Younger than you,
Here in Verona, ladies of esteem
Are made already mothers.3
It was followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream with its Ovidian metamorphosis of a working-class buffoon into a donkey – notoriously the best-endowed of male beasts – drawing the Fairy Queen into a physical obsession that is hilarious, sexy, but also humiliating. For while being the Ovidian celebrant of the rites of Eros, Shakespeare is the ultimate sexual cynic, whose Thersites in Troilus and Cressida exclaims: ‘Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery, nothing else holds fashion. A burning devil take them!’4 The same association between lechery and burning – lust and hell; sex and the scalding sensations of venereal disease – are expressed in the starkest and most personal form in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In those twenty-eight sonnets that reflect the twenty-eight days of his dark mistress’s menstrual cycle, he berated her for having infected both him and his beautiful young male friend:
I guess one angel in another’s hell.
Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.5
Measure for Measure, that sex-obsessed play in which extramarital sex is a capital offence, and in which the man of power, Angelo – another angel like those of Comfort and Despair in the sonnet just quoted – is willing to commute Claudio’s death-sentence in exchange for the nun-sister’s maidenhead, enters into the darkest places of the human sexual life, and the blowsy bordello and tavern-life of Mistress Overdone, Lucio, a ‘fantastic’ (that is, an extravagant dresser), Pompey the Clown and friends is one not merely familiar to Shakespeare, but a world of lechery that was known to the theatre audiences; which, indeed, when the Globe theatre had been built on Bankside in the thick of the capital’s brothels, was absolutely visible all around them.
When Pompey and Mistress Overdone bemoan, at the beginning of Measure for Measure, the possibility that the priggish Angelo is going to demolish the seedy ‘suburbs’ of the city and close the brothels, they are speaking of something that the Londoners of Shakespeare’s day would know had been tried during the reign of Henry VIII.
Scholarly opinion divides between those who do and do not believe that the morbus gallicus of venereal syphilis was brought to Europe from the New World, and that this explains the rampant growth of the disease in the sixteenth century. If it were a consequence of the Old World’s greed for the treasures of the New World, there would be an emblematic fittingness to the story that is perhaps too neat, and which explains perhaps why some medics believe a mild form of syphilis existed in Europe in the fifteenth century, but transmuted itself into the ravaging disease that so laid waste humankind until the discovery of penicillin.6
Henry VIII, who had attempted to enact the Measure for Measure-style anti-bordello laws himself, died in an agony of syphilitic periostitis at the age of fifty-five. This great ox of a man had survived smallpox, malaria and the tuberculosis that had killed his father; he had survived dangerous sports; but eventually the symptoms of syphilis became unmistakable: ulcers on both legs, a collapsed nose, an increasingly erratic mental state. When he died his vast corpse was put in a lead coffin and slowly transported from London to Windsor. It was rested overnight at Syon House, where the coffin split and leakage spattered on the floor, to be licked by the household dogs. If ever there was a character who exemplified the Divided Self, described by Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, it was Henry:
Two such opposèd kings encamp them still
In man, as well as herbs – grace and rude will.7
At war with his destructive sexual nature, Henry VIII had closed the brothels, which his son Edward VI reopened in 1550. ‘For the Stews’, as a priest said in a sermon at Paul’s Cross, ‘are so necessary in a commonwealth as a jaxe in a man’s house.’8
Thomas Nashe’s The Choise of Valentines – alternative title Nash his Dildo – is a poem with hilarious candour: the ‘offertory’, before entering the ‘Oratorie’ to the ‘foggie three-chinnd dame’ at the door; the choice of ‘prettie Trulls’ offered him; the eventual selection of ‘gentle mistris Francis’, who pretends she has only come to this ‘dancing-schoole’ ‘to avoide the troblous stormy weather’; the slow undressing; the preliminary cunnilingus:
his mouth beset with uglie bryers
Resembling much a duskie nett of wyres –
The penis flagging until she:
dandled it, and dance’t it up and downe,
Not ceasing, till she rais’d it from his swoune,
And then he flue on hir as he were wood [mad],
And on her breeche did thack, and foyne a-good
The age-old cry of womankind:
Oh not so fast, my rauisht Mistriss cryes
. . . Togeather let our equall motions stirr . . .
. . . She ierks hir legs, and sprauleth with hir heeles,
No tongue may tell the solace that she feeles . . .
The pleasure being over, despite Nashe’s attempts to contain himself, in quarter of an hour, the ‘gentle mistris’ says that in future she will get more pleasure from her dildo:
That bendeth not, nor fouldeth anie deale,
But stands as stiff as he were made of steele,
And playes at peacock twixt my legs right blythe.9
The brothels had to be painted white and to carry a particular sign: one of the most celebrated of which was the cardinals’ hats suggested less by religious considerations than by the scarlet tip shared by both princes of the Church and excited male organs. The double-think of the human race with regard to this whole area of life was in abundant evidence, with, on the one hand, open patronage of prostitution by those in authority; and, on the other, merciless punishments meted out by the law upon the women caught up in this trade. Cardinal Wolsey reputedly had an inscription over one of the doors of his palace at Hampton Court, which read ‘the rooms of the whores of my Lord Cardinal’. Queen Elizabeth’s cousin, Lord Hunsdon, did not go so far, but he let out properties in Paris Gardens, Southwark, to Francis Langley, owner of the Swan theatre, fully aware of what took place in the region. A Mirror for Magistrates in 1584 recorded that a young man might have to part with ‘forty shillings or better’ in ‘some blind [obscure] house about the suburbs’ for ‘a pottle or two of wine, the embracement of a painted strumpet and the French welcome’ – that is, venereal disease. A woman convicted of being a prostitute had to appease the convoluted perversity of male shame. She would have her head shaved, and would then be carted about the streets with a paper labelling her as a whore pasted to her forehead; accompanied by the banging together of barbers’ basins clattering in mockery. Repeat offenders might be tied to the ‘cart’s arse’ and dragged through the streets to the Bridewell prison, where they would receive a whipping. Bridewell was a house of correction, not a long-term prison. Mary Tudor had wanted to close the place down, since so many of the women whipped there revealed the sexual misdemeanours of the clergy; but it was given a reprieve and throughout Elizabeth’s reign it witnessed the regular beatings and thrashings and hangings meted out to petty – and not so petty – criminals. WHIPPED AT THE BRIDEWELL FOR HAVING FORSAKEN HER CHILD IN THE STREETS was an inscription on one unhappy head, who had been put in the pillory at Cheapside and then dragged through the streets.10
The risks of such terrible punishments did not deter the ‘Winchester geese’, as the women were called, after the Bishop of Winchester who owned so much of the Southwark property in which they plied their profession, any more than the risk of venereal disease deterred their clients. The need to survive in the one case, to satisfy lust in the other, was stronger than the dictates of common sense. Shakespeare’s sense that sex on such terms was an image of Hell was reflected in the writings of his contemporaries. In Thomas Dekker’s Lanthorn and Candlelight (1608) a visitor from Hell ‘saw the doors of notorious carted bawds like Hell gates stand night and day wide open, with a pair of harlots in taffeta gowns, like two painted posts, garnishing out thos
e doors, being better to the house than a double sign’.
In The Honest Whore, also by Dekker, one of the characters says to Bellafont, the prostitute:
The sin of many men
Is within you; and thus much I suppose,
That if all your committers stood in a rank,
They’d make a lane in which your shame might dwell
And with their spaces reach from hence to hell.11
Inevitably, in such a world, the doctor was in a position to see more than most. The sordid diaries and casebooks of Simon Forman (now in Oxford’s Bodleian Library), called by some, rather too generously, the Elizabethan Pepys, reveal not only the author’s obsessive sexual pursuits and conquests, but the sexual lives of innumerable Londoners of both high and low degree. Forman practised as an astrologer and as a medic. He first practised medicine in Salisbury, and by the time he was established in London in the 1590s he was noticing whenever he had ‘halek’, his word for sexual congress. A regular mistress was one Avis Allen, the recusant wife of William Allen, who was prepared to pay the enormous sum of £100 to avoid attendance at church at St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate. They first kissed on 20 November 1593, and a fortnight later, ‘she rose and came to me, et halek Avis Allen’ . . . She had come to him as a patient. The Allens, who entertained their doctor to dinner, were evidently in the shipping trade and resided in Thames Street near the river. Throughout the time of his affair with her, and its rather chillingly recounted adulterous encounters, Forman was advising clients about their astrological chances of good business deals, or the potential conception of children, as well as giving them cures for dropsy, venereal and other diseases. Men came to him to establish, via astrology, their chances of ‘halek’ with certain women, and ‘whether she is honest or a harlot’. Forman himself had ample chances of ‘halek’ – in the street, in his consulting rooms and in the houses of his clients. Marriage did not change his habits, though he noted down in his illiterate Latin the occurrences of ‘halek’ ‘cum uxore meo’ (sic, rather than mea; with my wife).
One of the women in Forman’s casebooks was Emilia Lanier, daughter of Battista Bassano, a court musician. While her husband was away at sea with the Earl of Essex, Emilia consulted Forman about Mr Lanier’s chances of a knighthood and professional promotion. She was a spirited, highly sexed woman, and Forman clearly came to know her tastes and habits intimately. She ‘hath a mind to the quent, but seems she is or will be a harlot. And because . . . she useth sodomy’ says a marginal note in his casebook (it might in fact refer to some other woman, but it gives the flavour of the levels of Forman’s interests in his clients. Another entry speaks of a man who wanted to know his chances of ‘halek’ with a woman and sent his servant to explore her body. She did not allow the servant to ‘halek’, but it is clear – unless this is a lurid fantasy of Forman’s – that the man ‘felt all parts of her body willingly and kissed her often’.
Emilia Lanier was the woman who became the mistress of the Queen’s cousin, Lord Hunsdon. What Forman’s casebooks reveal so interestingly – and we derive exactly the same impression from Shakespeare’s plays and poems – is a sexual free-for-all. The existence of syphilis and gonorrhoea with no real palliatives, and the fact that everyone in London was nominally Christian, did not diminish the rampant sexual energy of an expanding city. Forman happened to be there, with his inkhorn and his notebooks. But the men and women who pass through his pages, all sexually obsessed, are only a tiny fraction of the whole. No one especially expresses feelings of sexual guilt, and none are especially deterred by the morality propounded by the Puritans. Monogamy, chastity and even celibacy must have been practised by some Elizabethans, but one does not derive the impression from their writings that such conditions of life were the norm. As so often happens in a city where great cultural change is afoot, and where the population of immigrants from other lands, and from the country, is high, there is encountered this pulsating energy that irrepressibly takes sexual expression. The Berlin of the Weimar Republic, or the New York of Andy Warhol’s generation, was perhaps comparable in this respect to Elizabethan London.
Whether it was especially homosexual, or simply highly sexual, is quite hard to assess. Was Shakespeare gay, or did he simply – as well as enjoying sex with women – fall for boy actors from time to time? The word ‘Homosexuality’, like the word ‘Anglicanism’, did not exist in sixteenth-century English. The two words are so closely associated in twenty-first-century parlance that it is inevitable that one should ask whether the thing existed, even if they had no word for it. I have suggested in an earlier chapter that the word ‘Anglicanism’ did not exist because the Elizabethans had no concept of it. They had Catholic or Protestant ideas about the Church, but their quarrels and debates centred around the extent to which they accepted the Church of England, not whether they believed in a thing called ‘Anglicanism’. Modern readers will probably be less inclined to accept the idea that, because there was no word, there was also no ‘homosexuality’. But the sexual climate was very different, as is demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands of confused words written about the sexuality of Shakespeare. But when we go back in time and say that Marlowe and James VI and I were gay, I suspect that we are committing an anachronism. We can say that if they were alive nowadays they would have been gay; or that, viewed by our way of classifying human beings, they were gay. But the idea of classifying human beings at all, still less of dividing them according to sexual preference (or, come to that, skin pigmentation), is a by-product of nineteenth-century science. Just as Victorian collectors wanted to classify different species of butterfly or beetle, so they divided the human race and invented words such as ‘homosexual’.
One useful corrective to the idea that there were gay Elizabethans is the legal evidence. ‘During the forty-five years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign and the twenty-three years of King James I’s reign only six men are recorded as having been indicted for sodomy in the Home Counties assizes, for example, with only one conviction.’12
It is an astonishingly low statistic, and when same-sex activity was punished by law, it was nearly always because some act of violence had accompanied it: buggery itself being in many cases a form of violence, whether performed upon a member of the same or the opposite sex. Rape, incest and adultery were the ingredients, for example, that made John Atherton’s acts of buggery seem worthy of death. He was hanged in 1640. The case made something of a stir since he was Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, and the woodcuts show the Right Reverend gentleman being hanged in his bishop’s outfit – Canterbury cap, rochet and chimere.
In questioning whether it is useful to use anachronistic words such as ‘Anglican’ or ‘homosexual’ in relation to the Elizabethans, I am not, of course, denying the obvious reason why such words are used; namely, that they are a clumsy shorthand designed to guide us through the alien world of a very different age. John Atherton was a bishop, and he did not acknowledge the authority of the Pope, and he dressed like twenty-first-century Anglican bishops: easier to call him an ‘Anglican’ or a promoter of ‘Anglicanism’ than to go back into his world and get the feeling of his religious milieu, which is something subtly different from what the word ‘Anglican’ implies. Likewise, it would be folly to deny that there were Elizabethan men who fell in love with one another, or with boys. The most famous of them quipped that ‘All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools.’ But sexual preferences need to be understood in social terms. Labels sometimes confuse as much as they illuminate. The emperor Claudius was considered a freak because he exclusively liked women and eschewed young male catamites. That fact stands out. To label all the other Roman Emperors as paederasts might be true, but only true nor’ by nor’-west.
Undoubtedly Elizabethan England provided as much opportunity as any other society for gay love to flourish; possibly rather more, given the number of pretty boy actors, and the male fashions that exposed the legs so alluringly. Given the mode among modern ‘gender studies’ for
exploring human character from this angle, however, it is remarkable how little mention there is of gay sex in Elizabethan pornography, or accounts of the Elizabethan underworld; equally remarkable is the fact that when men openly express their fondness for their own sex, it appears to have excited no particular shock. Richard Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepheard: Containing The Complaint of Daphnis [male] for the love of Ganymede (also male) was published in 1594. His work was quite popular. No printer had his hands chopped off for printing it. Nor did Barnfield, a Shropshire gentleman, graduate of Brasenose and friend of Shakespeare, seem to have ruffled many feathers by his candid sexual and emotional preference for his own sex (though the fact that he was disinherited by his father could indicate that what was unremarkable in Oxford and London upset the rustic sensibilities of Market Drayton, where he was buried). Barnfield was clearly one who enjoyed sex with boys. Equally obviously, Shakespeare (whose Sonnets are the only other such poems of the age that are addressed by a male to a male) was surprised by a joyous love for a beautiful youth, which developed into an all-consuming obsession that (in Sonnet 20) was specifically non-sexual. It was the boy’s youth and his face that enchanted Shakespeare and the twentieth sonnet rather crudely but explicitly makes clear that there was no interest for Shakespeare below the Mason–Dixon line, to use the Duchess of Windsor’s phrase.
What was new in the sixteenth century, and conceivably deserves a mention in this context, is the formulation of buggery as an offence in English law. It was in Henry VIII’s reign that sodomy became a statutory felony, punishable by hanging. This was not because the King had a particular interest in the matter. It was instead almost accidental. Henrician law after 1540 transferred power and judicial authority from the Church of Rome to the Crown. The offence of sodomy had formerly been covered by Church law. When, therefore, Mary Tudor revoked all her father’s law with a view to bringing everything back under papal control, she inadvertently brought in what was effectively a Buggers’ Charter in 1553. It was ten years later, in 1563, that the anomaly was corrected in English law, though all case law subsequently – as has already been said – related to cases where other offences such as rape or incest were involved. It was Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), a Norfolk gentleman, whose Institutes of the Laws of England (1600–15) defined the crime in the greatest detail – for example, including bestialism in its definitions and making the distinction that if the act took place between an adult and a minor, only the adult could be prosecuted. Coke, Speaker of the House of Commons (1593), Attorney General (1594), Chief Justice of the Common Pleas (1606), Chief Justice of the King’s Bench and Privy Councillor (both in 1613), was one of the great English law-makers – dismissed by James VI and I for questioning the limits of royal power and prerogative. The language of Coke’s Institutes in relation to buggery might make him sound prurient. It is true that he was probably a horrible man, but the description of this particular activity as ‘detestable and abominable’ was something he merely took over from the legislation of Henry VIII; and his concern, disgusting as may be the details that he spells out, was merely with legal definitions – extent of penetration, whether accompanied by emission, and so forth. In this area, as in all others, Coke was concerned to make laws that were clear and which could be established in evidence presented to a court. The language of the laws and statutes (‘Amongst Christians not to be named’),13 which clearly upsets some modern historians, overlooks the fact that when stray remarks made in the workplace about the Queen or the army could be viewed as dangerous acts of sedition; when membership of the Anabaptist sect could result in being publicly disembowelled; and when acts of petty theft could lead to the gallows – then the Elizabethans were very relaxed about same-sex encounters, only bothering to have a word for them when they involved anal rape. Compare this with the England of Elizabeth II, where prosecutions for homosexual behaviour in the early years of her reign were frequent: 480 men convicted for private acts between consenting adults during the period 1953–6.14
The Elizabethans Page 42
