Productive misogyny in medieval and early modern literature: Women, justice, and social order

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Content Productive Misogyny in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: Women, Justice, and Social Order by Megan Herrold A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the USC Graduate School University of Southern California In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy (English) August 2018 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 3 Introduction Towards a Queer Political Philosophy 4 Chapter 1 Gender and the Limitations of Individual Autonomy 25 In the Late Medieval Loathly Lady Tales Chapter 2 Marrying the Medusa in Spenser’s Book of Justice 70 Chapter 3 Misogyny and Justice in Shakespeare’s Bed Trick Plays: 113 Chapter 4 “Sprumpet Fortune”: The Gendered Stakes of 145 Gambling in Shakespeare Chapter 5 Compassionate Petrarchanism: Looking at the Stabat Mater Dolorosa 183 Tradition in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum Conclusion Lady Justice: Gender, Agency, and Allegory in the Legal 222 Emblem Tradition Works Cited 246 3 Acknowledgments: This project would not exist if not for my taking part in English Literature seminars led by generous and brilliant scholars. Robert Entzminger’s Milton seminar at Hendrix College started me off on this journey towards a career in the humanities; Elizabeth Fowler’s “Romance of Consent” at UVA made me fall hard for the earlier periods and what they have to offer about personhood; Rebecca Lemon’s “Conceptions of Tyranny” made me reconsider the robust theoretical and political philosophical capacities inherent in studying Shakespeare and early modern literature more generally; Heather James’ many reading groups at USC and at her home forged in me a sense of community and ethics that I found unceasingly mirrored back in the Ovidian underpinnings of the works we read; David Rollo’s “The Literary Prison of the Middle Ages” seemed pitched directly at my project in its consideration of representations of gender and reading practices. In fact, I can trace the genesis of each of the following chapters to one or more of the above classes—and the lessons in interpretation, writing, and pedagogy I learned from the professors who taught them. I’ve loved every minute of being in classrooms with these scholars, and would gladly continue to do so forever if I didn’t have to get a job. I’d especially like to thank Rebecca and Heather for working so closely with me in refining my ideas in their inchoate pre-verbal phases as well as in their slightly more formed versions on the page. If not for Heather’s reading groups, during which Amanda, Betsy, Lauren, Mike, Ash, and I would bounce ideas off of each other and Heather, and if not for Rebecca’s trust in my autonomy and speedy reading and inspired organizational suggestions for my drafts, I don’t think I could have made it through this long process of dissertation drafting and revising. I’ve learned so much from both of your examples in working with me. I couldn’t have done it without either of you. I also owe much to my fellow cohort members who kept me sane and plugging away at the work. I’m especially thinking of my fellow early modernists—namely, Lauren Weindling, Lauren Elmore, Amanda Ruud, Betsy Sullivan, Ash Kramer, and Mike Benitez. But I also am so grateful for the many friends I’ve made in the English and Creative Writing departments at USC—especially Sam Carrick, Diana Arterian, Nathan Martinez Pogar, Viola Lasmana, Gray Fisher, Cecilia Caballero, Rob Raibee, Ali Pearl, and Trisha Tucker. I’ve learned so much about teaching and ethics and care from each of these people, and I’m so happy to have known and worked with them. And I of course must also thank my husband, Billy. More than anyone, he’s the reason I kept plugging away at and enjoying the work. He was always there to remind me of my values when I would question their worth and keep me laughing when I needed a break. I’m so grateful to have met someone who is always up for discussions about gendered representations and expectations and their unjust but often hilarious implications. I’m very lucky and very thankful for him. 4 Introduction: Towards a Queer Political Philosophy In his sixteenth-century pastoral comedy, Galatea, John Lyly uses an all-boy theater troupe to dramatize a conflict involving those virtues so often associated with women and their normative social value: beauty and chastity. Set in a village outside of Lincolnshire on the river Humber and the neighboring woods, the play pits Cupid and his mother Venus against Diana and her followers, or love and society-generating sexuality against virginity, the repudiation of such. Where the goddesses might see the virtues they represent as opposed, the play’s outset emphasizes that both beauty and chastity must necessarily combine in one individual to stave off social ruin: due to a “condition” reached years before between the villagers and the sea god Neptune, “the fairest and chastest virgin in all the country” must be sacrificed every five years lest the Humber flood and destroy the village (1.1.48, 51). When two local beauties, Galatea and Phillida, appear vulnerable to being selected as this year’s quarry, their fathers—each fearful for his daughter’s life—dress them as boys and send them to the forest for safekeeping. Once in the forest, however, the cross-dressed maids get into even more trouble—trouble of a kind the play associates with the “impossible.” Galatea and Phillida not only arouse the ardor of Diana’s nymphs (with the help of Cupid’s machinations), causing them to repudiate their vows of chastity, but they also find themselves increasing drawn to one another—in love, despite the play’s association of love between women with “impossibilities” (2.2.10). In an ending that makes the “unpossible” possible, the play seems to sanction Galatea and Phillida’s queer desire by associating it with the reconciliation Diana and Venus: the two lovers can marry because Venus will transform one of the them into a man. Thus, at the exact moment the play acknowledges that the “impossibility” of queer desire might actually exist, it contains the threat of that desire through a heteronormative political position. In fact, a closer look at what 5 exactly is deemed “unpossible” reveals not the amor impossibilis of lesbian desire that so interests Valerie Traub—that possibility existed between Galatea and Phillida without the need for divine influence—but rather the physical transformation of one of the maids into a man so as to make that desire socially and politically appropriate. 1 When the maids state they wouldd rather die or be cursed than be barred from love, Venus pledges: “Then shall it be seen that I can turn one of them to be a man, and that I will,” for “What is to love or the mistress of love unpossible?” (5.3.151-2, 154). 2 Instead of imagining an alteration to the social order so as to legitimate queer social bonds—that is, to legitimate Galatea and Phillida’s queer marriage as well as acknowledge the validity of their queer desire—the romance ending of Galatea depends upon the physical transformation of an individual woman to shore up a commitment to a heteronormative system. The play, in short, requires the individuals who deviate from the social order to physically transform to uphold its eminence, keeping the legitimate expression of the deviation, queer desire in this case, as “unpossible” as its resurgence is inevitable. While Lyly’s romance ending, particularly through its transformation of heroine to hero, ultimately reifies what a contemporary (and pro-marriage equality) audience might interpret as an unjust social order, another female figure in the play points to the possibility of upending a systemic injustice that the majority of Lyly’s contemporaries would also recognize. In Act V, Lyly introduces the character Hebe in a role that serves what I’m calling a puella ex machina function. “Miserable and accursed…being neither fair nor fortunate,” Hebe is an imperfect sacrifice to Neptune that the villagers only turn to because they are desperate to stave off the 1 Of course, this transformation is also far from “unpossible” considering the acting conventions of the time. The boy actors are already performing their female roles. For more on gender play in early modern theater, see a collection like Erotic Politics ed. Susan Zimmerman or Lisa Jardine’s “Boy Actors, Female Roles, and Elizabethan Eroticism” in Staging the Renaissance Ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (1991). 2 Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism 6. 6 flood. Fulfilling only the chaste part of Neptune’s requirements, Hebe is rejected as a sacrifice— despite her willing consent to give her life for her community, her physical appearance bars that motion from being socially acknowledged as a true “sacrifice.” While Hebe, her life deemed not worth losing, ironically mourns her salvation, her example also points out an injustice in the original “condition” of social contract reached between Neptune and the villagers. Why, after all, are Neptune and the villagers killing off the village’s prettiest virgins—the most prized means of reproducing the village’s population into the future? Hebe’s improper fit within the model draws attention to its injustice and catalyzes its change. After rejecting Hebe’s sacrifice and a brief phase during which he plots the murder all of Diana’s beautiful and chaste nymphs, Neptune enters into a new agreement with Diana and Venus on behalf of the village, pledging to “for ever release the sacrifice of virgins” if they all chose to “prefer not a private grudge before a common grief” (5.3.75-7). Each of the gods, that is, chooses to overlook an injustice affecting them as individuals in favor of correcting an injustice affecting the community more broadly. So where the threat of Galatea and Phillida’s queer deviation is coopted to uphold the heteronormative system that couldn’t accommodate it, the play also posits a way in which an individual’s deviation might just as likely provoke a change in the social order itself. Thus, Galatea provides a unique vantage on what James M. Bromley calls the “political limits of Utopianism within queer theory.” That is, Galatea pits the longing for a utopia that foregrounds queer desire against a political system inherently invested in the heteronormative (32). 3 3 Bromley and I refer to the debate over whether politics is necessarily grounded in heterosexual reproduction and therefore fundamentally at odds with queer concerns. For more on this debate, see “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.” PMLA, 121.3 (2006): 819-29; De Lauretis, Teresa. “Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 17.2-3 (2011): 243-63; Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004); Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure (2011); Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009); and Snediker, Michael D. Queer 7 I linger with Lyly’s play because it introduces themes and motifs central to the argument of my dissertation. Through an emphasis on fictions of gender and particularly fictions of what a “woman” is, the play questions the particular injustices to which a social order might gives rise in the lived experience of individuals, and it posits how the order might respond to those injustices. As in the inability of the heteronormative system to accommodate Galatea’s and Phillida’s queer marriage, the injustice might be treated as a threat to order that must be transformed or otherwise contained to shore up that order. But another potential also exists: as in the unsuitability of Hebe’s sacrifice, the injustice might articulate the need to upend the original principle of order in favor one that is more broadly just: that is, a systemic response to better alleviate a “common grief.” At its core, “Productive Misogyny in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: Women, Justice, and Social Order” asks a simple yet unexplored question: why does misogyny so often materialize in medieval and early modern conceptions of a just society? From allegories of an ideal England, to comedies on companionate marriage, to plays, epics, and poems that attempt to reach utopian conclusions, “Productive Misogyny” finds that thinking of justice ironically means thinking through misogyny—and specifically, thinking through the ways in which individual women are allegorically figured as representative of an entire class of person to strategically privilege certain ordering principles over others. In exploring the reasons for the link between justice and misogyny, I argue that misogyny offers surprising ethical and political philosophical opportunities to explore gendered constructions of personhood. Specifically I reveal how authors ranging from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, including Chaucer, Gower, Spenser, Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.). 8 Shakespeare, and Aemilia Lanyer, appropriate conventionally misogynistic figures to rethink radically the ethical and political capacities of personhood, and therefore justice, in society. For misogyny to be “productive” according to my specifications, its fictions of female personhood must be negotiated in good faith and in a sustained way in the literary text. That is, the community imagined in the literary work must be called upon to respond in some way to the injustice that, ironically, also gives rise to the misogyny. “Productive misogyny” therefore encompasses those justificatory fictions concerning gender that arise when the place and/or the idea of women in a system of social order is contemplated, ethically and seriously. In the literatures I study, two possible and “productive” outcomes for this contemplation exist. On one hand, the ordering principle of the imagined society might alter so as to more justly accommodate the troubling woman within it—so much so that that the woman would no longer cause trouble. In such cases, alternative and largely queer principles for social cohesion are explored, such as queer family formation through adoption and compassionate suffering, examples that I explore in Chapters 4 and 5. The more conservative outcome, on the other hand, is the tendency for the troubling woman herself to change—in fact, to physically transform—in order to render the systemic injustice she elucidates moot in her particular case. Physical transformations feature repeatedly in the literature I study—not only in the loathly lady stories, where an ugly old hag transforms into the perfect woman, but also in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, wherein a statue of the Queen of Sicilia “transforms” into Queen Hermione herself and thus reconstitutes the kingdom feared lost. Like Lyly’s promise to transform one of the female lovers into a man in Galatea, the works I study often preserve the existing social order—along with the injustice the troubling woman originally pinpointed—by swapping a change on the level of individual agents for one 9 that would alter the system itself. And so, the tales that end in transformation often restage the original problem, or at least the social order that would give rise to a similar problem in the future. Such is the state of affairs in so many examples from the comedy and romance genres, as in Shakespeare’s so-called “problem” comedies, two of which I consider in Chapter 3, and the medieval and early modern romances I study in Chapters 1, 2, and 4. However, even as these works return to the original and already problematized social order, they also often revel in just how queer and/or personally damaging a return to normativity can be when viewed from the vantage of the character that has been made to fit within it. For instance, I’ll show in Chapter 2 how Spenser renders the scene of consensual heterosexual defloration a homoerotic and bloody spectacle when Britomart decapitates and penetrates her allegorical double, Radigund; in Chapter 3, I’ll demonstrate how Shakespeare renders “justice” through a heterosexual marriage forged through publicizing the husband figure’s deception and rape. Therefore, even as I mark a tendency in certain literary texts to recursively privilege the original patriarchal/heteronormative ordering principle as “just” or “natural,” the writers I study also demonstrate, as Maggie Nelson states it, “that no one set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical or the so-called normative” (72-3). Studying Productive Misogyny demonstrates that those principles of order so often defended as “natural,” “inevitable,” and “just” in early texts—namely, patriarchy and heteronormativity—are merely the privileging of certain fictions over others. In fact, I’ll show that in select works by Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Lanyer, nonnormative familial and political bonds often better serve the interests of justice than more traditional fictions of social contract, such as those forged through conquest, fraternity, and marital consent. Heteronormative Conflations and Queer Disjuctures: The Allegory of Political Philosophy What if…there were a practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and institution can be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest junctures 10 weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing? Think of that entity “the family,” an impacted social space in which all of the following are meant to line up perfectly with each other: a surname a sexual dyad a legal unit based on state-regulated marriage a circuit of blood relationships a system of companionship and succor a building a proscenium between ‘private’ and ‘public’ an economic unit of earning and taxation the prime site of economic consumption the prime site of cultural consumption a mechanism to produce, care for, and acculturate children a mechanism for accumulating material goods over several generations a daily routine a unit in a community of worship a site of patriotic formation -Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,“Queer and Now.” 4 Contemplating the unique depression the Christmas season inevitably arouses in her, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the above quote decouples the formative conflation first forged in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. In the history of Western political theory, thinkers have gone back to the examples first fostered in The Republic and the Ethics and Politics in seeking to connect individual to political roles; that is, the goals of moral philosophy or ethics have long been considered correlative to those of political philosophy. 5 This assumed connection so influenced the early modern imagination that, as Cynthia B. Herrup has shown in A House in 4 Tendencies, 6. 5 In Studies in Governmentality, Michel Foucault charts a renewed interest in this connection, what he calls the “art of government,” ushered in by Guillaume de La Perrière’s 1567 post- Machiavellian political philosophical tract, Miroir Politique. Whereas in Machiavellian sovereignty theory, “the doctrine of the prince and the juridical theory of sovereignty are constantly attempting to draw the line between the power of the prince and any other form of power, because its task is to explain and justify this essential discontinuity between them, in the art of government the task is to establish a continuity, in both an upwards and a downwards direction” between governance of the self and governance of the state and vice versa (The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (1991): 90-91). 11 Gross Disorder, the very publicized decoupling of ethics and politics in the behavior of Mervyn Tuchet, the Second Earl of Castlehaven, brought about his downfall. Legally charged with sodomizing his servants and assisting in the rape of his wife, the Earl’s greater crime was to flout his duties as a husband and householder and thus threaten the stability of a political system based on aristocratic governance. In such a system, neither the Earl’s behavior nor his person could be tolerated; he was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1631—an execution symbolic of failure to appropriately wield the ethical and political authority his role demanded. As the Castlehave case reveals, moral and political philosophers have historically urged the continuity between roles and the actions often associated with them. Yet contemporary queer theorists and feminists, by contrast, have urged recognition of the various harms those continuities impart upon the lived experience of individuals. Meditating on this disjunction in the historical period between the high middle ages and the seventeenth century reveals the extent to which fictional conventions aid in the construction of individual and social identity. For that period has long been considered to usher in the first inklings of what would come to be recognized as modern subjectivity—the conscious crafting of a coherent self. But in the wake of New Historicism, critics have emphasized that those instances of self-fashioning also occurred within broader social transformations—the political and religious upheavals of the time and the changes wrought by the emergent market economy—and the anxieties they often produced. And so, the potential to fashion one’s subjectivity depended upon the alarming notion that the social order itself was not fixed, and it correlated with many alarming attempts to fix it. 6 6 See, for instance, Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle. Howard contextualizes Greenblatt’s ideas of theatrical self-fashioning alongside the anti-theatrical literature of the day in her study of the political implications of representations of theater. While both Stephen Greenblatt and Jean Howard are quick to point out the illusory nature of self-fashioning, the freedom of which is constrained by “material and discursive forces” of institutions like “family, 12 Women and the idea of “woman” have been instrumental in early English thinkers’ grappling with such material and social upheavals, especially as those thinkers more or less consciously negotiate their role as literary creators reproducing and/or commenting on those upheavals in their literary representations. The self-fashioning revealed in Thomas Wyatt’s poetry is, according to Stephen Greenblatt, “defined by its rejection of the doubleness that in a corrupt world assures sexual and political success,” a duplicity that Wyatt finds “above all, characteristic of women” (160). As Lee Patterson urges, Chaucer constructs his poetic persona and the “rights of selfhood” more broadly through the sexualized and poetic deferrals he associates with the feminine and the Wife of Bath’s subjectivity specifically (282). For Nancy Vickers, Petrarchan poets participate in the dismemberment, containment, and poetic reproduction of the female body as they compete to out-blazon each other. And among the few to explicitly use the term “misogyny” in her study, Elizabeth Fowler elucidates the ways in which John Skelton constructs his alewife Elynour Rummyng as a collection of misogynistic and “clerical antifeminist” tropes, thereby critiquing the way the burgeoning marketplace unfixes value from goods through the figure of an incontinent wife. 7 But to what extent is the strategic use of feminine subjectivity as a tool for self- construction tantamount to participating in and perpetuating misogyny? I would argue that the difference lies in the political ramifications of this use. In her exploration of misogyny as “heterosocial idiom,” Kathryn Schwarz calls it a “scheme” and largely thinks of it in terms of “hate speech,” concluding that it “does not need rigorous logic to forge unified purpose and sense; it works most effectively through a partial approach to totalizing ends” (80). Such a view religion, state,” I would point out that some self-fashioning is more free than others (Greenblatt 257, Howard 35). 7 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning; Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History; Vickers, “Diana Described”; Fowler, Literary Character. 13 shares much in common with Kate Mann’s recent moral philosophical exploration of contemporary misogyny in the United States and Australia as the “police force of patriarchy”—a “political phenomenon” designed to “police and enforce patriarchal order” and more specifically, “to enforce women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance” (27-30). For both Schwarz and Mann, the logic of misogyny and the patriarchal order for which it works very much assumes a commitment to gender binarism (not to mention cis-heterosexuality) that must be protected and reinforced in the political sphere. 8 But while these political impulses certainly feature in the misogyny I’m calling “productive” in medieval and early modern texts—precious few of the writers I study would full-throatedly advocate for women’s equal participation in the political sphere—the writers utilizing “productive misogyny” themselves would sooner package their projects as explorations of individual ethics and social justice, or perhaps the exploration of the interplay of the individual’s private and political virtues. Either way, they would not exclusively bar one gender over another within their representation of the political sphere. In Spenser’s case, for example, his project “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline” necessitates the reader’s more than Book length association with Britomart, the female Knight of Chastity, even as the project morphs from an exploration of private to public virtues in the 1590 and 1596 editions. So where early modern political theorists and anti-feminist pamphleteers would hardly seek to find room for women in the political sphere, early modern poets and playwrights feature women time and again in their literary representations of the social and political order. In fact, women quite often serve as the agents of justice in such texts. 8 In R. Howard Bloch’s formative study of medieval misogyny, he refers to the inherent problem of representation poses, for misogyny speaks to “oppositions between what we perceive and what we endorse” and the uneasy “fit between representation and what one might think of as a political will” (1-2). 14 Because women are useful to imagining the political order but threatening if allowed to actually join it, I urge a focus on the role of allegory in both the fiction of subjectivity construction and the ways in which that construction is influenced and even curtailed in the cases of certain identity categories over others. In the latter case, we might recognize that the political goal of misogyny—to justify and/or perpetuate women’s subordination to men—often proceeds allegorically: one need merely think of Eve as a preeminent example wherein one woman is held up as representative of a whole class of person and used to justify the subordination and disenfranchisement of that class. But as previously discussed, that systemic work is at odds with the political value women and the idea of women offer to individual identity formation (of men) as well as the formation of social order based upon it. For instance, Kathryn Schwarz has demonstrated in What You Will that the subjectivity of the willfully obedient woman approximates that of the political subject in general, according to the contradictory logic of prescribed choice that the social contract assumes. Given the political use to which allegories of women are often put, one of the goals of my project is to forge a link between misogynistic fictions of women and the fiction of fraternal social contract that would become reified in the seventeenth century writings of Hobbes and Locke. 9 More specifically, my use of “allegory” in this project is informed by Gordon Teskey’s historicized definition of the term from The Spenser Encyclopedia, which situates Spenser’s use of it in the long tradition derived from Quintilian and Aquinas. Moreover, my use stresses the 9 The project offers an addendum to Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract, but it works from the other historical end. It also qualifies those studies that consider the role of marriage and other sexualized unions in the conception of political theory. See Victoria A. Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Melissa E. Sanchez, Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Mary Lyndon Shanley, “Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth Century English Political Thought.” The Western Political Quarterly. 32.1 (1979): 79-91. 15 allegorical function of what Elizabeth Fowler defines as “social persons” in Literary Character. For Fowler, social persons function “like genres: they are abstract conventions that never actually ‘appear’ in any pure form, but are implied referents by which characters are understood” (19). My use of “allegory” especially emphasizes the political implications of any one interpretation, such that readings of characters strategically determine how they should participate in the social and political order. To a certain extent, my work builds upon Paul de Man’s “allegories of reading,” finding a fundamental indeterminacy in the representation of women’s personhood in literary texts, but I also find this indeterminacy is often put to quite determined political uses. My work therefore also in part aligns with Frederic Jameson’s use of “allegory” in his practice of reading texts as “symbolic acts” of political history making—the ‘“utterances” in an essentially collective or class discourse’ (80). In my view, the medieval and early modern definition of woman, like the incoherent definition of “gay” Eve Sedgwick locates in modern society, “com[es] under the radically overlapping aegises of a universalizing discourse of acts and a minoritzing discourse of persons” (86). To illustrate this conceptual paradox by way of example, I’ll return to the relationship between Spenser’s reader and Britomart: “chastity” as a virtue might refer to a set of universal acts, male no more or less than female, but the association of Chastity with a female person has implications that are hardly universal. For instance, in the quest from the Book of Chastity through the Book of Friendship to the Book of Justice, Books III to V of The Faerie Queene, rendering chastity female justifies Britomart’s disappearance from the poem after she consents to her own symbolic decapitation and literal defloration (see my argument in Chapter 2). Despite his literary representation of a social order produced via female political consent, Spenser also suggests a justification for barring women from the political world more broadly—and 16 moreover, even as he writes under the aegis of a female sovereign. And thus, this project attempts to answer Sedgwick’s call for “study of the incoherent dispensation” of gender difference itself via a study of early modern definitions of gender and specifically, “woman.” For in their attempts to define “woman,” early moderns create “a field of intractable, highly structured discursive incoherence at a crucial node of social organization…the node at which any gender is discriminated” (90). As other critics have urged, there is always a politics to representation, and my study articulates the ways in which a focus on allegory specifically can help us isolate the ways literary works—and the gendered fictions within them—actively participate in the production of a “just” political order. 10 If we understand allegory, therefore, as in part swapping a reductive and fictional story or social value for complex subjectivity, it can prove useful in understanding the various irrationalities—misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and so on—that are so deeply imbricated in patriarchal social order. In my view, the work of allegory—and misogyny as a type of allegory—in scenes of social contract accords with Pierre Bourdieu’s argument concerning the work symbols do to consolidate the present and future stability of a system through consensus: “Symbols are the instruments par excellence of ‘social integration’: as instruments of knowledge and communication…they make it possible for there to be a consensus on the meaning of the social world, a consensus which contributes fundamentally to the reproduction of the social order.” Moreover, although symbols (and allegory, I’d add) work through consensus, the power 10 For similar studies that comment on the role of imagination in politics, see Howard The Stage and Social Struggle and Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon. For historical studies of the importance of social codes and literary representations in terms of praxis, see Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (1998) and Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (2005). For the gendered and violent potentials inherent in the use of allegory, specifically, see Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (1996). 17 such fictions wield depends on an inherent misrecognition: “For symbolic power is that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it.” 11 Misogynistic tropes are so common in early English literature that we often don’t acknowledge the power misogyny wields. But to a certain extent, I contend that our misrecognition of misogyny’s power is dependent on, to paraphrase Bourdieu again, both society’s complicity in that power and its collective investment in denying that complicity. At a certain point, this desire to deny complicity becomes willful. 12 To illustrate how a focus on allegory helps illustrate how the misogyny of a system might be obscured, I will briefly consider a potent legal example through which fictions of gender are used to define “justice”; and I will pitch the example to once again illustrate the two potential outcomes I find in the literatures I consider in “Productive Misogyny”—that is, revolution or return to the original social order. In early modern legal conventions, equity was understood as the moral thrust of justice; softer than strict adherence to the law, equity and the related concept of mercy look to the specifics of context that might suggest the law itself is unjust. As Aristotle puts it, “Equity is justice that goes beyond the written law” (Rhetoric 1.13.13). But considered in light of the examples I track in “Productive Misogyny,” the need for equity or mercy might also point to a systemic injustice in the law that ought to be altered to make the justice the law stands for more broadly applicable. The problem then becomes whether the law itself might alter to more adequately accommodate the exception that requires equity, or retain its original status, 11 My interaction with Bourdieu here aligns with Schwarz’s in her chapter on misogyny from What You Will (qtd. 79). The quoted portions are from Bourdieu’s “On Symbolic Power,” (164- 6). 12 My approach is in line with Sara Ahmed’s recent work on “Complaint,” in which she specifies that she listens with “a feminist ear” that “picks up on the sounds that are blocked by the collective will not to hear.” 18 thus perpetuating and even reinforcing the bifurcation between justice and equity, or eschewing the need for differentiation entirely in the name of “mercy.” Both of these latter moves would preserve the letter of the law, and both moves are specifically gendered in the medieval and early modern imagination. As I discuss in more detail in Chapters 2 and 5, there are long traditions of associating women allegorically with the principles of equity and mercy. Such associations are hardly coincidental. Aligning women with equity—the importance of contextual specificity—is just another way of demonstrating that traditional justice systems were not designed with their common experiences in mind; their concerns are to be dealt with through the specificities of context, not the universal concerns affecting male subjects. And aligning women with mercy—as in the long tradition of the Virgin Mary, as I discuss in Chapter 5—is way of eschewing the need to grapple with the justice system at all. Both are strategies that use fictions to justify the continued exclusion of women. And while I plumb here a legal example of this phenomenon, its strategies extend far beyond that register. Even social orders that do not explicitly take on legal fictions are imbricated with gendered associations and understandings of proper order, which may incur through reference to race, class, and sexuality systemically and personhood on the individual level. Throughout the dissertation, I show how these associations inflect scenes that problematize sexual consent in Spenser’s romance and Shakespeare’s bed trick plays, in scenes that dramatize class and emasculation anxieties in the medieval loathly lady romances and Shakespeare’s invocations of gambling, and in the power dynamics implied in the Petrarchan blazon tradition. While allegory is certainly a part of the traditional exclusion of women from certain social orders, its capacity to highlight systemic injustices also signals a way to think through alternative ordering principles that are more just to more people. The homosocial dyadic 19 historical origins of the concept of “friendship,” as revealed by Laurie Shannon in Sovereign Amity and expanded beyond the dyad in John Garrison’s Friendship and Queer Theory in the Renaissance, and the heteronormative concept of “family” upended by Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts, are just a few examples by which consensus over certain social codes obscure and constrict alternative possibilities for social cohesion. Literary representations of queer social or political bonds based on the affections in early modern texts can thus often offer avenues for social cohesion and futurity that are more inclusive than those that political theorists rooted in heterosexual reproduction would allow. Such possibilities, of course, may risk diluting the aims of queer theory if they, as Lee Edelman warns, “remain rooted in the willful management of affective intensities and susceptible, therefore to the misrecognitions that reify the subject’s self” (9). 13 But the community-building and boundary-shattering example of procreative tears I locate in Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum in Chapter 5 may join other models, like viewing the devotional aspects of early modern addiction in Rebecca Lemon’s recent study, in upending the fantasy of self-sovereignty that is so tied to our notions of self and political subjectivity. 14 If “Productive Misogyny” illustrates the ways in which an investment in self-sovereignty often produces unjust implications for women and others for whom the social order was not designed, it also gestures to less restrictive ordering principles upon which a social order might be based— political bonds based on respect, care, and compassion that are not based on any set notions of what (gender, race, sexuality, or class) constitutes a person in the political sphere. Literature Review and Chapter Breakdown 13 Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (2014). 14 See Rebecca Lemon, Addition and Devotion in Early Modern England (2018); see also Elizabeth Fowler’s conclusion to Literary Character. “Productive Misogyny” also speaks to the need to deemphasize the constitutive fiction of self-sovereignty in favor of what Jennifer Nedelsky calls the “relational dimension of human experience” (3). 20 The first project to examine the coupling of justice and misogyny within multiple genres and through multiple time frames, this project contributes to and significantly extends extant work on gender, society, and literature in early modern England. To date, the most successful scholarship on misogyny and the role of women in society-building tends to emphasize the historical parameters of the querelle des femmes or “woman question” genre, typically culminating in the early modern period in the political philosophical discussions of Queenship in the Elizabethan era, as in Katherine Eggert’s Showing Like A Queen, or the analogy between marriage and the social contract into the seventeenth century, as in Frances Dolan’s Marriage and Violence, Victoria Kahn’s Wayward Contracts, and Shannon Miller’s Engendering the Fall. Often, feminist projects are reclamations of the role that particular archetypes play in service of the construction of subjectivity or the formation of a genre. Some writers emphasize the Renaissance resurgence of figures from classical tragedy, lament, and epic, including Heather James, Tanya Pollard, Kay Stanton, Nancy Vickers, and Linda Woodbridge. And others mark the loss or re-packaging of pre-Reformation Biblical and hagiographical exemplars, including Philippa Berry, Katharine Goodland, Debora Shuger, and Tiffany Jo Werth. Recent feminists like Kathryn Schwarz in What You Will, Melissa E. Sanchez in Erotic Subjects, and Valerie Traub in Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns draw upon the insights and potentials of queer theory to explore the ways a historicized account of gender and sexuality shapes our knowledge of early modern subjectivity and politics. Like these writers, I am interested in the distinctly gendered limits of political and personal sovereignty, concerns which later social contract theorists like Hobbes and Locke would for the most part bypass in their conception of the individual and the social contract. My project expands on such discussions, however, in two ways. First, even as I urge the inclusion of fictive 21 and imaginative literary works in the disciplines of political and moral philosophy, my project expands the scope of such debates by emphasizing the influence of the medieval period. Following Laura Ashe, Patricia Clare Ingham, David Rollo, and Michelle R. Warren on the role of the imaginary in history-making, I demonstrate the long resonance of medieval fictions— including stock conventions for character and plot—in political theory. Second, my project’s methodology suggests the value in turning from the productive but arguably confining use of psychoanalytical models to a more historical and specifically literary method. Where psychoanalytical criticism, especially in the wake of Janet Adelman and Nancy Vickers, has contributed much to our understanding of the ambivalence with which women were held in early modern society, my project uncovers the capacities of character that would have resonated with early readers and audience goers: specifically, I contribute to the uncovering of the understudied role of allegory in shaping personhood and the social order. Moving from the medieval period through the seventeenth century, “Productive Misogyny” is organized around key misogynistic tropes that are invoked in the service of constructing a just social order. My first chapter explores the loathly lady genre in the 14 th and 15 th centuries in England. Chaucer, Gower, and the anonymous author of The Weddynge of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle rework an Irish myth about fertility and right rule into a commentary on the limitations of individual autonomy in society-building: the just social order is forged by shunting the notion of compromised subjectivity onto women in general and the loathly lady in particular. Chaucer especially demonstrates the degeneration of this genre from one concerned with kingship and the sovereign’s proper relationship with his dominion to one in which class conflict is pitted against gender conflict to apologize for a rapist. 22 In chapter two, I show how Spenser draws on motifs of troubling women—specifically the Medusa the loathly lady—in the Book of Justice of The Faerie Queene. Casting his knight of justice as a gender-bending loathly lady enslaved to an emasculating Medusa, Spenser entertains modeling foreign policy in Ireland on the violence inherent in heterosexual marriage. While Spenser reveals the way in which female marital consent might be applied to the political sphere to justify women’s exclusion from it, he also leaves room for a queer political bond between his female sovereigns, Gloriana and Irena, who mutually affirm each other’s sovereignty. My third chapter turns from the women who might be collapsed into misogynistic literary figures to the ways women might use literary figures themselves to comment on misogynistic systems. In it, I take on Shakespeare’s use of the “bed trick” in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. Through this stock folkloric convention, Shakespeare’s communities of women join forces and appropriate the misogyny to which they are subject to produce justice through marriage. Through these tricksters who strategically weild their proximity to the category of “whore,” Shakespeare also reveals that a state-sanctioned marriage might countenance and even justify the publicized deception and rape of a husband figure. Chapter four considers Shakespeare’s use of gambling throughout his canon; I show how the Shakespearean Gamester’s social and economic success depends on his literal and symbolic control over “strumpet Fortune” and the women associated with her. When Shakespeare’s Gamesters call Fortune a “strumpet” and stake the lives or reputations of female characters in risky bets from The Taming of the Shrew to Hamlet to Antony and Cleopatra to The Winter’s Tale, they project fears of radical social leveling, or “evened odds” onto women, thereby containing the consequences of their anti-social drives and preserving the amicable façade of a “brothers’ wager.” In The Winter’s Tale, which I argue is Shakespeare’s most thorough 23 exploration of this tendency, Shakespeare envisions the queer family as a social order less risky than patriarchal monarchy. My final chapter considers Aemilia Lanyer’s revision of Petrarchanism through the stabat mater dolorosa liturgical tradition in her passion poem, Salve Dues Rex Judaeorum. Through applying Marian Compassion to much-maligned women including Eve, Cleopatra, and Lanyer herself, Lanyer models how looking at women ethically might both create and sustain a more just society. Instead of the Petrarchan gaze that cultivates rivalries between self and other, between men and women, and between poets, Lanyer’s way of looking involves compassionate tears that both blur boundaries between self and other and cultivate more and more connections. Through a reading practice that produces compassionate and procreative tears, Lanyer’s Mary, Christ, and readers refuse to reify Petrarchan rivalries and instead forge queer families. I conclude with an exploration of the ways in which the tradition of representing justice as female—as Lady Justice—allegorically justifies the exclusion of women from the political order even while acknowledging its dependence on them. Like the other literary tropes I explore in this project however, representations of Lady Justice also gesture towards possibilities for political agency of women alongside non-normative models for social order. These potentials are available to all persons no matter their gender, sexuality, race, or class, even though they are often associated with particular identity categories so as to justify their political exclusion. From there, I gesture to possible avenues for future research. Turning to a consideration of agonistic political philosophy and theorizations of queer utopia, I consider the ways in which an emphasis on allegory might help bridge the divide between queer and feminist political theory and potentially salvage the fiction of the “social contract.” For investigating medieval and early modern women’s imagined role in the historical constitution of social order can help pinpoint the 24 struggle as well as the potential way out of the tendency to erase certain classes of people from the political sphere in order to shore up the fiction of self-sovereignty in others. 25 Chapter 1: Gender and the Limitations of Individual Autonomy In the Late Medieval Loathly Lady Tales An ugly old hag forces herself on a young and doughty knight. Should the knight countenance her sexualized advances, he is rewarded: the loathly lady transforms into a lovely young woman. From its earliest iterations as an Irish fertility myth, to Gower and Chaucer’s versions, to Princess Fiona, the sometimes-ogre of Shrek, the story is light and humorous on its face. But this superficial levity belies the radical implications of the genre. Delving into theories of political and personal sovereignty, the loathly lady challenges us to take seriously the role of women in polity building. It posits that parity in heterosexual relationships might prove a potent model for political relationships. This juxtaposition of levity and seriousness, parity and hierarchy, correlates to the ambivalent role women play in the genre—an ambivalence encapsulated in the figure of the loathly lady herself. Early versions reveal her lovely form after a would-be sovereign has risked kissing her; later versions see her lovely by day and loathly by night, leaving it up to a husband to choose which version of her he favors. In any version, the loathly lady embodies the ambivalent misogynistic implications of patriarchal values. In equal measures, the loathly lady both repulses and attracts the knight: while loathly, her physical form constitutes a sexual challenge, but she is a repository of political expertise otherwise unavailable to the knight; and while lovely, she fulfills male social and sexual fantasies that cannot ultimately be sustained. As such, the loathly lady intermingles what is conventionally understood as repellant and appealing concerning women: the inevitability of their aging physical form, their sexual insatiability and corresponding capacity to emasculate sexually and/or socially, and their inscrutability in matters 26 of consequence to men. In a nutshell, the loathly lady is a misogynistic boogeyman, a figure upon which masculine fears of and desires for women mingle and contradict. 15 In this chapter, I argue that what primarily motivates the ambivalence ascribed and embodied by the loathly lady is the necessity of compromised individual autonomy in marriage as well as polity building. As the genre evolves, the loathly lady’s transformation from “sovereignty hag” to the embodiment of a male fantasy—in the Tale of Florent, the lady claims her beauty will last forever: “Mi beaute, which that I now have, / Til I be take into my grave; / Bot nyht and day as I am now” (1837-9)—corresponds with a similar impasse in a commonplace of early modern political theory. The conjugal unit was idealized as the best analogy to encapsulate the harmonious relationship between sovereign and subject since it mingles the possibility of reciprocal parity through consent to the bond and hierarchy in status between the parties. 16 But though the knight defers to the loathly lady in these tales, the narrative removes the 15 As such, my work in this chapter participates in the existing discussion on medieval England begun by David Rollo in Historical Fabrication, Laura Ashe in Fiction and History in England, and Michelle Warren in History on the Edge in on the role of romance in the historical fabrication of “England” and “Englishness” in the 12 th and 13 th centuries. The loathly lady stories I study are from the later medieval period, but they participate in this earlier historiographic activity, applying a myth concerning right rule in the context of heterosexual marriage as a subunit of the realm. My work is thus in line with Patricia Clare Ingham’s Sovereign Fantasies, which argues that the Arthuriana of the late 14 th and 15 th centuries was used to shore up insular identity in England. Ingham’s work also pays special attention to the troubling women in Arthur tales (like Bertilak’s Lady and Morgan le Fey) who threaten insular unification. The loathly lady is an important figure in this regard, and, although treated by Ingham (181-4), her focus on the political role of marriage as an alternative to war in the tales overemphasizes “The Tale of Florent” to the detriment of the other tales and overlooks many of the gendered nuances of the tales I’m here able to detail. 16 My second chapter also takes on these political theories. For an overview of them, see Victoria A. Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Melissa E. Sanchez, Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Mary Lyndon Shanley, “Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth Century English Political Thought.” The Western Political Quarterly. 32.1 (1979): 79-91. All three scholars frame the political philosophy of the late Tudor against the more fractious political 27 possibility of actually doing so. In his granting the loathly lady mastery over him or fulfilling her sexual desire by kissing her, the lady transforms, removing the necessity for the knight to actually seal the deal: she is granted the right to mastery but not allowed its expression; she is granted her desire, but her physical transformation upon its granting conflates her desire with his desire. In short, the lady earns the right of uncompromised autonomy but never allowed to express it; and because of this trick, patriarchy acknowledges the need to defer to women without incurring the implications of actually doing so. Therefore, both inscribed in her repulsive form and obscured by her attractive form, the loathly lady represents the implications of masculine fears of limited autonomy, the necessity of the interpersonal bonds between compromised subjectivities that form the basis of the social order. 17 By associating the compromised subjectivity necessary for society generation and cohesion with women, I demonstrate how the loathly lady genre—in each of its iterations—stages and restages the fiction of men’s autonomous subjectivity; the recursive nature of the tales reveals the toll patriarchy takes on women. Coming very close to an exploration of a radical, post-patriarchal order, the genre ultimately clings to the old order, “solving” the problem of emasculating bonds through the lady’s transformation from an unsuitable love prospect to the perfect woman. Extrapolating from these tales, my argument suggests that the ethos of the patriarchal social order in fact relies on this ambivalence being shunted on to women, and as such, I will explore those implications debates of the seventeenth century; they suggest that the conjugal analogy primarily referred to the positive affective ties between monarch and subject (Kahn 10-11, Sanchez 11-29, Shanley 79-80). All of these studies share in common a bifurcation between medieval and early modern (specifically seventeenth-century) thought. 17 See Kathryn Schwarz What You Will for a similar discussion of the gendered associations in the bonds that shore up community and society. I explore these in more depth in chapters two and three. 28 through three loathly lady tales in English: the anonymous romance, The Weddynge of Sir Gawaine and Dame Ragnelle, Gower’s “Tale of Florent,” and Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” These three tales have been summarized—their differences noted—before. In this chapter, my aim is to explore the particular brands of misogynistic othering at work in each tale and the ways in which each tale explores, but ultimately repudiates, another possible ordering principle for heterosexual relations. I contend that, without a loathly lady and without the misogyny that creates her, the patriarchal social order in each tale cannot hold. And moreover, I’ll demonstrate that in its trajectory from a myth on the nature of sovereignty to fable of heterosexual marriage, the tales retain its associations of contrived subjectivity with women even as it marks the degeneration of men: what began as a demonstration of sovereign virtue degenerates into the redemption of rapist knights. The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle: Gender and Legitimate Land Claims The Old Irish precursors present the forging of a sexual bond as the foundation of a legitimate claim to sovereignty. 18 ⁠ The earliest examples of the story enact a fertility myth, as the decay of the land in winter is transformed via husbandry into the fecundity of spring—or alternately, as the union of the sun-god and earth-goddess ⁠ that brings on springtime. 19 In its earliest Old Irish iterations, these stories center on the nature of a ruler’s sovereignty over the land: the knight who will brave the hag’s ugliness and kiss her deserves to reign sovereign over the land she occupies; in these versions, the hag stands in for the unruliness of the land’s 18 For a discussion of the variant strains of the genre and an accounting of their differences, see JK Bollard, “Sovereignty and the Loathly Lady in English, Welsh, and Irish” Leeds Studies in English, (1986). 41-59. 19 Bugge, John. “Fertility Myth and Female Sovereignty in The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell.”The Chaucer Review 39.2 (2004): 198–218. 198. 29 agriculture, its people, or both. 20 In the middle English iterations, such epic concerns translate into the more personal realm of romance, as sovereignty over the land morphs into the power dynamic between husband and wife. While there is debate in the scholarship over which middle English tale is the earliest, all of them in some way deal with this nature of sovereignty usually via class issues. 21 While an argument on the temporal primacy of any one tale will hardly be my focus in this chapter, I begin with The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle because it is the late medieval variant closest to the themes of the Irish precursors. In this tale, like the sovereignty hag stories, the marriage of the title allegorizes and in indeed resolves a territorial dispute between sovereigns: Gawain and Ragnelle’s marriage, as I’ll show, solves the initial border dispute between King Arthur and Sir Gromer Somer Jour. And in doing so, this tale’s use of the loathly lady motif does the most to encode the compromised subjectivity usually associated with women into the experience of men—for in the tale, Arthur’s life depends on both the actions of Ragnelle (for helping him solve Gromer’s riddle) and Gawain (for consenting to marry Ragnelle in payment). Far from actually endorsing parity between the genders based on the similarity of Gawain’s and Ragnelle’s compromises, however, The Wedding avoids emasculating Gawain and Arthur through reliance on the conventions of romance, especially the foundational principle Arthurian exceptionality. For The Wedding tempers Gawain’s status as a “coward” in bed with the transformed lady through various references to Gawain’s exceptional 20 Carter, S. “Duessa: Spenser’s Loathly Lady.” Cahiers Élisabéthains (2005). 9-18. 21 The English “Loathly Lady” Tales is a good place to turn for these various arguments. Russell A. Peck, in “Folklore and Powerful Women in Gower’s ‘Tale of Florent,’” argues that Gower’s predates the others: he argues that it adapts folklore elements circulating at the time, among them include a (c.1299) spiel by King Edward I in which an ugly woman demands of Arthur’s court a promise to end the strife between the commons and lords. Paul Gaffney, on the other hand, argues for the primacy of The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle because of the manuscript evidence of it originating as oral performance; see “Controlling the Loathly Lady, or What Really Frees Dame Ragnelle.” 30 status: he is both the consummate servant and friend of King Arthur and the consummate chivalric lover, a status to which the death of Dame Ragnelle at the end of the tale restores him. In the end, The Wedding gestures to a mutually submissive power dynamic between spouses—a power dynamic that the tale suggests may also fruitfully apply to the relationship between rival sovereigns—but ultimately devalues these alternative dynamics to salvage the exceptional status of Arthurian knights. The central conflict that actualizes the plot of The Wedding stems from a disagreement between neighboring sovereigns bearing incompatible relationships to the land they occupy. The issue arises for King Arthur when, on a hunting excursion “in Ingleswod / With alle his bold knyghtes good,” he chooses to separate from his men and “stalk” “a greatt hartt” deep into “brere” (17, 23, 33, 35). While his decision to go it alone ensures that his success with the deer, if actualized, would go unrivaled, it also puts him in a dangerous situation: for “As the Kyng was with the dere alone, / Streyghte ther cam to hym a quaynt grome (strange man),” whose hail to him—“Welle imet, Kyng Arhour!…/ Whate sayest thou, Kyng alone?”— both reminds Arthur of his vulnerability without his men and reveals an alternative interpretation of the events animating the romance so far. The “quaynt grome” is Sir Gromer Somer Joure, a knight whom, according to him, Arthur has wronged: Welle imet, Kyng Arthour! Thou hast me done wrong many a yere And wofully I shall quytte the here; I hold thy lyfe days nyghe done. Thou hast gevyn my landes in certayn With greatt wrong unto Sir Gawen. 31 Whate sayest thou, Kyng alone? (54-60) The land upon which Arthur hunts is presumably the land he wrongfully took from Gromer. While Arthur may interpret the felled and butchered deer as evidence of his prowess as a hunter, it also—according to Gromer—bears witness to Arthur’s illegitimate encroachment and justifies his death. The boundary dispute between the men actually stems from a more foundational difference between them: their interpretation of what constitutes a legitimate relationship with the land. Judging by Arthur’s behavior thus far, he favors conquest: his behavior belies a feeling of entitlement—he hunts where he likes and also (at least according to Gromer) distributes the lands he encounters to whom he chooses. Gromer, on the other hand, is a green man—a fairy tale figure closely associated with to the land he occupies. His name, “Gromer Somer Jour,” an amalgam of Old Norse, English, and French words, roughly translates as “Summer’s Day Youth.” ⁠22 Gromer doesn’t care for typical courtly matters: he is indifferent to Arthur’s warning that murder will bring him shame: Arthur warns him that “Alle knyghtes wolle refuse the in every place; / That shame shalle nevere the froo (leave you),” and Gromer interprets that warning as just a ploy to “skape” (68-9, 74). And he refuses Arthur’s bribes: Arthur promises to grant Gromer “whate thou most crave” and Gromer reneges, wanting “nother lond ne gold, truly” (80, 85). Instead, Gromer asks that Arthur grant him a more magical request like other green men and mystical beings: Gromer challenges Arthur to return “Evyn att this day twelfe monethes end” and “shewe me att thy comyng whate wemen love best in feld and town” (93, 91). And so, The Wedding associates the typical question of the late medieval loathly lady stories not with women attempting to coerce honest knights, as in “The Tale of Florent,” or with women attempting to 22 Hall, Louis B. The Knightly Tales of Sir Gawain, 1976. 155. 32 redeem nefarious knights, as in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” but with a green man—the spiritual embodiment of nature. On the surface, Gromer’s question seems merely to push the plot forward, to introduce the loathly lady. Dame Ragnelle, the only person capable of answering the question, is also Gromer’s sister, a connection revealed when Gromer’s plan to kill Arthur is thwarted. When Gromer hears the correct answer to his question—that “Wemen desyre sovereynte, for that is theyr lykyng”—he knows who has told Arthur: ‘And she that told the nowe, Sir Arthoure, I pray to God, I may se her bren on a fyre; For that was my suster, Dame Ragnelle, That old scott, God geve her shame.’ (473-5) But the familial relationship between Gromer and Ragnelle speaks to their thematic connection as well: together, the green man and his ugly sister approximate the sovereignty hag of the Old Irish tales. Arthur may have illegitimately acquired Gawain’s lands from Gromer, but Gawain could legitimate that land grab when he kisses Ragnelle on their wedding night. And therefore, what women want, and specifically, what Ragnelle wants, is key to determining whether Gromer or Arthur’s claim to the land is legitimate. Ingleswood, as Thomas Hahn points out, is a contested space. Named from the Anglo-Saxon for “the wood of the Angles,” Inglewood Forest is located in Cumberland, on the northwest border of England and Scotland (Hahn note 16). While loathly, Dame Ragnelle encodes the values of both Gromer and Arthur in her person. On the one hand, descriptions of Ragnelle emphasize her connections to the natural, putting her on the level with Gromer. She’s often described as almost animalistic—she has “Hangyng pappys to be an hors lode” and “two tethe on every syde / As borys tuskes… / The 33 one tust went up and the other doun” (241, 548, 551). And her journey from the forest to Arthur’s Carlisle finds humor in the juxtaposition of her country ways in the court. At her wedding feast, Ragnelle’s uncouth manners cause others to marvel, which they do over and over: “she was fulle foulle and nott curteys” (602); “she ete as moche as six that ther wore; / That mervaylyd many a man” (605); “There was no mete cam her before / Butt she ete itt up, lesse and more” (613-4); and “So she ete tylle mete was done, / Tylle they drewe clothes and had wasshen” (619-20). But on the other hand, Ragnelle—unlike Gromer—desires to rank among the courtier class. When Arthur first comes upon her, “as ungoodly a creature / As evere man sawe, withoute mesure,” he first marvels, then details her loathsomeness in an ugly blazon that is fifteen lines long (228-9; 231-45). But the reader soon learns that not everything about Ragnelle is hideous: “She satt on a palfray was gay begon, / With gold besett and many a precious stone” (246-7). And her preferences for the finer things extends to her romantic desires as well. In return for her help, she asks, or rather demands, of Arthur: “Thou must graunt me a knyght to wed. His name is Sir Gawen” (280-1). Where Gromer refused Arthur’s offer of “what thou most crave,” Ragnelle’s answer to Arthur’s “Whate is your desyre, fayre Lady?” is a resounding, “Gawain.” Where the original myth demonstrates a sovereign trading sexual favors for a legitimate land claim, this latter iteration widens the scope of the sovereign’s gift to the loathly lady in exchange for land. Ragnelle desires Gawain sexually, sure, but she also desires social advancement—a place in Arthur’s court. But if Ragnelle teaches Arthur something he doesn’t know—what women want—Arthur also teaches Ragnelle. While willing to grant Gromer’s land to Gawain, Arthur balks at granting his friend to Ragnelle and thus catalyzes the tale’s lesson about honoring bodily sovereignty. He refuses to grant Ragnelle’s wish, explaining he has no claim over Gawain: “‘I may nott graunt 34 the / To make warraunt Sir Gawen to wed the; / Alle lyethe in hym alon.” (291-3). Fortunately for Arthur, Gawain is game to wed Ragnelle even after hearing how ugly she is; he freely consents: Ys this alle?… I shalle wed her and wed her agayn, Thowghe she were a fend; Thowghe she were as foulle as Belsabub, Her shalle I wed, by the Rood, Or elles were nott I your frende. (342-7) When his service to Arthur is tested on their wedding night, Gawain proves himself again; but more importantly, the wedding night discussion demonstrates how much Ragnelle has changed. In their chamber, Ragnelle first attempts to press her sexual right to Gawain through reference to conjugal debt, or spouses’ reciprocal sexual obligation to each other: “A, Sir Gawen, syn I have you wed, / Shewe me your cortesy in bed; / With ryght itt may nott be denyed” (629-31). But she immediately rethinks pushing her claim on him; instead, she asks him for affection through reference to his freely given devotion to Arthur: “Yett for Arthours sake kysse me att the leste; / I pray you do this att my request” (635-6). And of course, Gawain again obliges enthusiastically: “‘I wolle do more / Then for to kysse, and God before!’” (638-9). And for Gawain’s part, his chivalry seems to know no bounds; he consents to any of Arthur’s and Ragnelle’s claims upon him—without either the murmur and complaint that Florent demonstrates and without having deserved a reckoning, as Chaucer’s rapist knight does. This compliance on his part is perhaps politically motivated. He consents to help Arthur for Arthur’s sake, without first seeing Ragnelle himself. Indeed, when the two finally do meet, it is Ragnelle 35 and the other ladies of Carlisle to object in any way to his impending nuptials. Gawain remains silent as Ragnelle proclaims, “‘God have mercy!… / For thy sake I wold I were a fayre woman, / For thou art of so good wylle” (536-8); only after “Dame Gaynour” or Guinevere exclaims “‘Alas!’” along with “alle the ladyes in her bower” who “wept for Sir Gawen,” do Arthur and Gawain reveal their own despair: “‘Alas!’ then sayd bothe Kyng and knyght, / That evere he shold wed suche a wyghte” (542-6). And Gawain continues to view his marriage as merely political in the bedroom scene as well: his enthusiasm to have sex with Ragnelle cannot stem from arousal, for he has his back turned to her when he offers it. At this point, the tale—like the other late medieval variants—diverts from the Irish originals and thus preserves the knight’s reputation and prowess: the author refuses to make the strapping Gawain kiss the ugly hag. When “he turnyd hym her untille, / He sawe her the fayrest creature / That evere he saw, withoute measure” (640-3). The tale’s obsession with depicting Ragnelle beyond any kind of “measure” is here turned on its head: her unequaled ugliness transforms into unequaled beauty. Initially shocked—Gawain exclaims, “‘A Jhesu!…Whate ar ye?”—Gawain, like Ragnelle before him, both delights in his claim over her and then defers to her claim to her own bodily sovereignty. After marveling at her transformation, he adapts quickly, evinced through the language of ownership and his subsequent amorous actions: “‘Wele is me, my Lady, I have you thus’ / And brasyd her in his armys and gan her kysse / And made great joye, sycurly” (653-5). The Wedding is thus notable among the late medieval variants in depicting the knight and lovely lady consummate their relationship before the lady poses her question about sovereignty. Gawain enjoys Ragnelle’s beauty before he learns he may not have it always, for, as Ragnelle says “My beawty wolle nott hold” (658). Gawain must: Chese of the one… 36 Wheder ye wolle have me fayre on nyghtes And as foulle on days to alle men sightes, Or els to have me fayre on days And on nyghtes on the fowlyst wyfe - The one ye must nedes have. Chese the one or the oder. Chese on, Sir Knyght, whiche you is levere. (657-65) Her speech is riddled with references to Gawain’s agency over her body: its fate will be determined by his “chese/choice,” his “wolle/will,” his “levere/preference.” But Gawain, perhaps from Ragnelle’s recent example, or from Arthur’s, from whom Ragnelle learned that lesson, refuses to dictate the status of her reality, which he emphasizes also affects him. Instead, he defers to Ragnelle’s own “choyce/choice” in words that recall Arhur’s to Ragnelle when refuses to grant her Gawain as a prize: ‘Do as ye lyst nowe, my Lady gaye. The choyse I putt in your fyst: Evyn as ye wolle, I putt itt in our hand. Lose me when ye lyst, for I am bond; I putt the choyse in you. Bothe body and goodes, hartt, and every dele, Ys alle your oun, for to by and selle.’ (677-83) Now it is Gawain’s speech that is riddled with references to Ragnelle’s agency over his body: he emphsizes her “choice,” her “wille,” and her “lyst/liking,” and claims that his own reality—his “body and goodes, hartt, and every dele”—depends upon on her. And like Arthur’s refusal to 37 grant Gawain to Ragnelle—a refusal based on Arthur’s insistence that Gawain’s will “‘Alle lyethe in hym alon’”—Gawain here emphasizes that Ragnelle’s will, and its implications upon his own body and goods, “‘Ys alle your oun’” (293, 683). As such, the tale urges that one’s claim to sovereignty over another’s body ought not to be entertained, suggesting the practical injustice of the conjugal debt convention, despite its conceptual gesture to parity between the two heterosexual genders. Rather, each spouse should be sovereign over him/herself, which will in turn affect the other spouse. Submission to the other’s self-determination, the tale suggests, is the just order of things: as Gawain puts it, “Lose (release) me when ye lyst, for I am bond”—bound to Ragnelle through their bond, he looks to her preference to dictate his status. His is a freely given servitude, stemming from a refusal to master her. 23 And where The Wedding in general warned against the individual venturing towards his fortune “alone,” it presents Gawain and Ragnelle’s marital bond as utopic: through their union of “they two theymself alone,” and make “joye oute of mynde,” a goal and paradoxical state that Milton will echo in the “Paradise within…happier farr” that postlapsarian Adam and Eve can find “hand in hand” on “their solitary way” (12.587, 648-9). However, this gesture to parity between the genders is too threatening to be sustained. The Wedding initially attempts to quell the danger of gender parity through urging Ragnelle’s reciprocal submission to Gawain. So that she will “nevere wrathe the serteyn (hurt you surely),” Ragnelle vows, “Whiles that Ilyve I shal be obaysaunt…And nevere with you to debate” (782, 784, 786). And her submissive vow works for a time—they have a child together, “Gyngolyn,” and Gawain loves her ardently. But The Wedding cannot ultimately sustain Gawain’s love for Ragnelle since it emasculates him: “As a coward he lay by her bothe day and nyghte / Nevere 23 In my second chapter, I explore Spenser’s take on self-mastery, which he inherits through the loathly lady genre. 38 wold he haunt justyng aryghte; / Thereatt mervaylyd Arthoure the Kyng” (808-10). His submission to his wife, or “cowardess,” arouses the same reaction in Arthur as Ragnelle did when hideous: he marvels at it. Ragnelle has to go. And indeed, the poet owns his desire to make quick work of her death: “Nowe for to make you a short conclusyon, / I cast me for to make an end fulle sone / Of this gentylle Lady” (817-9). He gives her “butt yerys five” with Gawain and emphasizes Gawain’s grief at her death, but ultimately, the threat Ragnelle poses is too much for Carlisle to sustain. It needs Gawain to be perpetually courtly and chivalric, free to perform knightly deeds like “justyng (jousting)” and make other alliances; for his own and Arthur’s sake, presumably, “Gawen was weddyd oft in his days” (832). The recursivity implied by that statement—“Gawain was wedded oft in his days”—demonstrates the issue at core of the loathly lady tales in general: that the compromised subjectivity that marriage and other bonds require are shunted onto women/wives, killing them off thematically while leaving men/husbands to make bond after bond, the fiction of their autonomous agency intact. And in The Wedding specifically, this shunting of the marital subjectivity onto women has implications for the initial conflict of the tale. Just as the tale requires Ragnelle to absorb the harms to Gawain’s masculinity that he consensually risks in marrying her, so too does the tale use the marriage of Ragnelle and Gawain to erase the harms to Gromer and absolve Arthur from any trespass or blame. The tale uses Ragnelle to reframe Arthur’s original land grab as Gromer’s discourteousness. The lines immediately following the description of Gawain as a “coward” and immediately preceding the narration of Ragnelle’s death sees her ask Arthur: “’To be good lord to Sir Gromer, iwysse, / Of that to you he hathe offendyd’” (in so far as; 812-3). And Arthur immediately seizes on her repudiation of Gromer’s manners, which fail to mention any claim Gromer may have upon him or any misstep on his part: “‘Yes, Lady, that shalle I nowe for your 39 sake, / For I wott welle he may nott amendes make; / He dyd to me fulle unhend” (acted towards; discourteously; 814-5). And so, The Wedding, like the sovereignty hag precursors, uses women to legitimize a male sovereign’s claim to land; but because it uncouples the sexual act (the kiss) and the political act (the granting of land) from its principle actors, The Wedding draws attention to the fact that the transaction has as much to do with the lady’s erasable labor as the sovereign’s sexual or political prowess. Because of Ragnelle’s intercession—through her supplying the answer to Gromer’s question to Arthur and her death—both Arthur and Gawain’s status as the exceptional king and knight of England are reinforced. “The Tale of Florent”: Murmuring and Complaining Over Women’s Self-Sovereignty Like the male English figures in The Wedding, Gower’s Florent is an exceptional knight. Not only does Gower emphasize his aristocratic status through blood ties—Florent is “nevoeu (nephew) to th’emperour / And of his court a courteour”—but Gower also presents Florent as independently virtuous: he is, in short, a “worthi knyht” (1408-10). In fact, Gower dwells on Florent’s knightly virtues—details that will be in stark contrast to Chaucer’s rapist knight: He was a man that mochel myhte; Of armes he was desirous, Chivalerous and amorous, And for the fame of worldes speche, Strange aventures for to seche, He rod the marches al aboute. (1412-17) Despite his initial conflation of political and ethical virtue in his knight, Gower, in his contribution to the loathly lady genre, revises it such that the more overtly political ramifications 40 of “sovereignty” are watered down. Instead, “The Tale of Florent” demonstrates how an individual male’s ethical treatment of his spouse might negate the necessity for a more political sense of virtue. The Tale thus conflates the political “sovereignty” problem of gender in marriage that the loathly lady genre typically explores with the tendency of individual lovers to complain about their proximate commitments—especially, to complain because love bonds (especially to women) circumscribe their agency. Gower’s version of the tale comes from Book I of his Confessio Amantis, which is dedicated to exploring and correcting against the sin of pride. “The Tale of Florent” is framed by the Confessor’s sermon to Amans, in which he advises him to choose “boxomnesse,” or obedience, over the pride in the form of “Murmur and Complaint.” 24 Upon bemoaning the tendency towards “Murmur and Compleignte,” however, the Confessor clearly associates this specific form of pride with all men, regardless of circumstance: For thogh fortune make hem wynne, (even if) Yit grucchen thei, and if thei lese, (grumbe; lose) Ther is no weie for to chese Wherof thei myhten stonde appesed. (1348-51; whereby; appeased) Using the loathly lady motif to the Confessor’s end, Gower makes the knight’s granting of sovereignty to the loathly lady illustrate how “obedience / Mai wel fortune a man to love” (1858- 9). But on closer inspection, the Tale actually bridles when “man’s obedience to love” too much approximates his “obedience to women” more broadly. So while “The Tale of Florent” comes to suggesting parity between men and women’s experience as subjects who must negotiate the thin 24 My reading aligns with Robert F. Yeager’s on Gower’s interest in murmur and complaint as an effect of pride. See John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990. 41 line between willful obedience and coerced submission to another, the Tale also undercuts its own gesture to gender parity—and it does so ironically, as I’ll show, through the figures of old women. In short, by pitting the transformation of the hag against its depiction of old women as inherently coercive in the tale, “The Tale of Florent” claims obedience as a manly virtue at the same time as it quells the threat men see as inherent in actualizing that virtue: at the point at which Florent obeys the loathly lady without murmur and complaint, he finds he has nothing about which to complain. Moreover, when read in reference to Gower’s framing device, this ending presents Florent not only as an exceptional knight but an exemplary man for Amans and would-be-virtuous male readers in general to imitate. In short, Gower’s version of the loathly lady tale does much to universalize the gender disparity my reading reveals, paving the way for Chaucer’s version, wherein the man rewarded for learning what women want might even be a rapist. Throughout “The Tale of Florent,” Florent finds himself, through little fault of his own, encountering and negotiating horribly unjust circumstances; and if the reader reads reparatively, she will see that Gower links Florent’s success in the Tale to his internal transformation: he goes from complaining utterly about his unjust circumstances to finally accepting them with “buxomnesse,” an attitude adjustment that reverses all of his previous injustices. On one such adventure, Florent accidentally kills another knight, Branchus, in self-defense, and finds himself at the hands of Branchus’ “grantdame,” who in retribution coerces Florent into an impossible bargain: Florent must answer a “questioun” correctly or face death: “if thou of the sothe faile, / There schal non other thing availe, / That thou ne schalt thi deth receive” (1463-5). She plans to obscure her desire for vengeance through the facade of Florent’s freely-given consent; if her plan succeeds, she will kill Florent without offending the Emperor. Once Florent 42 assents to the grantdame’s deal, she asks him that question she knows he can’t answer: he must find out “What alle wommen most desire” (1481). Her unjust bargain with Florent breeds several other bad faith transactions: the only person who can help Florent, the loathly lady, also demands something in return: she’ll give Florent the answer to the grantdame’s question if he promises to marry her; and when the hag’s answer to the grantdame’s question proves successful, and Florent is bound to marry the hag, who “of alle kinde / Of wommen is th’unsemylieste,” he then owes her the marital debt that he is loath to pay (1624-5). In each of these cases, Florent is both faithful to his oaths and resentful of them. He returns to the grantdame’s court and follows through on his dreaded marriage vows because “This knygt hath levere for to dye (would rather die) / Than breke his trowthe and for to lye / In place ther as he was swore (1511-13). But true to Gower’s commentary on Pride, alongside plighting and following through on his troth, Florent bemoans his plight through “murmurs and complaints” that become increasingly mournful (and hilarious) as he finds himself increasingly in obligation to old women. At the beginning of his troubles, Florent speaks forthrightly when he informs his uncle of his oath with the grantdame: “his adventure plein / He tolde, of that him is befalle” (1490-1). But any vitriol he reserves in his hesitancy to blame the grantdame redoubles when confronted with the various claims of the loathly lady. After Florent exhausts all of the wisdom of his uncle’s court (“alle / The wiseste of the lond”) without answering the grantdame’s question, he learns he must instead trust the loathly lady to save himself. And his murmuring and complaining begin in earnest upon seeing her: In a forest under a tre He syh wher sat a creature, A lothly wommannysch figure, 43 That for to speke of fleisch and bon So foul yit wyh he nevere non. (1528-32) She is the ugliest thing Florent has ever seen, and he tries to pass her by without speaking, but when the creature calls to him by name, he is bound to address her. Moreover, Florent’s obligations to her mount further as it becomes clear that she knows of his fate and can offer him “conseil” to avert it (1546). But before she gives him the answer he seeks—“bot ferst, er thou be sped”— she asks for something from him: “Thou schalt me leve such a wedd, / That I wol have thi trowthe in honde / That thou schalt be myn houseonde” (1357-60). Rather than be grateful to her for offering the counsel that will save him, Florent is (although quite understandably) loath to swap “answer or die” for “marry me or die.” But Florent is more than resentful over her offer; he does all he can to amend her terms. He first refuses her outright: “Nay…that may noght be” (1561). Then, he bargains with the hag: “Florent behihte hire good ynowh / Of lond, of rente, of park, of plowh, Bot al that compteth sche at noght” (1565-7). And later, he leaves the hag hanging as he attempts to bargain with himself: Tho fell this knyht in mochel thoght, Now goth he forth, now comth agein, He wot noght what is best to sein, And thoghte, as he rod to and fro, That chese he mot on of the tuo, Or for to take hire to his wif Or elles for to lese his lif. (1569-74) Ultimately, Florent realizes “his avantage” in the match and accepts her offer (1575). But by “advantage,” Florent isn’t thinking how his marriage to the hag will save his life; rather, he 44 concludes that the old woman may not live long, and he schemes that, once married, he could “put hire in an ile (island), / Wher that no man hire scholde knowe, / Til sche with deth were overthrowe” (1578-80). He thus agrees to marry her in bad faith and only as a last resort, making her feel the full sacrifice of his consent: “If that non other chance / Mai make my deliverance /…Have hier myn hond, I schal thee wedde” (1583-4, 1587). The lady, for her part, accepts his conditional offer, her “browe” that “frounceth up,” the only marker of her dismay at his various insults. If Florent was hesitant to marry the hag even though she promises his salvation, he dreads doing so after her counsel actually does save his life. After the hag’s answer—that “alle wommen lievest wolde / Be soverein of mannes love” (1608-9)— fulfills the grantdame’s challenge, Florent hardly celebrates. Instead, he mourns as “tho began his sorwe newe, / For he mot gon, or ben untrewe, / To hire which his trowthe hadde” (1665-7). Unwilling to go back on his oath, Florent attempts to resolve his dread by think of his marriage as “penance” (1669). But when he finds his lady waiting for him, he is struck anew by her ugliness: Florent his wofull heved uplefte (woeful head raised up) And syh this vecke wher sche sat, Which was the lothlieste what That evere man caste on his yhe: Hire nase bass, hire browes hyhe, Hire yhen smale and depe set, Hire chekes ben with teres wet, And rivelen as an emty skyn Hangende doun unto the chin, 45 Hire lippes schrunken ben for age, Ther was no grace in the visage. Hir front was nargh, hir lockes hore, Sche loketh forth as doth a More, 25 Hire necke is schort, hir schuldres courbe— That myhte a mannes lust destourbe! Hire body gret and nothing smal, And schortly to descrive hire al Sche hath no lith withoute a lak (no limb without a lack; 1674-91) In an ugly blazon, Gower ironically lists all of his lady’s parts—not to contain the threat of her beauty as per Vickers, but to redouble the effect of her loathliness on both Florent and the reader. In listing all of these details with an aim to dehumanize the lady, however, Gower ironically emphasizes what makes the hag human and crucially, like Florent, which is more disturbing to him. Even more than her ugliness, it is the justice of her claims upon Florent repulses him. He finds the hag in the same place he left her: “This olde wyht him hath awaited / In place wher as he hire lefte” (1672-3); and if her presence there speaks to her faith in him, the “teres” that “wet” “Hire chekes”—perhaps the only line of the blazon that doesn’t immediately denote the hag’s hideousness and Florent’s repulsion—suggest her surprise and happiness to see him there. Arguably rejoicing in their impending bond, the hag reaches out to Florent and reminds him of their agreement. But because these lines come immediately after the ugly blazon, Gower is doubling down on Florent’s resentment: Sche proferth hire unto this knyht, 25 In my fifth chapter, I deal with the ways in which the Petrarchan blazon tradition encodes racialized comparisons to portray beauty. 46 And bad him, as he hath behyht, So as sche hath ben his warant, That he hire hold covenant And be the bridel sche him seseth. (1693-97) Out of context, these lines speak towards Florent’s honor and dwell on the hag’s humanity—she “proffers herself” to her future husband, reminds him of his “behyht (promise)” and of her act as “his warant,” and speaks of their “covenant.” But Gower also tempers these connections between them as equals with a line that dehumanizes Florent: for if he becomes “the bridel” that she “seseth (seizes),” a vastly different version of marriage emerges, troubling the ideal one that the loathly lady tales otherwise seem to cultivate: instead of traded “maistrie” between the spouses, as emphasized in the other two versions I explore in this chapter, this reference to Florent as the bridle the hag seizes points to a utilitarian understanding of marriage. And indeed, the reader later learns that the hag requires the love of a “knyht that in his degre / Alle othre passeth of good name” to break her curse, which suggests the hag’s choice of Florent is quite motivated (1848-9). But this utilitarian understanding of marriage is actually quite far from Florent’s mind; instead, he seems more concerned with his dread over the vow he’s made than the fact that he’s being used: “Him thenkth wel nyh his herte brekth / For sorwe that he may noght fle, / Bot if he wolde untrewe be” (1700-2). And even when Florent attempts to resign himself to his fate, Gower’s analogies hint at Florent’s tendencies to more murmur and complaint. Turning to the language of opposites in describing the moderation that makes good health, Gower describes Florent’s plan for marriage with the hag in terms of diet: he will “Takth baldemoine with canele (gentian root; cinnamon)” and “drinkth the bitre with the swete” (1704, 1708). But these wholesome maxims slip into 47 sarcasm quite quickly: upon espousing the good of drinking the bitter with the sweet, Gower continues, “He medleth sorwe with likynge, / And liveth, as who seith, deyinge” (1709-10). And at this point, complaint overwhelms Florent as he mourns that: “His youthe schal be cast aweie / Upon such on which as the weie / Is old and lothly overal” (1711-13). Then, trying to make the best of his situation, Florent brings his lady into his court privately and at night so “That no man myhte hire schappe avise” until he gets her cleaned up. There begins another ugly blazon of sorts as the court’s ladies attempt to clean and dress the hag; but despite their best efforts to dress her fashionably and comb “hire hore lockes (hoary locks),” she looks worse than before: “Tho was sche foulere on to se”—so much to complain about (1750-9). And again, the hag’s ugliness repels Florent, but no more than her eagerness to make good on those vows Florent made her. After their marriage (again, at night to limit public view), the hag emphasizes their bond and the physical implications of that bond: the marital debt. She: clepeth him hire housebonde, And seith, ‘My lord, go we to bedde, For I to that entente wedde, That thou schalt be my worldes blisse,’ And profreth him with that to kisse, As sche a lusti lady were. (1768-74) In the face of her eagerness, Florent dissociates: “His body myhte wel be there, / Bot as of thoght and of memoire / His herte was in purgatoire” (1774-6). While the two are “abedde naked,” he “torneth on that other side, / For that he wolde hise yhen hyde / Fro lokynge on that fole wyht” so that he doesn’t have to face the commitment he made her or the debt he owes her (1781, 1783- 5). But eventually, Florent recognizes the physical consummation of marriage is his wife’s due. 48 He faces his own obligations inherent in the bond he made to her—he “bad him thenke on that he seide, / Whan that he tok hire be the hond” (1796-7)—and then flips over to face her physically, although with a bit more disassociating, “as it were a man in a trance” (1800). And for his display of “buxomnesse” without “murmur and complaint,” Florent is rewarded. Instead of the hag, he sees before him: …a lady lay him by Of eygtetiene wynter age, Which was the faireste of visage That evere in al this world he syh. (1803-5) Up until this point, the Tale has associated the hag’s ugliness with her eagerness to be bound to Florent; that her ugliness transforms at the same moment Florent commits to his vows without issue suggests that her physical repulsiveness derives from his resisting her claims upon him. The moment Florent ceases to do so—the moment he stops murmuring and complaining— is the moment she appears to his sight the most beautiful woman in the world. However, this endpoint for Gower’s project on the problem of pride raises significant questions when mapped onto the conventions of the loathly lady genre: at issue is the status of individual autonomy and sovereignty when individuals—a man and woman— consent to marriage. For to conflate Florent’s pride problem with the issue of sovereignty between spouses entertains the notion of gender equity even as it reinscribes the justice of the traditional power dynamic between the genders in marriage. Through the conflation of dangerous pride and the need to grant wives sovereignty, we must wonder whether Florent bristles at the lady’s claims upon him or at her sense of self-actualization in making those claims. And further, to what extent is a bond made with a social inferior—for example, any bond a man makes with a woman, i.e. 49 marriage—thus an injustice to a social superior, in this case, a man? To put it another way, is Florent’s murmuring and complaining a problem personal to him or a systemic problem affecting all men—do men take their bonds with women as always an exercise in women’s “sovereignty” over them, or is it especially pronounced in Florent’s case? The Tale seems to want it both ways. On one hand, it gestures to gender parity, for both husband and wife suffer attempts to undermine their autonomous agency and achieve success through their deft negotiations of their claims to self-sovereignty and sovereignty over their spouse. For Florent, both the grantdame and the loathly lady present him with bargains that seem consensual but actually coerce: in both agreements to the old women, Florent chooses something unwanted to avoid his death, a choice that renders the status of his “freely given” consent suspect. However, the loathly lady experiences such coercion as well. We find that her hideous status originated in a curse placed upon her by another evil older women: she is actually “the kinges dowhter of Cizile (Sicily)” whom her “stepmoder for an hate, / Forschop me (transformed)” (1841, 1844-5). And this curse circumscribed the lady’s choice of partner: her transformation would remain until she, …hadde wonne The love and sovereinete Of what knyht that in his degre All othre passeth of good name. (1846-9) Like Florent, then, the lady is coerced into choosing as a partner the only person capable of helping her out of their contrived status. Although she may have chosen Florent specifically for his reputation for virtue—like Dame Ragnelle, who chooses Gawain at the start of her tale because he is the “best knight in England”— we realize that her selection of Florent was based 50 on his potential: “the dede proeveth it is so” that he truly is the “knight who passes all others in good name” (1851). And so the statuses of both Florent and the lady largely mirror each other: both depend on their partners to dictate whether their bond to one another will perpetuate the coercion and ugliness they have known or will transform into something consensual, beautiful, and mutually beneficial. But on the other hand, the Tale’s resolution of the problem of gender difference in issues of sovereignty shunts the responsibility for that resolution on female sexual appeal. In the transformation of the loathly lady to a beautiful maid, the Tale suggests that once young husbands stop thinking of women as horrible and controlling and blaming them for the circumscribed agency vows require, marriage and other vows with women don’t seem so bad (akin to the message of the “Beauty and the Beast” tale with the genders swapped). But this resolution merely trades one male fantasy of female control—coercive and ugly old women who make life a purgatory for active young men—for another—the promise of eternal female youth and attractiveness. But by associating “obedience to love” with granting sovereignty to one’s wife, “The Tale of Florent” goes further than the other iterations in the circumscription of female sovereignty to the sexual register: For of this word that ye now sein, That ye have mad me soverein, My destine is overpassed, That nevere hierafter schal be lassed (diminished) Mi beaute, which that I now have, Til I be take into my grave; Bot nyht and day as I am now 51 I schal alwey be such to yow. (1833-40) The Tale thus suggests that women’s attractiveness stems from men’s commitment to upholding vows without complaint. From the male perspective this Tale assumes, granting sovereignty to women is only painful when it rankles, which is concomitant to “when the lady is repulsive”; once his lady is lovely full time rather by day or by night or ugly full time, Florent has little to dread. But such a resolution requires an impossible reality for the lady: just as she was always ugly as a loathly lady, she must now be always beautiful “Til I be take into my grave.” For if her beauty were to fade, then it must mean that Florent has started complaining again. And thus, if we would doubt the practical efficacy of the lady’s marriage-bed promise to never age, then we must doubt Florent’s commitment to his vows as well. For this reason, the Tale resolves just after this marriage-bed conversation: after the lady vows to be both beautiful and “‘youres evermo,’” Gower conflates the pair’s subsequent lovemaking with the rest of their lives: “Tho was pleasance and joye ynowh, / Echon with other pleide and lowh; / Thei live longe and wel thei ferde” (1852-5). Not only is granting a female sovereignty pleasant as long as she’s lovely, it’s also far easier if lives are circumscribed to the bedroom. In the other versions of the loathly lady tale I explore in this chapter, the lesson the knight learns can be applied backwards to envision an alternative to his fate. In The Wedding, Gromer Somer Jour’s initial issue stems from a problem of sovereignty and a dispute over boundaries— geographical and bodily; the lesson Gawain learns from Ragnelle is indicative of the lesson Arthur should have applied to Gromer. And in Chaucer’s Tale, the rapist knight could have asked the maiden he rapes what she wanted and allowed her to choose for herself; similarly, he could have asked the court of ladies what they wanted and allowed each to choose for herself how she’d answer that question. But to map Florent’s lesson back onto the other scenes of 52 circumscribed agency in the Tale, we’re merely left with unjust old women whose vows merely coerce (never delight). These women are unable to restrain their desires for revenge or jealousies of youth. As such, “The Tale of Florent” pits the concerns of the younger generation against the antisocial concerns of the women of the older generation. And through its contrived resolution of a lady who cannot age, the Tale draws attention to the inevitability of those antisocial concerns to resurface in the future. Female sovereignty is either confined to the utopia of the bedroom— where it is dependent upon the impossibility of eternal female attractiveness—or, it is imagined as rueful and coercive—impossible to withstand without murmur and complaint. The Tale allows no room for an alternative social order or, ironically for Confessor’s project throughout the pride section of Confessio Amantis, a way out of pride. The recursive nature of the loathly lady tales generally is in Gower’s hands depicted as inevitable and recursive male dread over their socially necessary commitments to women. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”: Redeeming the Rapist Like the other versions I detail in this chapter, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” also dramatizes the recursive nature of the loathly lady tales—Chaucer’s “Tale” addresses but ultimately silences a systematic problem stemming from the fiction of gender difference by way of a magical marriage between individuals. And although the loathly lady’s transformation upon being granted “maistrie” by her spouse solves all of their immediate problems, it also paves the way for the original systemic problem to resurface in the future. And more significantly, this very conservatism may be easily interpreted as the answer to “what women want.” As Lee Patterson puts it in his study of Chaucerian subjectivity construction, “What Chaucer’s Wife wants is not political or social change; on the contrary the traditional order is quite capable of providing the 53 marital happiness she desires”; and later, continuing his conflation of the loathly lady with the Wife, he states, “Hence, she (the Wife) is willing to abandon maistrye once she learns he (Jankin) cares enough to grant it” (310 ⁠ ). 26 Looking closer at Chaucer’s particular addition to the genre, however, we might find it surprising that it also includes this gender conservatism. For, just before the tale’s magical conclusion, Chaucer’s treatment of “gentillesse” is quite radical: in the voice of the loathly lady, Chaucer argues that nobility derives from virtuous acts rather than one’s station at birth—a lesson, I would urge, as applicable to gender as class difference. However, the genre takes over and the lady transforms. And as Suzanne Edwards explains, the tale’s ending keeps alive the potential for Chaucer’s troubling men (his knight and his readers) to “err in misinterpreting a gender difference, which is nothing more than a compromise fiction, as an enduring truth” (22 ⁠ ). 27 And thus, in demonstrating how acknowledging the injustice of class and gender difference can ironically shore up rather than evacuates those injustices, Chaucer reveals just how much the message of the loathly lady genre might be degraded: once a tale about sovereigns earning a legitimate right to the land the lady represents, the genre in Chaucer’s hands descends to the redemption of a rapist through the rhetoric of gender and class parity. It’s been a far fall indeed from the values inherent in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, for example. In that tale, Ragnelle’s transformation and death absorbed the potential harms to the exceptional status of both Gawain and Arthur that incurred through their honoring the claims of others. But in Chaucer’s version, the loathly lady’s sacrifice doesn’t redeem Arthur’s kingdom or Gawain’s reputation; it redeems instead a nameless rapist, and indeed safeguards his place within Arthur’s 26 Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. 27 Edwards, Suzanne. “The Rhetoric of Rape and the Politics of Gender in the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the 1382 Statue of Rapes.” Exemplaria 23:1 (2011). 3-26. 54 kingdom. When scholars treat the proto-feminism of “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” they usually sideline the Tale’s class interests in favor of its interests in gender, particularly insofar as gender relates to Chaucer’s poetic project. Lee Patterson, for example, bases his interpretation on the Ellesmere sequence of The Cantebury Tales to argue “we move from the political opposition generated by the class inequality of Fragment I to an ideological antithesis determined by gender” in “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale.” The importance of the Wife of Bath for Patterson is that she is the figure through which Chaucer manipulates the femininity of poetics to construct his poetic persona (281). Carolyn Dinshaw, following Patterson, also emphasizes the Wife’s gender and loquacity, which “renovates the patriarchal hermeneutic to accommodate the feminine”—the “feminine” including the romance genre along with sexualized (and thus feminized) conventions like “digression, dilation, [and] delay of closure” (126 ⁠ ). 28 But to confine the Wife’s contributions (not to mention, any poetry that deals with women) to the sexual realm sidelines the majority of loathly lady’s speaking part: key to the Tale’s resolution, the loathly lady not only tells the rapist knight what “wommen moost desire” but also digresses for nearly 100 uninterrupted lines on the good of determining “gentillesse” through virtuous deeds rather than the privilege of birth. Thus, reading for the sexuality of the Wife and her Tale tends to overshadow the contributions she and it make for women outside of that register. Indeed, reading the Wife’s contributions as merely sexual puts us in league with the rapist knight, who hears the loathly lady’s diatribe about the virtue of deeds over birth without having to abide by it. The moment Chaucer’s loathly lady lesson might sinks in, the conventions of the loathly lady genre tale over: when the knight verbally acknowledges the right of the lady choose her own desires, 28 Dinshaw, Carolyn. Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. 55 when he grants her “maistrie,” she transforms and removes the threat to him and us of doing actually so. To use the lady’s language of “gentillesse” to describe this sleight of hand, the knight’s virtuous deed (granting mastery to the hag) reifies his privilege of birth—his having been born an aristocratic male entitled to a prize in a wife. More disturbingly, the Tale’s resolution also suggests that a rapist’s rhetorical gesture of respect to a new woman can redeem him from his original crime of rape ⁠ . 29 Chaucer’s Tale, in ostensibly reclaiming the right of women to speak, illustrates the ways in which women’s their very speech might continue to go unheeded: by confining women’s contributions to the register of sexual desire, Chaucer’s Tale demonstrates the ways in which a society, through only committing to gender parity rhetorically, continually erases the claims of individual women and their would be contributions to society. My reading largely extends the work of Lee Patterson, who, building his interpretation off of the Wife’s digressive revision of Ovid’s Midas tale, argues that the Wife’s apparent antifeminism is merely an invitation to her readers to read more carefully: “For her telling argues that men, their listening obstructed by the carnality symbolized by their ass’s ears, will naturally prefer the immediate self-gratifications of antifeminism to the severer pleasures of self- knowledge.” Taking his insistence that “if men are really committed to a disinterested quest for truth they will avoid a surface misogyny in favor of the wisdom offered by the full story” a bit further, I will urge readers of any gender identity to avoid confining the Wife’s many varied contributions to the sexual register and instead view the mechanisms by which women’s acts and voices are erased by any means necessary in the Tale (288). Patterson argues that the knight’s answer to the lady reads past the surface misogyny of her either/or offer: she suggests that a 29 The first to connect “maistrie” to the knight’s original crime was Bernard Huppe in 1948. For more recent scholarship on the theme of women’s sovereignty, see Elaine Hanson and Carolyn Dinshaw. 56 woman can be either beautiful or chaste, a common trope of misogynist’s thought; by refusing her trap, Patterson claims the knight earns his reward. But I would suggest that we also need to read past the confining nature of the Tale’s ending. And to do so, I will elucidate the various ways the Tale dramatizes the erasure of women’s acts and voices by any means necessary—even using the rhetoric of gender and class parity to do so. The most obvious erasure of women’s full complexity is the knight’s rape of the maiden, Chaucer’s addition that has most fascinated critics of the Tale. But even before the knight rapes her, “maugree hir heed (dispite her will/desires),” Chaucer includes a curious erasure of women in a toss away phrase that introduces the knight: And so bifel that this kyng Arthour Hadde in his hous a lusty bacheler, That on a day cam ridynge fro ryver, And happed that, allone as he was born, He saugh a mayde walkynge hym biforn, Of which mayde anon, maugree hir heed, (dispite her will/desires) By verray force, he rafte hire maydenhed. (882-8; my italics) Edwards bases her argument off of how strident the verse is in presenting the unambiguousness of the rape, a point she complicates through her argument concerning the ways the rhetoric of rape was utilized to further control women in patriarchy ⁠ . 30 But why go looking for implicit evidence of rhetorical fictions when Chaucer’s text is rather upfront about them. The line describing the knight “alone as he was born” depicts a doubly illogical impossibility. Most obviously, the knight is not alone in the scene—he sees a lady “hym biforn”—and he rapes her. 30 Her reading suggests that we cannot know how willing this maiden was, since the 1382 Statute of Rapes muddied the waters on the connection between rape and women’s consent. 57 The fact that he rapes her “maugree hir heed,” may suggest that he doesn’t factor women’s will into his perceptions, but insisting on “hir heed” implies that it exists. But the analogy used also suggests the knight’s long-term tendency to overlook the women around him: no one can be “alone as he was born” because no one is ever born “alone”—births require a female body. The fact is the knight is not alone on the occasions he is claimed to be; the text implies that he sees women, but they don’t count. From the Tale’s invocation, the Wife hints that the knight’s tendency to overlook the women around him bespeaks—and shores up—the norms of his society. Although the Tale seemingly honors female authority in depicting King Arthur granting the punitive measures to Queen Guinevere, Chaucer alludes to a more coequal relationship between sovereigns of different genders that is quickly forgotten as the knight’s story of rape and redemption develops. At the very beginning of the Wife’s Tale, she describes a realm with dual sovereigns: In th’ olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour, Of which that Britons speken greet honour, All was this land fulfild of fayerye. The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye, Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede. (857-61) As in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, this Tale also gestures to those magical beings of the green spaces: here they are dancing fairies led by an elf-queen. But where The Wedding dramatizes a conflict over land ownership, the sovereign rivals in Chaucer—the “elf- queen” King Arthur—seem more coequal. The land described as the land of the Britons is also “fulfild of fayerye” who are jolly and often publicly dancing. The Wife thus envisions a time in which the joint authority of a male and female sovereign coexisted peaceably. 58 Once the possibility of rape enters the scenario, however, the jolly company no longer dances. According to the Wife, the “lymytours and othere hooly freres,” whom she later aligns with the “incubus” figure, are responsible for the fairies’ disappearance: “This maketh that ther ben no fayeryes” (866, 880, 872). Extending Edwards’ argument about the slippery nature of rape rhetoric, I argue that the Wife’s description of rapists removing fairies symbolizes the ways in which rape and the rhetoric of rape—principally, its threat—confines and therefore controls women’s behavior. Erasing the fairies and the elf-queen who leads them removes the possibility of their pleasure, but it also removes the problem (not the possibility) of rape by shifting responsibility from the perpetrators to the victims. But I would also urge that the Wife makes light of that harm to rape victims even while detailing its effects: And he ne wol doon hem but dishonour” (881). Her suggestion is this: if the harm of rape is such that it not only erases women’s pleasure but also women full stop—those fairies who were formerly but now no longer dancing—then perhaps rape, though harmful, shouldn’t be treated as quite so harmful as to justify the erasure of women. Doing so—weighing the problem of rape over the visibility of women and their pleasure—actually acts in service of extending the authority of King Arthur. After all, the elf-queen disappears with the rest of the fairies. But even more disturbingly, however, Chaucer’s version of the tale shows how the punishment devised for the knight serves to erase the crime of rape while seemingly purporting to encourage him to see the women around him. In fact, although Queen Guinivere’s punishment seems superficially well conceived—the man who seemingly cannot see the women whose will he overrides should be forced to learn what women want—it also provides an opportunity to further the erasure of women via their own consent. It forces the knight to grapple with that perpetual question, “what do women want,” without requiring him to apply the knowledge he 59 learns when doing so might actually effect change on a systematic level. He travels around the kingdom for a year, asking any woman he can find what women want; and he gets various answers. But what he desires is an answer to the question that would allow him to stop asking it—an answer that would erase the need for further inquiry. His quest for the question itself, therefore, becomes a way for the knight to confine the experience of women to one register ⁠ , 31 and the scene in which he finally gets a definitive answer echoes the description of the disappearing fairies of the Tale’s invocation. Nearing the time of his trial by Queen Guinevere, the knight comes across “ladyes foure and twenty, yet mo” dancing together (992). He draws toward them eagerly, “ful yerne,” and the reader might wonder whether his eager approach belies his former rapist ways before the Wife assures us of his “hope that som wysdom shold he lerne” (994). Before he reaches the dancers, however, they vanish. His former inability to acknowledge the women around him even as he is raping one now morphs into the erasure of women on a larger scale. The Wife seems to suggest that he trades the erasure of individual women’s agency for the systemic erasure of women through viewing them as arbiters of the wisdom he needs. When the twenty-four ladies disappear, however, one lady is left behind whom he can’t help but see: “a wyf— / A fouler wight ther may no man devyse” (998-9). This is the loathly lady who will, of course, reveal to him “wommen moost desire.” But Chaucer’s loathly lady version is unique in withholding the revelation of both her answer to the question and what she desires from him in return. Where Ragnelle decidedly asks Arthur for Gawain’s hand, and the lady from “The Tale of Florent” asks for marriage outright, Chaucer’s lady exchanges her secret, which she whispers in his ear, for the knight’s generic promise that “’The nexte thyng that I requere thee, / 31 Edwards warns of the danger of this confining towards the nature of desire. Naming it stops its amorphous and inherently expansive nature—and so denies parity between the genders because both men and women share commodious and ever expanding desires. 60 Thou shalt it do’” (1010-1). In these deferrals of knowledge of what women and the loathly lady in particular want, Chaucer performs that titillating (typically rendered as sexualized and feminized in the criticism) delay by which men’s (and reader’s) attention is arrested. However, I’d like to posit another alternative to this sexualized reading of Chaucer’s delay in deploying the tropes familiar from the loathly lady genre. In withholding what the loathly lady wants and withholding the answer to the question of what women want in general, Chaucer points to opportunities for the reader as well as the knight to ask this question of women herself. Guinevere’s punishment does leave room for the possibility of the knight’s redemption, but the way he commits to the punishment keeps him from those “severer pleasures of self- knowledge” for which Patterson argues. Notably, the knight in his year-long search and at his actual trial refrains from asking the question of two important categories of women: the maiden he raped, to whom he certainly owes something, and Queen Guinevere, along with her lady jurors, to whom he owes his life. When the knight returns to Arthur’s court, he finds “Ful many a noble wyf, and many a mayde, / And many a wydwe” assembled alongside “The queene” who is “hirself sittyng as a justice” (1026-8). This assembly of ladies will confer to determine the accuracy of his answer, which applies to women in general and each hearer in particular. Addressing Guinevere singly, he tells them all (and us) what they want for the first time in the story: ‘My lige lady, generally,’ quod he, ‘Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee As wel over hir housbond as hir love, And for to been in maistrie hym above. This is youre mooste desir, thogh ye me kill. 61 Dooth as yow list; I am heer at youre wille.’ (1037-42) Addressing these lines, Edwards emphasizes the unsatisfying nature of his answering at all: to nail down desire is to deflate its amorphous and temporally imprecise potential, a lesson the knight learns when he refuses to answer the loathly lady’s bedroom question about his preference for her appearance (19-20). According to Edwards’ reading, then, the ladies’ conference after hearing the knight’s answer treats it as lackluster; instead of cheering him for being right, they generally agree “he was worthy han his lyf” because they cannot contradict him: “In al the court ne was ther wyf, ne mayde, / Ne wydwe that contraried that he sayde” (1043-5). Along with counseling that naming a desire cannot do away with it as surely as fulfilling that desire can, I would also point out that the knight’s move to answer the question at all proves he hasn’t really learned the lesson about what women want. That is, treating desire as if it could be dealt with systemically erases the experience and desires of individual women. Granting that women’s sovereignty should be honored at the same time that the knight refuses individual opportunities of honoring women’s sovereignty—as in asking the raped maiden or Queen Guinevere what they want and then fulfilling it—trades the rhetoric of justice for its actualization. And so, the problem with the loathly lady genre’s lesson on the good of granting women “sovereynetee” is that the rhetorical recital of granting sovereignty might take the place of actualization the grant of sovereignty: the knight learns that the acknowledgment that women have desires is enough— there is no need to actually indulge them, the desires or the women. 32 And the Knight’s marriage to the loathly lady only reinforces the possibility of hypocrisy standing in for justice. Their wedding night together emphasizes the way in which the knight’s 32 Cf. Dinshaw’s affirmative conclusion: “Men’s desire is still in control, as her tale shows, but feminine desire must continue to be acknowledged” (129). I hope to point out how empty this resolution is. 62 rhetoric might be disconnected from his deeds. After all, the text revels in the fact that the knight can be nominally married to and owe his life to his wife but also refuse to actualize those debts to her because he finds her so repulsive. When the two go to bed, “he walweth and he turneth to and fro” (1085). When the lady asks him why, she speaks from a subject position that assumes that her rights over him will be both acknowledged and fulfilled. She asks him why he is so “dangerous” or aloof when “I am youre owene love and youre wyf; / I am she which that saved hath youre lyf, / And certes, yet ne dide I yow nevere unright” (1091-3). She asks if the knight’s behavior is singular to him or if it is illustrative of Arthurian knights generally: “Fareth every knyght thus with his wyf as ye? / Is this the lawe of kyng Arthures hous?” (1088-9). The knight has married her rhetorically, but he refuses to fulfill that promise. While the lady treats the word and deed of marriage as inextricable, the knight tries his best to decouple his promise to her from its implied obligation by blaming the lady for all of his troubles, which he claims cannot be “amended nevere mo” (1099). In the face of her list of her merits that imply his obligation to her, he lists her faults: “Thou art so loothly, and so oold also, / And therto comen of so lough a kynde,” that it is “litel wonder” that “I walwe and wynde” (1100-2). Seizing on the knight’s understanding of “gentillesse,” the lady attempts to convince him of an alternative model by which to judge nobility, a lesson that, if he should honor it, would align his rhetoric with his deeds and provide that self-knowledge Patterson values (1109). The lady states that knight’s interpretation of “gentillesse / As is descended out of old richesse” is misguided, for those who are “moost vertuous” are so both “Pryvee and apert” (1009-10, 1113- 4). To bolster her point, she mentions famous examples, the most virtuous of which is Christ, that “grettest gentil man” whom “we clayme of hym oure gentillesse” (1116-7). She also rallies Dante, Valerius, Seneca, Boethius, and Juvenal to her cause, and again emphasizes that Christ 63 “In wilful poverte cheese to lyve his lyf” (1179). Chief among the virtues of the truly noble is the gentillesse of being virtuous in public as well as private, both “pryvee and apert” (1114, 1136). What she’s getting at here is a repudiation of hypocrisy: those who are truly noble commit to the bonds they make and act nobly when they’re in public as well as private. They do not make bonds they have no intention to fulfill; they don’t rape maidens only because they believe themselves to be “alone.” If the knight attended her lecture, he would conclude that she’s worthy and noble of having the promises made her fulfilled. But fortunately for the knight, she doesn’t make him apply the lesson he’s supposedly learned. Although he should be able to look past her age, ugliness, and poverty towards her gentillesse, she helps him out by returning to the tendency to confine women to their sexual status. She opts to sidestep her former points in favor of his “delight”: “But nathelees, syn I knowe youre delit, / I shal fulfille youre worldly appetit” (1217-8). Although her question forces him to choose between his concerns for public and private, as per her speech, it also present the choice that she has spent 100 lines arguing is related to class as inherently bound to her sexuality: ‘Chese now,’ quod she, ‘oon of thise thynges tweye: To han me foul and old til that I deye, And be to yow a trewe, humble wyf, And nevere yow displease in al my lyf, Or elles ye wol han me yong a fair, And take youre aventure of the repair That shal be to youre hous by cause of me.’ (1219-25) Patterson describes the choice the lady gives as a false one: the idea that women are either old 64 and chaste or beautiful and unchaste is a misogynistic fantasy; the knight’s refusal to choose between the options thus ostensibly proves he has learned to read beyond surface misogyny and instead change his own behavior (312). While I appreciate Patterson’s interpretation and see its applicability in line with the knight’s perspective in the story, I also would reiterate that the tale here, like all of the other loathly lady tales, gestures to women’s capability to choose at the same moment it refuses to entertain what following through on her choice would mean. When the knight acknowledges his wife’s capacity to choose, he finds doesn’t have to compromise at all: she will be both lovely and chaste in public and private. To address Patterson’s reading directly, I would argue that beyond the lady’s bedroom question, the entire tale is misogynistic: it employs the rhetoric of gender parity to reinscribe its original investment in the inequality between the genders. When the lady finally gets to choose for herself, it is his desires that are actualized. Hers remain obscure—the reader could ask at the tale’s ending, quite justifiably, ‘wait, what does she want?’ Chaucer illustrates the misogyny of the tale more explicitly through the loathly (now lovely) lady’s last words. When the knight grants her “maistrie,” she transforms and makes him rather exorbitant promises that encode misogynistic fantasies: ‘I wold be to yow bothe— This is to seyn, ye, bothe fair and good. I prey to God that I moote sterven wood, (may die insane) But I to yow be also good and trewe As evere was wyf, wyn that the world was newe. And but I be to-morn as fair to seene As any lady, emperice, or queene, 65 That is bitwixe the est and eke the west, Dooth with my lyf and deth right as yow lest.’ (1240-8) She yokes her sanity and life to the status of her sexual appeal: if she ever grows less than lovely or less than chaste, she grants him leave to kill her. If Patterson saw the misogyny of the lady’s choice to the knight, surely he’d view this salvific resolution as anti-feminist as well. The lady even promises to be as “good and true” as any wife before Eve introduced original sin—when “the world was newe.” And in confining the contributions of “lady, empress or queen” to their relationship with beauty erases those ladies and queens that have been present at the margins of the drama throughout. Guinevere and her fellow ladies’ work as justice and jury of pales in comparison to the value of their beauty, which here merely serves as an analogy to describe the knight’s transformed wife, whom he now views as valuable—not because she has saved his life—but because she is “fair to seene.” Although the Tale’s resolution is comic, its conservatism folds gender-based danger back into the system it pretends to make more just. For the drama of the female jurors and the loathly lady have paved the way for the knight to capitalize throughout on the fact that his word and actions need not be related; he might act without gentillesse and still be of noble birth, still be a knight—his wife will cover for him. And although the Tale through its women—including the loathly lady, Guinevere, and her female jurors—endeavors to teach the knight that virtuous deeds ought to outweigh the claims of birth, the Tale also does all it can to redeem the knight and restore him to the status to which he was born. Even though, as Edwards states, the rhetoric of rape has such power as to erase the possibility of women’s sexual pleasure, the resolution of the tale suggests that the rhetoric of equality between the spouses might go so far as to erase women: after all, the redemption of the knight, signaled by the loathly lady’s transformation, presumably 66 applies to his former crime of rape as well. Her transformation obscures the loathly lady’s loathliness, the knight’s original crime, and the woman attached to it—all in service of restoring the original social order the knight’s behavior disrupted. Like Gower’s version, Chaucer’s version pivots on the ways women’s sacrifices might preserve the patriarchal order; but it also extends Gower’s redemptive conclusion, widening the pool of redemption from those male individuals who murmur and complain to include rapists—just as long as those rapists are also of high birth. A Resolution Neither Loathly Nor Lovely The late medieval loathly lady tales are conservative. They ultimately suggest that acknowledging that women have desire is enough to keep the threat of that desire in check. And so, in effect, each tale inevitably refuses to grant the Lady her voice when at last they acknowledge she has one. But I want to stress that each of the examples I explore in this chapter—The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, “The Tale of Florent,” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”—also comes rather close to envisioning a just social order outside of patriarchy before they abruptly redirect to redeeming it. And ironically, it is through the more overtly misogynistic elements of each tale that an alternative social order might be imagined. In The Wedding and “The Tale of Florent,” jealous and coercive stepmothers originally transform Dame Ragnelle and Florent’s bride into loathly hags. But what if an intergenerational relationship between women were not always marked as inherently combative in the medieval imagination? Several tales hint at just such an arrangement between women, but those alliances are usually rationalized away in the tale itself or its criticism. Take, as one example, the Ovidian May-December romance between Pomona and Vertumnus. Before revealing himself to be the lusty god in disguise, Vertumnus disguises himself as an old woman to gain Pomona’s trust and 67 entry into her garden. As an old woman, Vertumnus offers Pomona sage advice about the practicalities of love and marriage—so much so, in fact, as to entice her to accept him as her husband when he does reveal himself. And if this tale’s emphasis on male deception can disqualify it as an example of intergenerational female concord, perhaps consider the relationship between the aged Morgan le Fey and the lovely Bertilak’s lady in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. On one hand, this intergenerational female friendship is at once derided by Gawain as he denounces all women through Eve, the originator of all of man’s woes. But on the other hand, it forms part of the radically alternative social order of Bertilak’s castle, for he is complicit in their deceptions of Gawain. These triangles—Vertumnus, Pomona, and the old woman Vertumnus disguises himself as, and Bertilak, Bertilak’s lady, and Morgan—each form mini-communities that are linked through trust bonds between both one woman and anther and between one woman and a man. In Chaucer’s version, communities of women manifest in various forms. But before their example might proffer an alternative social order, they are allowed or even encouraged to disappear so that patriarchal norms might be reinforced. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” presents several such congregations of women. The first, made up of fairies, dances on the green before the threat of rape makes them—and their pleasure—disappear. The next consists of the twenty- four damsels that seemingly diffuse into the loathly lady, who speaks for all women. And the last group is led by Queen Guinevere: the women in it rally together to judge what the rapist might tell them about what they desire. Over and over, the loathly lady tales ask the question, “What do women most desire?” and end by positing one answer in the mouth of the knight: the loathly lady’s. But what if, in Chaucer’s communities of women, each individual woman were allowed to answer that question for herself, listen to her fellows, and even pose more questions? What if 68 she were even allowed the possibility to change her mind, to contradict herself or her fellows— that is, allowed the means and venue through which she might keep talking as well as enact those desires alongside her fellows? Perhaps Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies offers just such an alternative—a place and a community of women who are uniquely differentiated—not collapsed into the example of one woman, be it Eve or the loathly lady. Indeed, although the loathly lady is a bogeyman in the patriarchal imagination in many ways, as I’ve indicated in this chapter, one of the the most damaging ways she is such stems not from the perceived threats she poses to men or the resentments she incites in them. Rather, the danger she poses is tantamount to her promise of conservatism, the idea that dealing with an individual once can “fix” an issue that is systemic. That is, the most damaging feature of the loathly lady is the idea that she contains multitudes within her singular form: she is not only loathly, but lovely; she speaks to the knight but speaks for all women; and, from her beginnings as a fertility figure, her individual body and desires stand in for the land more broadly, and even, perhaps, the body politic. Her status as allegorical of all women at once facilitates the tales’ conservative endings and promotes the “compromise fiction” of gender difference. Therefore, while the notion of consent the tales further is the same for both men and women—both depend on compromises of individuality for the sake of the other—the fact of the lady’s transformation associates a version of consent that is both unalterable and non-negotiable with women and a version of consent that reinforces autonomous wholeness with men. The loathly lady upholds the myth that a man’s or a system’s dealing with one woman can “cover” for dealing with all women. 33 33 I use the word “cover” here as a pun on the legal principle of coverture. Both coverture and the loathly lady tales work to obscure even erase women rather than grapple with the conflicts they bring attention to. I’ll have more to say about this issue in chapter two. 69 And so, my reading in this chapter suggests that the loathly lady tales might be a possible source for the commonplace analogy that understands the relationship of a sovereign to his lands through the conjugal union of husband and wife. But even while promoting the justice of that analogy in theory, the tales also gesture to its injustice when applied to the lived experience of subjectivity between husband and wife. For if the loathly lady stands in for both individual the “wife” in a marriage and as the multitudes governed by a sovereign, how can she speak once, for everyone, and for all time, singularly? Until those multitudes are allowed to speak and to continue speaking for themselves and until women are no longer obscured by or collapsed into the idea of Woman, the perennial question, “what do women want?,” and the perennial need for feminist readings, are always going to resurface. As themselves versions of the loathly lady tales, feminist readings will continue to be necessary as long as the problems they point out are—like those that the loathly lady points out—merely obscured by fictions of the existing system rather than used to produce new and more just systems. 70 Chapter 2: Marrying the Medusa in Spenser’s Book of Justice Although we might rightly read The Faerie Queene, with John Rogers, as “the first great poetic celebration in English of the institution of marriage,” Spenser raises serious doubts about the practical efficacy of that institution in Book V. 34 On the heels of the triumphant marriage of the rivers Thames and the Medway in Book IV, an imagined scene of social contract that establishes the English polity through sexualized consent, Spenser in Book V depicts the failure of the particular marriage that will bring about the Tudor line. 35 Destined matriarch of the Tudors since Book III and engaged to Artegall since Book IV, Britomart, the Knight of Chastity, departs the poem in Book V, unwed and never to return. 36 And the poem hardly mourns her loss; in fact, Artegall, Britomart’s future husband and Book V’s Knight of Justice, seems relieved to be rid of her and beautiful women in general, especially after having endured slavery in drag for several cantos at the hands of his wife’s double, the Amazonian queen, Radigund. Therefore, when Spenser banishes Britomart and seemingly concludes, “Nought vnder heauen so strongly doth allure / the sence of man, and all his minde possesse, / As beauties louely bait,” many critics (more or less reluctantly) champion Spenser’s seeming repudiation of marriage and heterosexual political bonds in general in Book V (5.8.1.1-3). 37 If the distraction of bonds with women can tempt “Great warriours…their rigour to represse, / And mighty hands forget their manlinesse,” 34 John Rogers, “Poetry and Marriage: Lecture 5 of NEGL-220: Milton.” Open Yale Courses. http://oyc.yale.edu/transcript/209/engl-220 35 See Elizabeth Fowler, Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). Fowler acknowledges the existence of an ethical problem haunting the marriage, for Proteus holds Florimell in erotic slavery while it takes place (202-14). 36 Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). According to Eggert, the permanent union of Britomart and Artegall is “evade[d]…evidently because of its emasculating potential” (35). 37 All quotations of The Faerie Queene will be from the Longman edition (ed. by A.C. Hamilton; New York, 2001). 71 then raptus and conquest are more suitable models for polity building than marital consent with its emasculating implications (4-5). 38 If this were the case, however, Artegall’s foreign policy travails in Ireland should have been rather more successful. But Book V ends with Artegall’s further emasculations: called home by the Fairy Queen Gloriana, he and his groom, Talus, are hounded by Envy and Detraction, hags that pelt them with stones and snakes, symbols emblematic of the public censure of Lord Grey’s exploits in Ireland. Rather than slaughter these hags or allow Talus to do so, Artegall, in his last action of the Book, opts to “repress his rigor” and at least sideline if not forget his “manliness.” Instead of a repudiation of emasculation in the Book, Spenser suggests emasculation may be a component of justice itself. This seeming paradox stems from a false conflation in Spenser criticism. When consent is opposed to conquest, and romance to epic in discussions of the marital themes of the Book, a crucial aspect of Spenser’s allegory is also overlooked—namely, his exploration of the productive political violence that actually inheres within the conjugal bond. In fact, I argue that the violent implications of the marital bond are responsible for the more unsettling episodes in Book V. For in these episodes, Spenser pushes the commonplace political analogy of conjugal to political bonds to its potentially violent and politically expedient conclusions. As Frances Dolan has illuminated, the competing definitions of marriage as a bond forged in contract, fusion, or hierarchy means that violence is often the inevitable result when marriage has room for only one fully individuated being. 39 Extrapolating from the domestic to the political realm through the 38 See Fowler, “The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser.” Representations 51 (1995): 47-76; Benjamin P. Myers, “Pro-War and Prothalamion: Queen, Colony, and Somatic Metaphor Among Spenser’s ‘Knights of the Maidenhead.’” English Literary Renaissance 37.2 (2007): 215-49; and Eggert, 22-50. 39 For more on analogies in early modern thought, see Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered 72 analogy, the potential for marital discord Dolan highlights can only increase when the sovereign occupies a female form. 40 Therefore, while Book V enjoys the dubious honor of being Spenser’s most relentlessly violent Book in the whole Faerie Queene, I urge that it is through specifically marital violence and its political philosophical implications that Spenser envisions the just forging and continuation of social order. At the same time he explores the productivity of marital violence, Spenser also opposes that model to other, queerly productive bonds that he similarly insists on keeping alive throughout the Book. These nonnormative connections are often merely hinted at in Book V: although quickly quashed, they are signaled first in the battle between Britomart and Radigund; and they animate the last Canto’s bonds between women, including the political bond between Gloriana and Irena and the queerly reproductive one between Envy and Detraction. These latter connections necessarily threaten patriarchal order, but they also gesture to alternative ordering principles for society that Spenser preserves and also aligns with justice. In this essay, I argue that Spenser allegorizes political consent as a women’s consensual self-decapitation in Book V in the face of other potential (queerer) models for social cohesion. In episodes that dramatize an implied pun on women’s capacity for self-sovereignty—the Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1988). For more on the analogy between politics and ethics in marriage, see Frances Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and Sanchez (especially chapters 1 and 2). When Fowler in Literary Character discusses Spenser’s elaborate and seemingly contradictory balance of powers in his depiction of the social contract, she calls his vision “a consensual, republican empire “(207-8n.53). 40 For Spenser’s critiques of female rule and Elizabeth specifically, see Pamela Benson, "Rule, Virginia: Protestant Theories of Female Regiment in The Faerie Queene." English Literary Renaissance 15.3 (1985): 277-292; Maureen Quilligan, “The Comedy of Female Authority in The Faerie Queene.” English Literary Renaissance 17.2 (1987): 156-71; Donald Stump, “A Slow Return to Eden: Spenser on Women’s Rule.” English Literary Renaissance. 29.2 (1999): 401-21; Mary Villeponteaux, “Displacing Feminine Authority in the Faerie Queene.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 35.1 (1995): 53-67; and Susanne Woods, “Spenser and the Problem of Women’s Rule.” Huntington Library Quarterly. 48.2 (1985): 141-58. 73 connection between a “maiden’s head” and her “maidenhead”—Spenser envisions the forging of the social order through depicting a woman’s violent self-discipline of her potential to dominate a future husband. In the first section of the chapter, I demonstrate how Spenser uses marriage as a tool by which the justice of an idealized “golden age” might be approximated in the present “stonie one” (5.proem.2.1-2). For heterosexual marriage, as Spenser conceives it, transforms men and women’s tendency to unjustly “Stony” each other into a heterosocially productive force that also might be applied to foreign policy. But looking closer at Spenser’s allusions to the Medusa myth in his marriage project, particularly in the battle between Britomart and her Amazonian double, Radigund, I reveal the queer underpinnings at the heart of Spenser’s heteronormative project. The polity-building potential afforded by Britomart’s violent self- curtailment stands opposed to other, queerly productive bonds between women throughout the Book. As such, my reading makes the case for Spenser—the ultimate celebrant of heterosexual marriage—and his Book V in particular to be considered within the current debate over queer futurity—the disagreement whether the concerns of queer theory are inherently at odds with the heternormative thrust of political theory. 41 For a closer look at Spenser’s depiction of social contract through female decapitation/defloration reveals Maggie Nelson’s notion “that no set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical or the so-called normative” (72- 41 I refer to the debate over whether politics is necessarily grounded in heterosexual reproduction and therefore fundamentally at odds with queer concerns. For more on this debate, see “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.” PMLA, 121.3 (2006): 819-29; De Lauretis, Teresa. “Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 17.2- 3 (2011): 243-63; Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004); Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure (2011); Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009); and Snediker, Michael D. Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.). 74 3). And in revealing and even reveling in the violent implications of world building through heterosexual marriage, Spenser’s Book V ironically also belies a queerer sociopolitical future. The Problem of “Stony” Justice That Spenser’s marital negotiation culminates in the Book of Justice is hardly coincidental. Because justice is conventionally rendered an idealized abstraction to be interpreted by men on earth, Artegall—simultaneously the Knight of Justice and a material man—must struggle to embody it. 42 In A View of the State of Ireland, Spenser rehearses a classical argument concerning this tension between idealized and practical justice through his interlocutors, Eudoxus and Irenius. 43 At issue is the extent to which talic justice or strict adherence to the law (lex talionus) is adequate in practice, or whether equity, that is, that principle of the law that takes fairness and context into account, need be practiced to make justice more just. 44 In reference to a 42 See my discussion of Justice emblems in the dissertation introduction. A common reading of Spenser’s Book V sees the virtue of justice as ideal and thus its embodiment in a man as always subject to failure. See Judith Anderson, “ ‘Nor Man it Is’: The Knight of Justice in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.” PMLA 85 (1975): 65-77; Kenneth Borris, Spenser’s Poetics of Prophecy in “The Faerie Queene V” (Victoria: University of Victoria English Literary Studies, 1991: 62); and Heather James, “The Problem of Poetry in The Faerie Queene, Book V.” The Spenser Review 45.1.1 (2015). David Lee Miller, in “Gender, justice and the gods in The Faerie Queene, Book 5” (Reading Renaissance Ethics. Ed. Marshall Grossman. New York: Routledge, 2007. 19-37), links this issue explicitly to gender. Drawing from Gordon Teskey’s Allegory and Violence, he suggests that this failure stems from a “logical impasse” in Plato’s metaphysics that Spenser dramatizes. If form is masculine and transcendent to matter’s feminine materiality, then a material man like Artegall will struggle to embody the abstract virtue of justice (19). 43 Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland. Eds. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. For connections between View and Book V, see Clare Carroll, “The Construction of Gender and the Cultural and Political Other in The Faerie Queene 5 and A View of the Present State of Ireland: the Critics, the Context, and the Case of Radigund.” Criticism 32.2 (1990): 163-92. Her reading draws connections between Spenser’s gender and colonial ideologies, his poetics and politics. 44 For a discussion of the literary construction of equity in the period, see Elliott Viconsi, Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). For discussions of equity in Spenser, see Brian C. Lockey, “‘Equity to measure’: The Perils of Imperial Imitation in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. 10.1 (2010): 52-70; and Andrew J. Majeski, Equity in English 75 particularly tricky adjudication issue, Eudoxus and Irenius differ on whether a judge can be implicitly trusted to intervene on behalf of an oversight of the law: Eudox. Yea, but the iudge, when it commeth before him to trial, may easily decide this doubt, and lay open the intent of the law, by his better discretion. Iren. Yea, but it is dangerous to leave the sence of the law unto the reason or will of the iudge, who are men and may bee miscarried by affection, and many other meanes. But the laws outght to bee like stony tables, plaine, stedfast, and unmoveable. (40) When Irenius opposes the “sence of the law” to the sense(s)—both rational and emotional—of men, he favors “unmoveable,” “stony tables” because they remain implacable despite outside influences. Rejecting outright what Eudoxus refers to as “discretion” in the judge’s practice of equity, Irenius suggests that any deviation from the law is a miscarriage of justice. Indeed, the word he uses to describe men under any influence is “miscarried.” Citing this passage, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “miscarry” as: “To cause (a person) to go wrong or astray; to mislead, delude, or seduce.” Although “seduce” seems a bit loaded in the context of the passage isolated from View, when applied to Artegall’s situation throughout Book V , it speaks to his struggles to achieve justice in the abstract as he navigates the material world, particularly in cases involving women. In Canto 2, for example, Artegall and his groom, the “yron man,” Talus, encounter a problem of justice that dramatizes the gendered implications of the practice of equity from View. Although the scene is often read as an allegory of money’s nefarious influence, its depiction of Artegall’s pity for Munera also belies the importance of gender to the scene. 45 In the episode, Renaissance Literature: Thomas More and Edmund Spenser. New York: Routledge, 2006. 45 For more on the limits of the financial allegory in the scene, see Heather James; Majeske, 9, and Abraham Stoll, “Spenser’s Allegorial Conscience” Modern Philology. 111.2 (2013): 181- 76 Artegall and Talus hear of a father and daughter pair, Pollente and Munera, who unjustly guard a bridge, robbing and murdering the travellers who attempt to cross it. Despite Pollente’s being “a man of great defence; / Expert in battell and in deedes of armes,” Artegall is able to subdue and decapitate him with Chrysaor, the sword of justice (5.2.5.3-4). Munera’s defenses, however, pose an altogether different problem for the Knight of Justice. At the walls of her castle, Artegall is so “beaten with stones downe from the battilment / That he was forced to withdraw aside”; he therefore calls upon Talus, who “neither force of stones…/ Nor powr of charms… / Might otherwise preuaile, or make him cease for ought” (5.2.22.7-9). Talus tears into the castle, unaffected by Munera’s “charms” or “stones.” And although Talus later “made way for his maister to assaile” the matter and judge Munera himself, the text clearly links Talus rather than Artegall with the action of justice in the scene. Artegall pities Munera—“Artegall him selfe her seemelesse plight did rew”—and Talus executes the plain, steadfast, and unmoveable justice the case calls for, which apparently includes mutilation. Talus first “Chopt off, and nayld on high” Munera’s hands and feet and then throws the rest of her body over her castle walls to “drown[…] in the durty mud,” all amid the protests of her “vaine loud crying” (5.2.26.9, 5.2.27.2-4). Although we might from such actions describe Talus as resolute and “without remorse,” the text describes Artegall as such: “Yet for no pity would he (Artegall) change the course / Of Iustice, which in Talus hand did lye” (5.2.26.1-3). As Artegall’s behavior attests, this early scene of Book V aligns with Irenius’s position from View, as interpreted by the OED. When “affections” can “seduce” men—even the Knight of Justice—into a failure of justice, a commitment to “plaine, stedfast, and unmoveable” stone tables—and Talus, allegorically—seems not only reasonable but a necessary tool in the service of justice. As Heather James recently put it, “Talus 204, especially 198-99. 77 is a hard man to deny,” and indeed, many scholars read Book V as increasingly siding with Talus and the strict justice he represents as the Book goes on. In contrast, the proem of Book V gives good reason to scrutinize the implacability of “Stony” tables and stony men. Munera’s defenses—her “stones” as well as her “charms”—and the connected but very different reactions of Talus and Artegall in the face of them inform Spenser’s lamentation that the present age has fallen from “the golden age” to “a stonie one” (5.proem.2.2). Spenser suggests that the character of men in the present day has changed for the worse through an inversion of the creation myth from Ovid. Where Deucalion and Pyrrha threw stones over their shoulders to repopulate the world, men transforming from Deucalion’s stones and women from Pyrrha’s, the inverse occurs in Spenser’s Stony age: “men themselues, the which at first were framed / Of earthly mould, and form’d of flesh and bone, / Are now transformed into hardest stone” (5.proem.2.3-5). 46 Like Talus, then, such men can be characterized by the adjectival form of the word “Stonie,” meaning “abounding in, or having the character of rock or stone.” The justice of such Stony men is talic—strict and implacable in the face of that which might influence it. 47 Artegall’s Stoniness, however, signals a different problem altogether. His affective reactions to women invoke another meaning of “Stonie” at use in the period—a verb that the Oxford English Dictionary defines to mean, “to amaze or stupefy with a blow” or “to induce insensibility…benumb, deaden.” This usage critiques women’s power to stun men into inactivity, either by means of their astonishing beauty or their strategic use of gendered conventions for 46 See Eggert, who reads, “degendered,” as the removal of separation between the sexes, therefore signaling the emasculation of men (23-4). 47 See Tiffany Jo Werth, “‘Degendered’: Spenser’s ‘yron man’ in a ‘stonie’ age.” Spenser Studies. 30 (2015): 393-413 for an alternate reading in which the “stonie” man Talus is not quite as dispassionate as he seems. 78 behavior. 48 Either way, women who “Stony” men use gender ideals or norms to immobilize and figuratively transform the men into stone. Aligned with the traditional reading of Artegall and Britomart as Book V’s representations of Justice and Equity, this denotation of “Stony” suggests that too great an adherence to matters of equity also delays and may even completely hinder the practice of justice. The issue with either type of Stoniness—the strict law of Talus or incapacitating power of a feminine influence— is the potential tendency of both to permanently impede justice from being done. After all, the humans of Spenser’s proem transform into stones no matter whether they are thrown by Duecalion or Pyrrha. Thus, Spenser’s concern is that this transformation may 48 For the former, compare Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Oxford: Printed for Henry Cripps, 1651, wherein female beauty is described as hazardous: “sith Lucian, of his mistris, she is so fair, that if thou dost but see her, she will stupifie thee, kill thee straight, and Medusa like turn thee to a stone, thou canst not pull thine eyes from her, but as an adamant doth iron, she will carry thee bound headlong whether she will her self, infect thee like a Basilisk” ([3.2.2.2] 462). This quotation comes a page after the inclusion of Spenser’s “Nought under heaven…” stanza from Canto 8, quoted above (461). But Burton also mentions beauty’s affect on both sexes: “It holds both in men and women. Dido was amazed at Aeneas presence” (462). For the latter, see Lowell Gallagher, Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), for the relation of the Medusa figure to Elizabeth’s political strategies and Spenser’s casuistry project. This type of “stoniness” referenced throughout Book V may implicitly be targeted at Elizabeth, but it is also a common theme in Amoretti and Epithalamion, and I’m thankful to Judith Owen to pointing me to the line, “Medusaes mazeful head” (189), during the 2017 Spenser Session at Kalamazoo. See the Critical Edition. Ed. Kenneth J. Larsen (Tempe: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997). And of course, a woman’s arousal of a “stonied” response in men may be a more or less strategic or even conscious move on her part, particularly depending upon her station; similarly, a man’s “stonied” response to a woman may be more or less strategic or even conscious move on his. See Michael C. Schoenfeldt, “Gender and Conduct in Paradise Lost.” Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images. Ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993: 310-338) for a discussion of the “manipulative submission” that may be practiced by male courtiers (310-12). For the classic account of the mix of admiration and misogynistic aggression in the Petrarchan blazon tradition, see Nancy Vickers, “‘The blazon of sweet beauty’s best: Shakespeare’s Lucrece.” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Edited by Patricia Parker. London: Methuen, 1985 and “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhymes.” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265-79. 79 become permanent, that “They into that ere long will be degendered” (P5.2.6, 9). 49 As I shall show, Artegall will fight his “degendering” into stone and learn to be the Knight of Justice through his marriage negotiation with Britomart in which both spouses realize their respective capacities to Stony and be Stonied by each other. Marrying the Medusa: Women’s Marital Consent as Self-Decapitation Although the terms do not derive from the same etymological source, the two types of Stoniness – fierce law and astonishment – unite in Spenser’s marital negotiations of Book V through a sustained invocation of the Medusa myth, including its connections to Petrarchanism. 50 In the myth, the Medusa’s ability to astonish and immobilize men often emasculates them, and thereby seems to justify men’s exorbitant violence in retribution. 51 As Book V unfolds, Artegall must decouple the two types of Stoniness that the myth explicitly links. And he does this by using marriage as a policy tool that equitably neutralizes the threat of emasculating women: where he is liable to “lose his head” in astonishment at female beauty, women symbolically lose their heads through marriage. Spenser’s invocation of the Medusa myth reworks its violence through allegory: the literal decapitation of the Medusa in the myth becomes figurative in Spenser’s hands, symbolizing the civil death of a wife. In the myth, looking upon the Medusa turns men to stone. 49 See Werth’s discussion of this line in terms of the materiality of stone and men. Eggert discusses how the line registers the inherent emasculation of the present age (especially 23-5). See Miller’s reading of the line as “degender-read” in his emphasis on the importance of “an alertness to reading” in the legend of justice (22). 50 Larsen says of Spenser’s use of “astonish” in reference to the Medusa in Epithalamion 189-90 that “Spenser is either 1. playing with the spurious derivation of astonied from ‘stony’; or 2. has in mind Ovid’s ‘attonitos’ (= astonied or stunned), its actual etymon” (241). 51 See Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1953-74. 18:273-74. Eggert draws upon his “Medusa effect” in her reading (24). 80 Perseus, intent to subdue her, uses his shield as a mirror to both defend himself against her gaze and reflect and thereby appropriate its power. Once she sees her own reflection in the shield, the Medusa turns herself to stone. Perseus then decapitates the immobilized monster and uses her head to immobilize his enemies, ultimately turning his vulnerability to Medusa into the means by which he conquers others. As Nancy Vickers has shown, the tradition of Petrarchan blazons is founded upon the Medusa myth. 52 That is, the Petrarchan poet who might be stunned by female beauty might also reflect and thus appropriate that beauty in his verse, the blazon. Just as Perseus uses the decapitated Medusan head to subdue his enemies, so too does the Petrarchan poet use his eloquence in depicting female beauty to stun his rival poets. This tradition informs an emblem enshrining the printer of Barthélemy Aneau’s 1552 Picta poesis, called “Typographia Agathandri Symbolum [The Device of the Printer Agathandrus]” (see Figure 1). The Greek inscription, “ἘΚ ΤΟΥ ΠΌΝΟΥ Ὁ ΚΛΈΟΣ,” translating to “from labor, fame,” heralds Perseus as a symbol of the printer. The implication is that the printer’s feat (Aneau’s book) will astonish rivals: in the emblem, men literally turn to stone below Perseus as he flies. As opposed to Petrarch’s use of the myth, Spenser’s primary concern is men’s vulnerability to women rather than men’s using that vulnerability to jockey for position among other men. Where Perseus decapitates and appropriates Medusa’s head for his own use, Spenser 52 Vickers, “This Heraldry in Lucrece’ Face.” Poetics Today. 6.1/2, The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspectives. (1985): 171-84. Figure 1: Emblem from Picta poesis, Barthélemy Aneau, 1552 (A5v p10). 81 seeks to more justly manage the threat she poses through her consent to marriage and the figuration of civil death. His headless Medusa is a figuration of civil death. The allegorical connection between decapitation and coverture can help explain an early and otherwise obviously unjust judgment of Artegall’s, which occurs in the Sir Sanglier episode. In canto 1, Artegall and Talus come across a squire weeping over a “headlesss Ladie…/ In her owne blood all wallow’d woefully” (5.1.14.3-4). Despite appearances to the contrary, the squire claims he is innocent of beheading the lady. The criminal, according to him, is Sir Sanglier, who decapitated his own lady when she objected to his taking another, the squire’s lady. If the squire is to be believed, Sir Sanglier is guilty of both raptus and murder; but when Artegall and Talus track down Sanglier, the knight denies both charges and claims the living lady as his own. Although Artegall suspects the squire is innocent and Sanglier guilty, he cannot prove it. He therefore turns to Solomon’s famous method and reveals Sanglier’s mendacity and callousness: because Sanglier approves the cutting of the living lady in two, Sanglier proves himself guilty and the squire innocent of rape and murder. To punish Sanglier, Artegall and Talus force him to bear the dead “Ladies head” for a year, “to witnesse to the world that she by him is dead” (5.1.26.8-9). As several readers of this scene have pointed out, Artegall’s adjudication ignores the input of the living lady and translates the rape and murder of women into a property dispute between men. 53 But even as we might recognize the possibility of Artegall’s action in this case stemming from a localized problem—he ignores the women because of his aforementioned tendency to be astonished them— I also find a systemic cause for his oversight. If we view the rape and decapitation of women in the scene in line with conventions of coverture and popular 53 See Mary Bowman, “Distressing Irena: Gender, Conquest, and Justice in Book V of The Faerie Queene.” Spenser Studies 17 (2003): 151-82. James also mentions the women’s silence. 82 symbolic representations of headless women, we can see that Artegall’s judgment speaks to the burden of proof in cases that involve the sexual agency of unmarried women. In addition to its connection to the Medusa myth, the depiction of heads and headlessness is common in tracts on good governance, be they theological treatises or political or marital advice tracts. 54 A body without a head speaks to an improper distribution of agency, in a single individual— as in, one’s body acting without the rational guidance of one’s head—or illustrative of a political or domestic imbalance—as in, a polis or country without a government or a house without a householder. In the conjugal/political analogy, the husband is said to be the head of the wife as the sovereign is head of the body politic. A headless woman, therefore, as Emblem XVI from Perrière’s The Theater of Fine Devices attests, could be considered a disturbing marvel—more disturbing even than the Medusa herself, as the accompanying poem attests (see Figure 2). The impossibility of a headless woman in practice speaks to her symbolic nefariousness. She signifies a failure of governance: a woman’s body without the legitimating authority that a husband, or head of household, would provide. 54 See Dolan chapter 1. Figure 2: Emblem from The Theater of Fine Deuices, Guillaume de La Perrière, 1614. 83 The headless woman also represents a failure of governance in respect to female chastity. Naked, headless, and with her hand covering but also drawing attention to her vagina, the woman in the emblem invokes a visual and linguistic pun on the loss of a maiden’s head and her lost maidenhead. Her headlessness therefore illustrates the ways a woman’s claim to authority—her will, her reason—is also lost through a bodily change via her loss of virginity. In Sovereign Amity, Laurie Shannon notes the similarity in the consentio possible for both male friends and female virgins. “Masculine friendship and female chastity both proffer self-sufficiency, autonomy, and constancy, as well as a freedom from servility, mutability, or contingency,” a status that for women is removed when they lose their virginities (68). After marriage, this loss is covered—another pun—by her gain of a husband: through the legal principle of coverture, the husband’s “head” takes the place of her lost one, her children are assumed to be his. But headless and without a husband to cover her, the woman literally cannot speak for herself; she has no recourse to the legitimating authority a husband would provide. If we take these visual puns seriously in Book V, Artegall’s adjudication in the Sir Sanglier episode demonstrates the difficulty of differentiating between an actual romantic bond and raptus when a woman cannot bear witness for herself. That the women are not speaking is exactly the point. Spenser presents Artegall adjudicating the obvious injustice in the Sir Sanglier case by whatever means he can, ultimately attempting to correct the marriage failure in an unsatisfying approximation of coverture: forcing Sanglier to carry around his lady’s decapitated head. As such, Spenser articulates through his allusion to Medusa and headless women in general the necessity of women’s participation in the justice process. Through marriage, their consent sanctions the (otherwise unjust) legal and bodily changes they undergo in civil death. Because a husband’s cover might easily mask an injustice, the wife should rightly decapitate 84 herself through marriage. We see this more just model of heterosexual relations underlying Artegall’s judgment between the False and Fair Florimells in canto 3. At the long awaited union of Florimell and Marinell, their “spousals” are interrupted by the arrival of the pair’s nefarious doubles: False or Snowy Flormell and Braggadochio, the braggart knight who shamefully absconded with Marinell’s shield (5.3.10.9). We readers know that both of these two are pretenders; but the men assembled cannot definitively prove this fact, particularly since they are “stonied” by False Florimell’s beauty. With Fair Florimell offstage, Marinell “long astonisht stood,” transfixed by the appearance of False Florimell, the embodied blazon of his true bride. Although False Florimell is merely a monstrous collection of pretty parts—“Instead of eyes [she has] two burning lampes…in siluer sockets, shyning like the skyes,” “golden wyre” for hair and so on—Marinell cannot distinguish between the women: “euer as he did the more auize, / The more to be true Florimell he did surmize” (3.8.7, 5.3.18). Artegall strategically avoids having to adjudicate between the two Florimells by focusing on the men involved: he compares Marinell’s shield, now in Bragadocchio’s possession, to the arm that bears it: “That shield, which thou doest beare, was it indeed… / But not that arme, nor thou the man I reed” (5.3.21.1, 3). Only after determining that Braggadocchio is a fake does Artegall “wager” that Braggadocchio’s lady “Is not…Florimell at all; / But some fayre Franion, fit for such a fere” (5.3.22.5-6). Spenser invokes the blazon tradition and its association with the Medusa figure at this point of Book V to link marriage to his justice project. Where Perseus appropriated Medusa’s head for his own gain, Spenser articulates a more just way to contain the power of the Medusa to 85 astonish men: trust that women will neutralize their own threat through marriage. 55 Fair Florimell neutralizes her double when Artegall literally sets the doubles against each other: Then did he set her by that snowy one… Streightway so soone as both together met, Th’enhaunted Damzell vanisht into nought: Her snowy substance melted as with heat, Ne of that goodly hew remayned out, But th’emptie girdle, which about her wast was wrought. (5.3.24) Although indistinguishable to the assembled knights, the allegorical aspects that distinguish Fair and False Florimell— authenticity vs. falseness, the whole vs. parts, true character vs. reputation, depth vs. surface, beauty as a virtue vs. beauty as attractions—all melt along with False Florimell herself, until all that remains of her is the “emptie girdle” that she once wore. A wink towards the wedding night’s completion of the legal principle of coverture, Florimell’s girdle remains the last vestige of her autonomy before she it is collapsed 55 In Amoretti and Epithalamion, Spenser also explores strategies to deal with man’s astonishment at woman’s beauty through marriage. I’ll gesture to such moments of resonance in footnotes. I have in mind the feminized subjectivity exemplified in the behavior of the “willful” women Kathryn Schwarz discusses in What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Their willful consent subtends the bonds upon which the patriarchal order depends. Figure 3: Emblem from Emblemata, Andrea Alciato, 1584 (E9r f33r). 86 into or “covered” by Marinell’s; the aspects of her person that formerly defined her—her capacity to arrest the attention of the men around her, and her capacity to consent as a contractual and sexual agent—should all disappear once her marriage to Marinell is consummated. 56 The emphasis on shields in the scene is significant. In Ovid’s version of the myth, the Medusa was once a beautiful maiden with lovely hair. After Neptune rapes the Medusa in Minerva’s temple, Minerva—unable to punish a fellow god—punishes the Medusa with her monstrous form, including snakes for hair. Minerva also marked the transformation, emblazoning her shield with the symbol of snakes or the Gorgon’s head. 57 This detail animates the sixteenth century legal emblem tradition, as in Emblem XXII of Andrea Alciato’s 1584 collection, Emblemata (see Figure 3). Titling the image, “Custodiendas virgines [virgins must be guarded],” Alciato depicts Pallas with a Gorgon- bearing shield. Where, when wielded by Perseus, Medusa’s 56 Compare the beloved’s self-neutralization in Amoretti, Sonnet 75. When the speaker’s “stonisht hart stood in amaze” at his beloved’s eye, he fears her becoming an archer and “darting…deadly arrows fyry bright, / at euery rash beholder passing by” (3, 7-8). He is ultimately saved by the “Damzell” herself, who “with twinkle of her eye / broke [the] misintended dart” that is “aym[ed]…at my very hart” (10-12). 57 See Ovid, Metamorphoses: Books 6-10. Ed. William S. Anderson. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978: 4.753-803. Spenser surely had this passage in mind while composing Book V. Chrysaor, the name of Artegall’s sword, is also the name of Perseus’ brother in Ovid’s version. Figure 4: Emblem from Picta poesis, Barthélemy Aneau, 1552 (G4v). 87 head subdued male rivals, Medusa’s head in Minerva’s hands protects virgins from violability. The conflation of both potentials animates another emblem from Aneau’s Picta poesis, called, “Stupor Admirationis, ex armorum, & Literarum Praestantia” [Dazed awe accompanies superiority in armaments and literary culture] (see Figure 4). In this image, Minerva herself, bearing the Gorgon’s head on her shield, turns men into stone, linking Minerva’s wisdom and virginity to the literally stunning power of “Litterae & Arma,” as the accompanying poem attests: “Quorum homines rapit admiration tanta: stupor / Defixox, ut saxa quis esse putet” [For these (letters and arms), men are seized by rapt admiration, rooted stiff with awe, so you might think they were stones]. In Spenser’s hands, the protective power of the Medusa can extend to married chastity in addition to virginity. The change need only correlate with the turn from Minerva wielding the Gorgon’s head to a woman herself symbolically doing so—that is, marrying a single man to subdue her capacity to stun all men indiscriminately. The association between shields and Medusa’s legacy also speaks to ideals of married chastity, as Vickers avers when she opposes Medusa to Lucrece. In marriage, a virtuous wife functions as the “shield” and “herald” of her husbands’ lineage—her married chastity defends the legitimacy of his familial line by ensuring that her children are also his. 58 But Vickers’ reading might be extended further to account for the particular threat embodied in the Medusa. Since both Lucrece and the Medusa in Ovid’s version are victims of rape, the Medusa’s monstrosity stems from her refusal, unlike Lucrece’s, to commit suicide after failing to adequately defend patriarchy; that is, the Medusa’s monstrosity coincides with her resolute survival after rape. In Spenser’s justice project, the invocation of the myth suggests that when women consent to marriage, the particular justice issues they introduce should collapse into their husband’s in an 58 Vickers alludes to (but does not explicitly name) Ovid’s version of the myth in her discussion of heraldic blazons (especially 181-83). 88 allegorical suicide. It is therefore no coincidence that the melting of False Florimell coincides with the restoration of Marinell’s shield. Culminating in her loss of virginity to her husband, her consent to coverture constitutes a metaphorical self-decapitation. Medusan Marriage in Radegone: Queer Heterosexuality If the violence of the Medusa myth exists in the subtext of the Florimell episode, Spenser literalizes that violence in the Radigone episode as he illustrates Britomart’s choosing the heterosexual marital dyad over other potential political bonds. This process begins with a series of fights between Artegall and the allegorical doubles, Britomart and Radigund, and culminates in the future-wife’s self-curtailment that explicitly aligns marital consent with a sexualized decapitation. 59 Artegall first hears that Radigund, an Amazonian queen, enthralls all male knights who challenge her, both figuratively and literally; each finds himself first taken in by her beauty and then enslaved and in drag in Radigund’s lair. 60 Outraged at this, Artegall sets out to battle her in the name of justice, but his actions more accurately activate Spenser’s Medusan marriage project. On the battlefield, Radigund carries a shield fit for a Medusa: it is “bedeckt / Vppon the bosse with stones, that shined wide, / As the faire Moone in her most full aspect” (5.5.3.6-8, my italics). Although Artegall’s masculine and martial prowess easily contends with the literal stones in her shield, he cannot do so with the figurative stoniness that also shields her from his attack. “Hauing her thus disarmed of her shield,” Artgall moves to unlace her helmet and decapitate her, 59 Eggert refers to Britomart as “a castratingly Medusan sight” whose “task is…to subdue herself” (30, 41). 60 For a discussion of gender in the battle scenes between Artegall, Britomart, and Radigund, see Woods, “Amazonian Tyranny: Spenser’s Radigund and Diachronic Mimesis.” Playing with Gender: A Renaissance Pursuit. Eds. Jean R. Brink, Maryanne C. Horowitz, and Allison P. Coudert (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 89 as Perseus did the Medusa, “Thinking at once both head and helmet to have raced” (5.5.11.1, 9). However, his plan is stunted, for, When as he discouered had her face, He saw his senses straunge astonishment, A miracle of natures goodly grace In her faire visage. (5.5.12.1-4) Like her shield, her face resembles the “Moone,” and it proves the better defense from Artegall’s onslaught (5.5.12.8). Upon seeing it, he is stunned and drops his sword. As many commentators have noted, these descriptors of Radigund and her fight with Artegall echo those of Britomart in Artegall’s combat with her in Book IV , a battle that also ends with the revelation of Britomart’s face and Artegall’s awed capitulation to her. I have more to say about the similarity of these two battles later, but for now, I want to emphasize that in both cases, the women warriors “stonie” Artegall precisely at the moment that Artegall’s masculine and martial power would otherwise physically dominate them. His astonishment at female facial beauty translates into various emasculations: “disarmed” by Radigund, Artegall is literally stripped of his arms and forced to dress in drag by Radigund; 61 enthralled by her, he is literally placed “in wretched thralldome” to her. His “Stonied” response to Radigund allows her stoniness to surface. Radigund’s beauty makes Artegall lose his head, and so he cedes his more natural authoritative position to her: “So he was ouercome, not ouercome” (5.5.17.1). Like a Medusa, Radigund turns Artegall into stone. Fortunately for Artegall, the Medusan marriage plot Spenser previously outlined in the Florimell episode continues in the following cantos. As when Fair Florimell neutralized the 61 For a reading of the importance of clothing to gender conventions and subjection in Radegone and political theory more broadly, see Jeffrey B. Griswold, “Allegorical Consent: The Faerie Queene and the Politics of Erotic Subjection.” Spenser Studies. 29 (2014): 219-37. 90 threat of False Florimell, Spenser contends with Artegall’s astonishment by pitting the female doubles, Britomart and Radigund, against each other. 62 And invoking the sexualized violence of the Medusa myth, when Britomart and Radigund fight, the two relentlessly attack each other’s sexual organs—the means by which the patriarchal order is reproduced: Their dainty parts, which nature had created So faire and tender, without staine or spot, For other vuses, then they them translated; Which they now hackt and hewd, as if such vse they hated. (5.7.29) The sexualization of their battle continues when Britomart eventually unseats Radigund with a penetrative head wound: “She her so rudely on her helmet smit, / That it empierced to the very brain” (5.7.33.7-8). When these attacks culminate in Britomart’s decapitation of Radigund— “She with one stroke both head and helmet cleft”—Spenser’s implied pun on ‘maidenhead’ and ‘maiden’s head’ highlights that the women are fighting for control over their allegorical symbols of self- and sexual-sovereignty (5.7.34.3, 5-6). 63 On one hand, Britomart’s removal of both head and hymen actualizes her consent to marriage with Artegall. But on the other hand, the wife figure’s self-deflowering is highly ironized—Britomart and Radigund focus their attack on their “dainty parts” not because they are eager for heterosexual reproduction, those “other uses” Spenser coyly hints at, but rather “as if such use they hated.” As such, Spenser’s depiction of female self-curtailment ironizes Maggie Nelson’s notion concerning queer family making. In her project to decentralize heterosexual reproduction as merely one form of social bond formation, Nelson urges that “any bodily experience can be made new and strange, that nothing we do in 62 See Miller for a reading of the gendered ethics of Britomart’s journey, emblematically rendered in the Isis Church episode. 63 See Quilligan, “On Renaissance Epic,” for a reading that relates their fight to the dangers of colonial intermarriage (26-34). She alludes to the Medusa myth (34). 91 this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical or the so-called normative” (72-3). In this way, Spenser renders a scene typical of romance—women’s consent to a destined marriage—in epic terms, with a heroic female warrior violently vanquishing another version of herself, the version that would not commit to furthering patriarchy. Thus, the episode emphasizes that heterosexual reproduction—the heteronormative act par excellence—requires both women emasculating men and women’s murder/suicide of their virginal bodies (if it is consensual). Even more radical is the description of the women’s blood: it “gushed through their armes” and spills on the battlefield; by spilling it, they thus “on the ground their liues did strow / Like fruitles seed, of which vntimely death should grow,” an analogy that comingles several paradoxes (5.7.31.7-9). First, their hymeneal bloodshed is “conceived in male terms”—especially as this blood is said to have “gushed through their arms” and scattered like seed—to signify the genesis of a familial line. 64 And secondly, their bloodshed blurs the boundary between the literal and allegorical in terms of the sex act for a woman. At the surface level, the blood spilled speaks to the female warriors’ risking their lives in battle. But the shedding of their hymeneal blood also allegorically signals the physical aspects of civil death, the “vntimely death” they cultivate through their battle/hymeneal rupture (5.7.31.9). Since Britomart is destined to mother the English line, her literal death would be untimely and “fruitless,” but her civil death through her decapitation of Radigund plants the seed for the Britons to come. In short, in positing a self-decapitating Medusa in Britomart, Spenser suggests that marriage, as an act of self-actualized civil death that includes the emasculation of men and masculinization of women, is constitutive act that ushers in the English polity and Tudor line. In 64 Gallagher 178. 92 the sections that follow, I will demonstrate that the scene in Radegone is a watershed moment in interpreting what Spenser means by “justice” in the Book. On one hand, he presents Britomart’s consent to heterosexual marriage as just in that her sacrifice is paralleled by one Artegall makes. This parity between the genders in marriage also produces, however, the means by which consent as a foreign policy model might perpetuate rather than alleviate political injustices. And on the other hand, Spenser’s depiction of Britomart’s hesitancy to commit to heterosexual marriage also hints at the possibility of a viable queer model for polity and society building, one that gains prominence as it aligns with other depictions of nonnormative political bonds in the latter cantos. “That lothly uncouth sight”: Men’s Marital Consent as Consensual Slavery Taking Spenser’s project to be one that promotes the justice of heterosexual marriage, we might view that he presents the self-sacrifice of each spouse as mutual. If the figurative potentials of decapitation haunt the wife’s experience of what it means to consent to marriage, the central cantos of Book V also explore the husband’s vulnerabilities to his wife. In Radegone, Artegall experiences the ways in which his enthrallment by a woman’s beauty literally puts him in thrall to her. Emasculated slavery at the hands of an Amazonian queen is Spenser’s metaphor for the autonomy men in particular risk when they consent to marriage. 65 But Artegall’s slavery in drag is also integral to Spenser’s more radical experiment in Book V: a model for marriage that, through the violent trading of mastery and submission between the spouses, would weave together what are otherwise disparate threads – threads that critics have read as pulling apart in 65 On risking status in marriage, see Dolan (50). Later, Dolan quotes Margaret Cavendish in linking women’s slavery in marriage to men’s slavery to the beauty of women (80). 93 Book V , including epic and romance, 66 poetry and history, 67 ethics and political philosophy. 68 To refine his revision of the Medusa myth in service of his conjugal/political project in Book V , Spenser repurposes another tradition that also centers on ugly women and society building: the loathly lady motif, especially as used in Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” In Radegone, Spenser actualizes the slavery that these tales only hint at through their discussions of sovereignty and their debate over “maistrie” between the sexes. 69 When he allegorizes marriage through, on one hand, the epic battle between the opposing forces of the female will, and on the other, male loathly ladies who willingly submit to a female master, Spenser demonstrates the justice of a marital model based on feminized subjectivity that applies not only to women, but also to men. The earliest examples of loathly ladies are found Irish fertility myths in which the lady is sometimes called the “sovereignty hag,” but the motif also proliferated in the English middle ages. 70 At core, these stories center on issues of sovereignty, or what Chaucer terms in his version, “maistrie”: the knight who will brave the loathly lady’s ugliness and kiss her is granted a sexual and political boon in one. When the loathly lady transforms into a fair maid in the Irish versions, the knight is granted sovereignty over the unruliness her loathliness represented—either the land, its people, or both—in short, aspects that would likely appeal to Spenser in an unruly Ireland. In the Middle English versions of Gower, Chaucer, and anonymous romance, “The Weddynge of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle,” the lady’s loathliness is usually related to some 66 See Eggert. 67 See James. 68 See Fowler, “Failure.” 69 See A.C. Hamilton on “maistrie” in Book V (180-90). 70 For more on these tales, see Chapter 1 of this dissertation. Also see Elizabeth Passmore and Susan Carter, eds., The English “Loathly Lady” Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007). For resonance of the tales in Spenser specifically, see Carter, “Duessa: Spenser’s Loathly Lady.” Cahiers Élisabéthains (2005). 9-18. 94 combination of her lower class status, her physical repulsiveness, and/or its sexual challenge for the young knight. Should the knight defer to the loathly lady, he is doubly rewarded: she not only grants him the benefit of her wise political counsel, but she transforms into a lovely young marriage prospect. 71 In Chaucer’s version, this is termed as a transfer of “maistrie” or mastery. 72 In the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the loathly lady senses her husband’s reticence to consummate their marriage and asks him whether he would prefer she remain ugly and therefore chaste or attractive and therefore untrustworthy. Having previously learned (from the loathly lady herself) that “Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee / As wel over hir housbond as hir love, / And for to been in maistrie hym above” (1038-40), the knight declines to choose and instead defers to her “wise governance” (1231). 73 By refraining to choose for her, the knight grants her mastery over him and the lady transforms into a maid both lovely and chaste. Where Perseus decapitates Medusa and appropriates her power in the myth, the loathly lady motif emphasizes consent and therefore gives women a voice. But its levity also masks a sleight of hand: in granting “mastery” to the loathly lady, allowing her to choose for herself, the knight sidesteps the need for her to actually do so. To put it another way, when the knight allows the loathly lady to choose for herself, she chooses for him. 74 71 The repellent aspects of the loathly lady are slightly variable. In Chaucer, it is “gentillesse” or class issues that most explicitly repulse the knight (1109). Similarly, in the anonymous romance, Dame Ragnelle’s rude manners offend in Arthur’s court. In Gower, however, the loathly lady’s physical ugliness impedes the knight’s sexual performance. 72 Hamilton views the central conflicts of The Faerie Queene as rehearsing the Chaucerian “problem of ‘maisterie’” (180-86). 73 Geoffrey Chaucer and Larry D. Benson. The Riverside Chaucer. (Boston: Houton Mifflin Co., 1987). 74 What I’m calling a “sleight of hand” is usually explained through love, as in, love and mastery are mutually exclusive. But when it comes to the analogy between conjugal and political 95 In this sleight of hand, the loathly lady motif buttresses a political philosophical and patriarchal commonplace: the collapse of a wife’s consent, which presumes an equivalent reciprocal relationship between the spouses, into a hierarchal relationship with her husband. Political theorists usually deal with this seeming contradiction through the conjugal analogy: the wife or subject figure consents to a lower status relative to her husband or sovereign. 75 When Britomart decapitates Radigund, she fulfills the ultimate promise of the loathly lady motif in Spenser’s version, both in its invocation of a fertility myth and in that the mastery granted to the wife will return to the husband. Through Radigund’s holding Artegall in “wretched thralldom,” the husband figure grants mastery to the wife; and by effectively managing the overreach of Radigund, the wife figure in Britomart rights the patriarchal order. She decapitates Radigund, restores Artegall’s armor, and returns Radegone to the rule of men. From Artegall’s perspective, his risking thralldom in granting mastery to a woman ultimately becomes a boon for him as Britomart learns to reign in herself. But when Spenser’s version brings much of the violent subtext of the loathly lady genre to the surface, it undercuts the justice of that political philosophical commonplace for women. Specifically, when Spenser inverts the traditional gender hierarchy in marriage and creates in Artegall a slave mastered by Radigund, he speaks to the injustice of a model of marriage wherein an instantaneous moment of consent strips the person of agency thereafter. When Artegall relations, the hierarchy of husband over wife is assumed; according to Dolan, love requires hierarchy (especially 26-8). 75 In her first chapter, Sanchez uses the word “assent” to differentiate between contractual consent and agreement to occupy a lower status. See also Dolan Chapter 1 on the conflation of “fusion” and “hierarchical” models of marriage. These readings rely on Carole Pateman groundbreaking work on contract theory, The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. 96 consents to Radigund’s contractual terms for battle, that agreement approximates what marriage is for women, an assent to an unalterable status: That if I (Radigund) vanquishe him, he shall obay My law, and euer to my lore be bound, And so will I, if me he vanquish may; What euer he shall like to doe or say. (5.4.49.2-4) That this contract also resembles a slave contract is notable. After all, the concept of “civil death” was used to speak of the status of both women in marriage and enslaved persons. 76 When the terms of this contract result in Artegall’s slavery to Radigund in drag, many critics see Spenser decrying Radigund’s overreach. 77 But Spenser emphasizes Artegall’s will throughout his end of the marriage negotiation, beginning with his deferral to Britomart in Book IV and culminating with his deferral to Radigund in Book V . When we compare Artegall’s dueling capitulations to his wife-figures, it is clear that Spenser requires the future-husband figure also to literalize what the earlier iterations of the loathly lady motif render unnecessary: Spenser models in Radigund the willful, enthralling master to Artegall’s willful, enthralled slave. In the initial battle between the future spouses, Artegall and Britomart’s fight in Book IV , the distinction between Artegall’s senses and sense remain ambiguous; he capitulates to Britomart, but does not willfully consent to that capitulation. Upon seeing Britomart’s face, Artegall is astonished into inactivity and his sword drops from his hand: His powrelesse arme benumbd with secret feare 76 See Dolan for a discussion of the logical (if not actual) links between women’s subjection under patriarchy and slavery (80-2). For a discussion of the limit case of slavery in the history of contract, see Kahn (57-80). Fowler also alludes to slavery as a limit case in Spenser’s development of the social contract (205, 212). 77 For a feminist example, see Quilligan, “On Renaissance Epic.” She sees the scene denouncing the injustice of men’s slavery and justifying the slavery of women (26). 97 From his reuengefull purpose shronke abacke, And cruell sword out of his fingers slacke Fell downe to ground, as if the steel had sence, And felt some ruth, or sence his hand did lacke, Or both of them did thinke, obedience To doe to some diuine a beauties excellence. (4.6.21.3-9) With his hand and phallic sword doing the thinking for him, Artegall’s astonished capitulation to Britomart’s beauty does not constitute the willful granting of mastery to his future spouse. In the Radegone episode, however, Artegall’s mind is complicit to his subsequent subjugation and emasculation to Radigund, a fact signaled by his willfully throwing his sword away. Upon seeing her face, His cruell minded hart Empierced was with pittifull regard, That his sharpe sword he threw from him apart, Cursing his hand that had that visage mard. (5.5.13) Considering the loathly lady motif underpinning this episode, Artegall’s phallic loss of sword constitutes his self-curtailment. The “stoniness” of his senses extends to his mind and transforms into his will to submit to her mastery. As opposed to his capitulation to Britomart, his to Radigund turns a moment of astonishment in the face of female beauty to his willful obedience to his future wife. Instead of his “senses” being “miscarried” or his sword thinking for him, Artegall feels pity for Radigund and willfully acts in accordance with those feelings, allowing himself to be mastered by his future spouse. In the famous passage, the text is at great pains to emphasize the justice of Artegall’s consensual subjection to Radigund: 98 So was he ouercome, not ouercome, but to her yielded of his owne accord; Yet was he iustly damned by the doome Of his owne mouth, that spake so warelesse word, To be her thrall, and seruice her afford. For though that he first victorie obtained, Yet after by abandoning his sword, He willful lost, that he before attained. No fayrer conquest, then that with goodwill is gained. (5.5.17) For those critics past and present quick to damn Radigund, this passage with its emphasis on the just and consensual nature of Artegall’s concession to her is rather hard to square. While I agree with those who speak to Spenser’s ultimate critique of Radigund’s overreach, I hesitate when that conclusion applies to the overreach of women and not men. 78 Rather, in the Radegone episode, I see Spenser critiquing a model of contractual consent that instantaneously justifies a non- negotiable status; 79 he instead furthers a model of marriage in which consent allows for the continued negotiation of roles between agents who alternately risk—and thereby justly retain— their self-sovereignty. Perhaps this self-curtailment in marriage is emasculating for men for it requires a husband’s implicit trust in his wife, but Spenser suggests that to do otherwise would be an 78 In a similar vein, Lisa Celovsky, in “Early Modern Masculinities and The Faerie Queene.” English Literary Renaissance 35.2 (2005): 210-47, argues that Radigund’s overreach is a potent warning to Artegall (228). Compare this scene to Amoretti Sonnet 67: in an analogy between a hunter and deer, the hunter is surprised to see “a beast so wyld, / so goodly wonne with her owne will beguyld” (13-4). 79 See Dolan for a suggestion that the hierarchy assumed between husband and wife “covers” for more complex relations that may actually exist (42-9). 99 injustice. 80 When Artegall consensually subjects himself to Radigund, the text emphasizes his hopelessness to ameliorate his situation by himself: “Not by a strong hand compelled thereunto, / But by his own doome that none can now vndoo” (5.6.16.4-5, my italics). Even stony Talus sees the justice of Artegall’s situation and “thought it iust t’obay” (5.5.19.9). Therefore, like a subject’s to his sovereign or a wife’s to her husband, Artegall’s only recourse in this system is to trust that Radigund will not tyrannize him, for it is only in her “powre her owne doome to vndo, / And als’ of princely grace to be inclyn’d thereto” (5.5.41.8-9). And from this trust in his master to master herself, Artegall is lifted from his subjection. 81 From this vantage point, we can better appreciate Artegall’s initial astonishment upon viewing Radigund’s face as hearkening to his willful consent to feminized subjectivity in marriage. His shock at her beauty is in part owing to the fact that he sees himself in her face: “when as he discouered had her face, / He saw his senses straunge astonishment” (5.5.12.1-2). As Eggert argues, Artegall in this moment sees his own emasculation reflected in Radigund’s face (39). But the moment also speaks to the husband figure’s recognition of himself as a Medusan wife in the reflective shield of an astonishingly beautiful face. This moment initializes his willing consent to her mastery over him; he is even “empierced…with pitiful regard,” just as Radiund’s head (hymen and mind) was “empierced to the very braine” (5.5.13.2, 5.7.33.8). These aesthetic, affective, and sexual reflections of a wife’s experience in Artegall reach their full expression in Radigund’s lair. This time, through Britomart’s eyes, we see Artegall and Radigund’s other slaves as: “that lothly uncouth sight of men disguised in womanish attire” (5.7.37.6-7). Artegall, in fact, 80 See Dolan (50) for the ways marriage necessarily risks individuality, to often violent ends. Spenser sees this risk as a boon rather than a threat to be avoided at all costs. 81 Sanchez quotes Fortescue’s model of the proper sovereign as “he who is able to vanquish not only others but also himself” (qtd. 12, from John Fortescue, “In Praise of the Laws of England.” On the Laws and Governance of England. Ed. Shelley Lockwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 53). 100 is a loathly lady. The sight may be so loathsome to Britomart because Artegall makes an ugly drag queen; or perhaps it is loathsome, as the more common reading goes, because his being a knight stripped of armor and in drag at all is so shameful. 82 But a third option is also possible: Artegall becomes a loathly lady in the Radegone episode so that he can experience the civil death marriage brings women as a woman consenting to that fate. It matters that Britomart sees this “lothly uncouth sight” when she is dressed in armor as a warrior; she, like Artegall when he views himself in Radigund’s face, sees a version of herself mirrored in Artegall, and a version of him in her. 83 When the spouses see themselves in each other, they are more likely to reign in their respective capacities to Stony. On the individual level, therefore, Spenser emphasizes the possibility of political parity between the genders. Together with Britomart’s self-defloration and figurative suicide, Artegall’s consensual thralldom is considered more just precisely because each is an act of consensual self- abnegation. However, when this individual model is applied to the political realm, as per the conjugal political analogy, we must also reckon with the vastly different implications that consent has in the political realm when it is a woman and not a man consenting. The latter cantos of Book V emphasize the ways viewing female consent as a civil suicide might be exploited to suit certain political ideologies over others. Gendered Astonishment in Foreign Policy 82 C.f. Griswold 226. 83 C.f. Amoretti Sonnet 45: using the conceit of a mirror, the speaker says to his beloved: “But if your selfe in me ye playne will see, / remoue the cause by which your fayre beames darkned be” (13-4). And see Sonnet 65, on mutual slavery in marriage: “when loosing one, two liberties ye gayne” (3). 101 Although Spenser suggests that gender parity on the individual level might be achieved through marriage, his implications are clear—politically, Britomart needs to leave the poem; it would be a problem if she remained a public figure after her symbolic deflowering/decapitation, since that would make her a rival to Artegall. And in the rest of the Book, Spenser entertains the political expediency of applying his Medusan marriage model as a broader political policy. In fact, he goes so far as to apply it in the trial of Duessa by Mercilla in Cantos 9 and 10, an allegorization of Elizabeth’s trial and decapitation of Mary Queen of Scots. If we read the proceedings as Mercilla’s quelling the threat that an aspect of herself poses in the figure of Duessa, then Spenser succeeds in using his allegory to revise the beheading of a rival sovereign as an act of mercy. 84 In the cantos that follow, Artegall joins his own double, King Arthur, in episodes that seek to apply the conjugal/political analogy to foreign policy. 85 In feats that rescue damsels representing specific localities—Duessa of Scotland, Belge of Belgium, Flourdelis of France, and potentially Irena of Ireland—Spenser applies his Medusan model to suit the damsels’ differing marital statuses. Complicating the issue in each case is the differing relationships Belge, Flourdelis, and Irena have to Geryoneo and Grantorto, husband-figures that signify Catholic Spain. However, the damsels are also depicted as threatened by versions of themselves as wife- figures, most often symbolized through allusions to the damsel’s relationship to Catholicism. In each case, Artegall and Arthur attempt to use the political implications of the Medusa model to exploit figures’ gendered capacities to Stony and be Stonied. 84 For Mercilla’s judgment of Duessa, I rely on Gallagher’s nuanced reading (215-61). C.f. Carter on the trial of Duessa. 85 See Carroll for a survey of earlier scholars’ work to link the Radegone episode to the latter cantos, a project her work extends. 102 In the case of Belgium, Belge is a widow, in danger not only of submitting to Arthur but also of being Stonied by her relationship to Catholicism. 86 When Arthur saves her and her kingdom from Geryoneo, an avatar for Catholic Spain in Canto 11, Belge worries that her acceptance of his help implies her consent to her subjection to him. She frets: “What guerdon can I giue thee for thy paine, / But euen that which thou sauedst, thine still to remaine?” (5.11.16.8- 9). But Arthur reassures her and refuses to conflate his husbandry of her dominion with the role of husband. Grateful for his forbearance, Belge asks Arthur not to leave her kingdom until he has “rooted all the relickes out / Of that vilde race, and stablished my peace” (5.11.18.6-7). The implication is that, while Arthur could manage the threat of his own capacity to master Belge, Belge cannot neutralize the feminized Catholic threat to her kingdom on her own. And so, Arthur routs out the Catholic “Monster” that “vnderneath the Altar lay,” and kills it before it breeds: he “Vnder her wombe his fatall sword he thrust,” releasing its “loathly matter” (5.11.21.2 and 7, 5.11.31.2 and 9). In this iteration of his marital model, Spenser inverts the gender of several key figures from the Medusa myth and loathly lady motif. Where his male knights previously were Stonied by females, here Belge looks on, “stonied sore” and incapacitated with pity as the Monster’s screams. Where Britomart neutralized her threat by attacking Radigund’s head and hymen, Arthur, after first obtaining Belge’s consent, targets the Monster’s sexual organs to kill her (5.11.30.3). Allegorically, Arthur’s defeat of both Geryoneo and the Catholic feminized monster ensures that Belgium will make no further entanglements with domineering Catholic forces, neither through marriage now that Geryoneo is dead, nor through progeny now that the monster cannot breed. Arthur, it seems, respects that Belge’s status as a widow preserves her claim to self-sovereignty, even if she cannot activate that claim herself. 86 C.f. Gregory 366-72 and Sanchez 76-78. See Dolan for a discussion of coverture and how widows regain their individuality after their husbands’ death (76). 103 While Arthur’s overstep is justified in the Belge episode, the domestic dispute in the episode that follows uses the Medusan model to justify a marital rape. Artegall comes upon Flourdelis, a wife in a domestic dispute with her husband, Burbon, who symbolize France and its sovereign. This episode has been read as alluding to the Henri IV’s conversion to Catholicism from Protestantism and England’s equivocal response, in support of Henri’s claim to France but critical of his conversion. 87 In the episode, Spenser depicts Burbon tossing his shield aside (his Protestantism) to win back Flourdelis (France’s populace), who has absconded with Grantorto, an avatar for Catholic Spain. As opposed to the Belge episode, where Arthur acted under the damsel’s consent and opposed foreign overreach in her realm, Artegall struggles with how to adjudicate justly in the case of a husband and wife. For the marriage between Burbon and Flourdelis, which is threatened both by Flourdelis’ adultery with Grantorto and Burbon’s relinquishment of his shield (his Protestant faith), ultimately “covers” an act of coerced consent. The action in the episode jumbles the deferral of mastery between the spouses, demonstrating the ease with which the nuance of Spenser’s marital model in Radegone might be exploited to revert to the ethos of conquest. First, we seem to witness a reprisal of the Radegone episode with the genders inverted. Bourbon, speaking of his wife’s abandonment of him, confesses, “Whether withheld from me by wrongfull might, / Or with her owne good will, I cannot read aright” (5.12.49.8-9). The status of Flourdelis’ will in her adulterous relationship is ambiguous, her consensual coercion recalling Artegall’s being “overcome, not overcome” by Radigund. And Bourbon’s consent is also an issue since he relinquishes his armor seemingly willingly: he “layd [it] aside… / Hoping thereby to haue my loue obtayned” (5.11.54.5-6). 88 If 87 C.f. Gregory 372-78 and Sanchez 78-84. 88 C.f. Sanchez 82, who argues that Artegall “mercilessly demand[s] a standard [from Burbon] that he himself has not been able to meet.” I would add that the standard needs to be upheld 104 we read Burbon’s action through its possible allusion to the Medusan connection to shields, then his idea to lay aside one shield to gain back the figurative shield that is his wife may speak to the deferral between spouses championed in Radegone. But where Artegall’s deferral to Radigund was genuinely consensual and required Britomart “her doome to vndo” and to redress him in his armor, Burbon’s relinquishment of his shield to win Flourdelis back is strategic: “for yet when time doth serue, / My former shield I may resume again” (5.11.56.1-2). The French pair’s marital fracas, therefore, demonstrates the ethical risks of the Medusan marital model when spouses refuse a sincere and consensual deferral of mastery to one another. The marriage is technically salvaged when Artegall reminds Flourdelis of her marriage vow. She, “Abasht at [Artegall’s] rebuke,” “hanging downe her head with heauie cheare / Stood long amaz’d,” in an affective capitulation to her husband. And just as in Radegone, where Artegall’s astonishment allows Radigund to press her advantage, Flourdelis’ astonished inactivity leaves room for Bourbon to master her, but with one crucial difference: Spenser is clear that Burbon is not granted Flourdelis’ consent to overstep. He …her againe assayd, And clasping twixt his armes, her vp did reare Vpon his steede, whiles she no whit gainesyd, So bore her quite away, nor well nor ill apayd. (5.11.61) Burbon’s action is rendered in the language of raptus. 89 From Burbon’s perspective, his rape of his wife is the allegorical restoration of his shield and therefore a perverse reaffirmation of their marriage vow. But from hers, her lack of consent suggests that Burbon takes advantage of through the behavior of both husband and wife. Artegall’s hypocritical and unmerciful upbraiding of Burbon speaks to the ease with which one can read the Medusan marital model as an emasculation on the part of the man participating in it. 89 C.f. Myers, who states Burbon’s husbandry of Flourdelis “hover[s] on the edge of rape” (247). 105 Flourdelis’ astonishment to master her before she consents to that mastery; a more equitable resolution would see Flourdelis willfully returning Burbon’s shield (and herself) to him, as Britomart restored Artegall’s armor to him in Radegone. But Spenser, in demonstrating how easily a wife—the shield of her husband’s lineage—might be treated as the object with which a husband shields himself and not the subject who actively shields him, either shows or revels in how easily his Medusan model might be coopted into more straightforward and conventional narratives of dominion, including rape and conquest. Where establishing unforced consent mattered so much to Spenser in Radegone, in this episode Spenser demonstrates the political boon of a consensual relationship (like marriage) might “cover” an act of conquest (like rape). Interpreting Irena: A Future Medusan Wife or a Queer Friend? When finally Artegall arrives at Irena’s kingdom to rescue her, it is crucial to Spenser’s commentary on political relations that she is a maid. Her unmarried status cannot be “covered” by the raptus with which the France episode ends. And because Irena remains unmarried at the end of the Book, Spenser may therefore advocate one of two possible interpretations of her fate. According with his treatment of female figures—like Britomart and Radigund and later Mercilla and Duessa as doubles—Spenser may end his Book V with the implication that Gloriana ought to adjudicate the Irish problem in an act of self-abnegation: that is, she ought to neutralize her threatening double, Irena. Read this way, we would understand that Spenser is driving at a greater commitment from Elizabeth to governance in Ireland, which was at the time figured more as a borderland of England than a separate sovereign state. 90 In this interpretation, Gloriana’s 90 Gregory 387-88. See also Sanchez, who notes that Irena stands for, on the one hand, Elizabeth, drawing from Richard McCabe, “The Fate of Irena: Spenser and Political Violence.” Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Ed. Patricia Coughlin. (Cork: Cork University Press, 1989. 109-25); and on the other hand, for the inhabitants of Ireland—the New English, drawing from Anne Fogarty, “The Colonization of Language: Narrative Strategy in A View of the 106 order for Artegall’s return is therefore a problem: for although he has decapitated Grantorto, he is forced to return “ere he could reforme it thoroughly” (5.12.27.1). 91 Spenser may hereby suggest that the “salvage” island will always be a problem so long as Gloriana refuses to police her allegorical double, Irena. His suggestion is, like Mercilla did of Duessa, and Britomart of Radigund, Gloriana should marry off or decapitate the maiden Irena herself. And to further bolster the justice of this reading, Spenser refuses to direct this emphasis on self-curtailment to women alone; rather, Spenser is clear in holding his male characters to the same standard as he did in his model for political consent. At stake in each of the damsel episodes is the temptation for the husband-figure to overstep his bounds, to extend the work of husbandry to the role of husband in Arthur and Artegall’s cases with Belge and Irena, respectively; and to disrespect the role of negotiated marital consent in the case of married spouses, Burbon and Flordelis. 92 Or, to frame this overstep in line with the loathly lady motif, the temptation is: to kiss the sovereignty hag and thus be granted her land; or to grant one’s spouse the right of mastery but refuse to tolerate its expression. Therefore Artegall, like the other potential tyrants of Book V , including Grantorto, Geryoneo, Burbon, Radigund, and potentially Elizabeth, is susceptible to that “sacred hunger of ambitious minds / And impotent desire of men to raine… Where they may hope a kingdome to obtaine” that the text explicitly applies to Grantorto alone (5.12.1). 93 Instead of indulging this temptation to reign above all others in Present State of Ireland and The Faerie Queene, Book VI.” Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Ed. Patricia Coughlin. (Cork: Cork University Press, 1989. 75- 108). Sanchez notes that the conflation of the queen with the island draws from their similar integrity as virginal, insular bodies (84). 91 The decapitation is quite comic and actually welcomed by Grantorto at this point: “He lightly reft his head, to ease him of his paine” (5.12.23.9). 92 We would today call the Flourdelis episode an instance of marital rape. 93 C.f. Sanchez, who argues that Burbon “has as much potential as Grantorto to become a tyrant” (83). C.f. the reading of the line in Andrew Hadfield, “The ‘sacred hunger of ambitious minds’: 107 Ireland, Artegall ultimately follows Gloriana’s order and therefore neutralizes the threat that he himself poses. The suggestion would follow that, given Artegall’s example, Gloriana ought to do the same. In contrast to the above interpretation, however, I urge that Spenser’s ending of Book V also points to a radically different reading: the possibility that political stability might be reached without reference to heterosexual marriage at all. After all, Gloriana’s decapitation of Irena would also violate her virgin status symbolically, given this model Spenser has set up throughout Book V . And when the Book ends, Gloriana’s order is obeyed and Irena remains a maid. 94 Gloriana, like Elizabeth, may therefore wield her virginity politically. Read from the perspective of a politically savvy female sovereign, we might concede that if a woman must “die” for heterosexual reproduction to be viable in the given system, then the strategic retention of one’s maidenhead is also the means of retaining one’s authoritative head. Instead, then, I think we ought to read Spenser’s ending as hinting at a possibility of interpersonal accord between women who mutually respect each other as political agents, a relationship something like the queer friendships studied by Laurie Shannon and John Garrison, or the “queer family” that Maggie Nelson articulates in The Argonauts. 95 As such, neither Gloriana nor Irena need quell the other to fit more seamlessly into (or more precisely, to be covered more entirely by) patriarchal politics; but rather, both may mutually exist/reign and indeed affirm one another’s existence/sovereignty. Of course, Spenser is deeply ambivalent about this risk of allowing female concord. Throughout the Book, he has presented female “friends” as either false friends or in cahoots Spenser’s savage religion.” Edmund Spenser. Ed. Andrew Hadfield. (New York: Longman, 1996. 177-95). He view this “sacred hunger” in relation to Spenser’s religious project in Ireland. 94 Fowler, too, stresses that Gloriana “identifies Irena as sovereign in her own right” (226). 95 See Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) and John Garrison, Friendship and Queer Theory in the Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 2014). 108 together against the interests of men. Even though an Amazonian court would presumably be filled with female friends, the one that Spenser dwells on is a false friendship. While Radigund’s slave at Radegone, Artegall activates an intense sexual rivalry between Radigund and her maid, Clarinda. While on a mission to woo Artegall on Radigund’s behalf, Clarinda falls in love with him herself and works to double-cross Radigund. 96 While this female friendship suggests that women cannot work together, the one Spenser leaves us with at the end of Book V suggests that female friends may work together all too well. When called back to Fairyland, Artegall and Talus are hounded by “two old ill fauour’d Hags,” Envy and her daughter Detraction. In an ugly blazon, Spenser renders the two in an awfully (or loathly) familiar fashion: 97 The one of them, that elder did appeare, With her dull eyes did seeme to looke askew, That her mis-shape much helpt; and her foule heare Hung loose and loathsomely; Thereto her hew Was wan and leane, that all her teeth arew, And all her bones might through her cheekes be red; Her lips were like raw lether, pale and blew, And as she spake, therewith she slauered. (5.12.29) These figures demonstrate that, if women are expected to discipline themselves, the opposite may occur: “These two now had themselues combynd in one, / And linckt together gainst Sir 96 See Griswold’s argument on the sexual dynamics of the Radegone episode. He argues that Artegall’s obedience to Radigund does not imply his consent to subjection. And given the Radigund and Clarinda rivalry, Griswold argues that any coerced sexual act on Artegall’s part does not imply his love (esp. 229-33). 97 See Patrizia Bettella, The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2005), for more on the “ugly woman” convention in Italian poetry. 109 Artegall” (5.12.37.1-2). The hags’ fusion is echoed through the slip between singular and plural pronouns that refer to them and their words. The text at one point refers to the “most bitter words they spake,” with “they” referring to the hags, but in the next lines, the third person pronoun refers to their “sclaunders” voiced by one of the hags: “She with the sting, which in her vile tongue grew, / Did sharpen them” (5.12.42, my italics). As the two hags morph into one, their words proliferate in many voices that are also univocal, a paradox that speaks to the seemingly sourceless but overwhelming power of envy and detraction against Artegall. 98 Where previously, women’s self-discipline served patriarchal goals through charting them on a course to heterosexual marriage, the fusion of the hags constitutes an unjust inversion of patriarchal (and heterosexual) reproduction: “vnto themselues they gotten had / A monster,” the Blatant Beast who will terrorize Book VI (5.12.37.6-7). I suggest that we might read the reproductive fusion of the hags as an ironized version of Gloriana and Irena’s concord—the concord between two sovereigns and self-sovereign virgins. And in this light, we might also revise Britomart and Radigund’s battle in Radegone as a failed queer friendship. After all, both Britomart and Radigund are hesitant to fulfill the patriarchal imperative towards heterosexual marriage: they attach each other’s “dainty parts” as though they hate that for which they are destined—heterosexual marriage. Spenser suggests that the concord of “fruitless seeds,” like the concord of virgins, Gloriana and Irena, is itself fruitful, even if the individual “seeds” fail to heterosexually reproduce. In this light, the relationship between female sovereigns at the end of Book V signals neither manly impotence nor political failure but rather alternative (non-normative) political bond that may usher in a new kind of society. 98 The hags are usually read allegorically as the response to Lord Gray’s Irish policies. See James for a reading that views them in line with Ovidian envy, that enemy of poetic truth. 110 Unlike heterosexual marriage, this queer political bond refuses to use consent as a cover for slaughter. Directly after Britomart’s decapitation of Radigund, the act I’ve read as symbolic of her consent to heterosexual reproduction, Talus steps in and commits “piteous slaughter” upon Radigund’s “warlike traine” (5.7.34.7; 5.7.35.5). That is, Talus treats Britomart’s consent to heterosexuality as justifying the slaughter of the Amazon race: “For all that euer came within his reach, / He with his yron flale did thresh so thin, / That he no worke at all left for the leach” (5.7.35). No longer symbolizing “fruitless seed,” the Amazons’ blood after the slaughter lacks even the shadow capacity for growth or sustenance—it could not even give work to parasitic leeches. When Britomart sees what Talus has done, “her heart did quake” and “she his fury willed him to slake” lest he leave no one alive (5.7.36.5,7). For aligning consent allegorically with the consenting woman’s death, Spenser risks a model that uses a woman’s “yes” to justify genocide. Gloriana’s order of Artegall to return may relate to this tendency to justify conquest via one instance of consent. In Canto 12, Artegall’s attempt to rescue Irena results in the slaughter of the Irish. And like the scene of Britomart’s consent at Radegone, symbols of death and life comingle in images of bodies as strewn “seeds.” As he did before to the Amazonian warriors, when Talus encounters the Irish, he “sternely did vpon them set , And brusht, and battred them without remorse” until all “lay scattred ouer all the land, / As thicke as doth the seede after the sowers hand” (5.12.7). And also recalling the scene at Radegone, Artegall, like Britomart before him, is repulsed by Talus’ actions: “Till Artegall him seeing so to rage, / Willd him to stay, and signe of truce did make” so that Grantorto might “reclayme with speed / His scattred people” (5.12.8 and 9). Again, symbols of death are treated as though they were the seeds of life, perhaps suggesting that Spenser sees genocide as a viable political tool for England’s peaceful futurity. 111 And indeed, the consensus opinion on Spenser’s views on the Irish problem aligns him with the merciless Irenius of The View. But, given the many examples throughout Book V that treat the reigning in of a tyrant as just, I suggest that Spenser also gestures to a way to proceed in justice and keep everybody alive. And we may read Artegall’s ultimate act in the Book in this light. Despite the injustice of Envy and Detraction’s “most bitter wordes,” Artegall refuses to wield talic justice in favor of mercy (5.12.42.1). Talus “would her haue chastiz’d with his yron flaile,” but Artegall refuses to allow him. Instead, Artegall “him forbid[s], who his heast obserued” (5.12.43.5). The ambiguous antecedents of the masculine pronouns suggest that Artegall forbids both Talus and that part of himself that calls for talic justice to punish the hags (5.12.43.3-4). Or to put it another way, Artegall forbids and Talus/Artegall obeys, fulfilling the goals of self-discipline so espoused throughout the Book. And for this commitment to justice that “preserued” the hags, Artegall must countenance their redoubled efforts to decry him: So much the more at him still did she scold, And stones did cast, yet he for nought would swerue From his right course, but still the way did hold To Faery Court. (5.12.43.6-9) That the projectiles launched by the hags consist of a snake and stones, items symbolic of women’s threat to men, speaks to the ultimate risks of adhering to justice informed by Spenser’s Medusan model. Some women, like Florimell, Britomart, and Mercilla have men’s best interests (that is, patriarchal interests) in mind, and commit to discipline those aspects of themselves that would threaten men. Others, like Radigund, Envy, Detraction, and even Gloriana may not— preferring a queerer model for a just polity. Either way, Artegall commits to his end of the 112 bargain as a Medusan husband: refusing to become “degendered” into stone permanently, he holds Talus back and relinquishes his ambition to mastery that so easily can become tyranny. And in issuing an emasculating but just order that he himself follows, Artegall actually comes rather close to approximating Gloriana herself. This way of justice for both ultimately leads back “To Faery Court” (5.12.43.9). 113 Chapter 3: Misogyny and Justice in Shakespeare’s Bed Tricks plays In Shakespeare’s use of the bed-trick convention in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, women harness misogyny to forge justice through marriage. Unlike other instances of bed-tricks in poetry and drama, Shakespeare’s bed-tricks privilege marriage: two women swap their bodies in the night, and thus “trick” a man into marital commitment. 99 The men, All’s Well’s Bertram and Measure’s Angelo, arrange to sleep with women they desire sexually, but instead consummate relationships with the women they’ve repudiated; as the loathed woman replaces the loved woman, 100 marital consummation replaces licentious sex. Therefore, while Shakespeare’s use of the convention still pivots on its most basic and misogynistic tenet—that all women are the same in the dark—his bed tricks also act as a force of justice in his plays. They render married wives out of discarded maids and husbands out of cads, demonstrating the ways in which the strictures of misogyny can marshal generic categories of personhood to productive use. Particularly problematic among Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” 101 All’s Well and Measure feature plots that pivot on women’s vulnerability to liminal social status based on their sexuality. In All’s Well, Bertram’s refusal to consummate his marriage to Helena renders her a 99 See Wendy Doniger, The Bed Trick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) for a discussion of the generic convention; for a comparison of Renaissance bed tricks, see Marliss S. Desens The Bed-Trick in English Renaissance Drama (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1994). 100 Judith Haber, Desire and Dramatic Form (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 172 n. 25. 101 First termed “problem comedies” by F. S. Boas in Shakespeare and his Predecessors (1896), see Carol Neely, Broken Nuptials, pp. 58-63 for the “problems” indicated by the term. See Gary Waller’s introduction for All’s Well’s “problems” in All’s Well in All’s Well That Ends Well: New Critical Essays. New York: Routledge, 2007. For works that contextualize the problem plays in Shakespeare’s canon, see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers and Richard P. Wheeler, Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies (Berkeley: University of CA Press, 1981). 114 married virgin while his desire for Diana threatens to render her a ruined maid. Angelo of Measure both reneges his engagement to Mariana and hopes to coerce the novice Isabella into fornication by manipulating the status of the women’s chastity. In each of these cases, the men use women’s increased capacity for the conflation of their sexual and social personas to control them. Theoretically, the conflation of these persons is legitimized when a woman marries, which tethers her status to a man’s. Through coverture and marital debt, for instance, a wife experiences the death of her legal and sexual personas. The plots of the bed trick plays, however, demonstrate that women are vulnerable to manipulation no matter their proximity to marriage—largely because they are understood and often defined through marriage. 102 Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate the unjust implications of the liminal personas to which women are subject to a greater degree than men and seek to correct the gendered imbalance. However, it is through these roles, through women’s capacity to be rendered generic, that the women construct justice in the plays. Their generic interchangeability on the sexual level allows the desiring but undesired women, Mariana and Helena, to stand in for the desired but undesiring women, Isabella and Diana, and “trick” the men. 103 Each woman risks her social/sexual reputation—Isabella and Diana to ultimately avoid, and Helena and Mariana to claim a connection to Bertram and Angelo. This is a dangerous gamble the women undertake in social worlds where they might easily be corralled under the label of “whore,” despite their 102 See Kathryn Schwarz, What You Will for discussions of the embedded agendas within “normative femininity.” See also Mario DiGangi discussion of the ideological gaps between women’s roles in “Pleasure and Danger: Measuring Female Sexuality in Measure for Measure,” ELH 60.3 (1993): 589-609; See Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman for the earliest sources of this discussion. 103 Janet Adelman says that Diana and Helena of All’s Well represent men’s desire for “split[…]the sexual object into the legitimate but abhorred Helena and the illegitimate but desired Diana.” From “Bed Tricks: On Marriage as the End of Comedy in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare’s Personality, Ed. Norman Holland, et al (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 154. 115 social or sexual status. 104 But as Kathryn Schwarz reminds us, “misogynist discourse presumes acceptance of social codes” not only “among those who speak but by those who are spoken.” 105 The women involved in the bed trick, in fact, utilize their acceptance of these codes to enact potentially identity-constituting misogyny in place of the misogyny to which they are generally subject; working through conventions intended to discredit, victimize, and control them, they play with the potential for their selfhood to intersect with “whore.” Though women’s particular vulnerability to social censure animates the plots of All’s Well and Measure, this essay shows that the conceptual inconsistencies and tensions within heterosexual marriage affect men as well. 106 The plays highlight the epistemological and 104 I qualify Jennifer Higginbotham, “Fair Maids and Golden Girls,” pp. 171-196 through reference to Ruth Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 1996). “Fair maids” and “golden girls” are both subject to the implications of the appellation, “whore.” 105 Kathryn Schwarz, What You Will, 77-103, especially 79. 106 See Janet Adelman Suffocating Mothers and Carol Neely Broken Nuptials for the role of bed tricks in social formation. For a discussion of the tricks in terms of rape culture, see Emily A. Detmer-Geobel, “Shakespeare’s Bed-tricks: Finding Justice in Lies?” in Justice, Women, and Power in English Renaissance Drama, Eds. Andrew J. Majeske and Emily Detmer-Goebel. (Madison: Associated University Presses, 2009), 118-139. For a reparative reading of the heroines’ virtue, see Eileen Z. Cohen, “‘Virtue is Bold’: The Bed-trick and Characterization in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure.” Philological Quarterly 65.2 (1986): 171- 86. For dramatic and prose comparisons to Shakespeare’s use of the trick, see Julia Briggs, “Shakespeare’s Bed-Tricks,” Essays in Criticism 44.4 (1994): 293-314. For a discussion of the hymen’s role in companionate marriage, see Theodora A. Jankowski, “Hymeneal Blood, Interchangeable Women, and the Early Modern Marriage Economy in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well.” A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays. Eds. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard. (Blackwell Publishing, 2005). Alexander Welsh uses Rabelais’ Tiers Livre to explain the masculine logic that underlies the plays in his “The Loss of Men and Getting of Children: ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’ and ‘Measure for Measure,’” The Modern Language Review. 73.1 (1978): 17-28. For a continuation of Neely’s exploration of “broken nuptials,” see Alan W. Powers’ “‘Meaner Parties’: Spousal Conventions and Oral Culture in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well,” The Upstart Crow 8 (1988): 28-41. Paul Gleed considers Shakespeare’s play in light of the marriage debates in “Tying the (K)not: The Marriage of Tragedy and Comedy in All’s Well That Ends Well” in All’s Well That Ends Well: New Critical Essays Ed. Gary Waller (New York: Routledge 2007), 85-97. For a less disturbed view of marriage in these plays, see Michael D. Friedman, 116 ontological problem that exists when social persons—man/woman, husband/wife, maid/wife— unite and clash in the formation of a marriage. In highlighting the ways bed tricks sort between and among the various registers of social personas 107 available to characters in the uneasy transition to “husband” and “wife,” this essay demonstrates the ways misogyny participates in shaping personhood and the social order of Vienna and Rousillon in two ways. First, acknowledging the role of misogyny in the forging of justice reveals the limitations of individuals’ autonomy and agency. Shakespeare’s tricks develop a relational autonomy akin to that which Kathryn describes as the feminized and compromised subjectivity upon which the social contract relies. Second, focusing on the role of misogyny in the construction of justice in the plays extends Schwarz’ argument. While granting that “covenants of allegiance, affiliation, fidelity, and reciprocity have their basis in the capacity of persons to agree within and among themselves, to formulate priorities of intercourse that work against the drives of dominance and opposition, but respond to a more foundational imperative of coexistence,” 108 this essay urges that the “intra- and intersubjective systems of alliance” to which Schwarz refers also have the potential to be forged through dominance and opposition, even as they work against those forces. The bed tricks of All’s Well and Measure align justice with the acknowledgement of a communally and relationally constructed self, but they construct that justice through forcing “‘O, let him marry her!’: Matrimony and Recompense in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46.4 (1995): 454-64. See Bruce Smith for the publicizing sexual function of All’s Well’s bed trick in “What Doing it in the Dark, Without Words, Tells Us About Early Modern Sexuality” in All’s Well That Ends Well. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. (New York: Signet Classics, 2005) 165-174. 107 Elizabeth Fowler, Literary Character, p. 19. Fowler states that social persons functions “like genres: they are abstract conventions that never actually ‘appear’ in any pure form, but are implied referents by which characters are understood.” Isabella’s character is composed of social persons that include “maid,” “novice,” “sister,” “virgin,” “saint,” meant ironically or earnestly, “wretch,” and potentially “punk.” 108 Kathryn Schwarz, What You Will, 3. 117 interpersonal alliances upon those that resist them. Through coercing marriage, the plays qualify the typically masculine fantasy of uncompromised individuality and hardline justice by yoking it to typically feminized exceptionality that takes relational selfhood and context into account. 109 The plays ultimately suggest that a character’s increased vulnerability to misogynistic censure makes her or him more just. Bed tricks force this qualified justice, which renders men as vulnerable to coercion, victimization, and social control as women are generally. In turning to Shakespeare’s bed tricks, this essay reassesses the role of both women and men as agents who marshal misogyny as a tool of social dispensation. Though misogyny is always contextual, never monolithic, these plays suggest that its various tensions and incoherent strictures might be managed on the local level. In addressing the particular cases of Shakespeare’s Vienna and Rousillon, this essay answers Eve Sedgwick’s call to study misogyny itself as “a field of intractable, highly structured discursive incoherence at a crucial node of social organization.” 110 Studying the productive force of misogyny in marriage, that most distilled site of social organization at which gender is discriminated, urges us to grapple with the central role of misogyny has had in the formation of societies as well as the central role women might play in harnessing its dispensatory power. In its circumscription of the autonomy of women and encouragement of the anti-social behavior of men, misogyny and its implications also provide room for both women’s agency and the stability of the social order. Ironically, it is 109 I invoke the tradition of allegorizing the components of justice in terms of gender (See Book V of The Faerie Queene). Talic or strict justice admits no partiality and is typically rendered male, while equity and mercy are typically depicted as female. Equity guards against the potential unfairness of justice in exceptional cases. Mercy is generally understood as divine or human forgiveness. My argument here is in line with legal scholar Jennifer Nedelsky, Law’s Relations. 110 Frances Dolan in Marriage and Violence argues that the rite is predicated on conflict. 118 through the misogyny inherent in the marital resolutions of Measure and All’s Well that women and men construct justice, and they do so through the deceptive device of the bed trick. Sorting Among Generic Personas– Men vs. Women The indeterminate sexual and social statuses of the women in either play can be summed up by the reception of Mariana in Act V of Measure. She enters wearing a veil, having just swapped her body for Isabella’s in their bed trick; her obscured identity speaks to the fact that her social, sexual, and dramatic status is in flux. The Duke does not know how to sort her generically; he declares, “Why, you are nothing then: neither maid, widow, nor wife.” Mariana has just had sex with her betrothed, Angelo; she is no longer a virgin, but neither is she married. She occupies a liminal state, something outside of “normative femininity,” which Schwarz calls “that set of roles which organizes subjects to the pursuit of proper ends” of heterosexual ideology. 111 Although Mariana’s indeterminacy speaks to what is potentially radical about her position, other forces seek to contain that disquieting potential through misogyny. Lucio, for example, helpfully suggests to the Duke, “My lord, she may be a punk; for many of them are neither maid, widow, nor wife.” In a play that links sexual activity with criminality, this suggestion is tantamount to an accusation. The other women in Measure stand similarly accused: Juliet’s fornication lands her in jail, while a rumor against Isabella would threaten her with a fate similar to Mariana’s social ruin. Helena of All’s Well, likewise rendered ambiguous through Bertram’s refusal to consummate their legal marriage, occupies the other extreme—as the Duke voiced, “why, you are nothing then.” The nothing/punk dichotomy offers men a facilitated way of dealing with women: the woman in question is either irrelevant to the concern of any man or held in common among all men. Faced without a middle ground between “nothing” and “punk” 111 Kathryn Schwarz, What You Will, 4. 119 in men’s conception, the women use bed tricks to publicize men’s generic personhood. In forcing the men into the role of “husband,” the women transform themselves from “whore” to “wife.” But that which proves salvation to women punishes the men. If the tricks treat women’s sexual personas as identical in order to insist upon their social distinction, the opposite seems to be true for men in relation to marriage. For men, viewing women as either a “punk” or “nothing” sorts women solely into the sexual register: either she’s worth the man’s consideration for sex and therefore a “punk” or not and therefore considered “nothing.” The inclusion of characters like Lucio and Parolles, figures that eschew marriage and revel in “blowing up virgins” respectively, speak to the need for masculine identity formation through women in the plays. The views of these “knaves” shed light on Bertram’s and Angelo’s disinclination to wed. More might be gleaned if we also consider Linda Celovsky’s insights into masculinity identity formation in The Faerie Queene, wherein she tracks the uneasy transition from youth to maturity and individuated knight to generic householder with which Artegall, Scudamore, and other knights struggle. 112 Similar issues stemming from inconsistent norms for masculine behavior exist in Shakespeare’s bed trick plays as well, although they are both qualified through Shakespeare’s positing unwilling, deceptive, and rather immature husbands. 113 Regardless of any particular motivation against Mariana or Helena or desire for Isabella or Diana as individuals, the men 112 Linda Celovsky, “Early Modern Masculinities and The Faerie Queene,” English Literary Renaissance, 35.2 (2005): 210-247. Celovsky explores the tensions that arise when men face the transition from bachelorhood to husbandhood” given inconsistent norms of masculinity (211-12). 113 Critics have floated many theories for the male characters’ misogyny in these plays. Adelman in Suffocating Mothers suggests the masculine dread of Mother (80-1); Neely in Broken Nuptials argues for Bertram’s sexual immaturity and narcissism (70); Schwarz in her chapter on All’s Well in What You Will and Norman N. Holland’s “Son’s and Substitutions: Shakespeare’s Phallic Fantasy,” in Shakespeare’s Personality. Eds. Norman N. Holland, et al. (Los Angeles: University of CA Press, 1989), 66-85 consider the masculine anxiety of replaceability in patriarchy; and Mary Thomas Crane posits dread over bodily permeability in “Male Pregnancy and Cognitive Permeability in Measure for Measure.” Shakespeare Quarterly 49:3 (1998): 269-92. 120 target women who desire to remain single and shun women hoping for marriage. 114 They exploit gendered norms for behavior to avoid marriage and have illicit sex. Constructing elaborate scenarios that contain the negative repercussions of their antisocial actions within the personhoods of women, they consent to a night of illicit sex that will be consequence-free and identity constituting for them. Moreover, the norms they exploit also protect them from censure, since their claims about women’s sexualities are more apt to be believed than the women’s own claims. The men’s ability to enjoy the social benefits associated with the sexual act, even the denial of its occurrence, relies upon the women’s absorption of its social detriments. But the women most in danger of being rendered “nothing” or “a punk,” Isabella, Mariana, Helena, and Diana, have misogynistic social norms at their disposal also. In the bed trick, the double standard the men attempt to exploit becomes the means by which they are themselves exploited. Fornication allows men to sort women, while marriage forces them to be sorted themselves. According to the Clown of All’s Well, however, men have nothing to fear when it comes to marriage. Near the beginning of the play, the Clown wishes to marry so that “Isabel the woman and I will do as we may” (1.3.18-9). His meaning at once bawdy and utopian, the Clown presents marriage as a means by which a man and woman might together gain an autonomy they wouldn’t otherwise have on their own. Extrapolating from his expansive and generative understanding of marriage, the Clown gestures towards a social critique of his fellow men: “If men could be contented to be what they are, there were no fear in marriage” (1.3.51-2). He argues that men have nothing to fear in marriage if they submit to being rendered generic 114 Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 78. Adelman states, “the fantasied act of despoiling virginity seems to be the only source of sexual desire (my italics).” Bruce Smith suggests that Bertram’s repulsion stems more from Helena’s class identity than her gender identity (171). The sex itself isn’t the issue; rather, the issue stems from sex that binds the men to the women through marriage. 121 through it. 115 The justice of the bed trick resides in its play with this gender distinction: in the trick, men’s “fear in marriage” is juxtaposed to women’s “fear in [not] marriage.” The masculine dread of being rendered generic through marriage is pitted against the social dangers to which unmarried but less-than-virginal women are subject if they are no longer generic maids, widows, or wives. The Duke’s query as to Mariana’s status, his and Lucio’s inadequate answers, and the unwilling husbands’ underestimation of the women in their lives points to the ways in which misogyny, in its effort to control women, also allows them room for ingenuity and innovations. Law, genre, and the unmarried men in the plays may refuse to grapple with the conceptual complexities women introduce: far easier to consider women whores or potential whores, held in common among all men, as Kate Keepdown is and as Isabella and Diana threaten to become; far easier to refuse considering women at all, to render them “nothing,” as Bertram and Angelo do to Helena and Mariana. The collapse of women into punks or nothing finds its clearest distillation in the bed trick, but the bed trick also provides the mechanism for misogyny’s comeuppance. And I argue that this juxtaposition in the bed-trick suggests the ways in which misogyny may function to enact justice for women and society. In order to address the ways in which both All’s Well and Measure seek out this sort of justice, this essay will consult the forms misogyny takes in each play more generally before turning to the bed trick plots themselves. Each play dramatizes a way in which men might capitalize off the ways misogyny informs the characterization of women. For Measure, the 115 We might compare the Clown’s speech about men to Angelo’s speech about women in Measure: he cautions Isabella, “Be that you are / That is, a woman” (2.4.133-134). Although Angelo gives advice for nefarious reasons, he is urging Isabella to avoid the inhumanity that her overbearing commitment to virginity creates (cf. DiGangi 596). In both the Clown and Angelo’s appeal to generic categories, they espouse the virtues of marriage and the dependent statuses it creates for both men and women. 122 women must grapple with their inability to control the legibility of their personhood, a tendency that leaves them vulnerable to being rendered “punks.” Isabella and Mariana find themselves manipulated by Angelo because their sexual and social personhoods are more easily conflated and socially legible as such. And for All’s Well, Helena must grapple with the potential of her character to be rendered “nothing” by Bertram’s attempts to parse her personhood into distinct registers; her task is to combine her sexual and social personhoods to be universally recognized as Bertram’s wife. After discussing the legibility of women in Measure and the erasure of women in All’s Well, I turn to the tricks themselves, through which misogyny affects men as well as women and renders a qualified justice for all. “She may be a punk”: The Legibility of Personhood in Measure for Measure From the very beginning of Measure for Measure, justice is presented as a problem of the legibility of social personas. 116 The Vienna of the play is a place wherein partiality in any form is shunned, be it a deviation from strict justice or a deviation from sexual purity. Through primarily the figures of Angelo and Isabella, the play thus creates a zero-sum game wherein any acknowledgment of wholeness compromised, whether through the application of mercy in the administration of justice or through allowing one’s character to be influenced by another, is associated with corruption. As the drama develops, however, the figures most invested in the utopic vision of a wholly autonomous, uncompromised 117 person—the Duke, Angelo, and Isabella—are the most likely to manipulate and be manipulated by that worldview. Such a worldview necessarily encapsulates a rather damaging view of female sexuality, as Mario 116 Compare Karen Cunningham, “Opening Doubts Upon the Law: Measure for Measure” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays. Eds. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard. (Malden, MA: Blackwood Publishing Ltd., 2005). 117 Compare Mary Thomas Crane, “Male Pregnancy and Cognitive Permeability in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49.3 (1998): 269-292. 123 DiGangi shows in his landmark reading of the play. 118 But what interests me in Measure is that the danger of the compromised body lies in its legibility, which necessarily affects women and men quite distinctly. In fact, the play ultimately suggests that women, in their increased capacity to be readable in their physical persons, may occupy at status less susceptible to hypocrisy and therefore more just than men may. The problem of legibility of personae is signaled from the outset of the play. The Duke’s central problem stems from the incommensurability of different personae he should occupy. As the sovereign figure of Vienna, the Duke should serve as the city’s seat of justice, but he instead relegates that responsibility to another. In an elliptical speech to his counselor Escalus, he excuses his relegation with the quip: “Of government the properties to unfold / Would seem in me t’affect speech and discourse” (1.1.3-4). As the Duke owns, his “speech and discourse” should affect the properties of government; they “would seem” to do so, but that which should be readable in his person somehow is not. Instead, he uses his sovereign power to cede his claim to it. He appoints his subject Angelo to fulfill his sovereign role: Elected him our absence to supply, Lent him our terror, dressed him with our love, And given his deputation all the organs Of our own power. (1.1.18-21) The Duke has in effect has dressed Angelo in his clothing. All the trappings of sovereign authority, down to his clothing and bodily organs, are divested from the Duke and invested in Angelo, who will now act as the allegorization of justice in the realm. In Angelo, presumably, we might register the terror, love, and power due to a sovereign and judge. What belies the Duke’s 118 Compare Mario DiGangi, “Pleasure and Danger: Measuring Female Sexuality in Measure for Measure” ELH 60:3 (1993), 589-609. 124 deferral of authority 119 to another is a failure of his personhood; he will not or cannot uphold Vienna’s “strict statues and most biting laws,” so he appoints a proxy who can and will (1.3.19). We begin to understand why he feels unsuited to uphold his social role when he describes Angelo. In him, the Duke sees the legible wholeness of person he feels he lacks: Angelo has “a kind of character in thy life / That to h’observer doth thy history / Fully unfold” (1.1.27-9). The Duke admires that Angelo’s character is readable—he puns on “character” and “history”—in his physical person, a sort of parallelism in form and content that he himself lacks. When the Friar scolds the Duke for relegating his duty, arguing that doling out justice “more dreadful would have seemed” in the Duke’s person than in Angelo’s (1.3.33), the Duke counters that though the Friar is right, such an action on his part would be “too dreadful.” Because he allowed his people to flout Vienna’s strict laws without punishment, it would be “my tyranny to strike and gall them / For what I bid them do” (1.3.34, 36-7). Having been too merciful, the Duke fears he would risk hypocrisy in switching tacks now; his need to enact strict justice in the realm does not square with his past merciful behavior. Even as his decision to appoint a proxy introduces a problem of wielding power inappropriately, inserting Angelo in the position of judge in Vienna protects the figure of allegorized Justice in the realm from the censure of hypocrisy. It also preserves the Duke’s personal reputation, distancing him from the repercussions of the planned reinstitution of hardline, or talic, justice. Any negative criticisms of either the Duke’s behavior or the course of justice might be shunted onto Angelo, whose purity and its readability are unquestioned. 119 The Duke’s failure is itself debatable. For those who take issue with his deferral, see Harry Berger’s Making Trifles, 335-426, Steven Mullaney’s The Place of the Stage 88-115, Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations, 133-42, Leonard Tennenhouse’s Power on Display, 154-9, Jonathan Goldberg’s James I, 235, and Jonathan Dollimore’s “Transgression and Surveillance,” 83. For those that read the Duke as bumbling benevolent type, see Wheeler’s Shakespeare’s Development 92-153. 125 Unlike the Duke, Angelo will not make exceptions for situation or context, and claims to hold himself to the same standard to which he holds others. In fact, Angelo boasts of his utter lack of hypocrisy: “When I that censure him do so offend, / Let mine own judgment pattern out my death, / And nothing come in partial (2.1.29-31). Angelo here subscribes to the merits of absolute justice, the inadmissibility of anything “partial.” His refusal to entertain arguments for equity and mercy are tantamount to what the Duke sees are his merits: Angelo will not parse and he cannot be parsed. For this reason, the Duke chooses Angelo as his proxy over Escalus, who is in many ways the more suitable choice. The Duke describes Escalus, however, as “pregnant” with knowledge of “The nature of our people, / Our city’s institutions and the terms / For common justice” (1.1.9-11). Though Escalus is a qualified judge, the diction used to describe him associates him with the play’s anxiety over bodily permeability, most often associated with female sexuality. Moreover, being termed “pregnant”—literally carrying another person within one’s body—and being associated with the “common” suggests that Escalus’s character is commodious enough as to entertain other persons within it. 120 Angelo’s seeming just, therefore, is tied to his singularity and autonomy of personhood in addition to his lack of feminine contamination. With his seeming asexuality, Angelo is the perfect person to preside over the move to strict justice in Vienna. The city’s reestablished legal strictures center around sexual promiscuity: the law seeks to make all sexual personhoods legible. Claudio and Juliet, lovers indicted for fornication, catalyze the plot. Though arguably candidates for the spousals de futuro marriage convention, an engagement that usually countenanced if not condoned premarital sex, Claudio and Juliet land in jail. Their crime is the same—both partners commit premarital sex—but its 120 Crane, 283, sees Escalus as sexually contaminated by the common people. 126 punishments are distinct for either partner based on his/her gender. Claudio is sentenced to death while Juliet’s punishment is implied, as Mistress Overdone explains: “his head [is] to be chopped off…and it is for getting Madame Julietta with child” (1.2.61-5). Ordinarily, marriage would obviate the need to punish anyone in this situation. The two were all but married anyway; their legal marriage would retroactively make their premarital coupling legitimate, removing the need for punishment at all; he would keep his head, and she would become a wife, their child legitimate. But since the Vienna law exists to discourage and not condone premarital sex, such a resolution for the individual couple would be unjust for Vienna; the flouting of the law, after all, resulted in a city full of sex workers, illegitimate children, and unrepentant cads like Lucio. But looking closer, the Vienna law seeks to enact justice based on a principle of equity. Since fornication affects unmarried men and women differently, the law exists to correct this imbalance. Without punitive measures for illegitimate sex, women would be made pregnant and men would be largely unaffected. To counter this difference, the justice of the anti-fornication law is strict: a head for a head. The culpable man is to be beheaded for taking the woman’s maidenhead. The law equates man’s literal death to woman’s social death. The gender-based punitive difference stems from differences in social and sexual legibility. 121 Both Claudio and Juliet acknowledge their double crimes in breaking the law. First, they are culpable for stepping outside of the social order in precipitating their marriage rights. Though Claudio and Juliet consider themselves plighted “upon a true contract,” their union, crucially, “lack[s] / Of outward order” (1.2.122, 125-6). What held them up was a “dower” for Juliet, which would seem a minor impediment for marriage. But this economic aspect belies a 121 DiGangi, 592-3, also stresses the importance of Juliet’s legible sexual body. 127 social one. Juliet’s dowry, as Claudio explains, was being held “in the coffer of her friends…Till time had made them for us,” and while this impediment remained, the couple had sex in secret. Therefore, while they publicly respected, they privately flouted the “outward order” of social approval. They parsed their persons: they acted publicly as ‘youth engaged to maid,’ and privately as ‘husband and wife.’ And ultimately, their secret made itself known: “it chances / The stealth of our most mutual entertainment / With character too gross is writ on Juliet” (1.2.130-2). Instead of the socially approved wedding banns, their socially prohibited sex made their connection legible. Alluding to the effect on Juliet, Claudio acknowledges the other injustice his actions caused. They both equally committed the crime through their “mutual entertainment,” but Juliet bears the burden of that crime: Claudio has “writ” the crime, but Juliet is the one upon whom the crime can be read. Their sex act is legible on her body. In Crane’s reading of this line, she suggests that it’s the “stealth” of the act that leads paradoxically to its publicity (281), but that’s only literally true for Juliet. It happens to be true in Claudio’s specific case because he is already socially connected to her; we might think of Lucio’s objection to being married to the prostitute Kate Keepdown at the play’s end to think of the difference a social connection adds to a mere sexual one. More precisely, Claudio’s line speaks to the unequal social and biological ramifications the same act has on a man and a woman. With a pun on “character,” Juliet’s character in society changes due to the legibility of their shared crime. She is no longer a maid, and can no longer be perceived socially as one, and therefore, that social person that formerly took part in the character of Juliet is dead. The law in demanding the death of Claudio seeks to make the punishment of the culpable man more equal to hers in that light. 122 When discussing 122 See DiGangi 595. He argues that Claudio’s death sentence makes Juliet’s crime permanent. 128 his culpability with Lucio, Claudio is resigned to this fate: “Thus the demigod Authority / Make us pay down for our offense, by weight” (1.2.100-1); their offense is shared, but he suggests its payment is weighted differently. Juliet understands her sentence in terms of weight as well. When discussing her crime with the Friar (the Duke in disguise), she, like Claudio, refers to it as “mutually” committed. And despite this mutuality of act, she agrees with the Friar/Duke that “Then was [her] sin the heavier kind than his” (2.3.29-30). This line contains reference to the double standard that women are subject to harsher penalties for the same actions that men also commit; however, in this context, the double standard seems a bit out of place. Juliet’s punishment is nowhere near as ostensibly harsh as Claudio’s; after all, she is allowed to live while he is to die. The Friar’s pronouncement contains a pun that helps explain this difference. Her crime is “heavier”; it causes a bodily change through her pregnancy. The crime has weighed upon her body in a way it hasn’t Claudio’s. And moreover, in Viennese society, that change in her physical person affects her social person as well. 123 With the “death” of her maidenhood, Juliet is no longer a viable candidate for matrimony. She joins the other women in the play—Mariana, Isabella, Kate Keepdown, Mistress Overdone—in being neither “maid, widow, nor wife” (5.1.202). 124 Juliet even obliquely references this death of her social person. Distressed that Claudio is sentenced to die the next day, she exclaims, “O injurious law, / That respites me a life whose very comfort / Is still a dying horror!” (2.3.42-4). The law keeps her from a literal death, but her sentence to 123 Not to mention her religious person, to which the “Friar” appeals also in his hearing her confession. 124 I thus extend Mario DiGangi, 591. He states, “Isabella occupies the space of resistance and loss between ‘virgin’ and ‘wife.’” 129 perpetual social ambiguity is itself a sort of static “dying,” fit punishment for her crime against the social order. 125 The law in Vienna attempts to correct this double standard with Claudio’s death. But when Claudio’s sister Isabella hears of his fate, she finds herself arguing for its continuance. She does so in spite of all she believes. As a novice bound for the convent, Isabella is adamantly invested in her conflation of social persons: her bodily virginity informs her spiritual virginity, and her purity of person runs through and through. She is in fact very much like Angelo in her refusal to compromise any of her social persons, for she feels them all intricately bound. To admit the impurity of one would compromise all the others. Fornication, as she tells Angelo “is a vice that most I do abhor, / And most desire should meet the blow of justice.” Thus, her suit on behalf of her brother puts her at odds with herself: his vice is one “for which I would not plead, but that I must; / For which I must not plead, but that I am / At war ‘twixt will and will not” (2.2.29-33). Having compromised his sexual person, her brother’s whole person should be affected as her own would be as Juliet’s certainly is in the present case. However, she asks that Angelo be partial in her brother’s case: she pleads, “I do beseech you, let it be his fault, / And not my brother” that he condemn (2.2.35-6). Her words argue in favor of parsing between registers of personhood for men. Angelo at first resists her argument, but finds himself won over when he concedes partiality in his own station. He tells her “It is the law, not I, condemn your brother.” Spoken by way of consoling Isabella, Angelo’s words also concede his ambivalence of person. In admitting 125 Maus in her introduction for her introduction of the play in The Norton Shakespeare glosses “respite me a life” as referring to the convention of allowing a condemned pregnant woman her confinement and birth before her execution. However, Juliet’s sentence for fornication is never explicitly stated; nor for that matter, is Kate Keepdown’s, a known prostitute. The play seems to align women’s ambiguous sexual states with a social rather than literal death. 130 that he is not the law, he admits his identity is “partial,” or made up of parts. He in effect finds himself at the juncture of strict justice and mercy the Duke avoided by appointing him. But where the Duke turned to a more pure man to avoid false “seeming” in his person, Angelo capitalizes off of social conventions involving gender to contain his hypocrisy. Determined to sleep with and thereby ruin Isabella, Angelo trades on his purity of public persona: O place, O form, How often dost thou with thy case, thy habit, Wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls To thy false seeming! (2.4.12-5) This apostrophe to outward form is only possible given Angelo’s particular outward form—his station and gender. He glories in what they allow him to do, to let him “write ‘good angel’ on the devil’s horn,” making it “now the devil’s crest” (2.4.16-7). Punning on his name, Angelo also plans to participate in the sexual double standard in Vienna: his writing that he is ‘good Angelo” is enough to make goodness legible as belonging to him. As for the object to be written on, Isabella falls victim to Vienna’s and her own obsession with bodily impermeability. Crane states that Angelo’s nefarious intentions stem from his “deeper desire to locate the source of his own sexuality outside his body” (284), something Isabella also argued for on behalf of her brother. But unlike the Duke and Angelo, who have access to a social hierarchy invested in their “false seeming” more than their ontological being, Isabella does not have that privilege because she is a woman. As part of his seduction technique, Angelo makes a claim for universal human frailty, recalling Ecclesiastes 8:5: “We are all frail” (2.4.122). But Isabella knows that statement is relative; she urges that women are “ten times frail” as men, “For we are soft as our complexions are, / And credulous to false prints” (2.4.128- 30). Where Juliet participated in the crime to which her body bears witness in both legibility and weight, Isabella may be legible or weighted down by any condemnation, false or true. If Isabella 131 bargains her virginity for her brother’s life, her social and religious reputation will be ruined. But even if she doesn’t sleep with Angelo, his “false print” may publicize that she did, leaving her still ruined and her brother dead. The social indifference to women’s actual sexual status is a fact Isabella cannot elude. We later learn that another, Mariana, has succumbed previously to it. Given Angelo’s trap, Isabella threatens to become another Mariana, socially dead virgin. Mariana unjustly occupies the same status as Juliet, without the benefit of having participated in her own social ruin. And like Isabella, Mariana is placed in such a position by Angelo’s hypocrisy. By the very means that Angelo attempts to force Isabella into a sexual relationship with him, he formerly extracted himself from a relationship with Mariana that was no longer expedient to him. According to the Duke, Angelo scorned his engagement to Mariana after she lost her dowry: he “Left her in her tears…swallowed his vows whole, pretending in her discoveries of dishonor” (3.1.220-2). 126 By spreading the rumor, Angelo uses misogynic conventions to his benefit, obscuring his pecuniary concerns and avoiding marriage through slandering Mariana’s sexual status. Given his status as a man and the seat of law in Vienna, Angelo may render both women punks despite their actual sexual status, as his treatment of Isabella in Act V amply shows. In an environment wherein women have always the potential to be seen as sexually criminal, needing only to be legible as such, it is the bed trick that paves the way for justice between the genders. Where heretofore, Claudio and Angelo controlled the tools of legibility to coopt the women’s sexual agency, the women through the bed trick gain a greater degree of control over their social and sexual legibility. The bed trick allows women to both have sex and lie about having sex in a way that is socially legitimate. 126 See Julia Briggs, “Shakespeare’s Bed-Tricks.” Essays in Criticism 44:4 (1994), esp. 307, who emphasizes the connection between Claudio and Angelo. They similarly place weight on the financial component of marriage, stalling or calling off their plans to marry because of changes in their intendeds’ dowries. 132 “Why, you are nothing then”: Obscuring Women’s Labor and Desire in All’s Well Where Angelo of Measure manipulates the ways in which Isabella’s registers of personhood are linked, Bertram of All’s Well constructs a situation wherein Helena’s personas are unjustly kept separate. Instead of a “punk,” Helena is in danger or being rendered “nothing,” that is, a non-entity in the play. In light of Measure’s concerns with the sexual legibility of the genders, Bertram’s refusal to consummate his marriage to Helena denies her the capacity to render her body socially and sexually legible as his wife. Bertram legally marries Helena, but refuses to sleep with her; he tells his mother in a letter: “I have wedded her, not bedded her, and sworn to make the “not” eternal” (3.1.20-1). The pun on knot/not ironizes his parsing of marriage into its registers of meaning: Bertram’s marriage to Helena honors its social and legal component, but not its sexual component. Bertram’s parsing of marriage extends to Helena’s personhood: a wife but not really a wife, she has no role to fill and thus, her liminal status corresponds to those of the ambiguous women in Measure. In fact, All’s Well makes the social deaths of the non-married women in Measure explicit through Helena’s rumored death in Act V. All’s Well thus more fully explores the flip side of the punk/nothing dichotomy—where Measure highlighted the loved object’s struggles to avoid being “a punk,” All’s Well privileges the loathed object’s elusion of being made into “nothing.” Its plot tracks Helena’s elaborate labors to ensure she is reckoned a character in her husband’s life, despite his indifference. As Neely has it, Helena’s task is to “combine the roles of chaste beloved (through her idealizing rhetoric, her pilgrim’s disguise, and her mock death), of sexual partner (through the bed trick), and of wife (through her legal betrothal, marriage ceremony, and pregnancy).” 127 More broadly, Helena’s struggles dramatize the implications of patriarchy’s tendency to obscure women’s roles 127 p. 65. 133 in the social order that depends on those roles. 128 The men of All’s Well participate in behaviors that tend to erase women in order to bolster their project of masculine identity formation. Helena’s Herculean labors demonstrate what it takes for a woman to demand acknowledgement of her generic personhood in the face of indifference, to be treated as a “wife” by a husband who’d sooner disregard her entirely. I began this essay alluding to the Clown’s view of marriage as panacea for all his present and future needs and desires, be they sexual, religious, economic, or social. As the Clown prattles, however, he reveals a rather unrealistic set of expectations he has for his intended, Isabel. First he mentions the gifts marriage will provide over and above his current status: “Service is no heritage, and I think I shall never have the blessing of God till I have issue o’ my body; for they say barnes are blessings” (23-6). At issue with his use of “issue” are its potential referents, sexual and reproductive, and what their very different labor implications belie. Does the blessed issue he refers to come from his body or Isabel’s? Of course the possible referents do overlap in a way that might be universalized, eroding gender difference: his issue in the form of sexual release will result in Isabel’s issue in the form of a “barne.” Both of these issues are sexual for both him and Isabel, particularly if we take into account Galenic understanding of conception at the time, which necessitates the female orgasm. But if we consider the reproductive referent of “issue,” the Clown’s sexual emission itself transforms into a “barne,” effectively erasing Isabel’s desire and labor in conception and childbirth. As the Clown’s reasons to marry proliferate in this speech, it becomes clear that the utopia he envisions coincides with further oversights of Isabel’s labor. When he refers to a sexual impulse to marry, he blames in the same line his “poor Body,” “the flesh,” and “the devil” that 128 See Kathryn Schwarz, What You Will, chapter four. See also Detmer-Goebel for a more critical reading of Helena’s manipulations (121). 134 drive his lust, which legally sanctioned sexuality through marriage will satisfy (28-30). But he also switches tacks, valuing marriage for the spiritual penance rather than sexual license it will provide. He claims he desires to “marry that I do repent” for his sins (36-7). At the same time that his desperation to wed for potentially contradictory reasons belies a deep theological question—his first denying then asserting his will in fleeing sin facetiously argues both for and against the existence of free will—it also obscures Isabel’s role in all this. If he is driven to marry by lust, Isabel will contain that lust. If he is driven to marry to repent, Isabel will provide that penance. As the Clown terms it, marriage will apparently satisfy any and all of his needs, now and forever; but if we acknowledge the implications of this expansive and contradictory view of marriage, we find that his marital cure(s) are administered by and through Isabel. As the Clown’s wife, she is his choice, his destiny, his sex object, his priest, his sin, and his salvation. What Isabel has to say on the subject, we never know. But we do get to see what another woman might go through to satisfy anxious masculinity in the figure of Helena. In addition to the tasks Neely lists, Helena also fulfills other social components of marriage via her own virtue and initiative. She gains the sanction of her match from the upper classes, from both her mother-in- law and her king; 129 when her choice of husband balks at her low class, the king offers to lift it; and when her sexuality is repudiated, again by that husband, she works with others to supply her husband with the “body” he desires. But her desire to be Bertram’s wife is at odds with Bertram’s own construction of social identity, and both worldviews conflict upon the pressure point of women’s virginity. Conflicting viewpoints on virginity and “the virgin” are signaled early on in the play. At first, virginity is discussed in a more traditional sense. When Helena asks the courtier Paroles 129 See Steven Mentz and Regina Buccola, All’s Well That Ends Well: New Critical Essays. They discuss Helena’s healing of the king and its folklore precedents. 135 what defenses virgins might employ to protect their virginities, he tells her: “There is none. Man, setting down before you, will undermine you and blow you up” (1.1.112-3). Thus he riffs on the conventional military metaphor for sex, wherein virgins are citadels to be “blown up”—a pun for being conquered and made pregnant—by men, who serve as armies. Helena balks at the unfairness of this assertion and asks, “Is there no military policy how virgins might blow up men?” Her question appeals to a sense of justice, of equitable treatment despite gender difference. Paroles again sexualizes her question and denies any agency to virgins apart from the loss of virginity: “Virginity being blown down, man will quicklier be blown up; marry, in blowing him down again, with the breach yourselves made you lose your city” (1.1.117- 9). There is no room in Paroles’ worldview here for militarized or even self-actualized virginity. 130 Whether virgins blow men up or down, it’s only important to Paroles that virginity is lost, so that more virgins can be born: “It is not politic in the commonwealth of nature to preserve virginity. Loss of virginity is rational increase, and there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost” (119-22). Of course Paroles is correct; a community is only sustained through population increase and therefore reproductive sex is an asset. But Helena does not lose sight of the fact that this truth also corresponds rather well to Paroles’ own personal preferences. He, after all, says “with the breach yourselves made you lose your city”; the influx of the second person pronouns (yourselves, you, your) in the line locates culpability in the terms’ antecedent, the virgin, when the city is lost. In the metaphor, armies may suffer ups and downs, but cities are destroyed; moreover, they are culpable for their own destruction. 130130 See Patricia Parker, “Dilation and Inflation: All’s Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Shakespearean Increase.” Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996). 185-228. 136 Faced with being implicated against her will in the stakes of such a worldview, Helena resolves make the best of it. The best she can do is to answer the question: “How might one do, sir, to lose it to her own liking?” (1.1.140). The swap from the impersonal pronoun to the feminine is telling. What Helena frames as a universal problem for desire and fairness—having sex with one’s choice of partner—is immediately augmented by an emphasis on gender distinction. The change in pronoun suggests that what is presumably a universal desire is particularly constrained in its expression when the desirer is a woman. The rest of the play, in fact, demonstrates just what Helena will have to do to lose her virginity to her own liking. The list includes risking her own life to save a King; risking an adopted mother’s wrath; arguably raping her husband by pretending to be someone else; fulfilling his ludicrous demands which include getting secretly pregnant; going on pilgrimage and dying but coming back to life. She does all this to bring about her marriage to the man she loves, but the play implicitly suggests that such gymnastics are necessary to allow a woman to lose her virginity in the manner of her choosing—that is, in a way both sexually desired and socially acceptable. But Helena is nothing if not tenacious. She anticipates this capacity within her conception of her virginity when Paroles asks her if she plans to do anything with hers. She says: Not my virginity yet There shall your master have a thousand loves, A mother and a mistress and a friend, A phoenix, captain, and an enemy, A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign, A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear. (1.1.152-7) Some critics of the play feel this passage reveals Helena to be untoward and unfeminine, and thus furthers their rather misogynistic readings of the play. 131 David McCandless more compassionately views Helena’s discussion of her virginity as “a coded disclosure of [her] erotic 131 See Neely, McCandless, and Schwarz on the misogyny present in secondary criticism of the play. 137 stirrings.” As such, we’re meant to think her sexually forward, but her total devotion tempers that forwardness. And in fact, she reveals her “active (masculine) longing to consummate her passion in terms that betray a “feminine” urge to empower and sustain Bertram.” 132 Schwarz urges us to consider that Helena’s constant will to be Bertram’s wife is simultaneously both masculine and the feminine: a “willing submission [wherein] constancy fuses determination to acquiescence (‘ever ready to bend her will’)”. 133 To my mind, Helena is here musing on the vast capacity she imagines her virginity to have, directed as it is towards marriage to Bertram. She fantasizes upon the personas she might embody within her marriage to him, being to him a “thousand loves” and so on. The personas she nominates are varied and contradictory—friend/enemy, counsellor/sovereign—and potentially of both genders—goddess, captain, traitress. And thus, the list compliments the Clown’s understanding of marriage as panacea as presented from a wife’s perspective. It reveals both a naive hopefulness and a pragmatic cynicism in her expectations for marriage. Helena’s boundless but practically minded capacity for loving Bertram makes it all the more heartbreaking when he rejects her. And he does so by turning her determination to embody all persons for him against her. He legally marries Helena, but refuses to consummate the marriage, an action that insists upon parsing the parts of her character that combined, would make her his wife. Legally but not sexually married, Bertram buys into Paroles’ worldview wherein virgins are to be “blown up” without recourse to their agency. Helena’s virginity is less valuable to Bertram because she wants him to take it. In wanting Bertram to “blow up” her virginity, Helena desires to fulfill the role of Bertram’s wife, which requires agency on her part that, through Bertram’s worldview, impinges on his own agency. Bertram instead pursues Diana, 132 McCandless 452-4. 133 Schwarz 108-9. 138 a virgin valuable to him because of her disinterest in sex and marriage, which both ensures his conquest and preserves his freedom from a marital entanglement. Bertram’s fantasy of himself as an individuated and lusty youth enacts a situation wherein another’s agency necessarily imperils his own. Instead of allowing a relational sense of identity or autonomy, Bertram instead refuses to allow Helena a social existence at all. Through the trick, however, Helena capitalizes off of her “nothing” status. She harnesses the agency that being disrespected and underestimated allows her to make her sexual as well as social connection to Bertram legible to all, including him. The Bed Trick: Cobbling Liminal Women into Wives Ironically, the plays present women’s social vulnerabilities as boons to be exploited. Stifled from the ability to manipulate the social order as men like Bertram and Angelo can, the women use the misogyny to which they’re subject to reshuffle the social order. And the mode of this reshuffling takes the practical form of the bed trick. The orchestrators of the tricks utilize their identical generic sexual identities to secure their desire for a generic but socially distinct social identity. Where legibility of sexual persona so threatened the women of Measure, it proves Helena’s salvation. When she enters Act V visibly pregnant, Helena transforms Bertram’s marital stipulations from his letter into a socially and sexually legible form. And where Helena suffers under the “nothing” status to which Bertram relegates her in All’s Well, Mariana doubles down on her having been overlooked and underestimated by Angelo in Measure. She enters Act V veiled—her identity obscured—and reveals how she turned Angelo’s repudiation of her against him. Trading Isabella and Diana’s sexual personas for Mariana and Helena’s social personas, the wife-halves swap social and sexual persons to create whole wives. This retributive form of justice for the women is only possible after they realize their power relative to one another. In 139 Measure, the Duke instigates the bed trick. He informs Isabella of his idea to right all of Vienna’s wrongs with the bed trick, which will: “unrighteously do a poor wronged lady a merited benefit, redeem your brother from the angry law, do no stain to your gracious person, and much please the absent Duke” (3.1.198-201). But the mutuality of benefit to Isabella and Mariana might easily go the other way, as hinted in All’s Well. Diana, the loved lady of the bed trick, is understood as powerful relative to Helena. Her mother states that “This young maid (i.e. Diana) might do her (i.e. Bertram’s wife) / A shrewd turn if she pleased” (3.5.64-5). Helena gathers from this hint that Diana is not only the sort of sexual partner Bertram wants, 134 but also the means by which she can get what she wants. Helena needs to figure out a way to harness Diana’s sexual person in order to fulfill Bertram’s requirements and legitimize their marriage. Diana could do Helena a “shrewd turn,” but she could also help her and chooses to do so. Choosing to bind together as women has the potential to contain Bertram and Angelo’s damaging worldview, while choosing not to bind together would only further it. The women’s affirmative choice, however, is itself vulnerable to cooption, as the fifth acts of the plays demonstrate. In the immediate aftermath of the bed tricks, Isabella and Diana are publically pilloried as whores, although they and we know that their sexual purity remains intact. Though rather unjust, their public humiliation is an integral part of the bed trick, for as Emily A. Detmer- Goebel argues, the success of the trick necessitates dual deceptions. First, the women must deceive Angelo and Bertram through sex: Isabella and Diana pledge to sleep with the men, but Helena and Mariana actually fulfill the pledge. Secondly, the deceivers who remain virgins, Isabella and Diana, lie about having sex. The pseudo-trial scenes of Act V might be read as titillating or justifiable humiliations of Diana and Isabella, as Detmer-Goebel argues. But they 134 See Neely for a similar argument (73-4). 140 also, through their juxtaposition of women’s social and sexual humiliation against the bed- tricked men’s, pit the justice of the old order against that of the new order constructed through the bed trick. On one hand, the scenes highlight the myriad social barriers to women’s public speech about their chastity. Not only are the women’s assertions doubted, whether false or true, but also nearly all the “unchaste” women are threatened with imprisonment or death. On the other hand, the punishment of Diana and Isabella gains its power through unjust and inaccurate cultural assumptions about women—first, that women never desire sex, and second, that women would never compromise their sexual reputations. The bed trick proves that neither assumption holds by focusing on the agency of women who do both: Helena and Mariana desire sex and Isabella and Diana would risk their reputations and lie about having sex. Thus, the bed trick allows the women to alternately conflate and parse their social persons through an inversion of the conflation and parsing men try to force upon them. It harnesses the sexual agency of these men to a productive social use in making wives instead of whores. And although rooted in deceit, the plays treat the bed tricks as just. In All’s Well, Bertram, having already legally married Helena, sexually marries her when she pretends to be Diana. The end result of her bed trick is Helena’s transformation into a legally, socially, and sexually sanctioned wife. When she returns from the dead, pregnant with Bertram’s child and wearing Bertram’s family ring on her finger, she has fulfilled all of the stipulations Bertram has placed on her and therefore must be recognized as married to him. Humble as ever, though, she returns claiming her form “’Tis but the shadow of a wife you see, / The name and not the thing,” leaving it to Bertram to sanction the conflation of her social persons into his wife; he states, “Both, both. O, pardon!” and grants her both the name and the status of his wife (5.3.307-8). 141 Similarly, the bed trick in Measure paves the way for the socially “dead” women to return to “life” as generic wives. The next morning, as Isabella exposes all of Angelo’s wrongs including his refusal to save Claudio, a veiled Mariana publicly announces that the accused is also her “husband” due to her trick. She says, “Angelo / …thinks he knows that he ne’er knew my body, / But knows, he thinks, that he knows Isabel’s” (5.1.188, 197-9). Her words explain the disconnect between Angelo’s thoughts and actions, which correspond to the difference between Isabella’s body and her own. Mariana then reveals her face, and her previous connection to Angelo is publicly acknowledged by him. Although arguably gratifying, the public punishment of the unwilling husbands does not itself enact justice in the plays. Bertram and Angelo’s lot is extreme: not only are they publically shamed, they are threatened with death, their redemption only possible through marriage to the architects of their exposure and violation. These ends approximate the risks that exist throughout the plays for the women, who brave social death at the hands of men only to be awarded the generic status of “wife” to rather unsavory husbands. But more than merely staging the women’s personal vengeance against untoward and antisocial men, Shakespeare’s bed tricks proffer a more nuanced and just social order that takes gender difference and its implications into account. When penetrable “virgin” is traded for “wife” in the trick, a persona that can only be “blown up” is traded for a persona that receives its distinction through a relationship to another person. The marriage resulting from the trick is thus a socially approved connection that insists on a qualification of the notion of a whole and autonomous identity, which in the case of “virgin” for women is extremely vulnerable to the punk/nothing paradigm. To put it another way, the bed trick superficially unites an individual woman’s individual personas: her sexual and social personas combine to render her a “wife.” But at the same time as the union of personas makes 142 the individual woman whole, her becoming a “wife” qualifies that wholeness, linking her to another person. Through marriage, this qualification takes place for men as well, the bed trick limiting the male victim’s individuated wholeness by rendering him a generic husband. And by extension, the bed trick qualifies any other participant’s individuated wholeness as well. All characters that take part in or arrange the trick end up married or promised for marriage. No longer distinct entities that might “blow each other up” or do one another a “shrewd turn,” the men and women who together make up the bed trick are bound to one another, as the identity of each participant/proponent of the bed trick both informs and is informed by the others’ identities. To take the example from Measure, Mariana’s return from social death coincides with the Duke applying himself to his appropriate social role. Soon after Mariana throws off her veil, the friar throws off his hood, revealing he has been the Duke all along. With these two major revelations back to back, the play makes an argument for the justice of sorting the appropriate persons in their appropriate and socially legible form. Mariana is socially and sexually Angelo’s wife—she needs to be publically acknowledged as such. Similarly, the Duke has been reneging on his responsibilities as the seat of Justice in Vienna; he instead has been performing more localized judgments in his capacity as the friar. He needs to unite his persons, strict judge with merciful friar, realize their interdependence and his permeability to the influence of others to become a proper ruler for Vienna. His first order as such is to ensure Angelo and Mariana’s marriage, which is a problem because of Angelo’s sentence. At first ruling for Angelo’s death, the Duke’s judgment is rendered more just through being tempered by Isabella. Through her advisement, the Duke qualifies strict justice, saving Mariana’s husband and Angelo’s life. 135 135 Of course, Angelo would rather die than marry Mariana. But I read this desire as his last ditch avoidance of relational identity in marriage. 143 When Janet Adelman considers Shakespeare’s bed trick plays, she argues that the generative promise of All’s Well is undone by Measure: “by…splitting Helena’s power and revealing the controlling male presence that will finally put her in her place, Measure for Measure undoes the central movement of All’s Well, enabling marriage by putting it under the aegis not of a sexual woman but of a sternly a-sexual man” (102). But I want to urge the fact that the Duke himself has changed in his methods of authoritative control by the end of Measure. He, who first eschewed his social role for fear of proving hypocritical, comes to see the necessity of partiality, permeability, and justice tempered by mercy. He enters Act V veiled like Mariana, and leaves it publically engaged to Isabella; his personhood throughout the play has been bound up with women, and he finally submits to that fact and uses it to bolster justice in Vienna. The plot of the play pivots on the parsing of his, Angelo’s, and Isabella’s seemingly autonomous figures, revealing that each character is susceptible to the influence and even manipulation of the others. Although this vulnerability to being compromised induces anxiety, the play presents it as a beneficial and productive force. The many unsavory marriages in the play’s resolution is itself, therefore, a form of justice. The Duke may not marry Isabella because he loves her or she him, but rather to acknowledge their mutual roles in compromising each other in the bed trick. Instead of undoing its promise, therefore, the ending of Measure comes rather close to the ending of All’s Well. Those characters that acknowledge the value but also the limits of their autonomy are acknowledged as the most socially just. 136 Measure renders a bleak worldview of decaying sexuality into a more generative one by coming around to the potential communal 136 As Schwarz says, “chastity cannot make sense in singular terms” (177). The play constructs justice through relationships. 144 values of virginity that Helena of All’s Well knows from the start. 137 That is not to say that Helena is without her own troubles: her trajectory in All’s Well demonstrates the ease with which her worldview and labor might be repudiated—her happiness at the play’s resolution is after all tied to Bertram’s conditional “if.” 138 But the existence of a conditional in Bertram’s view of Helena itself embeds the promise of a continued marital negotiation. We’re left with the cynicism and hope of the Clown in All’s Well: to marry is to “do as we may.” His desire for marital panacea has the potential to obscure his wife’s labor, but it also presents marriage as a connection that affords interpersonal autonomy to the couple even as the individual’s autonomy is circumscribed and made generic by the fact of their coupling. The bed trick forges this nuanced and just version of marriage, made possible only through women’s harnessing misogyny and its implications to productive ends. 137 Bruce Smith similarly sees a potentially generative ending in the couple’s conception: they have “imagined a child together,” a spiritual as much as bodily act (174). 138 For a representative reading that draws attention to Bertram’s conditional love, see David Scott Kastan, “All’s Well That Ends Well” and the Limits of Comedy,” ELH 52.3 (1985): 575- 589. 145 Chapter 4: “Strumpet Fortune”: The Gendered Stakes of Gambling in Shakespeare In a direct address to gold, the eponymous hero of William Shakespeare’s The Life of Timon of Athens (1623) derides the ability of money to invert natural hierarchies. 139 According to Timon, gold makes “black white, foul fair, / Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant” and thus unduly influences men (4.3.29-30). Indeed, by Act IV of the play, the greed of his fellow Athenians has rendered the wealthy and generous Timon misanthropic and broke. Timon concludes his tirade with a vow concerning gold and its source, the earth: Come, damned earth, Thou common whore of mankind, that putst odds Among the route of nations, I will make thee Do thy right nature. (4.3.42-5; my italics) Through “odds,” Timon invokes gambling in a speech that asserts his superiority to his fellows. Other Athenians might succumb to money’s unnatural influence, but Timon can use money to restore the natural order. Timon’s pose is in line with the ways gambling in the early modern period has been shown to serve the construction of a masculine self. 140 By fashioning himself a “Gamester”—a figure that gained prominence from the Stuart period onward and may be defined as a “dedicated, habitual gambler”—Timon can associate himself with lower class people and pastimes while maintaining and even reaffirming his superior status. 141 139 According to Maus’s introduction in Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, p. 2251, there is no definitive evidence that Timon was performed. Its only source is the 1623 Folio. 140 For discussions of the use of play in the construction of the early modern self, see Nardo, The Ludic Self. See Zucker, “Social Stakes,” pp. 67-86 and Bloom, “Manly Drunkenness,” p. 21-44 for discussions of masculine self-construction through wagers involving money and drink, respectively. 141 Zucker, “Social Stakes,” p. 76. He also discusses the ways in which the archetype figured on the English stage into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, pp. 75-82. 146 To place too great a focus on a Gamester’s socioeconomic motivations for gambling, however, neglects the extent of the gendered stakes of gambling in Shakespeare’s plays. While Shakespeare’s Gamesters gamble for a variety of specific reasons, 142 they do so in part to distill the broader social order into a microcosm of society populated solely by winners and losers, cons and dupes; they in effect reframe the preservation of the patriarchal status quo as the triumph of one individual over another. Although these motivations apply to Timon, his avowed rationale for gambling is to better control that “common whore of mankind.” Timon thus aligns the restoration of “right nature” with not only positioning himself among men but also asserting his literal and figurative control over women, an act with heightened stakes in a play in which all of the female characters are in fact sex workers. 143 And considered alongside all of Shakespeare’s Gamesters, Timon is fairly typical; while gambling provides a style and vocabulary through which the Gamester might fashion his identity, that fashioning for men often occurs alongside an indifference or even outright hostility to the gendered implications of gambling—particularly its effect upon women. 144 So while Shakespeare’s plays often revel in the Gamester’s drives towards dominance, oppression, and hierarchical ordering, they also dramatize the irrational and dangerous limitations of those drives. As such, it is no coincidence that a Shakespearean wager often results in a stage littered with bodies. This chapter argues that Shakespeare invokes gambling over and over in his works 142 For a discussion of gambling in Antony and Cleopatra, see Woodbridge, “‘He beats thee ‘gainst the odds.’” Novy, “Patriarchy and Play” locates the centrality of play to The Taming of the Shrew. For a study of economic value and play throughout Shakespeare’s works, see Turner, Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics. 143 Karras, Common Women, argues that medieval patriarchy controls all women by potentially associating them with “common women” or prostitutes. For a discussion of Shakespeare’s heroines in relation to his use of “whore,” see Stanton, Shakespeare’s “Whores.” 144 For more on the idea of “self-fashioning” in the Renaissance, consult Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning. 147 because its gendered implications most effectively juxtapose conflicting theories of social organization to dramatic effect, demonstrating the potential for societal perdition under the guise of play. 145 Because women so often provide the occasion for thinking through the implications of typically masculine hierarchical drives, 146 my focus in this chapter will be on the ways women complicate Shakespeare’s scenes of gambling and catalyze plots by putting pressure on the terms and stakes of play. This exploration will begin through an examination of the ways Shakespeare’s women disrupt the ethos behind the need to determine “odds” in a wager. A historicized understanding of the term “odds” speaks to the ways emasculation is conceptually tied to compromised subjectivity. In Antony and Cleopatra, this phenomenon structures the rivalry between Antony and Caesar through reference to gambling. When Cleopatra steps in and starts gambling herself, her example goes against type in its refusal to associate the emasculation potential inherent in “odds” with women. The more typical misogynistic response, however, occurs in Hamlet, where women are portrayed as performing the emasculating work of gambling even when not participating in the wager at hand. 145 Colon-Semenza in Sport, Politics and Literature argues that “sport” was a contested category in the Renaissance relating to disagreements over the proper function of the individual body and its place in the body politic. Colon-Semenza positions himself against theorists who group sport together with carnival, that is, as the controlled and time-bound releasing of anti-social energies. In contrast, Colon-Semenza argues that “sport” was just as often central to conceptions of social order as disorder. 146 See Dolan, Violence and Marriage, pp. 3-7, 23-24, and 75, for a discussion of the violence tied to hierarchical drives within marriage. She argues that the drive for dominance can enact a “zero-sum game” between the partners, by which she means one partner’s gain in power necessarily determines the other partner’s loss. Shepherd discusses how hierarchies of age, social status, marital status, and gender affect power relations in English society in Meanings of Manhood, pp. 2-3. Also see Schwarz, What You Will, p. 3 for a discussion of the ways femininity coalesces with the “intra- and intersubjective systems of alliance” that society depends upon and that subtend hierarchical drives. 148 In the latter half of the chapter, I will consider the ways in which women are often associated with the “stakes” of gambling even when they do not actively participate in a given wager. I will elucidate the gendered implications of “stakes” through considering The Taming of the Shrew alongside The Winter’s Tale. Where, in Shrew, Shakespeare contains the threat women pose to patriarchy through transforming Kate from a potential Gamester to the stakes of Petruchio’s wager, he entertains in The Winter’s Tale the societal perdition possible when women become the stakes of play rather than players themselves. The Winter’s Tale then becomes the culmination of Shakespeare’s thinking about the gendered stakes of gambling: in order to win back his kingdom, Leontes must cease thinking in terms of gaming rivals and begin seeing himself in those he formerly treated as stakes to be wagered; this transformation aligns with ceasing to think of women as cons to believing in the con that a woman uses to save his kingdom. In these and Shakespeare’s other plays that invoke gambling, the ambiguity of women’s roles in wagers that affect them puts pressure on dramatic conclusions that seemingly uphold patriarchal order. Shakespeare suggests that when women serve as subjects staking rather than mere objects being staked in a wager, they belie the socioeconomic conservatism associated with gambling, and instead reveal its radical potential. “Making odds even”: death as an emasculating force When Shakespeare invokes gambling, reference to “odds” and/or “stakes” of play often signal the potential for literal and theoretical social clashes that undermine the theoretical presumption of equivalent rivals in a wager. The denotations of “odds” speak to this paradox. Early uses of “odds” refer to “odd or uneven things” or “inequalities.” 147 The determination of 147 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “odds, n.” 149 odds aims to correct for any differences between the players and therefore create equal stakes in a wager. The conventional phrase “to make odds even” brings these threads together through the image of scales balancing, the traditional symbol of justice. 148 Shakespeare dramatizes the failure to balance “odds” in The Merchant of Venice (1594-1598), 149 a play in which the central transaction approximates a gambling wager that is deemed illegitimate in a court of law. 150 When the Christian Antonio cannot repay the loan he borrows from Shylock, the Jewish moneylender of Venice, Shylock demands of Antonio the terms to which they both previous agreed. Antonio is to give Shylock a “pound / Of [Antonio’s] fair flesh” to absolve his debt (1.3.145-6). Although their agreement initially rendered the two men equivalent participants in their transaction, the play reveals that a Jew and a Christian cannot be equally matched in Shakespeare’s Venice. Shylock’s stakes in the transaction are coded: his charging compound interest and demanding Antonio’s pound of flesh are understood economically and socially through his Jewishness. That association between Shylock as an economic actor and his stakes is later used to undermine the legitimacy of his legal, economic, and social position in Venice. Shylock’s attempt to seek justice in court nearly results in his ruin. The court ultimately deems the men’s initial contract illegitimate on a technicality—Shylock is told he can exact Antonio’s “flesh” in payment for the breached loan, but his doing so would mean conspiring against the life of a Venetian citizen. Obtaining his due justice would therefore bring about the confiscation of Shylock’s lands and goods by the state. Shylock instead reneges all claims against Antonio and is granted mercy by 148 For a discussion of the conceptual links between justice, fairness, and gambling in the medieval and early modern imagination, see Woodbridge, English Revenge Drama, pp. 106-26. 149 Maus’s introduction to The Merchant of Venice in Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, pp. 1081-89 posits the composition date as after1594 and before 1598. 150 See Wilson, “Drama and Marine Insurance,” pp. 127-42. Zucker, “Social Stakes,” p.83 n.11 notes that the merchant Gerald Malynes views commerce in relation to gambling in his 1622 work, Consuetude. 150 the court. In short, Shylock’s presumption that he and Antonio were equivalent economic and legal actors in Venice resulted not only in the loss of his initial loan (not to mention his dignity) but very nearly also in the loss of his estate and livelihood. In addition to conjuring the image of justice rendered through balanced scales, the phrase “to make odds even” in the sixteenth and seventeenth century also spoke to the promise of social status leveling by a cosmic agent. When the reverend Richard Greenham seeks to console his Christian readers, for example, he counsels them to make the Sabbath “a counting day to make oddes euen with all men, but euen things odde with God.” 151 His reference to leveled distinctions implies granting forgiveness to fellow men and seeking forgiveness from God. Shakespeare on the other hand incorporates a less soothing iteration of the phrase in Measure for Measure (1604), where it is “death…/ That makes the odds all even” (3.1.41). 152 Whether attributing “evened odds” to God or to death, the equality and justice between men that results depends on the erasure of any individuality and exceptionality. While debtors, sinners, and social inferiors might rejoice at this leveling, creditors and social superiors likely would not. For those with greater stakes in their individual and exceptional status, equality tends to be regarded as threatening and, in a patriarchal society, emasculating. Hints of this emasculation by the cosmic leveling of distinctions can be found in the determination of “odds” in Shakespeare’s scenes of gambling. The gambling specific definition of odds is “the ratio between the amounts staked by the parties in a bet, based on the expected probability either way.” 153 As he did in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare often dramatizes the former part of that definition. The social and economic standing of the rivals in the bet often 151 Greenham, The Workes, p. 170. 152 Maus’s introduction for Measure for Measure in Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, p. 2021 lists 1604 as the performance date. 153 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “odds, n.” 151 determine their stakes of play. But Shakespeare also dramatizes the latter aspect of the definition of odds. Although the mathematical principles upon which gambling is based are relatively straightforward—if one knows the odds in play, it is possible to place strategic bets on the chance of particular outcomes—Shakespeare complicates matters by blurring the line between player and chance. If the leveling of status between players of different social standing could be emasculating, it is even more so when a Gamester no longer plays against a fellow mortal but one whose power approximates that of God or Death, that threat is imminently greater. In Antony and Cleopatra (1606-07), the potential emasculation associated with odds is manifest. 154 Mark Antony is Shakespeare’s most consummate aristocratic Gamester, placing bets on fishing, sea voyages, battles, and his friends’ behavior. 155 Although Antony is skilled at gaming, the Soothsayer warns that Caesar is luckier: If thou dost play with him at any game, Thou art sure to lose; and of that natural luck He beats thee ‘gainst the odds. Thy lustre thickens When he shines by. (2.3.23-6) In portraying men as metaphorical coins and thus seemingly equivalent rivals, the soothsayer imbeds an inverse proportion between the men: Caesar’s shining is linked to Antony’s luster clouding over. He claims this inverse relationship exists even when the odds are in Antony’s favor, a situation that should give pause. While luck may best skill in any particular gamble, Caesar’s destined win removes the very possibility of luck, suggesting the source of his fated victory stems from something beyond both chance and skill. As the agent of such a force, Caesar 154 See Cohen’s introduction to Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, p. 2619. He dates the play’s composition to 1606-1607. 155 Cf. the discussion of Antony in Woodbridge, English Revenge Drama, p. 119 and “He beats thee,” pp. 193, 200. 152 approximates the role of death in the cosmic sense of the term: like death of Antony’s life, Caesar must triumph over Antony in their wager. As in the implication of the term “odds,” Caesar’s death-like triumph over Antony hints of emasculation. Antony himself concedes the truth of the Soothsayer’s prophecy in an image of his sexual submission to Caesar: “in our sports my better cunning faints / Under his chance” (2.3.32-3). As his words here indicate, gendered expectations for manly behavior inflect Antony’s particular case of circumscribed action: hindered from winning by forces outside his control, Antony envisions himself dominated by Caesar, his “cunning” fainting under Caesar’s “chance.” Where Timon of Athens might associate this emasculation with a damning view of women, Antony and Cleopatra refuses to do so. When Antony succumbs to Caesar and death, Cleopatra turns to gambling language to mourn the unjust and emasculating universalism of death. She laments: O, see, my women, [Mark Antony dies] The crown o’the earth doth melt. My lord! O, wither’d is the garland of the war, The soldier’s pole is fall’n: young boys and girls Are level now with men; the odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon. (4.16.64-70) As opposed to the inversely proportional relationship between Antony and Caesar, a fellow man, Cleopatra’s characterization of her relationship with Antony suggests a direct proportionality between them: his loss is also hers. His death renders “the odds…gone.” With no more 153 distinctions to be made, the symbols of earthly value also waste away: crowns melt, garlands wither, and soldiers lose their sexual and military potency as their poles fall. Like Antony before her, Cleopatra marks this leveling of distinction with a pun: with no more Mark in the world, nothing is “remarkable,” a word that registers her particular loss but also the loss of any further distinction-making. Antony’s diminishing diminishes her because it symbolizes the death of their relationship as much as the death of his individuality. And like Antony, Cleopatra experiences his death as sexual emasculation. Her assertion that there is “nothing left remarkable” also puns on female genitalia, the “no-thing” that doubly registers her lack of penis. Without Mark to “remark” her “nothing,” Cleopatra suffers a loss of sexual potency alongside his. In presenting the joint emasculation of the unit through the loss of one individual, Antony and Cleopatra refuses the tendency to associate women with the emasculating connotations of “odds.” In fact, Cleopatra does her utmost to restore Antony’s distinction and theirs as a couple by reframing her death as a triumph. In preparation for her suicide, she orders the restoration of the physical trappings of distinction: “Give me my robe. Put on my crown” (5.2.271). With these, Antony also returns: she “sees[s] him rouse himself / to praise her noble act” and hears him “mock / The luck of Caesar,” actions tantamount to mocking the inevitability of death (5.2.275-7). With Antony’s restoration, she embodies the manlier elements and becomes greater than she could as an individual: “I am fire and air; my other elements / I give to baser life” (5.2.280). Her suicide, therefore, should be read as an insistence on masculine distinction, her individual death the triumph of the couple over death. Through their reconstituted bond, they both achieve masculine exceptionality and thus “mock the luck of Caesar,” and odds-leveling death. 154 “Marriage vows as false as dicers’ oaths”: Women and Cons Shakespeare also dramatizes the threatening gender implications that stem from the idealized theoretical ground of gambling odds in Hamlet through its titular character (1600- 04). 156 Resisting the reciprocal exceptionality achieved by the couple in Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet pins the emasculation resulting from leveled distinctions upon women—specifically his mother, Queen Gertrude. In pitting the blame on Gertrude and women for his hierarchical urges, however, Hamlet is characteristically oblique, an attitude also covered by the detached façade of the Gamester. His wager in act 5 functions similarly to his other machinations in the play, like his “feigned” madness and staged play within a play; these three “plays” grant him a façade of levity, obscuring his motivations and allowing him to manipulate others. 157 Through the wager, the various Gamesters’ desire to “win” at all costs results in the perdition of the court of Denmark. This perdition occurs largely because each man—Hamlet, King Claudius, and the noblemen Laertes—refuses to acknowledge the stakes for which he plays. Ostensibly, Hamlet and Laertes agree to fence each other, and Laertes and King Claudius place bets on the match. But serious motivations for revenge actualize the swordfight and the wager upon it: Laertes wishes to avenge his father’s murder at Hamlet’s hands; Hamlet wishes to avenge his father’s murder at Claudius’s hands; and Claudius wishes to prevent Hamlet’s revenge. 156 See Greenblatt’s introduction of Hamlet in Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, pp. 1666- 67. 1600-1604 is the likely composition date of Hamlet. 157 Cf. the justification of Hamlet’s duplicity in Nardo, The Ludic Self, p. 15. 155 To even the playing field in the athletic competition, Hamlet and Laertes have been assigned odds based on their skill as swordsmen. But the attempt to even the match between the men falls apart in the face of a rigged game in this notoriously difficult passage. Although invested in Hamlet’s death at Laertes’s hands, Claudius bets on Hamlet’s victory in the fencing match. Complicating this duplicity, both Hamlet and Claudius seem to agree that Claudius “hath laid the odds o’th’ weaker side,” implying Laertes is the “bettered [i.e. favored]” rival (5.2.199, 201). Critics disagree as to whether Claudius understands Hamlet or Laertes as “the weaker side,” which can mean either the poorer swordsman or the worse ranked swordsman. Either Claudius knowingly makes a bad bet on Hamlet, the worse fighter, or he manipulates the odds to favor his wager on Hamlet, the better fighter. 158 Similarly, although warned by his friend Horatio that he “will lose this wager,” Hamlet expects victory, stating, “I do not think so. Since he went into France, I have been in continual practice. I will win at the odds” (5.2.148-9). This assertion renders the arena of Hamlet’s victory ambiguous—does he mean he is the more practiced swordsman and will defeat Laertes at fencing? Or is he claiming to be a practiced Gamester, assured of his victory in the bet if not the sword match? Or is this, like so many other words out of Hamlet’s mouth, an oblique reference to something else? Regardless of his or Claudius’s true meaning, both expect a victory over something or someone. The confusing terms of the match corresponds to the confused stakes between the Gamesters themselves. In both the fencing match and wager upon it, each man attempts to assert an impossible level of control over the other men involved, all the while maintaining emotional 158 Scholarly interpretation of these odds varies widely. Woodbridge, English Revenge Drama, pp. 116-17 sees Hamlet as the poorer swordsman on whom Claudius bets. A statistician, Sprinchorn in “The Odds on Hamlet,” pp. 14-17 claims Claudius puts the odds on Laertes although he knows Hamlet is the better swordsman. Nardo, The Ludic Self, p. 31 sees the odds of winning always against Hamlet: he will die by winning (and toasting with the poisoned cup) or losing (stabbed by the poisoned sword). 156 distance from the stakes for which he is playing. Ostensibly, Laertes’s wager upon his match with Hamlet stakes his six French rapiers and poniards against Claudius’s six Barbary horses (5.2.108-110). 159 But the match for Laertes is also a front: it allows him to avenge his father’s death without outright murdering the Prince of Denmark. And similarly, subtext animates the match for the other players. Claudius stakes Laertes’s life to ensure Hamlet’s death by his poisoned sword; he stacks the deck in this regard with the poisoned cup should Hamlet win. And Hamlet pits himself against Claudius, as he has throughout the drama, in attempt to best the man who has murdered and supplanted his father as king. Hamlet terms his match with Laertes “A brothers’ wager,” and vows to “frankly play” it, and he purports to understand his wager with Claudius similarly—as an intimate but playful game, to be played honestly (5.2.190). But his action in both matches belies any degree of either brotherhood or frankness. The gambling between Hamlet, Laertes, and Claudius may seem superficially lighthearted, but the odds and stakes of play could not be more significant. Though perhaps embarked upon to bolster each man’s conception of the proper social order in Denmark, the gambles in act 5 of Hamlet bring about social ruin through the mechanisms and implications of each man’s drive to dominate the others at all costs. And at the end of the ostensibly playful match and wager, the stage is lined with corpses as all the odds between the players are evened. As in Timon’s use of gambling, Hamlet obscures his drive to dominate others by aligning hierarchical sorting with women and his mother Gertrude in particular. On one hand, he implies she is a con or gambling cheat. Although Gertrude is not knowingly involved in the men’s wager in act V, Hamlet has always viewed her sexual involvement with Claudius as evidence of her implication in his crimes. From the beginning of Hamlet, Hamlet suspects Gertrude’s guilt by 159 Zucker, “Social Stakes,” p. 71 also points out the stakes of the wager transcend its avowed terms. 157 association, owing to her hasty marriage to his Claudius. But Hamlet’s terming his game a “brothers’ wager” in Act V may obliquely allude to his mother’s sexual relationship with a pair of brothers and suggest that her sexuality metaphorically associates her with nefarious gambling. He states as much earlier in the play, where he terms her act in marrying again as a gambling con, or “Such an act / That…makes marriage vows as false as dicers’ oaths” (3.4.43-4). On the other hand, in focusing on the ways in which Gertrude’s sexuality has done away with the distinctions between his father and uncle, Hamlet both apotheosizes and denigrates her to the status of the goddess Fortune, the female figure typically associated with indiscriminate sexuality. Like Caesar’s status in Antony and Cleopatra, Gertrude’s sexual status, at least in Hamlet’s imagination, grants her a status beyond the mortal realm. Before the players arrive in Elsinore in Act II, Hamlet alludes to “the secret parts of Fortune,” and calls Fortune a “strumpet” (2.2.230-1). The Player’s speech also contains a reference to “strumpet Fortune,” which seems to grant Hamlet the license to unduly blame his mother. In the Player’s description, Fortune stands in to absorb the blame for a deadly combat male rivals, Priam and Pyrrhus. His speech begins as an invective against Pyrrhus as a “painted tyrant” but transforms into an invective against the unjust power of “strumpet Fortune” in allowing Priam to be killed (2.2.460, 473). And if Fortune is to be derided for leveling distinctions between men through death, Hecuba is to be lauded for her immortal grief over her husband’s exceptionality. After the “strumpet Fortune” lines, Hamlet calls the Player to “come to / Hecuba,” that he may hear of the inordinate grief and “lank and all o’erteemed loins” of Troy’s queen (2.2.481, 488). In this juxtaposition of sexualized women, Hamlet crystalizes his limitations on appropriate female agency: if the woman in question doesn’t devote herself to inordinate grief for a dead man, his exceptional status is called into question and her failure to eternally discriminate between him and other men puts her at the level 158 of a whore. As such, even though Gertrude is ignorant of the stakes of the wager in act 5, Hamlet implies she is either a con or a whore. Thus, and as was the case with Timon, Hamlet associates the negative aspects of gambling with women to obscure the hierarchical drives that contradict his avowed commitment to universal brotherhood—the “frank play” of the “brothers’ wager” requires the denigration of “strumpet Fortune” to absorb the risks of determining odds between men. “A game played home”: Women Staking or Staking Women The action of the wager in Hamlet demonstrates the tendency for gambling invocations to stack the decks, so to speak, against women. As the leveling of distinctions between men is ascribed to the female sex, the leveling of distinctions between men and women is reframed as women’s dominance over men. This phenomenon contributes to the radically different stakes of play that tend to align with different genders. As in the definition of “odds,” the definition of “stake/stakes” reveals this gendered difference through the implications of “stakes” in practice. Where the definition of “odds” acknowledges differences between agents with the goal of leveling those differences, the definition of “stakes” more explicitly speaks to what distinguishes between the agents of a bet. Throughout his works, Shakespeare uses several words to encapsulate the modern idea of gambling stakes, as both a noun—“that which is placed at hazard”—and verb—“to wager [or] hazard money on an event of a game or contest” (Oxford English Dictionary (OED)). 160 Informing the denotation of the word, “either by misapprehension or conscious word-play” as the OED suggests, is its associations with the definition of “stake” as 160 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “stakes, n2. and v3.” and “hazard, n. and adj., and v.” The earliest form of the modern sense of “stake” is the word “hazard,” originally referring to a dice game. By Shakespeare’s day, “hazard” also functioned as a verb meaning to risk, chance, or venture. 159 the scene of execution, as in “burned at the stake” or the stake a bear is tied to in bear-baiting, a popular activity in Shakespeare’s day that included a gambling component. 161 Shakespeare uses this sense of “stake” when the harried Olivia of Twelfth Night (1623) queries, “Have you not set mine honour at the stake / And baited it with all the unmuzzled thoughts / That tyrannous heart can think?” (3.1.110-12). 162 Indeed, the denotations of “stake” are linked conceptually, since to stake something in a bet is to willingly risk its death, either literal or symbolic, through its loss. When certain values are staked, as in Olivia’s expression above, this sense of total loss or symbolic death is more likely. Feminine virtues like chastity and obedience function similarly to all-or-nothing gaming principles: if compromised at all, those virtues are lost. And moreover, since feminine virtues are tied so closely to status markers like social class, women are less able to rely on the detached pose of a stylish Gamester. Where risking one’s masculine reputation through gambling can itself be a masculine act, risking a woman’s reputation often results in its ruin. In The Taming of the Shrew (1592), this gendered difference avoids ruin only through Kate’s using her husband’s bet to artfully obscure her own drives. 163 The last act and scene of the play contains one of Shakespeare’s quintessential wagers: newlywed husbands, Petruchio, Lucentio, and Hortensio, place a wager on the obedience of their wives, Kate, Bianca, and the Widow. Petruchio the wife-tamer wins the bet, an event that suggests the conflation of the play’s 161 For more on the resonance between blood sports like bear baiting and drama, see Scott- Warren, “When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens.” 162 See Greenblatt’s introduction in Shakespeare, p. 1762. He states Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night c. 1601. For the role of animal-baiting in Twelfth Night, see Scott-Warren, p. 65-67; Dickey, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy”; and Berry, “Twelfth Night: The Experience of the Audience.” 163 See Greenblatt’s introduction in Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, p. 140-41 for a discussion of c.1592 as the likely composition and performance date of The Taming of the Shrew. 160 comedic ending, his wife’s superior obedience, and his superior skills as wife-tamer and Gamester. 164 To untangle this coalescence, I would point out that another wager precedes the husbands’ more memorable wager on wifely obedience. The last scene of the play begins with a heated disagreement between Kate and the Widow, newly married to the nobleman Hortensio and convinced Kate is still the shrew of the play’s title. Before the women resolve the conflict on their own, however, it is relegated to the stakes of a gentleman’s wager upon it. 165 The husbands, Petruchio and Hortensio, initially root for their respective wives as they argue, but then Petruchio turns spectatorship into his active play: he wagers “A hundred marks, [that] my Kate does put her down” (5.2.36). To which Hortensio replies, “That’s my office,” a statement that serves both as his acceptance of the terms of Petruchio’s bet and as an objection to Kate’s supplanting his sexual primacy over the Widow (5.2.37). Hortensio’s assertion yokes the sportive and social aspects of his performance of masculinity to its sexual aspects that are threatened as assertive women act outside the purview of their husbands. This succession of events—women subjects relegated to objects through a manly wager upon their interaction—participates in the typically Shakespearean move that reinscribes patriarchal order at the first threat of an alternative social structure. No longer the primary actors in their own drama, the women exit the stage, making way for the men to wholly control the terms and stakes of a new wager. That the monetary amount of the husbands’ bet—100-crowns—is substantially less than the bet they placed on Kate 164 See Novy’s query in “Patriarchy and Play,” p. 264-65: “Why this ambiguous coalescence between Petruchio the dominant husband and Petruchio, the game-player, between a face assuming patriarchy and a comedy about playing at patriarchy?” 165 Crocker, “Engendering Shrews,” p. 48 makes a similar point. Petruchio “recasts the wives’ countering as a friendly homosocial competition between men.” 161 and the Widow’s initial conflict speaks to greater stakes of emasculation at play when the wives were players rather than the stakes of play. 166 Under the purview of the wager on wifely obedience, the women serve primarily as its stakes, their subjectivity obscured and made ambiguous in the face of the men’s more active gamble. However, Kate’s performance of obedience to her husband also grants her room for her own display of agency. It not only allows Petruchio to win his bet, but it allows Kate to “win” her previous interaction with the Widow. In a grand speech extolling the virtues of obedience, Kate demonstrates that she is no longer a shrew and thus proves the Widow wrong. Moreover, by performing her acceptance and furtherance of patriarchal norms, Kate also is in the position to chastise the Widow, to channel her activity to an end deemed socially legitimate in Shakespeare’s Verona. By using patriarchal norms to her own ends, Kate finds a way to productively use the heightened stakes to which her reputation is subject. “A game played home”: Society at Stake in The Winter’s Tale The Taming of the Shrew ends felicitously with Kate reframing her actions within the terms set by her husband in his wager. Although the play arguably affirms women’s power and influence, that activity must necessarily be ambiguously coded and inscribed within patriarchal norms. However, it is not always wise or possible for a woman to reframe her actions to suit the terms dictated by a patriarch. Women’s tendency towards heightened stakes in gambling grows more acute as the implications of those stakes mount. In his late play, The Winter’s Tale 166 According to Howards’s editorial notes on The Taming of the Shrew in Shakespeare, p. 195 n. 7, Petruchio’s 100-mark bet on Kate’s besting the Widow far exceeds the 100-crown bet on wifely obedience staked forty lines later. One mark equals thirteen shillings and four pence, while one crown equals five shillings. 162 (c.1610), Shakespeare takes the dangerous and gendered potential inherent in the word “stake” to its logical conclusions when applied to female chastity, a virtue that inherently relates a husband’s patriarchal status to his wife’s sexual activity. 167 Capitalizing on the ability of “stakes” to function as both noun and verb, Shakespeare dramatizes how easily those willing to stake values in bets find the persons attached to those values likewise at stake. The fantastic romance plot of The Winter’s Tale is saturated with gambling language and imagery. 168 In fact, its major plot points organize around the term “adventure,” a term with gambling resonance in its denotations of “chance, fortune, luck” and “chance of danger or loss…to put in jeopardy, to risk, to stake.” 169 At the beginning of the play, Polixenes, the King of Bohemia, is poised to end his nine-month long visit to Sicilia, the home of his best friend, King Leontes, and Leontes’s nine-months-pregnant wife, Queen Hermione. Hermione begins the gambling innocently enough: when Polixenes declines the invitation to remain a guest past his planned date of departure, Hermione playfully “adventures” the length of a her husband’s future stay in Bohemia against his friend’s present visit to Sicilia. Although the move ensures that Polixenes remains, it also ignites Leones’s otherwise irrational jealousy (1.2.38). Convinced his friend has impregnated his wife, Leontes plots to kill Polixenes, tries Hermione for treason, and later “adventures” the life of the newborn Perdita, all against the objections of his court, especially his female servant, Paulina. Since Perdita is Leontes’s child, this adventure risks the perdition of his kingdom and alludes to the suitability of her name—“Perdita” meaning “she who must be lost” (2.3.162). Exposing the infant results in Hermione’s apparent death of grief and the 167 See Greenblatt’s introduction to The Winter’s Tale in Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, p. 2881-82. 1610-11 is the likely composition date. 168 For discussion of the centrality of economic thought and language in the play, see Parker, “Temporal Gestation,” pp. 25-49. 169 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “adventure, n.” 163 death of Leontes’s acknowledged heir, Mamillius (Hermione’s son and Perdita’s brother). In the play’s second half, sixteen years later, the lovely Perdita herself “adventures” a cross-class marriage in her relationship with Florizell, the prince of Bohemia and Polixenes’s son (4.4.446). And when Perdita returns to Sicilia via sea voyage, an event that Leontes terms “th’adventure of her person,” she brings with her the fulfillment of a Delphian prophecy and the restoration of Leontes’s kingdom (5.1.154). Gendered stakes are in play amid all of this adventuring. 170 As in Shakespeare’s other plays, The Winter’s Tale begins with a patriarch pinning gambling’s emasculating potential on a woman. Hermione’s initial “adventure” to ensure that Polixenes remains a guest in Sicilia is made to satisfy Leontes. Where Leontes could not convince his friend to stay, Hermione playfully ensures Polixenes’s compliance. In what she calls an “adventure,” she essentially trades a week with Polixenes in Sicilia against the promise of Leontes’s staying an extra month on his next visit to Bohemia. 171 Through her action, which literally “put’st odds” between the men, she activates the emasculation potential of gambling and, at least in her husband’s mind, the conflation of women’s playfulness in general with sexual play. After she convinces Polixenes to remain in Sicilia, Leontes alludes to this conflation of women’s play in an aside to Mamillius: “Thy mother plays, and I / Play too; but so disgraced a part, whose issue / Will hiss me to my grave” (1.2.188-90). In response to her “winning” his friend where he could not—Leontes even asks her, “is he won yet?” (1.2.88)—Leontes extrapolates from her gambling “play” to suggest her extramarital sexuality, implying that Hermione’s “play” includes both deceit and 170 Bloom, “‘Boy Eternal,’” pp. 329-56 argues that Leontes’s emphasis on games is a response to his age in addition to his desire to differentiate himself from women. 171 The line is: “I’ll adventure / the borrow of a week. When at Bohemia / You take my lord, I’ll give him my commission / To let him there a month behind the gest / Prefixed for’s parting” (1.2.38-42). 164 licentiousness. 172 Leontes also sexualizes his passivity in Hermione’s gamble: her superior gambling ability, now sexually charged in Leontes’s mind, renders Leontes an emasculated and “disgraced” cuckold. Leontes thus takes Hamlet’s move a step further, not only suggesting a woman’s complicity in the emasculation potential of gambling, but also actively accusing her of what amounts to a conspiracy. He accuses Hermione of using the levity of play as a blind for her gambling con, which because of her position as Queen of Sicilia will affect the very legitimacy of Leontes’s kingdom. 173 When contemplating his son’s legitimacy, Leontes suggest that women lie when they cite the physical resemblance of a father to his child as a sign of female sexual fidelity: that “women say so” may not be enough proof if they are “false…/As dice are to be wished by one that fixes / No bourn ‘twist his and mine” (1.2.13305). Leontes compares women to loaded dice colluding with Polixenes in a fixed game. His implication is that women are the means by which a con performs a cheat; in this particular case, Leontes blames Hermione and women in general for delegitimizing his kingdom. In a worldview that casts women as inherently nefarious, men can either be subject to women’s manipulation or devote themselves to controlling the women around them. Viewing Polixenes as a cheat and Hermione as loaded dice, Leontes casts himself in the role of dupe. As he tells his worthy subject, Camillo, “it is a fool that sees a game played home, the rich stake drawn and tak’st it all for jest” (1.2.249-51). Refusing to be such a “fool” in Polixenes’s and Hermione’s “game played home,” Leontes actualizes all the systems of justice and control at his 172 See Elk, “Urban Misidentification,” pp. 323-46 for a discussion of the ways in which gender informs conning and play in The Comedy of Errors and cony-catching pamphlets, popular stories about “cony-catchers,” or conmen who trick unsuspecting “conies,” or dupes. 173 Cf. Turner, Shakespeare’s Twenty-First, pp. 59-60, who terms paternity a “risk in that dark and oceanic passage” of reproductive sex with a woman. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, pp. 224-26 roots Leontes’s anger in his necessary dependence on women. 165 dispensation as king against them. He sends a servant to murder Polixenes and then focuses his attention on Hermione and Perdita. Like Timon, Hamlet, and Petruchio before him, Leontes attempts to wrangle the threatening potential of women’s agency to preserve the existing social order. And he does so by invoking gambling: trying Hermione for treason in Sicilia’s law court and “adventuring” the life of the infant Perdita should be read as all-or-nothing games that ensure the death of the “loser.” Like the Gamester utilizing the guise of play, Leontes attempts to obscure his hierarchical and tyrannical impulses behind the façade of justice. 174 He uses gambling to uphold his status as the most dominant and exceptional individual in Sicilia, describing his denunciation against his wife, daughter, and friend as moves a Gamester might might: “The matter, / The loss, the gain, the ord’ring on’t, is all / Properly ours” (2.1.170-2). 175 But in fashioning himself a Gamester willing to stake his wife and daughter’s lives on his suspicions, Leontes ironically reveals the antisocial impulses he attempted to obscure through adopting the detached Gamester pose. His most tyrannous pronouncement in the play is ironically a straightforward avocation of what in a normal circumstance would constitute justice: he announces before the courtroom scene in Act 3, “let us be cleared / Of being tyrannous since we so openly / Proceed in justice” (3.2.4-6). Despite Leontes’ avowed commitment to justice in the courtroom scene, the assembled citizens of Sicilia and the play’s audience understand that Leontes has traded the relational and interpersonal values of trust, coexistence, and reciprocity that should and do undergird his kingdom for his sense of domination and control. And in doing so, he reveals the limits of the Gamester persona: it ought not be adopted by a man with so much to lose. For Leontes’ conception of his control over the “loss, gain, and ordering” of his plot is 174 Cf. Woodbridge, English Revenge Drama, pp. 106-26. 175 See Cormack, “Shakespeare’s Other Sovereignty,” pp. 485-513 for a discussion of Leontes’s attempts to reign through extreme individualism. 166 patently absurd: having staked Hermione’s chastity, his friend’s loyalty, his heirs’ legitimacy, all of their lives, and the status of his kingdom on his suspicions, Leontes must lose his bet if he is to have a kingdom at all. For “winning” his bet—that is, confirming his suspicions—would cause the loss of all of the individuals and relationships he stakes. Like Petruchio in Taming, Leontes occupies the privileged position under patriarchy wherein his winning at gambling should coalesce and reaffirm his other patriarchal positions. But unlike Petruchio, he is not only a husband with a wife willing to buttress his status; he is also a father, a king, and the figure of justice in Sicilia. Furthermore, his levity in the treatment of those roles he occupies is not read as sportive, but tyrannical; his indifference to implications of gambling is not stylish, but foolish. 176 Leontes’s conflation of roles stacks the decks against Hermione and his kingdom. On hearing of Leontes’s suspicions and his determination to pursue them, a servant warns him to: “Be certain what you do, sir, lest your justice / Prove violence, in the which three great ones suffer-- / Yourself, your queen, your son” (2.1.129-31). Hermione’s infidelity would be tantamount to her treason; if her children are illegitimate, so, too, is Sicilia’s monarchy. But Leontes runs towards this convergence of suffering. In contrast to the comedic reaffirmation of patriarchy in Shrew, The Winter’s Tale stages the full-scale destruction patriarchal norms can wreak when they alone determine the stakes of play. By the time he acknowledges his mistakes, Leontes sees that his actions have brought about the deaths of his son and wife (although Hermione is not really dead), and the presumed deaths of a loyal subject, his best friend, and his daughter. And the near collapse of Sicilia is destined to persist if Leontes 176 The play posits a more appropriate Gamester figure in Autolycus, the lower class gambler and con who delights more than tyrannizes his audiences in acts 4 and 5. For more on the conflict between Leontes’ statuses, see Shannon’s Sovereign Amity. As sovereigns, Leontes and Polixenes yearn for the “private status” afforded by “friendship language” (187); and the play ultimately produces “a happy confusion between statecraft and friendship’s functions at an emblematic level” (188). 167 fails to fulfill the Delphian prophecy: “The King shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found” (3.2.133-4). To restore “that which is lost,” Leontes must acknowledge Perdita as his heir, an act that would also absolve Hermione, Polixenes, and all of Sicilia of their supposed crimes against Leontes. That is, he must reaffirm his commitments to all of those people and relationships he formerly staked in his Gamester’s wager. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the play stages Leontes’s redemption through reference to gambling. Sixteen years later, when Florizell, Polixenes’s heir, brings Perdita to Sicilia in order to convince Leontes to advocate for their marriage, Shakespeare demonstrates that Leontes has repudiated his former Gamester ways, putting the veiled incest threat that The Winter’s Tale inherits from its source material to a surprising and socially affirming use through reference to gambling. 177 When Florizell implores Leontes’s aid in promoting the match to Polixenes, he pleads, “At your request / My father will grant precious things as trifles” (5.1.220-1). Leontes answers by inverting Florizell’s meaning: “Would he do so, I’d beg your precious mistress, / Which he counts but a trifle” (5.1.222-3). In this line, Leontes puns on the possible referent of “precious things”: where Florizell’s usage presents the “precious things” as Polixenes’s desire for his son’s class-appropriate match, Leontes’s usage refers to Perdita herself, unfairly counted by Polixenes as a trifle. Leontes’s words certainly hint of incest; he is cautioned to think of Hermione immediately after he utters them. But the line also registers the drastically altered position Leontes now occupies in terms of valuing the worth of human lives. Indeed, Leontes’s second use of “adventure” speaks to this disparity. Where he initially adventured his infant daughter’s life, this time he balks at the premise of adventuring lives, even 177 In Shakespeare’s source text, Robert Greene’s Pandosto, the king marries and procreates with his daughter. By invoking gambling at the very moment Leontes might pursue the incest plot, Shakespeare emphasizes the social harms the cavalier Gamester persona might enact. 168 the life of a stranger. Upon the arrival of Florizell and Perdita in Bohemia, Leontes admonishes Polixenes for risking his children’s lives in a sea voyage, and particularly Perdita’s: And hath he too Exposed this paragon to th’fearful usage— At least ungentle—of the dreadful Neptune To greet a man not worth her pains, much less Th’adventure of her person? (5.1.151-4) Echoing the earlier “adventure” of Perdita when Leontes banished her as an infant, Leontes’s words castigate the collapse of a person into the stakes of a wager. Here, Leontes implies that persons are “worth” too much to “adventure.” His references to “her pains” and “her person” even suggest a newfound understanding of the implications that gambling especially associates with women. A possible takeaway of this encounter is that even before he knows Perdita is his daughter returned, Leontes shows that he will no longer treat “precious things” as “trifles” to adventure. “Precious Winners All”: Redeeming Gambling by Redeeming Relationships In his reading of The Winter’s Tale, James A. Knapp sees the play as cyclical, redemptive in its staging of mirroring scenes that call for a Levinasian ethical “response to a demand from another” (253). In Act I and again in Act V, “Leontes will choose, first wrongly and then justly,” to act in ethical confrontations with Hermione that also stand in for the audience’s experience “with the interpretive dilemmas posed by the play’s reflections on the consequences of human judgment” (277). In the previous section of this chapter, my reading rehearses how Leontes’ redemption might be read through his ethical response to the gendered language of gambling: 169 when Leontes trades acting “wrongly” for “justly,” this action can be seen as coinciding with his repudiation of the Gamester persona through his refusal to treat “precious things” as “trifles.” However, even as Knapp emphasizes Leontes’s redemption through his faith in “an incomprehensible image—a living statue” and links that redemption with the audience’s faith in that incomprehensible conclusion, such a conclusion necessarily aligns the audience with the play’s various dupes: “We can accept the story of the redeemed king as a tale just as the rustics accept the truth of Autolycus’s doubtful ballads” (278). I would, however, urge caution in “accepting” the story of the redeemed king at face value, for the status of Leontes’s redemption is inherently ambiguous: if Leontes is redeemed, that redemption is made possible, I would argue, by those willing to redeem him. The recursive nature of the play as a whole both stages the potential for the initial patriarchal drama to begin anew with the next generation; but through its women and lower class characters, the play also gestures to an interpretation that would avoid the pitfalls that wracked Sicilia in Acts 1-3. Closer inspection of Leontes’ commitment to valuing as “precious” what he formerly considered “trifles”—namely, women, literally and symbolically—reveals the potential of his valuation to restage the original social order and the original conflict that Leontes found so emasculating. To treat Perdita as precious because she is potential wife-material—for either Leontes or Florizell—would stage anew the gender dynamics from which Leontes’ anxiety and Hermione’s suffering erupted, since female sexuality will always be tied to the realm’s legitimacy in a patriarchal system. To put it bluntly, once Perdita is no longer a young virgin, her potential to emasculate her husband will inevitably pose a problem unless something drastically changes in Sicilia. Looking closer at the play’s gambling language, however, elucidates an avenue Shakespeare preserves for redeeming gambling of the antisocial implications that men 170 like Leontes might exploit. Since Shakespeare uses Hermione’s initial wager to bring the threat men associate with women’s sexuality to focus, he also suggests Leontes’ and Sicilia’s redemption through rethinking the threats posed by a female Gamester. Namely, he presents his female characters, Hermione, Perdita, and Paulina, and lower class males as Gamesters whose wagers affirm rather than repudiate existing relationships and, moreover, work to promote new ones in the future; and in doing so, Shakespeare subtly challenges Leontes (and men like him) to either follow the lead of these responsible Gamesters or repeat the mistakes of the past. For this reason, I read the arrival of Florizell and Perdita in Sicilia in Act V—as much as the reanimated statue scene on which Knapp focuses—as the critical ethical moment in the drama. According to the prophecy, for his kingdom to be restored, Leontes must find what he has lost—but he has lost both a wife and an heir. The arrival of Perdita, who looks exactly like a young Hermione, thus poses a particular challenge of interpretation to him: either he will recognize in Perdita the chance at his original spouse magically rejuvenated, through whom he might generate heirs and therefore restore his kingdom anew (recall that Hermione, after aging sixteen years, would likely be unable to conceive children); or he will recognize her as his daughter returned, which will restore the original kingdom he lost, sixteen years later, rather than generating a newer version. Thus, the incest threat stands in for a broader challenge for Leontes: will he opt for her youth and the promise of starting over—a decision with sexual rewards as well as the potential restage the original gender dynamic that previously undid his kingdom—or will he choose to consider his age and her ascendency as his heir—a decision requiring work on his part in revising his former interpretation of gender dynamics, but one also promising a more stable foundation for his kingdom? 171 The latter route—the one that would fulfill the prophecy by treating Perdita not as a new Hermione but as Leontes’s heir—has always been more the more difficult one for Leontes since, by virtue of his suspicions and her gender, Leontes views Perdita as Other. Critics, in their differing ways, have demonstrated Leontes’s difficulties in acknowledging his affinity with people (women and aging men) over his with other (young) men. 178 Even before the various losses of the play’s first half, however, his servant Paulina attempted to convince him to view Perdita as a version of himself when she was an infant. In effort to change Leontes’s mind about his affinity with the women in his family, Paulina displays Leontes’ infant daughter to the court and details her resemblance to her father: Behold, my lords, Although the print be little, the whole matter And copy of the father: eye, nose, lip The trick of’s frown, his forehead, nay, the valley, The pretty dimples of his chin and cheek, his smiles, The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger. And thou good goddess Nature, which hast made it So like to him that got it. (2.3.98-105) Paulina’s words recall Leontes’s own in describing his likeness to Mamillius, whom he acknowledged as his son and heir: “They say it (his nose) is a copy out of mine” (1.2.124). Both instances refer to third parties who would vouch for the children’s resemblance to their father, both refer to specific features that bear witness to familial connection, and both use the language 178 See Gina Bloom, “‘Boy Eternal’: Aging, Games, and Masculinity in The Winter’s Tale.” ELR (2010): 329-56; see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers (219-38); see Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety (44); see Peter B. Erickson on the implications of sexual politics in “Patriarchal Structures in The Winter’s Tale.” 172 of “copies” to describe those resemblances. Echoing Leontes’s previous use of the possessive first person pronoun, “mine” to describe Mamillius’ and his shared nose, Paulina utilizes the masculine possessive pronoun “his” in describing various features of the infant to encourage the court present to agree and further promote Leontes’s identification with his daughter. To further encourage Leontes to see himself in the infant, Paulina moreover avoids any mention of the child’s gender: instead, she refers to the baby as an “it,” and details the presence of Leontes’s features in its face: her repetition of the possessive pronoun “his” attempts to solicit a sense of kinship with the girl in Leontes. Despite Paulina’s efforts, however, Leontes is at this moment committed to his resistance to the influence of and identification with women. Paulina’s pains to convince Leontes his daughter is his buckle next to his conviction that “Women say so, / That will say anything.” Perdita may appear to be a copy of Leontes, and “lords” may even vouch for it, but a woman’s testament to the fact is not to be credited; Leontes needs to acknowledge the affinity between his heir and himself on his own. When confronted with Perdita grown-up in Act V, therefore, Leontes at first appears to prefer the recursive route, interpreting her return to Sicilia as his chance at a new wife, as per the prophecy. And Shakespeare demonstrates Leontes’s preference to reinscibe gender difference through his avowed affinities with Florizell, not Perdita, his true heir. When he first sees Florizell and Perdita, he greets the young couple as if he knows them. Upon viewing Florizell, he marvels at the youth’s resemblance to Polixenes through the metaphor of copies: “Your mother was most true to wedlock, Prince, / For she did print your royal father off, / Conceiving you” (5.1.123-5). Although echoing Paulina through referring to resemblance as “prints,” Leontes returns to his former obsession with women’s sexual fidelity as he marvels at male-male resemblances. At first this recognition seems socially affirming: he tells Florizell, “I should call you brother, / As I did 173 him [Polixenes]” (5.1.127-8). But the reestablishment of the brotherhood of Polixenes and Leontes through Florizell is complicated through Leontes’s sexual interest in Perdita. Carried away by the various resemblances between the youths and his lost friend and wife, he skirts dangerously close to restaging the triangle dynamic that originally aroused his suspicions of infidelity in Act I. Thus, when Leontes views the two youths together, he most probably refers to his wife and friend when he says, “I lost a couple that ‘twist heaven and earth / Might thus have stood, begetting wonder, as / You, gracious couple, do” (5.1.131-3). The “wonder” they “beget” is likely Leontes’ awe, or at least his déjà vu, that he can repeat the past—including, potentially, its pitfalls. But another interpretation of the “couple…begetting wonder” exists, an interpretation that would begin to rectify Leontes’ past misdeeds rather than erase them to be staged anew. Given the various resemblances throughout the drama—Polixenes, Leontes, Mamillius and Florizell all look alike, as do Perdita and Hermione— Leontes may interpret the couple before him as grown up versions of the “pair” of children he lost, Mamillius and Perdita. Viewing Florizell and Perdita as the return of the heirs whose lives he formerly staked would signal a different way of interpreting his connections with others: instead of basing his affection and future social stability upon kinship ties, Leontes hints that versions of the self might be seen where they do not actually reside. Where in Act I, viewing Polixenes and Hermione together “begat” in Leontes suspicion and the fear of being replaced, in Act V, viewing the couple as his heirs—as versions of himself that might beget others—“begets” a view the self as multiplied beyond its temporal and spatial confines through affective bonds with others. Interpreted this way, Florizell and Perdita “beget wonder” because they represent versions of Leontes’s self that cast into the future rather than invitations to start afresh and potentially repeat the mistakes of the 174 past. To view Florizell as his heir, in fact, specifically flies in the face of Leontes’s former anxieties over proving his paternity. Since Florizell is decidedly not Leontes’s heir—he is Polixenes’s child, after all— Leontes’s viewing Florizell as his heir registers a sense of futurity inherently more stable than the kind promised by heteronormative patriarchy. His conflation of the generations might not merely speak to familial resemblance and the passage of time; it also suggests an alternative way of viewing the social order, as composed of subjects not discreetly individualized and autonomous but informed by relationship ties between and among those present and absent. Again, however, Leontes falters before establishing the socially beneficial connection most able to shore up his kingdom: his seeing Perdita specifically as his heir. And this faltering is based on his incapacity or unwillingness to bridge the impasse of gender difference. Leontes needs Paulina’s nudging to sort Perdita appropriately—she responds to his sexual interest in his daughter with “Your eye hath too much youth in’t” and reminds him of his commitment to Hermione in order to keep the incest plot from proceeding (5.2.224). To Paulina’s reprimand that Leontes’s “eye has too much youth in it,” I would add that it also “has too little maid in it”—for Leontes to respond to Perdita as if he were a youth in the face of the passage of sixteen years speaks to not only an unwillingness to mature on his part (or perhaps merely alludes to the felix amans convention), but for my purposes, it also speaks to an unwillingness to see in his daughter before him a version of himself and Hermione in one. While Leontes misses clues to his affinity with Perdita, Shakespeare hints at their resemblance, suggesting through his characterization of Perdita that she is—in terms of character and personality—her father’s (and her mother’s) daughter. For despite Leontes’s idea that she was “adventured” by Polixenes in her sea journey to Sicilia, and despite the fact that Perdita 175 largely remains silent in the scene, the audience knows from Act IV that the Old Shepherd who raised her considers Perdita herself an adventurer: the Shepherd in fact curses her for her propensities to make risky wagers with big stakes: O cursed wretch, That knew’st this was the prince, And wouldst adventure To mingle faith with him! (4.4.446-8) Like Hermione and Leontes before her, Perdita is described as a Gamester making risky but self- affirming wagers: like her mother did to ensure Polixenes’s stay in Sicilia, Perdita adventures to shore up social connections with others (the Shepherd’s characterization of her risk through the word “mingle” recalls Leontes’s suspicion over Hermione’s initial wager: “To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods” (1.2.111); and like her father, this adventure risks her life and the lives of those around her. The Old Shepherd fears as much, exclaiming that her adventure has left him “Undone, undone!” and fearful of his death: “If I might die within this hour, I have lived / To die when I desire” (4.4.447-9). If Leontes could focus on this fact—the shared affinity between Perdita, Hermione, and himself—then, Shakespeare suggests, the kingdom of Sicilia would be infinitely more stable—that is, less prone to rupture over the seeming but fictional “impasse” of gender difference. 179 Leontes’s viewing Perdita as his heir would go beyond the fictional bond between Leontes and Florizell to settle rather than merely ease patriarchal anxieties over women’s sexuality. 180 When she reads this scene, Rebecca Yearling in “Rivalry and Romance in Late Shakespeare,” argues that Perdita’s gender reduces Leontes’s anxiety about being 179 Cite Sedgewick quote about this “crucial node of social organization.” 180 Reading this scene, Rebecca Yearling, in “Rivalry and Romance in Late Shakespeare,” argues that 176 replaceable in patriarchy (241-3). I, however, am suggesting that the anxiety seemingly eased by the gender difference between Leontes and Perdita is actually a signal that Leontes really hasn’t changed and that the cycle will begin anew. Instead, Leontes must acknowledge the possibility for affinity between them—that is, he must acknowledge the possibility for a non-threatening connection between a male and a female. If he could view Perdita as a version of himself, then he would be well on his way to redeeming his initial misstep –not necessarily in sexualizing the connection between his wife and his friend, but in his using the possibility of a sexual relationship between his wife and friend to stake their lives and the livelihood of his entire kingdom. In hinting at the possibility for social stability through refusing to give into the sexual anxieties encouraged in a patriarchal system, Shakespeare gestures towards a future in which Sicilia’s stability might be forged and reestablished through affective bonds rather than merely patrilineal succession. 181 As such, Florizell and Perdita, the young heterosexual couple at the play’s end stand in for versions of their parents, themselves, and their parent’s friends, and they “beget wonder” not explicitly through their future heteronormative sexuality but through the non-normative connections, what Maggie Nelson might call the “queer family making,” in the last scenes. Described by Nelson in The Argonauts, there is a “long history of queers constructing their own families—be they composed of peers or mentors or lovers or ex-lovers or children or non-human animals” (72). The family assembled at the end of The Winter’s Tale resembles just such a queer family, one that bridges the impasses of gender and class difference 181 I read this scene as an ironic, because only superficially heteronormative, version of the “queer family” Maggie Nelson discusses. My reading is also in line with Laurie Shannon’s stress on potential reproductive capacities of friendship in Sovereign Amity: “For friendship’s practical modalities of speech and writing appear in The Winter’s Tale not merely as alternatives to familial and biological relations: they appear as the sine qua non of the perpetuation, regeneration, and invigoration of the ongoing life—of the self or the state” (190). 177 that had formerly defined the kingdoms of Sicilia and Bohemia. Leontes, as has been stated, accepts the returned Perdita as his heir despite the fact that her gender renders good his fears of the infiltration of Bohemia (and Polixenes specifically) into Sicilia (that is, with the marriage of Florizell and Perdita, Sicilia is even more subject to Bohemia’s control than if Perdita had been Polixenes’s child, as Leontes feared). Moreover, when Leontes puts his total trust in Paulina, the female servant he formerly derided as “a mankind witch,” and believes in her “spell” that brings a statue of Hermione to life, he reveals his commitment to eschewing or at least getting beyond his former misogyny (2.3.68, 5.3.105). 182 Similarly, the latter scenes of the play portray family making as a way to dispel the anxieties formerly associated with class leveling. Where Polixenes, the play’s other patriarch, repudiated interclass marriages throughout Acts IV and V, the latter scenes of the play wholly endorse the leveling of classes he formerly found so threatening. After the revelations of Perdita’s origins, the Shepherd who raised her alongside his son are raised in rank, achieving the same titles as the kings of Sicilia and Bohemia. According to the Clown: …the King’s son (Florizell) took me by the hand and called me brother; and then the two kings (Leontes and Polixenes) called my father brother; and then the Prince my brother (Florizell) and the Princess my sister (Perdita) called my father (the Old Shepherd) father, and so we wept; and there was the first gentle- man-like tears that ever we shed. (5.2.125-9) 182 After father and daughter are reconciled, Paulina invites the court to view a statue of Hermione, so that Perdita can see her mother and Leontes his wife. Paulina then “miraculously” brings the statue to life. Presumably, Hermione has been hiding for sixteen years while Leontes mourns and atones for the various harms he causes. And in terms of the prophecy, Hermione’s hiding away for the whole of her childbearing years ensures that Sicilia’s restoration depends entirely on Perdita’s return. 178 The tears shed by the various “fathers” and “brothers” assembled links the assembled characters as kin as much as Perdita and Florizell’s marriage did. With the affirmation that the Shepherd is much Perdita’s father as Leontes is, and that Polixenes, too, is her father, the play comes close to calling into question all of the forms upon which traditional society is usually based. 183 Instead, again quoting Nelson, the family assembled at the play’s end reveals that “queer family making [is] an umbrella category under which baby making might be a subset.” That a family can be made through affective bonds rather than heterosexual reproduction reminds us “that any bodily experience can be made new and strange, that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no one set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical, or the so- called normative” (72-3). In Shakespeare’s hands, even paternity—that act so enmeshed in determining legitimate sovereignty—is queered. Crucially, however, Shakespeare links the reconstitution of the family not with the patriarchs of the play, Leontes and Polixenes, but with the actions of women and lower-class men—those people the patriarchs were formerly quick to throw away, including Perdita, various servants (Antigonus, Camillo, and Paulina), and the Old Shepherd. Before the revelation of Perdita’s parentage, when the young couple’s prospects looked bleakest, Florizell in despair mourned the fact that “The odds for high and low’s alike” (5.1.206). However, by the play’s resolution, this contention proves more beneficial than detrimental for the characters assembled. Indeed, Shakespeare invokes his usual association of the threat of cosmic leveling through references to gambling “odds,” but this time seems far less anxious of the implications of that leveling—it need not mean that everyone loses. Through the various risks of the play’s women 183 Cf. Laurie Shannon’s reading of the lines: “These latter-day births, of course, are nothing biological and are entirely social in nature, and the Clown’s vocabulary even seems to confound and redefine family names in optative terms” (221). 179 and lower class men, the original societies of Sicilia and Bohemia are restored. These risks include: Perdita’s “adventures,” both her attempt at a cross-class marriage and her sea voyage to Sicilia; Antigonus’s acts in securing the infant before being eaten by the bear; the Old Shepherd’s kindness in rearing the infant and informing Polixenes of his daughter’s plot with Florizell; Camillo’s going against Leontes’s order to help Polixenes, his going against Polixenes’s orders to help Florizell, and his going against Florizell to help them all; Paulina’s con in hiding Hermione and forcing Leontes to commit to her memory over the prospect of a new wife. And through all of these actions, much more than Leontes’s penance, the women and lower class characters of the play provide the means by which the assembled court can be, as Paulina calls them, “precious winner’s all” (5.3.133). Paulina’s line casts the phonetically similar title of the play in a different light—what could be rendered “the winner’s tale” is reframed as “the winners’ tale.” 184 While it is possible to read the play, as many critics have, as restoring patriarchy, I hope that my emphasis on the male and female Gamester figures in the play demonstrates the limits of that restoration and indeed of Leontes’s redemption. While the play uses female and lower class male characters to restore even the most reckless of men in service of restoring society and family building, it does not insist on forgiving them. The only explicit scene depicting the forgiveness of a male Gamester, in fact, is played for laughs: the rustics forgive Autolycus the conny-catcher for his antisocial recklessness after he avows that he “wilt amend [his] life”; even though Autolycus is likely to renege on his avowed commitment to reform, the Clown forgives him. In fact, the Clown promises that he “will swear to the prince thou (Autolycus) art as honest 184 I’m in debt to Caroline Bicks for pointing this phonetic equivalence out to me at the 2015 conference of the Shakespeare Association of America. 180 a true fellow as any is in Bohemia,” reconciling any doubts he has for Autolycus’s future behavior with his hopes: If it be ne’er so false, a true gentleman may swear it in the behalf of his friend, and I’ll swear to the Prince thou art a tall fellow of thy hands and that thou wilt not be drunk; but I know thou art no tall fellow of thy hands and that thou wilt be drunk; but I’ll swear it, and I would thou wouldst be a tall fellow of thy hands. (5.2.146-51) The Clown will thus swear that Autolycus is something he knows he is not; thus, his knowledge that his suspicions of Autolycus will prove right do not obscure his hope that Autolycus may reform anyway. This scene of forgiveness between a hopeful dupe and a reckless huckster is meant to stand in for the scenes of forgiveness we do not explicitly see between Leontes and Hermione. She “embraces him,” in a stage direction spoken by Polixenes, but Hermione’s first words spoken are directed to the gods and her daughter (5.3.112). Indeed, Perdita, Paulina, and Hermione remain silent as Leontes speaks the tale’s concluding speech in which he seems to marry Paulina and Camillo and direct the restored friendship between Hermione and Polixenes through their children’s marriage. But the link implied between the male sovereign Leontes and the irresponsible huckster Autolycus thus suggests the limits of Leontes’s pronouncements and more importantly, the tenuous stability of patriarchal sovereignty altogether—for if its foundation can be rendered illegitimate though one man’s suspicions and if its stability ensured only through the willingness of women and the lower classes to lie and commit treason to save that sovereign from his own worst tendencies, then the sovereign is no better than a conny- catcher indulged by willing dupes. 181 To further illustrate his warning against absolute faith in patriarchal sovereignty, Shakespeare ironizes Paulina’s conclusion of “precious winners all.” Of course, all is not restored—those assembled are not precious winners, all. Mamillius remains lost despite his phantom presence in the marriage between Florizell and Perdita. As the character who most belies men’s dependence upon women, Mamillius is a sacrificial victim to dangerous ramifications of the Gamester persona. And more importantly, his death stands as a reminder against overvaluing the concerns of men and patriarchy over the characters necessary to prop up those figures and systems. 185 The “unspeakable comfort” Mamillius is said to provide Sicilia in the very first scene of the play would be better attributed to the women and lower class males that save the future of the kingdom by evening the odds the patriarchs are so committed to preserving (1.1.29). Conclusion In Shakespeare’s invocations of gambling, the association of women with the conceptual threats implied in “odds” and “stakes” elucidates the nefarious underpinnings of the patriarchal order. But with the help of female Gamesters like Cleopatra, Paulina, Hermione, and Perdita, an alternative social order can be glimpsed, one that—although perhaps not as superficially compelling as the radically utopic promise inherent in Hamlet’s “brothers’ wager,” is also not so hypocritical, nor its ramifications so damaging. Antony and Cleopatra demonstrates the possibility of the couple to triumph over death where the individual could only succumb to emasculation by it. And in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare depicts what it takes for that triumph to be managed before death evens all odds. To achieve “precious winners all” as Paulina 185 See Snyder, “Mamillius and Gender Polarization,” p. 2 for a discussion of Mamillius as symbolic of the maternal world. 182 promises, the “winners’ tale” that encompasses all of society, including women and lower class males. must supplant the “winner’s tale” that only affirms the patriarchal Gamester. Although the grammatical and phonetic alteration is slight, its implications are vast. 183 Chapter 5: Compassionate Petrarchanism: Looking at the stabat mater dolorosa Tradition in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum In her 1611 book of poems, Salve Deus Rex Judeorum, Aemilia Lanyer forges a connection between the radical social leveling promise by Christ’s Passion and the misogynistic censure to which she and other women are subject. Written by an ethnically complex woman of the middling class, Lanyer’s radical project, which I argue promotes the evacuation and even obliteration of hierarchical difference, has long elicited critical responses that emphasize the opposite. Many critics have considered Lanyer a social climber, convinced that her dedicatory poems are attempts to sue for wealthy patrons including queens and aristocrats—Mary Sidney has been a particular interest; while some have offered feminist apologies for this perceived audacity, others have largely viewed her alongside Ben Jonson as attempting to fashion herself as an author within the emerging English literary canon. 186 But like Yaakov Mascetti, I urge the need to resituate Lanyer’s potential socioeconomic project with the centerpiece of her collection in mind. 187 Indeed, her very title alerts readers to the crux of her project, a Passion poem. In her meditation on Christ’s suffering, Lanyer appropriates a socially legitimate means with which she can obliterate the hierarchies that make up that social system. Through a Christian genre and 186 Much of Lanyer criticism is concerned with, as Elizabeth Hodgson puts it, the “extent to which Lanyer’s petitionary praise is, or would be perceived to be, sincere, effective, or even convincing” (Hodgson, Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 55). For notable examples of such criticism, see Ann Baynes Coiro, “Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson,” Criticism 35, no. 3 (1993): 357-76; John Rogers, “The Passion of a Female Literary Tradition: Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’” Huntington Library Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2000): 435-46. 187 See Yaakov Mascetti, “‘Here I have prepar’d my Paschal Lambe’: Reading and Seeing the Eucharistic Presence in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” Partial Answers 9, no. 1 (2011): 1-15. Mascetti “rejects the reduction of Lanyer’s poetry to either patronage poetry or religious lyrics” (3). 184 lexicon, Lanyer levels such distinctions as gender, class, and even, as I’ll suggest, race in service of constructing a new community based on compassion. But it is not enough to consider Lanyer’s passion poem in isolation either, although many scholars have elucidated the surprising depth of her religious considerations. 188 Instead, in this chapter I will suggest that the two poetic sections that frame her Passion poem serve to emphasize the particular and contemporary stakes of her social-leveling project. She famously prefaces her passion poem with several dedicatory poems to former, possible and actual female patrons as well as the general reader, and she ends the volume with “The Description of Cook- ham,” a poem commemorating the former ancestral home of her patron Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, that was lost amid legal disputes over the right of Clifford’s daughter to inherit. While invocations of these particular women, especially Clifford, feature prominently throughout her project, Lanyer’s scope is much broader. Next to these contemporary women, Lanyer populates her Passion poem with a surprising range of literary and historical women: Old Testament heroines feature alongside Cleopatra and Octavia, and her revision of the drama at Calgary includes not only those mentioned in her Biblical sources—the Virgin Mary, the Daughters of Jerusalem, and Pilate’s Wife—but also Eve, the original woman of whom Pilate’s Wife offers an impassioned defense and whom, as I’ll argue, Lanyer puts on equal footing with 188 I will cite and comment many of these in the pages to come, including: Victoria Brownlee, “Literal and Spiritual Births: Mary as Mother in Seventeen-Century Women’s Writing,” Renaissance Quarterly 68 (2015): 1297-326; Gary Kuchar, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Virgin’s Swoon: Theology and Iconography in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” English Literary Renaissance 37, no. 1 (2007): 47-73; Marie H. Loughlin, “‘Fast ti’d unto Them in a Golden Chaine’: Typology, Apocalypse, and Woman’s Genealogy in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 no. 1 (2000): 133-79; and Micheline White, “A Woman with Saint Peter’s Keys? Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) and the Priestly Gifts of Women,” Criticism 45, No. 3 (2003): 323-41. Others include Catherine Keohane,“‘That blindest Weakenesse be not over-bold’: Aemilia Lanyer’s Radical Unfolding of the Passion,” English Literary History 64, no. 2 (1997): 359-85. 185 Christ through a meditation on suffering. As such, the entire volume presents an apocalyptic leveling of temporal and social difference—and the concomitant diffusing of notions of self and other—even as it is steeped in Lanyer’s profound consciousness of the stakes of that leveling and diffusing. 189 To bridge the divide between her imagined aristocratic readers and herself, and between them and her subject matter, Lanyer marshals literary and cultural tropes that meditate on the ethics of looking in order to critique the ways that women in particular (largely, although not exclusively) are looked at. Specifically, she considers the Petrarchan blazon tradition alongside that of the stabat mater dolorosa, a liturgical tradition that sought greater kinship with the Passion of Christ by contemplating the Compassion of Mary. Drawing on the misogynistic associations of each tradition and retooling them for her own ends, Lanyer not only envisions a new and affective way of looking at women in her book of poems, but also suggests that the act of reading her book of poems with her ethics of looking in mind can itself produce a more just society. 190 By reworking literary and cultural conventions that visually scrutinize women so that the rivalries between observer and observed are obliterated rather than reified, Lanyer’s poem ultimately suggests the inevitability of breaking down the hierarchies that separate her from her 189 My reading has much in common with that of John Garrison, “Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and the Production of Possibility,” Studies in Philology 109.3 (2012): 290-310, which comments on the ways Lanyer’s “polyvocality” opens up multiple opportunities for readers’ identification. Garrison comments on Lanyer’s tactic of embodying many speakers within one: her conflations of “I” and “you” along with other conflations of characters “enables Lanyer to address her female characters and also to dramatize the way in which her narrative stretches forward in time to reach her female reader” (306-7). 190 For others on the visual in Lanyer, see Mascetti, “Reading and Seeing the Eucharistic Presence,” who thinks of the importance of the visual in Lanyer’s Christian exegetical project, and Shannon Miller, “Gazing, Gender, and the Construction of Governance in Aemilia Lanyer’s SDRJ and Milton’s Paradise Lost” in Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth- Century Women Writers (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 2008): 48-74. Miller emphasizes the importance of gender in perspectives of the Passion. 186 readers, religious texts from her poem, and even Christ from herself. 191 And she does so by positing a radical new way of looking at women, even those female archetypes and ways of looking that are charged with centuries of misogynistic baggage. In this chapter, I will explore her refiguration of the Petrarchan blazon and stabat mater dolorosa traditions: primarily through the example of the ambivalent figure of the Virgin Mary and through a distinctly Marian Christ, Lanyer resuscitates other traditionally blameworthy females like Eve, Cleopatra, and literary women (like herself), and defends the more material and embodied aspects of Christian compassion against misogynistic censure. By appropriating misogynic responses to women to her own ends, Lanyer demonstrates the radical, ethical, and community-building potential that incurs when women (and even men) not only look at, but see themselves in and suffer alongside other women. Lanyer’s Petrarchanism Lanyer’s use of Petrarchan conventions has long fascinated critics, and most explore it through reference to Nancy Vickers’ work on the subject. Drawing primarily on “Diana 191 I go farther than most critics in suggesting that Lanyer’s association with her poem aligns her with Christ through the stabat mater dolorosa tradition of looking, but other critics have similarly noted the surprising conflations she suggests. Wendy Wall, in “Our Bodies/Our Texts?: Renaissance Women and the Trials of Authorship.” Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women. Eds. Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. New York: State University of New York Press, 1993, acknowledges the increasing force of Lanyer’s “analogy between her suffering and Christ’s” as well as the way “her “text becomes the word Incarnate” and “her published text becomes Christ” (62-3). Loughlin in “Typology, Apocalypse, and Woman’s Genealogy” notes Lanyer’s “radical conflation between Christ and the woman’s book, between the Bible and Lanyer’s text” (150). Brownlee in “Literal and Spiritual Births” sees Lanyer’s project as a performance of spiritual maternity: “[Lanyer’s] position as a second Mary is strongly suggested at the close of Salve Deus when she reveals that, like Christ’s mother, who was informed of her motherhood in a visit from the angel Gabriel, and following the convention of the annunciation to the barren wives of the Old Testament, she received news of her divine nomination to deliver a sacred body of text into the world; in a dream, she was ‘appointed to performe this Worke’” (1320). My reading adds a queer angle to Brownlee’s in noting that the hierarchy and boundary between Christ and Mary (and thus, Christ and Lanyer) are leveled and obscured, respectively. 187 Described,” these critics especially emphasize the ways in which Lanyer’s positionality as a woman and as white influences her claims to poetic authority through employing the blazon as a poetess. Where male poets invoke the blazon to compartmentalize women and jockey for position among other male poets, Lanyer’s use of these same conventions in service of describing Christ allows her, as Wendy Wall argues, to “refashions” them “into a female poetics, one which disrupts the conventional authorial and textual codes that alienated women from publication and from the public sphere” (67). 192 According to Wall, Lanyer’s use not only allows her to construct a writerly persona in an era hostile to female authors, but also provides “an acceptable means for a woman to become a desiring subject” through its construction of “a female gaze” (65). But Lanyer’s use of Petrarchan descriptors extends beyond their application to Christ; she applies them to many of the women populating her poem and women in general. This move of Lanyer’s has been read as reifying troubling racial hierarchies of the day. According to Kim Hall and Barbara Bowen, Petrarchan descriptors Lanyer uses, like “those matchelesse colours Red and White,” when coupled with racially charged figures like Cleopatra, whom Lanyer describes as “blacke,” points to the ways in which Petrarchanism has tended to expound a racialized conflation of beauty and complexion (“fairness”) in the time period (193). 193 But Lanyer’s Petrarchanism has also been linked to the queer sexual desires that saturate Lanyer’s entire volume; as Amy Greenstadt notes in reference to Lanyer’s blazon of Christ, Lanyer quickly 192 In addition to Wall, many other Lanyer readers emphasize Lanyer’s authorial “fashioning,” no doubt influenced by Greenblatt’s work. See also Elizabeth Hodgson, “Prophecy and Gendered Mourning in Lanyer’s “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” SEL 43, no. 1 (2003): 101-116, esp. 102. 193 See Barbara Bowen, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Invention of White Womanhood,” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, eds. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 274-304; for Lanyer’s use of the figure of Cleopatra, see Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 184. 188 moves on from detailing those beauties to imagine that Clifford’s reading about them will inscribe those beauties within her own heart, a move that Greenstadt describes as akin to a “consummation” (75). 194 While granting that Lanyer’s use of Petrarchan conventions has queer and racialized undercurrents, I want to urge another aspect of Petrarchanism that Lanyer retools in her poem: namely, she draws upon the convention’s assumption and construction of gendered rivalries in order to eventually obliterate them. Where Lanyer’s above-mentioned readers have focused on the ways her use of Petrarchanism allows her to fashion herself—either as female author or white woman or desiring subject—a focus on her work to acknowledge but then undermine Petrarchan rivalries serves, rather, to diffuse and even undermine notions of self—a move central to Lanyer’s project throughout work. Specifically, Lanyer references and then retools Petrarchan rivalries through her use the mirror and mirroring in the poem. Conventionally, to “mirror” beauty through verse is a goal of Petrarchanism. As Nancy Vickers argues, this goal is based upon assumed and enacted rivalries—between the poet and (typically his) muse and between the poet and other Petrarchan poets. Attempting to contain and combat the muse’s claim to power through beauty—beauty that often belongs to a female beloved—the poet reflects that beauty in his verse: he artfully recreates pairs of lovely eyes, lips, breasts, and so on in verse, to contain the beauty of his muse and combat it since his descriptions will outlive her corporeal form. In short, the Petrarchan poet allegorically recreates the Medusa myth: his blazon mirrors his muse’s beauty and therefore allows him to appropriate its power for his own ends, just as Perseus uses Medusa’s reflection to subdue her. But, as Vickers urges, this rivalry extends outward as well: the poet who reflects 194 Amy Greenstadt. “Aemilia Lanyer’s Pathetic Phallacy,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2008): 67-97. 189 beauties in his verse does so in competition with other poets, just as Perseus wields Medusa’s decapitated head to subdue his male rivals. 195 By considering the Medusan, rivalrous undertones to Lanyer’s blazon of Christ, the radical nature of her project comes to the fore. On one hand, choosing religious subject matter is part of her strategy to speak from a socially approved position. Blazoning Christ, unlike a generic Petrarchan lady, is unlikely to elicit many more responses from rival poets; a Petrarchan Christ is a bit of a trump card in that respect. But on the other hand, Lanyer’s detailing of Christ’s beauty in the very language from which the Petrarchan blazon tradition originated—the description of the loves from the Song of Songs 196 —suggests the emptiness of comparing earthly beauties in the face of spiritual beauties. In Salve Deus, Lanyer turns the power of the blazon to cultivate rivalries on its head: in her hands, blazoning spiritual beauty blurs the boundaries between subject and object, rather than reifying them and creating a contest. In an introductory section of the passion poem that Lanyer terms as “An Invective against outward beuty unaccompanied with virtue,” her main argument is the conventional devaluation of earthly next to spiritual beauty: “That outward Beautie which the 195 See Nancy Vickers, “This Heraldry in Lucrece’s face,” Poetics Today 6, no. ½ (1985):171-84, and Vickers, “‘The blazon of sweet beauty’s best’: Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Patricia Parker (London: Methuen, 1985), 95-115. Most critics who take up Lanyer’s Petrarchanism don’t delve into its Medusan rivalries that Vickers emphasizes. 196 Theresa M. Krier, “Generations of Blazons: Psychoanalysis and the Song of Songs in the Amoretti,” Texas Studies in Literature 40, no. 3 (1998): 293-327, notes that the Song of Songs is the source of the blazon that became so popular in the Renaissance. Wall also notes Lanyer’s reversal of the trajectory of the blazon (65). See also Gregory Waller, The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 136-56. Waller argues that Petrarchan conventions also inform as they are informed by conventional understandings of the Virgin Mary’s beauty. In these cases, Petrarch’s Laura is held up against Mary in terms of beauty and virtue, and similarly, Mary’s perfections, virgin-maternity among them, constitute an anxiety-producing model that the average woman cannot live up to. 190 world commends, / Is not the subject I will write upon, / Whose date expir’d, that tyrant Time soone ends (185-7). In contrast to Petrarchan beauty, “Those gawdie colours soone…spent and gone,” spiritual beauty is not time bound: “those faire Virtues which on thee attends / Are alwaies fresh” (188-90). The “thee” Lanyer addresses is Clifford here, but it soon becomes clear that she has divinity in mind as well. She states that “A mind enrich’d with Virtue, shines more bright, /Addes everlasting Beauty, gives true grace” and even apotheosizes the virtuous woman, for virtue “Frames an immortall Goddesse on the earth, / Who though she dies, yet Fame gives her new berth.” In this way, Lanyer repurposes the vanitas thrust that often undergirds Petrarchan poetry—the warning that beauty fades and death is imminent—and reframes its central tenet for the purposes of living a Christian life. Earthly rivalries that are inevitable because time bound aren’t possible when spiritual beauty is everlasting. Through Lanyer’s revised Petrarchan description of it, Clifford’s spiritual beauty apotheosizes them both: Clifford’s “Fame” that “gives her new birth” stems from both Clifford’s virtues and Lanyer’s record of it in verse. Lanyer goes on to further elevate the beauty that virtue bestows by warning of the dangers of outward physical beauty, which she links explicitly to conflict and rivalry between men and women. More than the ravages of Time, “grestest perils do attend the faire” (205). Among the threats to “those matchelesse colours Red and White” are the desires of men who wish to “overthrow the chastest Dame / Whose beauty is the White whereat they aim” (193, 207- 8). Through her repetition of “white” as a nominalized adjective, she demonstrates that chief or “matchelesse” symbol of beauty, chastity, and light complexion 197 —the “white”—is also the chief target for attack, the part of a prey animal most easily identifiable to a hunter. Riffing on 197 C.f. Bowen for the racial implications of Lanyer’s discussion of aesthetics. 191 the conventional metaphor that links amorous relationships with hunting, Lanyer’s emphasis uses the potential death of a prey animal to warn her female readers about the dangers of physical beauty: when beauty is apparent, it is also a target. And when Petrarchan conventions constructs men and women as rivals, there is no middle ground between victor and vanquished. In addition to furthering rivalries between men and women, Lanyer also uses Petrarchan conventions to warn of physical beauty’s danger in its cultivation of rivalries between women. Lanyer mentions several literary and historical female figures whose beauty led to dangerous outcomes, including Helen of Troy, Lucrece of Rome, Rosamund, the mistress of Henry II, and Matilda, a maid pursued by King John. 198 But Lanyer’s chief exemplar of beauty’s dangers is Cleopatra, a figure to whom she returns multiple times throughout the poem. When Cleopatra first appears in the poem, Lanyer describes her “Beautie and defects” of virtue, rewriting Cleopatra as a troubling Eve figure in reference to her adulterous relationship with Antony (215- 6). Lanyer asks of Cleopatra, “What fruit did yield that faire forbidden tree?” and suggests that what makes Cleopatra’s flaw greater than Eve’s is her failure to consider her fellow woman: Cleopatra errs because she “Did worke Octaviaes wrongs” (216). Although Lanyer entertains the possibility that Cleopatra, like Eve, suffers a failure of sight—Cleopatra is the “Poore blinded Queene” and Eve is later described as having “had no powre to see” (219, 765)—Lanyer concludes that Cleopatra’s blindness is linked to willful denials of compassion for others: she “Did worke Octaviaes wrongs, and his (Antony’s) neglects” (216). I will return to Lanyer’s treatment of Cleopatra—particularly her possibility for redemption along with Eve—when Lanyer herself does, after her narration of the Passion. But for now, it’s important to note that 198 See Susanne Woods, editor of Aemilia Lanyer, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 61 n. 225 and n. 233. Woods notes that Lanyer may have in mind Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond (1592) and Michael Drayton’s Matilda (1594). 192 Lanyer associates Cleopatra’s “defects” with her cultivation of rivalries: by choosing physical over spiritual beauties, Cleopatra furthers the typical Petrarchan project of establishing and furthering rivalries. In contrast to the ways mirroring in the blazon tradition can enact rivalries, Lanyer uses mirror imagery to further her project to blur intersubjective boundaries. At first glance, the mirrors present in Lanyer’s dedicatory poems seem placed merely to flatter her dedicatees—she describes Salve Deus in her dedication to Margaret Clifford as “the mirror of your most worthie mind,” and she specifically asks both Queen Anne and Lady Anne, Countess of Dorset, to view their “virtues” reflected in the poem: “Let your fair virtues in my Glasse be seen.” 199 Such an interpretation of “mirror” might speak to what has been understood as Lanyer’s attempts at pandering for patronage. But her allusion to her poem as a “Glasse” gestures towards the more common usage of “mirror” in the period: a “mirror” as a model for behavior, an exemplar. The two possible definitions collide in the dedicatory poem for Queen Anne. There, Lanyer gestures to types of mirrors better suited to reflecting Anne’s virtues, a glass of steel being the most truthful in its reflection: “Unlesse my Glasse were chrystall, or more cleare: / Which is dym steele, yet full of spotlesse truth, / And for one looke from your faire eyes it su’th” (40-2). 200 Lanyer both flatters Anne—calling her “fair” as she finds herself mirrored in the poem—at the same time that she enjoins her to continue reading, using the image of the mirror to suggest a pedagogical model for reading; like the tradition of viewing Christ as the “mirrour of Martyrs,” which Lanyer quotes and also models in the poem, Lanyer envisions a kind of reading and 199 Lanyer extends these reflections to Princess Elizabeth, whom she calls the pattern of [Anne’s] beauty. The distinctions to be flattened of course include that between her readers and herself, an implication many critics have seized upon to argue that Lanyer is a social climber. For a concise bibliography of Lanyer criticism, see Mascetti 2-3). 200 Indeed, “”dym steele” brings to mind Gascoigne’s satire on good governance, The Steele Glas (1576). 193 looking that is geared toward the emulation of the figures mirrored in the poem rather than the cultivation of rivalries. In the face of the ease with which the analogies enacted through mirror imagery can be taken to imply hierarchies, I instead read Lanyer’s “Glasse” as an invitation to the reader to both see herself reflected in it (the poem) and reflect in her behavior as a reader those virtues she sees (Christ’s, Clifford’s). In the dedicatory poem to Mary Sidney, for example, Lanyer yokes the two meanings in an invitation to Sidney to view her poem as Christ; that is, to both read the poem as if the poem is Christ and to read the poem as if she (Sidney) were Christ: So craving pardon for this bold attempt, I here present my mirror to her view, Whose noble virtues cannot be exempt, My Glasse being steele, declares them to be true. And Madame, if you will vouchsafe that grace, To grace those flowres that springs from virtues ground; Though your faire mind on worthier works is plac’d, On works that are more deepe, and more profound; Yet it is no disparagement to you, To see your Savior in a Shepheards weed, Unworthily presented in your viewe, Whose worthinesse will grace each line you reade. 194 Receive him here by my unworthy hand, And reade his paths of faire humility; Who though our sinnes in number passé the sand, They all are purg’d by his Divinity. (213-24) Just as Christ’s divinity provides Lanyer the means by which she can circumvent her middling status and claim the attention of someone like Sidney, so too, Lanyer suggests, should Sidney’s virtues lead her to “grace”—that is, read and not deride—Lanyer’s poem. 201 Reading generously in this way need not cause “disparagement” to Sidney, just as Christ’s lowly Shepherd garb does not disparage him. Lanyer’s cheeky suggestion is that Sidney should, like Christ, “grace” the poem—that is, read it with grace and see its graces rather than “disparage” it for its failures. In the later dedication “To the Vertuous Reader,” Lanyer reiterates her preferred practice of generous reading, what Eve Sedgwick would call “reparative.” She trusts that the readers of “these my imperfect indeavours” will employ “their owne excellent dispositions” and “will rather, cherish, nourish, and increase the least sparke of virtue where they find it, by their favourable and best interpretations, than quench it by wrong constructions” (50). Such reading Lanyer explicitly associates with women: her goals is for “all good Christians and honourable minded men to speake reverently of our sexe” (50). Her use of the first person pronoun, “our” against the more specific groups of “good Christians” and “honourable minded men” unites all women together and only some men. She implies that only “good” Christians” and “honourable minded” men are likely to speak reverently of women. But 201 C.f. John Rogers, “The Passion of a Female Literary Tradition.” Rogers argues that Lanyer envisions a line of poetic inheritance stemming from Sidney to herself. His argument offers an interesting spin on the typical reading of Lanyer as competitive: “in asking Sidney to ‘vouchsafe’ her ‘grace’ on Lanyer’s faulty Passion poem, she is seeking not only the worldly remuneration this wealthy patron might proffer in this life but also the far more valuable imputation of poetic agency that Sidney might one day be content to relinquish at her death” (443). 195 in the Sidney dedicatory poem, Lanyer constructs her ideal audience, made up entirely of women. A dream vision, the poem depicts a pagan garden where “Ladies” together achieve a radical parity in their unified community. Appearing as “umpiers…Judging,” the “Ladies go” forth and refuse to create division between them: And therefore will’d they should for ever dwell, In perfit unity by this matchlesse Spring: Since ‘twas impossible either should excel, Or her faire fellow in subjection bring. But here in equall sov’raigntie to live, Euall in state, equall in dignitie, That unto others they might comfort give, Rejoycing all with their sweet unitie. (85-6, 89-96) In these last lines of this dedicatory poem to the chief female writer of the age, Lanyer suggests that, among themselves, women would realize the justice of “perfit unity” devoid of hierarchy. Indeed, her focus on the impossibility that one should “excel” or “in subjection bring” the other flatly contradicts John Roger’s argument that Lanyer sees herself as the heir to Mary Sidney’s position in the burgeoning “female literary tradition” (445). Moreover, Lanyer’s vision of female equality and unity providing the means by which the community might grow—envisioning that “unto others they might comfort give”—suggests that this model of reading is socially generative, a potential she makes much more of through her revision of the stabat mater dolorosa tradition. Compassionate Looking/Reading and the stabat mater dolorosa tradition 196 The various conflations that Lanyer invokes in her project—between reader and text, between man and woman, between various figures and Christ—shares much with the themes, methodology, and implications of the centuries old tradition that depicts the Virgin Mary’s role during the Passion. Deeply pedagogical, the stabat mater dolorosa and related planctus Mariae traditions guide the reader/listener/viewer through an affective and meditative response to the Passion via Mary’s concomitant Compassion—literally con-passio or “suffering with”—and grief over her son’s death. Despite scanty biblical precedence for Mary’s role at Calvary, the genre elaborated her role extensively throughout the early modern period in England, in poetic, musical, and art historical forms—in sarum missals, rood screen remains, and musical iterations by Josquin, Palestrina, and others. 202 Named for the first line of the popular Latin poem composed in the thirteenth century, the stabat mater dolorosa primarily functions to solicit an intimate connection to Christ himself through sustained and visual (real or imagined) meditation on Mary. Script-like, the poem vocalizes a series of injunctions bent on shaping the affective response of any speaker, reader, or auditor: Eia Mater, fons amoris, me sentire vim doloris 202 For the related lyrical forms, including the planctus Mariae, the quis dabit, and the Salve Regina, see Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) and Eamon Duffy, “Aquinas Lecture 1988: Mater Dolorosa, Mater Misericordiae,” New Blackfriars 69, no. 816 (1988): 210- 27. For art historical conventions, including the Mater Dolorosa, the pieta, and Mary’s Swoon, see Amy Neff, “The Pain of Compassio: Mary’s Labor at the Foot of the Cross,” The Art Bulletin. 80, no. 2 (1998): 254-73 and Miri Rubin, Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures (New York: Central European University Press, 2009). For iterations of the tradition in medieval drama, see Emma Maggie Solberg, “Madonna, Whore: Mary’s Sexuality in the N-Town Plays,” Comparative Drama. 48, no. 3 (2014): 191-219 and Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (New York: Ashgate Publishing, 2005). For more on the affective aims of the tradition and other devotional Passion sequences, see Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 197 fac ut tecum lugeam. Fac ut ardeat cor meum in amando Christum Deum ut sibi complaceam. Sancta Mater, istud agas, crucifixi fige plagas cordi meo valide. Tui nati vulnerati tam dignati pro me pati poenas mecum divide. Fac me vere tecum flere crucifixo condolere donec ego vixero. Iuxta crucem tecum stare te libenter sociare in planctu desidero. Virgo virginum praeclara mihi iam non sis amara fac me tecum plangere Fac ut portem Christi mortem passionis eius sortem et plagas recolere Fac me plagis vulnerary, cruce hac inebriari, ob amorem filii. 203 (stanzas 9-17) 203 [O Mother, fountain of love, make me feel the power of sorrow, that I may grieve with you. Grant that my heart may burn in the love of Christ my Lord, that I may greatly please Him. Holy Mother, grant that the wounds of the Crucified drive deep into my heart. That of your wounded Son, who so deigned to suffer for me, I may share the pain. Make me sincerely weep with you, bemoan the Crucified, for as long as I live. To stand beside the cross with you, and gladly share the weeping, this I desire. Chosen Virgin of virgins, be not bitter with me, let me weep with thee. Make me to bear the death of Christ, the fate of his Passion, and commemorate His wounds. Make me be wounded with his wounds, inebriated by the cross because of love for the Son.] Translation by Hans van der Velden of “The Ultimate Stabat Mater Site,” with my slight alterations. 198 The repetitive exhortations of the speaker (note that the lines quoted above are only an excerpt of the entire poem, which is 20 stanzas long) to share both Mary’s and Christ’s suffering speak to the goals of “compassion.” The speaker/reader of the script literally wishes to garner fellow- feeling with Christ, to suffer along with him. 204 And s/he may more easily do so through Mary, who, the tradition suggests, is best teacher when it comes to grief. A late Medieval poetic iteration of the genre, “Sodenly afraide,” in fact describes Mary inviting those “‘Who cannot wepe,” to “come lerne at me’” (11). 205 After all, in losing Christ, Mary has lost her son, Lord, and husband in one fell swoop, a hardship that the related Quis dabit planctus lament especially emphasizes; she has much over which to grieve. 206 Although the Reformation in England would curtail and even invalidate many Catholic liturgical traditions, 207 meditations that emphasized a personal connection and even intimacy with Christ would remain a popular form of religious devotion. And although a source of contention depending on one’s confessional alliance, so, too, 204 For a discussion of the history of compassion, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600-1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 205 “Mary at the Foot of the Cross” Ed. Karen Saupe. Middle English Marian Lyrics (1997). TEAMS: Middle English Texts Series. <http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/saupe-middle- english-marian-lyrics-mary-at-the-foot-of-the-cross>. 206 See Bestul, Texts of the Passion, for more on the Quis dabit lament tradition, which widely circulated in the later Middle Ages. 207 For instance, see Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997); Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-century Print Culture (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (New York: Ashgate Publishing, 2005); Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Tobias Döring, Performances of Mourning in Shakespearean Theatre and Early Modern Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Thomas Rist, Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England (New York: Ashgate Publishing, 2008). 199 would meditations on a similar intimacy with Mary remain popular throughout the early modern period in England. 208 Lanyer’s poem, in fact, can be grouped alongside many others. Lanyer critics have long emphasized her focus on Mary in the poem, typically in relation to Lanyer’s attempts to construct her claim to poetic authority. Micheline White and Gary Kuchar, for example, have studied Lanyer’s construction of a poetic voice through her claims to Mary’s priesthood and co-redeemer status alongside Christ. 209 Kuchar and Victoria Brownlee pinpoint the Marian authority to which Lanyer (and her poem) aspires through reference to maternity. 210 To focus on those aspects of Mary that make her exemplary, however, sidesteps the ways in which Mary’s example in Lanyer’s poem works to undercut notions of hierarchy and exemplarity. These critics who have emphasized the socially appropriate aspects of Mary—her conventional status as griever and mother—to argue for Lanyer’s bid for poetic authority have sidelined the more radical implications both of Mary and Lanyer’s project. Indeed, Lanyer taps into that aspect of the stabat mater dolorosa tradition that has always been troubling, such that, 208 For more on the controversies surrounding the poem including its inspiration to both Catholic and Protestant writers in the early modern period, see Robert S. Miola, “Stabat Mater Dolorosa: Mary at the Foot of the Cross” in Sixteenth Century Journal 48.3 (2017): 653-79. See Laura Gallagher, “Stabat Mater Dolorosa: Imagining Mary’s Grief at the Cross” in Biblical Women in Early Modern Literary Culture, 1550-1700, eds. Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015) for a consideration of the pre-Reformation tradition and its presence in English literature of the 1590s; she traces it specifically in Thomas Lodge’s 1596 Prosopopeia, and C.N.’s 1595 Our Ladie hath a new sonne. 209 See Micheline White, “A Woman with Saint Peter’s Keys? Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) and the Priestly Gifts of Women,” Criticism 45 no. 3 (2003): 323-41. White argues that Lanyer offers justification for the priestly power of Clifford and her daughter. See Gary Kuchar, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Virgin’s Swoon: Theology and Iconography in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” English Literary Renaissance 37 no. 1 (2007): 47-73, who extends this argument to include Mary as priestly co-redeemer. My argument is much indebted to Kuchar’s, but both his and White’s arguments focus on Lanyer’s constructions of an authoritative position for women. I’m instead emphasizing the social leveling potential on Lanyer’s work. 210 See Kuchar and Brownlee for discussions of the connections between Marian devotional texts and Lanyer’s poem, primarily through maternity. See Mascetti for a discussion of the importance of the visual in Lanyer’s religious project. 200 despite the tradition’s popularity, it was suppressed by the Council of Trent and only included in the liturgy in the eighteenth century. The Mary of the stabat mater dolorosa and Lanyer’s Mary may indeed derive their power through their socially conventional grief and maternity, but, as I’ll show below, those gendered labors serve as the means by which all notions of hierarchy and authority are undermined. If the goal of compassion is gaining an affective intimacy with Christ, the stabat mater dolorosa orchestrates its achievement through Mary—either by literally looking at her as in the art historical iterations or imaginatively visualizing her as in the ekphrastic poetry or liturgical musical versions. As a mediator, Mary provides a useful distance through which the audience can more easily grieve for Christ: feeling alongside her allows the audience to navigate between the presumption of courting fellow feeling with Christ—as if the pain of grieving for him can approximate that of his Passion—and the callousness of not attempting to connect to his suffering at all. But ironically, the very distance that Mary’s position provides the audience is the means by which the audience is brought closer to Christ. While Debora Shuger argues that the subject position of the stabat mater dolorosa provides an alternative to “the dialectic of tortured and torturer” in the role of witness, I would urge that the tradition also seeks to blur boundaries between roles. 211 Because Mary’s con-passio approximates Christ’s Passio at the same time as it engenders a similar compassionate response in the reader/audience, her subject position blurs the boundary between witness and tortured. 212 In Lanyer’s hands, however, the potential for blurred 211 Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 100. 212 See Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001), especially her second chapter, “The Sword of Compassion,” for a historical discussion of the tension in articulating Mary’s suffering relative to Christ’s, whether her suffering approximates or ever equals his (77-101). 201 boundaries also extends to the boundary between witness and torturer: she suggests an equivalence between those who refuse to save Christ and those who fail to be moved by the Mary’s compassion. To begin this radical project, Lanyer in Salve Deus references the goals of the original stabat mater dolorosa lyric even as she encodes doubts about its assumptions of blurred boundaries in practice. In the original, a universality of response to Mary’s grief for her Son is assumed: “Who could not be sorrowful to behold the pious mother grieving with her Son?” Largely a rhetorical question, the interrogative is meant to unite the readers/chanters of the liturgical sequence in their Compassion. This unification occurs through the “othering” of those who withhold compassion—it even encourages it: specifically, it others Jewish and pagan deniers of Christ who also refuse to feel sorrow for Christ and Mary. Lanyer dramatizes this potential bifurcation in the audience of the Passion through her depiction of the Daughters of Jerusalem as Marian mourners who attempt to move their audience to compassion: Poore women seeing how much [Christ’s tormentors] did transgresse, By teares, by sighs, by cries, intreate, nay proue, What may be done among the thickest presse, They labour still these tyrants hearts to moue: in pitie and compassion to forbeare (995-999) Note that, like the stabat mater dolorosa tradition, Lanyer’s description of the women grieving is explicitly linked to the project of arousing audience compassion: they daughters “labour…tyrants hearts to moue.” Although their compassionate response to Christ fails to secure the forbearance of Christ’s tormentors, Lanyer, as in the original text and Shuger’s characterization of the subject 202 position it provides, encodes the notion that the reader might be moved as fellow witnesses of Christ’s Passion. But Lanyer makes the implicit reciprocity of the stabat mater tradition explicit: she urges the effect the Daughter’s Marian compassion has on a more important spectator: Christ himself. Ignoring everyone else, Christ singles the Daughters of Jerusalem out for his special, compassionate attention: Yet these poore women, by their piteous cries Did mooue their Lord, their Louer, and their King To take compassion, turne about, and speake To them whose hearts were ready now to breake. (981-984) In these lines, Lanyer stresses the potential for mutual compassion in the stabat mater model: the Daughter’s compassion for Christ arouses his compassion for them. Lanyer celebrates such mutuality of feeling, established and increased upon in the visual realm through looking at, being looked upon, and being conscious of these acts of mutual Marian beholding: Most blessed Daughters of Ierusalem, Who found such fauor in your Sauiours sight, To turne his face when you did pitie him; Your tearefull eyes beheld his eyes more bright; Your Faith and Loue vnto such grace did clime, To haue reflection from this Heau’nly light: Your Eagles eies did gaze against this Sunne, Your hearts did thinke, he dead, the world were done. (985-992) 203 The Daughter’s cries literally move Christ—he “turne[s] his face when [they] did pitie him.” And Lanyer emphasizes the reciprocity between them: when Christ and the Daughters lock eyes, the connection between them is made and then elevated by the consciousness on both sides of their being looked at and “reflected” in each other, as mirrors/models for each other. In making her Christ explicitly perform Marian Compassion, Lanyer emphasizes that gender need not dictate the limits of compassion. But her argument throughout her volume also acknowledges the extent to which gender has often dictated those limits. In the Daughters of Jerusalem section, the pagan torturers of Christ clearly inhabit the “torturer” subject position in regards to Christ. But Lanyer also suggests they do so because they, unlike Christ, refuse to feel compassion along with the Daughters. As such, these “spightfull men with torments did oppresse” not only Christ explicitly, but the “Poore women” implicitly by refusing “In pitie and compassion to forbeare / Their whipping, spurning, tearing of his haire” (999-1000). This list seamlessly mingles Christ’s torture (his being whipped and spurned) with a typically feminized affective response to it (being spurned and tearing her hair). And in this blurring of boundaries between the role of tortured and witness, Lanyer conflates the women’s labor with Christ’s as she describes the callousness of the pagans: the Daughter’s entreaties are “all in vaine”—the torturers refuse to feel compassion and stop their torture because their “malice hath no end” (1001-2). As such, Lanyer demonstrates a bifurcation within the subject position of witness to Christ’s suffering, suggesting that to witness such suffering—both Christ’s suffering and the suffering of those who feel compassion for him—and not be moved is tantamount to furthering the pain and humiliation of Christ. And throughout her volume, she typically associates this subject position—those who fail or refuse to feel Compassion alongside women—with men. As Wall puts it in reference to Lanyer’s prose defense of women in “To the Vertuous Reader,” 204 Lanyer “link[s] men who criticize women with those who put Christ to death” (67). While Wall is responding to Lanyer’s broad project to end the unjust and unwarranted criticism of all women (a topic I will take up later as I deal with the “Eve’s Apologie” section of the poem), Lanyer’s conflation of the torture endured by Christ in his Passion and the torture of those whose cries are ignored hints at the more misogynistic iterations within the stabat mater dolorosa and planctus Mariae traditions. When Lanyer extends the torturer subject position to include those who would doubt or criticize Marian grief, she implicitly references the iterations of the Marian devotional traditions that indulge in detailing and implicitly critiquing the excesses of her grief. As popular as the reverent descriptions of Marian devotion, examples of more misogynistic renderings of Mary’s compassion proliferated throughout the centuries. Bestul describes these versions as largely products of the male imagination. The assumed universal response from the original poem becomes less so as the genre proliferates into meditations on the excesses of Mary’s grief. While Anselm in 1104 dwells on her tears—“Domina mea misericordissima, quos fonts dicam erupisse de pudicissimis oculis… [My most merciful Lady, what can I say about the fountains that flowed from your most pure eyes…]—and Bonaventure in the mid-thirteenth century focuses on the extent of her sorrow—“Quae lingua dicere vel quis intellectus caperer sufficit desolationum tuarum pondus, Virgo beata?” [“O Virgin blest, what tongue could utter, what mind could grasp, the heaviness of your sorrow?”]—both writers reference in inability to actually connect with Mary. 213 The “who could not grieve with her?” question of the original is replaced with “what can I say about…?” and “what tongue could utter, what mind could grasp?” questions of the latter versions. And this disconnect between those who witness, Mary who witnesses Christ’s 213 Qtd. in Bestul 121-122. 205 suffering and the audience who witness Mary’s suffering, is further reified in versions from the later medieval period that display “an almost pathological description of Mary’s emotions” (qtd. Bestul 122). On one hand, the increased emphasis on the excesses of female mourning derives from the influence of the Stoics on the tradition and so, as Katherine Goodland argues, associates women with sinful despair. This critical association occurs even in the N-Town and York Plays that dramatize the otherwise action-propelling grief of the three Maries and Mary Magdalen (43- 51). But on the other hand, the iterations that dwell on Mary’s excesses of grief may do so for strategic reasons; Bestul argues, for instance, that her excesses suggest the need for patriarchal control of female mourning. In the Quis dabit tradition by Ogier of Locedio but attributed to Bernard, popular throughout the late middle ages, Mary is equal parts so passive and physically weak as to need help standing (an ironic reversal of the lyric “stabat mater dolorosa,” or “the sorrowful mother stands”) and so excessively emotional that she is “on the verge of lurching out of control” as Bestul articulates it (129). The text begins by describing Mary asking of herself, “What shall I do?,” dwells throughout on her outbursts, rending of hair, desire to be crucified alongside Christ, and ends with a description of her attempt to be buried alongside her son. 214 As typified in the Quis dabit, the later iterations of the tradition find the radical parity achieved through Mary’s identification with Christ and the audience’s identification with Mary increasingly troubling and ultimately repudiate it. Evidence of this trajectory in the tradition is implicit within Lanyer’s iteration of it in Salve Deus. From the outset, she imagines men unable to suffer alongside women—even Mary. 214 See Bestul’s descriptions of the treatise’s excesses, 128-32. 206 In fact, Lanyer may even have been familiar with the Quis dabit. Her section on the Daughters of Jerusalem may echo the fact that Ogier/Bernard addresses the Quis dabit treatise to the Daughters of Jerusalem: “O vos filie Ierusalem, sponse dilecte dei, vna mecum lacrimas fundite donec nobis noster sponsus in sua speciositate benignus et suavis appereat vel occurrat” [“O you daughters of Jerusalem, beloved brides of God, pour out your tears together with me until our bridegroom appears to meet us, sweet and kind in his beauty”]. 215 Unlike the invocations in the other versions of the stabat mater dolorosa tradition, the overtures of the Quis dabit make far less of Mary’s pedagogical grief. Instead of asking for guidance of Mary or Marian women to access feeling with Christ, the speaker in Quis Dabit presents it as a matter of course that the Daughters will perform their grief for him. And while the later versions of the tradition particularize more than universalize compassion by aligning it with excessive femininity, Lanyer’s version embeds a consciousness of that potential response in her poem; in fact, acknowledging Lanyer’s self-consciousness in this regard can help explain much of what seems so defensive about Lanyer’s posture throughout the poem. Lanyer embeds an awareness that some among her audience might doubt Mary’s display of grief. Seemingly anticipating audience scrutiny of Mary’s grief, Lanyer’s version asks a more defensive rhetorical question than the one in the original stabat mater dolorosa to engender audience compassion for Mary’s “griefes extreame”: How could she choose but thinke her selfe undone, He dying, with whose glory shee was crowned? None ever lost so great a losse as shee, Beeing Sonne, and Father of Eternitie. (1013-1016) 215 Qtd. in Bestul 128. 207 To combat possible attacks on Mary’s excessive grief, Lanyer appeals to Mary’s lack of choice in the matter. Instead of asking “who could not be sorrowful?” as the original lyric does, Lanyer asks, “How could a mother choose otherwise than grieve when she loses her son and God?” Lanyer’s alteration turns the religious experience of compassion inward for her audience; that is, if the original invites group solidarity through a universal response, Lanyer’s version invites introspection and demands an ethical response from her reader and Mary’s viewer. If the reader doubts the outward displays of grief Lanyer were detail, Lanyer’s framing emotional response through an appeal to individual choice requires the reader to consider Mary’s unique circumstances, the context of her response and the circumscribed agency that her context affords her. Lanyer invokes the reader’s ability and willingness (her “choice”) to inhabit the perspective of the person being observed grieving. As in Lanyer’s revision to Petrarchanism, this type of looking encourages the removal of boundaries between the viewer and the object of the gaze rather than further dividing them. In fact, directly after her reference to the tradition quoted above, Lanyer depicts Christ through Mary’ eyes as himself depicting Marian grief: How canst thou choose (faire Virgin) then but mourne, When this sweet of-spring of thy body dies, When thy faire eies beholds his bodie torne, The peoples fury, heares the womens cries; His holy name prophan’d, He made a scorne, Abusde with all their hatefull slaunderous lies: Bleeding and fainting in such wondrous sort, As scarce his feeble limbes can him support. (1129-1136) 208 The description of Christ’s suffering—his “fainting” and inability to support himself—recalls the Quis dabit depictions of Mary overcome by grief. If the witness would not doubt Christ’s pain, his “Bleeding and fainting” while being “Abusede with all their hatefull slaunderous lies” during his Passion, then s/he should also refrain from doubt of Mary’s expressions of grief (1131). To doubt either sufferer is to choose to further torment them instead of joining with them in compassion. But Lanyer’s description of a Marian Christ conflates the two beyond their shared compassion—she underscores the ways in which their pain at Calgary is tied to reproduction. In the art historical tradition, the depiction of Mary’s fainting next to the Cross, mirrored by Christ’s buckling as his dead body is removed from the cross, is called the “swoon” genre. 216 Animating the “swoon” tradition as well as Lanyer’s elaboration of the conflations between Mary and Christ in the above description are the connections between Mary’s Compassion and her birthing pains, which, absent at Christ’s birth, now come on at His death. The swoon genre thus literalizes Mary’s role as Mother of the Church, a role that stems from the descriptions of the Passion in John. According to John 19:26-27: “And when Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he said unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son. Then said he to the disciple, Behold thy mother: and from that hour, the disciple took her home unto him.” 217 Mary’s birthing pains stem from both her Son’s birth to eternal life and her adoption of John—her new son—at Calgary. 218 216 For more on this art historical genre, see Neff. See Kuchar for a discussion of the genre in Lanyer. McNamer suggests that women are especially poised for compassion through the visual realm because their “beholding” encompasses their greater ties to “holding” and caring for children and others. 217 I use the Geneva Bible translation. 218 See Duffy, McNamer, and Neff. Gallagher, in “Stabat Mater Dolorosa,” points out that in C.N.’s Our Ladie hath a new sonne, Mary’s birthing pains stem from her ‘new son,’ or John 209 While the kinship ties forged through fellow feeling can be viewed as merely spiritual— and indeed, there are many post-Reformation attempts to limit Mary’s motherhood to the symbolic register—many versions of the stabat mater dolorosa tradition, including Lanyer’s, insist upon Mary’s literal procreation at Calvary. 219 Rick Rambuss, in fact, views this type of procreation as queer. 220 In Lanyer’s version after all, it is Christ who acts as Mother Mary, experiencing “sharpest pangs” of birth: “His eyes with teares, his body full of wounds,” as “Sterne Death makes way that Life might give him place” (1157-9). 221 In depicting Christ’s Passion through reference to labor pains, Lanyer riffs on the Christian promise of Christ’s sacrifice: his painful death produces eternal life. But rather than claim the maternal procreative power for Christ over Mary, Lanyer is clear in linking the two of them in their shared and coequal maternal power. Since they both literally “procreate” through producing tears, the queer family they construct together literalizes the blurring of boundaries that is the goal of the stabat mater dolorosa tradition and thus can be viewed as the first microcosm of community built through modeling its pedagogy. Instead of literally and hetero-normatively birthing children, however, Christ and Mary births tears that connect them to one another in fellow feeling. In Lanyer’s hands, the relationship between Mary and Christ thus resists what Maggie Nelson, citing Susan Fraiman’s Cool Men and the Second Sex, terms as “the tired binary that places (188). I think the associations of emotion and childbirth in Mary’s Compassion may have something to do with the exposition of the term “pang” as both a sharp, physical pain and an emotional pain. 219 Brownlee disagrees with my contention here. Although she notes the literal maternal elements at work the poem, she insists that Lanyer’s project is one of spiritual maternity, as in the goals of priesthood (1319-20). See Kuchar for a discussion of the ways Lanyer re-appropriates the imagery of pregnancy from male poets like Philip Sidney as well as priests who use it metaphorically (63-6). 220 See Richard Rambuss, “The Straightest Story Ever Told,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17 no. 4 (2011): 543-73, for more on the atypical, queer family Mary’s adoption in John produces. 221 C.f. Brownlee, 1315, who connects Christ’s suffering to Mary’s maternity as well. 210 femininity, reproduction, and normativity on one side and masculinity, sexuality, and queer resistance on the other” (75; emphasis in original). Lanyer’s Mary is as queer, as revolutionary, and as normative as her Christ. Moreover, the non-normative procreative relationship between Mary and Christ illustrates an example of the queer ethical family Maggie Nelson articulates throughout The Argonauts: Lanyer’s depiction of Christian suffering “reminds us that any bodily experience can be made new and strange, that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no one set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical or the so- called normative” (72-3). Through literal tears—the physical manifestations and evidence of compassion—affective and familial bonds are engendered in the audience that beholds Christ’s and/or Mary’s suffering. Upon viewing this suffering, the Daughter’s of Jerusalem, Pilate’s Wife, and Lanyer’s readers in turn give birth to their own tears, which themselves have the potential to procreate. And the mater dolorosa tradition and its offshoots encode this procreativity. In the more erotically charged meditations on Mary Magdalene’s grief at the Passion, for example, her tears are explicitly linked to semen. 222 While Lanyer does not go so far as to explicitly link tears to semen, she does show that the tears of grief have the power to forge communities. In Lanyer’s hands, Mary’s tears, too, are procreative. When Mary performs her tearful Compassion in Lanyer’s description of the Passion, her tears are presented as celebratory and evangelical in their potential for community building. Rather than impugn Mary’s grief as indulgent as in other depictions of Marian Compassion, Lanyer insists that Mary’s tears “wash away [Christ’s] pretious blood” so that “sinners might not tread in vnder feet” as they gather on their way “To worship him” (1017-1019). In this way, Lanyer equates or even prioritizes Mary’s affective 222 See Goodland, 17 and 32. 211 expression to the blood sacrifice of Christ, suggesting that both contain the cleansing properties and community-constituting power of catharsis. 223 Both procreative, Christ’s sacrifice and Mary’s grief pave the way for Christian community building. As these examples illustrate, Lanyer’s contribution to the stabat mater dolorosa tradition is radical because it, at its core, refuses to align the more material aspects of Christianity with women. Instead, Lanyer associates the material excesses of grief and maternity with Christ as well as Mary, and so centralizes the material and fleshy aspects inherent to Christianity rather than sideline them by associating them with women only. As Lisa Lampert explains, the materiality of “Christian hermeneutical paradigms” encounters a pressure point in Mary: she is, after all, “the Jewish woman whose body is the site of the critical turn in the Christian narrative of supersession, the Incarnation, when the Word is made Flesh” (48). 224 Although this pressure point of materiality actually applies to Christianity more broadly since the Christ is the (Jewish) Word made flesh, Lanyer refuses to associate the negative implications of materiality with Mary, and by implication, women writ large. She reminds us instead that the fleshy, material, and incarnate God is the central tenant of Christianity. If Mary’s suffering leaves her tearful, fleshy, and arguably abject, so does Christ’s suffering leave him tearful, fleshy, and abject. Instead of this materiality being anxiety inducing, Lanyer demonstrates the ways in which compassionate materiality might be utilized as the very basis upon which community might be built. 223 See Shuger, The Renaissance Bible, 128-166, who argues for a discussion of notion of catharsis that is non-Aristotelian but rather linked to blood sacrifice in the Christian tradition. See Kuchar’s reading of this scene, wherein he mentions that Mary’s tears perform a gardening function, watering Christ who is the “Jessie floure and bud” (qtd. 59). 224 See Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). In her chapter 2, she details the importance of Jewish rebuttals to an incarnate God to early Christian doctrine and ideology. Her work broadly investigates the imbrication of misogyny and anti-Semitism in the medieval and early modern imagination. 212 “Eves Apologie” – Blurring Boundaries of Gender and Race Although perhaps not surprising, the intersubjective boundary blurring accomplished by contemplating Mary’s compassion has also long been used to shore up existing boundaries between certain groups—namely, Jews and Christians. 225 Despite Mary’s own status as a liminal figure—the Jewish female vessel through which the Word of God is made Incarnate—some iterations exploring Mary’s suffering at Calgary more or less explicitly condemn the Jews. The Stabat mater, rubens rosa, for example, mentions “Plebs tunc canit clamorosa: / ‘Cucifige, crucifige.’” While this could be translated as, “the crowd shouted raucously: ‘Crucify him, crucify him,’” Bestul, following Georges Duby, notes that plebs was a charged word during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: “increasingly, plebs was a term with perjorative connotations, as it was used by those who described society from a position of privilege to refer to all those who were not members of the dominant class…By the thirteenth century,” the time, I would add, the stabat mater dolorosa iterations proliferated, “plebs was undoubtedly a disparaging term, describing the unnoble and the subjected” (94). But other versions of the Passion were even more explicit in their condemnation of Jews: in Bonaventure’s Vitis mystica, for instance, Bonaventure speculates whether Christ’s bleeding face was caused by Jews who “tore his face with their fingernails” or “plucked his beard” off (qtd. Bestul 95). For my purposes in thinking through Lanyer’s retooling of the Passion genre, I want to draw attention to the first medieval Passion narrative to explicitly mention Jews, Ekbert’s 225 See Bestul’s chapter 3 for a historicized account of the ways in which Jews and Gentiles were either grouped or differentiated in their condemnation and torture of Christ. Although exceptions exist, Jews were increasingly blamed for Christ’s crucifixion over the medieval period. He also argues that the hostility towards the Jews in the Passion narratives likely relates to the “new realism of the Passion narratives” and the increased desire for bodily identification with Christ (79). 213 Stimulus amoris. Written c.1155 but popular in the 13 th century, Ekbert’s treatise characterizes the relationship between Christ and Judas as that of a “lamb” to a “wolf,” a nominative that would increasingly be associated with Jews in Passion narratives and elsewhere. 226 Lanyer participates in this trope in Salve Deus, referring to the Jewish betrayers of Christ as “The Jewish wolves, that did our Saviour bite” and later “Hel-hounds” (684, 689). However, while she, as Bowen states, “draws on the anti-Semitic rhetoric familiar in passion narratives…and nowhere discusses outright the idea that Jews might not be culpable, her shift from a religious or racial category to a gender category in attributing blame for Christ’s death has the effect of repositioning Jews in Christian theology” (291-2). Throughout the volume, Lanyer invokes Old Testament—read, Jewish—heroines, reclaiming them as female exemplars and members of her community of women; as Bowen has it, “Jewish women, at least by inference, are exonerated” from complicity in Christ’s crucifixion. Indeed, this seems to be the crux of Lanyer’s project: those who are willing to blur the boundary between self and other are Christlike, even if Jewish or Pagan or male, while those not willing to do so join the ranks of Christ’s torturers. Lanyer dramatizes the choice between compassion or withholding just before the Passion proper, in the “Eve’s Apologie” section, through the examples of Pilate and his Wife, pagans of different genders. First, it is worth noting how strange it is for Lanyer to include a defense of Eve’s committing original sin just before she narrates Christ’s Passion. In juxtaposing the two scenes, Lanyer argues that men’s collective guilt for the death of Christ exegetically counterbalances Eve’s individual guilt in bringing about 226 See Bestul, 85, for a large excerpt of the treatise. The lines of interest to me are: “O innocens ange dei, quid tibi et lupo illi? [O innocent lamb of God, why you and that wolf?].” The anti- Semitic characterizations proceed from here, but I quote this section in relation to Lanyer’s Passion narrative. 214 Original Sin. 227 But Lanyer also includes the defense of Eve before the Passion strategically, as an extreme example of the reading project she furthers throughout Salve Deus. If Pilate’s Wife, a pagan, can feel compassion for the Old Testament Eve, who not only is Jewish but who first committed the crime of Original Sin, then Pilate’s refusal of compassion for Christ is all the more damning of him. However much Pilate’s crime outweighs Eve’s, Lanyer refuses to delight in the ruin of men; instead of maintaining a kind of rivalry between the sexes, she asks for equality. Even though she marks that men have long used Eve’s part in Original Sin to condemn women as a whole, or “lay the fault on Patience backe, / That we (poore women) must endure it all,” she determines that women to ought not condemn all men on behalf of Pilate: “Let not us Women glory in Mens fall” (793-4, 759). Rather than continue to perpetuate rivalries between men and women, Lanyer asks that women’s subjection to men be reneged: “Then let us have our Libertie againe, / And challendge to your selves no Sov’raigntie” (825-6). She asks, “Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine / Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?” (829-30). Like the idyllic utopia of equal women in the dedication to Mary Sidney, Lanyer here gestures to a social order that would see men and women on equal footing in terms of sovereignty. When Lanyer through Pilate’s Wife sues for equal status between men and women on behalf of Eve and Christ, the reader should be reminded of Lanyer’s prose dedication, “To the Vertuous Reader,” the only gender-ambiguous dedicatory poem and the last before “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum” proper. In this section, Lanyer attempts to construct an ideal audience for her entire work by critiquing typical tendencies of both women and men to assign undue blame to 227 C.f. Bowen: “Despite its piety and focus on virtuous womanhood, Lanyer’s poem is essentially a polemic: like Rachel Speght’s Mouzell for Melastomus (1617), Salve Deus is a rereading of the Bible, here for the purpose of proving that it was men who were guilty of Christ’s death” (291-2). 215 women. Like her goal in “Eves Apologie,” her primary goal in the “Vertuous Reader” dedication is a defense of women in general, but this task is complicated by women who attempt “not only to emulate the virtues and perfections of the rest, but also by all their powers of ill speaking, to eclipse the brightnes of their deserved fame.” According to Lanyer such women, “forgetting they are women themselves, and in danger to be condemned by the words of their owne mouthes, fall into so great an errour, as to speake unadvisedly against the rest of their sexe” (48). By presenting her project as “polyvocal,” to use John Garrison’s term—Pilate’s Wife speaking on behalf of Eve and therefore all women, Lanyer demonstrates how women might join together to combat their tendency to turn against each other, “to speake unadvisedly against the rest of their sexe.” Lanyer in “To the Vertuous Reader” goes on to state that the censure of women by women merely contributes to men’s tendency to heap undue blame onto women. When such “evil desposed men” do so, however, Lanyer states that they are “forgetting they were borne of women, nourished of women, and that if it were not by the means of women, they would be quite extinguished out of the world, and a final ende of them all, doe like Vipers deface the wombs wherein they were bred, onely to give way and utterance to their want of discretion and goodnesse” (48). In this description, as in “Eves Apologie,” Lanyer recasts Original Sin as stemming from men’s indiscretion: instead of one woman, Eve, bringing about the Fall and thus condemning all women, men writ large act as satanic “Vipers” defacing the Edenic wombs of their mothers. When she refers to men’s “want of discretion and goodnesse,” Lanyer shrewdly suggests that their condemnation of women is a strategy: withholding compassion reifies hierarchies. Pilate’s Wife and the women who speak alongside her are willing to obliterate racial and gender hierarchies; Lanyer puts it to her “Vertuous Reader,” who may be male or female, to 216 decide if she or he is as well. Pilate, of course, chooses to withhold his compassion. When Pilate fails to be moved by Christ’s, Eve’s, and his wife’s examples, Lanyer envisions Pilate’s day of judgment as an inversion the stabat mater dolorosa tradition: “[Christ’s] blood, his teares, his sighes, his bitter groanes” will stand “witnesse” against Pilate (926). Redeeming Petrarchanism through Christian Tears If compassion can blur intersubjective boundaries and the production of tears can in turn produce communities such that even Eve might be redeemed, Lanyer’s model can productively be applied to the Petrarchan blazon tradition, reclaiming it as a means of performing Christian compassion. In fact, Lanyer prepares us for this early on in her poem, for, as I’ve already mentioned, the section, “An Invective against outward beuty unaccompanied with virtue,” likens Cleopatra to Eve when articulating the harms of physical beauty: What fruit did yield that faire forbidden tree, But blood, dishonor, infamie, and shame? Poore blinded Queene, could’st tou no better see, But entertaine disgrace, in stead of fame? (217-20) In her analogy, Lanyer compares Cleopatra’s adultery with Antony and betrayal of Octavia to Eve’s eating of the apple. Where Eve’s sin “lay a stain / Upon our Sexe,” Cleopatra’s misstep was “To stain thy blood, and blot thy royall name” (811-12, 222). Moreover, Lanyer links the two in terms of “blindness”—Cleopatra is the “Poore blinded Queene” and Eve “had no powre to see” (219, 765). The two are clearly linked in Lanyer’s mind through their initial fault and, perhaps more importantly, the vast implications of that fault. Therefore, if an apology can be urged for Eve, then so can Cleopatra be redeemed. She only needs to be shown how. 217 When Lanyer returns to Cleopatra after depicting multiple scenes of compassionate looking through the stabat mater dolorosa model, she is more explicit in her condemnation of the Egyptian queen, but note that this condemnation stems from Cleopatra’s refusal to blur the boundaries between her and others: “Shee (Cleopatra) left her Love (Antony) in his extremitie, / When greatest need should cause her to combine / Her force with his” (1411-3). Instead of suffering alongside him and thus blurring the boundary between self and other (“combining her force with his), Cleopatra leaves Antony “When his extreames made triall” and thus “did prove / Her leaden love unconstant, and afraid” (1420-1). 228 Associating Cleopatra’s physical beauty with her treatment of both Octavia and Antony as rivals, Lanyer‘s Cleopatra refuses to blur the boundary between self and other and thus precludes the possibility of spiritual transcendence. Lanyer offers a corrective to Cleopatra’s inconstancy and over-emphasis on physical beauty in her blazon of the beauty of Christ after the resurrection. However, the redemptive power of this blazon rests in its being viewed with Marian compassion. In the blazon, Christ’s beauty is associated with the women who behold him, blurring the boundary between subject and object, poet and muse, observer and observed. 229 In “A briefe description of his beautie upon the Canticles,” Lanyer blazons Christ: This is that Bridegroome that appears so faire, So sweet, so lovely in his Spouses sight, That unto Snow we may his face compare, His cheeks like scarlet, and his eyes so bright 228 I also find generative Bowen’s suggestion that Lanyer—as a Venetian transplant, of ambiguous ethnicity (i.e. ethnically Jewish)—might identify with Cleopatra. I think it less likely that Lanyer is constructing rivalries between “dark” Cleopatra and “fair” women than choosing to obliterate any rivalries through virtuous Christian compassion. 229 Wall also comments on the “deconstruct[tion]” of positions between “Other and Self, encoded male and female,” but ties that project to Lanyer’s positioning herself as an author (66). 218 As purest Doves that in the rivers are, Washed with milke, to give the more delight; His head is likened to the finest gold, His curled lockes so beauteous to behold; Blacke as a Raven in her blackest hew; His lips like scarlet threeds, yet much more sweet Than is the sweetest hony dropping dew, Or hony combes, where all the Bees doe meet; Yea, he is constant, and his words are true, His cheeks are beds of spices, flowers sweet; His lips, like Lillies, dropping downe pure mirrhe, Whose love, before all worlds we doe preferred. (1305-20) I quote in full to illustrate Lanyer’s playfulness here. She blazons Christ through the language of the Song of Songs, a description of the erotic relationship between a man and woman typically allegorized in the Christian tradition as describing the relationship between Christ and his Church. 230 Susanne Woods in her note mentions that line 1314 explicitly references a description of the Bride from the Canticles, suggesting that Lanyer’s Christ is feminized; but I contend that Lanyer means to capture the lack of gender specificity present in the original Canticles. Lanyer’s interest lies not in a specifically gendered Christ but in a gendered way of looking and being looked at. Capturing the spiritual beauty of Christ through a blazon of physical beauty doesn’t necessarily strip his power away from him, nor does it grant more power to the blazoner. Instead, 230 See Krier, “Generations of Blazons.” 219 this blurring of the boundaries between subject and object of the gaze actually occludes notions of difference all together. But crucially, Lanyer includes another scene of compassionate viewing to model how the blazon of Christ might virtuously be read. In the section “To my Ladie of Cumberland” that directly follows the blazon of Christ, Lanyer again conjures her patron to model for the reader and Cleopatra and Pilate how to look at and feel for Christ. In her address to Clifford, Lanyer conflates the literal Christ whom she just blazoned with Salve Deus itself, which she leaves within Clifford’s “heart”: in your heart I leave His perfect picture, where it shall stand, Deeply engraved in that holy shrine Environed with Love and Thoughts divine. (1325-8) Notions of “self” and “other” cease to exist as Christ forms a part of Clifford body. She then envisions Clifford in the act of reading her poem (also now engraved in her heart); conflating the poem with Clifford’s self and reading with compassion, Lanyer demonstrates how Clifford might restore Christ: There may you see him as a God in glory, And a man in miserable case; There may you reade his true and perfect storie, His bleeding body there you may embrace, And kisse his dying cheeks with teares of sorrow, With joyfull griefe, you may intreat for grace; And all your prayers, and your almes-deeds 220 May bring to stop his cruell wounds that bleeds. (1329-36) Lanyer explicitly links Clifford’s reading of Salve Deus with performing compassion via the stabat mater dolorosa. Reading and seeing Christ in the poem/in her heart morphs into embracing and physically weeping tears over the body of Christ. And these “teares of sorrow” that “kisse his dying cheeks” become the means by which Christ’s wounds are healed and Clifford’s sadness mingles with joy. And taken together with an introductory section of the poem, Lanyer envisions the attainment of joy through compassionate grief, the two emotions joining together and elevating each other just as Christ and Clifford do through the performance of the stabat mater dolorosa. Whenever Clifford finds her “sad Soule, plunged in waves of woe,” she need only look to Christ’s “all-reviving beautie” to “yield such joyes” (33-4). For the grieving tears that “plunge” Clifford in her “waves of woe” do not overwhelm her; rather, they are signs of her proximity to Christ: for not even Satan “can…quench in thee, the Spirit of Grace, / Nor draw them from beholding Heavens bright face” (39-40). In Lanyer’s hands, tears are aligned with everlasting beauty and a faith that cannot be “quenched.” Compassion for suffering produces transcendence just as appreciation of spiritual beauty produced everlasting life. Upon finishing reading Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, the reader sees that Lanyer has been modeling how to read compassionately throughout her volume. By eschewing the rivalries enacted by the Petrachan blazon tradition and instead urging greater avenues for connection through repurposing an even more compassionate iteration of the tradition that teaches compassion, Lanyer demonstrates how the suffering of self and others might be abated and beauty made transcendent. As I continue to think more about Lanyer’s volume, I want to consider that the community she builds through compassionate reading and seeing of self in another might offer a queer revision of the procreative Christian family that is neither anti-social 221 nor heteronomative. By explicitly isolating those moments within the traditions she revamps that are misogynistic and anti-Semitic, Lanyer ironically demonstrates that there is room for greater connection between individuals from various class and racial backgrounds as well as between the genders. These individuals need only to blur the boundaries that seem to divide them from others and instead emphasize the ways in which each might mirror or be a model for one another. And if they can do this, Lanyer suggests that the wonders of the Resurrection might be attained whenever the reader picks up her book and sees herself mirrored and modeled in it. Such wonders may be “more than man can comprehend,” for rivals oppose one another without enacting hierarchies: “Our Joy and Grief both at one instant fram’d, / Compounded: Contrarieties contend / Each to exceed, yet neither to be blam’d” (1218-20). Opposites like “Joy” and “Grief” can be “compounded,” just as Passion and Compassion, birth and death, and male and female are mingled for Lanyer’s Christ and Mary. This elevation of each rival in a dyad is only possible when the audience refuses misogynistic or racialized censure and rather commits that “neither” “contrarity” is “to be blam’d.” For if one is blamed over the other, as women have traditionally been blamed for Original Sin, and Jews for the torture of Christ, then neither is the transcendent beauty nor the immortal and redeeming compassion promised in Lanyer’s stabat mater dolorosa poem possible. 222 Conclusions: Lady Justice: Gender, Agency, and Allegory in the Legal Emblem Tradition My project urges a more nuanced understanding of the political work done by early modern representations of women. To augment my chapters that focus primarily on literary conventions and tropes of women, I will in the following section detail various attempts at allegorizing justice in the legal emblems of the period—a tradition that both casts a long shadow and epitomizes the fictional foundations upon which legal and political personhood are based. From this discussion, I will extrapolate briefly on the avenues for inquiry prompted by the project and my future plans to pursue those avenues. Saturated as we are with figures of Lady Justice—complete with her scales, her sword, and her blindfold—it hardly seems possible that such straightforward signifiers could point to anything more complex. The scales in her left hand symbolize the law—the tool by which she judges one side against another and the balance restored through her legal judgment; the sword in her right hand symbolizes deserved and righteous enforcement of the law; and her blindfold, perhaps most famous among her accouterments, symbolizes her impartiality to all who approach her. All together, these aspects speak to Lady Justice’s legitimate power and authority to adjudicate on behalf of law and justice. But, like all allegory, which, as Quintilian says, “presents one thing in words and another in sense,” visual allegory anticipates an authoritative interpretation; and because authoritative interpretations usually flatter those interpreters who have traditionally held power, the cadre of emblems of Lady Justice provides a fruitful ground for the interplay of productive misogyny. Looking closely at Lady Justice reveals that where she appears to wield the powers she represents—balancing opposing sides in her scales and punishing wrongdoers with her sword— her agency is only ever representative of the agency of others. The message that emblems of 223 Lady Justice promote is that justice is only ever accomplished allegorically—that is, through the interpretive acts of those who apply and enforce the law. This class of person has traditionally been occupied solely by aristocratic (and white) men. As such, I argue that Lady’s Justice’s most important attribute is her gender: her female form prompts the traditionally male viewer to perform acts of interpretation while it embodies/signifies the stakes of those acts. When, as I will demonstrate, Lady Justice or women attempt to act as agents of justice in the emblem tradition, other factors assemble to prevent justice from being done. Therefore, through the example of Lady Justice in the legal emblem tradition, a potent example exists of the means by which women are meant to merely represent political agency rather than actively participate in the political order. At first glance, of course, Lady Justice appears to be a goddess—a being usually endowed with inordinate powers. Whether she stands atop courthouses like the statue on London’s Old Bailey (see Figure 5) or is pictured among the clouds (see Figures 6 and 8 below), Lady Justice is meant to represent a divine sense of order that exists beyond the human attempts that can only approximate it. The divine status of Lady Justice derives from traditional Greek and Roman representations of Themis, the Titan who personifies divine order, good counsel, and natural law. “Themis” in fact translates to “divine law,” and the Titan’s symbol also inherited by Figure 5: Lady Justice on top of London's Old Bailey. Image by Simon Belcher, Getty Images. 224 Lady Justice—the scales of justice—represents the tool through which such divine order might be reached on earth. A closer look at the iconography associated with Lady Justice, however, reveals that the divine power she symbolizes is not hers to wield. And as it is in other allegories of virtues, her female form gestures to the discrepancy between the agency she allegorically represents—that belonging to the viewer—and her own agency. For instance, in Cesare Ripa’s depiction of “Divine Justice” in his collection of emblems first published in the 16 th century, the body of Lady Justice literally bridges the divine and human realm (see Figure 6). She sits with her head among the clouds and a dove “represent[ing] the Holy Ghost” and “the Globe of the World at her feet” (36). As the literal bridge between these spaces, her body forges the connection between divine justice and earth. And thus Lady Justice’s female form figuratively fulfills Robert M. Cover’s definition of “law.” Reconciling the paradoxically divine and material aspects of justice, Cover argues that law is best understood as “a bridge in normative space. It connects the world we have to a world we can imagine,” or the “world-that-is” to “worlds-that-might-be.” 231 As much as the tools pictured in the Ripa’s depiction of Lady Justice—the sword, the balance, the map—Lady Justice’s gendered body also serves as the means through which a higher order is approximated on earth. 231 See Robert M. Cover, “Bringing the Messiah Through the Law: A Case Study,” Nomos 30, Religion, Morality, and the Law (1988): 201-17; and “Folktales of Justice,” Capital University Law Review 14 (1985):179-203. Figure 6: Emblem from Iconologia, Cesare Ripa, 1709 (36R). 225 Indeed, any active agency allowed Lady Justice in the emblem tradition is highly gendered and intended for co-option by others. This tendency in the genre is especially pronounced in the first three emblems—all of which are devoted to Justice—in Pierre Coustau’s 1555 collection of legal emblems, Pegma. Coustau’s first emblem, called “Au simulachre de Justice, De Chrysippus,”is perhaps the most surprising in relation to traditional iconography of Lady Justice. In it, Justice is depicted as both a goddess and a nursing mother (see Figure 7). Instead of holding her conventional sword and balance in her right and left hands, her breasts are exposed to the twin nursing infants, which the accompanying poem allegorizes as referring to the sword and scales: “Dextra fovet bellum mamma, sinistra togam” [her right breast nurtures warfare, her left, the law]. More than a bridge between realms as in Ripa’s emblem, the female form in Coustau’s Mater Justitia serves as the conduit through which Divine justice becomes incarnate on earth. The emblem thus reconciles the tension in the practice of law that exists between the human, material realm and the divine, abstract realm. Through the image of a woman’s nourishing maternal body, that which is associated with female biology merges with that which is associated with the feminine Figure 7: Emblem from Pegma, Pierre Coustau, 1555 (a4r). 226 symbolically to encompass and seemingly reconcile the disconnect. Justice, the emblem suggests, does not exactly embody or produce divine order in the human realm. Rather, justice nourishes the growth and development of other more active agents of justice; that is, like a caring mother, justice nourishes warfare and law as if they were her (male) children. In the poem accompanying his emblem, Coustau registers this slip in his description of the agency Lady Justice employs: what are first conceived as maternal and material duties are repackaged as a genderless and more abstract activity such that all agency depicted in the emblem could be covered by men. Coustau first asks, “Quae Dea, quae…pia sollicitae munera matris obit?” [What goddess is this, who is…fulfilling the sacred duties of a devoted mother?]. And he answers, “Iustitia est penso chara perfuncta parentis” [Justice is fulfilling the obligation of a loving parent]. Through the figure of a woman, the idealized conception of law is preserved from its necessarily material and embodied nature in practice. Lady Justice’s female form thus symbolizes the materiality of law in practice while precluding her active and direct participation in the practice of law. It is warfare and law, after all, who will grow up to act, having been nourished and raised by their mother, Justice, to do so. This elevation of masculine agency relative to Lady Justice’s feminized and passive symbolic power is even more pronounced when the viewer of the emblem is learned, as is the assumed case throughout Coustau’s collection of over 180 legal emblems but especially in his second emblem. In this emblem, Coustau does much to differentiate between the human world and the divine, but instead of a focus on Justice’s maternal agency as a conduit, he suggests that it is the interpretive agency of learned men that produces justice on earth (see Figure 8). Called “Im sordide iudicantes” or “Against those who exercise corrupt justice,” Coustau’s second emblem depicts Lady Justice as a goddess in the heavens floating above a world largely barren 227 but for a single dejected tree. Justice carries a sword in her right hand and is trailed by a ribbon of cloth—called a “skarf” in the English emblem tradition, according to Goodrich—representing chance as opposed to the divine order Lady Justice represents. 232 Where lay readers could presumably gather the emblem’s superficial meaning—that it is best to trust to the divine to produce justice, however inscrutable it may be—Coustau also embeds a secret message to the learned that elevates them among his audience. The stars that flank both sides of Lady Justice promise the exercise of divine justice—if they can be read as such. The stars represent the constellations Libra and Leo, astrologically symbolic as the scales and lion, and thus reference the traditional tools of justice, punishment and law. And in the Latin poem accompanying the emblem, Coustau gives the learned reader another chance to arrive at this interpretation: “Qua locus ad library & radiantis membra leonis / Finditur [There a separate place is given her (Justitia) beside the Scales (Libra) and the limbs of the shining lion (Leo).” 232 See Goodrich 145. See also Woodbridge’s discussion of Fortune and Justice in relation to early modern revenge drama (English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (2010)). I will also discuss the relationship between chance and justice in Chapter 4. Figure 8: Emblem from Pegma, Pierre Coustau, 1555 (a6r). 228 Although the emblem overtly gestures to an inscrutable and distant divine female agent of justice, it also grants the authority to do justice to those capable of interpreting its esoteric signs in the natural world—be they written in the night skies or printed in a book. Where the body of Justice serves as the bridge between the divine and earthly realms in Ripa’s Divine Justice emblem and Coustau’s Mater Justitia emblem, Coustau’s second emblem invites the learned viewer himself to bridge the distance between the divine and earthly realms through his interpretive acts. In fact, the goddess in Coustau’s emblem only registers as Lady Justice if the viewer knows Latin and/or can recognize astrological signs, meaning that divine justice is only consciously accomplished on earth when an elite interpreter is around to read the proper signs. By the third emblem of Pegma, it is clear that Coustau finds women—even Lady Justice herself—incapable of doing the work of justice. In “Senatus Heliogabali. In iudices γυναικοκρατουµένους, & uxorio imperio viventes” [The senate of Heliogabalus. On (or against) judges in the power of their womenfolk, and those who live under the thumb of their wives], Coustau explores the limit case of symbolizing justice through female figures (see Figure 9). Before Lady Justice who sits at the center of the emblem, ladies sit in assembly, bickering and gesticulating rather than attend Lady Justice. The title of this emblem and the scene it depicts refer to a pseudo history of Roman Emperor Elagabalus (also know as Heliogabalus), who was famous for being both corrupt and henpecked by his mother and grandmother, whom he allowed to serve in the Senate. According to the Coustau’s interpretation of the history in the accompanying verses, listening to women in matters of justice is conflated with letting hordes of women, including strumpets, corrupt the hallowed halls of the Senate: Qui decreta vides muliebribus edita iussis, Totaque foemineos per for a stare greges, 229 Haec Phoenix quondam posuit monimenta sacerdos, Inter conscriptos addita scorta patres. [You who see decrees promulgated at the behest of women, And female crowds standing all around the forums [i.e. law-courts]: The Phoenician priest performed this public service [lit. set up this monument] once upon a time, That strumpets were included in the ranks of the conscript fathers [i.e. Senators]. Whether satirical or not, the emblem and poem serve as an encomium against women’s judicature in whatever form. For any amount of women’s political influence, the verse suggests, results in a female takeover of a sacrosanct male space. In the emblem, the ladies fill the senate, leaving no room for “conscript fathers.” Another injustice animating the emblem relates to the position of Lady Justice’s left hand on her womb: when women attempt to act in the political sphere, they do an injustice to their own female bodies. Coustau reuses this emblem near the end Pegma, where he makes the visual reference to pregnancy more explicit. In the later iteration of the emblem, the several poems that Figure 9: Emblem from Pegma, Pierre Coustau, 1555 (a8r). The same image recurs on V7v, p. 318. 230 accompany it are titled “In tempora & mores [on/against the times and customs],” refering to Cicero’s oration against Catiline, and “Mulier imperator, & mulier miles [The woman general and the woman soldier].” Copying the first lines of the three poems associated with the emblem should suffice to speak to the misogyny they encode: “Tota licet fatuis subsit respublica vulvis [Although the whole state may be swamped by empty wombs]”; “Creditur infelix stultis respublica vulvis [The commonwealth is thought to be unhappy in its foolish wombs]”; and “Publica si domini regerent moderamina cunni [If vaginas lorded it over the helm of state].” The takeaway from each poem is the injustice inherent when women attempt to act as agents of justice themselves or even take on actively political roles; when they do so, they are failing to fulfill their biologically determined role of reproduction. Where Lady Justice’s symbolic motherhood nurtured both warfare and the law in Pegma’s first emblem, here, her gesture to her midsection accompanied by her silence only draws attention to the empty gestures, empty wombs, and jabbering mouths characteristic of the women assembled around her. Taken together, Coustau’s three emblems of justice that begin Pegma suggest that Lady Justice serves best when her body symbolically nourishes the interpretive agency of men. To serve otherwise on her part is to commit injustice. While I in no way mean to excuse the misogyny that animates Coustau’s Lady Justice emblems, it must also be noted that the anti- feminist sentiments common in justice emblems stem from the fantasy that justice—a human construct—is also inviolate. A less-noted aspect of Lady justice’s divinity that speaks to the inviolability of justice is her virginity, a feature signaled in the iconography not only by her white robes but also by her blindfold. While most modern viewers Figure 10: Emblem from Iconologia, Cesare Ripa, 1709 (47R). 231 interpret the blindfold as symbolic of Lady Justice’s lack of bias, early modern interpreters who saw the proliferation of the blindfold in representations of justice would more commonly associate the blindfold with Lady Justice’s lack of passion—her lack of humors or her inability to be influenced by the humors she has. Both bias and passion are referenced in Cesare Ripa’s emblem of Justice, in which he describes her as “A Virgin all in white: blinded…The White shews that she should be spotless, void of Passion, without Respect of Persons, as she, being hoodwink’d, declares” (47; see Figure 10). The existence of justice depends on Lady Justice’s allegorical imperviousness to any influence that might sway her judgment—be it the influence of others or the influence of her own affections. 233 The fantasy of inviolability has gendered implications that justify barring women as agents of justice in the iconographic traditions. Juxtaposing Ripa’s emblem of Justice to his representation of Injustice reveals a gendered difference in the ways emblems represent an agent’s actions and its effects. Unlike the aspects of Justice that symbolize her passivity and lack of positive agency—she is “blinded,” “spotless,” “void of Passion,” “without Respect of Persons” (my italics)—the aspects of Injustice that symbolize his injustice are also depicted through implied action in the frame. Rather than “blinded” by an unknown agent, Injustice is “blind of the right eye,” a presumably conscious feature that “shews that he sees only with the left; that is, his own Interest” (41v; see Figure 11). And through his description of Injustice, Ripa strives 233 I will comment on a similar issue in Chapter 2, which explores the “stony justice” favored by Spenser in Book V of The Faerie Queene and The View of the Present State of Ireland. Law “ought to bee like stony tables, plaine, stedfast, and unmoveable” rather that up to the discretion of men who “may bee miscarried by affection.” The humanity (i.e. affections, openness to influence) of a judge therefore presents an impediment to his being an agent of justice. Figure 11: Emblem from Iconologia, Cesare Ripa, 1709 (41r) 232 to merely describe the figure symbolically, but action verbs animate the emblem: while he describes the “Tables of the Law all broken to pieces, on the Ground,” he also implies it is Injustice himself who actively “tramples on the Balance” (41v). The viewer can similarly imagine that Injustice himself is the reason his “white Garment” is “full of spots,” for he holds “a Sword in one hand and a Goblet in the other.” Drinking while fighting is a recipe for soiled garments. Unlike Justice’s iconography, therefore, Injustice’s bespeaks a causal relationship between act and representation: his garment is full of pots because he has stained it; the symbols of law are broken because he has trampled them. But in the case of Ripa’s Justice and many other examples in the tradition that depict the virtue as female, the possibility of corruption could stem from anywhere and could impact Lady Justice no matter her complicity in the acts of corruption. For this reason, the emblem tradition prompts the viewer to defend Lady Justice at all costs from acts that would violate the fantasy of her inviolability, even her own passions, actions, and judgment. For the allegory of the emblem tradition constructs a logical tautology: Lady Justice cannot defend herself dispassionately; justice cannot justly defend justice. Lady Justice can only be manipulated or honored. A consideration of emblems that attempt to represent attempts to corrupt justice can help me make this point. Such cases usually either present the agent who would corrupt justice as a clown fooling Figure 12: Woodcut from This present boke named the shyp of folys of the worlde, Sebastian Brant (London: Richard Pynson, 1509) 233 himself into a fantasy of his own power or refer to female corruption, specifically through the goddess Fortuna and the false, human attempts at justice she represents, to suggest that true justice can never be corrupted. The former case can be glimpsed in one of the oldest printed depictions of Lady Justice, in Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools. In this image, Brant depicts Lady Justice seated as she seemingly consents to be blindfolded by a clown (see Figure 12). A surface level reading of the woodcut suggests that Justice is vulnerable to manipulation: a clown can blind Lady Justice and therefore prevent her from knowing how she wields her tools in the name of justice, the sword and scales. But read in light of Brant’s vocation as a lawyer and the satirical nature of his text, the woodcut suggests a more nuanced interpretation: perhaps it is the clown, and not Justice, who is blind, even as he attempts to blindfold her and even as she consents to that fate. Lady Justice in the woodcut may appear to be vulnerable to the clown’s control, but the image animates a visual tautology: only a fool would conclude as much. The clown may be blinding Justice, but his gaze also tracks out the open and unbarred window in the left side of the frame and away from the barred window behind him, which represents the inscrutable and inviolate power of God. While Lady Justice’s literal blindness does not preclude the possibility of divine justice, the Clown’s figurative blindness points him towards an unknown and blank future. The idea that God’s power subtends all worldly attempts at justice can be Figure 13: Emblem from Pegma, Pierre Coustau, 1555 (L6r). 234 further gleaned by considering Lady Justice in light of her worldly cousin, Fortuna. As hinted at in my discussion of Ripa’s images of Justice’s inviolability and Injustice’s corruption, in the visual tradition, the distinction between worldly and divine justice finds animation through reference to the corruptible and corrupting—and often female—body. Consider, for example, Coustau’s emblem, “Contra veteres, nullam Fortunam esse ex Augustino [Against the ancients, there is no such thing as Fortune, after Augustine]” from Pegma (see Figure 13). In it, Coustau depicts a naked woman hanging opposite a wheel, both symbolic of Fortune and the goddess Fortuna. Especially in the emblem tradition but also more broadly, symbols of chance like a gambler’s dice, Fortuna’s wheel, or Fortuna’s indiscriminate sexuality, were often understood as human versions of justice in contrast to those more measured symbols of divine justice like the balance or scales—quite literally tools for measurement and objective and unchanging judgment. In Coustau’s emblem, Fortuna and her wheel appear level despite a significant difference in height, their positions mirroring each other as they hang from the framed structure. The two are in fact in a visual balance: the breasts of the lady form a line with the eye of the wheel, an equivalence reinforced as each figure hangs off of one of the two arms of the “Y” of the gallows. And in the accompanying poem, the connection between the sexualized lady and her randomizing wheel is only reinforced. Although Coustau identifies the lady not as Fortuna, but as Nemesis, both are close cousins and symbolic of human systems of justice—random chance and retributive vengeance. Of the image, Coustau states: Aspice ut in nostris pendet Rhamnusia furcis Et recipit sceleri debita pensa suo. Quaeque olim (si diis placeat) confecit utranque Paginam, apud Gallos ultima fata luit. 235 Quid tibi Fortunae curae est rota mobilis? illi Quid tecum est? sapiens solus Apud te habita [Look how Nemesis hangs in our gallows and takes the retribution owed for her crime. She who once (if it pleased the gods) filled both sides of the account, has paid her final debt here in France. Why are you worried about the unpredictable wheel of Fortuna? What is that to you? Live wisely in your house unencumbered]. Through allusions to various systems of human accounting—crime and punishment, two column accounting, and debt repayment—Coustau implies that attempts at vengeance (symbolized by Nemesis) and trust in chance (symbolized by Fortuna’s wheel) cancel each other out, leaving divine justice to trump all. Any worldly attempts at justice merely bring about death, evidenced in the emblem by the skull to the side of the gallows. Dead, Fortuna can no longer bestow her favor at all, let along indiscriminately; and similarly, the wheel of fortune hangs fixed, no longer able to turn. All the while, the stable and unmoving gallows form a set of scales that are always in balance, symbolic of divine order and balance without respect to worldly matters. As Brant’s and Coustau’s emblems suggest, the female form is not enough to signify truly inviolate justice. Even Lady Justice herself, as in Brant’s version, requires a divinely inscrutable and necessarily masculine order to buttress the justice for which her female form stands. 236 Drawing from this rich iconographic tradition and taking its latent gender and sexuality themes to their logical and misogynistic conclusions, the punk artist Banksy brings the goddess down from the skies to the ground in his 2004 piece in Clerkenwell Green. Made of solid bronze and weighing 3500 kg, Banksy’s modernized Lady Justice in an almost exact copy of Lady Justice that tops the Old Bailey (see Figure 5). Banksy’s version, however, holds the sword in her left hand and the balance in her right. And more shockingly, Banksy’s Lady Justice is revealed to be a whore—specifically, a stripper with thigh-high boots and an American dollar tucked into her garter (Figure 14). And I will use words like “whore” and “prostitute” here instead of “sex worker,” a term preferred by most laborers in that industry, because I see in Banksy’s piece only disdain for that profession. In a statement read by rapper MC Dynamite at the installation’s unveiling, Bansky pointedly only views Lady Justice’s gender and sexuality symbolically, declaring the piece, “A brand new monument for London,” one “dedicated to thugs, to thieves, to bullies, to liars, to the corrupt, the arrogant and the stupid.” 234 Presumably, sex work symbolically 234 Ian Youngs, “Guerrilla artist in statue stunt,” BBC News Wednesday, August 4, 2004. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3537136.stm> Figure 14: "Banksy - CND Sculpture Unveiling," Getty Images, Graeme Robertson 237 stands in for all crimes and corruption in London. According to the artist, the event was planned to mark the anniversary of the death of Kevin Callan, who in a miscarriage of justice was charged in 1991 with a crime he did not commit—the death of a four-year-old in a lorry accident—and jailed until 1995 when his conviction was overturned. Corresponding to that injustice, Banksy’s words about the statue in its unveiling register disdain for the legal system that could allow it: “It’s the most honest depiction of British Justice currently on display in the capital…I hope it stays there for good…We are learning that the people we trust with our liberty cannot be trusted.” And accordingly, the monument upon which his Lady Justice stands features a plaque with the phrase, “TRUST NO ONE” engraved into it. Lady Justice appears to be just, but beneath her robes, she is mercenary and promiscuous—even worse than Fortuna. But taking into account the commonplace of the justice emblem tradition to elevate the interpretive agency the viewing audience, Banksy’s critique of the justice system seems a bit flat and self-serving. Ostensibly, Banksy’s Lady Justice piece proclaims that those in charge of the British Legal system are turning Lady Justice into a prostitute. But in constructing that message, Bansky makes a move similar to Coustau’s in his second emblem of Pegma (see Figure 8), in which Coustau elevates his own vocation of lawyer to a quasi-divine status as the interpreter of divine signs. That is, according to Banksy’s message, Lady Justice has been corrupted, and Banksy is the gutsy mediator between realms who reveals this corruption to the masses in an impressive stunt. After all, in pulling the installation off, Banksy not only maintained his famous anonymity and secretly maneuvered a nearly four ton statue into a public green in London, but he also emphasizes in the piece itself the elite agency of the artist: Lady Justice’s robes are pulled back as if by magic to reveal her corruption, a feature that can only signify the agency of the artist who designed the piece and had the bronze cast just so. Moreover, the installation event 238 itself was designed to bring attention to Banksy himself. While the 2004 date may have been the anniversary of Callan’s death, the location for the event was chosen because it was the site of Banksy’s last arrest. Given these not-so-subtle paeans to himself as the piece’s artist, the plaque’s directive to “TRUST NO ONE” presumably implies in a wink to the audience, “TRUST NO ONE EXCEPT BANKSY.” Besides the self-serving nature of Banksy’s Clerkenwell Green piece, I find disappointing Banksy’s continuance and even doubling down on the misogynistic trend in the emblem tradition that bars women and Lady Justice herself from exercising and controlling her own legal/political agency. However, there are moments in the tradition that consider alternative scenarios. An emblem from lawyer Guillame de la Perrière’s La Morosophie, in fact, ironizes the conventional iconography of Justice and points out that it is perhaps not Lady Justice who cannot act as an agent of justice, but rather her audience who refuse to allow her to do so (see Figure 15). Barthélemy Aneau recycles this emblem a year later in his collection of legal emblems, Jurisprudentia. In Aneau’s version, he nominates the deific figure at the center of the emblem Justitia. And, as in Perrière’s version, she stands among an assembled group of men. She holds a book in her left hand from which she reads and gestures with her right hand, symbolic of the law and her juridical power, respectively, as the balance and sword signify in the conventional iconography of Lady Justice. But other iconographical norms in Perrière and Aneau’s depiction of Justice are ironized: instead of blindfolding Justice, Perrière and Aneau blindfold the male lawyers assembled around her. While allegorically, the emblem suggests lawyers’ potential to commit injustices even in the pursuit of justice, I would also urge the paramount importance of the scene’s gender dynamics. It seems that when Lady Justice rivals the lawyers as an agent of the law rather than 239 merely its signification to be interpreted, male lawyers stumble blindly and become representations of injustice. According to Goodrich, these dynamics recall a common anecdote traded among Renaissance lawyers: the story of the daughter of Accursius, the author of the early legal treatise, Glossa ordinaria. Accursius’ daughter, so the story goes, was a gifted interpreter of the law who desired to teach like her father; but because of her gender and her beauty, she was made to do so behind a screen or, in some versions, covered with a veil. 235 This precaution not only protected her students from distraction, in shielding them from their own amorous desire for her, but it protected the law itself. For, the story presumes, if issuing from the mouth of a beautiful woman, the intricacies of the law could not be communicated effectively. The law students would not be able to hear and learn from Accursius’ daughter, no matter her expertise or ability to communicate it. But while I certainly allow for the possibility of Goodrich’s interpretation of the Accursius story and reading of the emblem, I would also urge that the assembled and blinded lawyers may also exhibit the complicity I referred to in the introduction, citing Bourdieu, of those who wield symbolic power and simultaneously “do not want to know that they are subject 235 See Goodrich 158. He takes his version of the anecdote from a treatise defending Mary Queen of Scots—John Leslie’s A Defense of the Honour of the Right Highe, Mightye and Noble Princess Marie Queene of Scotlande and Dowager of France, fol. 193r (London, Dicaeophile 1569). Figure 15: Emblem from Guillame de La Perrière, Morosophie, 1553 (D5v). 240 to it or even that they themselves exercise it.” 236 The men around Lady Justice are complicit in their own blinding; they are unable to hear Lady Justice adjudicate in part because at some level they refuse to do so. I read this emblem in line with others that suggest the complicity of the artist in the representations s/he creates and the subsequent implications of those representations. The legal emblem tradition in fact encodes a meta-awareness of its status as fiction—its artists encode a meta-awareness of their status as fiction-makers. Throughout this discussion, I have made use of several emblems from Coustau’s Pegma collection. The title of that work refers to specifically to theater: “pegma” refers to the machinery that raises and lowers actors and props on a stage during a performance. The emblems explicitly proclaim themselves as works of fiction to be interpreted, much like law is to be interpreted by lawyers. Despite attempts to encode aspects of the divine within human constructions of justice, those constructions remain inherently human—the product of the men that produce them. In this light, an image from Guillame de la Perrière’s La Morosophie is appropriate (see Figure 16). In it, a sculptor creates an image of Lady Fortune with a chisel and hammer; lying at his feet are tools for measurement—tools similar to the woodworking tools the artist who created the woodcut likely used. Like the artist who created the woodcut, the artist in the emblem sculpts Fortune according 236 Bourdieu’s “On Symbolic Power,” (164-6). Figure 16: Emblem from Morosophie, Guillame de La Perrière, 1553 (M2v). 241 to his own specifications. If Fortune is naked and blind, the emblem suggests, it is the artist that makes her naked and blind. 237 He has an investment—financial and otherwise—in doing so. Because these artistic conventions are inherently fictional, however, they and the politics they invoke have the potential to change course, as I have argued throughout “Productive Misogyny.” After all, as the poem paired with the woodcut says, “Scultpor…e quovis simulacrum fingere trunco / Est Potis, instructa sic operante manu [A sculptor is able to make an image out of any piece of wood, for his trained hand works this way].” If the artist’s hand excels at producing art it has been trained to produce, then it can potentially train itself to produce other images and other conventions—the artist need only be invested enough to alter his conventional practices. Although each fictional representation of a woman often reifies conventional fictions of women, the potential to augment this history always exists because the constructions always already are understood as fictional. In its meditation on the fictional foundations of the legal system, the legal emblem tradition also suggests the limitations of gendered fictions even as it invokes them. Like all fictions, gendered fictions may reveal the willful and strategic blindness of the artist as well as those for whom he crafts his art. Faced with a virginal and blind version of Justice in need of the protection of a learned lawyer on one hand and a sighted and speaking agent of justice eager to compete with men in interpreting the law on the other, artists and audiences of the legal emblem traditions have typically preferred the former to the latter. But that does not mean that conventions cannot change. According to Sir Edward Coke in his 1602 pamphlet on common 237 My reading of the image accords with and extends that of Goodrich, 176-7. 242 law, Second Part of the Reports: “hominis vitium, non professionis [men err but law never].” 238 The legal system’s definition of agency is largely genderless, thus providing a means—even if impaired by societal constraints—through which true equality across all gender categories might one day be reached. And I for one find it inspiring that a sex worker—Stephanie Clifford, whose professional name is Stormy Daniels—is the face of a legal case against the man holding the highest office in the United States. This woman who earns money in part by defying societal consensus over what constitutes women’s worth is also a political agent actively pursuing a more just social order. I want end my discussion of emblems of justice with one that references the innately human capacity—regardless of gender—to create and potentially reify conventional fictions of personhood. In this image, from Barthélemy Aneau’s 1554 Jurisprudentia, Aneau depicts Deucalion and Pyrrha from Ovid’s creation myth from Book I of Metamorphoses (see Figure 17). 239 After the flood that devastates the world’s population, Deucalion and Pyrrha are the only humans 238 My reading is in line with Goodrich, 157. For more on Coke’s tract, see The Struggle for Sovereignty: Seventeenth-Century English Political Tracts, 2 vols, ed. Joyce Lee Malcolm (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999). Vol. 1. 239 Golding, Arthur. Ovid’s Metamorphoeses. Ed. John Frederick Nims. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000. Figure 17: Emblem from Jurisprudentia, Barthélemy Aneau, 1554 (9). 243 left. Confronting the devastation of the human race, the pair in Arthur Golding’s 1567 English translation worry that “Mankinde (alas) doth onely now within us two consist, / As mouldes whereby to facion men” (429-30). They pray to Themis, the titan who represents divine justice, for answers. They not only want to know “how the losse that on our kinde befell,” but how that loss “May now eftsoones recovered be”; moreover, they ask for her to “helpe us to repaire the world, which drowned under waves doth lie in great dispaire” (448-50). Faced with the divinely ordained devastation of the human race, Pyrrha and Deucalion worry how best to repopulate the world. If they look within themselves as models, they may risk perpetuating the original problem that so infuriated Jove that he brought on the flood. “Moved with their sute,” Themis tells them to “Go hille (cover) your heads, and let your garmentes slake, / And both of you your Graundames bones behind your shoulders cast” (452-3). Aneau’s emblem depicts not only Deucalion and Pyrrha’s supplication to Themis in its upper left corner but also their pair’s interpretation of her cryptic advice. They determine that their “Graundames bones” must be the stones of the earth; and when they toss those stones over their shoulders, they find their reading was correct: “The mankind was restored by stones, the which a man did cast. / And likewise also by the stones the which a woman threw, / The womankind repayred was and made againe of new” (490-2). In Aneau’s depiction, the stones the pair throws behind them similarly repopulate the earth with humans. In this story, I find a warning about the potential glories and dangers of allegorical interpretation. Like the flood in Lyly’s Galatea, the text with which I began in the introduction to the dissertation, the flood in the Deucalion and Pyrrha myth provides an opportunity to reconsider existing principles of social order. The flood that killed all their fellow humans aroused in Deucalion and Pyrrha an anxiety as they considered whether their examples serve as 244 the best model or “moulds” from which to “fascion” the human race. But by turning to allegory, the pair retools their “Graundames bones” as stones, an interpretation not only sidesteps a desecration, but also becomes a vehicle for the pair’s self- and artistic proliferation. This act of interpretation and artistry promises a new order: the stones are described “like to Marble” from which “the Carver by his Arte” might fashion “ymages new drawne and roughly wrought” (483- 4, my italics). Instead of risking the return to the original and corrupt order, the pair turns to a Lady Justice for help and ultimately eschews sexual reproduction, opting instead for gender- neutral tools to reproduce themselves. By throwing stones—by interpretive acts—Deucalion and Pyrrha make exact models of themselves, the type of people who consider the justice of their creations rather than just privilege the act of creation. And similarly, as I have argued throughout “Productive Misogyny,” there exists a tendency in canonical literature to use stock conventions about women in conventional ways, and thereby proliferate the same kinds of stories over and over without considering the justice of that repetition. However, each time such reproduction of tropes occurs, it has the potential for a conscious and strategic meditation on the political implications of allegorizing one’s “Graundames bones” into art—a conclusion that Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Lanyer each ultimately reach in their works as I have shown in each of my chapters. These thinkers, like Pyrrha and Deucalion in Ovid’s origin story, explore the extent to which stories should privilege a genderless sense of societal justice just as much as a repopulated earth. They consider whether interpreting one’s Graundame’s bones as stones is worth the implications of tossing them. And they come again and again to the question at the heart of “Productive Misogyny”—whether stories of a desecrated female ancestor is the Ur- fiction that produces all other fictions. 245 In answering Eve Sedgwick’s call for a study of misogyny as a site of “intractable, highly structured discursive incoherence at a crucial node of social organization,” “Productive Misogyny” augments our historical understanding of the extent to which gender and early modern fictions of personhood inform our conception of the social contract. It argues that a focus on misogyny brings into greater relief the centrality of a communally and relationally constructed self at that crucial historical moment when theories of individual autonomy and subjectivity were beginning to take shape. And it urges the importance of an ethical and historical grounding to current debates over queer futurity. In my future explorations of these ideas, I am committed to proceeding as John Bossewell’s Lady Justice does in his Workes of Armorie, with her scales in a defensive position—on a shield—in her right hand and with her eyes open (Figure 18). Figure 18: Emblem from Workes of Armorie, John Bossewell, 1572 (fol.5r). 246 Works Cited Adelman, Janet. “Bed Tricks: On Marriage as the End of Comedy in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare’s Personality, Ed. Norman Holland, et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, 151-74. Adelman, Janet. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This project asks a simple yet unexplored question: why does misogyny so often materialize in medieval and early modern conceptions of a just social order? Thinking of justice, it turns out, means thinking through misogyny. In exploring the reasons for this link, I argue that misogyny offers surprising ethical and political philosophical opportunities to explore gendered constructions of personhood. Specifically I reveal how authors ranging from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, including Chaucer, Gower, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Aemilia Lanyer, appropriate conventionally misogynistic figures to rethink radically the ethical and political capacities of personhood, and therefore justice, in society. ❧ ""Productive Misogyny"" is interested in the distinctly gendered limits of political and personal sovereignty, concerns which later social contract theorists like Hobbes and Locke would for the most part bypass in their conception of the individual and the social contract. The project expands on such discussions, however, in two ways. First, even as I urge the inclusion of fictive and imaginative literary works in the disciplines of political and moral philosophy, my project expands the scope of such debates by emphasizing the influence of the medieval period. ""Productive Misogyny"" demonstrates the long resonance of medieval fictions—including stock conventions for character and plot—in political theory. Second, my methodology suggests the value in turning from the productive but arguably confining use of psychoanalytical models to a more historical and specifically literary method. Where psychoanalysis has contributed much to our understanding of the ambivalence with which women were held in early modern society, my project uncovers the capacities of character that would have resonated with early readers and audience goers: specifically, I contribute to uncovering of the understudied role of allegory in shaping gendered notions of personhood and the social order.

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From the hellmouth to the witch's cauldron: cooking and feeding evil on the early modern stage

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Creator Herrold, Megan (author)

Core Title Productive misogyny in medieval and early modern literature: Women, justice, and social order

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/20/2020

Defense Date 04/12/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag allegory,bed trick,bed-trick,Chaucer,early modern literature,feminism,feminist theory,gender,Gender Studies,Gower,Justice,lanyer,loathly lady,medieval literature,misogyny,OAI-PMH Harvest,queer theory,Renaissance literature,Shakespeare,social order,Spenser,Women

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Language English

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Advisor Lemon, Rebecca (committee chair), James, Heather (committee member), Rollo, David (committee member), Smith, Bruce (committee member), Velasco, Sherry (committee member)

Creator Email meganlherrold@gmail.com,mherrold@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-22560

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Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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