the third, against the painting of women" to present a mixture of religious and medical arguments against the use of cosmetics. The Spanish doctor writes initially of the infernal nature of cosmetics, but then moves on to the excessive and repulsive details of cosmetic practices as a means of instructing his wayward female readers (to whom he refers, nevertheless, as "they"): The Ceruse or white Lead, wherewith women use to paint themselves was, without doubt, brought in use by the divell, the capitall enemie of nature, therwith to transforme humane creatures, of faire, making them ugly, enormious and abominable. For certainly it is not to be beleeved, that any simple women without a great inducement and instigation of the divel, would ever leave their natural and graceful! countenances, to seeke others that are suppositions and counterfeits, and should goe up and downe withed and sised [?] over with paintings laied one upon another, in such sort: that a man might easily cut off a curd or cheese-cake from either of their cheekes. (Sig. B3^-B3^) Only the devil could induce in women such ridiculous practices, the doctor suggests. Yet the transformative powers of the ceruse (a white Lead used as pigment), it appears, go beyond that of a whitened complexion. The arc of the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 100 doctor’ s flill argument is significant, as it displays the fluid passage from physical evidence to mockery to scolding to religious condemnation which characterizes many writings on cosmetics: Amongst which unhappie creatures, there are many, who have so betard their faces with these mixtures and slubber-sauces, that they have made their faces of a thousand colours: that is to say: some as yellow as the marigold, others a darke greene, others blanket colour, others as of a deepe red died in the wooll. O desperate madnesse; O hellish invention, O divelish custome: can there be any greater dotage or sottishnesse in the world, then for a woman in contempt of nature, (who like a kinde mother giveth to every creature whatsoever is necessarie to it in its kind) to cover her naturall face, and that pure complexion which shee hath received, with stench of plaisters & cataplasmes. What shal god say to such in the last ludgement, when they shal appeare thus masked before him with these artifaces: Friends, I know you not, neither do I hold you for my creatures; for these are not the faces that I formed. Thus the use of this ceruse, besides the rotting of the teeth, and the unsavourie breath which it causeth, being ministred in paintings, doth tu me faire creatures into infernall Furies. (Sig. 63^) Women are transformed into rank monsters who will be unrecognizable to God. The moral attack on women is unrelenting; but real physical alterations in women's health do seem to have occurred from the use of cosmetics (not surprising, perhaps, considering that the pigments were concocted from Lead or M ercu ry ^b o th poisons which may attack the central nervous system, cause numerous health problems, and which ultimately lead to d e a th ) .T h e Spanish doctor explains. ^^Ceruse, the white lead; mercury sublimate or quicksilver; and some products called "Orpin" and "Soliman." ^^Effects of Lead poisoning range from damage to the brain, nerves, red blood cells and digestive system to mental impairment, loss of memory, abnormal behavior, blindness, seizures, and fatality. A blue, black, or gray line may also appear along gums [perhaps related to the black teeth or mouth which is said to come from use of cosmetics?]. Because the body excretes Lead very slowly, it accumulates in the bones and body tissues and continues to cause symptoms and damage to the body (631). Likewise, all forms of Mercury are poisonous to humans: Mercury compounds are absorbed through the skin [as would be cosmetics, of course], accumulate in the brain and kidneys, and cause severe tiredness, incoordination, tremors, numbness in the limbs, dementia, and death (681). American Medical Association Home Medical Encyclopedia, Vol. H, ed. by Charles B. daym an, M.D. (New York: Random House, 1989). Lewis Carroll’ s Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 101 with a physician's clinical eye, the progression of the poisoning, in which the counterfeit beauty inversely creates foul disease: The excellencie of this Mercurie sublim ate... is such, that the women, who often paint themselves with it, though they be very young, they presently tume old with withered and wrinkeled faces like an Ape, and before age come upon them, they tremble (poore wretches) as if they were sicke of the staggers, reeling, and full of quicksilver, for so are they: for the Soliman and quicke-silver differ onely in this, that the Soliman is the more corosive and byting; insomuch that being applied to the face, it is true, that it eateth out the spots and staines of the face, but so, that with all, it drieth up, and consumeth the flesh that is underneath, so that of force the poore skin shrinketh, as they speake of the famous pantofle of an ancient squire called Petro Capata, which being often besmeared over to make it blacke, and to give it luster, it shrunke and wrinkled, and became too short for his foote. This harme and inconvenience (although it be great, yet it might well be dissembled, if others greater then this did no accompany it; such as ar, a stinking breath, the blacknesse & corruption of the teeth which this Soliman ingendreth. For if quicksilver alone, applied onely to the soles of the feete, one or twise, and that in a final quantitle, doth marrie and destroy the teeth; what can be expected from the Soliman, which is without comparison more powerfull and pe[?i?]ative, and is applied more often, and in greater quantity to the very lips and cheekes? (Sig. B4^-B4'^) And the final horror of the transformation from beauties to beasts, from painted women to "foulely deformed and stained over. . . horrible monsters" (Sig. B4^, occurs as the poisoning is passed on to the women's children: So that the infamous inconveniences which result from this Mercurie Sublimate, might be somewhat the more tollerable, if they did sticke and stay onely in them who use it, and did not descend to their ofspring. For this infamy is like to originall sinne, and goes from generation to generation, when as the child borne of them, before it be able to goe, doth shed his teeth one after another, as being corrupted and rotten, not through his fault, but by reason of the vitiousnesse and tainte of the mother that painted her selfe, who, if shee loath and abhoarre to heare this, let her forbeare to do the other. (Sig. B4V) The doctor melds medical effect with religious judgment, calling up Eve's sin as he describes the mother's bestowal of original sin upon her innocent offspring, who Mad Hatter is perhaps the best-known literary figure suffering from Mercury poisoning— hatters often suffered symptoms resembling madness because of mercury used in the tanning process. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 102 are punished for the mother's vanity. Just as discussion of fashion and women's behaviour is bounded by religious concerns, so writings on cosmetics, even medical observations, are seen through the filter of moral judgments. Attacks on cosmetics are united with invectives against frivolous fashions in many ways: female vanity, temptation, and vice are all ascribed to a universalized class of deceptive and overreaching women who threaten society through their self-display. Yet, unlike fashions. Renaissance cosmetics appear to have literally transformed the bodies of the painted women, lending vigor and legitimacy to moralists’ claims. However, the appalling threat of poisoning from cosmetics is often, in texts besides this doctor's, presented as the danger of ugliness rather than disease. The Quippes poet worries about ugliness covering more ugliness (43-48); Nashe in Christs teares frowns "that with paynting and phisicking thy visage, thou [hast] so deformedst it" (Sig. 72^. In Tuke, a husband complains of his bride, a "lasse,/ Young, fresh, and faire" who in a "yeere and lesse.. . Is turn'd a hagge, a fury by my side,/ With hollow yellow teeth, or none perhaps,/ With stinking breath, swart cheeks, & hanging chaps/ With wrinkled neck, and stooping, as she goes,/ With driveling mouth, and with a sniveling nose" (Sig. B30: the rank smell of the compounds is a common rebuke. Bans ley, for example, laments women's "dysfygure[ment]" o f their faces, so that "our exam ple... stynckes before Goddes face" (Sig. A3t). Despite the physical devastation presented in Tuke, and which would appear to be a persuasive argument against the use of cosmetics, many criticisms focus instead on the repulsive appearance that will result and on the moral untenability of face-painting itself.^^ ^^The threat that cosmetics will effect, not beauty, but hideousness, might seem paradoxically to bolster women's claims that they must attempt to "delyght [their husbands'] eyes, and to retayne his love towardes us" through their vanity ("The Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 103 Protestant Re-fashionings As with sumptuary laws, the arguments against women in early modem tracts on fashion are by no means new or radically different from earlier sentiments. The Quippes poet and his contemporaries are certainly not the first moralists to focus on fashion as the indication of moral downfall. Turning now to sources outside of the Quippes, this chapter traces the ways in which the Protestant appropriation of traditional themes served to define England against foreign and theological threats. Even attacks on women and fashions are transformed by revisionist ideology. Early examples of attacks on fashion abound; as R. Howard Bloch has observed, the long tradition of misogynist attack dictates that one can begin just about anywhere in tracing origins. Misogynist discourse, he notes, is always derivative— a fact that, Bloch maintains, explains its frequent monotony.^^ The similarities between earlier attacks and those in Renaissance England will become evident immediately. Decrying the society at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine in the south of France, for example, Geoffrey of Vigeois complains in the twelfth century. Time was when the Bishop of Limoges and the Viscount of Combom were content to go clad in sheep and fox skins. But today the humblest would blush to be seen in such poor things. Now they have clothes fashioned of rich and precious stuffs, in colors to suit their humor. They snip out the cloth in rings and longish slashes to show the lining through, so they look like the devils that we see in paintings .. . Youths affect long sermon," 222). Even while vanity is denounced, the reasons for women's concems over their appearance are evidenced when in the end, male moralists appeal to women's vanity as the reason not to use cosmetics. ^^Medieval Misogyny, 13, 47. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 104 hair and shoes with pointed to e s.. . . As for women, you might think them adders, if you judged by the tails they drag after them.^^ Not only the women, in this case, have fallen for the devil's snares, although fittingly it is the women who resemble serpents. The medieval moralist Orderic Vital draws an even more direct line between fashions and the inner nature of the wearer, when he too denounces the moral corruption of French society at the end of the twelfth century: These effeminate men, these dirty libertines who deserve to bum in hell- fire, shed their warrior costumes and laugh at the exhortations of the priests. They spend their nights at banquets of debauchery and drunkenness, in futile talk, playing dice and other games of chance . . . They take pains to please the women with all kinds of lasciviousness . . . Instead of covering their heads with caps they wear ribbons, and the external appearance is the sad reflection of their souls.^° Highly visible, fashion attracts attention as the wearer’ s definition of him or herself, and thus is often the focus of social critics. In their study of private life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Georges Duby and Philippe Braunstein emphasize the importance clothing played to individual identity. "Protection or ornament, clothing was the last wrapping of social life . . . Recall the furrier from Lucca in Sercambi's tale who feared losing his identity when he removed his clothes to bathe. Centuries of Christian vigilance and moral prohibitions prevented him from recognizing himself in his naked but opaque body."^ ‘ Orderic Vital's belief that the state of the courtiers' souls is reflected in their clothing betokens a Geoffrey de Vigeois, Recueil des historien de la France, cited by Moshe Lazar in "Cupid, the Lady, and the Poet," Eleanor o f Aquitaine: Patron and Politician, ed. William W. Kibler (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1976), 36-7. ^OQrdericus Vitalis, Histoire ecclesiastique, cited by Lazar, p. 37. ^ • A History o f Private Life II: Revelations o f the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: The Beknap Press of Harvard UP, 1988), 581. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 105 society in which dress is tied to identity, not dissimilarly from moralists' views in early modem England. Similarities abound, as well, between Renaissance diatribes on fashion and medieval English s e r m o n s . ^ ^ Several examples will suffice to show the resemblance. The story of Eve's role in the fall from Eden is conjured up repeatedly in medieval as well as Renaissance works to illustrate women's part in succumbing to, and encouraging, temptation. For example. Dr. William Lichfield, an "eloquent divine" of the thirteenth century, compares Eve and Mary as models for women, remarking that Mary's silence was a sign of virtue, but "Eve, ou re oldest moder in paradise, held long tale with the eddre, and told hym what god had seyd to hire and to hire husband of etyng of the apple; and hi hire talkyng the fend understod hire febylnes and hire unstabilnes, and fond theby a way to bryng hir to confusioun" (Owst 387). The voluble Eve opens herself and Adam to the serpent's corruptions by revealing her weak nature through speech. In addition to being the pathway to corruption, the Eve-like woman also participates in trapping men: so in both medieval and Renaissance sermons the image of the woman as the devil's snares is common. Another thirteenth-century preacher proclaims, "Those that lay wait as fowlers and hunters are the demons; their snares, decoys and traps are ^-G. R. Owst complained in 1961 that the early stages of the literature of Satire and Complaint were so poorly understood that "when .. .literary historians [i.e., of the Renaissance] come to deal with the more noteworthy authors whom they deem worthy of attention, they continue to attribute to them an originality here and there where no originality exists... All the while they remain heedless of a mass of current writing, eloquence and ideas from which the early inspiration came, a rude mountain torrent rushing half-concealed in its rocky bed which ceaselessly feeds and links up the grander lakes of our medieval literature" (211-212). Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History o f English Letters and o f the English People (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1961). His comments are echoed in David Aers' 1992 article "A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or. Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the 'History of the Subject'." Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 106 wicked and foolish women, who in their pomps and wiles catch men and deceive them" (386). John Bromyard, a thirteenth-century Dominican preacher fond of scathing censures of women, elaborates on this picture, adding details of contemporary fashions: In the woman wantonly adorned to capture souls, the garland upon her head is as a single coal or firebrand of Hell to kindle men with that fire; so too the horns of another, so the bare neck, so the brooch upon the breast, so with all the curious finery of the whole of their body. \ ^ a t else does it seem or could be said of it save that each is a spark breathing out hell-fire, which this wretched incendiary of the Devil breathes so effectually.. . that, in a single day, by her dancing or her perambulation through the town, she inflames with the fire of lust— it may be— twenty of those who behold her, damning the souls whom God has created and redeemed at such a cost for their salvation. For this very purpose the Devil thus adorns these females, sending them forth through the town as his apostles, replete with every iniquity, malice, fornication and the lik e.. . . they are the Devil's nets, with which he fishes in God's fish-pond, seeking to transfer His fish to the lake of H ell.. . . (395) Attacks on the falsity of cosmetics also appear in medieval sermons, which, like Renaissance attacks, utilize Tertullian's arguments that cosmetics present an affront to God even as they emphasize the ugliness that will result. "To put hair on the head or give a new complexion is the special concern of God. They, therefore, who do this kind of thing desire along with Lucifer to be equal with the All-highest; and for this reason the unnatural colour on their face makes them grow old before the proper time, and in the future they will be punished for it as well," avows one thirteenth-century preacher; the Austin friar of Yorkshire, John Waldeby, adds, "when women set about adorning their own persons, by constricting themselves in tight clothing they wish to appear slender, and with artificial colours they desire to seem beautiful, [they are] thereby expressly insulting their Creator" (392). The same arguments resurface in the Renaissance in Tuke, Bansley, Nashe, the Quippes, and many others. And anxiety about women's place in the public gaze informs medieval sermons as well. A tale in which a preening woman is likened to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 107 a straying cat is a commonplace in the medieval pulpit: A man complained that his cat would not stay at home. '"No?' said the other: 'Shorten her tail, cut her ears and singe her fur; then she will stay at home.' So I say to you of women," Nicholas Bozon preaches in a homily on widowhood, "should they be foolish, shorten their tails, or disarray their heads and discolour their clothes. They will not then be so much desired of folk" (388-389). By disfiguring the woman and controlling her dress, the male is granted authority over her place in society— in both medieval and Renaissance tracts. The same ideas, the same phrases, the same labels for women appear in Renaissance tracts as are found in medieval discussions of fashion. But the act of re-shaping these earlier arguments and of re-presenting them to late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth-century society becomes a way for the sermonizer to declare himself P r o t e s t a n t . ^ 3 Thus, for example, while the medieval sermonizer blames fashionable evils on the Frenchman,^'^ the early modern Protestant translates this threat of "infect[ion] of the English" into a dangerous, foreign Catholicism, using, nevertheless, the same language as his forbear. Thus, while the medieval moralist Andrew N. Wawn, in "Chaucer, the Plowman's Tale and Reformation propaganda: the testimonies of Thomas Godfray and I play ne Piers', Bulletin o f the John Rylands University Library o f Manchester 54(1913), 174-192, argues that the Plowman's Tale was part of Renaissance propaganda, "exactly the sort of work which one could imagine receiving official encouragement and sponsorship," because the Plowman— the ordinary Englishman reformers sought to reach— voices criticisms of the Pope and the church which complimented anti-Catholic sentiments. Such "propaganda" would present another instance of medieval sources' being recycled for reformation purposes. 94"[A]t the beginning of the Pestilence and for a long while before, men were simple and clad in homely fashion. But, after the Pestilence, when the war with France began, then began also the pride of the French to infect the English, and now the present age is surfeited with it— especially in pride of raiment, in baselards, in horns, and in the various adornment of colours...," complains the medieval preacher Master Rypon(Owst 406). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 108 compares women in fashions to the devil’ s altar,^^ the early modem writer compares the well-dressed woman to the spectacle of the Mass. In the period of the reign of Edward I, a list of political songs reveals a piece Against the Pride o f the Ladies, denouncing women’ s pride and extravagance in dress and other female vices; it also includes the poem Hwon holy chirche is under fate, a "lament on the corruption and slavery of the church" (Owst 222). The thirteenth-century author of the Speculum Laicorum, quoting Vincent of Beauvais, pronounces, "W om an... as saith Secundus the Philosopher, is the confusion of Man, an insatiable beast, a continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a daily ruin, a house of tempest, a hindrance to devotion" (378). English reformers utilize such sentiments— condemnation of women's finery, criticisms of a corrupt church, arguments against womankind’ s debased nature— to advance the cause of their religion and their careers.^^ The Protestant reformer turns general medieval arguments against vice into specific, focused attacks, and ancient arguments acquire a certain political ^^The Dominican John Bromyard here presents a satire on scenes of gaiety and springtime fashions: "for the Devil’ s and Hell’ s altar and for their altar-stone they have a fashionably attired body and head. Because, just as the sacristan makes more adornment of the altar at the greater feasts when more people come to church, thinking that there will be more folk to look at it that day, so does the sacristan of Hell, Pokerellus, with regard to these women, saying to them— "To-day is a great feast: many folk will see you. Adorn yourself, therefore, that you may be reputed beautiful and that those who behold you may delight in your loveliness!" Lo! then the Devil’ s altar, which is more gladly seen than God’ s altar: the altar of the Devil, I say, because... it is a crime to seek or wish to be sought after in this fashion" (Owst 394). A mere glance at the career of, for example, Stephen Gosson illustrates the place preaching held in personal advancement in the Elizabethan world. Although Gosson had literary connections at Oxford, his criticism of poetry, plays, and society (despite a shaky start) made his name and overshadowed everything else he did, ultimately winning him a place as rector of St. Botolph’ s, then one of the wealthiest livings in England. Arthur F. Kinney, "Stephen Gosson," Sixteenth- Century British Nondramatic Writers, Dictionary o f Literary Biography, Vol. 172, ed. David A. Richardson (Detroit: Gale Research), 96-104. See also Phoebe Sheavyn, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, 2nd edition, revised by J. W. Saunders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 109 topicality in the mouths of England's reformers. A Protestant ethos is created by positing a corrupt female, Catholic threat to England's inviolability. In an age in which the act of the Protestant is to interpret God's word, the translation of society’ s ills into recognizable, easily-read symbols on the person of England's women is a declaration of Godliness. The Whore of Babylon In exile in Geneva under Mary, John Knox, a Scottish reformer, wrote The First Blast o f the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment o f Women in 1557. As the title might suggest, Knox's work challenged a woman's— specifically, Mary's— right to power. Knox announces upfront the purpose of this first blast: "TO AWAKE WOMEN DEGENERATE," he proclaims, continuing, "To promote a Woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion, or empire above any Realme, Nation, or Citie, is repugnant to Nature; contumelie to God, a thing most contrarions to his reveled will and approved ordinance; and finallie, it is the subversion of good Order, of all equitie and justice" (373). The document is an example of many of the time's strongest misogynist arguments; in attacking Mary's rule, Knox marshalls accounts of female weakness, monstrosity, vanity, foolishness, cowardice, and various other unpleasant qualities. "Frome a corrupt and venomed fountein can spring no holsome water," Knox writes, "But the authoritie of a woman is a corrupted fountein, and therfore from her can never spring any lauful officer.. . . and therefore, who soever receiveth of a woman office or authoritie, are adulterous and bastard officers before God" (414). Religious authorities are arrayed— Paul, John, Tertullian, Augustine, Chrysostome— for such assessments as "Womankind (saith [John]) is rashe and fool-hardie, and their covetousnes is like the goulf of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 110 hell, that is, insaciable" (388). Knox announces early on, "I am assured, that God hath reveled to some in this our age, that it is more then a monstre in nature that a Woman shall reigne and have empire above Man" (366); and he explains that if ancient authors were to see a female monarch in power, they would be so astonished as to believe the hole worlde to be transformed into Amazones, and that suche a metamorphosis and change was made of all the men of that countrie, as poetes do feyn was made of the companyons of Ulisses, or at least, that albeit the outwarde form of men remained, yet shuid they judg that their hartes were changed frome the wisdome, understanding, and courage of men, to the foolishe fondnes and cowardise of women. Yea, they further should pronounce, that where women reigne or be in authoritie, that there must nedes vanitie be preferred to vertue, ambition and pride to temperancie and modestie; and finallie, that avarice, the mother of all mischefe, must nedes devour equitie and justice. (375) A woman's control of a nation is not only monstrous, it also "bringeth furth monstres" (401)— that is, Knox warns, a female monarch transforms the men of a nation with Circean power into creatures with the beastly, unlovely qualities of the female race. Rather than forthright virtues, men will take on such features as avariciousness, vanity, ambition, foolishness. Knox's conclusion, that "They oght to remove frome honor and authoritie that monstre in nature: So call I a woman cled in the habit of a man, yea, a woman against nature reigning above man" (416), utilizes the image of the mis-dressed woman who, inappropriate and unnatural, oversteps her bounds and thus destroys her country. Of course, Knox's vicious attack on the Catholic Mary, written in 1557, was published in 1558— just in time for Elizabeth I's accession to the throne. While his First 5/a^r caused him considerable trouble with Elizabeth, who extended Knox's exile and was never to like Calvin or his church for their supposed Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ill condonation of the work,^? Knox nevertheless refused to retract his arguments. When he was denied passage to Scotland in January of 1559, for example, Knox wrote to Elizabeth, "I can not deny the writting of a book against the usurped Authority and unjust Regiment of Women; neither yet am I minded to retract or call back any principal] point or proposition of the same, till truth and verity do further appeir" (352-353).^^ The First Blast was designed to attack Mary's specifically Catholic rule, but the arguments Knox chose for that attack were familiar derogatory assessments of female character. Knox's diatribe provides a clear example of the ways in which well-used arguments against women are turned against the Catholic Church, just as attacks on women often carry with them 97 Which Calvin denied in irritation at being out of favor with the Queen. Calvin claimed not to have known of the book for a year after its publication, and wrote in a letter to Sirt William Cecil (? 1559) that when Knox asked him about the government of women, "I candidly replied, that as it was a deviation from the original and proper order of nature, it was to be ranked, no less than slavery, among the punishments consequent upon the fall of man; but that there were occasionally women so endowed, that the singular good qualities which shone forth in them made it evident that they were raised up by Divine authority; either that God designed by such examples to condemn the inactivity of men, or for the better setting forth his own glory..." (Laing 357). 98 a comment hardly designed to placate Elizabeth. David Laing notes that Knox's views were not uncommon, and were shared by his colleagues Goodman, Whittingham and Gilby, although the work was not received well. Goodman published a similar document, which was to cause him much trouble with Elizabeth, as well. Laing remarks, "But both works were published somewhat unseasonably, as such questions on Government and Obedience, it is justly observed, might have been more fitly argued when a King happened to fill the throne. The terms used by Goodman in reference to Mary, Queen of England, are not less violent than unseemly. She died on the 17th of Nov. 1558, and her successor regarded the authors of these works with the utmost dislike, although neither of them, in their writings, had any special reference, or the least intention of giving offence, to Queen Elizabeth" (352). Another English exile, John Aylmer, who later became Bishop of London, wrote a reply to Knox which argued (quite practically, it seems) that Knox should have stuck with attacks on Mary, and not have gone into general arguments against female rulers (354-355). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 112 suspicion of Catholic taint.^^ Denunciation of the Whore of Babylon carries with it dispraise of the overdressed, preening woman as well as theological or political differences. This melding of argumentative tactics often finds expression in a dislike of what is characterized as female display, while it serves at the same time to declare the Protestant voice of the sermonizer. For example, Knox's ill-clad, unnatural queen, in addition to her other sins, compels idolatry. Where a woman "beareth empire," a country either lacks a head, "or els ther is an idol exalted in the place of the true head... As images have face, nose, eyes, mouth, handes, and feet painted, but the use of the same can not the craft and art of man geve them ..." (390-391). The "odious empire of Women" (413), as empty as a false image of Rome, lacks the virtue and strength that her appearance, name and proportion " do resemble and promise" (391). Like the fashionable woman, her exterior appearance and inner self do not match. And as a false idol, she is condemned by God's law, for, as Knox explains, "the same God, that in plain wordes forbiddeth idolâtrie, doth also forbidde the authoritie of women over man" (414). Knox summons the image of the wicked, painted Jezebel in his address to Mary near the end of his treatise, as he scoffs, "Cursed Jesabel of England, with the pestilent and detestable generation of Papists, make no litle bragge and boast.. .. they have not prevailed against God; his throne is more high then that the length of their homes be able to reach" (418). The horns of the bestial Catholics, led by their unnatural female ruler, cannot touch Knox's Protestant God. An interesting parallel exists between Catholic Italy's linking of a religious minority— the Jews— to women through love of finery, just as Protestant England saw connections between its women and the luxury-loving Catholics. In each case, the attack on women and the enemy religion served to reinforce religious identities at home. The Franciscans used attacks against the Jews and their finery to strangthen their place within Italian society; so, too, Protestant reformers often use attacks on ostentation to declare their theological position. See Hughes for more on Italian views of Jews' dress. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 113 Charles Bansley uses the inverse argument in his attack on "the pryde and abuse of women now a dayes," written about a decade before Knox's publication-Women, he rhymes, . .they that walcke in proude raymente,/ walcke not truelye in spyryte and fay the/ But in a flesshely develyshe waye,/ for so the Scripture sayeth" (Sig. A l''). And such devilish attire is rooted in Catholic sin: From Rome from Rome thys carkerd pryde, from Rome it came doutles Away for shame wyth soch filthy baggage, as smels of papery and develyshenes Lorde what Romishe monsters make ye your children, to[o] shamefull to be tolde Ye make them sure your god almyghtes, and Popyshe ydolatry ye do upholde... (Sig. A30 The idolatry of the Roman Church, a common accusation among Protestant writers*^', here is grafted to English women's undue love of finery— the women. lO O A treaty se, shewing and declaring the pryde and abuse o f women now a dayes (London: Thomas Raynalde, -1550, 4°). Bansley ends his poem with an address to "Kyng Edward & his noble counsail al." Christopher Haigh argues that with the death of Henry VIII, a "second, truly Protestant, Reformation" occurred, in which "rituals and beliefs demanded by the old king were new derided, evangelical piety was the fashion, and Latimer was installed as Court prophet" (168). In 1547, a total ban on images in London was enacted in the name of stopping popish idolatry. When Mary took the throne and Catholicism was restored. Catholic practices were often denounced as instances of idolatry; for example, the erection of an altar for mass was greeted in 1553 with attacks such as Rowland Taylor's: "Thou devil! who made thee so bold to enter into this church of Christ to prophane and defile it with this abominable idolatry?" (208). And under Elizabeth's Protestant reign attacks on idolatry continued from various Protestant factions: In October of 1559, Elizabeth ordered "that a crucifix and candlesticks be set on the communion table of the Chapel Royal, and decided later that roods should be restored in parish churches... .The new Protestant bishops whom Elizabeth had nominated were horrified by what they saw as her revival of idolatry. Early in 1560 some of them sent a protest to the queen, declaring that all images were specifically prohibited by the second Commandment; a few, though, were willing to allow images in their churches if Elizabeth insisted, provided there was no veneration (244). Prominent Protestants such as William Perkins argued that the English should remove "popish superstitions in sacrifices, meats, holidays, apparel, temporary and bead-ridden prayers, indulgences, austere life, whipping, ceremonies, gestures, gait, conversation, pilgrimage, building of altars, pictures, churches, and all other of that rabble," and follow just God's word. Haigh argues that, although the trappings of Catholicism, a "works-religion," had Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 114 he accuses, actually uphold Catholicism by wearing their "synfull fashions" (Sig. A3''). Pride in a fine appearance smells of popery and incorrect worship. So, too, Thomas Nashe accuses women of making themselves into idols, "over-gilded" so as "to bee more honoured and worshipped," an implicit reference to Romish practices {Christs teares Sig. 701- Inherent also in the Quippes poet's argument against women's fashions is a strident anti-Catholicism. Like Eve, who turned from God's command and fell to the attractions of evil, or like the misled Catholics who worship the regalia of their Pope, the "vainglorious" women who spend money on finery have given up English currency— a known thing of value— for items whose intrinsic value is questionable. They do not understand where the fashions came from, and clothed in displays of the marketplace, the wearers' own purity is thrown into question. The poet queries, ".. .can any tell, from whence they cam .. ?" (64). His question echoes John Calvin's arguments against the uncertain value of relics, which, interestingly, Calvin denigrates using the trope of women's fashions: And so completely are they all mixed up and huddled together, that it is impossible to have the bones of any martyr without running the risk of worshipping the bones of some thief or robber, or, it may be, the bones of a dog, or a horse, or an ass. Nor can the Virgin Mary's ring, or comb, or girdle, be venerated without the risk of venerating some part of the dress of a strumpet. Let every one, therefore, who is inclined, guard against this risk. Henceforth no man will be able to excuse himself by pretending ignorance. *°- been confiscated and banned, and the "sterilized services of the Book of Common Prayer" and a Protestant "Word-religion" celebrated in their place, the attitudes which sustained Catholic practices were not eradicated by the Protestant Reformation (288). Haigh claims that such arguments proved less effective than political Reformations had been, and "the Protestant Reformation did not destroy essentially Catholic views of Christian life and eternal salvation" (288-289). English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Yet attacks on idolatry and trappings of the Romish church would often serve as a sign of the Protestant. lOZJohn Calvin, Tracts and Treatises on the Reformation o f the Church, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdman Publishing Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 115 Acknowledging the uncertainty in the origins of the relics, Calvin warns against their worship: similarly the poet warns against the worship of questionable frivolities and by extension against the corruptions of the "infected" woman. A tract written by one F., G. B. A., A discoverie o f the great subtiltie and wonderful wisdom o f the Italians, sets forth a common assessment of Catholics as carrying a disease of religion which will overtake and infect Christendom, leading men to "breake asunder all bonds of amity, and flesh them to ruine one another like crue 1 1 and savage beasts" (Sig. A30- The author explains that the Roman Church encourages the worshipping of idols so as to increase the servitude of the people, because "true understanding of this commandement, wold coole and freeze the zeale of those that bring offrings to the worshipping of their Images, with the which they licke their lippes full sweetly" ( 4 3 ) . Fleshly interests and bestial appetite come of improper worship, just as they are provoked by immodest dress. William Perkins, for example, addresses proper attire during a larger discussion of appropriate forms of worship; he asks, how do we know what is necessary? and replies that, according to Scripture, "Vaine and curious persons are not to be competent judges hereof; but in these things, we must regard the judgement and example of modest, grave, and frugall persons in every order and estate who upon experience and knowledge, are best able to determine, what is necessarie, and what Company, 1958), 341. First translated into English by Steven Wythers and printed as A very profitable treatise, made by m. Jhon Calvyne, declarynge what great profit might come to al christendome, y f there were a register made o f all Sainctes bodies and other reliques, which are aswell in Italy, as in Fraunce, Dutchland, Spaine, and other kingdomes and countreys, 1561. ^o^The full title reads, A discoverie o f the great subtiltie and wonderful wisdom o f the Italians, whereby they bear sway over the most part o f Christendome, and cunningly behave themselves to fetch the Quintescence out o f the peoples purses: Discoursing at Large the rneanes, how they prosecute and continue the same: and last o f all, convenient remedies to prevent their pollicies herein (London: Printed by John Wolfe, 1591). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 116 is not."*0'^ The word of God gives direction in worship as well as in dress; the Catholics are a dangerous model for either. "Abominable practise [s]" come from those who veer from the form and fashion which God prescribes (Perkins Sig. Gg70- Anxiety about wrong behavior appears explicitly in ihcQuippes in the worry that foreign products are contaminating the English state economically, draining it of its specie, and more markedly, in the concern that they are contaminating England's women. But the debate over finery is also relevant theologically within Protestant debates over ceremony and vestments: the Quippes poet's fear of fashion translates into the fear that Catholic finery could drain England of its Protestantism. * o f questionable value and unknown origin, foreign "toyes" contaminate women with their taint of the common marketplace. ^^‘ ^The Whole Treatise, Sig. FfS^-GglE Perkins cites Math. 6: 28-31, "And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you. That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thougtht, saying. What shall we eat? or. What shall we drink? or. Wherewithal shall we be clothed?" and I. Tim. 6.8., "And having food and raiment let us be therewith content." The two passages are presented as proof that "our Saviour Christ teacheth" that "Our care for appareil, and the ornaments of our bodies, must be very moderate" (Sig. Ff8''). •°^Eamon Duffy notes that "though both Mass vestments and copes had been permitted for use in the communion service of 1549, the reformers increasingly discouraged the wearing of chasubles, which had unacceptable doctrinal associations, and encouraged 'counterfeiting' of the Mass" (492). The 1552 Act of Uniformity removed most of the ceremonies that had been condemned by Protestants: baptism, confirmation, and burial services were rewritten, the traditional structure of the mass was abandoned, and the old vestments were forbidden as signs of the papist church (Haigh 180). Under Mary, of course, the vestments were brought back, and under Elizabeth controversy continued, as arguments raged over whether Protestant ministers could suitably wear vestments and ornaments such as had been in the Mass (240). Elizabethan modifications on the 1552 act included restoring "the use of the cope by the priest when holy communion was celebrated, a gesture towards traditional ritual, even though the proper Mass vestment, the chasuble, was not permitted" (Duffy 567). In 1559-60, orders to destroy vestments were sent out, although apparently not all churches complied, and the debates over proper apparel for ministers of the English Protestant church would continue for many years. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 117 and literally, in the poem, with "poxe & pyles." What is appropriate or "necessarie" becomes confused when women's bodies wear frivolous dress. Without the poet's translation of strange fashions into an understandable tongue, the devil's reaches extend through Eve's daughters to Protestant Englishmen. Attacks on the Roman Church are allied with criticisms of women and fashion: idolatry of images and excessive love of finery are misguided; improper worship and corrupt fashions carry infection; the idol and the painted woman call up the same sin; the theatricality of the Mass and the whorish woman are alike in that both ask to be gazed upon.*°^ The worshipped image, of woman or Church, is presented as a threat to England's stability, and therefore must be denounced. Anti-Catholic arguments are bolstered by employing available misogynist platitudes, and just as transgressing women are linked to forbidden Catholic display, the threat of the Catholic Church is feminized in English accounts. Roger Ascham hints in The Scholemaster that the wantonness of Italy leads English Protestants into Catholicism, explaining that, "the sutle and secrete Papistes.. .procured bawdie bookes to be translated out of the Italian tonge, whereby ouer many yong willes and wittes allured to wan tonnes, do now boldly contemne all seuere bookes that sounde to honestie and godlines" ( 2 3 0 ) . And often the characterization of the Church as female is much more direct, as in the case of the young traveler Henry Wotton, who in 1592 writes proudly of his exposure to the Pope while in Rome, boasting. No Englishman, containing himself within his allegiance to her Majesty, hath seen more concerning the points of Rome than I have done; which I lo^Barish observes that Protestants object to the host because it is too tangible: "It had been turned into a thing of spectacle, to be gazed upon and marvelled at" (164). >07Roger Ascham, English Works: Toxophilus, Report o f the Affaires and State o f Germany, The Scholemaster, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 118 speak absolutely without exception.. . . The Whore of Babylon I have seen mounted on her chair, going on the ground, reading, speaking, attired and disrobed by the cardinals, or rather, by Montalto alone, in both her mitres, in her triple crown, in her lettica, on her moyl, at mass, and lastly in public consistory.. .of Rome, in short, this is my opinion, or rather indeed my most assured knowledge, that her delights on earth are sweet, and her judgements in heaven heavy^oB Of course the image of the Pope as the Biblical Whore of Babylon was a common Protestant insult to Catholicism.But Wotton's depiction takes on particular life when read in relation to other accounts of the feminine temptations that threaten Englishmen. As the next chapter examines more completely, English travelers delight in describing the harlots of Italy for their native audience. Wotton's account, an almost voyeuristic observation of yet another Italian "whore"— in this case, the Pope— recalls other Englishmen's descriptions of Venetian courtesans' attire and living arrangements.' It also calls up moralizing tracts on Englishwomen's fashions. In his fascination with the Pope's dress, Wotton describes the vestments as misguided feminine vanity, and the Whore of Babylon's display is likened to that of the immodest harlot's disrobing for the public gaze. The sinful, the female, and the Catholic are often described in the same terms. As "^BSir Henry Wotton, Letter to Lord Zouche, Florence 8 May 1592, in The Life and Letters o f Sir Henry Wotton, Logan Pearsall Smith, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 274. Wotton would later serve as ambassador to Venice for nearly fifteen years. '09John Bale is generally credited with instituting this insult with his 1545 Image of Both Churches, in which he interprets Revelation's Whore of Babylon to be the Pope. Wotton's description appears informed by Revelation: "And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication... and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration" (17: 4- 6). ’ 'OSuch as the famous accounts of Thomas Coryate in Coryats Crudities Hastily gobled vp in fine Moneths trauells in France, Sauoy, Italy, Rhetia comonly called the Orisons country, Heluetia alias Switzerland, some parts o f high Germany, and the Netherlands; Newly digested in the hungry aire o f Odcombe in the County of Somerset, & now dispersed to the nourishment o f the trauelling Members o f his Kingdome. London, printed by W. S. Anno Domini 1611. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 119 Bans ley cries contemptuously, "Now fye upon proude s trumpery,/ And al vayne devyllyshe stuffe" (Sig. A3''). The Quippes poet’ s monstrous, wanton women, arrayed in their "hellish toyes" (26), are described— and thus, circumscribed— in his poem in order to protect England's men. Feminizing the threat posed to Englishness and, in this case, to Protestantism translates the opposition into familiar terms within clearly defined sexual hierarchies, and affords the reformer a confident avenue of lively criticism. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 120 Chapter Three English Self-Alienation: The Case of Italy and the Strumpet of Rome In his 1617 treatise Quo Vadis?, Bishop Joseph Hall explains that, in accordance with God's plan, the Englishman is meant to remain in his native land. The very geography of England indicates that travel should be discouraged, and the desire to leave England suggests dissatisfaction with God: It is an over rigorous construction of the workes of God, that in moting our Eland with the Ocean he ment to shut us up from other regions; for God himselfe that made the Sea, was the Author of Navigation, and hath therein taught us to set up a wooden bridge, that may reach to the very Antipodes themselves: This were to seeke discontentment in the bounty of God, who hath placed us apart, for the singularity of our happiness, not for restraint.' Travel to foreign lands can only threaten this happiness and menace the Englishman's peace of mind. Having been abroad twice himself. Hall admits that he "found our spirituall losse so palpable, that now at last my heart could not chuse but breake forth at my hand, and tell my Countrymen of the dangerous issue of their curiositie" (Sig. A4''). Hall does concede that certain kinds of travel may be necessary in "Matter of trafique, and Matter of State," as God has confined "some commodities" to some countries, and "sprinkled upon some" countries other benefits (2). Merchants must venture abroad to fetch those goods that England lacks, so long as they "take heed, least they go so farre, that they leave God behinde them" (4). In addition. Hall notes, England must maintain 'Josheph Hall, Quo Vadis? A Just Censure o f travell as it is commonly undertaken by the gentlemen o f ournation (London, 1617), 1-2. Hall's description of England recalls John of Gaunt's famous paean to England in Shakospearo'sRichard II (-1595): "This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,/ This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,/ This other Eden, demi-paradise,/ This fortress built by Nature for herself/ Against infection and the hand of war,/ This happy breed of men, this little world,/ This precious stone set in the silver sea,/ Which serves it in the office of a wall,/ Or as [a] moat defensive to a house,/ Against the envy of less happier lands;/This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England... " (II.i.40-49). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 121 contact with foreign governments in matters of policy so that she has knowledge of their proceedings and can protect herself from the "wit of untrusty neighbourhood" (4). Yet, aside from these necessary communications with countries outside God's "I-land," any "Travell of curiosity," Hall asserts, must be viewed with disfavor; it is often conducted "only to feede some vaine Caméléons at home with the aire of Newes, for no other purpose, save idle discourse," and it ultimately leads to "both private and publike mischiefe" (5-6). The mischief occasioned by travel is a topic much explored by moralists and writers of fictions alike, whether it be to censure or celebrate such activities. The perils that foreign travel presents to the Englishman, in his beliefs, behavior, and person, are manifold, and Hall's rebuke to travellers addresses debates on travel that had been carried on in England for years.- Such debates involve philosophical questions about the active versus the contemplative life as well as current political and theological issues. "[S]hall wee be so madde as to. . . cast our selves into the mouth of danger?" Hall demands (53), and cautions that "[mjotion is ever accompanied with unquietnesse; and both argues, and causes imperfection" (90).^ -Perhaps one of the most famous examples of Renaissance advice to the traveller occurs in Polonius's speech to his son as Laertes departs for France, in which he instructs him on comportment, speech, clothing, etc. (William Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.iii.58-80). 3Hall uses an analogy to the celestial spheres' movement: "Motion is ever accompanied with unquietnesse; and both argues, and causes imperfection, whereas the happy estate of heaven is described by rest; whose glorious spheres in the meane time, doe so perpetually move, that they are never removed from their places" (90). Interestingly, the same analogy is used to opposite ends by Sir John Stradling in 1592: "Unlike those base spirits who remain forever at home, the haught and heavenlie spirited men, (men indeed) are never well but when they imitate the heavens, to whose nature nothing is more repugnant, then any time to be idle or ill occupied." Justus Lipsius, A Direction fo r Travailers. . ., transi. Sir John Stradling (London, 1592), Sig. A2^. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 122 Within the broader question of whether the Englishman should venture beyond England’ s shores lay the specific problem of travel to Italy, an enticing destination for the travelling Englishman. Nowhere in English discussions of travel is the danger of imperfection against which Hall warns so manifest as Italy- -a foreign place that, if English discussions of travel are to be believed, lures and repels the Englishman abroad more than anywhere else in Europe. Over the course of a hundred years, English Protestantism undergoes theological and political changes, but the general approach to Italy remains consistent. In discussions of women's fashion, the visible and seductive are identified as enemies to the security of the English state; in disputes over travel, it is Italy which is most visible and seductive, and which is figured as female, licentious, and excessively ornamented. The foreign Italy and the native Englishwoman nevertheless appear as similar threats to the virtuous Englishman and are addressed in much the same terms, as corrupt, infectious, and monstrously frivolous. The Englishman's perceptions of and reactions to Italy define the forbidden and delineate the acceptable for the English gentleman abroad or at home. This chapter is divided into two main sections. The first, organized around the negative case made against travel, culminates in an examination of Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller as a case study of the fictional English traveller abroad. Within this first section, I look at the relation of travel and education; the moral pitfalls for the traveller; the image of Circe, as a beguiling Italy; travel and metamorphosis; and theatrical treatments of the subject of the English traveller. The second section of the chapter looks at defenses of travel— both overt celebrations and implicit defenses. Champions of travel, such as Milton and Henry Peacham, are placed next to various implicit defenses of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 123 travel within a humanist agenda. The key issue holding these myriad topics together is the problem of education: travel from England from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries is intricately bound up with the act of writing, and thus with the presentation of oneself both in a foreign country and on the page. The basic dilemma of travel and travel literature involves a series of conflicts: purity and contagion; the self and Other; moral simplicity and sophistication; identity and disguise; reality versus appearance. These oppositions pervade both the attacks on, and defenses of, travel, and illustrate that travel writing is interesting precisely because it poses explicity the problems of self-exposure that are involved in all writing. I. The Case against Travel Abroad "The Glory of a Perfect Breeding"? Reasons to Stay Home In 1606, Sir Thomas Palmer listed the five main attractions of Italy for the English traveller: the climate, the opportunity of a university education, the example of courteous behavior, the chance to observe the workings of a variety of different forms of government, and the many archaeological and historical treasures in that country.^ An Englishman during the Renaissance could gain both sophistication and learning through travel in Italy. As the country in which numerous classical texts had been rediscovered and studied by early humanists, and as the culture in which Castiglione's esteemed II Cortegiano originated, Italy promised to cultivate the traveling Englishman for life at court. Palmer's list reveals how the physical location 'Italy' is reconciled to an English humanist program: travel can serve as education in terms both of classical learning— Mn essay on the meanes how to make our travailes into forraine countries the more profitable and honourable. In Bibliography o f British and American Travel in Italy to I860, ed R. S. Pine-Coffin (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1974), 5. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 124 contemporary Italy holds keys to ancient Rome— and in terms of practical, political experience in the English courtier's training. But Palmer's suggestions for Italian travel present just one view in larger debates over the benefits provided by any foreign travel at all. As they focused on various interpretations of portions of Plato and Aristotle, and fulminated about the Roman Church's designs on the Protestant English, Englishmen disagreed over the place of experience in education and questioned the benefits for a young man of an acitivity so fraught with dangers as travel. Hall's Quo Vadis? addresses itself to the young men who may leave England "to seeke the glory of a perfect breeding, and the perfection of that, which we call Civilitie" (and who will, according to Hall, "lose their hopes, and themselves in the way") (Sig. A50; he also admonishes the "wise parents" of these young gentry, claiming that if they could have "borrowed mine eyes for the time, they would ever leame to keepe their sonnes at home" (5). Hall's pamphlet, in systematically attacking various defenses of travel, shows the structure of the debate. He provides a clear summary of justifications for travel: perhaps it is not the learning of the schoole, but of the State, wherein our Traveller hopes for perfection: The site and forme of cities, the fashions of government, the manners of people, the raising and rate of forraine revenues, the deportment of Courts, the menaging both of warre and peace " (32-33) Such aspirations, like journeys to the "minerall waters of the Spa" (Sig. A50, the desire to see "forraine things" (22), admiration of foreigners (26), training in "verball discourse" or foreign languages (37), attraction to foreign manners and fashions (81), or the pursuit of learning abroad (33) are, in Quo Vadis?, untenable— indeed, reprehensible— reasons for undertaking travel outside England. The "affectation of too-early ripeness that makes them prodigall of their childrens safety and hopes" prompts parents to allow their young sons to travel. Hall Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 125 asserts; his treatise aims to abort such practices and thus preserve the integrity of true Englishmen. Treatises on the education of the young form a large and important genre of humanist prose and provide glimpses into the formation of the proper English gentleman in early modem England. Often, the treatises were written for the students as well as the parents; they argued that the humanist attention to Greek and Latin literature would be of great value to the future citizen or statesman. As Paul O. BCristeller observes. Through the reading of the classical authors, the student was to acquire a fund of moral ideas, sentences, and examples that would give him the necessary preparation to face the tasks of his own life. In stressing the moral value of a classical education, the humanists effectively countered the charge made by some theologians that the reading of the pagan poets and writers would corrupt the morals of the young.^ In his brief list of the writers of such humanist appeals, Kristeller includes Roger Ascham of England, author of the 1570 The Scholemaster. While anti-humanist tracts target pagan classical works, in The Scholemaster Ascham discusses corruptions which spring from much more immediate and insidious sources. Along with his many suggestions for a sound education, Ascham's treatise covers in scurrilous detail the horrors that face an Englishman abroad in Italy. The Scholemaster, while slightly hysterical in its approach to the dangers of Italian travel, is not atypical of anti-Italian literature, and illustrates with vivid particulars the warnings that Hall advances more generally in Quo Vadis?^ ^Paul Oskar Kristeller, "Humanism and Moral Philosophy," in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, ed. Albert Rabil, Jr., v. Ill (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 286-287. ^Sara Wameke investigates the images of the educational traveller by examining first, English travel before the year of Ascham's 1570 Scholemaster— ixtivcX mainly of pilgrims, students, and gentlemen— and then travel in the wake of his work. She divides her study into categories in which the educational traveller was seen in early modern England: the Italianated traveller, the aetheist traveller, the Catholic traveller, the morally corrupt traveller, and the cultural renegade. Images Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 126 Travel in Italy, Ascham makes clear, will not complement a youth's education, and in fact will endanger the purity of English at home. All things Italian, imported books as well as manners, open the individual traveller and the English nation to multiple corruptions and moral decay. Ascham notes with alarm that Italy poses threats not only by example of ill life, but more by preceptes of fonde bookes, of late translated out of Italian into English, sold in euery shop in London, commended by honest titles the soner to corrupt honest maners: dedicated ouer boldlie to vertuous and honorable personages, the easielier to begile simple and innocent w ittes.. . . Ten Sermons at Paules Crosse do not so moch good for mouying me to trewe doctrine, as one of those bookes do harme, with inticing men to ill liuing. Yea, I say farder, those bookes, tend not so moch to corrupt honest liuing, as they do, to subuert trewe Religion. Mo Papists be made, by your mery bookes of Italie, than by your earnest bookes of Louain? The distrust in Ascham's diatribe of influences from the very birthplace of Cicero's Latin might appear inconsistent coming from a well-known Cambridge humanist and "enthusiastic antiquarian."* But Ascham is merely articulating an extreme end of the divergent attitudes toward contemporary Italy in sixteenth century Protestant England: as the "very acme of beauty and culture, of license and corruption," Italy consistently earned both adulation and bitter attack.^ Ascham's criticisms of Italy run the gamut of national prejudices. He announces that in Italy, "sinne, by lust and vanitie, hath and doth breed vp every where, common contempt of Gods word, priuate contention in many families, [and] open o f the Eduational Traveller in Early Modem England (Leiden, New York, Koln: E.J. Brill, 1995). ^Roger Ascham, English Works: Toxophilus, Report o f the Affaires and State of Germany, The Scholemaster, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 229-231. Ascham's views of Italian books could have been describing the printer John Wolfe's forged Italian texts, (addressed in the excursus appended to this chapter), but for a gap of fifteen years in publication dates. *Lawrence V. Ryan, Roger Ascham (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), 3. ^John Leon Lievsay, The Elizabethan Image o f Italy. (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1979), 1. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 127 factions in euery Citie" (223); Italians' agenda is "not to punish sinne, not to amend manners, not to purge doctrine, but onelie to watch and ouersee that Christes trewe Religion set no sure footing, where the Pope hath any lurisdiction" (234-235). Italy's many courtesans encourage "more libertie to sinne, than euer.. .in our noble Citie of London in ix. yeare" (234). The English traveller to Italy, Ascham warns, can become irrevocably tainted by these multiple "perilous poyson[s]" (226). In the event that an Englishman cannot avoid traveling in Italy, Ascham turns to his humanist sources for direction for his young pupil: Yet, if a ientleman will nedes trauell into Italie, he shall do well, to looke on the life, of the wisest traueler, that euer traueled thether, set out by the wisest writer, that euer spake with tong, Gods doctrine onelie excepted: and that is Vlysses in Homere. Vlysses, and his trauell, I wishe our trauelers to looke vpon, not so much to feare them, with the great daungers, that he many tymes suffered, as to instruct them, with his excellent wisedome, which he alwayes and euery where vsed. (224) Ascham's faith in the power of invoking Homer, a pagan poet, calls attention to his primary purpose in composing The Scholemaster as a defense of humanist education, and highlights the work's resemblance in purpose to other humanist treatises on education. Such treatises devote much attention to extolling the praises of Greek and Latin literature, "discussing the merits and educational value of specific classical authors and their different v/orks... humanist educators laid much stress on the moral value inherent in the study of ancient literature, history, and philosophy" (Kristeller 286). In Ascham's construction, the traveller versed in Homer becomes less susceptible to the many dangers he will face on Italian soil. But Ascham offers the traveller no further practical advice. He looks to Homer to provide models for behavior, but he focuses more on scaring off Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 128 potential travelers by invoking common fears— as does Hall, decades later— than on arming the Englishman with defenses should he choose to venture abroad.‘° Part of the suspicion and fear of travel to Italy, of course, were grounded in real dangers which faced the Renaissance traveller. As Clare Howard points out in her study of English Renaissance travellers, during the war between England and Spain, any Englishman caught on Spanish territory was a lawful prisoner for ransom, and Spanish territory included Sicily, Naples and Milan, and to a certain degree Rome because of the papal alliance with Spain. “ In addition, agents of the Inquisition worked alongside the persuasive Jesuits to convert Protestants back to Catholicism, and the cases of English travellers who converted while far from home and subject to Catholic pressures prompted many Englishmen to discourage foreign travel because of the threats to their religion •°From the times of the earliest religious changes in England, exiles from the current religious mle sought refuge abroad; such unhappy departures from England are viewed differently from the "travel of curiosity" that comes under such fierce attack in England. In his study of later Renaissance travel, John Stoye argues that in the seventeenth century English travel to Italy underwent several major shifts: under Elizabeth is found what Stoye calls "extreme distrust"; under James I, especially from 1603-1630, a unique condition arose in which ambassadors to Venice were crucial, and communication with the English government was constant and important from the households of the diplomatic corps. During this time, travel was conducted with suspicion, and was associated with political affairs and secrets of state. Time abroad was seen as a path to power in the courts at home, as preparation for service to the monarchy at home. Travel to Italy was also closely regulated and guarded by the English government prior to 1630, and was usually limited to the north of Italy, especially Venice. Travellers would often remain in Italy for an extended period of residence. After Charles I's peace treaties with the courts of France and Spain (post-1630), travel began to assume more formulaic patterns over all of Italy. Rome was to gain importance over Venice, and less fear and suspicion of travel is seen. Less attention was paid by the English government to travellers, and a more open attitude to Italian things being returned to England appears. By 1650, the conventions of the Englishman's tour of Italy are nearly cemented, and travellers to Italy have remarkably similar experiences of Italy. The English route to Italy was becoming what would later be known as the Grand Tour. English Travellers Abroad 1604-1667: Their Influence in English Society and Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). “ Clare Howard, English Travellers o f the Renaissance (London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1914), 76-77. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 129 (77-89).*^ Adventurous accounts of travellers' encounters with bandettos, \ccAoViS lovers, lewd women, swindlers and "the subtelty of spies, the wonderful cunning of Inn-keepers and baudes"'^ suggest that other dangers faced the Renaissance traveller as well (although in travellers' accounts, the line between fact and fiction may sometimes be blurred). The threats which Englishmen saw in travel to Italy were numerous: while there, the infamous lasciviousness of Italians endangered the traveller's virtue, just as the Catholic Church would assault his Protestantism. The fame of Italian, especially Venetian, courtesans contributed to the portrayal of Italy as the place of Ascham's "vanitie and vice" (223), a characterization on which the travel writer Thomas Coryat capitalized in his scurrilous Coryat's Crudities in 1611.*“ ^ Antony Munday represents Italy as menacing not only to the individual traveller's integrity, but also to England itself: in his 1582 The English Romayne Lyfe, he describes English Catholics in Rome as they torture the martyr Richard Atkins (who tried to convert the Pope) and train to overthrow Elizabeth's rule.‘5 The risks and discomforts of travel suggested by such accounts are also ‘-The uproar surrounding Campion occurred in 1581, although this specific incident cannot explain Ascham's fears of the papacy's designs on England. •^Hermannus Kirchnerus, An Oration made by Hermannus Kirchnerus . . .concerning this subject; that young men ought to travell into forraine countryes, and all those that desire the praise o f learning and atchieving worthy actions both at home and abroad, in Coryat's Crudities, vol. i., 131. ■ '‘Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities Hastily godded [often written "gobbIed"]vp in fine Moneths trauells in France, Sauoy, Italy, Rhetia comonly called the Grisons country, Heluetia aliàs Switzerland, some parts o f high Germany, and the Netherlands; Newly digested in the hungry aire o f Odcombe in the County o f Somerset, & now dispersed to the nourishment o f the trauelling Members o f his Kingdome (London, printed by W. S. Anno Domini 1611). ‘^In The English Romayne Lyfe. Discovering: The Hues o f the Englishmen at Roome: the orders o f the English Seminarie: the dissention betweene the Englishmen and the Welshmen: the banishing o f the Englishmen out o f Roome: their Vautes vnder the grounde: their holy Pilgrimages: and a number o f other matters, worthy to be read and regarded of euery one. There vnto is added, the cruell tiranny, vsed on an English man at Roome, his Christian suffering, and notable Martirdome, fo r the Gospell oflesus Christe, in Anno. 1581. Written by A. M. sometime the Popes scholler in the Seminarie among them. . . Seene and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 130 evident in the relation between the words travel and travail, which spring from the same root and which in Renaissance spelling are often used interchangeably. Physical dangers posed to the Renaissance traveller cannot explain all of the resistance to English travel in foreign countries, however. When in 1569, one year before Ascham wrote The Scholemaster, John Rainolds participated in Oxford's formal university disputations to obtain his bachelor of arts degree, the three questions posed to him were: "Is foreign travel useful for the future politician?", "Do the senses deceive?" and "Is there a rotten seed in [every] pomegranate?" These questions appear to have been typical of exam questions, and Rainolds subsequently incorporated his responses to the questions into his lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric}'^ In his lecture on the nineteenth chapter of the Rhetoric, Rainolds summarizes the humanist debates on the merits of travel, which center around the interpretation of Aristotle's Greek,"For legislation, surveys of the world are useful." The sentence was at the center of the larger humanist controversy disputing the competing merits of the active and contemplative lives. Rainolds explains: There is great disagreement among the best interpreters in translating this sentence of Aristotle's. Indeed, Majoragio translates. . .[it] as terrarum peragrationetn [travel throughout the world], Trebizond as peregrination.es [travels abroad], Barbaro as peragrationem orbis [wandering the world over], Henri Estienne as circumire et lustrare orbem terrarum [touring and wandering about the world], Pseudo-Sturm as terrarum orbem perlustrasse [to have viewed the world all over]. Brocard as terrarum peragrationem, locorum lustrationem et descriptionem [travel throughout the world, a wandering about and a description of places]. allowed. Imprinted at London, by John Charlewoode, for Nicholas Ling: dwelling in Paules Churchyarde, at the signe o f the Maremaide. Anno. 1582 (100,5-17). ‘^ME traveller, travailer; fr., OF, fr., traveillier, traveillier, "to labor, toil, trouble, torture." In "The Indifferent," John Donne puns on these two meanings, as he asks his love, "Must I, who came to travail thorough you,/ Grow your fixed subject, because you are true?" (1 1 . 17-18). 'Law rence D. Green, ed. and trans., John Rainolds's Orford Lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 27-28. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 131 Ignorantly translated, I believe. Aristotle seems not to want swiftness of foot for traversing the ends of the earth, but quickness of mind for hastening through the writings of the learned. And so Carlo Sigonio translated the phrase clearly as ambitus terrae [surveys of the world]. That is to say, and as that learned man Piero Vettori interprets it, commentaries in which the sites of cities and places have been described, and likewise the laws and mores of the inhabitants explained.'* As Rainolds's commentary makes clear, humanists' theories often developed from the attention to a correct interpretation of original classical texts. His lectures are an example of an essential humanist activity: in addition to refining the practice of textual criticism, humanists devoted much of their attention to copying, editing, translating and writing commentaries on classical works, usually as the basis for class lectures. In his Oxford Lectures, Rainolds translated the Greek into Latin and provided learned commentary on the texts. Above all, humanists tried to follow and recapture the correct usage of classical languages.'^ This turn to the text for answers may also characterize the Protestant English humanist, who looks to both God's word and classical writings for direction in contemporary, national questions. Richard Mulcaster, for example, consults classical texts even as he reads God's plan into England's state. In his treatise on the education of English children, Mulcaster looks first to classical models for guidance on English behavior: . . . neither as Pythagoras, or Plato were, who sought cunning where it was, to bring it where is [^/c] was not. For Platoes journey into Sicile proceeded not of his minde to travell, but up on hope to do some good on Dionisius the tyrant, who did send for him by Diones meane.-" ^^Rainolds's Oxford Lectures, 271 -273. '^Kristeller discusses humanists' multiple text-centered activities in "Renaissance Humanism and Classical Antiquity," in v. I of Rahil's Renaissance Humanism, pp. 6-9 and 12-13. -^Positions wherin those primitive circumstances be examined, which are necessarie fo r the training up o f children, either fo r skill in their booke, or health in their bodie (London, Thomas Vautrollier for Thomas Chare, 1581), 210-211. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 132 Plato travelled, not because he wanted to, but first, because he needed to gather knowledge; and second, because he was called upon to do so. But these conditions do not apply to Mulcaster's England. Thus Mulcaster decides. We neede not to travell in their kinde for learning. We have in that kind thankes be to God for the pen & print, as much at this day as any countrie needes to have: nay even as full if we will follow it well, as any antiquitie it selfe ever had. And yong gentlemen with that wealth, or their parentes in that wealth, might procure, and maintaine so excellent maisters and joine unto them so choise companions, and furnish them out with such libraries, being able to beare the charge, as they might leame all the best farre better at home in their standing studies, then they ever shall in their stirring residence, yea though the desire of learning were the cause o f their travell. (211) Because of the height of learning which England has achieved, travel is no longer necessary as it may have been in classical times. The books available, the potential libraries young men can build, obviate any need for travel. Mulcaster further remarks that Socrates refused to leave the country, even to save himself from execution, and that Plato, in his twelfth book of laws, ordained that "none under fourtie yeares in any case travell abroad" so as to avoid many of the problems brought about by "forreine trafficquers" (215). The classical authority is consulted, examined, and ultimately interpreted so as to serve Mulcaster's argument against travel. So, while the slightest variance in interpreting classical phrases greatly alters the interpreter's opinion, the opinion may also guide the interpretation. After delineating his disagreements with other translators of the Greek, Rainolds offers his own assessment of Aristotle's contested phrase: This therefore is Aristotle's meaning, as Vettori rightly says: since it is useful to know the laws and mores of other states, it is clear that reading books which describe geography and the mores and institutions of nations is extraordinarily valuable for decreeing good laws. It seems to me that more wandering is done by the minds of those who use this passage for extolling foreign travel. Even if travel would have been advantageous to the proposers of laws in the times of Aristotle, which the examples of Solon and Lycurgus perhaps confirm, still it does not follow that it is Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 133 therefore advantageous for our times, because we can find these things at home which they sought abroad. (273-274) Philosophical reasons and allegiance to Aristotle's Greek inform Rainolds's opinions of travel; he reaches the same conclusion that Mulcaster and others offer in regards to England's present need for travel. Rainolds's rejection of foreign travel may also spring from Aristotle's views that "the supreme good of man must include a minimum of external advantages and... the contemplative life is the highest goal of human existence";-' as Justus Lipsius, author of De ratione cum fructu peregrinandi, et praesertim in Italia observes, it is not easy to combine the life of a traveller with that of a scholar, "the one being of necessitie in continual motion, care and business, the other naturally affecting ease, safety and quietness."-- In Quo Vadis?, Bishop Hall privileges pragmatic reasons over the philosophical for choosing the scholar's life. "These lessons," Hall instructs, may bee as well take out at home: I have knowen some that have travelled no further then their owne closet, which could both teach and correct the greatest Traveller, after all his tedious and costly pererrations, what doe wee but lose the benefit of so many journals, maps, hystoricall descriptions, relations, if we cannot with these helps, travell by our owne fireside? Hee that travels into forraine countries, talkes perhaps with a Peasant, or a Pilgrim, or a Citizen, or a Courtier; and must needs take such information as partiall rumour, or weake conjecture can give him.... (33- 34) The traveller, confined to the perspective of the lonely visitor, must rely on narrow, and thus skewed, views of the country he visits. To such myopia Hall contrasts the broad knowledge available to the scholar at home in the comfort of England: but hee that travels into learned and credible Authors, talkes with them who have spent themselves in bolting out the truth of all passages; and -‘Kristeller, "Humanism and Moral Philosophy," 278. — Justus Lipsius, De ratione cum fructu peregrinandi, et praesertim in Italia, 1610 (Cited in Howard 41). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 134 who having made their labours publike, would have beene like to heare of it, if they had mis-reported: The ordinary Traveller propounds some prime Cities to himselfe, and thither hee walkes right forward, if he meet with ought that is memorable in the way, hee takes it up; but how many thousand matters of note fall beside him, on either hand; of the knowledge w[h]ereof he is not guilty; Whereas some grave and painefull Author hath collected into one view, thatsoever his country affords worthy of marke; having measured many a fowle step for that, which we may see dry-shod; and wome out many yeeres in the search of that, which one houre shall make no lesse ours, then it was his owne... A good booke is at once the best companion, and guide, and way, and end of our journey.. . . (34-36) In addition to the many dangers of travel. Hall explains, the Englishman abroad will gain less knowledge than he who remains at home, although he will endure more discomfort. As Rainolds's and Mulcaster’ s discussions and Hall's reasoning make clear, anxieties over the Englishman's voyage to Italy relate not only to the sorts of cultural prejudices against Italy articulated by Ascham, but also to a long standing tradition of debate over the usefulness of any travel's superseding education from books. The debate over travel is also closely related to disputes over the proper training of a courtier. Along with humanist defenses of educational programs, another group of significant Renaissance moral treatises tries to describe, and to propose for imitation, the humanist ideal of the perfect citizen, magistrate, courtier, or gentleman.^ The role of travel, and travel writing, is debated within the larger question of the proper and appropriate education. Ascham's Scholemaster, while setting forth ideals, focuses on the specific educational programs which a gentleman should follow to reach an English variety of education; similarly Sir Thomas Elyot's The bake named the Gouemour, written in 1531, forty years before Ascham's work, both outlines an educational program and proposes a model for moral and elegant behavior.-'* He dedicates the book to -^Kristeller, "Humanism and Moral Philosophy," 291. -'*Elyot's views, while insular, illustrate that the debate on travel pre-dates the strong Protestant identity that characterizes Elizabethan and Jacobean writers. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 135 Henry V m , announcing his purpose to be the proper training of those destined to become rulers. Elyot encourages the student's versatility in cosmography but is not, apparently, a great fan of travelling, and he does not see travel as necessary to the young noble's training. For what pleasure is it, in one hour, to behold those realms, cities, seas, rivers, and mountains, that uneth in an old man's life can not be journeyed and pursued: what incredible delight is taken in beholding the diversities of people, beasts, fowls, fishes, trees, fruits, and herbs: to know the sundry manners and conditions of people, and the variety of their natures, and that in a warm study or parlor, without peril of the sea, or danger of long and painful journeys. I can not tell what more pleasure should happen to a gentle wit, than to behold in his own house every thing that within all the world is contained.-^ The universe is contained within the educated man's own study, where in safety and comfort he can contemplate his world. To prepare the young noble to gain "authority in a public weal," Elyot suggests that training in cosmography be administered prior to exposing the youth to the histories, to moral philosophy, and to the Bible, but after he has learned Greek and Latin and has been trained in the art of Rhetoric (41-52). Elyot's outline of the future ruler's humanist education coincides theoretically with Rainolds's and Hall's conclusions on travel, that travel is unnecessary when the same information on foreign government, customs and peoples is available in England. The distractions and discomforts of real travel only emphasize the benefits of the contemplative life. Richard Mulcaster emphatically supports such a view in his Elementary, where he argues that everything learned in travel could as readily be acquired at home, and with it, moreover, one can acquire a love for one's native soil. Each country ought to develop its own individuality, he argues; foreign customs do not fit, and foreign Elyot's stance shows an early anxiety about the effects of leaving England's shores; later, religion is added to his arguments as the English place themselves as the opposition to the Antichrist, Italy. '^^Prose o f the English Renaissance, ed. J. William Hebei, Hoyt H. Hudson et al. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1952), 50. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 136 ideas only distort one's own. Speaking from a decisively English humanism, Mulcaster states, "I love Rome, but London better. I favor Italy, but England more. I honor the Latin, but I worship the English."-^ Despite the protestations of English purity that appear in educational and moral treatises, foreign influences on the English courtier were commonplace. The ten editions of Castiglione's The Courtyer which were printed in England during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries exerted, in their picture of the ideal member of court, an "influence on Elizabethan taste and manners [that] can hardly be exaggerated.Even Roger Ascham admits to the worthiness of Castiglione's book, while of course maintaining his opinion of travel to the country of its origin: To ioyne leamyng with cumlie exercises, Conto Baldesar Castiglione in his booke, Cortegiano, doth trimlie teache: which booke, aduisedlie read, and diligentlie folowed, but one yeare at home in England, would do a yong ientleman more good, I wisse, then three yeares trauell abrode spent m Italie. (218) Other Italian manner-books, such as Stefano Guazzo's La Civile Conversazione, 1574, (with English translations in 1581 and 1586) and Giovanni della Casa's Galateo o f Manners and Behavior in 1576 indicate that Italians were considerable authorities on the proper behavior of both courtiers and the middle classes in England; the Queen herself was well versed in Italian, and her court found it -®Cited in Lewis Einstein's The Italian Renaissance in England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1913), 163-164. -U. Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1954) 19. Quoted in Bartlett, Kenneth R. "The Courtyer of Count Baldasser Castillo: Italian Manners and the English Court in the Sixteenth Century," Quademi d'ltalianistica: Official Journal o f the Canadian Society fo r Italian Studies, 6 (Autumn 1985): 257. Castiglione's work was available in English, translated by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561; a polyglot edition with triple columns of French, English and Italian was printed by John Wolfe in 1588. For the ten editions of The Courtyer printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see S.T.C. 4778-87. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 137 expedient to follow her lead.^s Such prominence, however, also provides fodder for attacks on Italy and the traveller. English purity, finally, is incompatible with the necessity of education; even for those refusing to leave England, education involves exposure to classical literature and an invasion of foreign-born texts and ideas. "The Depravation of Manners": The Moral Pitfalls of Travel in Italy As the advice to young Englishmen illustrates, the traveller to Italy places himself in danger even if he pursues his travel for respectable, educational reasons. In a well-known passage, Ascham explicitly outlines the fear of the changes wrought upon the young Englishman abroad: He, that by liuing, & traueling in Italie, bringeth home into Englad out of Italie, the Religion, the learning, the policie, the experience, the maners of Italie. That is to say, for Religion, Papistrie or worse: for leamyng, lesse commonly than they caried out with them: for pollicie, a factious hart, a discoursing head, a mynde to medle in all mens matters: for experience, plentie of new mischieues neuer knowne in England before: for maners, varietie of vanities, and chaunge of filthy lyuing. These be the inchantementes of Circes, brought out of Italie, to marre mens maners in England. {The Scholemaster 229-230) The dangerous qualities similarly detailed in A discoverie o f the great subtiltie and wonderful wisdom o f the Italians threaten not only the purity of the English traveller, but also the purity of Protestantism and England.-^ As Hall cautions, foreigners come always with the "fraight of their nationall wickednesse," and -^Lievsay, 17. Reed Way Dasenbrock examines Italy's influence on English writers in Imitating the Italians: Wyatt, Spenser, Synge, Pound, Joyce (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). -^F., G. B. A., A discoverie o f the great subtiltie and wonderfullwisdom o f the Italians, whereby they bear sway over the most part o f Christendome, and cunningly behave themselves to fetch the Quintescence out o f the peoples purses: Discoursing at Large the meanes, how they prosecute and continue the same: and last o f all, convenient remedies to prevent their pollicies herein (London: Printed by John Wolfe, 1591). Interestingly, the work is dedicated to Henry IV, King of Navarre, as the "bright and glorious. . .starre" that will protect the English from the "disease" of the Italians. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 138 travellers cannot help but be affected by contact with them. In some cases, the Englishman abroad merely becomes absurd. The Italianate Englishman, "un diabolo incamato," is ridiculed repeatedly in tracts both on travel and fashion; Thomas Nashe, for example, jeers at the literary pretensions of returned, "educated" Englishmen, who display an unseemly disregard for their native land: Tut sales our English Italians, the finest witts our Climate sends foorth, are but drie braind doltes, in comparison of other countries: whome if you interrupt with redde rationem, they will tell you of Petrarche, Tasso, Celiano, with an infinite number of others; to whome if I should oppose Chaucer, Lidgate, Gower, with such like, that liued vnder the tirranie of ignorance, I do think their best louers, would bee much discontented with the collation of contraries, if I should write ouer al their heads, Haile fellow well met. One thing I am sure of, that each of these three, haue vaunted their meeters, with as much admiration in English as euer the proudest Ar/o5fo, did his verse in Italian.^o Even the aspects of Italian travel which are most strongly defended— the opportunity to gain knowledge and to complete the education of a gentleman- become suspect when they threaten one's allegiance to English things. Jerome Turler addresses just this issue when, in his 1575 support of travelTTze traveller, he cites "an auncient question, whether traveyling do a man more good than harme?" (4).^' Hall, who answers, "more harme," lists the negative changes that may occur while abroad: "Some have come home perhaps more sparing, other more suttle, others more outwardly courteous, others more capricious, some more tongue-free, few ever better," he catalogues, and concludes, "And if themselves bee not sensible of their alterations, yet their Country and the Church of God ^°From Nashe's preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon: Camillas alarum to slumbering Euphues, in his melancholie Cell at Silexedra. Wherein are deciphered the variable ejfects of Fortune, the wonders o f Loue, thetricumphes o f inconstant Time. Displaying in sundrie conceipted passions (figured in a continuate Historié) the Trophées that Vertue carrieth triumphant. . . , 1589 (Sig. A20- Reprinted in The English Stage: Attack and Defense 1577-1730, ed. Arthur Freeman (New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1973). ^‘Jerome'Turler, The travveiler o f Jerome Turler, 1575. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 139 fee les and rues them" (86-87). The returning traveller becomes, like the Englishwoman wearing foreign fashions, a carrier of infections. In the figure of the transformed traveller lies great uncertainty: while he could, as many educational treatises command, return more learned, polished, and wise, the travelled Englishman could also acquire Italian "subtiltie," and return possessed of a "corrupt disposition" (Hall 86), to the ruin of his country and religion. In The Schoole o f Abuse Stephen Gosson creates a tradition for the contrast between Italian corruption and English purity by evoking a lineage for these Italian stereotypes with references to an ancient English past: Bunduica, a notable woman and a queen of England that time that Nero was emporer of Rome, having some of the Romans in garrison here against her, in an oration which she made to her subjects seemed utterly to contemn their force and laugh at their folly. For she accounted them unworthy the name of men or title of soldiers because they were smoothly appareled, soft lodged, daintily feasted, bathed in warm waters, rubbed with sweet ointments, strewed with fine powders, wine swillers, singers, dancers, and players.3- The parallels which Gosson intends are not subtle: he follows his historical vignette with excessive praise for England's current queen, and chastises the English people who have consistently ignored Elizabeth's attempts to, like Bunduica, limit the pride, "prating" and "overlashing in apparel" occurring in English society (264). Gosson forces a comparison between the effeminate and unwelcome Romans and contemporary Italian influences. Merely by invoking common stereotypes of the degenerate Italian, Gosson criticizes what he considers excesses in society and implies that a rejection of the Italian is an act of patriotism equal to the expulsion of foreign invaders. ^-Stephen Gosson, The Schoole o f Abuse, 1579, in Prose o f the English Renaissance, eds. William J. Hebei, et al. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1952), 264. Gosson here refers to Boadicea (died A.D. 62), a British queen who resisted the invasions of the Romans. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 140 So, too, in Shakespeare’ s history play Richard II, the king's frivolous and foolish ways signal his unfitness for the English throne, despite his birthright. When John of Gaunt and the Duke of York discuss Richard's unwillingness to take the elder statesman's counsel, they locate his flightiness in foreign influence; Gaunt. Though Richard my live's counsel would not hear. My death's sad tale may yet undeaf his ear. York. No, it is stopp'd with other flattering sounds. As praises, of whose taste the wise are [fond]. Lascivious metres, to whose venom sound The open ear of youth doth always listen; Report of fashions in proud Italy, Whose manners still our tardy, apish nation Limps after in base imitation. Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity— So it be new, there's no respect how vile— That is not quickly buzz'd into his ears? (Il.i. 15-26) The king's changeability, imitation of Italian manners, and susceptiblity to flattery appear un-English, as opposed to the laconic Bullingbrook, who returns to native soil from an imposed exile, where he "sigh'd my English breath in foreign clouds,/ Eating the bitter bread of banishment" (in.i.20-21). In Shakespeare's play about the proper use of power and the rights of a king, the usurper is justified in part because he removes foreign influence from England's throne and restores to the court a steady, English presence. Thomas Coryat in his 1611 Coryat's Crudities excuses his detailed descriptions of Venetian courtesans by noting that "the name of a Courtezan of Venice is famoused over all Christendome" already (261).^^ He justifies his prurient interest in the courtesans as virtuous, enacted on the behalf of his readers: For I thinke that a vertuous man will be the more confirmed and setled in vertue by the obseruation of some vices, then if he did not at all know what they were. For which cause we may read that the ancient Lacedemonians were wont sometimes to make their slaues drunke, which 33Pages misnumbered; Sig. V5f Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 141 were called Helotae, and so present them to their children in the middest of their drunken pangs, to the end that by seeing the vglinesse of that vice in others, they might the more loath and detest it in themselues all the dayes of their life afterward.. . . (271) Thus, as in Gosson's use of Italian stereotypes, the dangers of travel are reduced to an opposition between pure Englishness and corrupt Italianness. By positing an easily identifiable Italian 'Other' against the English traveller or, in Gosson's case, the Italianate Englishmen against the true, an English identity of purity is created and strengthened- Ann Rosalind Jones describes the Italy of Renaissance England as "another country, a country of others, constructed through a lens of voyeuristic curiosity through which writers and their audiences explored what was forbidden in their own culture.In this configuration, the stereotypes of Italy and the fictions which those stereotypes allowed play an important part in defining, for the English, what it is that is forbidden, as well as what it is that is important, in their culture. Jones notes in her study of Coryat's travel journal that "Coryat writes with a double agenda: to thrill his readers and to protect their morals, to sell his book with the promise of titillation and to dignify it by setting his ethical seriousness as an Englishman against the variety of'Ethnicke' types he encounters" (102). Throughout, she notes, Coryat mediates his readers' exposure to the dangers of Venice by constantly breaking into the narrative and inserting a moralistic commentary on the lustful scenes he has depicted (108). Coryat's defense of himself as presenting his English readers with a model of what not to be, and his careful assertions that he has remained essentially untouched by the scenes he has witnessed, illustrate that travel to Italy is undertaken so that the Englishman can know himself, not others. For example, Coryat provides his English reader with a detailed view of the interior of a Venetian chapel, reporting. ^'^Ann Rosalind Jones, "Italians and Others: Venice and the Irish in Coryat's Crudities and The White Devil," in Renaissance Drama 18 (1987), 101. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 142 at one end . . . was an Altar garnished with many singular ornaments, but especially with a great multitude of silver Candlesticks, in number sixty, and Candles in them of Virgin waxe. The feast consisted principally of Musicke, which was both vocal 1 and instrumentais so good, so delectable, so rare, so admirable, so superexcellent, that it did even ravish and stupifie all those strangers that never heard the like. But how others were affected with it I know not; for mine owne part I can say this, that I was for the time even rapt vp with Saint Paul into the third heaven. (251) Similarly, Coryat is enticed by the Italian women's costumes: Almost all the wiues, widowes and mayds do walke abroad with their breastes all naked, and many of them haue their backes also naked euen almost to the middle, which some do couer with a slight linnen, as cobwebbe lawne, or such other thinne stuffe: a fashion me thinkes very vnciuill and vnseemely, especially if the beholder might plainly see them. For I beleeue vnto many that haue prurientem libidinem, they would minister a great incentiue & fomentation of luxurious desires. (261) The ornamented, candlelit church, identified with its Catholic accoutrements, sways the Protestant Coryat with its sensual music; the women, transparently covered, tease him with the sight of their bodies. Yet throughout, Coryat retains his reporter's attention to detail and an outsider's co m m en tary C o ry at's accounts of Italy's disgusting lasciviousness educate him and his readers about the virtue of England. The frontispiece to Coryat's Crudities depicts a dignified Coryat surrounded by foreign women (one— Germany— vomiting onto his head)— but nevertheless untouched within the picture's fram e (FIGURE FOUR). As Peacham's advice in The Complete Gentleman indicates, a thorough knowledge of England is necessary before traveling to Italy, not only to innoculate the traveller against Italy's dangers, but also to enable him to discern the important differences between the two countries. Coryat's entertaining travelogue seeks both to ^^Anthony Parr, in "Thomas Coryat and the Discovery of Europe," The Huntington Library Quarterly 55"4 (1992): 579-602, argues that Coryat creates a new genre of travel writing in which the traveller is "more concerned about creating a superior experience lor his readers"; Parr sees this as an element of "literary performance... not to be found in English writing about Europe before the early Jacobean period" (585). This genre sought to adapt "an essentially satiric or jest-book mode to the demands of descriptive travel writing— an adaptation that Coryat was one of the first to make" (591). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 143 illustrate his own Englishness and to delineate other countries' foreignness. One of Hail's grievances in his arguments against foreign travel is that more than one English youth is travelling in order to imitate foreign manners, rather than to gain the "knowledge of himself, and settleth his affection more sure to his own country," as Peacham advises.^^ The traveller must avoid "returning as empty of grace, and other vertues, as full of words, vanitie, mis-disposition" (Hall Sig. A50- Mulcaster asks, "What is the very natural end, of being borne a countryman of such a countrey [as England]? To serve and save the countrey. What? with forreine fashions? they will not fit" (212). Proper travel to foreign lands is conducted so as to learn more about England. A Female Italy: Circes' Court The dangers Italy poses to the Englishman are frequently conveyed, in learned treatises, tracts on education, travel accounts and fiction, through classical references— perhaps because many of the commentaries on travel were written under the influence of humanism. It was through their relationship with texts that travel had meaning to humanist writers. But in such writers' use of classical antiquity as a model, patterns of thought recur which resemble the arguments used to excoriate Englishwomen for the dangers of their frivolous fashions. The figure of Eve, tempting the male Englishman to his damnation, rises up in pagan guise in the Englishman's Italy. Consistently, in work after work addressing English travel to Italy, when the traveller takes on the role of Ulysses, Italy becomes Circe's Court. Italy is figured as a gendered space which specifically threatens the male 36peacham's definition of proper travel appears on pp. 159-160 in The Complete Gentleman. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 144 traveller by assaulting his senses, tempting him to pleasure, and then transforming him into an Italian "beast." So Roger Ascham, that most horrified commentator on Italy, describes the evils of travel in Italy through the allegory of Ulysses's journeys. He does not, however, provide any contemporary references for his classical allusions as he delineates the terrors in store for the wayward traveller: [H]e shall not always in his absence out of England, light vpon a ientle Alcynous, and walke in his faire gardens full of all harmelesse pleasures: but he shall sometymes, fall, either into the handes of some cruell Cyclops, or into the lappe of some wanton and dalying Dame Calypso: and so suffer the danger of many a deadlie Denne, not so full of perils, to distroy the body, as, full of vayne pleasures, to poyson the mynde. Some Siren shall sing him a song, sweete in tune, but sownding in the ende, to his vtter destruction. If Scylla drowne him not, Carybdis may fortune swalow hym. Some Circes shall make him, of a plaine English man, a right Italian. And at length to hell, or to some hellish place, is he likelie to go.... (225) The perils the English Ulysses will undergo are also of a distinctly female nature: Calypso will delay him with sensual attractions; the Sirens will falsely sing to him of pleasure and knowledge; Circes will transform his virtuous plainness. Ascham then elaborates on the dangers posed by the Circes' court that is Italy: I know many .. .who, partyng out of England feruent in the loue of Christes doctrine, and well furnished with the feare of God, returned out of Italie worse transformed, than euer was any in Circes Court. . . And as Homere, like a learned Poete, doth feyne, that Circes, by pleasant inchantemetes, did tume men into beastes, some into Swine, som [jfc] into Asses, some into Foxes, some into Wolues etc. euen so Plato, like a wise Philosopher, doth plainelie declare, that pleasure, by licentious vanitie, that sweete and perilous poyson of all youth, doth ingender in all those, that yeld vp themselues to her, foure notorious properties... The first, forgetfulness of all good thinges learned before: the second, dulnes to receyue either learnyng or honestie euer after: the third, a mynde embracing lightlie the worse opinion, and baren of discretion to make trewe difference betwixt good and ill, betwixt troth, and vanitie, the fourth, a proude disdainfulness of other good men, in all honest matters. (226-227) Although Ascham does not define the specific threats to the traveller as he makes his way through dangerous Italy, they too are fairly obviously female, and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 145 Ascham implies that the pathway to such corruption occurs by yielding to pleasure. The transformations that result from the traveller’ s failure to resist Circes' enchantments are even more clear. He will forget both his English identity, becoming a "right Italian," and his religion, being unable to distinguish good from evil. Coryat similarly uses the image of Circe's Court as well as other feminized references to describe Venice and the female attractions he meets there. But although Coryat invokes the same temptresses that Ascham describes, he appears less able to explain the evil of the traveller’ s pleasurable dalliances. Venetian courtesans, who inhabit houses resembling the "Paradise of Venus," exert an influence which reaches even beyond the national boundaries which Ascham delineates. Cor>'at comments. So infinite are the allurements of these amorous Calypsoes, that the fame of them hath drawen many to Venice from some of the remotest parts of Christendome, to contemplate their beauties, and enioy their pleasing dalliances. And indeed such is the variety of the delicious objects they minister to their louers, that they want nothing tending to delight. (265) From Calypso, Coryat's descriptions elevate the courtesan to the status of Circes, whose power leaves the ungelded man no recourse beside magic against her transforming powers; [T]he ornaments of her body are so rich, that except thou dost euen geld they affections (a thing hardly to be done) or carry with thee Vlysses hearbe called Moly which is mentioned by Homer, that is, some antidote against those Venereous titillations, she wil very neare benumme and capituate they senses, and make reason vale bonnet to affection. (266) In addition to arming oneself against the visual persuasions of the courtesans, Coryat cautions the traveller to "fortifie thine eares against the attractiue inchauntments of their plausible speeches" and against the "melodious notes that shee warbles out vpon her lute" (267-268), as the courtesans possess powers of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 146 rhetoric and musical abilities which equal those of the singing Sirens.3 ? One assumes that they will attempt to lure Englishmen to the rocks of lewdness with their captivating powers; Coryat is less concerned than is Ascham over the potential threats to the traveller's Protestantism, and concerns himself with the more fleshly temptations.^® Linda Phyllis Austern, in her study of the female musician in Elizabethan culture, notes how weighted the image of the siren is in early modem England, and points out that the mythical siren is often equated with real whores. The evils of the siren spring from various threats she poses: . . .only an inhumanly evil woman, a dangerous monster clad in a cloak of beauty, would attempt to deprive man of his senses for her own ends. Sometimes men have no choice but to listen, for they may be spell-bound by the enchantment of music and beauty before they realize what is happening. The quintessential example of the female musician who intends destruction is the siren of Classical mythology, whose very ^ ■ ^ A curious inversion of this metaphor occurs in Thomas Heywood's play The English Traueller, in which the Young Geraldine's ill-favored wife pleads with him not to undertake travel abroad. She exclaims, "I doe beseech thee, my deere Geraldine,/ Looke to thy safety, and preserue thy health;/ Haue care into what company you fall;/ Trauell not late, and crosse no dangerous Seas;/ For till Heauens blesse me in thy safe returne,/ How will this poore heart suffer?" To her arguments, Geraldine replies, "I had thought/ Long since the Syrens had bin all destroy'd;/ But one of them I find suruiues in her;/ Shee almost makes me question what I know,/ An Hereticke vnto my owne belefe:/ Oh thou mankinds seducer." And with further prompting, he denounces her in Biblical terms: "Thou Adultresse,/ That hast more poyson in thee then the Serpent,/ Who was the first that did corrupt thy sex,/ The Deuill" (89-90). In Heywood's play, even when the siren sings at home to keep the Englishman from travel, she does so as a loose woman, and is denounced for her sex. Thomas Heywood, The English Traveller. As it Hath Beene Publikely acted at the Cock-Pit in Drury-lane: By Her Maiesties semants. (London: Printed by Robert Raworth, 1633), in The Dramatic Works o f Thomas Heywood Now First Collected with Illstrative Notes and a Memoir o f the Author in Six Volumes, Vol. 4 (London: John Pearson, 1874), 1-95. ^®Ann Rosalind Jones describes how Coryat presents travel as sexual opportunity, leading his (male) reader through his encounters with courtesans. In his descriptions of the virgin city of Venice, "famous for the sexual accessibility of one class of her female citizens," Coryat represents Venice as "an insistently feminine landscape, which he praises in the vocabulary of courtly compliment" at the same time that he resists the sexuality of the city. The city, like a shameful woman, ultimately must be rejected despite its great beauty. Thus, he conflates the dangerous sexuality of the courtesans with the scandalous glamor of the city of Venice (101-104). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 147 persuasion means death. Her name is synonymous with the sensual evils of music and of perverted femininity, for her enticement is direct, immodest, and purely physical.^^ The moral implications of invoking the image of the siren to represent the attractions of Italy, then, define the sins therein as specifically female, sexual and fatal to the Englishman's Englishness. At times, the individual female threats of the siren courtesans and Circean women meld together in the figuration of the country of Italy itself as female.'*^ Sir Thomas Hoby describes a countryside which conspires to lead the English traveller into sin with the Circean beauty of its landscape. The beautiful and fecund Italian landscape implicitly assumes the power to affect the staunch English traveller, as the change from Hoby's heretofore impassionate journal entries suggests. The beauties in Italy appeal to all the senses in the same way that the elements on Circe’ s island overwhelmed Odysseus’ s men. So in depicting Naples, Hoby writes: And the fertilitie of the countrey is suche that yt dothe not onlie bring furthe necessarie things for the sustinance of the lyff of man with suche abundance, but also for deliciousnes and for sensual pleasure in great quantitie. .. [there are] vines of great estimation and such abundance of savorous flowres that it is no less pleasure to behold them then to smell them. The aere is verie temperat, and is open on the sea almost on everie side.^‘ ^^Linda Phyllis Austera, '"Sing Againe Syren’: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature," Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 442-443. '*°A practice which is by no means limited to descriptions of Italy or to English describers— Boccaccio’ s Decameron begins a day with a description of the landscape itself as a female body, and references in England to, for example, the "mother tongue" are common. However, in English travellers’ depictions of Italy, an emphasis on the sensuality of the land can often be found. ^‘From The travels and life o f Sir Thomas Hoby, Kt. o f Bisham Abbey, written by himself, 1547-1564 (29-30). In Book X of The Odyssey, Odysseus narrates the story of how his men are tricked by appeals to their senses. They see an island "covered with woods and scrub," filled with game. The men hear Kirkê’ s (Circes’) "beguiling voice, while on her loom/ she wove ambrosial fabric sheer and bright," and approach her, overwhelmed by her goddess-like beauty, to be fed "a meal of cheese and barley/ and amber honey mixed with Pramnian wine." Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 148 The land itself tempts the traveller to forsake his native soil. In order to withstand the enticements of such a dangerous climate, Hoby takes several precautions to emphasize both his Englishness and his humanist achievements, stopping in Strasburg, a Protestant center, and translating into English Martin Bucer's The gratulation . . .unto the Churche o f Englande for the restitucion o f Christes religion before he ventures into Italian territory. Raleigh writes that "[Hoby's] earliest literary work, undertaken out of reverence to his host and teacher [in Strasburg], was not sonneteering.. .the author meanwhile, having stablished himself in learning and the Protestant faith by his winter's residence at Strasburg, took his way into Italy... Thus fortified, Hoby enters Italy and travels through Italy's "carnival of senses" untouched for several years. James Howell's 1642 Instructions fo r Forreine Travell addresses just this need to fortify onself before entering Italy's dangerous clime.'^-^ The pleasures of Italy and the Italian people, "being the greatest embracer[s] of pleasures," will assault the Englishman on all sides. Howell warns, "being now in Italy that great limbique of working braines, [the English traveller] must be very circumspect in his cariage, for she is able to tume a Sainte into a Devill, and deprave the best natures, if one will abandon himselfe [to pleasure], and become a prey to dissolut courses and wantonnesse.. .. Here he shall find Vertue and Vice, Love and They are, of course, immediately transformed into beasts. Trans, by Robert Fitzgerald, in Literature o f the Western World: Volume I, third edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1988), 379-381. But Hoby could also have known the story through Books X m and XIV of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which describe in more detail the sensual attractions of Circes' isle and the nature of the travellers' transformations. '‘-Sir Walter Raleigh, in his introduction to The Book o f the Courtier by Sir Thomas Hoby (London, 1900), xxviii. James Howell, Instructions fo r Forreine Travell. Shewing by what cours, and in what compassé o f time, one may take an exact Survey o f the Kingdomes and States o f Christendome, and arrive to the practicall knowledge o f the Languages, to good purpose, 1642, ed. Edward Arber (English Reprints: London, 1869); Collated with 1650 edition, whose additions are added in brackets within the text. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 149 Hatred, Athéisme and Religion in their extremes" (41-42). Yet, unexpectedly, Howell does not forbid travel to this perilous place despite his dark warnings. Rather, he stipulates that only the Englishman strongest in faith and national allegiance should risk such travels: Such a one, I meane he that is well instructed in his own Religion, may passe under the torrid Zone, and not bee Sun-burnt, if he carry this bon- grace about him, or [and] like the River Danube which scomes to mingle with the muddy streame of Sava, though they run both in one Channell, or like [the chast River] Arethusa, which Travelleth many hundred miles through the very bowels of the Sea, yet at her journeys end issueth out fresh again, without the least mixture of saltnesse or brackishnesse: So such a one may passe and repasse through the very midst of the Roman See . . . and shoot the most dangerous Gulphe thereof, and yet returne home an untainted [English] Protestant... (17). In Howell's metaphor, the fresh-water Englishman flows through brackish Italy without taint of Catholic salt. Indeed, he may emerge from such intercourse all the purer for having undergone it: nay he will be confirmed in zeale to his owne Religion, and illuminated the more with the brightnesse of the truth thereof; by the glaring lights and specious glosses, which the other useth to cast; For Opposite jiixta se posita magis elucescunt. Nay the more he is encompassed with the superstitions, of the contrary . . . the more he will bee strengthned in his own Faith; like a good Well useth to be hotter in Winter than Summer, per Antiperistasin, that is, by the coldnesse [frigidity] of the circumambient ayre, which in a manner besiegeth it round, and so makes the intrinsique heate, unite and concentre it selfe the more strongly to resist the invading Enemy. (17) Howell's scientific metaphors serve to illustrate the possibility of the Englishman's purity in the face of Italian corruption; at the same time, they privilege English constancy over Italian fleshly temptations even in his text.'*^ ^Transformations in the dangers that threaten the Protestant Englishman appear, interestingly, in the changes to Howell's text by 1650. Now, the travelling Englishman must steer between the hot Italian and the cold Swiss religions [the "Geneva lake" through which the freshwater Englishman must run (17)]; in the 1650 edition, the phrase "with the coldnes of some Churches and the too many ceremonies of others" is inserted in the disquisition against Catholicism's superstitions, and rather than returning merely an "untainted Protestant," the traveller returns "an untainted English Protestant" (17). Apparently, it was now possible to be too Protestant as well as to be a dissolute Catholic. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 150 The passage on travel to Italy begins with Howell's assertion, "whereas Religion should go array'd in a grave Matron-like habit, [they use to cloath her by the dresses of som Saints] they have clad her rather like a wanton Courtisane in light dresses: [to please the outward base and the common people]" (16-17). A country that uses its religion as a sexual lure, in Howell's view, should be risked only by the strongest Protestant Englishmen. In Quo Vadis?, Hall even more explicitly allies the ostentation and splendor of Italy's Catholicism, "Antichristianisme," in his words, with female fleshly temptations. "Doe wee send our sonnes to learne to be chaste in the midst of Sodome?" he asks, and explains the trade-off of travel in Italy: The world is wide and open; but our ordinary travell is southward, into the jawes of danger; for so farre hath Satans policie prevailed, that those parts which are only thought worth our viewing, are most contagious; and will not part with either pleasure, or information, without some tang of wickednesse.. . . (12-13) The most attractive areas are also, alas, the most dangerous, and threaten the English traveller like a disease. The English, Hall bemoans, "send forth our children into those places which are professedly infectious"; "If we desired to have sonnes poisoned with mis-beleefe," he queries, "what could wee doe otherwise?" But the infection enters, as it does within England, through the eye, with a deceiving, spectacular appearance. The real power and threat of Catholicism lie in its outward beauty and display: how safe can it bee to trust young eyes with the view and censure of truth and falshood in religion? especially when truth brings nothing to this barre, but extreme simplicitie, and contrarily falshood, a gawdy magnificence, and proud majestie of pompous ceremonies, wherewith the hearts of children and fooles are easily taken. (15) In Hall's scenario, the young Englishman, assaulted by splendid sexual temptations to succumb to a false faith, is especially vulnerable because of the simplicity and plainness of his own Protestantism: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 151 That Curtizan of Rome (according to the manner of that profession) sets out her selfe to sale in the most tempting fashion; here want no colours, no perfumes, no wanton dresses; whereas the poore Spouse of Christ can only say of her selfe, I am blacke, but comely. When on the one sidethey shall see such rich shrines, garish Altars, stately Processions, when they shall see a Pape adored of Emperours, Cardinals preferd to Kings, confessors made Saints, little children made Angels, in a word nothing not outwardly glorious: on the other side a service without welt or guard, whose majestie is all in the heart, none in the face, how easily might they incline to the conceit of that Parisian dame, who seeing the procession of S. Genovieve goe by the streets, could say (O que belle, &c.). . . . (15-16)'*5 Again, the church of Rome is likened to a prostitute— John Bale's Whore of Babylon— who lures her male viewer in with a dazzling show of her wares, clothed in "clokes of grosse superstition" and devising her "meanes of seducement" of the Englishman (49, 54). The Protestant's godly plainness here becomes a liability, as the innocent Englishman— used to an unadorned altar and plain worship— lacks defenses against the devices of the wicked. Hall extends the metaphor of the alluring female Italy as he outlines the Circean metamorphosis that will overtake the young Englishman: he will fall into depraved manners and affect a "varietie of... vaine disguises" in foreign fashions. "These dresses being constant in their mutabilitie, shew us our masters," Hall proclaims, and details the beastly transformations they work: Whom would it not vexe to see how that other sexe hath learned to make Antiks and monsters of themselves? Whence came their hips to the shoulders, and their breasts to the navell; but the one from some ill-shap't Dames of France, the other from the worse minded Curtizans of Italie? Whence else learned they to daube these mudde-walles with Apothecaries morter; and those high washes, which are so cunningly lickt on, that the wet napkin of Phryne should be deceived? Whence the fristed and poudred bushes of their borrowed excrements? as if they were ashamed of the head of Gods making, and proud of the Tire-womans? (82) But here Hall slips into familiar attacks on women's fashions, not men's, a curious shift in the midst of a treatise on the education and needs of the young English gentleman. Quo Vadis? disparages the travels of young men outside of England, ‘ ‘^The proximity of "Pape" to "pappe" would appear, here, not to be accidental. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 152 and uses the figuration of a sophisticated, wanton courtesan as a way to describe the vulnerability of those young men. Yet, in depicting the transformations that overtake England, the bodies of Englishwomen are used to show the beastly threats posed by the foreign.'’ ^ Despite the figuration of Italy as female, and of its threats as specifically feminine threats to the English traveller, this construction of Italy appears to have little to do with real women. The courtesans described so vividly by Coryat and so allusively by Ascham are merely tools for the writers; a female Italy has more to do with intangible qualities of Englishness that English writers are attempting to define, than with women. Creating an Italian Other constructs an English national identity by virtue of the opposition; and age-old ideas of corruption's origin explain why, in constructing that opposition, Italy is figured as female. When the English traveller returns from Italy, he is somehow changed. Thus, there must have been a conduit from the former English "purity" to the subsequent Italian corruption. The writers of anti-Italian literature had, at their disposal, an entire arsenal of arguments which established women as the source of all corruption.-^'^ ^^Hall follows this passage on fashion with a peculiar disquisition against fancy food, complaining, "Where had we that luxurious delicacie in our feasts, in which the nose is no less pleased, then the palate; and the eye no lesse then either? wherein the poles of dishes make barricades against the appetite, and with a pleasing encombrance trouble an hungry guest? Where those formes of ceremonious quaffing, in which men have learned to make Gods of others, and beasts of themselves... " (83). Apparently proper English food neither smells, nor looks, good. Again, the Biblical story of the Fall, in which the woman causes man's sin, is invoked. In examining the imbalances in Renaissance views of women's sexuality, Mary Beth Rose points out, "Female entrance into the sexual world, whether through body or mind, by choice or unwittingly, whether by reciprocating male affections or merely remaining the passive object of them, is equivalent to sin, is sin. Even when sexual love is viewed with a less holy and foreboding gloom, it is often regarded instead as bitterly degrading, bestial, and absurd" (6-7). In other words, woman is the pathway to corruption regardless of her awareness or participation in the corrupting acts. The Expense o f Spirit: Love Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 153 The Nature of the Traveller's Metamorphosis Intrinsic to England's construction of a national identity are questions of how the early modern Englishman conceived of himself. As much of the literature about travel to Italy reveals, many of the anxieties about travel center around the nature of the transformation which Circean Italy works on the Englishman while he is away from the safe shores of England. Writings on travel are pervaded by the fear tliat one's nationality, or national characteristics, can be traded while abroad as easily as material goods. Many writers focus on the surface corruptions of the Englishman as a means of understanding this uneasy metamorphosis. Gabriel Harvey, for example, draws a picture of the Italian ate Englishman in satirical rhyme: Indeed most frivolous: not a look but Italish always. His cringing side neck, eyes gleaming, physiognomy smirking. With forefinger kiss, and brave embrace to the footward. A little apish hat, crushed fast to the pate like an oyster; French cambric ruffs, deep with a witness starched to the purpose. Every one per se a ; his terms and braveries in print. Delicate in speech, quaint in array, conceited in all points. In courtly guises, a passing singular odd man. This nay more than this doth practice of Italy in one year.^* The fashions and effete manners of the Italianate Englishmen (the Italians, for example, insisted on using forks!) were obvious changes to the English gentleman, and were easy to ridicule. Even in the dedicatory verses prefacing and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); see also her article "Moral Conceptions of Sexual Love in Elizabethan Comedy." Thus, if Italy is constructed as female and sexual, the writers of such anti-Italian literature have plenty of material available (as can be seen in anti fashion treatises) to explain the threat Italy poses to the male traveller. ^^Cited in Einstein, 165. According to Nashe, Harvey's rhyme was meant to be a satire on the Earl of Oxford, who had recently returned from travels to Italy with new fashions in dress and manners. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 154 Coryat's Crudities, an account of the steadfast but witty English traveller, John Davis of Hereford quips, "Then doe yee fall upon a goodly Woman,/ Which, for her stature, you would take for some man/ Drest in th'Italian fashion, and doth stand for/ Faire Italie it selfe... With Ruffe about his necke set on so finely/ That you would sweare he nothing doth supinely" (Sig. i3^).^^ And in 1625, Samuel Purchas repines. As for Gentlemen, Travell is accounted an excellent Ornament to them; and therefore many of them comming to their Lands sooner than to their Wits, adventure themselves to see the Fashions of other Countries, where their soules and bodies find temptations to a twofold Whoredom, whence they see the World as Adam had knowledge of good and evill, with the losse or lessening of their estate in this English (and perhaps also in the heavenly) Paradise, and bring home a few smattering termes, flattering garbes. Apish cringes, foppish fancies, foolish guises and disguises, the vanities of Neighbour Nations (I name not Naples) without furthering of their knowledge of God, the World, or themselves.^° As Hall had similarly fretted, in acquiring foreign, depraved manners, the traveller departs from England's God and society, caught up as he is in "Smoke, Cup, or Butter-flie vanities and superfluities" (Purchas Sig. [P]50- Uncertainty over travel relates to deeper concerns over the mutability of the self; the question of whether Circes enacted a metamorphosis inside the traveller, as well as outside, underlies even frivolous treatments of the topic. Elizabethan works of fiction ^^Coryat's book begins with a great number of Panegyricke Verse about his travels and writing. All seem less than flattering to Coryat, "our Britaine Ulysses" (Sig. i2^). John Davis's (or, as the verses introduce him, Joannes Davis Herefordiensis's) verses purport to describe the "Viner, Title-page, or Frontispice" of Coryat's work, which depicts various scenes from his travels. 5°Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes. in five bookes. The first contayning the voyages and peregrinations made by ancient Kings, Patriarkes, Apostles, Philosopher, and others, to and thorow the remoter parts o f the Icnowne World: Enquiries also oflMnguages and Religions, especially o f the moderne diversified Prosessions o f Christianitie (London, 1625), Sig. [backwards P]5k The folio sized book is in three large volumes, a dimension to which Purchas alludes when he comments, "I must acknowledge that adventurous courage of the Stationer Master Henry Fetherstone (like Hercules helping Atlas) so long to beare this my heavy World at such expenses." Howell cites Purchas in the introduction to his Instructions fo r Forreine Travell. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 155 such as Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller and William Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona, among many others, explore the role of the traveller abroad. As a more flexible forum for discussion of these cultural anxieties than the educational treatise or the traveller's journal, literary characters examine their own roles and question the status of the Englishman in relation to others. Although Machiavel!i's 1 1 principe is perhaps the epitome of the educational treatise, in its constant attention to the parallels between history and the present and its portrait of the ideal ruler as a model for the edification of his desired Medici patron, Margaret Scott has shown that many of the English stereotypes of deceitful Italians relate to Elizabethan perceptions of Machiavelli's political writings: As the devil's henchman, or even the devil incarnate, Machiavelli became associated with every kind of sin... the Machiavel... who in the context of Elizabethan drama seeks to exploit religion for his own ends or to persuade others to accept his authority and his precepts, is necessarily the enemy of true religion, established order, and real virtue. (154, 163)^‘ The Machiavel's refusal to recognize the higher authority of God, of course, explains much of the dread he inspired. But greater than the fear of his beliefs is the threat that the Machiavel can appear one way, and be another underneath: the Machiavel's deceit is not always apparent. The possibility of contradiction between outer appearance and inner self comes to be associated with the traveller to Italy for several reasons. While in Italy, of course, the English traveller was susceptible to the attractions of an illusory freedom which Machiavelli's "diabolical atheism" offered.^- As the Machiavel came to be linked with the ^'Margaret Scott, in "Machiavelli and the Machiavel," Renaissance Drama, New series xv (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1984), 147-174. ^-Robert Greene, "To those gentleman, his quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits in making plays, R.G. wisheth a better exercise, and wisdom to prevent Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 156 elusive Jesuits in England, Englishmen saw the traveller's integrity as challenged even more strongly: the Jesuits were often considered irresistably persuasive, their arguments overwhelmingly tempting in their falsehoods.^^ "Never any Pharisee was so eager to make a Proselyte, as our late factors out of Rome," Hall warns in Quo Vadis? (53), and he cautions the Englishman against having any "conversation or conference with the Jesuits, or other dangerous persons" (93). Hall goes on to link (as does Howell) Catholicism, deceit, aetheism, and courtly behavior as he decries the "depravation of manners" wrought by travel: Where the Art of dishonestie in practicall Machiavélisme, in false equivocations? Where the slight account of that filthinesse, which is but condemned as veniall, and tolerated as not unnecessary? Where the skill of civill and honorable hypocrisie, in those form all complements, which doe neither expect beleefe from others, nor carry any from our selves? . .. Where that close Aethisme, which secretly laughs God in the face. . . . Loe here, deare Countrimen, the fruit of your idle gaddings.. . . (84-85) Facility with language does not always signal desirable changes in the traveller; in Hall’ s account, it can also indicate a lack of sincerity and false faith. In addition, if while abroad the traveller has succumbed to Jesuit arguments, he can return a Catholic without outer signs of the transformation and threaten England's church. In order to escape Catholic forces directed at the Protestant Englishman, the traveller would journey in disguise. Sir Henry Wotton relates with satisfaction his movements around Rome 'disguised' as a Catholic German, as he undertakes to penetrate as far as possible into secrets of the Papal Court in the service of Elizabeth: his extremities," in Greenes Groats-worth ofwitte, 1592 {Prose o f the English Renaissance, 421). 53Mario Praz notes that the Machiavel became, ironically, linked in Elizabethan minds with the Jesuits (who had fiercely opposed the theories of Machiavelli), because of the Jesuits' supposed abilities to manipulate men for the causes, and to move unperceived in Protestant England. "Machiavelli and the Elizabethans" in The Flaming Heart, pp. 13 iff. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 157 I entered Rome with a mighty blue feather in a black hat; which, though in itself it were a slight matter, yet surely it did work in the imaginations of men... First, I was by it taken for no English... Secondly, I was reputed as light in my mind as in my apparel.. .And thirdly, no man could think that I desired to be unknown, who, by wearing of that feather, took a course to make myself famous through Rome in few days.^*^ Wotton consistently plays with his identity during his many travels. Later, Wotton would travel to Scotland as an Italian, sent by the Venetian state to warn James Stuart of an attempt planned on his life. Wotton only unmasked himself as a "true Englishman" after he had publicly delivered his message to the Scottish king. In fact, Wotton regarded a change of nationality as almost necessary for anyone who would make the most of his opportunities abroad. He writes, "he travels with mean consideration in my opinion that is ever one countryman" (18). Wotton's approach to travel is decidedly different from that of his pupil Milton, which was to proclaim loudly his Protestant Englishness to all, leaving no question as to his status. While Wotton's travel is more playful, it brings to the fore all of the anxieties over the Machiavel. If one's nationality can be as fluidly exchanged as Wotton presents in his disguises, then the definition of the Englishman is called into question. Case Study: A Fictional Englishman Abroad in Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller Thomas Nashe's 1594 fictional account of an Englishman abroad. The Unfortunate Traveller; or, the Life o f Jack Wilton, plays with the identity of his narrator the page Jack Wilton, and with Jack's view of his own self while travelling. By focusing on the dress of his characters, Nashe can highlight the dangers inherent in the Englishman's "idle gaddings" and traffic with foreigners. The hero of the work, the irreverent page Jack Wilton, encounters an array of ^^The Life and Letters o f Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 272. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 158 foreign figures grotesque and comical in his travels through Europe, which culminate in Jack's confrontations with the dangers of a corrupt and degenerate Italy. The Unfortunate Traveller draws on many of the most popular genres of its time, as Nashe's character recounts for his English audience the adventures he undergoes while outside the boundaries of a safer England. Alternating between serious and flippant tones. Jack describes locales he encounters in the style of current travelogues and provides commentary on the wild events he depicts. Throughout, Jack proves a narrator hardly to be trusted, a quality which he constantly points out to his audience with sarcastic asides. Ann Rosalind Jones notes that Nashe "plunges, one by one, into the oral and written forms of his time: humanist oration, Anglican sermon, jest-book anecdotes, urban journalism, satire, aristocratic lyric, revenge tragedy," without committing to any one of these literary modes.^^ Although these various modes are held together by the forceful voice of Nashe's character Jack Wilton, the book's many elements have led to much critical argument over how the novel as a whole should be labeled.^^ Although Nashe's novel resists easy categorization and challenges the genres of its age as it plays with literary convention, in its treatment of the Other the novel's ideas prove less innovative. Jones reads Nashe as Bakhtinian polyphony, but Nashe's polyphony contains less harmony than conflict; although The Unfortunate Traveller lends itself to a Bakhtinian reading, that reading misrepresents the work, which ultimately proves not innovative and subversive, as Ann Rosalind Jones, "Inside the Outsider: Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller and Bakhtin's Polyphonic Novel," ELH (Spring 1983) 50:1 (64). 5^In his introduction to An Anthology o f Elizabethan Prose Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Paul Salzman notes that "It was once fashionable to see [The Unfortunate Traveller] as a picaresque novel, but recent scholars have stressed more disjunctive characteristics, linking it to the grotesque mode, to Nashe's highly self-conscious engagement with language . . . This most linguistically self-conscious work eventually finds no secure resting place on the page or in the voice" (xx-xxi). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 159 Bakhtinian analysis requires us to believe, but conservative and traditional. Nashe draws on pejorative stereotypes in his portrayal of the foreigners who assault mischievous Jack on his travels. The French, Italians, and Dutch, Anabaptists, Saracens and Jews, among many other groups such as women and Catholics, appear as exaggerated types who pose many dangers to the unwary Englishman. The foreign, 'naturally' grotesque, threatens Jack's life, character and religion— indeed, his national and personal identity— and therefore must be destroyed within the context of his Life. Despite the light-hearted tone in which these ideas are presented, Nashe's fictional treatment of outsiders corresponds quite closely to commonly-held attitudes toward women, travel, and the foreign in Elizabethan England. The Englishman could establish standards for his own identity through his engagement with such grotesque figures as Nashe presents, clearly delineating by contrast the profile of a proper English gentleman and his proper English state. Early on in the narrative, the "ugly mechanicall Captain," persuaded by Jack that he is a "myraculous polititian," deserts the English army to the French, but caught in his own stupidity, he is flogged and sent back to the English, who in turn flog him again. Although Nashe presents this absurd Machiavellian character at the start of the novel, he continues to play with the idea of disguise. For example, as Jonathan Crewe notes. Jack Wilton describes clothes which "allow him to proclaim him self because they don't hide what is underneath; "forsaking naked innocence, the speaker paradoxically recovers it to a degree by being what he seems and hiding nothing, not even the artfulness of his self-exposure."^"^ Confronting the idea of the disguised English traveller. Jack opens himself to ^^Jonathan V. Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal o f Authorship (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 69. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 160 scrutiny. His outfit, it turns out, is an amalgamation of national fashions. Perhaps anticipating Henry Wotton's travelling gear. Jack wears: [M]y feather in my cap as big as a flag in the fore-top, my French doublet gelt in the belly as though, like a pig ready to be spitted, all my guts had been piuched out, a pair of side-paned hose that hung down like two scales filled with Holland cheeses, my long stock that sat close to my dock and smothered not a scab or a lecherous, hairy sinew on the calf of my leg, my rapier pendant like a round stick fastened in the tacklings for skippers the better to climb by, my cape cloak of black cloth overspreading my back like a thornback or an elephant's ear that hangs on his shoulders like a country huswife's banskin which she thirleth her spindle on, and in consummation of my curiosity, my hands without gloves, all a-more French, and a black budge edging of a beard on the upper lip, and the like sable auglet of excrements in the first rising of the angle of my chin.^s Jack's apparel resembles just that which William Harrison, in his sketch of Elizabethan apparel for Holinshed's Chronicles, decried: the Englishman has no apparel of his own by which to declare himself; rather, he turns from one foreign fashion to the next. Jack has adopted the signs of other cultures, and he wears a hodge-podge of foreign nationalities on his body. Nashe's character presents a picture of perhaps the most playful, and at the same time hostile, type of Englishman abroad. While the travelling humanist or courtier seeks greater learning or sophistication for his own benefit. Jack's aspirations are far more mercenary. Of course, once any traveller departs from the security of home, he becomes an outsider in a foreign land, at the mercy of uncertain circumstances and unfamiliar cultures; his reactions to such strangeness reveal many of his culture's assumptions and methods of thought. As G. K. Hunter remarks, "The impact of foreigners on a community or culture is affected, obviously enough, both by the opportunities for contact and knowledge that exist, and by the framework of assumptions within which information about foreign 5*Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller or The Life o f Jack Wilton, 1594 in An Anthology o f Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed. Paul Saltzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 225. All references to Nashe's text refer to Salzman's edition. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 161 lands and customs is presented and received" (3). At home in England's largely homogeneous culture, the values of the Englishman's culture are transparent. Abroad, however, the Englishman is suddenly made aware of values that are not his own, and he is the outsider. Ironically, he often responds to his marginalized condition by denouncing the dominant cultures which he encounters. Consistently we see that the English traveller carries his prejudices along with him; he knows what he will see, he projects his world-view onto the landscape he meets, and his descriptions of his travels for the English audience inevitably confirm its prejudices. Through the eyes of many English travellers, foreigners, even though they are at home, are the outsiders— inappropriate, corrupt, and grotesque. Some of the traveller's resentment may reside in the indignities of having to behave according to non-English rules. Jack Wilton frequently excuses his misfortunes abroad by claiming, "my fault was more pardonable in that I was a stranger altogether ignorant of their customs" (270). More bitter, Nashe's character of an exiled English Earl complains of his lack of authority in Italy, assigning animalistic traits to the disempowered traveller: He that is a traveller must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing; and if this be not the highest step of thralldom, there is no liberty or freedom. It is but a mild kind of subjection to be the servant of one master at once, but when thou hast a thousand thousand masters, as the veriest botcher, tinker, or cobbler freeborn will domineer over a foreigner, and think to be his better or master in company, then shalt thou find there's no such hell as to leave thy father's house (thy natural habitation) to live in the land of bondage. (283) The exiled Englishman is not pleased with his status as "Other" in Italy, a condition created by his lack of power in the face of foreign signs which he is not at liberty to interpret. The native tinker or cobbler has greater knowledge than Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 162 does he, the unwilling foreigner, thus creating a balance of power disagreeable to the nobleman both in personal relations and in terms of class structure. Outside of his homeland, the class distinctions so important to the nobleman dissolve. The Earl advises Jack to avoid travel and its accompanying dangers altogether, and cautions that the Englishman is best at home in England: "Believe me, no air, no bread, no fire, no water agree with a man or doth him any good out of his own country. Cold fruits never prosper in a hot soil, nor hot in a cold" (287). The Englishman outside of his native clime undergoes some variety of beastly transformation; here, indignity incites the metamorphosis rather than an effeminate Church or lascivious woman. But Jack's gentlemanly advisor elaborates on the changes Italy will enact on English plainness, relying on common stereotypes of Italy and the dissolute traveller: It makes [the Englishman] to kiss his hand like an ape, cringe his neck like a starveling .... From thence he brings atheism, the art of epicurizing, the art of whoring, the art of poisoning, the art of sodomitry. The only probable good thing they have to keep us from utterly condemning it is that it maketh a man an excellent courtier, a curious carpet knight— which is, by interpretation, a fine close lecher, a glorious hypocrite. (286) From the first mention of Italy in The Unfortunate TraveZ/er Nashe capitalizes on stereotypes of Italy. The page Jack Wilton, after several episodes of mischief in the English camps, meets up with his master the Earl of Surrey, and the two set out for Italy, "that country which was such a curious moulder of wits" (248). Jack himself questions their destination, "musing what changeable humour had so suddenly seduced him [the Earl] from his native soil to seek out needless perils in these parts beyond sea... " (238). The ordinarily sober Earl has undertaken his travels, not for respectable, educational purposes, but for love of a Florentine beauty newly arrived in England. The besotted Earl describes Geraldine in exotic, decidedly foreign terms, evoking the wonders of the East: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 163 She it is that is come out of Italy to bewitch all the wise men of England .. . Her high exalted sunbeams have set the pheonix nest of my breast on fire, and I myself have brought Arabian spiceries of sweet passions and praises to furnish out the funeral flame of my folly. (238) Despite the romantic vocabulary with which Jack and his master begin their voyage, the moment the two arrive in Venice an assortment of exaggerated Italian evils assaults them. Jack describes their reception: having scarce looked about us, a precious supernatural pander, apparelled in all points like a gentleman and having half a dozen languages in his purse, entertained us in our own tongue very paraphrastically and eloquently, and maugre all other pretended acquaintance would have us in a violent kind of courtesy to be the guests of his appointment. His name was Petro de Campo Frego, a notable practitioner in the policy of bawdry. The place whither he brought us was a pernicious courtesan's house named Tabitha the Temptress's, a wench that could set as civil a face on it as chastity's first martyr Lucretia. (248) Nashe capitalizes on the fame of Venetian courtesans such as Tabitha, which symbolized to English eyes Italy's sexual lasciviousness and looseness— Ascham's thousands of courtesans teeming in Italy. Just as in his travelogues, Thomas Coryat must ultimately reject both Venice and the beautiful but shameful courtesan, so the courtesan Jack first meets turns out to be a "graceless fornicatress," a "whore, this quean, this courtesan, this common of ten thousand .. !" (250). But before denouncing her. Jack leads his ^^Coryat's meeting with a famed Venetian courtesan, a central episode in his travelogue and one worthy enough to merit a "picture... according to her Venetian habites, with my owne [picture] neare vnto her, made in that forme as we saluted each other," similarly utilizes English notions of Italian character (Sig. V50- Coryat includes the incident, he says, despite the charges of "luxury and wantonnesse" that so "lasciuious a matter" will incite, because frequently such subjects are excluded from writings on the city. But of course, such depictions were commonplace, and the encounter instead serves to present the English reader with an intimate glimpse of the sinful Italians' practices and to celebrate Coryat's chaste response. Parr muses, "one wonders whether some of Coryat's escapades would take quite the form they do in his narrative if it were not for the example of fictions like Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, which typically construct a protagonist who is boisterous, resourceful, dexterous and street-wise— in a word, witty" (598). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 164 audience with fascination through the interior of the courtesan Tabitha's house. His descriptions, again calling to mind the even more foreign Orient, serve several purposes. In illustrating the extent of her ability to deceive. Jack's details link that deceiving ability to her Catholicism and emphasize the foreignness of the realm in which the two Englishmen are now immersed: What will you conceit to be in any saint's house that was there to seek? Books, pictures, beads, crucifixes— why there was a haberdasher's shop of them in every chamber. I warrant you should not see one set of her neckercher perverted or turned awry, not a piece of hair displaced. On her beds there was not a wrinkle of any wallowing to be found; her pillows bare out as smooth as a groaning wife's belly, and yet she was a Turk and an infidel, and had more doings than all her neighbours besides. Us for our money they used like emperors. (248) Catholic elements of worship litter the courtesan's abode. In a diluted version of iconoclastic attacks on Rome, Jack points to what, in Protestant views, are signs of a dead theology based on empty show. And yet, despite the icons and crucifixes, the den of iniquity that Jack obviously expects in Tabitha's quarters, is instead a house which appears respectable, emphasizing how little Jack the Englishman can trust appearances in Italy. Like the panderer, who greets them eloquently and "like a gentleman," the courtesan seems to be a lady. The panderer, too, proves unworthy of his initial impression, and Jack rejects him in a violent diatribe, proclaiming that his body should reflect his inner evil: Detestable, detestable, that the flesh and the devil should deal by their factors! I'll stand to it, there is not a pander but hath vowed paganism. The devil himself is not such a devil as he, so be he perform his function aright. He must have the back of an ass, the snout of an elephant, the wit of a fox, and the teeth of a wolf; he must fawn like a spaniel, crouch like a Jew, leer like a sheepbiter. If he be half a puritan and have scripture continually in his mouth he speeds the better... God be merciftil to our pander. .. he was seen in all the seven liberal deadly sciences; not a sin but he was as absolute in as Satan himself. Satan could never have supplanted us so as he did. I may say to you he planted in us the first Italianate wit that we had. (252) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 165 Thus the two figures Jack meets immediately upon entering Italy represent common stereotypes of the Italian, which Jack links to the demonic as soon as he catches sight of their 'true' natures. Jack describes the Machiavel as worse than Satan in his trickery, calling on the images of the cunning Italians such as appear in the pamphlet A i/ijcoverze o f the great subtiltie o f the Italians to link ungodliness with Italian wit. The exiled Englishman warns Jack that Italians will deliberately deceive the honest Englishman, "the plainest dealing soul that ever God put life in... the Italians [have] no such sport as to see poor English asses how soberly they swallow Spanish [poisoned] figs; devour any hook baited for them" (284). When Jack arrives in Rome, he hears of the bandettos, who murder around Rome and Naples. An example of the general danger and savagery of Italy, the bandettos are additionally threatening because they do not declare themselves: Disguised as they go, they are not known from strangers; sometimes they will shroud themselves under the habit of grave citizens. In this consideration, neither citizen nor stranger, gentleman, knight, marquis, or any other may wear any weapon endamageable upon pain of the strappado. (270) Although the English traveller enters Italy armed with the knowledge of the Italians' dishonesty and lasciviousness, he could be led astray by seemingly innocuous signs. Jack and his master's experiences illustrate that the possibility of contradiction between outer appearance and inner self constantly confronts the traveller in Italy, where Machiavellian characters such as the "chaste" courtesan, the cunning pimp, and disguised bandettos populate every scene. As Jack Wilton declares, the panderer's corruption "planted in us the first Italianate wit that we had" (252)— the beginnings of a transformation to Machiavellian deceitfulness. Thus Nashe plays into uncertainties over the transformative effects of travel upon the plain Englishman. By exaggerating the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 166 identifying features of other nationalities, the English gain a clearer picture of their national identity— stolid, steady, of "extreme simplicitie" (Hall 15). G. K. Hunter notes that "[t]he foreigner could only 'mean' something important, and so be effective as a literary figure, when the qualities observed in him were seen to involve a simple and significant relationship to real life at home" (13). One of the easiest forms of ridicule, as we have seen, focuses on the excesses of fashion, benefitting from the strength of a misogynistic discourse which traditionally rejected fashion as effeminate and foolish. And Nashe's use of clothing to delineate character resembles the approaches found in common misogynistic diatribes which demonize women in their foolish abuse of fashion; an exaggeration of customs in dress visibly illustrates differences among nationalities and allows for ridicule and rejection of the absurdly-dressed. Thus throughout The Unfortunate Traveller, Nashe's narrator Jack consistently describes others, and himself, by their attire. Fashion offers the traveller a clue to the nature of the wearer, and the traveller is provided with a system, however inaccurate, for reading the others he meets. The novel continually reminds us of Jack's apparel during his travels, calling attention to the meanings that his clothing bears according to the context in which it is read. When Jack arrives in Rome, he again describes his dress in detail: At my first coming to Rome, I, being a youth of the English cut, ware my hair long, went apparelled in light colours, and imitated four or five sundry nations in my attire at once; which no sooner was noted but I had all the boys of the city in a swarm wondering about me... he is counted no gentleman amongst them that goes not in black; they dress their jesters and fools only in fresh colours, and say variable garments do argue unstaidness and unconstancy of affections. (269-70) To the Romans, Jack's attire signifies an untrustworthiness. The joke, of course, lies in the Romans' interpretation of Jack's fashions; to Nashe's English readers. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 167 such traits as "unstaidness and unconstancy of affections" belong to Italians, who are swayed by passions while the Englishman remains solid. The events of the narrative, which end with the account of a revengeful and violent Italian murderer, support the stereotypes. Yet Jack's motley attire does signify a certain inconstancy. Jack's conduct in Italy presents the picture of depravity and disorder. In the company of his courtesan Jack undertakes many adventures, not the least of which is to masquerade as his master the Earl of Surrey. But Jack is unapologetic about his falsified identity, and defends himself by claiming, "my pomp, my apparel, train and expense was nothing inferior to his; my looks were as lofty, my words as magnifical" (258). To Jack his outward appropriateness justifies his movement to a higher class; the fears of the exiled Englishman are realized in the person of the traveller Jack Wilton, who once away from England abandons his society's values. Yet, although Jack proves a rather amoral, opportunistic and irreverent Englishman, he nowhere approaches the grotesque extremes of behavior and appearance as do the foreigners he meets. Most of the women Jack meets are grotesque, sexually voracious and corrupt beneath their initially attractive appearances. The women in Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller are not, however, alone in their dissoluteness: nearly everyone Jack encounters on his adventures is grotesque. The Unfortunate Traveller is a novel about Jack's confrontation with multiple Others— foreigners and others excluded from Englishness— and the transformations wrought on Jack through those encounters. Through the irreverent character of Jack Wilton, Nashe explores the nature of the traveller who moves from one social class to another, among nationalities and from alliance to alliance. At the end. Jack marries "his rich courtesan," the recent widow of a wealthy Italian, and returns to the service of the English king. He is a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 168 traveller who assumes the negative traits of the nationalities he encounters, while at the same time constantly criticizing anything non-English. Each type Jack meets is made obvious by country, ethnicity, religion, or gender. The importance of outward appearance is established early on in the novel, as Jack and other pages in Henry VIU's court, concerned about how to identify a gentleman, outwardly mark the visitors' bodies: In which regard it was considered of by the common table of the cupbearers what a perilsome thing it was to let any stranger or out-dweller approach so near the precincts of the prince as the great chamber without examining what he was and giving him his pass. Whereupon we established the like order, but took no money of them as they did, only for a sign that he had not passed our hands unexamined we set a red mark on either of his ears, and so let him walk as authentical. (225) Although labeling strangers does not always prove so easy. Jack's descriptions indicate that most others wear a "red mark" of some sort, usually in their dress. For instance. Jack witnesses John Leyden and the Anabaptists as they come forth onto the battlefield at Munster; their ridiculous, common attire for the battle illustrates for Jack the error of their ways: flourishing entered John Leyden the botcher into the field, with a scarf made of lists like a bowcase; a cross on his breast like a thread-bottom; a round twilted tailor's cushion buckled like a tankard-bearer's device to his shoulders for a target, the pike whereof was a pack needle; a rough prentice's club for his spear; a great brewer's cow on his back for a corslet; and on his head for a helmet a huge high shoe with the bottom turned upward .... Very devout asses they were, for all they were so dunstically set forth, and such as thought they knew as much of God's mind as richer men. (229) Part of the Anabaptists' error, it appears, is linked to their lower class; yet Jack goes on to link their problems to their foreigness when he remarks. So fares it up and down with our cynical, reformed foreign churches, they will digest no grapes of great bishoprics, forsooth, because they cannot tell how to come by them. They must shape their coats, good men, according to their cloth, and do as they may, not as they would, yet they must give us leave here in England that are their honest neighbors, if we have more cloth than they, to make our garment somewhat larger. (233-34) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 169 Jack uses the metaphor of clothing to express his attitude toward the Anabaptists and to simultaneously declare his Englishness. This approach to description continues as he travels through Germany and mocks the scholastics and townspeople of Wittenberg. The language Jack hears there, and the people's appearance confirm stereotypes of Germans as boorish drunks.®° Despite the grotesque natures of the Germans and the exaggerated Italian stereotypes Jack meets, no characters are portrayed as viciously as the Jews Zadok and Zachary who betray Jack. "Of an ill tree I hope you are not so ill-sighted in grafting to expect good fruit," Jack warns the audience of the Jewish characters (293). Not just the Jews' clothing illustrates their corruption; their very bodies, grotesque in the extreme, reveal the error of their religious and social values.^' Perhaps the most shocking element of The Unfortunate Traveller for ^°The frontispiece to Coryat's Crudities depicts the three countries of Germany, France and Italy as women, dressed in the fashions of their nations, grouped around a portrait of Coryat (FIGURE FOUR). The German women is shown vomiting onto Coryat's head. As John Davis's ecphrastic poem explains of the engraving, "A dainty Dame (not dainty of her vomit)/ Powres downe upon him (like a blazing commet)/ The streame of her abundance from her Gullet,/ And hits him on the Noddle, like a Bullet,... Which Damsell, with her free ebriety,/ Doth lie, or sit, or stand for Germany." Cited in Ann Rosalind Jones, "Italians and Others," 107. Hunter cites from John Marston's The Malcontent an example of generalizations by country: "The Dutchman for a drunkard/ The Dane for golden locks,/The Irishman for usquebaugh/The Frenchman for the [pox]" (15). The English earl who lectures Jack on the evils of travel similarly (and in greater detail) provides a catalogue of each nation's problems. The Italian is violent, deceitful and wanton, especially the Neapolitan, who "carrieth the bloodiest wreakful mind" (284); the French effeminate in fashion and slovenly; the Danes and the Dutch are drunkards (284-877). G'C)f course the Jews' actions follow the worst anti-Jewish propaganda and leave no doubt about their race's intrinsic evil: they sell Jack and his courtesan Diamante as chattel; Doctor Zachary plans to dissect Jack in his anatomical experiments; the lecher Zadok daily strips and scourges Diamante for his pleasure; later as revenge, Zadok threatens to poison the springs which supply the city of Rome, and plans to serve the children of the city as dinner to the Pope. Jack calls Zadok's death a triumph; he describes the torture and pain of the Jew without compassion, in lengthy and excruciating detail (298-99). Although they are some of the most disgusting characters, within the context of Nashe's narrative the Jews are incidental characters, little different from the Germans or Italians except perhaps in their repulsive physical nature and inhuman nature. They are Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 170 today's reader is the extreme way the novel rejects these Others whom Jack meets in the course of his travels. The violent deaths and tortures suddenly intrude on Jack’ s flippant narrative, and illustrate that the Englishman must not only show his difference from the grotesque Others; he must, in addition, destroy them. Zadok's torture and agony, the "end of the whipping Jew," are presented as if for the pleasure of the viewer, with no mention of the suffering of a human being. While the "unpitied and well-performed slaughter" of the Anabaptists incites even Jack's compassion, it is the same compassion he would feel at seeing a bear, "the most cruellest of all beasts," killed by too many dogs in an unfair match (236). And Jack still describes the Anabaptists' deaths in gory detail, noting at the end of his account, "So ordinary at every footstep was the imbruement of iron in blood that one could hardly discern heads from bullets, or clotted hair from mangled flesh hung with gore" (236). He ends the episode by reminding his audience of the Anabaptists' heresy, and bemoans the effects the slaughter has had on him: "what with talking of cobblers and tinkers and ropemakers and botchers and dirt- daubers, the mark is clean gone out of my muse's mouth, and I am, as it were, more than duncified twixt divinity and poetry" (236). In the wake of such an experience. Jack flees the realm of such overwhelming otherness: "I travelled along the country towards England as fast as I could" (237). He soon meets up with his master the Earl of Surrey, only to return to the Continent and the dangers of Italy. The novel closes with the execution of the bandetto Cutwolf, who delivers an extended speech describing his crimes before dying a horrible death "splintered in shivers" on the wheel, "where yet living he might behold his flesh legacied important for the plot, but are just another set of foreigners whom Jack meets and rejects as part of his return to England and English values. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 171 amongst the souls of the air" (308). The courtesan Tabitha and her panderer, the lascivious and deceitful Italians who betray Jack and the Earl on their arrival in Venice, are executed for their crimes. Jack's narrative dwells more on Cutwolf s death scene and establishes him a representative of the violent Italy which, the novel instructs, should be avoided. Cutwolfs parting words ally him with his fellow countryman and again call up English stereotypes of Italy. He declares. No true Italian but will honour me for it. Revenge is the glory of arms and the highest performance of valour. Revenge is whatsoever we call law or justice. The farther we wade in revenge the nearer come we to the throne of the Almighty. .. All true Italians imitate me in revenging constantly and dying valiantly. (307) Just as the slaughter of the Anabaptists sends Jack running back to England, so does the sight of the vengeful Italian's death. The end of the novel has Jack give up his foreign behavior, marry his courtesan, and return home to English culture. Jack's immoral conduct, while the source of amusement in the course of the novel, is best left abroad. Jack pledges, To such straight life did it thenceforward incite me that, ere I went out of Bologna, I married my courtesan, performed many almsdeeds, and hasted so fast out of the Sodom of Italy that within forty days I arrived at the King of England's camp . . . And so as my story began with the King at Turney and Turwin, I think meet here to end it with the King at Ardes and Guines, (308) For all of Jack Wilton's irreverent attitude, disobedience to the rules of English class structure and disregard for decorum, 77ie Unfortunate Traveller displays a completely conservative ideology. Nashe's book serves to reinforce conservative views even in the person of the novel's hero. Jack: his very playfulness with his identity, his mutability while abroad, emphasize the need for the Englishman to establish his identity as solid and unchangeable, different from the untrustworthy foreigners who do not play according to English rules of behavior. Nashe's attention to the details of fashions in Jack Wilton's tale points to the English Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 172 traveler's concern over disjunctions between appearance and reality. The stereotypes who frequent Jack’ s travels suggest a desire to avoid such complications and complexity as more balanced portrayals of the foreign might require. By placing his Englishman abroad, rather than focusing on Others at home in England, Nashe is able to recount the tale of Jack Wilton's realization of, and return to, his own Englishness. While other examples of foreign settings, such as the many Shakespeare plays set in Italy, use the exoticism and distance of the foreign site to play out native problems, Nashe's tale can utilize the 'real' genre of the travelogue in emphasizing the differences between foreign vice and English virtue. The construction of Otherness in Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller comes about through an examination of superficial detail as if it were an adequate measure of more essential difference. A Traveller on the Stage: The Two Gentlemen o f Verona Shakespeare's early comedy The Two Gentlemen o f Verona directly questions the stability of the traveller's identity and the relationship between inward and outer realities with a more serious portrayal of the changeable traveller.®- At the start of the play, of course located in Italy, a youth's father discusses with his servant the advantages of travel for a youth, agreeing that ®-The play, "the least loved and least regarded of Shakespeare's comedies," cannot be dated with any precision. According to Anne Barton, its earliest mention is in Meres' list of 1598, although Clifford Leech has conjectured that part of the play was written perhaps in 1592, with the rest added hastily for performance in 1593. Introduction to the play. The Riverside Shakespeare, eds. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974), 143. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 173 without travel, a man cannot be perfect.^^ They articulate common defenses of travelling as education. Panthino asks Antonio why his son has not travelled: Pan. He wond'red that your lordship Would suffer him to spend his youth at home. While other men, of slender reputation. Put forth their sons to seek preferment out: Some to the wars, to try their fortune there; Some to discover islands far away; Some to the studious universities. For any or for all these exercises He said that Proteus, your son, was meet; And did request me to importune you To let him spend his time no more at home. Which would be great impeachment to his age. In having known no travel in his youth. Ant. Nor need'st thou much importune me to that Whereon this month I have been hammering. I have consider'd well his loss of time. And how he cannot be a perfect man. Not being tried and tutor'd in the world: Experience is by industry achiev'd. And perfected by the swift course of time. (I.iii.4-23)^ Within the first act, the issue of travel abroad is presented unproblematically, as the finish to a gentleman's education and as a means to experience the world. Accordingly, Antonio's son, tellingly named Proteus, is sent to join his friend Valentine at the court of Milan, to gain knowledge. The first appearance Proteus makes after he has assumed the status of the traveller, however, reveals that he has also abandoned his former identity: he falls in love with Valentine's beloved and proceeds to underhandedly betray both Valentine and his own love at home, Julia. He ascribes his "metamorphoses" to love, fueled by the sight of the beautiful Silvia (I.i.66, II.i.30, Il.iv. 190). The *^^See Shakespeare's Italy: Functions o f Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, eds. Michele Marrapodi et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), for an examination of the significance of Italy for Elizabethan playwrights and their audiences. The essays analyze the exploitation of the Italian setting as a structural constituent of Renaissance drama, as well as its moral and political implications. ^All references to the play are from The Riverside Shakespeare. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 174 speed at which Proteus changes character does credit to his name and suggests the mythical transformations wrought on the English traveller by the female forces of Circes' court; Proteus’ s behavior also invites comparison with the Machiavel, for he maintains a facade of innocence even as he betrays his friends. He admits his Machiavellian deceptions to himself when he remarks, "Already I have been false to Valentine,/ And now I must be as unjust to Thurio:/ Under the color of commending him,/1 have access my own love to prefer..." (IV.ii.1-4). He is seemingly amoral, despite his awareness of the treachery of his actions, and in his transformed state he stoops "to worship shadows and adore false shapes" (rv.ii.130) in his futile love for Silvia. Indeed, Proteus's actions resemble that of the Catholic worshipper at reliquaries in Protestant parodies. Julia describes Proteus's behavior as she addresses Silvia's picture: "O thou senseless form,/ Thou shalt be worshipp'd, kiss'd, lov'd, and ador'd;/ And were there sense in this idolatry,/ My substance should be statue in thy stead" (IV.iv. 197-201). Near the close of the play Proteus desperately attempts to rape Silvia, proclaiming, "I'll force thee yield to my desire" (V.iv.59). Although The Two Gentlemen o f Verona is a comedy and thus the characters, however unsatisfactorily, are reconciled at its close, the question of travel's effects on the young gentleman remains unresolved as the characters depart. Shakespeare applies all of the stereotypes of the traveller in Italy to his character Proteus: upon leaving home, Proteus finds himself at the mercy of a love which transforms his character into an amoral Machiavel, who operates by deceit and who engages in false idolatry and even violence. Proteus is reunited with his love from home, Julia, in the last scene of the play, but the audience is left wondering how his previous metamorphoses have altered him. Similar ambivalences about travel, especially to Italy, appear later in John Fletcher's 1620 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 175 comedy The Wild Goose Chase:^^ initially, the young gentleman traveller returns from Italy and is praised for the polish and sophistication which he must have gained on his travels. The first act of the play includes several discussions of the learning a young man can attain abroad. However, as Fletcher’ s play unfolds, the sophistication the returned traveller has gathered in Italy is revealed as less attractive than it had at first appeared. He is a cad, cruel to the ladies, manipulative, vain and changeable. Although all ends happily, the audience, like Shakespeare's in The Two Gendemen o f Verona, is left with an uneasy view of the changes possibly wrought on the traveller in Italy. Such Protean changeability takes on moral implications when considered in light of Lothar Fietz's study of the image of the chameleon in Renaissance thought. Fietz contrasts the Continental view of man as a multiform, diverse being who can cultivate his potential diversity, found in such writers as Pico della Mirandola, Rabelais and Juan Luis Vives, with English uses of the chameleon. He argues. It was in the period of the English Renaissance that the originally neutral meaning of changeability and adaptability was endowed with moral overtones. In that climate of opinion changeability was associated with temporariness, transcience, and ultimately with the idea of temporal vanity and temporal appearance over against eternal being or reality. Nashe uses- -I do not know how often— the verb 'to address', meaning 'to dress', quite frequently; he thus links up the idea of temporariness with the idea of vain appearance; and the image of the chameleon is, as it were, used as a 'topos' ^^The play, according to the publisher of the first folio edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, was lost when that volume was compiled; it reappeared later, and was issued separately, in folio, in 1652. A second edition appeared in 1679. It is, however, known to have been acted as early as 1621. Farquhar based his comedy The Inconstant on the play, which, William Neilson notes, "points to the obvious relationship between the Fletcherian comedy, of which [The Wild-Goose Chase] is a typical example, and the drama of the Restoration" (859). The Chief Elizabethan Dramatists, Excluding Shakespeare, ed. William Alan Neilson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1911). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 176 in which the meanings of temporariness, vanity, appearance, deliberate deceit, hypoocrisy converge and merge.^^ Often, he notes, the Machiavellian character in Elizabethan drama describes himself as a master of the outward show, a talent he uses in order to deceive the world: Gloucester, the villain in 3 Henry VI, claims, "I can add colours to the chameleon,/ Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,/ And set the murderous Machiavel to school" (HI.ii. 190-192). Fietz remarks that the Tudor myth implies "that man was bound to the place assigned to him in contemporary society or in the universe. Any attempt at transcending the assigned status was considered to be sinful in itself, because it engendered the stability of the Tudor system" (99). Thus the English traveller to Italy, subject to transformation and change like the misdressed woman, becomes suspect by virtue of the religious and political climate of the age. Reformation attacks on the stage such as Stephen Gosson's Schoole o f Abuse illustrate the Elizabethan dislike for foreign influence and their unease with ambiguous effects of disguise. In Gosson's construction, poetry itself is deceit and works to disguise corruption, and, as the next chapter examines more closely, we find in his anti-theatrical rhetoric the same images evoked to condemn women's apparel and travel to Italy. Poets' words, Gosson charges, .. .are the cups of Circe that turn reasonable creatures into brute beasts, the balls of Hippomenes that hinder the course of Atalanta, and the blocks of the devil that are cast in our ways to cut off the race toward wits. No marvel though Plato shut them out of his school, and banished them quite from his commonwealth as effeminate writers, unprofitable members, and utter enemies to virtue. (259) Effeminate poets, then, entice theater-goers in the same ways that the female temptations of Italy draw in the English traveller, or foreign fashions lure the ^^Lothar Fietz, "The Chameleon and the Player: Reflections on the Relation between English and Continental Renaissance Thought" in Anglia: Zeitschrift fiirEnglische Philologie 110 (1992), 89. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 177 native Englishman. The metamorphoses imposed on these victims also appear similar. The male viewer is led into fleshly damnation; the traveller falls into corruption and pleasure-seeking; theater audiences, Gosson explains, fall into a "lewdness of life... wallowing in ladies' laps" and flirting with women (261). Not surprisingly, Gosson identifies the female members who engage in such behavior as prostitutes (262). Gosson cries with horror, We have robbed Greece of gluttony, Italy of wantonness, Spain of pride, France of deceit, and Dutchland of quaffing. Compare London to Rome and England to Italy, you shall find the theaters of the one, the abuses of the other, to be rife among us (261). The theater, a place where deliberate and proclaimed disguise is practised, has become a place of corruption. In addition, the theater is a place where men become women on the stage, the ultimate representation of changeability. While the Circes enacting the metamorphoses of Englishmen may vary from a tempting Italy to graceful words, she always induces a transformation which constitutes corruption to an English self which, by definition, is male. The construction of Italy as dangerous to the male self relates to Englishmen's desire to define their Englishness, as the plainness and purity which are defined as English become more apparent when they are held up against the supposed lewdness of Italy. By creating a female Italy, the corruption threatening the male English self is even clearer— women are the pathway to sin, they lead away from purity. The England which is constructed in opposition to Italy reveals many of the values of England's early modern culture. A Circean Italy is used to prepare the English traveller for the dangers which await him, and to protect him from them. If he can read allegory into his experiences, he can distance himself from the immediate threats to himself, his manhood, and his Englishness. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 178 II. Champions of Travel JustiOcations for Risking the Beastly Metamorphosis Despite such depictions of the amoral traveller and the chorus of voices against leaving God's island for the harlot's countryside, traffic with foreign countries continued to have its champions, and in the early 1600s even grew in popularity.^'^ Just as there were elaborate treatises on the need to remain at home, travel's advocates produced well-reasoned arguments to justify leaving England. The disregard for travel such as appears in Hall and Elyot was, for example, sharply condemned by Elizabeth's secretary William Davison, who implies that English isolation is inappropriate to a civic humanism which develops through the active life.® ® In his Instructions fo r Travel, Davison scorns the man who thinks himself fit by books and urges a synthesis of scholarly and practical ideals: Our sedentary Traveller may passe for a wise man as long as hee converseth either with dead men by reading; or by writing, with men absent. But let him once enter on the stage of publike imployment, and ® H n his book Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (1935, rpt. 1958, 1980), especially Chapters 10, "Pathway to Foreign Learning" and 14, "The Wonders of Travel," Louis B. Wright argues that travel literature served an economic purpose for the middle class, helping them to interact better with foreign tradesmen. ®®Davison's treatise falls within a larger debate over the nature of civic responsiblity. The fifteenth-century scholar Ermolao Barbaro's (the grandson of Francesco Barbaro) dispute with his family illustrates this debate: he had accepted an ecclesiastical position without permission, but his father summoned him to return from Rome to Venice. At issue was his refusal to marry and live the life of a politically active Venetian nobleman. As a young man Ermolao had written an essay. De coelibatu, in which he expressed his desire to be free of the public cares of a civic-minded citizen and the familial obligations of the head of a household, devoting himself, instead, to a life of uninterrupted study. De coelibatu emphasizes personal freedom rather than self-sacrifice. In 1491, when confronted by a friend who had been sent to Rome to fetch him, he wrote back, "I live joyfully, I live free, I live for letters... O happy calamity, that has restored letters to me, and me to letters, and indeed myself to myself." Margaret Leah King, "Caldiera and the Barbaros on Marriage and the Family: Humanist Reflections of Venetial realities," The Journal o f Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1976): 43. The life of the scholar devoted to his books and the statesman active in his country's affairs did not always coincide; debates over travel in part develop from this larger issue. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 179 hee will soone find, if he can but bee sensible of contempt, that he is unfit for Action. For ability to treat with men of several humours, factions and Countries; duly to comply with them or stand off, as occasion shall require, is not gotten onely by reading of books, but rather by studying of men. Yet this is ever held true; The best scholler is fittest for a Traveller, as being able to make the most useful observation: Experience added to learning, makes a perfect Man.^^ James Cleland, writing twelve years later, similarly encourages the young English noble to travel after he has completed the general education at home, as preparation for political life: Travailing hath ever been esteemed and used, as the principal and best meanes, whereby a young Noble man, or anie other maie profit his Prince, his Countrie, and himselfe. It is the true Science of Pollicie, and the good Schoole of al government. There are no rules of Moral Philosophy so sure and certaine as those, which wee learne by other mens examples.™ At the same time, Cleland cautions against the sins rampant in a papist nation such as church ceremony, courtesans in gondolas, and the attractions of swaggering and fighting (69). He advises that the English traveller keep a careful journal so as to maintain the educational purposes of his journeys: Wherefore I recommend, onlie unto you a Journey booke, wherein you should write in good order everie night at your going to bed all that you have seene & heard worthie of particular observation, that day.. . have ever your Ephemerides in readines to write everie night, what you have observed that daie: and so with Gods grace; you shal retume home againe sufficientlie instructed in al things pertaining to the good government of the state. (77) The traveler's written record of his experiences, the journal which, when he returns to England, will attest to the traveler's activities while in Italy, also acts as ^^William Davison. Profitable Instructions; describing what speciall observations are to be taken by Travellers in all Nations, Sattes and Countries; Pleasant and Profitable. By the three much admired, Robert, late Earle o f Essex. Sir Phillip Sidney. And Secretary Davison (London: Benjamin Fisher, 1633), Sig. A2’ ^-A3''^. Howard notes that Davison is believed to have written the tract c. 1595 but that it was not printed until 1633 (35-36). ™James Cleland, The Institution o f a Young Noble Man, 1607. Cited in Steven J. Masello, "Thom ^ Hoby: A Protestant Traveler to Circe's Court," Cahiers Elisabethains. Etudes sur la Pre-Renaissance et la Renaissance Anglaises, 27 (April 1985), 68. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 180 a sort of armor against the sins which surround him there. Faith in the protective powers of the text informs much advice on how to encounter Italy's dangers: often classical literature is the charm or example that will lead the traveller to safety; but here with Cleland, the traveler's own written English words maintain his purity. The purpose of travel is to write about that travel. Cleland's fears of the "pleasures and diverse allurements" of Italy, which prompt him to suggest the protection of ajournai, appear implicitly in the detailed and practical advice which Henry Peacham sets out to prepare the nervous English traveller in The Complete Gentleman (1622) and in The Truth o f Our Times (1638). Peacham's advice on traveling is interesting because he champions travel for proclaimed humanist reasons of moral education, and he advances his argument by systematically offering advice which addresses specific English fears. Peacham's approach is perhaps the antithesis to Ascham's standard invocation of classical tropes, because Peacham earnestly attempts to meld ancient examples with modem values in his defense of English travel. Peacham was a painter, musician, mathematician, writer of English and Latin verses, traveller, social critic and scholar. He wrote The Complete Gentleman for young William Howard, son of Thomas, Earl of Arundel and Surrey, intending it for William and other English gentlemen to save them "from the tyranny of these ignorant times and from the common education, which is to wear the best clothes, eat, sleep, drink much, and to know nothing."” ^' Peacham viewed the gentleman's studies of history as closely involved with travel and with the student's knowledge of geography, coins, statues and ancient inscriptions. Heltzel comments that "[Peacham] looked upon antiquities not as dead things, but ^'Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, The Truth o f Our Times, and The Art o f Living in London, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), xiii. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 181 as things full of meaning, and he was aware at the same time of the aesthetic appeal of many of them" (xvi). This humanist tendency to look at antiquity and relate it to the present, to treat classical elements as equally relevant to everyday life as were contemporary influences,^- becomes obvious in Peacham's advice to the traveller. For the young gentleman to develop fully as a statesman, his morals need the strengthening which only foreign travel can provide. The Complete Gentleman ends with Peacham's defense of travel. He explains that he concludes with travel because. In my opinion nothing rectifieth and confirmeth more the judgment of a gentleman in foreign affairs, teacheth him knowledge of himself, and settleth his affection more sure to his own country than travel doth. For if it be the common law of nature that the learned should have rule over and instruct the ignorant, the experienced the unexperienced, what concemeth more nobility, taking place above other, than to be learned and wise, and where may wisdom be had but from many men and in many places? Hereupon we find the most eminent and wise men of the world to have been the greatest travelers (to omit the patriarchs and apostles themselves in Holy Writ), as Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Osiris, King of Egypt, who traveled a great part of the world... . (159-160) Peacham's list of worthy travellers in history extends through Xenophon, Alexander and Menelaus, and represents his humanist defense of travel on the premise that travel has trained many great statesman by experience and example, and that the modern gentleman should, like those famous figures, learn by the examples of humanity which travel provides. Like Cleland, Peacham considers travel a necessary element of education, suggesting as does Cleland that the young traveller consider his travel encounters as he does classical examples. But unlike Cleland, Peacham does not concern himself with elaborating on the numerous dangers which await the traveller; he outlines the practical measures ^-Lewis W. Spitz remarks on this humanist way of regarding antiquity both in his article "Humanism and the Protestant Reformation" in Rabil's Renaissance Humanism (vol. HI, 380-411), and Volume I of his book The Renaissance and Reformation Movements {St. Con\s\ Concordia Publishing House, 1987) 139-170. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 182 which the traveller should take to ensure his safety and calmly lists the specific things of which the traveller should be wary. After articulating his reasons for suggesting travel, Peacham directly addresses common English fears and arguments against foreign travel, and offers advice on how to avoid those dangers successfully. For example, when Ascham worries that Italy can change the good Englishman in undesirable ways, he articulates a common English fear of and for the traveller. The consistent ridicule of and distrust exhibited toward the Italianate Englishman reveals the culture's uncertainty over just how and why the "plain Englishman" can change. Peacham specifically addresses this fear and suggests that it is the English traveller's failure to know enough about England which leads to his downfall. As Hall complains, the English care too little for their own culture: "Whether it be the envie, or the pusillanimitie of us English, wee are still ready to undervalue our owne, and admire forrainers; whiles other nations have applauded no professors more then those which they have borrowed from us; neither have wee beene so unwise, as to lend forth our best" (26). Hall, of course, discourages any departure from England for educational purposes; Peacham takes a different approach. Before he ever leaves English soil, Peacham suggests, the traveller must protect himself with a strengthened national identity. So Peacham advises the English nobleman: [Bjefore you travel into a strange country, I wish you, as I have heretofore said, to be well acquainted with your own. For I know it by experience that many of our young gallants have gone over with an intent to pass by nothing unseen or what might be known in their places, when they have been most ignorant here in their own native country, and strangers to their just reproof could discourse and say more of England than they. (161) Here Peacham counters a commonly expressed reason for not travelling— that one's "Englishness" will be diluted— with an essentially humanist argument. In a humanist education, the pupil's own manipulations of style or the language were Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 183 based in the study and imitation of classical texts. Exercises in translation, from the original and back again, encouraged an intimacy with Latin grammar and style. The student was steeped in a familiarity with the texts such that when he did embark on his own exercises, he did not overly pollute the beauty of the ancient languages. Throughout his exercises, the student would be imbibing the moral values contained in these classical texts and so would gain the virtue necessary for the true r h e t o r i c i a n Peacham's advice for protecting one's national identity is essentially the same as the theory behind such rhetorical exercises. Just as the student must be thoroughly familiar with Latin before he can employ it without the moral guidance of a classical author, so the Englishman must be "well acquainted" with his own country before he can venture alone into another. Thus Peacham uses humanist reasoning to allay specifically English fears over national integrity. His succeeding advice presents the threats which the fortified Englishman must, nevertheless, be wary of while in Italy. His suggestions coincide with commonly articulated fears, based on the theory of climatic influence, that inhabitants of northern regions such as England were not only uncomfortable in the hotter southern regions of the world, but because of their climate, possessed less subtlety than the Italians and thus, in their hearty plainness, were at the mercy of the sneaky Italians in matters p o litic ." [T ]h e torrid zone," in which only the stanchest Protestant Englishman can pass "and not bee Sun-burnt," threatens the ^^Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, in The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1990), present a survey of influences on English rhetorical theory in the Renaissance on pp. 463-482. '^^This theory of climatic influence is explained by Zera S. Fink in Appendix A of The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery o f a Pattern o f Thought in Seventeenth Century England (Evtix\s\.ov[\ Northwestern University, 1945), 191- 192. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 184 less hot-blooded traveller in multiple ways (Howell 17). G. K. Hunter notes that the traditional opposition between Northern phlegm and Southern blood was "much invoked to contrast the grossness of the Teutons with the passionate conduct of the Latins"; the balance between extremes, of course, was held by the E n g l i s h . ' ^ s p o r example. Hall calls upon such theories in his diatribe against travel when he explains that for health. The wise providence of God hath so contrived this earth, and us, that he hath fitted our bodies to our clime, and the native sustenance of the place unto our bodies. The apparent difference of diet (and of drinkes especially) falling into so tender age [of the young travelling gentleman], must needs cause a jarre in the constitution; which cannot in all likelihood, but send forth distemper into the whole course of the ensuing life. .. changes of soil it can leave an ill qualitie behinde it. (17-18) The pamphlet A discoverie o f the great subtiltie and wonderful wisdom o f the Italians sets forth another, more strongly-worded, version of this theory of climates. The author, not unlike Hall in his interpretation of England's island status, instructs that the English must follow God's geographical signs: His having placed the Alps on one side of Italy and the seas on the other "for bars betweene us and them" shows that there should be no traffic between the English and Italians, "whether we be Catholiques or Protestants" (Sig. A3). Because the English are at the mercy of the clever Italians, the author needs to issue this warning, he explains, and he remarks that he has written this tract "to the end that. . . the quicke and subtill Italians may no more abuse us, so that we shall no more bee exposed to the lamentable miseries, into the which they were woont to bring us headlong, as men altogether blind ande grosse-headed, at their owne lust and pleasure" (Sig. A3). In his first chapter, the author then provides "a discription of Italie, and the causes of the subtilitie of that Nation" (1). The geographical design ^^G. K. Hunter, Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1978), 15. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 185 of Europe places Spain in the position of the head; France, as the stomach; GeiTnany as the belly; and Denmark as the left arm; but Italy "extends more to the Southward, and the other bounding North, with his two armes" (I). With this rather cryptic explanation thus presented, the author elaborates on the effects of Italy’ s southern position on the continent: "the moderate temperature of the clymate, situate in a subtill.. neere unto the sea every where, without any excesse heate or cold," as well as the Italian trade with people of "Asia, Affrica, and Europa" cause the Italians to be "verie wittie and subtill headed, all cunning"— so cunning, in fact, that those who are tricked out of their money don't even realize it’ s been done to them (2). The rest of the tract provides historical (Julius Caesar, Romulus and Numa Pompilius ) (3) as well as contemporary references to illustrate the Italians’ dangerous cunning and to elucidate the threats facing the Englishman as a result of these Italian qualities. Peacham's treatise addresses such fears with straightforward explanations and locates the Englishman’ s defense in that very northern steadiness of his faith, as long as he is aware of possible dangers. Peacham explains: In your passage I must give you in either hand a light: preservation and observation— preservation of your mind from errors and ill manners; of your body from distemperature either by overeating, drinking, violent or venereal exercise. For there is not any nation in the world more subject unto surfeits than our English are, whether it proceedeth from the constitution of our bodies, ill agreeing with the hotter climates, or the exchange of our wholesome diet and plenty for little and ill-dressed, or the greediness of their fruits and hot wines, wherewith only we are sometime constrained to fill our bellies, I am not certain. No less peril there is ab istis callidis et calidis solis filiabusj^ which almost in every place will offer themselves or be put upon you by others. ^^Lipsius, "From those cunning and passionate daughters of the sun." [Heltzel’ s translation]. Coryat also refers to this phrase in his description of the dangerous Venetian courtesan. He writes, "But beware... that thou enter not into termes of priuate conuersation with her. For then thou shalt finde her such a one as Lipsius Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 186 Keep the fountains of your mind from being empoisoned, especially by those serpents, error and aetheism, which you shall find lurking under the fairest flowers. And though you hear the discourses of all and listen to the charms of some, discover your religion or mind to none, but, resembling the needle of the compass, howsoever for a while moved or shaken, look northerly, be constant to one. To be carried away with every fancy and opinion is to walk with Cain in the land of giddiness, the greatest punishment that God laid upon him. (161-162) The reason for the corruption of the English, it seems, is the English constitution itself. Yet while reading The Complete Gentleman, the terrors of foreign travel appear less monstrous and more surmountable than they appear in Ascham's descriptions of Italy's infectious evils. Peacham's later collection of essays,T/ze Truth o f Our Times, includes such pragmatic advice as how to conduct oneself in foreign inns, how to protect one's money, and what to eat."^^ The Complete Gentleman argues against insular humanist arguments like Elyot's or Rainolds's, as Peacham's defense of travel as experience illustrates. His work also argues against national fears of travels such as those articulated by Ascham and Hall. Travel and education are one. For Peacham, the benefits of knowledge which spring from travel far outweigh its dangers, and he seeks to convince his English readers of their need to advance their knowledge and cultivation by giving them "a taste how and what especially to observe in your travel" (170). John Milton's writings provide a glimpse of a seventeenth-century English traveller to Italy who enthusiastically undertook his journeys, who proclaimed his Englishness throughout Italy as a defense against its temptations, and who returned to England and in the course of defending his reputation, presented a justification for his travel abroad."^^ Milton's account of his travels appears in truly cals her, callidam & calidam solis fdiam, that is, the crafty and hot daughter of the Sunne" (267). 77Peacham, "Of Travel," in The Truth o f Our Times, pp. 217-222 of Heltzel's edition. ■ ^ ^ A stark contrast to Mowbray's view of exile from England in Richard IT. "A heavy sentence, my most sovereign leige,/... The language I have learnt these Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 187 1654 \nThe Second Defense o f the People o f England, in which Milton responds to "an anonymous libel entitled 'The Royal Blood Crying to Heaven for Vengeance on the English P a rric id e .U n lik e his anonymous attacker, Milton clearly establishes his own identity before launching into his argument, with an autobiography intended to illustrate his status as a respectable Englishman. His opponent claims that Milton, "having been expelled from the university of Cambridge, on account of his atrocities, had fled his country in disgrace and travelled into Italy.. .[and] when he returned, he wrote his book on divorce" (827b). It is to these charges of vice and loss of religion that Milton explicitly responds, and his first defense is to define Italy as the source of humanist learning: But why, sir, into Italy? Was it that, like another Saturn, I might find a hiding-place in Latium? No, it was because I well knew, and having since experienced, that Italy, instead of being, as you suppose, the general receptacle of vice, was the seat of civilization and the hospitable domicile of every species of erudition. (827b) To further reject the charges that his travels to Italy had adversely affected him, Milton’ s journeys in Italy become a Protestant adventure, because Milton insists forty years,/ My native English, now I must forgo,/ And now my tongue's use is to me no more/ Than an unstringed viol or a harp,/ Or like a cunning instrument cas'd up,/ Or being open, put into his hands/ That knows no touch to tune the harmony./ Within my mouth you have enjail'd my tongue,/ Doubly portcullis'd with my teeth and lips,/ And dull unfeeling barren ignorance/ Is made my jailer to attend on m e... What is thy sentence [then] but speechless death,/ Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?... Then thus I turn me from my country's light,/To dwell in solemn shades of endless night" (I.iii. 154-177). And Bullingbrook: .. every tedious stride I make/ Will but remember me what a deal of world/1 wander from the jewels that I love./ Must I not serve a long apprenticehood/ To foreign passages, and in the end,/ Having my freedom, boast of nothing else/ But that I was a journeyman to grief?" Later, he asserts, "Where e'er I wander, boast of this I can,/ Though banish'd, yet a true-born Englishman" (I.iii. 270-274, 308-9). When Bullingbrook returns, he complains, prior to ordering the execution of Richard's men, "[I] Have stoop'd my neck under your injuries,/ And sigh'd my English breath in foreign clouds,/ Eating the bitter bread of banishment... " (Ill.i. 19-21). ™Merritt Y. Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957), 817. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 188 on proclaiming his religion. He describes his pleasant stay with one John Baptista Manso, "a nobleman of distinguished rank and authority" who shows him great courtesy, but who, we learn, remains separated from Milton by religious differences. Milton recounts that, "On my departure he gravely apologized for not having shown me more civility, which he said he had been restrained from doing, because I had spoken with so little reserve on matters of religion" (829b). The Italian trip ends as a drama of the bold Englishman in Italy whose national and religious identity is never in question. The traveling Milton errs only in being too English, too Protestant: While I was on my way back to Rome, some merchants informed me that the English Jesuits had formed a plot against me if I returned to Rome, because I had spoken too freely on religion; for it was a rule which I laid down to myself in those places, never to be the first to begin any conversation on religion; but if any questions were put to me concerning my faith, to declare it without any reserve or fear. I, nevertheless, returned to Rome. I took no steps to conceal either my person or my character; and for about the space of two months I again openly defended, as I had done before, the reformed religion in the very metropolis of popery.. . . in all those places in which vice meets with so little discouragement, and is practised with so little shame, I never once deviated from the paths of integrity and virtue, and perpetually reflected that, though my conduct might escape the notice of men, it could not elude the inspection of God. At Geneva [on his way home] I held daily conferences with John Deodati, the learned professor of Theology. (829b-830a) Here, travel to Italy is defended as an activity which strengthens the Englishman's national pride and Protestant faith because of the pressures to which those aspects of the traveller's identity are subjected by Italian temptations. Milton was well aware of the humanist debates over travel, as his 1644 treatise O f Education, which he republished in 1673, illustrates. The intense humanist course of study which Milton delineates here seeks to "try all [students'] peculiar gifts of nature" to extract their excellencies, "which could not but mightily redound to the good of this nation, and bring into fashion again those old admired virtues and excellencies" (639a). Milton scorns French contributions to his students' Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 189 educations, which would lead them to become "mimics, apes and kickshaws," but he does allow, [I]f they desire to see other countries at three or four and twenty years of age, not to leam principles but to enlarge experience and make wise observation, they will by that time be such as shall deserve the regard and honor of all men where they pass, and the society and friendship of those in all places who are best and most eminent. And perhaps then other nations will be glad to visit us for their breeding, or else to imitate us in their own country. (639a) The defenses of travel presented by Peacham take on even larger proportions in Milton's vision of education. In Milton there is no mention of the dangers of travel, but rather he sees the Englishman's foreign journeys as opportunities for national pride and personal development. Obviously Milton's need for such self justification indicates that English cultural prejudices against travel in Italy were very much in existence; but in English humanist defenses, travel and education become linked to matters of national identity. Travel to Italy is defended as an activity which, in Milton's narrative, strengthens the Englishman's pride and Protestant faith because of the pressures to which those aspects of the traveller's identity are subjected by Italian temptations. When in On Education Milton visualizes his students inspiring foreign imitators, he is envying the strength of influence which Italian culture wielded in England.*^ Italy's obvious impact on English literature, manners, and fashions, especially in Elizabeth's court, made Italian culture prevalent enough in English ^°Mario Praz, in the introduction to The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. E/zor (Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1966), broadly outlines movements of influence between Italy and England, noting that "The direction of the influence [of literary relations between the two countries] was reversed when England's position shifted from the fringe to the centre of Western culture. Hence the Italian ignorance of even first-rate literary works from that marginal province of European culture to which pre-eighteenth century England belonged, and the English ignorance of Italian literary works as soon as, from the end of that century, Italy's position became to a great extent peripheral" (3). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 190 society that it became the subject of common stereotypes. Easily identified cultural stereotypes of Italy as corrupt and violent, and of Italians as wanton, deceitful and passionate appear repeatedly in Elizabethan literature. The male Italian, either a ruffian or effeminate in his fastidious manners and excessive fashions, came to stand for what the travelling Englishman should avoid becoming, whereas Italian women were for the most part immoral but fascinating, and certainly to be avoided. These pejorative images of Italians appear in condemnations of foreign contamination and discouragement of foreign travel; they also come to be used in both real and fictional travellers' accounts of journeys in Italy, as devices for clearly defining Italians as non-English. Thus we can see that humanists' concern with travel took various forms. Considerations of travel appear frequently in treatises on the education of the young, as in Ascham's The Scholemaster, Cleland's Institution o f a Young Noble Man, and Peacham's The Complete Gentleman, as well as in Milton's O f Education. Hall's Quo Vadis?, of course, is concerned with nothing else. While Cleland's and Peacham's support for foreign travel separates them from Ascham's theories of education, all three view humanist learning as intrinsic to the moral development of the English gentleman, and often as the reason that travel can occur at all. Defenses of humanist education become, as well, arguments for knowledge by experience and example. Encouragement of travel springs from standard arguments concerning a virtuous man's involvement in an active life as opposed to a contemplative life. Cicero, the model of the philosopher statesman who combined a scholarly life with civic involvement, serves as an example for the humanist's traveller. The vita contemplative and the vita activa are each, on their own, inadequate. As the early humanist Leonardo Bruni writes in 1420, "The contemplative life is, to be sure, the more divine and rare.. .but the active is more Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 191 excellent with respect to the common good."** In their attempts to counteract anxieties about travel, English humanists champion the traveller as one who can achieve a synthesis of the two. Ulysses' "Hearbe called Moly": Defenses Against Travel's Dangers and Critics In the face of the virulent attacks on and intense anxiety surrounding travel to Italy, classical antiquity, as a model in thought and literature and as a source of moral ideals and development, comes frequently to be used in defending the traveller. The English traveller calls on well-worn humanist defenses of education to circumvent the stigma attached to any traveller, and to justify travel specifically to Italy. In the midst of early modem, and especially Reformation, England's ambivalence toward Italy and Italian influences, humanism is invoked as an intellectual armor against, as well as a compelling reason for, willingly encountering the multiple dangers which confront an Englishman in Italy. Coryat comments that ideally, the traveller would "carry with thee Vlysses hearbe called Moly which is mentioned by Homer” as an antidote to Italy's Circean effects (266), calling up the image of the valiant sojourner who survives attempts on his virtue. At the same time that such references call on classical images and illustrate the writer's education, they also come to serve as the Moly themselves, for the traveller in Italy and back at home. The same descriptions used by Ascham in hazily defining Italy's ominous enticements are employed by English travellers in order to deflect the efficacy of those temptations; and naming courtesans "sirens," as Ascham did with alarm, instead becomes a way for the humanist traveller to justify his being within the courtesans' reaches in the first * * Cited in Donald R. Kelley, Renaissance Humanism (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 21-22. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 192 place, because the Englishman assumes the role of the valiant traveller of antiquity. The love of travel has less to do with women than with classical literature, travellers protest. Although he may be abroad in dangerous foreign climes, the travelling Englishman's writings assure the reader that his mind remains in the library. As the English traveller had not only to protect himself against the dangers in Italy, but also to justify his travels to the Englishmen at home, references to classical learning are invoked in journals of English travellers to Italy to aid the traveller in the face of temptation or danger; and classic humanist defenses appear, written by travellers as they seek to explain their journeys within such a hotbed of corruption and sin. In his study of the English traveller George Sandys, Jonathan Haynes points out. Young gentlemen were regularly shipped off in the train of ambassadors or with voyages of discovery. They should be distinguished from the trained scientific observers— the young gentlemen had no discernible function. But they had read the literature of advice for travelers, and kept ajournai, and when they returned this journal was circulated. Often it was their first public performance. If it was good enough it could be used to advertise their parts and education, and might lead to employment... The significant point about this literature is that it requires the author both to prove himself as a responsible observer and to show his grip on his own culture, his cultivation, and to combine both elements with style and (if possible) sprezzatura.^- Haynes's study of Sandys's travels seeks to "resurrect a minor classic of the English Renaissance" and to "show us English humanism in its fullest flowering" (13, 18). He uses Sandys as "an exemplary case study" to attempt to grasp Renaissance humanist ideas of culture and history. To do so, he sets Sandys's book in the historical context of the travel genre (beginning with medieval pilgrimage accounts and going on to professional travel records such as Richard ^-Jonathan Haynes, The Humanist as Traveler: George Sanys's Relation of a Journey begun An. Dom. 1610 (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986), 36-37. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 193 Hakluyt's collections often utilize), analyzes Sandys's book from a literary viewpoint, and then explores in detail the four sections of the Relation to define the distinctive hermeneutic operating within each of them. In doing so, Haynes demonstrates the English humanist's extreme reliance on classical references as modes of interpretation and illustrates how, in Sandys's treatment, history is reduced to a moral spectacle based on the Christian pattern of sin followed by retribution. Haynes examines Sandys's journal as a work of literature and as a document which provides evidence of humanist thought. As he points out, the journal acted as a youth's first public performance, and therefore reveals the author's earnest effort to display his talent. When the English traveller was traveling to Italy, the journal took on an additional, necessary role in justifying and explaining the author's activities. The trappings of humanism which appear in travellers' journals of Protestant England- -constant analogy to classical tales, allegorizing in classical terms, constructing travel experience as training for civic contribution upon the traveller's return— very deliberately work against the pervasive social stereotypes and suspicions Elizabethans held for Italians, and can be read as a specific literature of justification.*^ George Sandys's 1615 record of his travels displays the consummate humanist who experiences the present through the mediation of classical, symbolic references: for Sandys, Italy exists only through her ancient authors. His Relation o f a Journey presents, in carefully crafted journal form, Sandys's * * Haynes outlines clearly Sandys's use of the classical to mediate his interactions with the foreign, especially Italian, world. Haynes's study of Sandys as a travelling humanist has been invaluable; to his picture of Sandys I add the idea that this travel journal, which ends with a trip to a corrupt modem Italy, has been produced very carefully to explain the traveller Sandys's 'safe' exposure to such a dangerous world, and that Sandys's work is written with the intent of countering specific English cultural prejudices against Italy. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 194 travels through Turkey, Egypt, the Holy Land, and Italy. The varying attitudes of the English humanist toward Islam and the sites of ancient history are apparent in Sandys's accounts. Haynes notes that Sandys's "predominant rhetorical stance [in the journal].. .locates him in a library rather than on the road" (46-47). Such an attitude strangely allies him with the critics of travel, such as Cleland, Hall, and Howell, who argue that the Englishman need never leave the comfort of his study to gain knowledge and experience. As an English scholar abroad in the dangerous land of Circes, Sandys assumes in his journal the posture of the humanist at home with his books. Indeed, as he finds so little in Rome to correspond to the culture which inspired humanism, Sandys fills much of his journal with descriptions of seventeenth-century Rome— but in terms only of its classical ruins: The plaine that lies between these hi Is and the Citie, is repleate with mines: where are to be seene the foundations of Temples, Theaters, See. vnder which, no doubt but many admirable antiquities haue their sepulture. Approved by that triall made by Alphonsus Pimentellus the Vice-roy.. .When hauing remoued the vpper earth, it was their chance to light on an entire Temple, although cmshed together: the walls and pauement of polished marble, circled with a great Corinthian wreath, with pillars, and Epistals of like workmanship; together with a number of defaced figures excellently wrought: the worke as well of the Grecians as Latines. There they also found the statue of Neptune, his beard of a blew colour: of Saturne, of Priapus (for he held in his hand the heft of a cycle:) of Vesta with the top of her haire wound round in a fillet. . . . (137) As in Coryat's travelogue, the English traveller describes in great detail places of worship, the men's appearance, a woman's hairstyle. Yet, with Sandys, they are all part of classical mins. Coryat mediates his experience of the Italian with witty asides and commentary; Sandys experiences Italy as ancient Rome. Rather than interacting with the Italy of his own time, Sandys instead conducts a species of literary studies— reading monuments as manuscripts, confronting the sites he sees as texts to be interpreted. At home in England, scholars such as Rainolds and Mulcaster consult classical texts as a means of asserting their views on present- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 195 day travel. Sandys similarly consults classical texts as a means of seeing present- day Italy. Haynes comments, "when faced with ruins he does not question them closely, but moves instead to establish a connection with a literary source, which provides the energy and direction of his treatment" (137). In its heightened and abstract picture of Renaissance Italy, Sandys’ s journal displays a travelling humanist’ s response to anti-Italian sentiment: he chooses to describe the country in symbolic terms which have already often been defended as morally acceptable. Italy stands out from Sandys’ s other destinations: while Islam and Egypt can be described merely as strange, unintelligible spectacles, and the Holy Land is infused with the imposing presence of the Bible, Italy as the classical world "speaks to Sandys in a way the other worlds through which he passed do not" (140). He can ignore the alienation which he feels at viewing what he considers a decline from antiquity by seeing Italy exclusively through that accessible humanist lense. While Sandys’ s reliance on classical allusions might seem an extreme or idiosyncratic example of the utmost "humanist reading" of Italy, a similar tendency in describing Italian travel appears in other journals. Despite their varied agendas as historian, author of a travel manual, and courtier, the approaches in the accounts of William Thomas’ s The historié o f Italie, Jerome Turler’ s The Traveiler o f Jerome Turler, and Sir Thomas Hoby’ s Travels and Life all translate the current corruptions visible in vernacular Italy through the lingua franca of classical reference. These works, all of them sixteenth-century reactions to Italy, were written earlier than the discussions of travel found in Peacham, Milton, and others. Yet the approach to travel found in these texts— guided by the writers’ love of classical learning— models the connection between the act of writing and the act of travelling which characterizes later travel writing. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 196 Both William Thomas and Jerome Turler provide examples of travelling Englishmen whose interest in Italy is constantly mediated by the glory of ancient Rome. Thomas wrote The historié o f Italie, the first English history of Italy, in 1549. He intended the account, completed after five years' residence in Italy, to enable Englishmen through selected examples from Italian history, to see "what a numbre of beautifull citees have been edified, and what great countries have been enriched by peace and concorde, as also how many goodly thynges and wonderfull regions have been destroied by striefe and warre" (Sig. A30- Full of antiquarian and political information. The historié o f Italie provides the English reader with a guide to Italy, accompanied by Thomas's learned commentary. Thomas's reflections on the ruins of Rome are a fascinating example of an English Protestant's, and classical scholar's, reading of the city: Thinking to finde a great coutentacion in the sight of Rome, because that amongest al the citees of the worlde none hath been more famous than it, I disposed my selfe to goe thither. But whan I came there, and behelde the wonderfull majestee of buildynges that the onely rootes therof doe yet represent, the huge temples, the infinite great palaices, the unmeasurable piliers, moste parte of one peece, fine marbel, and well wrought, the goodly arches of triumphe, the vaines, the conductes of water, the images as well of brasse as of marble, the Obeliskes, and a noumbre of other lyke thynges, not to be founde againe thoroughout an whole worlde: imaginyng withall, what majestee the citee myghte be of, whan all these thynges flourished. Than didde it greeve me to see the onelie Jewell, myrrour, majestres, and beautie of this worlde, that never had hir lyke, nor (as I thynke) never shall, lie so desolate and disfigured, that there is no lamentable case to be hade, or lothesome thyng to be seen, that male be compared to a small parte of it. (Sig. F20 Thomas views the ruins of Rome through their former glory, "imagining withall" how they must have looked in classical times. He goes on to ponder the historical events that led to such a state: Neverthelesse whan I remembred againe the occasions, wherof these glorieuse thynges have growen, what noumbres of warres the Romaynes have mainteygned, with infinite bloudsheddyng, destructions of whole countreys, ravishmentes of chast women, sacke, spoyle, tributes. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 197 oppression of common welthes, and a thousande other tyrannies, without the whiche the Romaines could never have achieved the perfection of so many wonders as mine eye dyd there beholde: Than perceived I, ho we just the judgement of god is, that hath made those antiquitees to remayne as a soule spoyle of the Romaine pride, and for a witnesse to the worldes ende of their tyranny. So that I wote not whether of these two is greater either the glorie of that fame, that the Romaines purchased with theyr wonderfull conquestes: or their present miserable astate, with the deformitee of theyr antiquities. (Sig. The pulls on Thomas's sympathies correspond to the two identifying features of the acceptable English traveller: an interest in Italy only as the site of the classical world, and a constant awareness of one's Protestantism.^'* In addition, Thomas displays the Protestant's urge to read in the physical world the signs of God's justice: the ruins remain as God's reminder of the Romans' sins, a "witnesse to the worldes ende." In regarding this "destroied Rome," Thomas seeks reasons for its decay. He concludes that "nother the barbarouse nacions, nor yet tyme ought to be blamed for it, but rather the greedie beastlinesse of them, that bothe within the citee and without, regarded not to spoyle those noble antiquitees, to gamisshe and beautifie therwith theyr private buildyngs" (Sig. G40. Contemporary, "beastly" forces conspire to destroy the remnants of classical magnificence. In Thomas's description, the Vatican, filled with "manie beauty full and fine thynges," possesses grandeur because of the literal pieces of classical history it contains: Thomas remarks that "above all the newe buildyng, if it were finished, wolde be the goodliest thyng of this worlde, not onelie for the an tike piliers that have been taken out of the antiquitiees, and bestowed there, but also for the greatnesse and excellent good proporcion that it hath." But his praise does not come unqualified: "Neverthelesse it hath been so many yerees adoyng, and is yet so unperfect, that ^ ‘ *For example, Thomas insistently calls the pope "bishop of Rome" throughout his work. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 198 most men stand in dout, whether ever it shalbe finished or no" (Sig. K4V). Even as he marvels at the sights (and sites) he describes, Thomas's account is careful to illustrate his resistance to Italy's temptations. The lengthy descriptions of the Roman antiquities which Thomas includes in his History, interspersed with mythical and historical interpretations of the sights, constantly remind the reader of Thomas's reasons for remaining in Italy for so long. His classical interests proclaim the travels as educational.*^ Turler's interst in antiquities varied slightly from Thomas's historical viewpoint, but his justifications for travel follow familiar humanist lines of argument for travel as experience. His 1575 traveller gains knowledge by comparing the social, economic and military features of foreign lands with those of his own. Aware of his critics, Turler acknowledges, "There is an auntient complaint made by many that our cuntreymen usually bringe three thinges with them out of Italye: a naughty conscience, an empty Purse, and a weake stomache" (65-66).*^ Yet, despite such complaints, Turler advocates time abroad, *Hn "The Strangeness of Strangers: English Impressions of Italy in the Sixteenth Century," Quademi d'italianistica Vol. I No. 1 (1980): 46-63, Kenneth R. Bartlett cites Thomas (as well as John Milton) as an example of a glowing English acceptance of Italy, one half of the "powerful dichotomy, a species of schizophrenia, in the English appreciation of the peninsula" (46). In Bartlett's view, Thomas's "praise is warm and sincere, his appreciation of all aspects of the nation, both ancient and contemporary, deep and well-considered" (51). To such an open-minded, favorable view Bartlett contrasts "the xenophobia... disguised as patriotism" of "Italophobes," who with "malicious" intent used "unjust," "vile caricatures" of Italians (60-61). After issuing such judgments on his Elizabethan subjects, Bartlett concludes, rather anticlimactically, that "the division [between lover and haters of Italy] came down to a matter of personal taste, perhaps occasioned by particular circumstances" (59). Such a view, however, seems reductive, ignoring the complexities of the background to the debate on travel, as well as the tensions present within a text such as Thomas's, which, in its turn to antiquity and its criticism of contemporary Italy, evidences something more than unquestioning adoration of the Italian. *^Jerome Turler. The Traveiler o f Jerome Turler, devided into two Bookes (London: William How for Abraham Weale, 1575). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 199 warning the Englishman against an insular view of the world. To those who refuse to leave their own country, he scoffs, "let them then be wyse only in theyr owne concedes, and contempne others in respecte of themselves, beynge puffed up with an opinion of knowledge, a thinge so aevell, that a more woorse or more dangerous in all the Worlde can bee none devised" (115). Like travel's critics, Turler utilizes geography to make his argument: For natue & God the make of all thinge, hath not given us feete for intent wee shoulde walke up and downe in our owne Citie or Cuntrey only, but that if occasion serve wee shuld also go see and frequent forreine nacions also: for else doubtlesse God and Nature woulde have shut up the wayes and forbidden the passedge to straunge Cuntries. (113-114) Unlike Hall, who sees God's geography as an order to stay at home in England, Turler reads into the topography a commandment to travel. As he points out, "Y ea,. . . we shuld now have no Cosmography at all, which contayneth the discription of the whole world, nor Topography, which comprehendeth the description of certain private places: unies it were graunted unto us through the benefite of travelinge" (31). But Turler appeals also to the reader's curiosity about his own book knowledge: And what can be more delectable, then to beeholde the things whe[re]of thou hast read sumthing or heard of other, and againe to beehole in minde and contemplation those things which thou hast somtime seene, and to applie them to thy u se .. . . (114) Turler's entire treatise addresses the reader as does this appeal, showing the complementary nature of travel and erudition. While the text is laden with classical references, it at the same time traverses the sites of Italy, provides interesting details and descriptions. For example, Turler describes a volcano's eruption in the "Realme of Naples, which they call Tripergula, and neare unto the village which wee shewed Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 200 before was sometime Ciceroes Académie," as a dramatic narrative interspersed with scholarly facts: not many yeere agoe, that is to say in the yeere of our Lorder MDxxxviii. there suddeinly arose an hill out of the grounde, which remaineth unto thys day, conteining in compassé about foure my les. Beffore this Hill arose, there were continually Earthquakes in that place the space of certein dayes without intermission, and fiers of Brimstonie substaunce, and of that liquour whych commonlye is called Oleum Petrae, Gyle of the Rocke. But anone, when thys her[e] beegan to growe to a great flame, and when the matter of the fyer was somedeale spent, there insued suche tumbling out of stones, and such flying up of Ashes, fierce windes, and horible perturbacion of the ayre: that it was feared that all the whole frame of the worlde would fall. (157-158) At times Turler's interest in antiquities borders on what Einstein describes as "archaeological" (139): Turler relates with delight the reported unearthing of a classical relic: Hereof a sufficient witnes is Raphaell Volaterranus, writing, that in his time in the way called Via Appia nigh Rome, there was digged up the body of a woman, embaulmed with precious oyntments, whole, uncorrupted, layd up in a Coffin, and covered with a Marble Stone, having beetweene her feete (as he sayth) a burning Candle whom the liquor of the oyntment nourished, but suddenly went out as soone as the Marble coveringe was remooved: adding moreover, that divers supposed that it was the body of Tulliola, Tallies Daughter whom he loved dearely. (30) The humanist's pleasure in travel to Italy originates, not in the alluring countryside or the lascivious women, but with the ties to the classical— a love that is ordained within the pursuit of classical wisdom. With the claim that his book is the first devoted to the precepts of travel, Turler constructs an instructional manual "conteining a notable discourse of the maner, the order of traueiling ouersea, or into straunge and forrein Countreys.. .[and] comprehending an excellent description of the most delicious Realme of Naples in Italy. A Woorke very pleasaunt for all persons to reade, and right profitable and necessarie vnto all such as are minded to Traueyll" (Pine-Coffin 66). Turler here acts as a guide for the young traveller, interpreting sites and illustrating the proper response to a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 201 contemporary Italy. In the tradition of the humanist educational manual, Turler's guide to travel has its defenses built into its structure. Sir Thomas Hoby, trained at Cambridge and by extensive travel for a post of ambassador to France^” ^ , traveled to Venice, Rome, Naples and, uncommonly for an Englishman, to Sicily in 1548-1550 and in Northern Italy in 1554 and 1555. The travels and life o f Sir Thomas Hoby, Kt. o f Bisham Abbey, written by himself, 1547-1564 is an example of the type of careful, protective journal which James Cleland would later recommend for the English traveler, and which served to establish a gentleman at the court upon his return to England. In his journal Hoby copies a considerable number of inscriptions from the ancient ruins he visits; he frequently quotes Latin poets. Hoby maintains a cautious distance from the Italian scenes in which he participates, and his journal reflects the almost antiseptic, impartial stance which he adopts. For example, when Hoby witnesses a scene of unjust and shocking brutality, he reserves comment: There came in another companye of Gentlemen Venetiens in another maskerie: and one of them went in like maner to the same gentlewoman that the Duke was entreating to daunse with him, and somewhat shuldered the Duke, which was a great injurie. Upon that, the Duke thrust him from him. The gentleman owt with his Dagger and gave him a strooke above the short ribbes with the point, but it did him no hurt, bicause he had on a jacke of maile. The Duke ymmediatlie feelinge the point of his dagger, drue his rap ire, whereupon the gentleman fledde into a chambere there at hand and shutt the dore to him. And as the Duke was shovinge to gete the dore open, a varlett of the gentlemannes came behinde him, and with a pistolese gave him his deathes wound and clove his heade in such sort as the one side honge over his shouldger by a litle skynne. He lyved abowt two dayes after this stroke. There was no justice had against this gentleman, but after he had awhile absented himself from the Citie the matter was forgotten. The varlett fledd, and was no more heard of. This Gentleman was of the house of Giustiniani of Venice.®^ ^"^Elizabeth sent Hoby to France in March of 1566 shortly after he was knighted, but he died soon after in Paris on July 13 of that same year, and so was unable to fulfill the career for which his travels had prepared him (Masello 79). ^^Cited by Sir Walter Raleigh in his introduction to The Book o f the Courtier by Sir Thomas Hoby, David Nutt (London, 1900), xxx-xxxi. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 202 Hoby writes in a historiographer’ s voice to narrate this scene of foreign violence and passion— apparently he remains untouched by the incident. His lack of comment or emotion in regard to what is constructed as an excessively 'Italian' scene (among others) stands in sharp contrast to the infrequent occasions in which his opinions appear. Hoby's personal views intrude only when he comments on what he considers foolish Catholic superstitions and ceremony, and when the antiquities of Italy incite his admiration. The Pantheon he calls "the fayrest and perfectest antiquitie abowt Rome," and the contemporary work of the Florentine artist Giovanni Agnolo Montorsoli catches his interest because of its blend of aesthetic value with a classical subject: "I saw a fountine of verie white marble graven with the storie of Acteon and such other.. .which to my eyes is one of the fairest peece of worke that ever I sawe" (Masello 72). Hoby allows emotion to enter his journal only when appropriate by English standards: when defending the "true" Protestant faith, and when commenting enthusiastically on evidence of antiquity. Even to the impassionate English observer, however, the beautiful and fecund landscape of Italy implicitly assumes the power of the land of Circes, and as we have seen, Hoby's descriptions of the countryside seem to suggest that the beauties in Italy appeal to all the senses in the same way that the elements on Circe's island overwhelmed Odysseus's men. But Hoby had fortified himself against such Italian blandishments through Protestant study in Strasburg; after his return to England, Hoby's translation of Castiglione's II Cortegiano was printed by William Seres. Although The Courtyer was a translation of a vernacular Italian text, it came with impressive credentials which protected Hoby from the dangers of its Italianness. The printer Seres' chief output was Protestant theology. Hoby dedicated his Epistle o f the Translator to Lord Henry Hastings, another Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 203 strong Puritan who "made himself conspicuous by his lavish support of those hot headed preachers."*® In addition, a letter from the humanist Sir John Cheke addressed to Hoby was included, laying down the right principles of translation into English such as, "I am of this opinion, that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangled with borrowing of other tunges.. . ."® ° Knowledge and the humanist interest in translation become, with Cheke's advice, allied with national pride and purity. There is other evidence of travellers returning from Italy to publish respectable humanist works for their English contemporaries. George Sandys produced Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd, and Represented in Figures in 1626. The Metamorphoses had been translated and probably published by William Caxton in 1480, and Golding published a version in 1567. As with the concepts of The Courtyer, the Metamorphoses' popularity in the original language was well established: Ovid was prescribed reading in many schools and was a standard text in humanist courses of study. Sandys continues to interpret Ovid as he "Englishes" it, displaying for his contemporaries a massive erudition in his version of the classical text. Sandys was considered, for both his Relation and the Ovid, one of the major literary talents of the day, rememberd by Dryden as "the ingenious and learned Sandys, the best versifier of the former age."®' The English traveller justified and excused his presence in Italy by delivering his perceptions of that country in humanist terms, and by producing *® M y information comes from Raleigh's introduction in a 1900 edition of Hoby's translation. ®°John Cheke, A Letter of Syr J. Cheekes to his loving frind Mayster Thomas Hoby, dated July 16, 1557 and inserted into the 1561 (and 1900) edition of The Courtyer. ®'Quoted by Haynes, pp. 14-15. My textual information on the Ovid comes from Mary M. Innes' introduction to her translation of The Metamorphoses o f Ovid (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962), 24-25. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 204 learned and English literary works upon his return. Sir Henry Wotton, who served as ambassador to Venice under James I and thus spent nearly fifteen years in the perilous climate of Italy,^^ similarly used humanist references liberally when describing the Italy he experienced; and he, like other Elizabethan travellers, also appears eager to illustrate his having withstood the temptations of Italy and of having remained a true Englishman. This time as ambassador was not Wotton's first exposure to the dangers of Italy, although even twenty-five years earlier, the urge to preserve Englishness appears in his correspondence. In his youthful Continental travels, Wotton appears to have practiced his friend John Donne's counsel to go "as/ Fishes glide, leaving no print where they passe,/ Nor making any sound. .. in the world's sea"; he returns from abroad untouched by the waters through which he p a s s e d . ^ 3 Donne praises Wotton's forbearance in 1598, commending him. Whom, free from German schismes, and lightnesse Of France, and faire Italies faithlesnesse. Having from these suck'd all they had of worth. And brought home that faith, which you carried forth, I throughly love, (lines 65-69)^'' A proper English traveller, Wotton in his youth gains education but gives up nothing of his English faith or steadfastness. So, too, Wotton asserts immediately ^-Wotton was in Rome, Venice and Florence in 1592-93 and again in Venice c. 1597-1602. He later served three terms as amassador to Venice: 1604-12, 1616- 19, and 1621-24. ^^Donne and Wotton maintained a friendship for nearly all of Donne's life; they met in 1584, when Wotton was sixteen and Donne twelve, and when Donne died, it was Wotton to whom everyone looked to write the first life of the poet-priest (Wotton's protégé Izaak Walton finally did so). Ted-Larry Pebworth and Claude J. Summers have argued in "Thus Friends Absent Speake": The Exchange of Verse Letters between John Donne and Henry Wotton" that Donne's and Wotton's verse letters written during the "ominous breach between Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex that lasted through July and August of 1598 and threatened to paralyze the govemment... illuminate the personalities of ambitious young men" (361). Donne's advice to Wotton appears in "Sir, more then kisses" (371). Modem Philology (May 1984): 361-377. ^'♦Pebworth and Summers 372. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 205 in his first publication after his return to England in 1624, that he is still a "plain Kentish man," explaining: I have been abroad some part of his [my most deare and gracious SOVERAIGNE] civil Service; yet when I came home, and was again resolved into mine own simplicity, I found it fitter for my Penne . . . to deale with these plain Compilements, and tractable Materials; then with the Laberynths and Mysteries of Courts and States; And lesse presumption for me, who have long contemplated a famous Republique, to write now of Architecture, then it was anciently for Hippodamus the Milesian, to write of Republiques, who was himself but an A r c h i t e c t . ^ ^ In his preface, Wotton is careful to establish that, although he participated in the foreign intrigues which were part of his ambassadorial role in Venice, he ‘ maintained throughout an Englishness which needed only England and scholarly work to reappear. After many years abroad, Wotton's book makes a public declaration that he remains untouched. Just as Sandys publishes his humanist journal and translation of Ovid, and Hoby an English Courtyer, Wotton presents an erudite pamphlet on architecture, drawing from his knowledge of famous Italian buildings, to justify his time spent abroad. His choice of subject was appropriate, as at that time architecture was really the only art noticed by English travellers, perhaps because of the physical continuity with antiquity which the buildings present (Einstein 147). The persistent appearance of humanist arguments for Italian travel despite its acknowledged dangers, and the pervasiveness of humanist references and techniques in describing Italy can be seen as conscious attempts to oppose the anti-Italian prejudices so open in Tudor society, and thus to justify the travelling. By viewing dangerous Italy through a humanist lense, the English traveller avoids the immediate dangers which beset him: the Venetian courtesan is not really a ^^From The Elements o f Architecture, Collected by Henry Wotton Kt., From the Best Authors and Examples, 1624, in Reliquiae Wottonianae, London, 1651 (198). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 206 whore, but a siren who sings to the travelling, historically safe, noble Ulysses, just as the threat of Catholicism and the irresisitably persuasive Jesuits become the legendary Circes, who turns men into beasts but who is ultimately tamed. Humanist defenses of the usefulness of travel argue that it provides young men with experience and the character desirable in future advisors to their monarch. Fitting such defenses into a familiar classical structure of the educational defense or the classical translation, these humanist defenses similarly work against the distrust and fear of Italianate things voiced by such learned men as Ascham, Bishop Joseph Hall, and Antony Munday. But if travel to Italy can be constructed as a duty to the state and as training prior to serving England's ruler, and if the traveller ventures forth into Italy armed with careful warnings and a prescribed course of action by which he will properly benefit in the development of his character, then the worries that he will return a poisoned, changed Italian beast appear less warranted. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 207 Excursus John Wolfe: Printer, Pirate and Propagandist The life and career of the Elizabethan printer John Wolfe offer a history of the relationship between the mechanics of printing and the biases of his society at a time when print was assuming an increased social function. A flamboyant and high-profile character, he led the Stationers' Rebellion of 1583, challenging royal control and exclusive privileges in printing. He is also known, both before and after this noble campaign in the name of reform,^^ for working in more wily ways against printing restrictions. A famous "book p ira te ,W o lfe unhesistantly printed thousands of copies of the Psalms in metre, catechisms, grammars and a whole assortment of patented books and undersold the privileged stationers in provincial markets. Probably the first to print an Italian book in England,^^ Wolfe went on to become "the most prolific and important printer in Italian during Elizabeth's reign.He is especially known for a series of forged editions of Machiavelli and Aretino which caused bibliographers in the early 1900's some 96Wolfe presented himself in heroic terms during his bids for printing privileges: when Barker, a fellow Stationer, "sent for the said Wolfe and demanded of him why he printyed the Copies belonging to his office: he answered, 'Because I will live'." And even more extravagantly, "Wolfe being admonished that he being but one so meane a man should not presume to contrarie her Highnesse governmente: 'Tush,' said he, 'Luther was but one man, and reformed all the world for religion, and I am that one man, that must and will reforme the govemment in this trade.'" Cited in Joseph Loewenstein, "For a History of Literary Property: John Wolfe's Reformation," English Literary Renaissance, 18 (Autumn 1988), 402. ^ ■ ^A n occupation explored extensively by Cyril Bathurst Judge in Elizabethan Book Pirates (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1934). Judge devotes his third chapter entirely to John Wolfe and his associate Roger Ward. '^^Ubaldini's Vita di Carlo Magno, 1581. The author notes this status in the preface to the second edition, although according to Harry Sellers there is some question as to whether a certain Cathechismo, cioè Forma breve per amaestrate i fanciulli, translated from Latin by Michelangelo Florio, could have been printed in England during the years 1549-1553. In "Italian Books Printed in England Before 1640," The Library, series 4, 5 (1924): 105-06. 99Sellers, 108. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 208 confusion. The forgeries are particularly interesting because of the flair with which Wolfe accomplished them: beautifully printed, the books include elaborate prefaces which, under fictional imprints, construct complicated genealogies of the texts and their supposed Italian printers. Wolfe's motivations for these fictions remain unresolved and have been debated: some see the detailed falsehoods as strictly financial decisions, others, as examples of Wolfe's theatricality, playfulness or perspicuous judging of society. While certainly these explanations provide partial answers, they also illuminate, as Joseph Loewenstein points out, that "the bibliographic history of Wolfe's exports could still use some tidying up."ioo Wolfe, himself known as someone of "Machiavellian devices, produced these eight Italian texts during a time when Italy and Italians occupied ambivalent positions in English society. I propose that his surreptitiously produced Machiavellis and Aretinos illustrate a pragmatic approach to existent cultural stereotypes of Italians. Wolfe's texts capitalize on fears and desires in Elizabethan society so as to create a paradigm for the propaganda which, with the advent of the printing press, became an often-used tool of Elizabeth's government in the wars against her internal and external enemies. Into the atmosphere of admiration and distrust of travel to Italy, the returned traveller, and all things Italian came Wolfe's forged Italian texts, appearing between the years of 1584 and 1589.'°- He printed five fictitious ‘°°Loewenstein, 396. ""Christopher Barker, Upper Warden of the Stationers' Company and one of many victims of Wolfe's book piracy, comments in 1582 to Wolfe in exasperation, "Wolfe, leave your Machiavellian devices, and conceit of your forreigne wit, which you have gained by gadding from countrey to countrey, and tell me plainly, if you meane to deale like an honest man." Quoted in Loewenstein, 397, and more fully by Clifford Chalmers Huffman in Elizabethan Impressions: John Wolfe and his Press (New York: AMS Press, 1988), 3. James Howell's 1642 Instructions fo r Forreine Travel provides a warning against an altogether different kind of Italian book pirate: "In the perambulation of Italy young Travellers must be cautious, among divers other to avoyd one kind Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 209 editions of the writings of Machiavelli and three of those of Pietro Aretino. All eight texts include varying, but similar prefaces in Italian which, under imaginary printers' names and locations, explain situations in which the books were produced. Wolfe printed many other Italian texts during the same years, of differing content and interest, but none others under these false imprints. Why those texts? Why print them surreptitiously? Why create the elaborate fictions in the prefaces? All three of these questions can be answered to a certain degree with the explanation of Wolfe's opportunistic personality and his ability to seize a chance to improve his status as someone outside the official book printing trade: these books could make him money. But the success of his opportunism indicates larger social forces at work. The Italian books presented Wolfe with opportunity for several reasons. Although London was located in the "ultime parti di Europa" and was not known for the quality of its books (English type was less sophisticated than Continental productions, and writers of the time complained that English printers used inferior paper and allowed many misprints and co rruptions),W olfe discovered that he was free from the restrictions on of Furbery or cheat, whereunto many are subject, which is, that in som great Townes, specially Rome and Venice, there are certain Brokers of manuscripts, who are no other then Mountibanks, in that kind, that use to insinuate themselves to the society of strangers, and bring them with a shew of reservedness such and such papers magnifying them for rare extraordinary peeces, and dangerous to be divulg'd, whereas they prove oftentimes old flat things that either are printed already in Te, oro politico, Boterus, or Bodin; Or they are some absolet peeces reflecting happily upon the times of Cosmo de Medici, or touching the expulsion of the Jesuits out of the territories of St. Marc, or the creation of some Pope, and such like, which do nothing at all advantage one to be acquainted with the present face of things; In the Court of Spain there are likewise such Interlopers, and I have known divers Dutch Gentlemen grosly guld by this cheat, and som English bor'd also through the nose this way, by paying excessive prices for them" (43- 44). ‘°^A. Gerber on p. 201 in "All of the Five Fictitious Italian Editions of Writings of Machiavelli and Three of Those of Pietro Aretino Printed by John Wolfe of London (1584-1588)," Modem Language Notes 22 (1907), cites documents from Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 210 printing imposed by the Catholic Church. Neither Machiavelli nor Aretino could be reprinted by Italian printers as they normally would have been because they were included in the recently-established Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the Roman Catholic Church. Machiavelli's works, already prohibited in Rome in 1549, were printed and read in Italy until 1559, when the whole of the Works appeared in the Index, ending open printing of them in Italy for over two centuries. Catholic treatment of Aretino's works was similar: their pornographic content made the Index in 1557 and 1558, and the eradication of texts of Aretino was "so effective that his name disappears completely from Italian books of the century."”^ Consequently, there was a good market for contraband reprints introduced from abroad. By the late eighties, a substantial part of Wolfe's output was being marketed at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which during the seventies and eighties was "Catholic Europe’s chief source for prohibited books; a thriving smuggling industry brought indexed titles into V en ice."W o o d field is careful to point out, however, that It would be wrong to imagine that [Wolfe] was printing only for a foreign market and did not expect to sell any of these books at home, since a promising English market for Italian books had recently been developing after a generation in which Englishmen had come to be more and more interested in Italy and the Italian Renaissance... The continental market was already at [Wolfe's] disposal because he had been very successful with his editions of the Latin classics, which he started to send to the Frankfurt Fair as early as 1581; while at home sales were guaranteed by the enormous contemporary interest in Machiavelli, whose works, especially The Prince, are mentioned again and again in the literature and records of the time. The same was true of Pietro Aretino. It was evident the Holy Inquisition at Venice in 1592 in which Giordano Bruno explains reasons for printing books in England despite the country's poor reputation for printing. Denis B. Woodfield also supplies details of the poor reputation English printing had acquired, in Surreptitious Printing in England, 1550-1640 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1973), 9. •“^Discussed by Sellers, pp. 110-111. Also in Woodfield, pp. 8-9, who suggests an article in the Catholic Encyclopedia under "Censorship" for the best short history of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. ■ “^Loewenstein, pp. 395-396. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 211 that in England as well as on the continent there would be a demand for their books in the original Italian; and because of the Index this demand could not be met by Italian printers. (9)“^ Thus by printing the Italian texts under false Italian imprints, Wolfe took advantage of several conditions of the current printing trade: he avoided the negative reputation of English printers which could have hurt his sales on the Continent, while supplying books which could not otherwise be obtained in Catholic countries; he also took advantage of interest in Italian books at home by enhancing the exotic nature of the books with his refined Italian styles of print and the lengthy prefaces which let readers in on foreign intrigues in printing. The Machiavellian character which emerges from descriptions of Wolfe's interactions with his fellow English stationers and of his consistent disregard for laws other than his own interest makes financial explanations for his productions of Italian texts quite plausible. Wolfe appears to have ranked, in Loewenstein's words, "as one of his culture's greatest sneaks" (390). His noble rhetoric in the 1583 Stationers' Rebellion in which he compared himself to Luther takes on another dimension when we learn that he was, during this time, "accused of personal greed, lining his pockets with money ostensibly collected to fund his campaign, of making personal threats, of inciting riot, even of promising to make the poor rich,"'"^ and that when he was coerced into silence with a doubled salary, loôMachiavelli had been available in England in various forms since 1576: Gentillet's misshapen interpretations of Machiavelli appeared in French in 1576 with Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner et mainteni en bonne paix un ryaume ou autre principauté: Divisez en trois partis; a savoir, du conseil, de la religion et police que doit tenir un Prince: Contre Nicholas Machiavel Florentin (Weimar) and in English in 1577 with Simon Patericke's translation: A Discourse upon the Meanes o f Wei Governing and Maintaining in Good Peace a Kingdom (London); Dacres English translations of the Discorsi and The Prince do not appear until 1636 and 1640, but there were at least seven Latin translations between 1560 and 1622. Wolfe's Machiavellis in Italian appeared in 1584 (Scott 149-150). '“'^Christopher Barker, 1582, the Queen's Printer; cited in Loewenstein, 401. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 212 entrance into the Stationers' Company and an appointed post, Wolfe abandoned his fellow unprivileged printers and led raids on book pirates’ presses, who were of course filling his former role.‘“® As convenient as it may be to explain Wolfe's piracy of Italian books through financial motives, some questions remain. Wolfe sent other, more reputable Italian texts to the Frankfurt Fair, such as works by Tasso, Pigasetta, della Porta, and Betti, and most of these printings are given accurate im p rin ts.H u ffm a n attributes Wolfe's choices of texts to an "ability to discern inherently valuable texts, to sense the right moment to catch reader interest, and the audacity to ignore technical restrictions in order to achieve a desired goal" of disseminating "fascinating material.. .[which] because it was so new and compelling... would— and should!— engender curiosity in all who could read" (viii, 7). Rather than exploring why these particular texts contain false prefaces, Huffman concentrates on what we can learn about Wolfe from them, and draws from them a picture of a theatrical character, concerned about the fates of Italian emigres in an intolerant England, who combined a desire for profit with the distribution of "new, different, and inherently interesting material for which, he sensed, his London readers were ready" (6). Huffman's portrait of an altruistic and highly intellectual printer who carefully modeled his printing on his country's needs appears not only to ignore the otherwise accepted image of Wolfe as a Machiavellian opportunist, but to run counter to common conceptions of printers ■o^Loewenstein's article outlines Wolfe's roles in the conflict; Harry R. Hoppe's "John Wolfe, Printer and Publisher, 1579-1601," The Library, series 4, 14 (1933), 241-288 provides extensive detail of what is known about Wolfe's career and life. Admittedly, much of what is known about Wolfe's role in the Rebellion derives from his enemies' records; but his actions often speak for themselves, even without his contemporaries' commentaries. •^^Loewenstein, 396. Huffman’ s book includes an Appendix of printing and publishing by John Wolfe for John Wolfe on pp. 133-161, as well as lengthy discussions of the contents on the less notorious Italian books which Wolfe printed. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 213 as often unconcerned with the contents of their books. But it would not be inaccurate, I believe, to claim that Wolfe did precisely judge his audience of English readers; nor would it be misleading to say that Wolfe acted according to strictly financial motivations. If Wolfe's eight fictitious texts are examined closely in relation to the tides of opinion regarding Italians in the last decades of the sixteenth century, his business acumen becomes clear: Wolfe deliberately tailored these particular Italian texts to the existing stereotypes of Italians. Called a man of "Machevillian devices" with "conceit o f . . . forreine wit" in 1582, and later, in his more "respectable" years as Beadle and destructor of illegal presses, named "Machiavel.. .most tormenting executioner of Waldegrave's goods," Wolfe had first-hand experience with the distrust and suspicions held by his countrymen against Italians or anyone who carried their taint, whether from travel or by other association. Wolfe's productions of Machiavelli and Aretino, it seems to me, intentionally emphasize their Italianness, playing into the pervasive stereotypes of Italians which Ascham's diatribes illustrate so well. If, as Anne Rosalind Jones claims in her study of drama, Italy afforded writers "a credible itinerary of seduction and correction.. .an exhilaratingly lawless framework for tumult irreducible to fixed ethical categories" which allowed Elizabethans to explore "what was forbidden in their own culture" (116-117, 101), Wolfe capitalized on this role of Italian literature. Consciously judging his audience and ^^^Printing the Written Word: The Social History o f Books, circa 1450-1520, ed. Sandra L. Hindman (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991) contains several articles regarding the relationships among printers, booksellers and the authors of the texts, in addition to the myriad other people involved in producing a book at during this period slightly before Wolfe: for example, Sheila Edmunds' "From Schoeffer to Vérard: Concerning the Scribes Who Became Printers," pp. 21-40. “ •In his role as Beadle Wolfe underwent considerable ridicule in the hands of Martin Marprelate, who leveled this accusation at him in 1588. Quoted by Hoppe, 264. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 214 subtly adjusting his productions to appeal to their ambivalent interests in Italians, Wolfe was taking advantage of already-present stereotypes, and emphasizing aspects of his texts which would make them most fit for those attitudes; in so doing, Wolfe must have added to, as well as used, these stereotypes for his own financial benefits. A brief look at Wolfe's forgeries will reveal his contributions to the fictitious presentations of the original texts. Wolfe printed five works of Machiavelli: I Discorsi and II Prencipe in 1584; the Historic in 1587; the Lib ro dell’ Arte della Guerra, also dated 1587, and Lasino doro in 1588. All five contain fictitious imprints. The Discorsi and II Prencipe both bear the imprint "Heredi d’ Antoniello degli Antonielli, Palermo, 1584." The prefaces state that the editors (the authors of the prefaces) have labored hard to provide accurate texts, even citing at times the earlier editions used as copy te x ts .P a le rm o is not only a fictitious location for the printing, but an improbable one; the preface writer states that "he knows heretofore Palermo has not been known for printing important works, and he apologizes for errors that have crept into the present text, blaming them on the fact that they typesetters did not know the Italian language: 'Per esser eglino siciliani, et per non sapere la favella toscana, con tutta la loro diligenza, non gli hanno potuto schifare'." Of course, the clumsy Sicilian typesetters stand for Englishmen who would have been similarly unfamiliar with the Tuscan language. Wolfe's next Italian production, building on and responding to the fictions of the 1584 texts, was the 1587 Historic, with the imprint, "In Piacenza appresso gli heredi di Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1587." Its preface addresses the "benigno," interested and receptive reader (as Wolfe knew ■'-Much of the detail on the prefaces' contents I have taken from Huffman, pp. 3- 6, and Sellers' and Gerber's articles. “ ^Huffman, 4. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 215 Elizabethans to be) and constructs an elaborate genealogy and past for the Italian texts. According to the fiction, Antoniello degli Antonielli, printer of Machiavelli titles in the past (including Libro dell'Arte dell Guerra, also with imprint Palermo, in 1587), was succeeded by "heredi" who printed the 1584 Discorsi and Prencipe} The present texts purports to have been prepared by heirs of a certain Gabriel Giolito, who contest Antoniello's heirs' rights to publish works which the Giolito family has printed for many years. This Historié appears as part of the feud the preface describes, as a challenge to the Antonielli family. The preface ends as "the spokesman assures the reader of the accuracy of the book he holds in his hands, and initiates a sly camaraderie with him, reminding him that he has always been pleased with books bearing Giolito imprints. He promises more to come, books that will be even more acceptable and pleasing to the interested reader, and he lists several, including the 1588 L'asino d'oro."^^^ It is clear that Wolfe's fictions, besides masking his own identity as a London printer, fit into many preconceived notions of Italians: the rivalries and family- centered vengefulness which Nashe calls on in the Unfortunate Traveller, or that Thomas Coryat would soon describe with scurrilous detail in Coryat's Crudities, ii4"Agli anni passati, Benigno lettore, furono stampate d'un Antoniello degli Antonielli palermitano alcune dell'opere del valente N. Macchiavelli, le quali, molto prima, & meglio stampate, se non c'inganniamo, riceveste dal nostro m. Gabriel, di felice memoria, & cosi la presente; & perche egli ti promette quivi di volerti anchora dare questa Historia col rimanente dell'altre opere di questo nobile scrittore, ci pare che ci faccia gran torto in fare stampare que libri, che da nostri sono sempre stati stampati, onde ci siamo diterminati di non la sofferire, & cosi hogi incominciamo a darti la presente in molti luoghi ammendata, & da noi con ogni diligenza ristampata, credendo, che hora non I'acceterai men lietamente, che per I'adietro t'habbi fatto, & cio conoscendo più ci disporrai a darti tosto le altre, che sono le sue Comedie, le sue Novelle il suo Asino d'oro, alcuni suoi Capitoli, e'l suo Decinale compendio delle cose fatte in diece anni in Italia. Et con questo fine ti desideriamo ogni compiuta félicita" (Huffman 4-5). "^Wolfe's fiction slips here slightly, as he has Antoniello producing in 1587 after he had supposedly been succeeded by his heirs in 1584. “ ^Huffman, 5. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 216 surface in the activities of the Antonielli and Giolito. Even the title pages to the 1584 Machiavelli bears the inscription, "II vostro malignare non giova nulla,"“ ^ or in other words, "Your maligning helps not at all"— perhaps another subtle hint at Italian rivalries. When the fictions of the Machiavelli prefaces are compared with those of Wolfe's productions of Aretino's scandalous works, the direction of their appeals to Elizabethan prejudices and interests become more clear. As Huffman notes, the theater created by Wolfe's prefaces include a "competition among four generations of two printing houses— with two voices just offstage, the printing house in Rome {L'asino d'oro, 1588) and the imaginary firm of Giovanni Andrea del Melagrano that printed the third part of Aretino's Ragionamenti.. .all of which were really Wolfe's own" (5-6). Although Wolfe cites Melagrano as the 1589 printer of Aretino's third book. La Prima e Seconda Parte de Ragionamenti, with the colophon "Stampata, con buona licenza (toltami) nella nobil citta di Bengodi, ne I'ltalia altre volte piu felice, il viggesimo primo d'Octobre MDLXXXIV," are attributed to a Barbagrigia ("Graybeard") and his heirs. Bengodi, the "nobile city" of printing, is Boccaccio's city of happiness and abundance, with its river of undiluted wine, mountain of Parmesan cheese and vines tied together with sausages.''* The name literally means "Enjoy yourself well." The sensually appealing, almost epicurean choice of location of course appropriately matches the strongly pornographic character of Aretino's Ragionamenti', of course, it also corresponds to the characterization of Italy as Ascham's "Circe's Court" and the home of Sirens, which present the Englishman with irresistible temptations which threaten his integrity. As we have seen, Italy, and especially Venice's, reputation of housing hundreds of thousands of "illustrated in Sellers' article, p. 113. ' '*In the third story of the eighth day of the Decamerone. Cited in Huffman, p. 4. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 217 courtesans, of course contributed to the tangible nature of the legends of the sirens. Wolfe's (or Barbagrigia's) issues of Aretino probably had a large sale, according to Harry Sellers, "to judge from the fact that there are three editions professedly of the same year in the British Museum; Gerber saw another in Berlin and Brunet knew of yet another" ( 1 1 4 ) . 'Sellers points out that the Aretino in the British Museum is bound with Annibale Caro's Commenta di Ser Agresto da Ficaruolo sopra la prima ficata del padre Siceo, another piece of pornography. We capture a glimpse of Wolfe's approach to these forged Italian texts in his printing of Le Vite delle Donne Illustre by Ubaldini, a Court parasite. Initially printed under false identity, Wolfe included his own name and location on a new title page when it was discovered that Ubaldini's work had pleased the Queen. The title was also altered to Le Vite delle Donne Illustre d'Inghilterra— "Lives of Illustrious Women of England"— and contained an "extremely flowery and flattering 5 1/2 page dedication to Queen Elizabeth."'2° Obviously, Wolfe saw an opportunity to advance himself in the Court's favor. But even in this self- declared Wolfe text, his choice of the sycophantic writings of an Italian courtier coincides with prejudices against the fancified "Italianate gentleman" and supports the suggestion that Wolfe was, indeed, catering his choices of surreptitious printings to the whims of society. The history outlined by Denis Woodfield in Surreptitious Printing in England, of subsequent uses of false imprints for foreign vernaculars, particularly the working relationship between Wolfe and Lord Burghley, Principal Secretary to Edward VI and later to Elizabeth, provides some insight as to how Wolfe's “ ^In his use of the term "edition" here. Sellers may mean just a "variant" sheet, not an entire print mn in the modem sense of the term. ■20The change is described by Woodfield on p. 14. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 218 earlier editions of Italian texts w o rk e d .F o llo w in g Wolfe's technique, the use of a fictitious imprint became an acknowledged method of attempting to increase the sales of a book in a foreign vernacular. After 1584, Woodfield argues, the use of a fictitious imprint should be assumed to be an act of conscious policy. Burghley, having witnessed Wolfe's succesful uses of the ficititious imprint, enlisted his support for multiple publications of propaganda. These forms of propaganda, often published in languages of the Continent, were used for varying purposes in support of the Queen: to alter opinion at home of English and foreign Catholics; to confuse, irritate or work against the "enemy," namely the Antichrist (the Pope) and Catholic Spain. Obviously, the purposes of Wolfe's printing in Italian change when the forgeries are put to political use. But we know that Burghley had copies of Wolfe's Machiavellis and Aretinos; and we know that, working from his knowledge of Wolfe's success, Burghley consciously adopted Wolfe's techniques as well as his aid in enacting those techniques in support of the Queen. While proving that Wolfe's early forgeries were intended as anti- Catholic propoganda is not my intention, we can say that the forged prefaces of the works of Machiavelli and Aretino fit into and were gauged to appeal to existing desires and fears of their audiences; and we can say that similar techniques of rhetorical appeal were later put to use, with Wolfe's help, for purposes of political propoganda. Wolfe provided the paradigm for Burghley's print war against the Queen's enemies, who came increasingly to be symbolized by anything foreign. '2iWoodfield's Chapter Three addresses the imitators of Wolfe; his fourth chapter presents in fascinating detail the machinations of Lord Burghley in support of the Queen. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 219 Chapter Four Ornament: Language, Clothing and Deportment in the Renaissance The unreliability of outward appearances in The Faerie Queene is often remarked upon in studies of Spenser's poem. Spenser's heroes are constantly confronted with confusing doubles or deceptive situations which threaten their progress: the "counterfeisance" of the False Florimell and the many "forgeries" of Archimago, for example, present travellers in Faerie Land with problems of how to decipher the nature of each creature in light of its outer form. The text of the poem, as well as its characters, resists interpretation. C. S. Lewis notes in his study of allegory that "[n]ot everything in the poem is equally allegorical, or even allegorical at all."' Lewis ends up leaving his reading of the poetry unfinished, warning, . . . difficulty arises from the fact that the poetic version has almost too much meaning for prose to overtake... The very speed and ease with which the 'false secondary power' produces these interpretations, warns us that if once we give it its head we shall never be done. The more concrete and vital the poetry is, the more hopelessly complicated it will become in analysis.. . . (344-345) The number and variety of critical works on The Faerie Queene support Lewis's assessment. The Faerie Queene continually evades easy explication. Critics have varying explanations for the nature of appearances in the allegory of The Faerie Queene. Writing on the House of Busyrane from Book m , Leonard Barkan sees the Ovidian scenes in the Busyrane tapestries as part of Spenser's commentary on the dangers of transformation. Barkan cites the Renaissance moralizer Natale Gomes's condemnation of the metamorphic nature of love in human affairs: "For love makes those things which are most filthy, ■ C . S. Lewis, The Allegory o f Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 334. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 220 deformed, disagreeable and dangerous to appear righteous, beautiful, pleasant, and profitable." Such an account of false appearances, Barkan argues, underlies the whole presentation of appearances in The Faerie Queene?- Colin Burrow similarly studies Spenser's borrowing from Ovid and concludes that in Spenser "the metamorphic motif has been transformed into an inconspicuous underlying process of moral transition."^ The subtlety with which Spenser presents the origins of a landscape, for example, and the ways in which that etiology affects the characters who enter into the landscape, provide a "device for showing how inconspicuously sin transforms without ever quite making itself felt as sin" (103). In Burrow's reading, pagan metamorphosis takes on moral tones within the fiction of The Faerie Queene. Changes in appearance which accompany metamorphoses contribute to the difficulty in making proper judgments on the basis of outward form. One of the most important lessons Red Cross Knight must learn on his way to Holiness is to distinguish between Una and Duessa. As the poem makes clear, Duessa's appearance is often misleading, manufactured by Archimago to confuse others' interpretations: Her purpose was not such, as she did faine. Ne yet her person such, as it was scene, But vnder simple shew and semblant plaine Lurckt false Duessa secretly vnseene. As chaste Virgin, that had wronged beene: So had false Archimago her disguisd... (II.i.21)* -Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit o f Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 238. ^Colin Burrow, "Original fictions: Metamorphoses in The Faerie Queene" in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 103. ‘ ‘Citations are to The Faerie Qveene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman Group Limited, 1977). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 221 Stephen Greenblatt sees such manipulation of appearance as exclusive to the corrupt characters of Spenser's poem, who deceive intentionally. He writes, . . . the concealment of art, its imposition upon an unsuspecting observer, is one of the great recurring evils in The Faerie Queene. Acrasia as demonic artist and whore combines the attributes of those other masters of disguise. Archimago and Duessa. Their evil depends upon the ability to mask and forge, to conceal their satanic artistry; their defeat depends upon the power to unmask, the strength to turn from magic to strenuous virtue.^ Virtue in this formulation is a question of being able to 'see' properly: the hero in Spenser is one who can somehow reconcile the differences between appearance and reality, who can see through the disguise of an imposter like Archimago or Duessa. A. Leigh Deneef has argued, "Spenser defines the success of his heroes as a process of 'defacing' the false fictions created by his poetic antagonists."® Considered in an historical context. The Faerie Queene's concern with the possible contradictions between appearance and reality takes on additional significance. As a late English Protestant response to the larger philosophical debate over the nature of form and matter, Spenser's work is particularly concerned to establish the inherent unreliability of human perception in matters of truth. The world of The Faerie Queene is one in which there is no God present to comfort or to lead, and the characters wander without a clear sense of direction, constantly assaulted by individuals and conditions which challenge their ability to discern a right path. The shifting identities of evil figures such as Duessa, the False Florimell, and Archimago and also the disguises assumed by chaste Britomart and the brave Artegall illustrate how much a traveller in Faerie Land needs to distrust appearances: outward form is never a constant and can always ^Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 189-190. ® A . Leigh Deneef, Spenser and the Motives o f Metaphor (Durham: Duke University Press, 1982), 94. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 222 deceive. The forces of evil in particular prove able to manipulate outward form, just as Satan transforms from angel to toad to serpent in Paradise Lost, Milton's later exploration of some of the same issues from a Puritan standpoint. Spenser has created a world in The Faerie Queene in which he can describe a Protestant ideology, one in which the traveller in a misleading human world must rely on faith alone to reach the truth of salvation. The Protestant hero must be able to resist the blandishments of the present and see his faith clearly, or he risks descent into a sterile, pagan world of beastly metamorphoses. The archetypal Protestant hero appears again and again in Foxe's Acts and Monuments, which was chained in the cathedrals of England in 1571P The Protestant martyrs Foxe portrays face a clear choice: to succumb to Catholicism, or to stand against its evil and die as the ideal witnesses to the faith.^ Lawrence D. Green argues that Protestant martyrs participated in set roles which prescribed for them the proper behavior to demonstrate their faith.^ He writes, "[t]he martyrs were plagued by their own suspicions that they really desired self-aggrandizing suicide. They believed that a ritualistic act of imitation, properly performed, would dispel those doubts, and would instead confirm that they had the proper stance toward God" (69). The martyr who appeared to have died well hoped that his semblance to true martyrdom matched reality. Secure in the role layed out for him, Foxe's Protestant hero could present a model of unchanging Christian virtue; Foxe's readers could recognize these clearly presented sig n s.S p en ser's heroes Hohn N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins o f the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 435. ®The English "martyr" comes from the Greek màrtys, or "witness." ^Lawrence D. Green, "Stance Perception in Sixteenth-Century Ethical Discourse" in Rhetoric and Ethics: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 59-80. i°In Foxe's account of the martyrdom of Hugh Latimer, for example, these signs become clearer as Foxe revises his work. In his second edition of the Actes and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 223 in The Faerie Queene, in contrast, have no simple path of behavior to follow. The world which they encounter beseiges them with complex situations which defy any pre-set methods of interpreting signs. Although Protestant ideology often was set up specifically in opposition to the evils of Catholic doctrine, as were the sufferings which Foxe described, the problem of human perception in a flawed world was one which had concerned great thinkers for centuries before Luther broke with the Church in the early 1500s. Luüier emphasized the division between humanity and the divine, arguing that man cannot by his own resolution and effort overcome his estrangement from God.'* Calvin's 1536 intellectual defense of the Reformation, Institutes o f the Christian Religion, further affirmed this separation, insisting upon a totally sovereign God and utterly impotent and debased man, thus creating a reformed God who was "completely powerful, utterly inscrutable, implacably unforgiving, [and] perfectly merciful," yet always remote.*- Because of this great rift between Monuments (1570), Latimer tells his fellow martyr Nicholas Ridley to "play the man" as he walks to his death. The injunction is one of the most famous in all of Foxe, but it is also one of the most striking in Eusebius's accounts of the early Christian martyrs as Polycarp hears a voice which enjoins him to "play the man" as he goes to his death. Whether the addition is due to Foxe's own reading of Eusebius or whether the lines were really spoken by Latimer, the allusion to the earlier generation of martyrs helps to demonstrate that Foxe's Protestants are as saintly as the early Christian martyrs. The familiar form helps to make their acts easy to classify. “ Luther's arguments for his beliefs can be found in what are frequently called the Reformation Treatises, such as The Treatises on Good Works, The Papacy at Rome, An Appeal to the Ruling Class of German Nationality, The Pagan Servitude o f the Church, and The Freedom o f a Christian, all written in 1520, as well as in his debates with Erasmus, such as The Bondage o f the Will, 1525. '-Eugene E. White, Puritan Rhetoric: The Issue o f Emotion in Religion (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 7. White goes on to explain the "grave theological and psychological problems" caused by such absolutism, noting that "inasmuch as man's understanding grows out of his awareness and inasmuch as little, if anything, exists in his experience to prepare him for the allness of an absolutely sovereign God, man could not easily understand or serve such a deity. Because he could not personalize such a God, he could not easily identify with Him" (7). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 224 man and God, reformers argued, man can never presume to know the mind of God because he can rely only on imperfect earthly perception. Such beliefs spring from a broad philosophical tradition: philosophers, in particular those steeped in Neoplatonism, had grappled for centuries with the problem of how to seek a transcendent truth while depending on the unreliable evidence available to human senses. Luther viewed any reliance on fallible human faculties to reach divine truth as hubris, an offense against God. But Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt point out that despite Luther's differences with the Church, "all the major churches of post-Reformation Europe, Protestant and Catholic alike, drew on the same philosophical traditions that had been institutionalized in the Middle Ages and reintegrated with their ancient origins in the Renaissance."*^ Tracing the variations of philosophy's attempts to reconcile form and matter, content and style, res and exactly the problems which Spenser sets forth in his poem and in his heroes' travails— illustrates the extent to which questions of form and matter concerned Renaissance, and Reformation, thought. Puritan theologians promoted the plain style, seeking a clarity of interpretation; yet Spenser and, later, Milton produce texts fraught with difficulties for the reader. These Protestant poets' deliberate complication of signs is, paradoxically, in response to the same problem facing Puritan writers— how to seek out the self- evident word of God in a world which distorts that truth. Both the form and the content of Protestant writing grapple with these same issues. As attacks on fashion and anxieties over the traveller illustrate, the Reformation in England opens a semiotic breach, widening the gulf between what '^Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 37. From this point on Copenhaver and Schmitt's book will appear as RP in references within the text. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 225 is signified and that which signifies— rej and verba, the thing and the word. Writers question how one signifies honestly, or truthfully, or appropriately, even as they ask at the same time how one reads a sign clearly in a Protestant universe devoid of God's direct guidance. Clothes that seem chaste may actually signal vice, or foreign threats, or an improper social class; the returned traveller may appear a stolid Englishman but hide Machiavellian guile. So, too, the Englishman abroad will confront an array of unrecognizable and confusing sights which may or may not align with his familiar values. The urge to clarify signs— through external marking of clothes, of behavior, and of words— suggests an uneasiness with the artificial aspects of a changeable human world. Debate over language plays a central part in early modem concerns over external signs. Poetry is rejected as an ungodly disguise of language, dangerously feminine in its seductions; yet it is embraced as part of humanity's quest for truth, enticing man to pursue ideals through its beauty. Ancient debates over the transformative power of language are re-worked in England as Puritan attacks on any forms of ornamental display link discussions of language to other questions over the nature of reality and its appearance. Fashion and ornamental display are prevailing metaphors in discussions of language and its figurative possibilities and dangers. References to tropes which are seen as decoration, and thus as secondary to literal meaning, are often described in terms of women's clothing, cosmetics and other blandishments of beauty, and women in these formulations are related to the deceit, doubleness, or movable nature of tropes. Just as the idea of Woman is inseparable from the 'problem' of clothing, philosophy— and truth— are inextricable from language. Eloquence may distract from content or confuse the listener's understanding: the unreliability of language's clothing complicates the search for Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 226 truth. In early modem England, the moral implications of the "sweet syrup" of poetry are inseparable from other debates over content and style. This chapter examines religious debates over representation, the philosophical underpinnings of these debates, and moments when these debates enter early modem literary discussions. The chapter has three parts: a consideration of the debates on poetry; Puritan approaches to language, including a section on the philosophical background to such approaches; and the presence of these issues in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. The Style versus Content Debate Disputes over the proper media through which to convey tmth were waged constantly in the Renaissance. Arguments over the power and purpose of rhetoric, the proper method of translation, and the morality of poetry in portraying nature indicate that to distinguish tmth in the varieties of man's earthly reality is often a daunting task. Two quite different works written by the Italian humanist Leonardo Bmni in the early 1400s, The Laudatio o f the City o f Florence and On the Correct Method of Translation, reveal one humanist's responses to the question of how much style affects the content of the thing it presents. Bmni's arguments delineate only one position in a recurrent debate which challenged the practices of scholars in multiple fields, and which would continue for years to come. Yet Bmni's pre-Reformation reasoning illustrates the extent to which later Protestant questions about language's unreliability build upon earlier philosophical debates, as Reformers seek to understand and define a Protestant way of seeing tmth. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 227 In The Laudatio o f the City o f Florence^ Bruni compares the smooth workings of the city of Florence to the harmony of music: as he notes, "[t]here is nothing in it that is out of order, nothing that is ill-proportioned, nothing that is out of tune, nothing that is uncertain. Everything has its place, and this is not only fixed, but correct in relation to the o th e rs.D e c isio n s are made "in accordance with reason" (120). The worthiness of the city in Bmni's descriptions springs not only from the organized and fair operations of its government, but also from the perfect balance apparent in the city's order. The nine magistrates, in addition to governing well, appear dignified: when they "venture forth" from their hallowed halls, Bmni explains, they must be "preceded by lictors to enhance their dignity" (118). Foreign visitors to Florence, therefore, will not only experience the great liberty of the city, but will be induced to realize its elegance and symmetry and admire the noble bearing of its powerful men. Not just praiseworthy content matters: the appearance of that praiseworthiness is also important. Bmni's emphasis on both style and content, on balanced ideas as well as aesthetic symmetry, runs throughout his treatise On the Correct Way to Translate. The good translator, besides grasping the wisdom of Aristotle's words, must be able to convey that wisdom in its original beauty to his reader. As Bmni says, "[tjhis then is the best way to translate: to preserve the style of the original as well as possible, so that polish and elegance be not lacking in the words, and the words be not lacking in meaning" (221). The way the words appear is nearly as important as that they appear at all. Appearances can, indeed, alter meaning. In ■ '’ ^Leonardo Bmni, The Laudatio o f the City o f Florence in The Humanism o f Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts, Gordon Griffiths, trans. James Hankins and David Thompson (Binghamton, New York: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1987), 117. Citations from Bmni's treatise On the Correct Way to Translate are also to this text, pp. 217-229. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 228 Bruni’ s eyes, it seems, the magistrates of Florence should rather stay inside their city hall than venture forth in disarray. Recognizing the myriad ways that signs on earth can be misinterpreted. Bruni encourages public figures and translators alike to synthesize their subject's outer appearance with the perception which they desire of its inner nature. According to Bruni's reasoning, spectators assume that if the form appears good or virtuous, so then is the government or the translated text. He encourages a rhetoric of sorts which takes advantage of that type of literal reading. The condemnation of rhetoric Giovanni Pico della Mirandola expresses in his letter to Ermolao Barbaro demonstrates great fear of exactly what Bruni suggests. Making use of the familiar condemnation of cosmetics, Pico warns Barbaro, "[w]e must be wary of all such pretty show: for the listener, charmed by the attractive exterior, might dig no further: he might not pierce to the marrow and blood which, as we know, oft runs infected under an attractively made-up face." * 5 That which is cosmetically-altered, it seems, is more likely than the natural to hide a tainted interior. In his letter Pico articulates a conflict between the deception and untrustworthiness of oratory and the truth of philosophy, arguing to his friend that ornamental language will obscure the truth of the words it adorns. He points out that barbarians did not lack wisdom, although they were often ineloquent; to divorce wisdom from eloquence is, he declaims, "as much a violence as to marry them is illegitimate" (107). The blandishments of rhetoric are repeatedly compared to the vanities of a maiden whose purity is obscured by cosmetics or hair ornaments. It is this possibility of a covering over of true nature with an artificial appearance which marks eloquence as dangerous. Pico asks. ‘^Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Letter to Ermolao Barbaro, dated June 3, 1485 from Florence; in Fallico and Shapiro, Volume I, p. 109. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 229 For what does the rhetorician do but seek to lie, to deceive, to be circuitous, and to insinuate? You take pride in maintaining that it is your business to influence the will, to make black appear white, and white, black; and that you can, with words, elevate, destroy, support, or annul anything that you wish; finally, it is your claim that with the near magical lure of eloquence, you can transform, at will, things themselves in appearance and character. Not, of course, that they become by your magic what you say; yet, while not becoming so, they can be made to appear to the listener as you wish them to appear. (107-108) Pico's concern over the listener's susceptibility to the "magic" of rhetoric is, in fact, in accordance with Bmni's assessment of the public's response to appearances. Both recognize the power of words to create an appearance disparate from reality. He who effects the deception carries the power to influence others as he wishes— thus Bmni's interest in the workings of a government. As Pico quickly points out, the nature of matter does not necessarily change with its form; yet the unwary spectator may not realize that discrepancy in tmsting appearances. Eloquence's lure distracts from the pursuit of tmth. Despite the differing intents of Bruni's and Pico's writings, the two humanists are allied in their acknowledgment that the senses cannot be trusted in the apprehension of tmth, for images can deceive. This basic premise, of course, also underlies Protestant attacks on the trappings of the material world. In their discussion of Pico's letter to Ermolao Barbaro, Copenhaver and Schmitt observe that "[f]or Barbaro, writing in the Petrarchan tradition, language was an end in itself, but for Pico language was merely the philosopher's tool" {RP 170-171). Of course as they also point out, Pico studiedly makes use of an elegant classical writing style when conveying his distmst of eloquence.'^ The vehemence with which Pico condemns eloquence appears considerably altered by ‘^A practice which, as we shall see later in this chapter, also characterizes many Puritan attacks on eloquence. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 230 the close of his letter, as he admits to having argued against rhetoric largely to provoke its defense. Pico compares himself to Plato's Glaucon, who praised injustice, not to convince himself by his own arguments but to spur Socrates to laud justice. In the same way, just to hear from you some defense of eloquence, I have polemicized against it, even against my own inclinations and nature. If, indeed, I really believed that the barbarians were correct in their neglect of eloquence, I would never have almost wholly given up studying their writings; nor should I, as I recently have, taken up the study of G reek... (117) Pico's letter is effective precisely because, with his manipulations of words, he has persuaded his audience into believing his repudiation of eloquence for most of the letter. The passionate style which directs his words masks his true intentions until the last few paragraphs, when he admits to his deception. The rhetorical disguise belies the letter's use of the very techniques it deplores. Pico's letter craftily works to contradict itself, and to emphasize the danger of a clever orator by so doing. The tricked reader, having read Pico's disclaimer at the end, is all the more aware of the dangers of such a persuasive eloquence as he has just displayed. The distrust of the insidious ability of language to affect will which Pico describes in 1485 was no less alive in Elizabethan England. Stephen Gosson's well-known tract The Schoole o f Abuse, written in 1579 and dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, attacks poets for their guileful wit, commenting, "[t]he deceitful 1 phisition geveth sweete syroppes to make his poyson goe downe the smoother. . . the Syrens songue is the saylers wracke. .. Manie good sentences are .. .written by poets as omamentes to beautifie their woorkes, and sette their trumperie to sale without suspect."'"^ Gosson utilizes familiar tropes in his dispraise of the "amarous poets" (9): the feminine wiles of the sirens and the dangerous "cuppes '^Stephen Gosson, The Schoole o f Abuse, containing A Pleasant Invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, &c. (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1841), 10. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 231 of Circes" lure the (male?) reader of poetry into perilous vice. Gosson goes on throughout his tract to elaborate on numerous evils perpetuated by the wrongful attractions of poetry and the theater. He cautions darkly. There is more in them then we perceive: the Divell standes at our elbowe when we see not, speaks when we heare him not, strikes when we feele not, and woundeth sore when he raseth no skinne nor rentes the fleshe. In those thinges that we le[a]st mistrust the greatest daunger doeth often lurk .... (27) Poetry's capacity to influence the listener without his awareness is its most disturbing quality. "The abuses of Plaies cannot be showen," Gosson explains, "because they passe the degrees of the instrument, reach of the plummet, sight of the minde, and for tryall are never broughte to the touchstone" (28). The elusive dangers of poetry's artful temptation prove powerful enough, Gosson asserts, to lead all levels of society into sin and moral decay. Although Gosson does concede that some instructive poetry, properly used, can model virtue, he rejects poetry for his English readers because its allurements subjugate reason and thus lead men to be "ever overlashing, passing our bounds, beyond our limites, never keeping our selves within compassé" (33). More like beasts than men, poetry's victims wallow in sensual pleasures: they have "straunge consortes of melodie to tickle the eare, costly appareil to flatter the sight, effeminate gesture to ravish the sence, and wanton speache to whette desire to inordinate lust" (22). Playgoers in London, Gosson avows, descend into exclusively material concerns, a sign of the ungodly role played by poetry in society. The tract relies on colorful depictions of the sins it attacks as a means of showing readers their own absurdity. Such descriptions disguise Gosson's polemic in gaudiness. Gosson's voice is of the reformed writer who observes his countrymen's behavior Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 232 with an outsider's lack of sympathy. For example, Gosson pictures the carnival like fracas of theater crowds, heaving and shooving, such ytching and shouldering to sytte by women; such care for their garments that they be not trode on; suche eyes to their lappes that no chippes lighte in them; such pillowes to their backes that they take no hurt; suche masking in their eares, I know not what; suche geving them pippins to passe the tim e... such ticking, such toying, such smiling, such winking. .. it is a right comedie to marke their behaviour. . . . (25) Rather than contemplate man's higher capabilities, audiences attend to the trivial in a chaos of physical desires. Furthermore, in Gosson's formulation, the allure of the poetic word leads men astray and into earthly and feminine pleasures— fancy clothes, luxury, gossip, games. Yet these snares of the devil come disguised in the comely form of entertainment. As does Pico, Gosson warns that words can mask appearances; unlike Pico, however, Gosson links poetry with earthly vice and advocates rejecting poetry and forsaking the theater. Pico, unlike the reformer Gosson, celebrates the power of words even as he heightens his reader's awareness of them; he recognizes the futility of rejecting language's allure, as Gosson advocates. '^Arthur F. Kinney in the DLB 172 argues that the Schoole o f Abuse is Gosson's "most misunderstood" work, noting that Gosson is "always careful to show that his criticism is about abuse, wrong uses of art, and not art itself. His attack is partial, not absolute" (99). Although Gosson is often labeled a Puritan for his works against the theater, Kinney writes that "it is clear that he was not a Purtian in any literal or authentic sense but that his moral sense came directly from the centers of the Anglican settlement at Canterbury and Oxford" (103). Kinney defends Gosson's tract from charges of ranting by observing that "Gosson's intention is clearly artful, not simply admonitory. His seven-part essay follows Rainoldes's lectures on the formal oration or declamation, but Gosson so arranges his presentation that he combines all three forms of Aristotelian argumentation taught at Canterbury and Oxford. Thus his School o f Abuse is an epideictic argument in which he censures certain practices and forms of art and sport in and around London and urges all citizens to react similarly; it is also a forensic argument, in the appended letter to Sir Richard Pipe, in which Gosson condemns past laxity and proposes certain legislation; and it is a deliberative argument, which in the appended letter to the gentlewomen of London warns of future dangers and argues for voluntary self-control" (99). Yet Gosson's forceful Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 233 Sidney responds to Gosson's attacks with An Apology fo r Poetry in 1583. He chides poetry's attackers as ungrateful, "to seek to deface that which, in the noblest nations and languages that are known, hath been the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed afterwards of tougher k n o w led g es.A g ain , here, the image of a female Poetry leading the male reader appears, although Sidney's maternal figure nurtures mankind, while Gosson's siren lures him to his death. Throughout his essay, Sidney is concerned to establish poetry as part of humanity's quest for truth.-' Sidney's polished style allows him to make the outrageous suggestion that poetry is the most divine of all pursuits; his sprezzatiira masks the possibility that his claim is not entirely ironic. Gosson's criticisms of poetry's deceptive nature become attributes of poetry in Sidney's formulation; because poetry makes its subjects attractive, it entices man to pursue ideals and leads him toward a higher truth which surpasses the mundane. "Our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is," Sidney explains, "yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it" (158). Poetry's sweetness encourages learning: language and images, as well as the general condemnatory voice in the piece (what Kinney calls "clusters of metaphors and a shifting persona") do contribute to the sense of a blanket condemnation of his subject, poetry. •^Sidney's essay was written in 1583 and published in two versions in 1595, the Defence o f Poesie and the. Apologie for Poetrie. Kinney observes that the structure of Sidney's essay indicates its relation to Gosson's arguments: "the form of the Defense, the judicial oration, is written in reply to another argument; the four charges Sidney lists in the negativo are precisely those in Gosson's School, and Sidney maintains his geniality and wit in part. .. by parodies of Gosson as a host, teacher, doctor, and soldier" (100). -°Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology fo r Poetry in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 155. - ‘Derek Attridge remarks that Sidney's treatise is primarily an apology for fiction, whether in verse or prose, rather than of poetry in its strictly formal sense. Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), 25. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 234 For who will be taught, if he be not moved with desire to be taught, and what so much good doth that teaching bring forth (I speak still of moral doctrine) as that it moveth one to do that which it doth teach? (163) Sidney ties poetry to the high ideals of the philosopher: its ability to delight is an avenue toward higher understanding of the philosopher's subjects. Sidney confronts the same difficulty articulated by many philosophers, of how to attain truth while chained to an earthly existence. He agrees that learning, the "purifying of wit," is undertaken with the aim to "lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable o f (159). But Sidney draws the Augustinian distinction between what he calls "serving sciences," which encourage knowledge of the science for itself, and higher types of learning which lead to an understanding of a man’ s self and which "most serve to bring forth" virtuous action (159). Distinguishing poetry as more noble than the "serving sciences," Sidney groups poetry with philosophy's respected search for truth at the same time that he elevates it above philosophy's short-sightedness. He provides a brief history of the philsophical quest for truth: For some that thought this felicity principally to be gotten by knowledge and no knowledge to be so high and heavenly as acquaintance with the stars, gave themselves to astronomy; others, persuading themselves to be demigods if they knew the causes of things, became natural and supernatural philosophers; some an admirable delight drew to music; and some the certainty of demonstration to the mathematics. But all, one and other, having this scope— to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying his own divine essence. (159) United by the quest for a transcendent truth, these philosophies are also similar in the pitfalls which threaten their disciples, according to Sidney: But when by the balance of experience it was found that the astronomer looking into the stars might fall into a ditch, that the inquiring philosopher might be blind in himself, and the mathematician might draw forth a straight line with a crooked heart, then, lo, did proof, the overruler of opinions, make manifest Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 235 that these are but serving sciences, which . .. have each a private end in themselves.. . . (159) The most noble search for truth inspires virtue "with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only"; poetry, in its ability to stimulate the passion for learning, to delight and instruct at the same time, is related to other disciplines while at the same time it remains superior to them.-- He who "has so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry" risks remaining bound within his human reality and rejects the opportunity to aspire to a higher truth (177). Gosson attacks poetry's potential for changing the appearance of earthly reality, arguing against such deception much in the same way that Pico cautions against rhetoric's illusory embellishments. Yet it is poetry’ s very ability to transform earthly reality which ties it to noble goals, Sidney argues. All arts draw from nature for their principal object, but poetry is able to transcend the bounds of man's senses: Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclopes, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. (157) The poet is able to depict with images the truths which the philosopher clumsily strives to articulate; he is similarly superior to the historian, because although the historian is constrained by facts, the poet may "[beautify history] both for further teaching, and more delighting, as it pleaseth him" (162).-^ With Sidney's — In Sidney's belief that poetry should lead man to aspire to noble planes through intruction, then, the Defence agrees with Gosson's Schoole o f Abuse. -^This distinction between the historiographer and the poet is made by Aristotle in Chapter IX of the Poetics: "The true difference is that one relates what has Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 236 definition of poetry, man can change and transcend his material form with the "counterfeiting, or figuring forth... [the] speaking picture" which is poetry (158). Certainly no one ranges more within the zodiac of his wit than Edmund Spenser, whose poetry makes elaborate use of "speaking images" and embellished language to create fabulous versions of man's natural world. Although Sidney criticized Spenser's use of antiquated language, Sidney and Spenser shared many of the same concerns over English poetry. In October of 1579 Spenser wrote to Gabriel Harvey from Westminster that he was in "some vse of familiarity" with Sidney; they were interested in a classical reform of English meter which would bring about "a generall surceasing and silence of balde Rymers."-'* Spenser was aware of Gosson's attack on poetry and of Sidney's response to Gosson. In the same letter Spenser writes, "New Bookes I heare of none, but only of one, that writing a certaine Booke, called The Schoole o f Abuse, and dedicating it to Maister Sidney, was for hys labor scorned, if at least it be in the goodness of that nature to scorn. Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender, published in December of 1579, was dedicated to Sidney, "him that is the president/ Of noblesse and of chevalree."-^ Sidney links poetry with the philsopher's quest for increased knowledge and the attainment of truth. So does Spenser combine the delight his poetry will give with its instructional value when he describes "the whole intention" of The happened, the other what may happen... Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular." -'‘Cited in Hamilton, p. viii. ^C ited in Andrew D. Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics o f Protestantism: A Study o f Contexts University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 197 (n. 70). -^Cited in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume I, eds. M. H. Abrams, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), 508. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 237 Faerie Queene in his 1589 letter to Sir Walter Raleigh. Spenser explains his approach to chronology with reasoning completely in accordance with Sidney's Aristotelian definition of poetry: . .. the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the times as the actions, but a Poet thrusteth into the middest, euen where it most conemeth him, and there recoursing to the thinges forepaste, and diuining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing Analysis of all.-? Spenser explains in language which again echoes that of Sidney's Apology that he has elaborated on the history of King Arthur because the fame and allure of the stories will help him to convey his instructional message: The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline: Which for that I conceiued shoulde be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter, then for profite of the ensam ple... To some I know this Methode will seeme displeasaunt, which had rather haue good discipline deliuered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they vse, then thus clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall deuises. But such, me seeme, shoulde be satisfide with ihe vse o f these dayes, seeing all things accounted by their showes, and nothing esteemed of, that is not delightfull and pleasing to commune sence. (737, my emphases) Even as he justifies his choice of ornamental and attractive poetry, Spenser's letter acknowledges the arguments of Protestants like Gosson who resist "clowdily" presented lessons, supporting instead such literary forms as the plain style to which Spenser alludes with "good discipline deliuered plainly." Spenser chooses his literary form in part because of his readers' desire for ornamented poetry. Fundamental differences over how language affects the message it carries appear in a comparison of Spenser and Sidney's positions and that of Puritan supporters ??"A letter of the Authors to the Right noble, and Valorous, Sir Walter Raleigh knight, Lo., 23 January 1589. In Hamilton, p. 738. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 238 of plain speech; the Protestant beliefs of the poets and the Puritans, however, may not be so disparate as their views of poetry suggest. It is in their use of language in light of their beliefs where the two groups differ most. Dame Eloquence In the third, and longest, book ofThe Arte o f English Poesie, George Puttenham's detailed 1589 treatise on the uses of poetic language, Puttenham draws an explicit connection between women's love of finery and poetry's need for ornament. As an introduction to the subject of Book DI, "Of Ornament Poetical," Puttenham presents first an explanation of women's relation to their elaborate courtly dress, reflecting, as we see in these great Madames of honour, be they for personage or otherwise neuer so comely and bewtifull, yet if they want their courtly habillements or at leastwise such other appareil as custome and ciuilitie haue ordained to couer their naked bodies, would be halfe ashamed or greatly out of countenaunce to be seen in that sort, and perchance do then thinke themselues more amiable in euery mans eye, when they be in their richest attire, suppose of silkes or tyssewes and costly embroderies, then when they go in cloth or in any other plaine and simple appareil.-® Here Puttenham draws attention to the artificial nature of standards of beauty as well as to the trappings of class and status: whether or not they are beautiful. -®George Puttenham, The Arte o f English Poesie. Contriued into three Bookes: The first o f Poets and Poesie, the second o f Proportion, the third o f Ornament, facsimile reproduction (Kent, Ohio: Kent University Press, 1970), 149. Attridge comments that although Puttenham's book has often been dismissed as a 'charming but unsophisticated and inconsistent potpourri of Renaissance commonplaces, [it] may be read as a quite strenuous attempt to articulate crucial problems having to do with the status of poetic language within a specific linguistic and cultural framework.. . . Puttenham's treatise is especially useful.. because it does not exercise to the full the rhetorical and persuasive powers that are, in part, its subject— unlike, for instance, Sidney's roughly contemporary Apologie for Poetrie, where tensions and contradictions tend to disappear under the immaculate surface of courtly sprezzatiira" (18-19). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 239 court ladies rely on their elegant clothes for their place in "euery mans eye." Language, Puttenham points out, is no different: Euen so cannot our vulgar Poesie shew it selfe either gallant or gorgious, if any lymme be left naked and bare and not clad in his kindly clothes and colours, such as may conuey them somwhat out of sight, that is from the common course of ordinary speach and capacitie of the vulgar iudgement, and yet being artificially handled must needes yeld it much more bewtie and commendation. (150) Poetry's body, like the great ladies', must be clothed in "figures and figuratiue speaches... the flowers as it were and coulours that a Poet setteth vpon his language or arte" so that its beauty shines fully (150). The poetical body also requires such apparel to shield it from the eyes of the common and to elevate it to its proper status. The artificial, then, in Puttenham's appraisal, merely grants naked limbs their appropriate splendor. Puttenham's not unusual use of Woman to explain figurative and ornamental language clarifies many early modern attitudes toward poetry. The woman's body acts often as the site of discussions of language: she is Dame Eloquence even as she is the sirens singing men to their deaths, she is the shifting duplicity of wordplay even as she is the Mother Tongue providing man's first w o r d s B u t as Puttenham and others illustrate through their choices of metaphor, debates over social conduct and self-presentation feed into linguistic concerns, and the terms of fashion polemics are applied to questions of language and its uses. The painted and ornamented woman proves a resonant image for figurative language. In such tracts. Woman is to apparel as Language is to Poetry and Rhetoric— that is. Poetry and Rhetoric are changing, frivolous ornamentation for the "natural" Word beneath. Or, Woman is Poetry and Rhetoric, in which case Poetry is the corrupt figure of the woman who insatiably desires the clothes. In -^An image invoked several times by Sidney in . An Apology fo r Poetry. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 240 each case, the Woman's association with the ornamental as well as the counterfeit comes into play. From as early as Tertullian's writings, women are linked to the decorative, the seductive, the ruses of speech, the figurai and at the same time the material.3° In Renaissance England, women's bodies and, more particularly, their dress continue to be used in debates over language as Protestants reconfigure age- old questions about the role of poetic form in the search for truth. Though women are not the subject of such inquiries, they and their fashions frequently serve as the vehicle through which the subject is approached— becoming both the sign of the problem as well as the problem itself. The convention of representing Poetry as a woman springs in part from a long history of allegory. The influential treatise The Marriage o f Philology and Mercury, composed by Martianus Capella, a fifth-century grammarian, draws a portrait of the seven liberal arts— Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Music— as women clothed in dress fraught with allegorical significance. For example. Dialectic's hair is done up in elaborate rolls which denote the syllogism; Rhetoric is tall, beautiful, and graceful, but wears a helmet over her hair and carries arms; Astronomy's hair sparkles with stars and 3°R. Howard Bloch traces a history of antifeminism as a means of understanding medieval misogyny, concluding that "The denunciation of women . . . constitutes something of a cultural constant" reaching back to the Old Testament and to ancient Greek writings, and extending through classical Hellenic, Judaic, and Roman traditions up to the fifteenth century. "Like allegory itself, to which it is peculiarly attracted, antifeminism is both a genre and a topos... a 'register'— a discourse visible across a broad spectrum of poetic types." In the early church fathers' writings, which would influence generations of later writers, Bloch observes three trends; "(1) a feminization of the flesh... (2) the estheticization of femininity, that is, the association of woman with the cosmetic, the supervenient, or the decorative... and (3) the theologizing of esthetics, or the condemnation in ontological terms not only of the realm of simulation or representations, of 'all that is plastered on' in Tertullian's phrase, but of almost anything pleasurable attached to material embodiment." Medieval Misogyny and the Invention o f Western Romantic Love (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 7, 9. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 241 she possesses golden wings with crystal feathers.M artianus’ s book was in the libraries of most monasteries and cathedrals in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, and informed numerous medieval works (Mâle 79). Later writers would add to Martianus's list, expanding his practice of using women and their apparel to represent abstract notions: the medieval Latin poet Alanus de Insulis would offer up Grammar as a "majestic matron [whose] swelling breasts are founts of knowledge" (80); in Consolation o f Philosophy Boethius describes Philosophy as a woman whose clothing, dim from neglect, is torn by the "hands of rough men" (90-1).3- In a poem dedicated to the sixteenth-century historian of Rome, Carlo Sigonio, "The Difference between Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, and History" is explained. Here are three fine maidens in different dress, standing on a young girl serving as a pedestal. History is simple, illuminating and preserving time, mother of truth, bringing glory to good men. She shows no favor, admits no preference; she judges not, but leaves judgment to others. She simply tells, from the beginning, what was done. Rhetoric, who follows her, is more eloquent, laying before the judge endless disputes. She walks about in a long gown and tries to win her case in careful poses, displaying herself in jeweled finery. One hand is open, the other carries a spear. ^'Emile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France o f the Thirteenth Century, transi. Dora Nussey (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), 77-8. ^-A thirteenth-century short poem devoted to questioning the virtue and vice of women, "De Dame Guile," contains what Bloch calls a "'reverse' or 'negative' blason of the woman— every woman— which equates her body parts with falseness and deceit: 'I will begin with the head: she wears a braid of foolish pride and a plait of false seduction. She wears a hat of cowardice, and her hair-do of trickery is interwoven with deceit. Her locks are of melancholy. And the dress she wears is not of silk or of beaten gold, but of false envy bordered with fakery which does not permit honesty'" (21). The poem, as with many other later examples, focuses not on female body parts, as Bloch says, but on female dress; the woman, it seems, is the equivalent of her apparel, which signifies her essential nature. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 242 holding it softly, without threatening offense. Dialectic comes next, rude and careless in dress, bringing hidden Truth into the light. She goes forth to seize and hold her opponent and never allows escape from her grasp. She taunts, ensnares, rules through reason, and binds her quarry with strong chains. Variously she appears in Appollo's light. But little can she do without Grammar, for Grammar is the base of every good work, and those who know her not do nothing lasting. Compare history with a flying dog, Rhetoric with a Chimaera, Logic with a sphinx, but Grammar with a firm foundation.^^ An illustration accompanies the poem, showing the naked History flanked by fancy Rhetoric and the disheveled Dialectic, all balanced upon the bent back of Grammar, who supports the other three [FIGURE FIVE]. Rhetoric's jeweled clothing represents the seductive persuasions of her art; unlike History, who remains bare of all artificial ornamentation. Rhetoric seeks to effect a change in her audience with manufactured trappings of beauty.^'* But, the poem suggests, the change may be fantastical. The chimera, part lion, part goat, waves a serpent's tail, a grotesque figment of man's imagination and a testimony to the false transformations that language can bring. Sidney refers to the dissembling nature of figurative language in the Apology when he elaborates on the abuses which words can allow. He grants that "not only love, but lust, but vanity, bu t.. . scurrility, possesseth many leaves of ^-^Joannes Sambucus, Emblemata, et aliquot niimmi antiquie operis, Antwerp, 1616, fol. I21f., in Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrimnderts, eds. Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schdne (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlag, 1967), col. 1537-38. The translation from the Latin appears in Donald R. Kelley, Renaissance Humanism (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 75-6. ^ “ ^The title page of the 1631 The Needles Excellency: A New Booke wherin are diners Admirable Workes wrought with the Needle. Newly inuented and cut in Copper fo r the pleasure and profit o f the Industrious depicts the appearance of Wisdome, Industrie, and Follie as women in different fashions. Wisdom and Industry wear more somber and older styles, of course, than the frivolous Folly. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 243 the poets' books," but he maintains that such abuses can be attributed not to the nature of poetry, but to human nature: it is not "that poetry abuseth man's wit, but that man's wit abuseth poetry" (169). Sidney defines the "right [and wrong] use of the material point of poesy" by employing familiar misdressed figures: Now, for the outside of it, which is w ords... So is that honey- flowing matron eloquence appareled, or rather disguised, in a courtesanlike painted affectation: one time with so farfetched words, they may seem monsters, but must seem strangers, to any poor Englishman; another time, with coursing of a letter, as if they were bound to follow the method of a dictionary; another time, with figures and flowers, extremely winter-starved.. . For now they cast sugar and spice upon every dish that is served to the table, like those Indians, not content to wear earrings at the fit and natural place of the ears, but they will thrust jewels through their nose and lips, because they will be sure to be fine. (175)^^ Sidney compares ornamental language with women's fashion, as does Pico in his warning against the infection running beneath "an attractively made-up face," to describe deceptive language which distorts the nature of its subject with no higher purpose in mind.^^ Improperly used, fancy words can be ridiculous: the courtesan affects the fashions of her superiors but remains but a painted imposter. Sidney admits that this sort of poetry frightens Englishmen as would monsters or strangers: unfamiliar in such apparel, the words confound the Englishman who cannot know how to interpret such language. Furthermore, Sidney's image of the overly-pierced Indians, ornamented excessively and in the wrong places, depicts ^^Sidney's designation of the ears as the "fit and natural place" for earrings proves interesting in light of Diane Owen Hughes' research into the long and varied signification of women's earrings. ^^Tertullian early on links clothing with language by returning to the Genesis story of the fall from Eden. Bloch writes, "If, as Tertullian claims, 'all things that are not of God are perverse,' and if, as Augustine maintains, God is not in signs, then not only are signs perverse, but words or verbal signs stand as a particularly degraded excess. They stand as a constant reminder of the secondary and supplemental nature of all 'the arts'. 'With the word the garment entered,' Tertullian asserts, implying that language is a covering that, by definition and from the start, is so wrapped up in the decorative as to be essentially perverse" (46). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 244 the outsiders who do not understand any of poetry's subtleties and therefore misinterpret the signs of beauty. The wrong use of poetry, in these cases, errs in that it calls attention to its attempts at counterfeisance. And, rather than leading man to the pursuit of a higher truth, this improper poetry mires him in the petty attempts at earthly grandeur. The manipulations of language occupy much of Puttenham's treatise, as well, as he examines the ramifications of a society in which, we may dissemble, I meane speake otherwise then we thinke, in earnest aswell as in sport, vnder couert and darke termes, and in learned and apparant speaches, in short sentences, and by long ambage and circumstance of wordes, and finally aswell when we lye as when we tell truth. (197) Not only the poet, but the rhetorician as well as the courtier must use the conceits of language to communicate, and Puttenham points out the seeming paradox that dissembling occurs in truth as well as in lies. Both the poet and the orator, as "artificers of language," dissemble in their speech (1(57).3? Puttenham avers, "Sweetenes of speech, sentence, and amplification, are therfore necessarie to an excellent Orator and Poet, he may in no wise be spared from any of them (208-9). Puttenham's book focuses on a codification of the language of the best-versed courtier, "in the beautie and gallantnesse of his language and stile... in all his 37In The Rhetoric o f Concealment: Figuring Gender and Class in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), Rosemary Kegl sees Puttenham's emphasis on counterfeiting as his implicit pairing of the courtier's ambition and royalty's act of self-presentation. Puttenham's practice of indirect revelation, Kegl argues, "marks out the poet's characteristic usurpation of royal imitation and making. Poets counterfeit from princes the very countenance that Elizabeth I counterfeits from Venus and by which royalty countenances, or authorizes, not only the transformation of the poor, the lewd, the cowardly, and vile but also the elevation of the private poet to public status" (12). The repeated riddling disclosures in the Arte, Kegl maintains, simultaneously clothe and strip Elizabeth: "Through this figure, riddling disclosure itself is grounded with a woman— the queen— who speaks simultaneously from incompatible positions" (27). Kegl relates this clothing and stripping to Elizabeth's use of the king's two bodies in defending her female rule (28-9). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 245 gorgious habilliments" (304). Even in Puttenham's celebration of poetry's tricks, though, distrust of shifting linguistic meanings echoes throughout. For example, Puttenham proposes that figurative language in itself is duplicitous because it enacts changes in the minds of listeners: As figures be the instruments of ornament in euery language, so be they also in a sorte abuses or rather trespasses in speach, because they passe the ordinary limits of common vtterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceiue the eare and also the minde, drawing it from plainnesse and simplicitie to a certaine doublenesse, whereby our talke is the more guilefull and abusing... seeking to inueigle and appassionato the mind. .. . (1(56)38 The poet is therefore always a manipulator of language and of his audience. To illustrate that "eloquence is of great force," Puttenham draws on an image from Lucianus in which painters in Marseilles had figured a lustie old man with a long chayne tyed by one end at his tong, by the other end at the peoples eares, who stood a farre of and seemed to be drawen to him by the force of that chayne fastned to his tong, as who would say, by force of his perswasions. (154) The playful figures of ornament Puttenham catalogues, he suggests, hide powerful effects, forces which chain audience to speaker. Yet in the Arte, the only monstrous use of language occurs when the poet utilizes figures inappropriately, by failing to match the style of his words with the 38fn her book Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), especially the last chapter, "Coming Second: Woman's Place," Patricia Parker examines the associations of woman with the secondary, the double, the inferior copy of the original. And she argues that "What is even more important... than the linking of women with the deceit, doubleness, or movable nature of tropes, and the social as well as sexual implications of such transportability— a link which after the Renaissance would appear in novelistic as well as political preoccupations with vagrant women, harlots, and other 'wandering' vagabonds— is the question of the position of women in relation to the ordering of discourse itself. This relation is one we might approach first through tropes which involve reversal, the upsetting or exchange of proper sequential order, of grammatical and logical line" (110-11). Such terms in Puttenham (such as in this passage, in which doubleness is linked to deceit and the impassioned mind), paired with his explicit use of the image of Woman, would resonate with common discourse about the supplemental, secondary, and transgressing female. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 246 occasion. "[I]f his matter be high and ioftie that the stile be so to[o], if meane, the stile also to be meane," Puttenham warns, or the Poet violates all rules of "decencie" and shows himself "nothing skilfull in [his] arte" (161-2). As Sidney had argued, the apparel of poetic language is noble when worn properly. As in tracts on fashion, suitably dressed female beauty leads man to higher thoughts rather than to fleshly concerns. Good poetry sets Virtue out to be "more lovely in her holiday apparel," stirring in man's mind a "lofty image" that "inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy, and informs with counsel how to be worthy" {Apology 166). But indecent poetry merits only scorn. Like Sidney, Puttenham chooses yet another woman to illustrate the foolishness of misplaced ornament— here, one whose beauty is ruined by the misapplication of her make-up: if the crimson tainte, which should be laid vpon a Ladies lips, or right in the center of her cheekes should by some ouersight or mishap be applied to her forhead or chinne, it would make (ye would say) but a very ridiculous bewtie, wherfore the chief prayse and cunning of our Poet is in the discreet vsing of his figures.. . with a delectable varietie, by all measure and iust proportion, and in places most aptly to be bestowed. (150) Proportion— the ability to tell when and how language should be appropriately used— occupies much of Puttenham's treatise. The woman with lipstick on her chin is an obviously ridiculous figure; the proper poet should be able to sense the equivalent in his use of ornamental language. Derek Attridge remarks that the proliferation of terms in the Arte for this sense of proportion "suggest[s] the importance of this moment within the argument as well as its elusiveness as a stable concept. Its titles include decorum... decency, discretion, seemliness, comeliness, agreeableness, seasonableness, well-temperedness, aptness, fittingness, good grace, conformity, proportion, and convetiiency" (29). The search for a way to codify the proper use of language can perhaps be seen as a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 247 Protestant urge even when divorced from theological issues: Puttenham seeks answers to how the medium of poetry can convey its meaning truthfully in a world where nothing can be trusted. Throughout his project,T/ze Arte emphasizes the unreliability of the most attractive and most "natural" uses of speech. The conclusion reached in Puttenham's treatise seems to be similar to that in Castiglione's Book o f the Cowrn'gr— decorum, like Castiglione's sprezzatura— cannot be learned, but comes naturally to the best poet.^^ Puttenham writes, "even as nature her selfe working by her owne peculiar vertue and proper instinct and not by example or meditation or exercise as all other artificers do, [the poet] is then most admired when he is most natural 1 and least artificiall." Yet Puttenham refines this statement, continuing, "Therefore shall our P o et. . . be more commended for his naturall eloquence then for his artificiall, and more for his artificiall well dissembled, then for the same ouermuch affected and grossely or vndiscretly bewrayed" (313). The most natural speaker, using talents not learned or artificial, is the best; but of course, the best speaker is one who can mask his artifice so as to appear completely natural. Although Puttenham openly ^^In Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 50-106, David Javitch argues that Puttenham's manual is concerned not only with poetry, but also with courtly conduct. Javitch sees the indirect nature of courtly poetry as political strategy and aesthetic choice; in the court climate, the wise courtier avoids conveying dangerous sentiments clearly, and his fellow courtiers appreciate the transparent gesture in the artfully-presented poem. Other critics also read Puttenham's book as part of court culture: Louis Montrose and Heinrich F. Plett argue that the Arte was Puttenham's own courtly bid for favor. Louis Adrian Montrose, "Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship," Renaissance Drama 8 (1977): 6-7, 10, 22, 23, 28-29, and "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form," ELH 50:3 (Fall 1983): 433-52; Heinrich F. Plett, "Aesthetic Constituents in the Courtly Culture of Renaissance England," New Literary History 14:3 (Spring 1983): 610-11, and "The Place and Function of Style in Renaissance Poetics," in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice o f Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 364-75. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 248 calls his courtier a "figure of faire semblant," one who can "dissemble his conceits as well as his countenances," and thus whose words and appearance can never be trusted as truth. The Arte does not directly denounce such dissembling in moral terms. But Puttenham's suggestion that the natural use of language and the best dissembled use of language may prove indistinguishable to a good poet's listener underlines just the reservations about figurative language which besieged his society. Ink-wasting Trifles Puttenham closes The Arte ofPoesie with a dismissal of the importance of his own work, beseeching the pardon of his "most gratious soueraigne Lady" for having presumed "to hold your eares so long annoyed with a tedious trifle" (313). He hopes that he will not be seen as unfit for greater service for having spent so much time "in describing the toyes of this our vulgar art"; but, he says, seeing "Also that I write to the pleasure of a Lady and a most gratious Queene, and neither to Priestes nor to Prophètes or Philosophers," the subject of poetry should be acceptable (314). Gosson's Schoole o f Abuse also apologizes for possibly boring its readers, and ends with an appended address to the "Gentlewomen of London," chiding them for their public display of themselves and thus uniting the abuses of poetr>' with women's abuses of comportment (48-51). Sidney calls his Apology "this ink-wasting toy of mine," something the reader would have endured only by "evil luck" (176) Such disclaimers form a convention of ‘ ‘^Sidney's considerably larger work dedicated to lady also attained the status of ornament: Abraham Fraunce's 1588 rhetorical handbook The lawyers logike instructs readers to "reade that most worthie ornament of our English tongue, the Countess o f Pembrookes Arcadia, and therein see the true effectes of naturall Logike which is the ground of artificiall, farre different from this rude and barbarous kind of outworne sophistrie; which if it had anie vse at all, yet this was Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 249 linking poetry or language with ladies' trifles and frivolous concerns, thus dismissing one's efforts with courtly sprezzatura and distancing oneself from the subjects contained therein.'*' Other examples abound. The prefatory "Letter of G.P. to R.B." in George Pettie's A Petite Pallace ofPettie His Pleasure (1576), a stylized set of translated stories, proclaims, if you like not of some wordes and phrases, used contrary to their common custome, you must thinke, that seeing wee allowe of new fashions in cutting of beardes, in long wasted doublets, in litle short hose, in great cappes, in low hattes, and almost in al things, it is as mutch reason wee should allow of new fashions in phrases and words. But these faultes, or whatsoever els., I care not to excuse unto you, who are the only cause I committed them, by your earnest desire to have mee set downe these trifles in writing.'*- Two years later in Euphues: The Anatomy o/VK/r (1578), John Lyly opens self- deprecatingly by comparing his book to fashion trends: "But a fashion is but a day's wearing, and a book but an hour's reading... He that cometh in print because he would be known is like the fool that cometh into the market because he would be seen."'*^ Lyly dedicates his next work, Euphues and his England (1580) "to the Ladies and Gentlewomen of England," stating suggestively that in the dedicatory epistle that: I would you woulde read bookes that haue more shewe of pleasure, then ground of profit, then should Euphues be as often in your hands, being but all, to feede the vaine humors of some curious heades in obscure schooles, whereas the Art of reasoning hath somewhat to doe in euerie thing, and nothyng is any thing without this one thing" (Sig. B3^). '"The early Church father John Chrysostom associates the seduction of language with Eve's susceptibility to the serpent's blandishments: "she believed in the one who professed mere words, and nothing else" (Bloch 49). Thus capitulation to eloquence is equated with original sin, and Eve and her kind are used to represent the allure to which she fell victim in the garden. '‘-George Pettie's A Petite Pallace ofPettie His Pleasure, ed. Herbert Hartman (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 6. Anthology o f Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed. Paul Salzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 88. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 250 a toy, as Lawne on your heads, being but trash, the one will be scarce liked after once reading, and the other is worne out after the first washing. There is nothing lyghter then a feather, yet is it sette a loft in a woemans hatte, nothing slighter then haire, yet is it most frisled in a Ladies head, so that I am in good hope, though their be nothing of lesse accounte then Euphues, yet he shall be marked with Ladies eyes, and lyked sometimes in their eares.'^ Women's fondness for trifles will endear his work to them, Lyly suggests, while at the same time his remarks launch the book with a mocking and witty tone to declares Euphues' sx.7 ii\xs as play.-^^ Lyly closes the address by suggesting that women try on his book as they would fit their clothes; If a Tailour make your gowne too little, you couer his fault with a broad stomacher, if too great, with a number of plights, if too short, with a faire garde, if too long, with a false gathering, my trust is you will deale in the like manner with Euphues, that if he haue not fead your humor, yet you will excuse him more then the Tailour: for could Euphues take the measure of a womans minde, as the Tailour doth of hir bodie, hee would go as neere to fit them for a fancie, as the other doth for a fashion. ( 10) Lyly's work— not a treatise on language, certainly, but an exercise in a popular poetical style— is merely a lady's "fancie," and thus has no real import, the preface declares. In his work on prodigal sons in Elizabethan literature, Richard Helgerson has noted that poetry, especially love poetry, is itself rebellious, because it was seen as wasting time, as effeminate and feminizing, and as encouraging wantonness.-*^ Indeed, in his Apology, Sidney sets forth these charges of the "poet-haters" clearly: First, that there being many other more fruitful knowledges, a man might better spend his time in them than in this. Secondly, that [poetry] is the mother of lies. Thirdly, that it is the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires, with a siren's sweetness drawing the mind to the '^The Complete Works o f John Lyly, Vol. II, ed. R. Warwick Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 9. '*5Such mocking tones frequently characterize tracts on fashion, which are also often putatively addressed to female readers. ‘ ’ *^See, for example, "The New Poet Presents Himself: Spenser and the Idea of a Literary Career," PMLA 93:5 (October 1978): 893-91 1 and The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 251 serpent’ s tale of sinful fancy.. . . And lastly, and chiefly, they cry out with an open mouth, as if they outshot Robin Hood, that Plato banished [poets] out of his commonweath. (168) Sidney responds to such charges with sophisticated and witty arguments, but near the end of his tract, he dismisses the importance of his work as a "toy." Such disclaimers can be read as apologies, of sorts, for time spent in such pursuits. The standard form of these apologies, however, returns to the decorated lady as a way to distance the male writer from the dangerous traps of poetic pursuits while allowing him to try on all the latest fashions. Puritans and the Plain Style— The Sign Signified In his Apology, Philip Sidney advocates a "proper" use of poetry that will inspire virtuous behavior; the Puritan response to the intricacies of figurative language, in contrast, is to shy away from any poetry that is potentially deceptive."^"^ An interesting example of Puritans' distrust of language appears in their treatment of the psalms, the Biblical place where the very disturbing sensuality of rhyme and meter that Puritans rejected elsewhere is undeniable and problematic."** The American Puritan Richard Mather debates the translation of -*^Russell Fraser sees economic considerations playing a role in the attacks on the stage, as well as theological concerns. Fraser argues that the Puritan attack on poetry is not grounded merely in religious fervor: "But the hatred of poetry is not peculiar to the Puritan. The bigotry of those who give expression to this hatred is without question sincere. It is engendered, however, not so much by a horror of license, whether real or imagined, as by a horror of imposition... [poetry is] intervening between men and their appointed business. This business is the detecting and harnessing of truth." The War Against Poetry (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970), 6-7. •**Kenneth Graham confronts the recent critical trend to dismiss the plain style. Graham examines the problem of teaching in a theology which claims that the word of God is self-evident. He argues that Protestant preachers enunciate theology primarily to bring together worshippers in a common faith, "to create communities out of convictions." The "plain style," in Graham's view, refers more to being evident than to being spare. The Performance o f Conviction: Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 252 the psalms from Hebrew to English meter and notes the devil's insidious presence in the congregation's questioning of the psalms: "[t]he singing of the psalms, though it breathe forth nothing but holy harmony and melody, yet such is the subtlety of the Enemy— and the enmity of our nature against the Lord and His ways— that our hearts can find matter of discord in this harmony, and crotchets of division in this holy melody.Mather concludes that the Hebrew poetry must be translated into the native English tongue, and that it must keep close to the original text: "[f]or we have respected rather a plain translation than to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any paraphrase: and so have attended conscience rather than elegance, fidelity rather than poetry..." (322). Mather attempts to reconcile the need to stay true to the text without being swayed by decorative language. The meter of the psalms was a necessary evil, an exception to the favored style of speech to which Mather and others held themselves when preaching. Increase Mather describes the attributes of his father's form of speech in The Life and Death o f that Reverend Man in God, Mr. Richard Mather. His way of preaching was plain, aiming to shoot his arrows not over his people's heads but into their hearts and consciences. Whence he studiously avoided obscure phrases, exotic words or an unnecessary citation of Latin sentences... The Lord gave him an excellent faculty in making abstruse things plain, that in handling Cornell University Press, 1994), 92. It is interesting to note that the Puritan style is ornate by late-twentieth-century standards; we might say the same of their fashions. ■ ' ‘^Richard Mather, The Bay Psalm Book, in The American Puritans: Tlteir Prose and Poetry, Perry Miller, ed. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 320. Richard Mather lived 1596-1669 and thus is writing later than the Elizabethan poets Sidney and Spenser. The ideas which he presents, however, articulate long-held Puritan views which can be glimpsed, for example, in Gosson's more moderately-Protestant, but passionate diatribes against figurative language. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 253 the deepest mysteries he would accomodate himself to vulgar capacities. .. .5° Puritan preachers and writers cultivated the plain style in their effort to see a clear path to God while trapped in a confusing earthly world. Perry Miller notes in his study of early American Puritans that the plain style was developed as Puritans attempted to "confront the blinding mystery of salvation directly, to spare themselves and the people nothing, to keep attention from ever being beguiled by flourishes" (165). Consciously reacting against the ornate rhetorical practices of the metaphysical preachers, Puritans constructed sermons in which they hoped style would not interfere with content. "The essence of the Puritan style," Boyd M. Berry writes, "is a quest for a permanent, fixed, static, even rigid order. Berry continues, "Reflecting this myriad quest for static fixity was their prose itself, cast into rigidly 'methodized' systems and redolent of such terms as 'justification', 'sanctification', 'salvation', and 'damnation'. All turn a potentially transitive act into a solid, manageable noun" (9). The temptations of poetical language which Sidney lauds are deliberately avoided by the Puritans as potentially evil distractions from God's truth. Logically ordered, Puritan sermons contained numbered passages so that the congregation (many of whom took notes) could follow the progress from the "doctrine" through the sequential "reasons" to the enumerated "uses." But within these paragraphs all the resources of rhetoric, illustration, metaphor, simile, were skillfully employed— as long, that is, as the rhetoric never became an end in itself but was rigorously subordinated to conveying the meaning. (Miller 165)« ^ “Increase Mather's account was published in Cambridge in 1670. In American Puritans, p. 237. Process o f Speech: Puritan Religious V/riting and Paradise Lost (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 8. ^-Eugene E. White cautions that "Puritan theology was not monolithic, nor was Puritan rhetoric." But, he asserts, certain generalizations can be made about Puritan sermons: "The basic thrust of Puritan rhetoric was dichotomized into a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 254 By making language "clear," the Puritans attempt to remove the distractions of a speech's presentation, to coordinate a sermon's form with its subject matter. The Puritan congregation then is not at the mercy of a preacher's interpretations, susceptible to the temptations of his rhetoric which detract from the purity of Scripture. Early in the sixteenth century, the translators of the Bible, Tyndale and Coverdale, reject poetry and popular romances: the truth they convey is partial, and only Scripture holds the full truth. The plain style is a response to the danger which Pico articulates in his letter to Ermolao Barbaro, that things "can be made to appear to the listener as [the rhetorician wishes] them to appear" (108); in the Puritans' eyes, deceptive appearances were temptations of the the master of disguise, Satan. Style is potentially less deceptive and thus less dangerous when the listener is constantly made aware of the speaker's use of language. William Perkins' seminal text on sermons. The Art o f Prophesying, applies Reformation ideology to the practice of preaching. Perkins specifically repudiates rhetorical embellishment, arguing instead for speech that is spiritual and gracious. devotion to logic and a recognition of the tremendous influence of the em otions.. .. In their theory concerning the strucmre and composition of the sermon, the Puritans blended Ramism, Aristotelianism, and neo-Ciceronianism, and they brilliantly coalesced that blend with the concepts of the psychological nature of man and the morphology of conversion. Ramus taught that all communicative acts should follow the 'natural' method: from the universal, or most general, to the particular. The speaker should start with a general definition of his topic and with a division of the whole into its parts. Then, by successive definition, divisions, and explications, he should work toward the most particular. Aristotle explained that there are only two basic processes in a speech: to state the case and to prove it... . The neo-Ciceronians taught that the duties of the orator— to instruct, convince, and excite the listener— should be interwoven through this sixfold disposition: exordium, statement of the case, partition of the case, confirmation, refutation, and peroration" {Puritan Rhetoric 15-18). Such structured formats and the emphasis on logic (rather than emotion, which was seen as antagonistic to the reasoning process) would allow Puritan congregations to perceive the rhetorical techniques which a preacher was using. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 255 styled after Biblical language and based on the laws of Scripture.^^ "The Word of God is the wisedome of God concerning the trueth, which is according vnto godlinesse descending from aboue," Perkins states early in his treatise (4). The preacher, as the medium through which such un mediated truth is conveyed to the congregation, bears the heavy responsibility of "sacred doctrine... exercising Prophecie rightly" (1). As the translator Tuke's dedicatory epistle explains, God in "these eight and fortie by-past yeeres together... hath dispelled the duskie clowdes of Popish darknesse as palpable as that of Egypt, and hath caused the Sun-light of the Gospell to shine cleerely in all our coasts. He sheweth his word vnto vs... (Sig. A2'^'0- In Tuke and Perkins' conceptions of the "faithfvll ministers of the Gospell" and their Biblical readings (Sig. A4^), God's word possesses the clarity of daylight, free from the shadow through which man sees darkly. Unlike man's use of language, Perkins explains, God's speech, through Scripture, is untainted by man's manipulations: The perfection [of God's Word] is either the sufficiencie or the puritie. The sufficiencie is that, whereby the word of God is so compleat, that nothing may be either put to it, or taken from it, which apportaineth to the proper end thereof... thou shalt put nothing thereto, nor take ought therefrom. Reuel. 22.18.19. The puritie thereof is, whereby it remaineth entire in it selfe, voide of deceit and errour. Psalm. 12.6. The words o f the Lord are pure words, as sillier tried in a furnace o f earth fined seuen times. (5) ^^The Art o f Prophesying: Or A Treatise Concerning the sacred and onely true manner and mehode o f Preaching (London, 1607). First written in Latin as a section of The Golden Chaîne, or. The Description ofTheologie., the 1607 edition is translated into English by Thomas Tuke, who would also compile a thorough treatise on cosmetics, A Treatise Against Painting and Tincturing of Men and Women, 1616 (illustrating, perhaps, that the two concerns may not have been so different as they might at first appear). Manuals produced by William Ames and Richard Bernard, along with Perkins' guide, would come to be the "normative texts for pulpit rhetoric m England and America" (80), Alan D. Hodder, "In the Glasse of God's Word: Hooker's Pulpit Rhetoric and the Theater of Conversion," The New England Quarterly LXVT (March 1993): 67-109. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 256 Perkins' belief in "pure" language, lacking the deceit and misleading tendencies of man's words, informs his instructions to aspiring Protestant preachers. Yet his distrust of human speech leads him to caution these readers against adding improper interpretations to the Biblical text: "That also I adde, that collections ought to be right and sound, that is to say, deriued from the genuine and proper meaning of Scripture. If otherwise, wee shall draw any doctrine from any place" (96). But of course, as many others conducting the debate over language's affect on meaning had found, defining where proper interpretation stops and unsound "deriuations" begin is not always so clear. For example, Perkins acknowledges that some use of what Puttenham would call figurative or ornamental language is possible in a sermon. He notes, "It shall be lawfull also to gather Allegories: for they are arguments taken from things that are like, and Paul in his teaching vseth them often. I.Cor.9.9" (97). Biblical precedent allows for such figures. But, Perkins hastily adds, several restrictions apply: But they are to bee vsed with these cautions: 1 . Let them be vsed sparingly and soberly. 2. Let them not be farre fetcht, but fitting to the matter in hand. 3. They must be quickly dispatcht. 4. They are to bee vsed for instruction of the life, and not to proue any point of faith. (97) Like Puttenham in his advice to the aspiring poet-courtier, Perkins falls back to a belief in decorum— having the natural sense to decide what is "fitting to the matter in hand" and not farfetched. In God's church, like Elizabeth's court, the best speaker is he who can be trusted to be appropriate and balanced. Despite his detailed coaching on the structure, "right Diuiding of the word," methods for applying doctrines, gestures, form of prayer, etcetera, Perkins must ultimately rely on the preacher's sense of proportion in choosing his language. The preaching manual's instructions illustrate that man's word will always, in a fallen world, encapsulate the pure Word found in Scripture. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 257 The emphasis Puritans placed on clarity of interpretation occurs also in their desire to declare the purity of their faith in the plainness of their clothes. Worn by all degrees of clergy, the surplice was ordained for the priest and lower clergy in 1552 under Edward when the alb, vestment, and cope were abolished. Elizabeth I's Act of Uniformity and Royal Injunctions of 1559 also insisted on it as a sign of the English church. Perhaps because of Calvin's plain practices on the Continent, however— the black and white "Geneva gown" serving as a model of simplicity— the surplice was often rejected by English reformers as popish and overly fancy.5 * * Dyson Hague remarks that as the Puritan element grew stronger in English society, it was "a significant sign of the temper of the times that the storm centre of ecclesiastical controversy in the reign of Elizabeth was a piece of linen. In Mary's reign it was the Mass. In Elizabeth's reign it was the surplice."^^ As tracts on fashion illustrate, the external marking visible in clothing is invested with symbolic significance beyond the mere whim or fancy of the wearer.In ^^Janet Mayo, A History o f Ecclesiastical Dress (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., 1984), 69. The surplice, which looks like the short white robe worn by today's choir boys, is "a modification of the alb and worn over the cassock. It grew fuller with wider sleeves, originally to accomodate the fur-lined cassock or gown worn by the clergy in colder northern countries. As such it was shorter than the cassock and not girt at the waist and retained this form even after the cassock became a much slimmer garment. . . With the cotta and the rochet it has remained pure white and is a liturgical garment although not blessed.. . . The surplice is also worn by those not ordained, i.e. the vergers, choristers and servers" (174-75). ^^The Story o f the English Prayer Book{ 1926), 204. 5^Mayo notes an interesting point in the history of Protestant arguments over ecclesiastical dress. In the wake of the Reformation, old copes (a ceremonial version of an outdoor cloak)that had survived in cathedral vestries were often sold because of their great value; very few remained by the time of Elizabeth. But "[ajnother, albeit minor, threat to the survival of copes was the sudden intrusion of clergy wives who, now living in the previously bachelor precincts and closes of cathedrals, set about making their accomodation more comfortable. In 1563 the dean and chapter of Worcester were accused of breaking up the large organ which had cost £200. Its metal pipes had been melted to make dishes for the wives of prebendiaries and its case had been used to make beds for them. Sir John Bourne, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 258 theological matters, the plainness of clothing bears similar significance to the plainness of language. For example, John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, refused to wear the surplice and cope on the grounds that such garments could not be justified by the New Testament; he also objected strongly to the color scarlet for bishops, and induced Elizabeth to change the color to black, a more sober shade (70, 72). At the convocation of 1562, it was requested "that the ministers be not compelled to wear such gowns and caps as the enemies of Christ's gospel have chosen to be the special array of their priesthood" (72). Edmund Grindel, Archbishop of Canterbury, reported in 1567 a "womanish brabble" in his church when he appeared wearing a square cap, as he was greeted with taunts of '"ware horns" (73). Although many objectors wore the garments in order to have the legal freedom to preach, such matters became the grounds of serious d i s p u t e s . ^ ^ A century after Grindel's rude parishioners, the Archbishop William Laud would go to the Tower for advocating the outward expression of ceremony and ritual. Such debates are spurred by the desire to avoid the confusing signs of a fallen who lodged his complaint with the privy council, said the wives would have shared the copes and ornaments if the unmarried men had not prevented them" (71). The common complaint of rapacious wives, especially in regard to apparel, appears here in slightly altered form. ^■^During the Great Awakening in the mid-1700s in New England, a meeting was held: "the separatists of New London, Connecticut [and James Davenport, a charismatic and controversial preacher] . . . urged the people to collect their idolatrous possessions, such as wigs, gowns, hoods, cloaks, rings, necklaces, and books and sermons written by Increase Mather, Benjamin Colman, Charles Chauncy, and other ministers. On a Sabbath afternoon, [Davenport] directed the burning of these articles upon the town wharf. As the fire ate into the pile, he led the participants in chanting incantations and singing 'Glory to God' and 'Hallelujah'.. . . Partly as a result of the publicity given to the New London episode, in May of 1743 a convention of Massechusetts ministers published a testimony against the Awakening, attributing its emotional manifestations more to the devil than to God" (White 54). Even a century later, the debates were to continue. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 259 world, to confound the devil's snares by refusing any but the plainest of sartorial or linguistic garb.5 % John Foxe's 1570 edition of the Acts and Monuments, published at the height of the vestments controversy, includes an intriguing celebration of Thomas Cromwell's enforcement of sartorial clarity. Alternating between a story of fashionable excess and religious recalcitrance, the passage suggests a nostalgia for Cromwell's certainty and decisiveness during the reign of Henry Vm. Foxe begins the anecdote by describing an offender against proper dress and deportment, a certeine servying man of the lyke ruffynly order, who thinking to discover hym self from the common usage of all other men in straunge newfanglenes of fashions by hym self... used to go with hys heare hangyng about hys eares down unto hys shoulders, after a straunge monstruous maner counterfetyng belyke the wilde Irishe men, or els Crinitus lopas, which Vergil speaketh of, as one wery of his own English fashion: or else as one ashamed to be sene lyke a man, would rather go like a woman, or lyke to one of the Gorgon sisters, but most of all lyke to hym selfe, that is, lyke to a ruffin, that could not tell how to go.^^ 58The 1563 Homilie against Perill o f Idolâtrie makes explicit the comparison between the fancily-dressed Catholic church and the plain Protestant, again using the image of the harlot and the chaste matron. The sermon declares that the Roman church is a "foule, filthie, olde withered harlot... and understanding her lacke of nature and true beautie, and great lothsomenesse which of her selfe shee hath, doeth (after the custome of such harlots) paint her selfe, and decke and tyre her selfe with gold, pearle, stone, and all kinde of prêtions jewells, that the shining with the outward beauty and glory of them, may please the foolish fantasie of fonde lovers, and so entice them to spirituall fornication with h er.. . . Whereas on the contrary part, the true Church of GOD, as a chaste matron, espoused (as the Scripture teacheth) to one husband, our Saviour Jesus Christ, whom alone shee is content onely to please and serve, and looketh not to delight the eyes of phantasies of any other strange lovers, or wooers is content with her natural! ornaments, not doubting, by such sincere simplicitie, best to please him, who can well skill of the difference betweene a painted visage, and true naturall beauty" (69). Certaine Sermons or Homilies (London, 1623), facs. (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968), introd. Mary Ellen Rickey and Thomas B. Stroup. 5^John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1570), Volume II. STC 11223, p. 1359, Sig. PPP3F Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 260 The man's hair calls to mind the savage Irish, an effeminate man. Medusa, a lowly breaker of the law. Yet, although his infraction appears to be against merely fashion or tidiness, the serving man attracts the displeased attention of Lord Cromwell: As this ruffyne ruffling thus with his lockes, was walkyng in the streates, as chaunce was, who should meete him but the Lord Cromwell, when beholding the deforme[d] and unseemely maner of hys disguised goyng, full of much vanitie, & hurtfull example, called the man to question with him... when he... was not able to yelde any reason for refuge of that hys monstruous disguysing, at length he fell to thys excuse that he had made a vowe. To this the Lord Cromwell aunswered agayne, that for so much as hee had made hym selfe a votarie, hee woulde not force hym to break hys vowe, but untill his vowe should be expired, he should lye the meane tyme in prison, & so sent hym immediately to the Marshaley: where he endured [until he was persuaded to be] brought agayne to the Lord Cromwell with his head poled accordyng to the accustomed sorte of hys other felowes, and so was dismissed. (1359) The rebellion signified by the serving man's long hair is soon quelled with a shaved head. Foxe's story of the steadfast Cromwell and the foolishly stubborn serving man is followed immediately by a similar anecdote in which Cromwell spots a friar wearing his cowl "after the suppression of religious houses"; told that if his cowl were not gone by one o’ clock, he "shake be hanged immediately for example to all other," the friar, quite understandably, takes it off. These two colorful tales are glossed by Foxe's wistful assertion that "If the same Lord Cromwell, which could not abyde this serving man so disfigured in his heare, were now in these our dayes alyve, with the same authoritie, which then he had," the newfangled and "hyperboricall" fashions now littering London's streets would not be seen. Foxe closes the passage, this most all is to be marveled, that Magistrates, which have in their handes the ordering and guiding of good lawes, do not provide more severely for the nedefull reformation of these enormities. But here we may well see, and truly this may say, that England once had a Cromwell. (1359) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 261 Foxe's hearkening back to the genesis of the Protestant reformation calls up a time during which signs were clear and order enforced without hesitation. In the chaos of the vestmentary, and other, squabbles among English reformers, Foxe's account of Cromwell nostalgically looks to a more certain time. In her book The interpretation o f material shapes in Puritanism: A study o f rhetoric, prejudice, and violence, Ann Kibbey illustrates the dangers of such an approach as the Puritans', which presumes to know how to read signs and which imposes a clear meaning on reality, declaring that there is a right way of interpretation. Such readings cause the Puritans to fall into exactly the hubris against which Luther warns when they presume to understand signs in their earthly world.^° The Puritan rejection of figurative language is prompted by an attempt to control the multiplicities of meaning which words allow. Their fear is that without such control, the unwary listener can be led astray by cunning deceits which make falsehoods appear other than they are.^‘ Yet the impracticability of ^°Ann Kibbey, The interpretation o f material shapes in Puritanism: A study o f rhetoric, prejudice, and violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). An example of this phenomenon occurs in America, where Puritan theologians began to equate sin with any deviations from the ideas of the original New England founders. Puritan leaders begin to read all misfortune (Indian attack, disease, British restrictions) as signs from God evidencing His displeasure- -thus assuming that they could understand and interpret God's will through earthly signs (White 25). White points out that in Puritan sermons of this period, ministers continuously attack sin by exhorting listeners to forsake all error. "At first only ambiguously, later more openly, many of them taught what amounted to a quid pro quo equation: if man would forsake his sin and repent, he might assume that God would forgive and bless the land. Under this continued emphasis upon the conditional aspects of the social covenant, without their recognition of the ongoing change, the perceptual world of the ministers and the people gradually became accustomed to an expanded view of the capacity of man" (25-26). ^‘Thomas Hobbes, in his attempt to set down a science of politics, warns explicitly that the skilled orator is not to be trusted: "Eloquence, whose end (as all the Masters of Rhetorick teach us) is not truth (except by chance) but victory, and whose property is not to inform, but to allure." De Cive (Paris, 1642, English translation London, 1651), X.xi; quoted in Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 262 rejecting ail "dissembling" language shows even in reformers' own writings, which despite themselves exhibit elements of the eloquence they so deride. For example, in a 1644 tract, the Royalist Sir Kenelm Digby is described vividly as selling his "small parcels of silken Rhetorick fine and course compliments. Scriptures woven at Oxford, Posies for Prerogative, Ribands for Vive le Roy."^- This familiar image of fancily-dressed language used to condemn the enemy is hardly bare of ornament itself. Alan D. Hodder argues that In concentrating on plain style, emphasizing Puritan rationalism, or insisting on reading sermons solely as theological demonstrations, we make the mistake of accepting the Puritans' rhetoric at face value. Puritan ministers were well aware that a kind of incipient theater was traditional in pulpit oratory, and they were not averse to exploiting its power in a controlled way even in their own pulpits.^^ Earlier Protestants objected to the theatricality of the Mass, especially the elevation of the host. But Hodder maintains that despite the virulent anti-theater in England 1640-1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 369. *^-Sjt. Major Generali Brown, The Lord Dlgbies Désigné to Betray Abingdon (1644), 13. ® ^"In the Glasse of God's Word," 106-107. Hodder cites Thomas Hooker's striking use of imagery in calling the congregation to witness Christ's sufferings: "Consider our Savior Christ hath taken a great journey from Heaven to Earth toave us miserable wretched sinners; conceive you saw those streams of blood trickling down his cheeks, conceive you saw him upon the Cross, with his hands thrust through with Nayles, and his side pierced with a Spear, enduring the wrath of God for our sins and behold now he standeth at the door.. . . Imagine you heard Christ say, I have suffered these and these things for you, these hands of mine were nayled, this side of mine was pierced, this heart of mine was melted with anguish of the Spirit: Imagine you saw Christ standing and knocking at the door of your hearts, as indeed he doth, and say, Hoe all you within there, all your proud hearts, all you covetous and malicious hearts. Have you no regard to a Savior? a Crucified Savior?" (The Application o f Redemption, 202> -A). Hodder comments, "Apparent from Hooker's relentless exhortations to 'consider', to 'conceive', to 'imagine' is that, for his purposes, it was not enough simply to recall Christ's sacrificial drama; it had to be visualized, witnessed all over again, even in its goriest details" (87-88). Hodder does not mention Foxe, but the attention to the witnessing of the corporeal details of a martyr's death seems particularly reminiscent of the Acts and Monuments.', the corporealizing of Christ, which seems almost medieval here, is also surprising in light of the major objections among Protestants to just such means of worship. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 263 polemic of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, "no field of artistic expression, with the possible exception of music, was invoked or drawn upon by Puritans with as much frequency as the stage" (68-69). The strong position taken against any embellishment, Hodder points out, can be seen as an implicit way of defining the Puritan movement against the perceived extravagance of the Anglican church and the showiness of Roman practices (76). Yet the uneasiness with figurative language appears not only in the most extreme voices of the Reformation; the "silken parcels" of rhetoric that defined the Royalist in the mid-1600s had long been used to identify the overly-worldly, the sophisticated, the duplicitous. Understanding God's Signs Even as the Puritans attack the worldliness which was embodied by humanist learning, their attack is rooted in the humanist tradition. Puritans' problem with the excesses of poetry springs from humanist concerns with reading the signs (or poetry) of God in the world. A survey of the philosophical background of such debates illustrates the extent to which the question of interpreting God's signs in the confusion of a fallen world occupied humanist thinkers as well as English Protestants. Humanism was a well-established phenomenon and cultural force in each of the major countries that became Protestant, and reformers owe many debts to humanist programs of s tu d y A n understanding of earlier attempts to reconcile man with God lends depth to Protestant questions over the transformative nature of language and the difficulty ^Lewis W. Spitz, "Humanism and the Protestant Reformation," Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Fonns, and Legacy, Vol. HI, ed. Albert Rabil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 380-411. Spitz notes that "Renaissance humanism contributed tremendously to the Reformation, and the Reformation, in turn, provided for the continuity of humanism into the seventeenth century or longer" (381). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 264 of reading exterior signs. Figures such as Giordano Bruno, Nicolas of Cusa, Tommaso Campanella, and Juan Luis Vives, among others, grappled with the question of how humanity is to know an unknowable God. The flamboyant character Giordano Bruno was in England from 1583 to 1585, where he is described as having made "a small sensation in London and Oxford" with his controversial defenses of Copernicus "in Italianate Latin and by leaning too heavily on Ficino's theory of astral magic" (RP 291, 298). Bruno was well known for his artificial memory schemes which attracted the interest of patrons all over Europe. Initially part of the Dominican order, Bruno was charged repeatedly with heresy throughout his lifetime; he became first a Calvinist, then a Lutheran before he was lured back to Venice to be indicted and burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600. While in England Bruno enjoyed a period of great literary productivity, and he spent time with the friends of the Earl of Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney, a group to which Edmund Spenser belonged {RP 297-298). In the Heroic Frenzies and in other works such as On the Infinite, the Universe and Worlds which Bruno wrote while in England, Bruno addresses many of the issues which concerned philosophers of the sixteenth-century; his fate at the hands of the Inquisition illustrates the importance with which disputes over form and matter were imbued in his age. Bruno has little confidence in the ability of human perception to approach truth. In his approach to the problem of signification, Bruno asserts that limited and deceptive senses cannot report reliably on infinite space or countless worlds, because sense perception is inconstant and "not a source of certainty.""'^ Building ^^On the Infinite, the Universe and Worlds in Renaissance Philosophy: Volume I, The Italian Philosophers: Selected Readings from Petrarch to Bruno, eds. Arturo B. Fallico and Herman Shapiro (Random House Modem Library, 1967), 380. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 265 on that premise, Bruno continues that "our imagination should not be capable of probing beyond divine action" (386); that is, the human mind can see the results of divine action in what occurs on earth, but never can it perceive the divine intellect behind that action. Bruno writes to Monsieur de Castelnau, Seigneur de Mauvissière that the divine being is "an exalted shadow... Him who transcendeth understanding, comprehension or grasp.When Bruno argues that Mankind can see God's shadows, but never the splendor itself, he echoes Luther. For example, Luther draws on Paul's assertion that Christians do know the mind of the Lord, but only with reference to those things which are given to us by God. Luther states (calling upon the common trope of the Word as apparel), "[w]e have to do with Him as clothed and displayed in His Word, by which He presents Himself to us."^"^ Scripture, God's revealed truth, is the Christian's only avenue toward knowledge of God, yet even with that understanding man will never comprehend the mind of God. Luther remarks, "Ask Reason whether force of conviction does not compel her to acknowledge herself foolish and rash for not allowing God's judgment to be incomprehensible, when she confesses that all the other things of God are incomprehensible!" (201). By faith alone is the Lutheran justified; neither philosophy nor good works will bring man closer to God. But in Bruno's formulation there is the possibility of incomplete light for those who are not idle. Bruno does not so much call for good works as he does justify the earthly quest of the philosopher. Despite man's eternal separation from ^^Bruno's comments appear in an introductory epistle to On the Infinite Universe and Worlds addressed to the most illustrious Monsieur Michel de Castenau, Seigneur de Mauvissière, de Concressault and de Joinville, Chevalier of the Order of the most Christian King, Privy Councillor, Captain of 50 men at arms, and Ambassador to Her most serence Majesty the Queen of England. ^^Martin Luther, The Bondage o f the Will in Martin Luther: Selections from His Wr/tmg5, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Anchor Books, 1962), 174, 191. Luther refers to I Cor. 2 [: 12]. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 266 God and thus from the absolute truth, he must not abandon his search for this elusive ideal. Bruno's Heroic Frenzies sets out a model for the philosopher who lives in a universe apart from God's light, such as Luther describes. Intellectual endeavors to attain divine truth are courageous, according to Bruno, because man knows they are doomed. Copenhaver and Schmitt relate, Bruno pictured his love-crazed hero... as driven toward a divine quarry that he can never capture. The madman's heroism consists in his persistence, even after realizing that the divine beloved remains cruelly distant from the human lover, who can never see God's light directly, only its dim reflections in nature and soul. It belongs not to theology but to natural philosophy to undertake the furious chase or discursus through sense, reason, and mind that will bring humanity as close to the One as it can come. (RP 300) Interestingly, Bruno adopts an Ovidian scene of transformation to illustrate the fate of the searching philosopher. He provides an interpretation of the myth of the hunter Actaeon, who after seeing Artemis bathing naked was transformed into a deer and hunted by his own hounds. Bruno writes, Actaeon signifies the intellect bent on hunting divine wisdom.. . . Made the prey of his own dogs, chased by his own thoughts, he runs and takes a new path, renewed to go on .. . with greater ease. . . and a stronger wind into denser thickets, into the deserts, into the region of things beyond comprehension. Having been a common, ordinary man, he becomes rare and heroic. . .. Then his dogs kill him: for the mad, sensual, blind, and fantastic world his life ends, and he begins to live intellectually, to live the life of gods.®* In Bruno's reading, the trespassing Actaeon transforms not into a helpless, speechless animal at the mercy of the dogs; rather, Actaeon's infraction in Bruno's eyes represents intellectual curiosity, for which he is rewarded with a life of intellectual enjoyment detached from the encumbrances of a body. Copenhaver and Schmitt note that Bruno's Heroic Frenzies gives "a morality to the individual ^*The translation of this excerpt of Bruno's Heroic Frenzies is cited in Copenhaver and Schmitt, p. 300. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 267 searcher" (301); it also provides a justification for scholarly work in the immanently earth-bound world of the Protestant believer. Although Bruno renounced the Catholic faith, the origins of his thought appear much earlier from figures within the Church. Nicolaus of Cusa, a Bishop of Brixen under Pope Pius II and a faithful servant of the Church, grappled nearly one hundred years earlier with the same problems which Bruno attempts to resolve. The question of how to understand the search for truth carried immense significance when truth represented God. The famous 1440 treatise On Learned Ignorance, in which Nicolaus declares that "the cornerstone for learned ignorance is the fact that absolute truth is beyond our grasp . . . all we know of truth is that absolute truth, whatever it may be, lies forever beyond our grasp," most clearly sets out Nicolaus's ideas and illustrates his influence on later thinkers such as Giordano Bruno.^® Nicolaus begins On Learned Ignorance by describing human methods of learning. "It is in this way that all investigations proceed: by a sequence of comparisons which are relatively more or less difficult to establish. This is the reason why the infinite, qua infinite, is unknown; for it is above and beyond all comparison" (5). Nicolaus explains that as he strives for the ignorance which is the greatest learning, he is studying the infinite (or God) as best it can be known (6). The doomed quest of the philosopher articulated one hundred forty-four years later by Bruno can be seen in Nicolaus's statement that man's learning, however great, can never fully comprehend even the information available to him: ^^Nicolaus of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance in Renaissance Philosophy: Volume II, The Transalpine Thinkers; Selected Readings from Cusanus to Suarez, eds. Herman Shapiro and Arturo B. Fallico (Random House Modern Library, 1969), 7, 9. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 268 We are constitutionally unable, by any rational process, to reconcile contradictories. We move toward truth by means of things which are made evident to us by nature; and because this way of proceeding stops far short of the maximum's [God's] infinite power, we are unable to forge contradictories which are infinite. (10) Also like Bruno, Nicolaus does not turn from the quest for truth in the face of man's limitations. Nicolaus focuses on the purity of mathematics as a clearer avenue toward understanding. Since God is incomprehensible, he decides, man can know God only incomprehensibly through symbols, metaphors, and enigmas. Nicolaus is careful to point out that although "the more we abstract from sensible conditions the more secure and certain our knowledge is" (22), even abstractions remain inaccurate. To reach absolutely simple and abstract intelligence, of course, "we must reject what the senses, imagination and reason tell us, as these are material things" (19); but it is only by way of known things that humanity can approach the unknown. The problem is not a new one, as Nicolaus notes: All our greatest philosophers and theologians agree that the visible universe faithfully mirrors the invisible, and that we can rise from creatures, "through a glass," as it were, and "in a dark manner," to knowledge of the Creator. (21) The images that the creatures behind the glass are able to see can always be more precise. Barbara Freedman calls attention to the way in which geometrical optics informs Nicolaus's methods of approaching the unknowable God. She catalogues the extensive variety of images through which Nicolaus attempts to explain this dilemma: Cusa's work relies upon a distinction between the eye, which sees, and the mind's eye, which sees that it can never see itself seeing. If "God is the true Unlimited Sight," not "narrowed down to time and place, to particular objects, and to other like conditions," we must see how we cannot see God. In De li non aliud, Cusa suggests that although the hope of an undistorted reflection is dim, we must always remember to see as one who "sees snow through a red glass, sees the snow, and attributes the redness not to the snow, but to the glass." In De filicitione Dei, Cusa describes our Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 269 minds as different types of mirrors; in De beryllo, in terms of the concave and convex surfaces of a translucent stone. In De ludo globi, Cusa imagines the mind's quest for truth as spirals of a spinning ball marked with concave and convex surfaces. .. In De visione Dei, Cusa employs a trick perspective portrait to show us how we can see that we cannot see God.™ When man realizes the extent to the imprecision in his own knowledge, according to Nicolaus, he will have achieved the greatest learning available to him because he will have a greater appreciation for the magnitude of God. Man's intellectual distance from the divine can be bridged only in the transcendent mystery of Christ's incarnation; as Nicolaus says, "understanding begins with faith" {RP 178- 179). Nicolaus of Cusa is careful to state that his philosophic pursuits are led by Christian beliefs. Yet while recognizing man's distance from God, Nicolaus attempts to design a system of thought which, using abstract symbols and breaking away from traditional logic, could lessen that gap. "[W]e can do no better," he says, "than to utilize mathematical symbols" because of "their indestructible certitude" (23). Giordano Bruno's interest in memory systems also represents a turning to abstract concepts as a way to order man's universe. While Bruno's debts to Nicolaus of Cusa can most clearly be seen in Bruno's definitions of the philosophical hero, his developments in systems of artificial memory are largely indebted to Ramon Lull, a medieval thinker who lived c. 1232-1316. Lull's work illustrates an earlier attempt to deal with the problems of interpreting signs in an earthly world. As Copenhaver and Schmitt remark. Lull held high hopes for his mnemonics. They explain Lull's goals for his elaborate patterns of letters and words: ’ ’^Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 16-17. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 270 He designed his ars combinatoria or art of combinations to represent reality directly and to give its user universal and simplified access to all the arts and sciences. By manipulating the letters and figures of the art, one could master nature, convert the heathen, and know God himself. In one sense, the Lullian art is a cosmic notation, a cipher for the structure of the universe and a set of rules for reading it. {RP 293) The Lullian art was well known in Europe in Bruno's time, although of course in England what were seen as its prideful intentions were suspect. Lull's high ideals may appear extreme when juxtaposed with Luther's declarations of man's base nature; his attempt to order the natural world in such a way as to open God's world to man, however, bears strong resemblances to Renaissance movements such as the Cabala. Renaissance renewed interest in magic and in the Cabala, a system of Jewish mysticism and hermeneutics that developed in the Middle Ages, provides other examples of philosophers' trying to interpret the natural world and from it glean knowledge of God. Bernardino Telesio, who believed that nature is endowed with active powers and who sought a methodology for using the senses as authority, developed ideas whose ramifications become apparent when they are further extended by Tommaso Campanella. Campanella's 1620 treatise On the Sense and Feeling in All Things and on Magic also bears resemblance to Johannes Reuchlin's earlier beliefs in the Cabala: the three men, although developing their ideas in different directions, argue that knowledge of God is hidden yet available to a select few who can unlock its signs in nature. When Bernardino Telesio wrote On the Nature o f Things According to Their Own Proper Principles in 1565, he broke with the teachings of Aristotle which, he said, were in conflict with the senses, with themselves, and with Scripture. Telesio's treatise searches for a methodology for relying on human Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 271 perception in matters of truth. He writes that a "perfect knowledge" will be attained when "things that sense experience now displays are shown to be conformable with things already k n o w n . H e decides that nature "is multiple and endowed with active powers" (314), and devises an elaborate system of principles basic to all things with which he can explain the workings of nature. Telesio's approach in effect allows him to avoid the question of the relation between God and man: Telesio proposes to naturalize even the moral basis of human action. Conservation of the spirit in a pleasant and secure state is itself a moral end, whose highest form consists in distinguishing ephemeral from durable pains and pleasures. The philosopher of nature provides a materially grounded ethics suited to the spiritual soul, leaving it to the theologian to deal with the higher immaterial purposes of the rational soul. (RP 313) With magic, Campanella provides the link between natural philosophy and God which Telesio avoids. Like Telesio, Campanella argues that there is sense in things— "it is necessary to recognize that there is feeling in all natural things"— and he turns to an occult philosophy to make sense of a divinely-created natural world.7- Above all, Campanella insists that form is known directly through the senses (RP 319). Book I opens with an explanation of the philosophy he has developed: "the world is a living image of God and, therefore. .. it is sentient and knowing in all its parts . . . in which may be discovered the reasons for all the secrets of nature (339). Only he who is properly prepared in a manner consistent with Christianity, however, can access the magic which Campanella describes. Campanella makes clear distinctions between his form of magic and others, commenting that "[tjoday... the title magician is in such bad repute that we ^'Bernardino Telesio, On the Nature o f Things According to Their Own Proper Principle in Fallico and Shapiro, Vo/ume /, p. 303. "^-Tommaso Campanella, On the Sense and Feeling in All Things and on Magic, in Fallico and Shapiro, Volume I, p. 352. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 272 apply it only to the superstitious friends of demons: people who, tired of investigating things properly, have tried by short routes to wrest from the demons that which they cannot give" (372). Unlike such improper magic, Campanella's practice prepares man for greater understanding of God. Astrology in particular holds hidden knowledge: . . . for God— so good and loving is our Maker— displays His works to those who investigate, giving them not only what they seek, but also— when they are purged and well disposed through being virtuous— the grace to arrive at supernatural things. This wisdom, then, is not only speculative but practical, as well; for it applies what is known to the use and benefit of man. (373) Copenhaver and Schmitt comment that Campanella "added a metaphysical dimension, an immaterial, god-begotten wisdom, to the physical sense that Telesio had found in nature" {RP 321). Within Campanella's system of thought, the types of discepancies between form and matter which concern English Protestants are resolved. If the observer knows how to read the hidden signs of a certain form, he can unlock its secrets. The cabalistic explorations of Johannes Reuchlin at the turn of the sixteenth century represent yet another attempt to order the human universe with a "symbolic p h ilo so p h y .R e u c h lin explains to an ignorant listener in a dialogue that "[i]t is thus that the Cabalists understand the divine command of Genesis: let the earth bring forth a living soul to Our own likeness, i.e., to the divine Idea" (32-33). The Cabalist attempts through learning to approach as closely as possible the divine Idea. According to the discipline, . .. there is nothing granted by God which is more desirable than the art of contemplation; nothing is more suitable for the salvation of souls; nothing more apt to gain immortality than this 73The term is Reuchlin's. On the Cabalistic Art in Shapiro and Fallico, Volume II, p. 28. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 273 contemplation by which the human mind approaches that godliness which is congruent with human nature. (32) Cabalistic knowledge is gained by a combination of diligent study and the grace of God. Each man contains the capacity for godliness, and "it belongs to a few to find it; and of those blessed upon whom it shines, it shines not by their merit, but by the gift of God" (35, 43). However, Reuchlin cautions that "Wisdom follows after industry. For what is carried from sense to intellect is brought together by diligence of study and skillful reason" (43). He provides several examples of the cabalists' methods of deciphering the signs avaiable to them. Slightly different but one of the most memorable of his examples is Reuchlin's interpretation of man's body, which reveals man's purpose on earth and his place in the universe: . . . for this is man born and for this has nature fashioned him: so that he might walk on the earth with his feet, together with the brutes, while, alone of all the animals, he might carry his head upright to mingle with the angels in Heaven. His arms were set between his feet and his head so that he might reach down into the soil and labor for necessary food, and reach up to Heaven, when contemplating, for eternal life. Eyes capable of being raised and lowered were given to man, so that he alone might look to the earth for the salvation of the body and to Heaven for the salvation of the soul. (35) Reuchlin's interpretation, a picturesque way of discussing correspondences, provides to a degree what Telesio seeks when he attempts to reconcile "things known" by philosophers with what is available to the senses: the signs which the body of man reveals to him who can read them, perhaps not surprisingly, support Neoplatonic hierarchies. The conclusions Reuchlin draws about the nature of man prove similar to those which appear in both Pico della Mirandola's \A%60ration on the Dignity o f Man and the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives' 1518 Fable About Man. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 274 The issues which surface in philosophers' attempts to 'read' the natural world to learn about God appear in fable form in Vives’ Fable About Man, in which Vives attempts to understand man's changeable relationship to God. Vives describes a chameleon-like man who can appear to be many things. Man's nature is covered by a "mask and body" which can alter vastly, hiding his divine nature even from the pagan gods of Vives' tale.'^'* Like Pico della Mirandola's Protean chameleon in On the Dignity o f Man ( 1486), who is "constrained by no lim its... so that with freedom of choice and honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt p r e f e r , Vives' man can "be all things," from a plant to a brute beast to a replica of Jupiter (389). As Nancy Lenkeith points out, when the Jupiter of the tale creates the world, . . . he does not prescribe any particular form for man the actor. To him alone he gratuitously gives an unlimited power of self-transformation, exempting him from the rule of the immutability of essences. Man’ s activity determines his being.^^ Vives describes man as a creature whose nature seems to be independent of his outward appearance. As he plays with multiple metamorphoses, man "peers through the mask which hides him, almost ready to burst forth and revealing himself distinctly in many things" (388). Pico's Oration on the Dignity o f Man, which atttempts a justification of natural philosophy, contains an interesting variation on the theme of the well-dressed female figure. In Pico's conception, this adorned woman represents the marriage of mind and soul and is image of man's ability to transcend his earthly self. Pico writes. ^'^Juan Luis Vives, A Fable About Man in The Renaissance Philosophy o f Man, eds. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller and John Herman Randall, Jr., (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948), 390. ^^Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, "Oration on the Dignity of Man," in The Renaissance Philosophy o f Man, 225. ^^In her introduction to Vives in The Renaissance Philosophy o f Man, p. 386. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 275 as soon as she has cast out her uncleanness through moral philosophy and dialectic, adorned herself with manifold philosophy as with the splendor of a courtier, and crowned the pediments of her doors with the garlands of theology, the King of Glory may descend and, coming with his Father, make his stay with her. If she show herself worthy of so great a guest, she shall, by the boundless mercy which is his, in golden raiment like a wedding gown, and surrounded by a varied throng of sciences, receive her beautiful guest not merely as a guest but as a spouse from whom she will never be parted. She will desire rather to be parted from her own people and, forgetting her father's house and herself, will desire to die in herself in order to live in her spouse, in whose sight surely the death of his saints is precious— death, I say, if we must call death that fulness of life, the consideration of which wise men have asserted to be the aim of philosophy. (223) The union Pico describes blends religious experience with the triumph of rational thought; through philosophy, man finds God and leaves his earthly "family" behind. In Vives' fable, man's mind allows him similar powers. Man can choose how high or low he may be on the hierarchical scale between the level of the beasts and that of the gods, although he cannot be God.’" ^ Wisdom, prudence, knowledge, reason and memory identify him most closely with the highest divinity (388, 392); and man's ability to change himself, presumably by using those qualities, also brings him closer to the gods. A second significant aspect of Vives' tale is that man's appearance, his outer covering, can change and deceive, thus hiding his inner nature. In Vives' descriptions of play-acting man, man's various roles are as masks which he assumes. His body, it seems, does not necessarily match his inner nature. Man 7^Pico grants the philosopher similar powers: "Thou shalt have the power to degenerate intoothe lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul's judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine" (225). Extended the neo-Platonic hierarchies, Pico continues, "if you see one blinded by the vain illusions of imagery, as it were of Calypso, and, softened by their gnawing allurement, delivered over to his senses, it is a beast and not a man you see. If you see a philosopher determining all things by means of right reason, him you shall reverence: he is a heavenly being and not of this earth. If you see a pure contemplator, one unaware of the body and confined to the inner reaches of the mind, he is neither an earthly nor a heavenly being; he is a more reverend dignity vested with human flesh" (226). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 276 will "change himself so as to appear under the mask o f various identities; when the gods wish to meet him, "They [beg] Juno to let him into the stalls of the gods, unmasked" (389). Like Reuchlin, Vives too provides an interpretation of man's body, which in his depiction is a "costume" devised by Jupiter which the gods can inspect once man has removed it (390-391): . . . the costumes he [Jupiter] had made were no less appropriate than useful for all the acts. There was the lofty head, stronghold and court of the divine mind; in it the five senses arranged and placed ornately and usefiilly. The ears, accordingly, did not droop with soft skin, nor were they firmly fixed with a hard bone, but both were rounded by a sinuous cartilage. Thus they would receive sounds firom all directions, and the dust, straw, fluff, gnats which might be flying around would not penetrate into the head but would be caught in the folds. The eyes in equal number, two indeed, were high up so that they could observe all things and protected by a fine wall of lashes and eyelids against the same bits of straw and fluff, dust and tiny insects. They were the gauge of the soul and the noblest part of the human face. Then came the very attire o f the mask or the mask itself, so handsomely shaped, divided into arms and legs which were long and ending with fingers, so good-looking and useful for all purposes.. . . By no ingenuity could a more appropriate mask be conceived for a man, unless someone perhaps wish for the impossible. (391, my emphases) Free of this mask the body, man can enter into the gods' stalls and his pure nature is revealed to them. Yet it does not appear that Vives suggests man can rest with the gods only when separated from his body. No clear dichotomy between a base material form and a higher spirit exists here, for after tarrying with the gods man puts his body, the mask and "stage costume," back on for dinner and "it was given the power of perception and enjoyed the eternal bliss of the banquet" (393). Even when masquerading as a beast, man's nature remains intact underneath the disguise.’® As a fable. Vives' story of course caimot be taken literally. Yet the ’*This metaphor would maintain its popularity. In Giovanni Battista GeUi's 1548 Circe, a somtimes-humorous set of di^ogues in which Ulysses seeks to convince Circes' beasts to allow themselves to transform back into humans, Man is a figure who can become whatever he pleases by contemplation of the heavens. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 277 literary form Vives selects to convey man's nature illustrates the complexity of the issue: a fable requires interpretation, a decoding of the story. Perhaps Vives chooses to recount his philosophy through a fable to illustrate the intricacy of signs available to man in words. One must interpret Vives' allegory as man must attempt to decipher God's universe on earth. The relationship between man's earthly form and experience and his spiritual connection with God is never clear, particularly from one's earthly, and thus limited, perspective. The endless debates over the balance between form and matter in discerning truth— over the proper media through which to convey truth— play themselves out in Renaissance literary forms as well as in theological disputes and tracts on fashion and travel. The Traveller in Faerie Land The philosophical background to The Faerie Queene provides a framework through which to read Spenser's response to the question of how to interpret the information available to humanity in the search for truth. In effect, Alglaphemus, a former elephant, states that the "pernicious enchantress" Circes' "alluring enticements" cause men to "live in their bodies" (179); Ulysses asserts, "For if [man] surrenders altogether to his belly and gazes continually on the earth, he will quickly become as stupid as a vegetable; and if he indulges too much in sensual pleasures, he soon degenerates into a brute beast" (175). In Gelli's prefatory dedication to Cosimo de'Medici, Gelli states in language reminiscent of Pico and Vives that man can choose his state: "like a new Proteus [man can] transform himself into whatever form he elects, taking on, just like a chameleon, the color of whatever object he is most affected to; and finally to make of himself either a terrestrial or a divine creature by piercing through all barriers tohat state which his own free will most desires." When freed from wordly concerns, Gelli asserts, men become like spirits, blissfully contemplating divinity itself. Circe o f Signior Giovanni Battista Gelli, ed. Robert Adams (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 3-4. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 278 The Faerie Queene replies that there is no way to reconcile the problem except by understanding that truth forever evades the human mind. Like Foxe's martyrs, who looked to a set model of behavior to guide them to divine righteousness but without any certainty of redemption, Spenser's heroes cannot rely on any consistent earthly reality to confirm truth; the world of The Faerie Queene is most clearly distinguished by its eternal mutability. Moment by moment, the rules change for the heroes of each book of The Faerie Queene. As C. S. Lewis and other critics have realized, Spenser’ s text consistently evades interpretation by its readers; for the characters of The Faerie Queene, appearances in their changeable world constantly mislead and distract from their quests. The hero must pursue his or her quest, but that quest can never end and its meaning will never be clear. Despite his use of elaborate poetic language, Spenser seems to hold a distrust of his own medium, although he responds to that distrust of language quite differently from the Puritans. Rather than attempting to limit meaning, Spenser's language encourages meanings to generate endlessly. The deliberate complication of signs in Spenser's response to the problem of how to deal with reality represents an understanding of language's dangers and a species of warning to the reader to avoid easy answers. Throughout his "darke conceit" Spenser emphasizes the trickiness of the poetic word with constant shifts of meaning in his poem and its characters.^^ The reader of The Faerie Queene may never forget "^^Ernest B. Gilman discusses the problems of being poetic in an iconoclastic age. He points to Protestant poetry that is deliberately non-pictorial, and argues that such poetry, like the complications in Spenser's work, are part of the authors' attempt to develop a poetry which enunciates an iconoclastic ideology. Iconoclasm and Poetry in English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986). In ""To adore, or scorne an image': Donne and the Iconoclastic Controversy," John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age o f Donne 5: 1-2 (1986): 62-100, Gilman argues that Donne's poetry is "strongly charged by the iconoclastic controversy. Its tensely self- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 279 that he travels in an unknown land where signs are inconsistent and deceptive, where meanings are not solid. Like the heroes of the poem, the gentleman who reads The Faerie Queene for "vertuous and gentle discipline" must learn to resist the distractions of the poetry and glean some measure of truth from the tales it tells. Faced with the deceptions of the earthly world, the Puritans turn from language's traps; Spenser embraces its intricacies. The "continued Allegory" of Spenser's Faerie Queene is deliberately misleading and deceptive in order to illustrate its inconstancy: there is always the temptation to impose on the poem a system for reading its signs, but as many critics contest, those systems always break down in the face of the poem's layers of meaning. The meaning of the poem is deliberately impenetrable. Spenser's Faerie Queene brings together in poetic form many of the Renaissance philosophical debates over man's search for truth in a flawed world. Just as man's understanding of God's world will always be incomplete and confused, Spenser creates a poem which, as part of its lesson, frustrates the reader's attempts to produce steady interpretations and indeed illustrates the dangers of doing so. The recurrent theme of shifting identities in The Faerie Queene provides many examples of the disparaties possible between appearance and reality, form and matter. Ovidian metamorphoses occur as fitting forms of punishment: often a creature's outer form transforms into an accurate portrayal of its inner self. Malbecco, consumed by his selfishness and greed, transforms into a creature with "crooked clawes" who "Is woxen so deform'd, that he has quight/ Forgot he was a man, and Gealosie is hight" (in.x.57, 60). The evil queen Adicia is changed by her wicked wrath not into an abstraction, as is Malbecco, but into a brute form conscious and agonistic pictorialism comes into focus in the context of the continuing Reformation debate between the makers and breakers of images" (63). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 280 which mirrors her inner nature. She "transformed was/ Into a Tygre, and that Tygres scath/ In crueltie and outrage she did pas." Banished into a beastly existence, she must stay "farre from resort of m en ... There let her euer keepe her damned den,/ Where none may be with her lewd parts defy led,/ Nor none but beasts may be of her despoyled" (V.viii.49-V.ix.2). Representing another type of punished being, sad Fradubio, the errant knight taken in by Duessa's appearance, discovers his error too late and is transformed into a tree which nevertheless retains human characteristics. He bemoans his fate to the unsuspecting Red Cross Knight and the deceitful Fidessa (Duessa): . . . Nor damed Ghost (quoth he,) Nor guilefull sprite to thee these wordes doth speake. But once a man Fradubio, now a tree. Wretched man, wretched tree; whose nature weake, A cruel 1 witch her cursed will to wreake. Hath thus transformd, and plast in open plaines. Where Boreas doth blow full bitter bleake, And scorching sunne does dry my secret vaines: For though a tree I seeme, yet cold and heat me paines. (I.ii.33) Hamilton remarks that Fradubio ("in doubt") is "reduced to vegetable life because loss of faith through frailty is dehumanizing."*^ Fradubio's metamorphosis from human to tree occurs as a form of punishment for his trust in false Duessa. His punishment is that his outer form grows to match his unworthy inner nature. Mutability, it would seem, is a quality of untrustworthy or flawed characters: as their names dictate. Archimago, the False Florimell, Duessa, and Malengin— the most prominent examples of shape-shifting characters— use their counterfeit forms to ill ends, deliberately manipulating their appearances in order to deceive. The unsuspecting travellers in Faerie Land are inevitably beguiled by the evil characters' falsehoods and led astray from their paths. Occasionally, ^ “Hamilton, note to Stanza 33, p. 51. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 281 changes of form are imposed by evil characters on others. Caught by the Amazon Radigund, Artegall is forced to behave as a woman. He must "the distaffe vile to hold,/ For his huge club, which had subdew'd of old/ So many monsters, which the world annoyed;/ His Lyons skin chaungd to a pall of gold" (V.v.24). Under Radigund’ s rule, Artegall is forced to assume a shape contrary to his nature. He is "deformed" by the disguise he must wear (V.vii.38). Brito mart's shame when she frees Artegall indicates that although Artegall's inner nature may not have been altered by his female dress, his appearance nevertheless holds great importance: Where when she saw that lothly vncouth sight. Of men disguiz'd in womanishe attire, Her heart gan grudge, for very deepe despight Of so vnmanly maske, in misery misdight... At last when as to her owne Loue she came. Whom like disguize no lesse deformed had. At sight thereof abasht with secrete shame. She turnd her head aside, as nothing glad. To haue beheld a spectacle so bad. (V.vii.37-38) Artegall is punished for faltering before Radigund's deceptively beautiful face by having his appearance altered shamefully. Britomart, who can resist Radigund's power, frees Artegall from his service and restores his armor to him, an outward sign that he may resume his former identity. It would appear that those who deliberately manipulate form— their own or others'— are evil characters in The Faerie Queene. The doubleness of Duessa, which causes the downfall of Fradubio, leads Red Cross Knight away from the true Una and later causes strife among the knights travelling in Faerie Land, are unequivocally evil in intent. Similarly evil appear the intentions of those who trick the miserable Phedon, who suffers because he kills his lady based on untrue evidence. Phedon describes his being deceived by the false clothes of his lady's maid and his untrue friend, misleading appearances which prove his undoing: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 282 The Maiden proud through prayse, and mad through loue Him hearkned to, and soone her selfe arayd. The whiles to me the treachour did remoue His craftie engin, and as he had sayd. Me leading, in a secret corner layd. The sad spectator of my Tragédie; Where left, he went, and his owne false part playd. Disguised like that groome of base degree. Whom he had feignd th'abuser of my loue to bee. (IT.iv.27) Words such as "disguise," "feign" and "counterfeit" appear often in reference to evil characters in The Faerie Queene. As Duessa rides with the False Florimell, Ate, and Blandamour and Pari dell, the group's fake appearance of friendship becomes clear. The narrator comments, "Yet all was forg'd and spred with golden foyle,/ That vnder it hidde hate and hollow guyle./ Ne certes can that friendship long endure. How euer gay and goodly be the style,/ That doth ill cause or euill end enure. .. Thus as they marched all in close disguise/ Of fayned loue..." (rV.ii.29-30). The male Sprite inhabiting the False Florimell, we learn, does not need Satan to instruct him on "which way were best/ Himself to fashion likest Florimell,/ Ne how to speake, ne how to vse his gest,/ For he in counterfeisance did excell,/ And all the wyles of wemens wits knew passing well" (Dl.viii.S). Women's naturally deceitful natures, it seems, are available to shifty male villains, as w ell.*^* Archimago, that master of changeable appearances, takes on the form of Red Cross Knight with similar ease: ®'The twelfth-century The Art o f Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus calls attention to women's fluid, changeable nature with a vivid simile: "A woman is just like melting wax, which is always ready to take a new form and to receive the impress of anybody's seal." Such malleability in Spenser represents a dangerous inconsistency, one which at the time may have been gendered, as well. In the same passage, Andreas continues to catalogue common charges against women's fickle and untrustworthy natures which again could apply to Spenser's villains: "We know that everything a woman says is said with the intention of deceiving, because she always has one thing in her heart and another on her lips. .. [a woman] always keeps herself in the mood for deception, and everything she says is deceitful and uttered with a mental reservation." The Art o f Courtly Love, ed. John Jay Parry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 204-05. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 283 He then deuisde himselfe how to disguise; For by his mightie science he could take As many formes and shapes in seeming wise. As euer Proteus to himselfe could make: Sometimes a fowle, sometime a fish in a lake. Now like a foxe, now like a dragon fell. That of himselfe he oft for feare would quake. And oft would file away. O who can tell The hidden power of herbes, and might of Magicke spell? (I.ii. 10-11) Shifting of form is practiced by those characters which must be distrusted. Yet Spenser of course does not allow such a reading to stand unchallenged. His most honorable characters— Britomart, Artegall, Calidore— also practice deception and disguise their appearances. Britomart constantly masquerades as a man, deliberately deceiving even characters who pose no threat to her quest. Artegall disguises himself to suit his purposes, as for example when he assumes the "counterfet disguise" of a pagan knight to gain access to the castle of the Souldan (V.viii.25) or when he appears at the tournament as a stranger knight in "wyld disguize," covered with a "quyent disguise, full hard to be descride./ For his armour was like saluage weed" (IV.iv.39, 42). Sir Calidore, the hero of the Book of Courtesy, purposely deceives Priscilla's father to protect her reputation. Displaying the head of a slain wicked knight, Calidore achieves his "counter-cast of slight" by claiming that Priscilla's absence was due to the "discourteous Knight, who her had reft,/ And by outragions force away did beare:/ Witnesse thereof he shew'd his head there left,/ And wretched life forlorne for vengement of his theft" (Vl.iii. 18). The evidence of the head supports Calidore's false story, which actually belongs to the lady reft by Maleffort. But Calidore uses the story and its prop to hide the lady's guilt at having met her lover Aladine in the woods. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 284 The wicked knight's head serves as a useful warning of the deceptiveness of appearances in The. Faerie Queene. Even virtuous characters play with the differences between what appears to be true and what is true. Meanings constantly shift: mutability can represent the evil metamorphoses of an Archimago or the fecundity celebrated in the Garden of Adonis. Sometimes appearances match the material within them, as in the case of the transformed Malbecco or Error's hideousness; at other times, the deceptive beauty of a character such as the False Florimell or the tangible evidence of a story like Calidore's masks contrary realities. It is peculiar to Justice in the poem that it attempts to impose a clarity of meaning on the characters in Faerie Land. The forces of Justice attempt to make inward and outward forms match, to restrict constantly-shifting identities by making appearances easily readable. Artegall sentences the guilty Sangliere to carry the head of the murdered lady on his chest for a year, as an outward sign of the guilt he initially denies (V.i). Displaying his "owne dead Ladies head, to tell abrode [his] shame" removes the possibility that Sangliere will be mistaken for innocent. Artegall deals similarly with the Saracen Pollente and his daughter Munera, displaying Pollenie's head on a pike, with Munera's gold hands and silver feet "nayled on high, that all might them behold" (V.ii.26). Their punishments stand as public examples of his justice: But his [Pollente's] blasphemous head, that all might see. He pitcht vpon a pole on high ordayned; Where many years it afterwards remayned. To be a mirrour to all mighty men. In whose right hands great power is contayned. That none of them the feeble ouerren. But alwaies doe their powre within iust compassé pen. (V.ii. 19) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 285 Artegall's later treatment of the swaggering Braggadochio parallels his public dispensation of much harsher judgments on Sangliere and the Saracens. After Argegall exposes Braggadochio as an imposter and a fake. Talus brings the braggart's outer appearance in accord with his inner shame; First he his beard did shaue, and fowly shent: Then from him reft his shield, and it renuerst. And blotted out his armes with falshood blent. And himself baffuld, and his armes vnherst. And broke his sword in twaine, and all his armour sperst... And all his face deform'd with infamie. And out of court him scourged openly. (V.iv.37-38) The False Florimell, Braggadochio's fitting companion, melts from view in Canto iii, also visibly exposing her falsehood. Only after "these counterfeits were thus vncased/ Out of the foreside of their forgerie,/ And in the sight of all men cleane disgraced" (V.iv.39) are the members of the court able to laugh at the pretenders' false beauty and bravery. With justice rendered in such public fashion, and a clarity of meaning imposed by the relentless Talus, Artegall can continue on his quest. The method of justice by which Artegall removes any multiplicity of meaning appears similar to the Puritans' attempts to employ "plain speech" and to order their universe with comprehensible signs. Indeed, some public forms of punishment in England operated similarly, as when printers' bodies were mutilated according to their transgressions: ears removed for disobeying laws, or their sins displayed by branding. Within the world of The Faerie Queene, however, such signs of order fail to provide much assurance. The poem does not end with the Book of Justice. Justice is followed by the Book of Courtesy, which opens with a pessimistic view to the success of the clear justice just enacted: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 286 courtesy is in the mind, not in outward show, the proem reminds the reader. In modem times men are deceived by false show and forged courtesy; But in the trial! of tme curtesie. Its now so farre from that, which then it was. That it indeed is nought but forgerie. Fashion'd to please the eies of them, that pas. Which see no perfect things but in a glas: Yet is that glasse so gay, that it can blynd The wisest sight, to thinke gold that is bras. But vertues seat is deepe within the mynd. And not in outward shows, but inward thoughts defynd. (yi.Proem .5Y- As A. C. Hamilton points out, Spenser's reference to a "glas" recalls I Corinthians 13.12: "For now we se through a glasse darkely."®^ The reference also resembles Nicolaus of Cusa's description of the problem on which "all our greatest philosophers and theologians agree," which is that humans can rise only "'through a glass', as it were, and 'in a dark manner', to knowledge of the Creator"— an issue which Luther would bring to the forefront in his disagreements with the Church. Placed in the Proem to Book VI of The Faerie Queene, the reference again reminds Spenser's reader that human knowledge in this life is incomplete. As Spenser's heroes must learn, human reality is always unreliable and deceptive. The Faerie Queene addresses ancient philosophical problems of where in human existence reality lies. The problem which faces Spenser's characters is ^-Because the traveller occupies a misleading, human world, each book begins anew. The end of the "Cantoes of Mutabilitie" does not celebrate the pagan world so much as to assert its continual threat: the Blatant Beast will escape, to plague future generations with slaughter; the battle against evil must always be renewed. The Mutabilitie cantoes end as Nature points out, first, that there is a distinction between apparent change and underlying permanence ("yet being rightly wayd/ They are not changed from their first estate"); then she says that a time will come when none will see more change. The cantoes end with the poet's recognition that Mutabilitie is unfit to rule in heaven but that she does bear sway on earth. Thus he scorns earthly vanities, and meditates on that restful time when things will no longer change. As Spenser's Faerie Land travellers leam, the pagan world has always been attractive. Its attractiveness is exactly what makes it dangerous to the traveller who tries to depend on outward signs and appearances. s^Note to stanza 5, p. 625. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 287 how to make sense of signs in a phenomenal world, one in which appearances do not necessarily relate to reality. This problem was not a new one at the time Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene, as can be seen in the writings of Nicolaus of Cusa and Giordano Bruno, of the natural philosophers Bernardino Telesio, Tommaso Campanella and Johannes Reuchlin, as well as in debates over rhetoric conducted by Leonardo Bruni and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The problem assumed increased significance, however, after Luther made the unreliability of human experience a central part of his break with Catholicism. The Protestant believer may never see the face of God, and must exist in a world in which God's truth can never be fully known. Spenser's Faerie Queene can be seen as the embodiment of Giordano Bruno's doomed quest, in which the satisfaction of Finding truth is always denied despite the philosopher's eternal searching. The heroes of Spenser's poem, like Bruno's frenzied searcher, never end their quests; Britomart vanquishes Busyrane only to find Scudamore gone; the Blatant Beast, we learn, will escape from captivity in the future. The poem itself is not complete, leaving its readers uncertain of the outcome. The solitary Protestant believer moves through realms where signs are unfamiliar; the response to this danger, as can be seen in The Faerie Queene, is for Spenser to accentuate the problems of how to read those signs available to humanity. The poem itself defies interpretation. Travellers in Faerie Land are useful characters for Spenser to use in illustrating to his reader the necessity to 'see' correctly in this world, by never trusting outer appearances. The steadfast traveller is a perfect metaphor for the Protestant believer, who must make his way through a world which will constantly seek to deceive or distract him from his purpose, and in which he is never assured understanding. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 288 Conclusion "These Troublesome Disguises that We Wear" : A Miltonic Eden In his 1650 Eikonoklastes, John Milton attacks the claims of kingship and martyrdom that appeared in the Eikon Basilike as the last words of the beheaded Charles I. Milton is concerned to show how misreadings of God's signs, due to people's desire to be lured by appearances, confuse truth and stymie the proper reformation of religion. The figure of the king presented in the Eikon Basilike is devout, merciful, and kind, wrongly abused by his enemies. His prayers punctuate each section of the treatise and show the reader a king in close communion with God. For example, in speaking to God of his escaped wife, the Queen Henrietta Maria, the praying king asks. Let the truth o f that religion I profess be represented to her judgment with all the beauties o f humility, loyalty, charity, and peaceableness, which are the proper fruits and ornaments o f it; not in the odious disguises o f levity, schism, heresy, novelty, cruelty, and disloyalty, which some men's practices have lately put upon it. ‘ Perhaps because the Queen's Catholicism was a large part of her unpopularity (and contributed to charges that Charles was not Protestant enough), the voice of Charles in prayer suggests that his enemies only encourage her Catholicism by treating him badly. His execution will further estrange another soul from reform. To counteract such an effect, Charles asks God that the queen look upon Protestantism, not as it appears in his enemies, disguised by un-Protestant behaviors, but, rather, in its true form. 'Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture o f His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings, ed. Philip A. Knachel (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1966), 32-33. The sections of prayer appear in italics. Originally published in 1649, the text is thought to have been written by John Gauden, the Bishop of Exeter under Charles II. See Francis F. Madan's A New Bibliography o f the Eikon Basilike o f King Charles the first, with a note on the authorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 289 This conceit of the disguised Protestant recurs in the Eikon Basilike, as Charles remarks that "The deception will soon vanish and the vizards [visors or masks] will fall off apace. This mask of religion on the face of rebellion.. . will not long serve to hide some men's deformities" (170).- Rebels merely pretend their religion so as to seize power unlawfully from the proper leader, the text maintains. With a similar metaphor the figure of the king emphasizes his own Protestantism by again arguing that his mistreatment will only intensify his wife's Catholic beliefs: that she should be compelled by my own subjects and those pretending to be Protestants to withdraw for her safety, this being the first example of any Protestant subjects that have taken up arms against their king, a Protestant.. . . I fear such motions, so little to the adorning of the Protestant profession, may occasion a farther alienation of mind and divorce of affections in her from that religion which is the only thing wherein we differ. (30) The true king, the "Sacred Majesty" of the title and defender of the Protestant faith, is pictured in his piety on the famous frontispiece of the Eikon Basilike, which was published with all except the earliest editions of the treatise. Kneeling in prayer, the smiling king holds in his right hand a crown of thorns, as he looks to the heavenly crown— "Gloria"— shining above. His ornate earthly crown, "Vanitas," lies discarded at his feet; an open Prayer Book rests before him [FIGURE SIX]. The iconography is clear: the martyred king, tortured and crucified unjustly, gains his proper status after deathThe false Protestants who brought about his downfall have misread God's desires. -The problems of disguise are exacerbated in this king whose own participation in the royal masques culminated in the ultimate performance as Charles walked out of the traditional masque venue to his own death. Those who attacked the monarchy could not deny the fact that the king had died well (in the theatrical sense). ^In the text the king's voice calls up the terminology of Christ's martyrdom, telling God, "Thou seest how much cruelty among Christians is acted under the color o f religion, as if we could not be Christians unless we crucify one another" (67). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 290 It is to such claims that Milton responds most passionately: Charles is guilty of idolatry, of seeking to be worshipped in the image the Eikon Basilike creates and reveres. The existence of the treatise itself shows the king's falsity, as it displays a catering to the crowd rather than a private appeal to God. This king, Milton cries, hopes but to catch the worthless approbation of an inconstant, irrational, and image-doting rabble; that like a credulous and hapless herd, begotten to servility and enchanted with these popular institutes of tyranny, subscribed with a new device of the king's picture at his prayers, hold out both their ears with such delight and ravishment to be stigmatized and bored through in witness of their own voluntary and beloved baseness."^ The "new device"— the frontispiece— works as a tool, in Milton's view of things, to seduce the common reader to a false interpretation of Charles's character and situation. Just as in the engraving the king receives God with a ray of light to his eyes, the "image-doting rabble" are lured by the pretty picture of a devout martyr to the faith.^ The charges of "disguised Protestant" used in the Eikon Basilike are taken up by Milton throughout his reply, as he seeks to prove, in example after example, that Charles, his publication, and his followers all participate in worshipping the wrong God. They are the disguised Protestants, not the other way around. The disguises which confront Spenser's Faerie Land travellers threaten the Englishman of Milton's time, as well, where even claims to Protestantism cannot be trusted. Much of this debate over who is the "true" Protestant centers around problems of reading— of images, of words, of God's signs in the world. '^John Milton, Eikonoklastes: An Answer to a Book entitled "Eikon Basilike, The Portraiture o f His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings, " in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1957), 815b. ^The distinction between the Catholic eye and the Protestant ear— image versus word, visual worship versus internal faith— was a commonplace in seventeenth- century religious debate. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 291 Milton lambasts Charles for his desire to be admired, claiming that his attempts to win his audience rely on dissembling techniques. Besides the idolatrous frontispiece which represents for Milton the king's utterly un-Protestant status, the "cunning words" of the text itself seek to "turn our success into our sin" (815a). The Protestant triumph over a debased monarch becomes shameful if one accepts the sacred martyr of the Eikon Basilike', Milton likens Charles to those in Psalms who "flatter [God] with their mouth and lied to him with their tongues; for their heart was not right with him" (815a). The persuasiveness of Charles’ s words, Milton reminds his readers, may bear no relation to his inner grace. The problem of interpreting external signs, so important in tracts on fashion and advice to the traveller, proves equally significant in defining the Protestant state. Charles's first prayer to God on the eve of his execution in the Eikon Basilike draws particularly fierce fire from Milton, as in fact it is a plagiarized borrowing from Sidney's Arcadia— hTscdly, Milton points out, a meet source for the Protestant martyr the king is pretending to be. The old accusations against poetry's frivolity serve Milton well here, as he exclaims of the king. Who would have imagined so little fear in him of the true all-seeing Deity . . . as immediately before his death to pop into the hand of that grave bishop who attended him, for a special relic of his saintly exercises, a prayer stolen word for word from the mouth of a heathen fiction praying to a heathen God; and that in no serious book, but the vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia— a . poem in that kind full of worth and wit, but among religious thoughts and duties not worthy to be named, nor to be read at any time without good caution, much less in time of trouble and affliction to be a Christian's prayer-book? (793a)^ ^The prayer is Pamela's in Arcadia, as she pleads for God to have mercy on her lover Musidorus. Merritt Y. Hughes notes that Milton's disapproval of the use of Sidney's prayer was not "merely personal. An anonymous tract. The None-Such Charles— quoted by Ernest Sirluck in MEN, LXX (1955), 332— regrets that the king's 'soule was more fixt on Bens verses, and other Romances, during the time of his imprisonment, then on those Holy Writs, wherein salvation is to be sought for the soul... '" (793 n.38). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 292 The "amorous poetry" of the Arcadia threatens a reader's virtue at the best of times, Milton remarks, and he questions the godliness of one who would turn to such trifles at his most serious hour. Futhermore, the king's improper use of love poetry is yet another example of his attempt to seduce readers with his false claims. "[T]hese painted feathers that set him so gay among the people," Milton mocks, are "to be thought few or none of them his own" (794a). Pamela's prayer, like the painted feathers of courtly fashion, is not natural to the king. Milton rejects the meditations of the condemned king as corrupt, seeking to "disorder the minds of weaker m en... [to] dishonor the present government... [and to cause] the retarding of the general peace" (782a-b). Under false pretenses, the text seeks to create a martyr. So, too, Milton reprimands English readers for their idolatrous view of royalty, which causes them to judge a book by its cover, as it were, and ignore its contents. "For as to any rhoment of solidity in the book itself— save only that a king is said to be the author, a name than which there needs no more among the blockish vulgar, to make it wise, and excellent, and admired, nay to set it next the Bible," Milton scoffs, "though otherwise containing little else but the common grounds of tyranny and popery, dressed up, the better to deceive, in a new Protestant guise, and trimly garnished over" (782b). Milton again reverses the charge of being a disguised Protestant that in the Elkon Basilike defines Charles's enemies, by claiming that in the Eikon Basilike, the idolatry of Rome masquerades as Charles the Protestant. Eikonoklastes uses the metaphor of clothing to show the problem of disguises— linguistic, visual, theological, and political— that now plague the Protestant army within its own ranks. The question of how to interpret God's plan for a reformed state leads to the confusions of readings God's signs in the world. Milton rejects the Eikon Basilike's project of creating for England's readers a "dressed up" Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 293 Protestant saint whose words and actions represent piety; in the purity of a Protestant world, he suggests, such confidence in the display of clear signs can only be distrusted. Yet the easy opposition between corrupt Catholics and plain Protestants has been complicated, and the garb of Protestantism is no longer easily defined. To return now to the image of Milton's naked Eve in Paradise Lost is to find a nostalgia for a time when the deceits of clothing did not yet exist. In the garden, Adam and Eve have clear boundaries of behavior and duty. Adam declares in Book Vm, "not to know at large of things remote/ From use, obscure and subtle, but to know/ That which before us lies in daily life,/ Is the prime Wisdom" (191-94). Such pleasure in the simplicity of the practical and near is reflected in the ease of Adam and Eve's nakedness and the plainness of their worship. When the couple praises God, they thank Him for his gifts and. This said unanimous, and other Rites Observing none, but adoration pure Which God likes best, into thir inmost bower Handed they went; and eas'd the putting off These troublesome disguises which wee wear, Straight side by side were laid. . . . (IV.736-41) Milton's Adam and Eve lack both the rituals of corrupt earthly religion and the "troublesome disguises" of human clothing, both of which represent the confusions of the fallen world. But of course, Satan travels to the Garden and destroys such simplicity with dissembling words, which promise the clarity of seeing that in fact they banish. "God," the serpent whispers to Eve, "knows that in the day/ Ye eat thereof, your Eyes that seem so clear,/ Yet are but dim, shall perfetly be then/ Op'n'd and clear'd, and ye shall be as Gods" (IX.705-08). The serpent speaks of clear sight, undimmed by the separation from God: no longer, he tempts Eve, will she see as through a glass darkly. In Paradise Lost, the Fall Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 294 begins even before Eve gorges herself on the fruit; the mere passage of the serpent’ s cunning language to Eve's ears changes her way of seeing the world and destroys her ability to return to her former state of innocence. Milton writes. He ended, and his words replete with guile Into her heart too easy entrance won: Fixt on the Fruit she gaz'd, which to behold Might tempt alone, and in her ears the sound Yet rung of his persuasive words, impregn'd With Reason, to her seeming, and with T ruth.. . . (IX.733-38) The seduction occurs through both Eve's ears and eyes, as the blandishments of the serpent's double-sided words distract her from God's commands and the beauty of the fruit appeals to her feminine senses. The clarity of sight and order that had been hers disappears with the capitulation to the "false Worm's" rhetoric, and meanings of familiar sights become uncertain. The most obvious manifestation of Adam and Eve's fallen condition occurs when, waking from their post-coital sleep, "As from unrest, and each the other viewing,/ Soon found thir Eyes how op'n'd, and thir minds dark'n'd" (IX. 1052-54). Their former "native righteousness" is gone, and they are "naked left to guilty shame: hee cover'd, but his Robe/ Uncover'd more" (1058-59). Shame covers them in their uncovered nakedness; the body is no longer free from signification. Milton continues this play between the clothed and the unclothed, as Adam and Eve scramble to cover themselves: Adam declares, O Eve, in evil hour thou didst give ear To that false Worm, of whomsoever taught To counterfeit Man's voice, true in our Fall, False in our promis’ d Rising; since our Eyes Op'n'd we find indeed, and find we know Both Good and Evil, God lost, and Evil got. Bad Fruit of Knowledge, if this be to know. Which leaves us naked thus, of Honor void. Of Innocence, of Faith, of Purity, Our wonted Ornaments now soil'd and stain'd. And in our Faces evident the signs Of foul concupiscence.. . . (EX. 1067-77) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 295 Their usual ornaments— honor, innocence, faith, purity— are sullied, and their faces reflect the shame of their state. Physical ornaments replace the virtues they have lost. "Cover m e... Hide me," Adam pleads of the surrounding trees, before he and Eve seek to do so with fig leaves, which "for the present serve to hide/ The Parts of each from other, that seem most/ To shame obnoxious, and unseemliest seen" (EX. 1092-94). Adam and Eve are now unsure of their place, and the region formerly "full of Peace" fills with "high Passions, Anger, Hate,/ Mistrust, Suspicion, Discord" (1 123-24); Adam and Eve descend into fruitless mutual accusation, "And of thir vain contest appear'd no end" (1 187-88). The confusion, distrust and contention of the fallen Adam and Eve mirror the reformation that Milton surveys with dismay in Eikonoklastes. Unlike a world where God's commands are clear and man's place defined, the Protestants of England find themselves in mutual accusation, in disagreement over their God's will. Bound up within the serpent's duplicities of language, fallen man can never comprehend God. As Raphael explains to Adam and Eve in Book VII, Immediate are the Acts of God, more swift Than time or motion, but to human ears Cannot without process of speech be told. So told as earthly notion can receive. (VII. 176-80) The process of speech itself mars understanding of truth. Rather than leam through Raphael's explanations, however, Adam and Eve look for the immediate understanding held out by the serpent. The "fallacious fruit" promises to transcend language; the Fall is rooted in Adam and Eve's belief that they can experience God outside of words by eating of the fruit and "knowing" as God knows. But their disobedience merely shows their inability to escape language's cunning turns. In England, the dissatisfaction with language becomes part of an insistent Protestant identity, in which inward religious experience is constantly Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 296 validated by outward signs. The English treatment of fashion and travel cannot be seen outside the Protestant search for Truth, which is as much about language as it is about fashionable women or dangerous Italian influences. By looking at discussions of fashion and travel, I examine, as did the writers of the time, the perceptions of God's outward signs in the world. One cannot read such perceptions fully unless they are seen as Protestant perceptions: the compunction to read within the search for God defines the moralists of the age. Milton's naked Eve, ministering to Adam and the angel Raphael in the Garden, cannot make sense without an understanding of this century of debate over reading— of women, travellers, words, the earthly world— that leads up to Milton's lost Eden. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. C D ■ D O Q . C g Q . ■ D C D C /) C /) 8 ■ D C D 3. 3 " C D C D ■ D O Q . C a O 3 " O o C D Q . ■ D C D C /) C /) .c® )cf|';(lclM pt(ric(atciIiof tl)?nntiic.illD{'fpoficio« Oi'dti i2ngl('Q)Hi.ii>,iiiiDof ii)c noble rcnliiit of <EiiglmjD,?ofiUtnicwuptljnt tljcsciobfcD. C l a')i flit EngliQ) iiiaii,flnD italttb % flfliib Ijcte ' ’^urpngfiiini)nu>nDe,b)l)fltrflpiitcnf1 lUflt lucre notai 31 taipil lucre il)p0fliiDnolu 3 kipi were iljflt /)ota) ]|taipl lucre 3 1 cannot (rllul)flt otll iieiu (a(l)poii0,bc plcfauin to me 3 1 mpl limit tl)cni.inl)cil)tc J liiipiic oj ifict 39olu 3 1 a n a ki'ttatc.all men tiotli on me looUe % b a t Qioiilb 3 1 Do,but fct coclic on die Ijoope •ttoliat Do 3 1 ca«.pf all die iuo;lDcme faplc 3 1 lupll get fl garment,Hinl retlje to mp topic iT iian 3 1 flin a m inlon,roi 3 lucre tlie nciu gpfc F ig u r e o n e Andrew Boorde, The Fyrst Bokc of the Bitroduction o f Knowledge, 1542. Huntington Library. ,.I U ' i ’ l l : ijn l U t t i i u m U ' e lf .u /d " |(î X X I ) FIGURE Two Lukas de Heerc, "Tlic Englishman in his Native ^ Dress," Sixteenth Century. Huntington Library. vo 298 ^ i: Ç P r^^~ iJ /3 y ^VUcilAcd S p srJ x tx T iJ arc :o h e t^o u L lp at rkc FIGURE THREE Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentlewoman, drawne out to the fu ll body: Expressing, what habilliments doe best attire her, what complements doe best accomplish her. London: B. Alsop & T. Fawcet for Michael Sparke, 1631. Huntington Library. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 299 O R Y A T S d » , C r u d i t i e s un Idstüv coh'.rj, ^ W n ~ c ’ ■ j ^C'ütdis iVjüitÆ mCrrimrc.l ^ tm £ v ,â td & ,J { f itu a m a n /î' û lÛ é ii t^c lfnsm s~ C i!U JÜ ^î^^ u e t i i a S d j s m J ^ izrts ff c r m a n tr , i m £ i £ $ -^ht^fâruu ; D 'ù t^ £ lS c £ m tl:c Sunj rt r arr ffo è c d j^ Z mtfcCaimtir i f mcrs^EfS^noa- Jupcrseïtaift' JuunîSmataftfc t r m Æ m âùm - . C /ff r-' bers ci-tim Çb^Jernc-j. c e n i x n u e r c ,i: jm P iu J ta f 'i r W " W r c c FIGURE FOUR Frontispiece to Thomas Coryat’sCoryarj Crudities Hastily gabled vp in fiue Moneths trauells in France, Sauoy, Italy, Rhetia comonly called the Grisons country, Heluetia aliàs Switzerland, some parts o f high Germany, and the Netherlcmds; Newly digested in the hungry aire ofOdcombe in the County o f Somerset, & now dispersed to the nourishment o f the trauelling Members o f his Kingdome. London, printed by W. S. Anno Domini, 1611. Huntington Library. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 300 F i g u r e R v e Dialectic, History, and Rhetoric supported by Grammar. Joannes Sambucus, Emblemata, et aliquot nurnml antiquie operis, Antwerp, 1616. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 301 ratu . Chrifd FIGURE SIX Frontispiece to the 1649 £ /fen Sar:7I/:e/ The Portraiture o f His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings. Huntington Library. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 302 Bibliography Primary Works A Closet fo r Ladies and Gentlewoman. London, Arthur Johnson, 1611. A.L. "A Relation of Some Abuses which are Comitted Against the Commonwealth" Ed. Sir Frederick Madden. Camden Society Publications. Lxi. Amman, Jost. Nurember, 1577. An Anthology o f Elizabethan Prose Fiction. Ed. Paul Salzman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. 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Profitable Instructions; describing what speciall observations are to be taken by Travellers in all Nations, Sattes and Countries; Pleasant and Profitable. By the three much admired, Robert, late Earle o f Essex. Sir Phillip Sidney. And Secretary Davison London: Benjamin Fisher, 1633. Elyot, Thomas. The boke named the Gouemour. 1531. Erasmus, Desiderius. Desiderius Erasmus: The Praise o f Folly and Other Writings. Trans, and ed. Robert M. Adams. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1989. P., G. B. A., A discoverie o f the great subtiltie and wonderfullwisdom o f the Italians, whereby they bear sway over the most part o f Christendome, and cunningly behave themselves to fetch the Quintescence out o f the peoples purses: Discoursing at Large the meanes, how they prosecute and continue the same: and last o f all, convenient remedies to prevent their pollicies herein. London: Printed by John Wolfe, 1591. Foxe, John. 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In Chronicle and Romance: Froissart, Malory, Holinshed. New York: P. F. Collier & Son Company, 1910. Hartlaub, G. F. Zauber des Spiegels. 1590. Heywood, Thomas. Die English Traueller. As it Hath Beene Publikely acted at the Cock-Pit in Drury-lane: By Her Maiesties seruants. London: Printed by Robert Raworth, 1633. In The Dramatic Works o f Thomas Heywood Now First Collected with Illstrative Notes and a Memoir of the Author in Six Volumes. London: John Pearson, 1874. Vol. 4.: 1-95. Hie Mulier: or The Man-Woman: Being a Medicine to cure the Coltish Disease o f the Staggers in the Masculine-Feminines o f our Times. London, 1620. Hobbes, Thomas. De Cive. Paris, 1642. English translation London, 1651. Hohy, Sir Thomas. The Book o f the Courtier. Ed. David Nutt. London, 1900. Hoby, Thomas. The travels and life o f Sir Thomas Hoby, Kt. o f Bisham Abbey, written by himself, 1547-1564 . Holinshed, Raphael. Chronicles o f England, Scotland, and Ireland. New York: AMS Press, 1965. 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Perkins, William. The Whole Treatise o f the Cases o f Conscience. Cambridge, 1608. Pettie, George. A Petite Pallace ofPettie His Pleasure. Ed. Herbert Hartman. London: Oxford University Press, 1938. Pilkington, Thomas. "The sermon agaynst excesse of appareil." Certain Sermons appoynted by the Queenes Majestie to be declared and read, by all Parsons, Vicars, and Curates, every Sunday and Holyday, in theyr Churches. 1569. Plat, Hugh. Delightes fo r ladies, to adome their persons, tables, closets, and distillatories. London: Peter Short, 1600? Prose o f the English Renaissance. Ed. J. William Hebei, Hoyt H. Hudson et al. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1952. Purchas, Samuel Purchas his pilgrimes. in five bookes. 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Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 311 Baines, Barbara Burman . Fashion Revivals from the Elizabethan Age to the Present Day . London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1981. Baldwin, Frances Elizabeth. Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1926. Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Barkan, Leonard. The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit o f Paganism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Bartlett, Kenneth R. "The Courtyer of Count Baldasser Castilio: Italian Manners and the English Court in the Sixteenth Century." Quademi d'ltalianistica: Official Journal of the Canadian Society fo r Italian Studies, 6:2 (1985): 249-258. Bartlett, Kenneth R. "The Strangeness of Strangers: English Impressions of Italy in the Sixteenth Century." Quademi d'italianistica 1:1 (1980): 46-63. Beerbohm, Max. Defense o f Cosmetics. 1896. Bennett, Josephine Waters. 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New York and London: Routledge, 1991. 57-67. Jardine, Lisa. Still Harping on Daughters. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods: A New History o f the Renaissance. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Javitch, David. Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Jones, Ann Rosalind. "Inside the Outsider: Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller and Bakhtin's Polyphonic Novel." EL/7 50:1 (1983): 61-81. Jones, Ann Rosalind. "Italians and Others: Venice and the Irish in Coryat's Crudities and The White Devil." Renaissance Drama 18 (1987): 101-119. Judge, Cyril Bathurst. Elizabethan Book Pirates. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1934. Juhasz, Esther. Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire: Aspects o f Material Culture. Ed. Esther Juhasz. Trans. Judith Levy. Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1990. Kegl, Rosemary. The Rhetoric o f Concealment: Figuring Gender and Class in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. Kelley, Donald R. Renaissance Humanism. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991. Kelly, Kathleen Ann. "An Inspiration for Chaucer's Description of Chauntecleer." English Language Notes (fAasch. 1993): 1-7. Kibbey, Ann. The Interpretation o f Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric Prejudice and Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. King, John N. English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins o f the Protestant Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. King, Margaret Leah. "Caldiera and the Barbaro on Marriage and the Family: Humanist Reflections of Venetian Realities." The Journal o f Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1976). Kinney, Arthur F. "Stephen Gosson." Sixteenth-Century’ British Nondramatic Writers, Dictionary o f Literary Biography. Vol. 172. Ed. David A. Richardson. Detroit: Gale Research. 96-104. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 316 Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought and Its Sources. Ed. Michael Mooney. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Lazar, Moshe. "Cupid, the Lady, and the Poet." Eleanor o f Aquitaine: Patron and Politician. Ed. William W. BCibler. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1976. 36-59. Letts, Malcolm. Sir John Mandeville: The Man and his Book. London: 1949. Levine, Laura. "Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization from 1579 to 1642." Criticism: A Quarterly fo r Literature and the Arts 22 , (1986): 121-143. Lewis, C. S. The Allegory o f Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958. Lievsay, John Leon. The Elizabethan Image o f Italy. Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1979. Linton, Joan Pong. "Jack o f Newbery and Drake in California: Domestic and Colonial Narratives of English Cloth and Manhood." ELH 59 (1992): 23- 51. 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Thrupp, Sylvia L. The Merchant Class o f Medieval London: 1300-1500. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948. Rev. 1989. Valverde, Mariana. "The Love of Finery: Fashion and the Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse." Victorian Studies 32 (1989): 168- 188 Vickers, Nancy J. "Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme." Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265-79. Vickers, Nancy. "The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's Lucrece." Shakespeare and the Question o f Theory. Ed. Geoffrey Hartman and Patricia Parker. London: Metheun, 1986. 95-116. Vickers, Nancy. "The Mistress in the Masterpiece." The Poetics o f Gender. Ed. Nancy Miller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 19-41. Wameke, Sara. Images o f the Eduational Traveller in Early Modem England. Leiden, New York, Kdln: E.J. Brill, 1995. Wawn, Andrew N. "Chaucer, The Plowman's Tale and Reformation Propoganda: The Testimonies of Thomas Godfray tmd I Playne Piers." The Bulletin o f the John Rylands Library 54 ( 1973): 174-192. Weiner, Andrew D. Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics o f Protestanticm: A Study of Contexts. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. Whigham, Frank. Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes o f Elizabethan Courtesy Theory. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. White, Eugene E. Puritan Rhetoric: The Issue o f Emotion in Religion. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. Woodbridge, Linda Fitz. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature o f Womankind, 1540-1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Woodfield, Denis B. Surreptitious Printing in England, 1550-1640. New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1973. Wright, Louis B. Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England. 1935. Reprinted 1958 and 1980. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 320 Youngs, F. A ., Jr. The Proclamations o f the Tudor Queens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (Q A -3 ) / 4^ / r % 1 . 0 LI .25 in i m 1 .4 m 12.2 2.0 1 . 8 1 . 6 15 0 mm V c P 7 .' W / / o / / 4P P L I E O ^ IIV M S E . I n c . = 1653 East M ain Street Rochester. N Y 14609 USA Phone: 716/482-0300 - = ~ - = Fax: 716/288-5989 0 1993. Applied Image. Inc.. All Rights Reserved Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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