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Article Excerpt
WELL OVER FIFTY YEARS AGO, E. R. Curtius demonstrated that the literary arts of the late Middle Ages emerged from the persuasive branch of the trivium. (1) Since that time, however, few scholars have explored the Elizabethan court comedy as an exemplary genre designed to convince the monarch to adopt a specific course of domestic policy. Instead, the court comedy has been treated as an amalgam of masque and moral interlude to be interpreted as an imprecise roman a clef subject to exegesis as psychomachia--or, in more pejorative terms, a petty, overintellectual, and static form of drama whose characters drawn from myth and history must be treated as satirical reflections on Elizabeth's courtiers or as personifications of intellectual abstractions locked in ethical debate. (2) Dissatisfied with the working conditions this attenuated genre description has imposed on the study of drama and Renaissance politics, Shakespeareans have embraced recent but misguided attempts to free Shakespeare's comedies from having to be treated as courtly. This study of A Midsummer Night's Dream is offered as both correction and consolation: it clears away the entanglements of a century and a half of a misguided use of the archive by showing that Elizabethan comedies written for the court could and did advise on policy once the monarch placed the dramatic action in its proper time and place.
The generic description of the court comedy as an allegorical form of drama began well over a century and a half ago. Dissatisfaction with the findings only expanded the types of allegories allowed. N. J. Halpin's 1843 essay Oberon's Vision in A Midsummer Night's Dream, itself a response to Warburton's gloss on "the little western flower" in act 1, scene 2, of A Midsummer Night's Dream, popularized the practice of searching for references to Elizabethan courtiers in Elizabethan court comedy. (3) The methodology became an identifying marker of Lyly studies when R. Warwick Bond continued the process of finding equivalences in his 1902 multivolume edition of John Lyly's works. (4) Despite Bond's use of Halpin's methodology to discuss Endimion, Bond disagreed with Halpin's identifications of Eumenides, Corsites, Panelion and Zontes, Tellus, Semele, and Bagoa, and had doubts about Floscula. (5) Dissatisfaction with contentious identifications that could never be confirmed led G. K. Hunter in his 1962 book John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier to adopt a more flexible approach. Reasoning that "the court play often approximated to the court masque," (6) Hunter quoted Francis Bacon's "Of Masques and Triumphs" to prove "court plays were an occasion for court spectacle," (7) and adopted synchretic and evolutionary reasoning to conclude, "what the humanists did was convert the old fertility figures into classical deities or court-of-love abstractions. (8) Hunter's evolutionary theory of religion licensed him to treat several other allegorical senses beyond the topical; the court drama remained courtly so long as all of these meanings could be centered around the Queen.
Hunter's book encouraged later critics to describe the court comedy as analogous to the morality play--a genre of debate between personifications of abstractions. David Bevington's 1966 essay "John Lyly and Queen Elizabeth: Royal Flattery in Campaspe and Sapho and Phao" provided a model of rhetorical structure in which a refutation of the topical historical equivalence preceded a shift into a discussion of how the comedy induced an allegorical mode of thinking in the Queen. (9) Peter Saccio's 1969 book, The Court Comedies of John Lyly: A Study in Allegorical Dramaturgy, sought to clarify that Lyly's comedies were not allegorical per se, but rather material for exegesis, invoking a "mode of literary operation, a stimulation of the larger senses of meaning from the literal sense of the play." (10) In defining court comedy as an allegorical genre in which the "thematic interest predominates over the mimetic interest," (11) Saccio, like Hunter before him, extended his analysis of John Lyly to characterize all comedies performed at court. This trend was given the color of historical fact in John Weld's 1975 book, Meaning in Comedy, which imagined an unbroken linear continuum from exegetical treatments of Classical literature, figurative treatments of the Bible, morality play psychomachia, and semantic complexity of far-fetched metaphors discovered in Elizabethan court comedy. To justify his allegoresis without validating it with reception evidence, Weld followed his claim that "Renaissance mythology ... was dense with potential significance" with the parenthetical conclusion, "(Surely the statement needs no defense and illustration at this late date), and for spectators educated in the lore of the mythographers other meanings can be postulated." (12) Such apologies licensed exegesis. In his discussion of Endimion, C. C. Gannon invoked Neoplatonic ideas of the soul to imagine the play as an allegory of the soul's union with the body and its attraction to the divine. (13) Celebrating Endimion as an enigma because scholars could not pinpoint its correspondences allowed Robert Knapp to contextnalize its scenes with emblem books and thereby pronounce that "Endimion's private history must reenact the history of mankind." So imagined, the play as a whole becomes, to our surprise, "a vision of the ultimate reformed society; it shadows a New Jerusalem on earth." (14)
Turning away from biblical exegesis and emblem books as the means to understand court comedy, critics exploring festive themes adopted an approach more grounded in seasonal time. Northrop Frye's seasonal approach to genre pervades this style of reasoning. (15) Because seasonal rather than historical time established the most important temporal context, critics were encouraged to see the metaphors, mythology, and dance in court comedy as generically comparable to the masque, which might be performed in another year on the same occasion, despite the masque's emphasis on aristocratic disguisings. The shift allowed the mythological comedy and the masque to be compared solely as vehicles of emotional manipulation: the masque's transparency of characters that made it a ceremony of aristocratic homage was lost in the comparison. Northrop Frye's 1976 essay, "Romance and Masque," characterized the stage romance a "people's masque" that opposed two worlds to each other, and, in the manner of the masque, brought the action to a harmonious concord. (16) Marie Axton's 1977 essay "The Tudor Mask and Elizabethan Court Drama" discussed the mythological pattern of Lyly's Endimion in relation to masques from the Henrician period, insisting that "because critics have insisted upon equating Cynthia's courtiers with historical people, the play's pattern has been obscured." (17) The focus on seasonal time allowed Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz to treat John Lyly's Midas as an allegory of Epiphany, (18) while the focus on happy endings allowed Eugene M. Waith to title his article "The English Masque and the Functions of Comedy" without ever making a distinction between the two courtly genres. (19)
Today, the supposed similarity between masques and comedies inflects the way literary history is taught. Lloyd Davis in 1995 imagined that "Lyly's work forms a midpoint between sixteenth-century disguisings and seventeenth-century masques, adopting allegorical patterns of praise and mythological celebration that later authors would imitate and develop." (20) Objectively considered, however, the paradigm only sustains itself by normalizing to the genre of court comedy masque-like conventions (21) and explaining away negative evidence. Because the non-masque-like court comedies Measure for Measure or The Merchant of Venice do not satisfy the existing genre description, they are described as "Problem Comedies" and thus dismissed as generic abberrations.
The limited utility of the seasonal approaches to Renaissance literature led critics back to the search for the historical context of court comedy. For some, this renewal of interest in historical context has meant greater attention to the whole body of work of the playwright. In his 1992 review of Lyly criticism from 1969 to 1990, Kevin J. Donavan seems disappointed that "Most recent critics ... examine either the plays or the narratives, rarely both." (22) Others have paid greater attention to the courtly milieu: so Alvin Kernan reminds readers Shakespeare's Jacobean court plays were played at court when certain issues were in the air. (23)
Unfortunately, a third group has interpreted the call for historical context as an invitation to renew the search for topical allegory. In some manner, the inheritance is direct. Derek Alwes has searched for self-portraits in Lyly's works, grounding his interest on Fleay's 1892 identification of Lyly as Diogenes. (24) But the influence of Foucault leads others to credit the imprecision of equivalences to circumstances of repression in early modern England. Respect for the historical record has suffered: In 1991, M. C. Bradbrook justified the hunt for aristocrats in court comedy on the grounds that court remedies were designed to be imprecise so as to satirize without being censored, yet there is no evidence that censorship was a problem. (25) In his discussion of Endimion, Alexander Leggatt acknowledged Lyly's prologue to the play disqualifies that topical correspondence was intended, but overruled it to identify Cynthia as Elizabeth, Tellus as Mary, Queen of Scots, and Endymion as Leicester or Oxford, again crediting the Elizabethan Muse of political censorship for his inability to distinguish for certain which character signified whom. (26) A similar rhetorical strategy has permitted Richard Dutton to dismiss Samuel Daniel's assertion that Philotas was not intended to recall the Earl of Essex as "totally Disingenuous,.... since a systematic comparison between the play and its historical sources [i.e., supposed correspondences of characters to courtiers] puts it virtually beyond dispute that Daniel had intended such an analogy." (27)
For the most part, Shakespeare scholars have resisted a return to this form of contextualization. In 1994, the actor Charles Boyle cataloged unflattering correspondences between characters and courtiers discovered over the years in Shakespeare's plays to marvel at the Bard's ability to satirize the court. (28) But his attempt has generated few followers other than Richard Dutton. Instead, there has been a critical backlash designed to insulate Shakespeare's drama from having to be read as courtly. The logic of gate receipts has led Annabel Patterson and Erica Sheen to contend that Shakespeare wrote primarily for the public theater. (29) Alexander Leggatt has excluded mention of the theory of court comedy's referential nature in the Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, (30) a choice that seems designed to ensure that Shakespeare's comedies will not be discussed as courtly. More directly to the point is Leggatt's chapter on Dream in his Introduction to English Renaissance Comedy, which pronounces,
When we think of the play's original performance it is best to think not of an elegant occasion with a courtly audience in a candle-lit hall but of a normal normal afternoon in an outdoor playhouse,... [because] Shakespeare was not, in the first instance, an entertainer to the court or gentry but a working professional playwright ... [who] wrote for the paying public. (31)
We can only call Leggatt's assertion unsubstantiated if we neglect that it follows closely on the heels of Louis Montrose's more elaborate analysis of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The printing of Montrose's article by three different presses in three different time zones in a span of just four years in the late 1990s signals American scholars across the country enthusiastically embraced Montrose's finding and sought to disseminate it widely.
Certainly there are elements of Montrose's proof that literary historicans can admire. Montrose is right to challenge the "finding" that A Midsummer Night's Dream is courtly simply because its triple wedding and a dance of the fairies resembles an aristocratic masque. He is also right to point out that no external evidence exists that Dream graced the wedding feast of the Earl of Derby and the Lady Elizabeth Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford and Granddaughter of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Master of the Wards and Lord Treasurer of England, as some have declared, (32) or that Dream was staged on February 19, 1596, at the wedding of Thomas Berkeley to Lady Elizabeth Carey, the granddaughter of Henry Carey, first Lord Hundson, Lord Chamberlain after 1585 and Shakespeare's dramatic patron after 1594. (33)
Nonetheless, the historical record remains unequivocal on several more important points. First, Dream was written by William Shakespeare, a Lord Chamberlain's Man, who was required by law to perform his plays at court. Second, during the 1580s and 1590s, the monarch and the Privy Council kept the public theaters open as rehearsal spaces for such plays in the face of strong opposition from London magistrates. Third, Dream was published a year after the Globe's construction, a fact that suggests the Lord Chamberlain's men were attempting to reclaim some of the play's lost value after the change in public theater venue rendered this comedy obsolete. Fourth, Dream was performed at court before Prince Henry on January 1, 1603/4, demonstrating unequivocally its suitability for performance before a chaste prince.
The signature flaw of Montrose's argument disqualifying Dream as court comedy, however, is that it depends upon the long-standing assumption that the fable of court comedy always preserves a complimentary figuration of Elizabeth. Montrose reasons that as Elizabeth would not have been complimented to see herself represented as Theseus or Hippolyta or Oberon or the Fairy Queen, then "Shakespeare's ostensibly courtly wedding play is neither focused upon the Queen nor structurally dependent upon her actual presence or her intervention in the action." The only possible conclusion that can be reached is that Dream was never intended for court performance in the first place. (34) And if Dream were not written for court performance, then generalizing from the particular argues, "the dramaturgical and ideological matrix of Shakespearean drama was located not in the royal court but in the professional playhouse." (35)
In limiting his review of plays to George Peele's Arraignment of Paris, John Lyly's Endymion and Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels to justify his heuristic, Montrose neglects discussions of Elizabethan performances where critics reveal problems with the means of flattery that Montrose imagines universal in entertainments for the court. Theodora Jankowski has recorded significant difficulty in turning the supposed equivalence of Elizabeth and Sapho in John Lyly's Sapho and Phao into an unqualified compliment to Elizabeth. (36) Remarking on Lyly's The Woman in the Moon and Lyly's other pastorals, Anne Lancashire has contended that Lyly composed flattering drama that "in supreme compliment to the Queen present[ed] a Golden present in contrast to a Golden past." (37) Douglas Peterson discusses the fable of Lyly's Campaspe as if it were as historically grounded and mimetically oriented a recreation as Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV. (38) Helen Cooper has pointed out that "one of the greatest differences between drama and royal entertainment or masque lies in the interpretation given to the acting area and its relationship to the audience," to emphasize the point that the acting space in a court comedy was always different from Elizabeth's court while the space of the masque embraced the audience. (39) And Ulrich Suerbaum's analysis of the Elvetham Entertainment demonstrates that court entertainments often established fictional mechanisms to praise the Queen as herself, so that in these entertainments, "her identity is that of Elisa, Albion's Queen," and thus distinct from a legendary figure. (40) As these entertainments compliment Elizabeth as herself in contrast to rather than in equivalence with the characters of the fable, Dream would not have been so unsuitably complimentary, for it publishes the foolish lechery of the Fairy Queen in a way that highlights Elizabeth's chastity and thereby grants her greater dignity than the legendary figures of the mythological past.
The means of particularizing this contrast to Elizabeth in A Midsummer Night's Dream obviously lies in Oberon's account of Cupid's arrow, lines long recognized as alluding to the 1591 Elvetham Entertainment. (41) Like his setting of the play in ancient Greece, Shakespeare's allusion to the Elvetham entertainment locates the Chaste Elizabeth safely, temporally, and geographically beyond this flawed world of classical Athens. Montrose's use of roman a clef heuristics to deem this scene unsuitably flattering is a self-immolating argument, for the style of interpretation that he would apply to disqualify Dream as courtly originated in 1843 out of R. H. Halpin's discussion of Warburton's remarks on this very scene.
In his eagerness to declare that Dream is not structurally dependent on Elizabeth's presence, Montrose fails to notice that Oberon's courteous reference to the Elvetham Entertainment does more than position Elizabeth's dignity safely outside the comic action. Rather, the passage weaves this allusion into allusions to at least two other court entertainments, both of which the Queen attended: the first was the Earl of Oxford's 1581 presentation in which it was reported to Elizabeth that Cupid kept firing at and missing Vesta's bird who was nested in the Tree of the Sun; (42) the second was John Lyly's Sapho and Phao, performed at court on Shrove Tuesday either on 27 February 1582 or on 3 March 1584, at which time Elizabeth witnessed Sapho twice wounded by Cupid's bolts. (43) It is implausible that someone who did not follow the affairs of the court for at least a decade before Dream was performed would have recognized the triple allusion as easily as the Queen. And it is even more implausible to imagine that this invocation of his sovereign's past experience crept into Shakespeare's play by accident while he was thinking about entertaining the groundlings.
As it offers allusive testimony to specific dangers Elizabeth avoided, Oberon's vision encourages us to rethink how court comedies by Lyly and Shakespeare praised the English Queen. In the past decade, how Sapho and Phao complimented Elizabeth has emerged as a problem of Lyly studies. It was once held almost unanimously that Sapho corresponded to Elizabeth and Phao to Alencon, but both Theodora Jankowski and David Bevington admit they struggle to determine how equating Elizabeth to Sapho might have been complimentary to Elizabeth. (44) In addition, David Bevington has found that honoring the correspondence of Phao to Alencon would have given Lyly only three weeks to write and rehearse the play, if, as Bond contends, it were written for a 1582 performance. Bevington cites these difficulties to justify discussing the play as an allegory of love. The allusions in Oberon's vision demonstrate that our options are not so limited. In Shakespeare's mind, Sapho was not intended to be equivalent to Elizabeth; rather, when the Fairy King positions Cupid's arrow in relation to the "vot'ress," he identifies Lyly's Sapho as Elizabeth's foil. What this finding means is that the court comedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries did not require their audiences to seek out secret correspondences or engage in abstract exegesis: but rather, in contrast to masques, Elizabethan court comedies staged fables about places geographically and temporally distant from England such that love-wounded characters from these other courts who resembled Elizabeth in position, power, and other qualities might serve as foils to her more perfect self seated upon the stage. (45) By means of establishing contrasts with these legendary persons of other times, these plays complimented Elizabeth as a Virgin Elisa, the "imperial vot'ress" throned in the west, more perfect in herself than any figuration in a masque might make her.
In this finding we have a consolation and a caution. On the one hand, we can be confident that recognizing the compliment in Elizabethan court comedy only depended upon an audience being logical: the compliment emerged once the audience acknowledged a historical or spatial distance between the monarch and her foils. In establishing these characters as lesser foils, the court comedy flattered by contrast like tragedy or history. And the historical record confirms that informed audiences in Shakespeare's day, including an audience of Shakespeare's own imagining in The Taming of the Shrew, introduced the "pleasant comedy" as "a kind of history" to their less well-informed contemporaries. (46) In 1591, an Italian character in John Florio's Second Frutes said that there were no English comedies or tragedies but only histories without any decorum. (47) A bit earlier, Sir Philip Sidney admonished the stage for obeying the rules of history and not poetry, (48) and in 1612, John Taylor described a play as a "brief epitome of time." (49)
On the other hand, we must acknowledge that the comedic episode was drawn from an historical continuum that the audience had the responsibility to recall before we consider how it advised on policy. Those holding with Gary Schmigdall that "courtly art was obliged to reach happy conclusions" (50) are guaranteed to miss the point. The difference between a comedy and a tragedy for Thomas Heywood was that "comedies begin in trouble and end in peace; [while] tragedies begin in calmes, and end in tempest." (51) While Heywood's paraphrase of Donatus imagines a starting and an ending place for comedy's staged action, it does not demand that the peace is projected into the future. Rather, the play starts at one point in time and ends at another, but nothing is to say that the happiness the characters achieve at play's end is, in fact, an admirable, true, or enduring one. The liberty from dramatic unity implicit in imagining a comedy as a form of history thus demanded the Renaissance audience consider very closely the nature of the happy...
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