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Article Excerpt
Mary Sidney Herbert's translation of Garnier's Marc-Antoine has a trans-Channel context that sharpens and complicates its implications. To remember that Garnier was an official who nevertheless flirted with the radically subversive Holy League and wrote during a three-sided civil war in which definitions of loyalty were in flux adds further poignancy to a play set during Roman civil tumults. Sidney wrote shortly after the assassination of Henri III, a mother-dominated and (it was said) sexually ambiguous murderer whom many in England despised even as they preferred him to the League. Such a background gives Sidney's work additional irony and moral ambiguity.
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The translation by Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, of Robert Garnier's Marc Antoine (1578) has hardly gone unnoticed, although there is little critical consensus concerning her aims, her possible political implications, or her hopes, if any, for influencing the English theatre. I have myself argued that, although her Antonius (1592, republished in 1595 as Antonie) is often called 'closet drama' in the manner of Seneca, the paratexts of the 1585 edition of Garnier that she evidently used evoke an imagined atmosphere of Sophocles' Greece as much as or more than they do that of Neronic Rome, even as the liminary and dedicatory poems shimmer with an elegance generated by famous names and the author's own absurdly abject praise of Henri III in a politically pressured time. (1) By 26 November 1590, the date that Mary Sidney gives in the volume that includes both the play and her translation of Philippe de Mornay's A Discourse on Life and Death, England and France had each witnessed events with particular drama and threat. No play set in the time that saw the collapse of Rome's republic and the start of its empire could avoid political overtones, but these would have changed during the years stretching from Marc Antoine's first appearance to the date of the translation's composition to the dates of its publication--and beyond. Such overtones, moreover, were more dissonant than harmonious, for like most civil wars, those in France were not always easy to judge either intellectually or morally. The very name that some apply to the later civil conflict in France, 'la guerre des trois Henris' ('The War of the Three Henries'), shows how binary judgment was for a while untenable.
This present discussion is a companion piece, further examining the atmosphere of the late 1580s and the early 1590s that gave the play increased resonance. (2) I focus on the weather coming from France because Garnier was French, but in considering what Mary Sidney's play 'means', or what thoughts it might have inspired, we should, of course, remember the Armada, the war in the Netherlands that cost her brother his life, the recent deaths of her uncles, and the certainty that Elizabeth (that serpent of old Thames) would die without an heir. Such an atmosphere adds poignancy to other texts as well, most notably Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, for obvious reasons, and Edward II, because it can be read partly in terms of the sexual gossip about Henri III and tensions over access to royal favour. (3) Here, however, I look at some non-dramatic works from the late 1580s and early 1590s that sometimes use the language of dramaturgy and, on occasion, exploit the violations of gender expectations that helped poison political discourse. I conclude by suggesting yet another reason why Mary Sidney chose this play and not some other by Garnier with a less problematic heroine.
Richard Hillman has argued against reading Antonie in political terms, sensibly remarking that had Mary Sidney intended veiled commentary on current affairs, she had plays to choose from more relevant than Marc Antoine; she was probably more drawn, thinks Hillman, to the image of a grieving (if talkative) woman.4 My own interest here is not in political allegory or in reading the play against the Sidney family's quasi-republican preferences, but rather in recalling a discourse in which, more than usual, it was--or had recently been --hard to tell heroes from villains, to choose sides with full confidence, or even to know precisely how the great should play their gender roles.
Some reminders might be useful. (The plot of Marc Antoine hardly needs repeating: Antony kills himself; Cleopatra anticipates but does not quite yet perform her death; Octavius triumphs; the chorus mourns and moralizes.) The year 1576 had seen the founding of the Holy League, an alliance headed by the Guise family and dedicated to preserving an ultra-militant Catholicism both against the Huguenot threat, notably as represented by the Protestant Henri de Navarre, and against the vacillations of the pious but weak Henri III, whose efforts to co-opt it failed miserably. It was not long before the League's ambitious suspicions led to renewed civil war, particularly after the death in 1584 of Anjou (Elizabeth's suitor) had left Navarre the official heir to the French throne, making political choice difficult for many who detested Protestantism but feared the League. In May 1588, on the 'Day of Barricades', the League took over Paris and Henri III fled to Blois. On 23 December, at Blois, Guise was murdered at the order of the king, who for good measure had the duke's brother, the cardinal, killed too. A few days later, on 5 January 1589, doubtless heartsick to see her dynasty failing, the brilliant but tragic Catherine de' Medici died. And on 2 August the king himself died, having been stabbed a few hours earlier by a Jacobin monk, Jacques Clement, at the instigation, many said, of the League and Pope Sixtus V, whose defence of the deed outraged even those who had not liked Henri. (Garnier died late the next year, perhaps regretting his few painful and possibly involuntary weeks as a member of the League.) By the mid-1590s the League had met with defeat by a now converted and crowned Henri IV backed by moderate royalists, the 'politiques', and with, as a letter by Sir Robert Sidney in November 1595 advised, continued help by an angry but practical Elizabeth. (5) The situation was not without irony. Like the League, Huguenots had once been willing to fight anointed monarchs, and when the English intervened in the French civil wars on behalf of Navarre, or in the Netherlands against Philip II, they had to find ways to justify what others might call rebellion. However, after Henri III's death those who supported the new king suddenly found themselves remembering the divine right of kings and the sinfulness of revolt. No wonder that these years saw a flood of news pamphlets and anti-League polemic in England, some probably the work of its government. (6)
Such dismay over the civil war and the murder of Henri III was, however, ambivalent on a number of counts. Whatever the League's contempt for Henri's political wavering, for his naming of Navarre as his heir, and even for his ancestry, the king had been a devout Catholic. But he had also been a king with a reputation for luxury, moral corruption, and effeminacy, indeed for what some would now call homosexuality, although for others both concept and word are ahistorical. (7) Anger at this presumed royal sodomy was amplified by fear that his mignons were sleeping their way to influence and by dismay that, as Ronsard (if indeed he is the author) put it in several prudently unpublished sonnets, the king was putting his seed in his boyfriends instead of where it would do the kingdom some good. (8) Sodomy might be a sin, but royal favouritism and the lack of issue made it even more politically noxious than Elizabeth's virginity. To detest regicide made sense, but many also saw God's hand at work in punishing a morally lax persecutor of the Godly, a murderer who let his young overdressed and perfumed friends and his mother--the Italian Jezebel of France, Catherine de' Medici--dominate him. True, those he had recently murdered were themselves murderers. Politics is morally complicated.
And that, I think, is one reason for the subtle and intelligent Mary Sidney's choice of Marc Antoine. Whatever the nuances of tone and rhetoric that mark some differences among the versions of the story by Garnier, Daniel (author of the play Cleopatra), and Shakespeare, it is hard utterly to condemn Cleopatra and Antony but equally hard to exculpate them. Such ambiguities blunt any political point beyond the obvious--civil war is a bad thing; beware of ageing serpents of the Nile lest smarter and less sex-obsessed politicians take over; keep your eye on your kingdom and not on handsome foreigners lest you lose what is left of your liberty--but they suggest that, like her brother, Mary Sidney was as interested in the exploratory, the interrogatory, the ironic, as she was in the didactic. This must have been particularly true for...
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