Throughout this introduction, I have used words like “debate” and “conversation” to highlight a fundamental premise of my argument, namely that Shakespeare’s view of public figures is always in dialogue with that of others. Crucial among these is Lyly, who had a gift for the kind of diffuse political allegory that encourages speculation and discourages reprisals.103 Maurice Hunt argues Lyly’s court comedies “provide the only sustained dramatic precedent for Shakespeare’s critique of Queen Elizabeth by means of allegorical mirror images.”104 While “critique” does not convey the range of perspectives on Elizabeth examined in this book, I share Hunt’s conviction regarding the centrality of Lyly’s influence on Shakespeare. An acknowledged source for Midsummer Night’s Dream and Merry Wives of Windsor, Endymion sets a theatrical precedent for all the lecherous old men that concern me, which is why my first chapter focuses on it.105 Shakespeare learned from this play how to fuse real and fictional figures, thereby inspiring what the prologue to Endymion calls “pastimes,” a word that links what we refer to as the topical component of plays to other pleasures afforded by the theater.106 As Lyly reminds us, allusions to political persons, events, or patterns do not necessarily reflect the writer’s desire to align himself with certain factions, criticize certain policies, or intervene in public affairs. They also have entertainment value. Eager for the “journalistic news and topical comment” purveyed by plays, London audiences enjoyed playing at politics.107 For the price of admission to the theater, even the disenfranchised might become knowledgeable consumers of political material, who “voted on what they liked or did not like.”108 In Bartholomew Fair (1614), Jonson’s mocking scrivener draws up “Articles of Agreement” between spectators and authors that describe applause as a form of “suffrage.” While granting spectators “their free will of censure,” he also tries to prevent “any state decipherer or politic picklock” from searching out “who was meant” by various characters.109 As this caveat—or is it an invitation?—suggests, early moderns tended to read “plays . . . analogically, often ‘applying’ quite exotic fictions to contemporary persons and events.”110 Playwrights may have had incentive to provide grist for their audience’s interpretative mill, but catering to a taste for “pastimes” was risky, as Jonson and Thomas Nashe found out when their provocatively entitled Isle of Dogs (1597) led to Jonson’s imprisonment.111 In the aftermath of this affair, the Privy Council ordered “the common playhouses” struck down because of “lewd matters that are handled on the stages.”112 Although this order was never enforced, the council pursued a policy of tighter control over performances in the late 1590s, with “mixed success” and perhaps mixed motives.113 Writers for the public theaters had ample reason to balance the commercial value of staging politically loaded material against the risk of offending their courtly patrons. Lyly’s veiled allegories offered a model for attaining such a balance, which accounts for their enduring popularity with Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton all recycle materials from Lyly’s plays, including a bit of stage business from Endymion, in which a male favorite collapses on stage before his lady. This tantalizing pattern ran afoul of authorities only when Jonson abandoned the normal caution and made the lady “Elizabeth I” and not “Cynthia,” “Gloriana,” “Titania,” “Cleopatra,” or an unnamed fairy queen.114
Shakespeareans are often reluctant to allow “pastimes,” because they believe censorship prevented playwrights from referring to specific persons or they are wary of following the “inglorious” path of forebears like N. J. Halpin, whose ham-fisted “equating of dramatic characters with historical personages” has not aged well.115 Although this reluctance originates in mid-twentieth-century formalist approaches to literature, which sought to establish the timeless nature of Shakespeare’s work by purging its timeliness, it has persisted even in the wake of the new historicism.116 Taking David Bevington’s cue, historicist critics prefer to find evidence of “ideas or platforms”—or, nowadays, political ideologies and discursive practices—in Shakespeare’s plays over references to “personalities.”117 While few critics would, after Leah Marcus and Louis Montrose, contend that a Titania or a Joan offer no comment on Elizabeth I, many continue to approach the idea that Shakespeare’s plays glance at public figures other than Elizabeth with suspicion.118 Even Matthew Steggle, who argues that theatrical “personation . . . was a point of contention” throughout the period, cites critical consensus to exclude Shakespeare’s plays from consideration.119
This resistance is rooted in values that have little to do with early modern politics, in which platforms or positions were invariably tied to personalities (as, for example, a radical Protestant agenda or an interventionist policy in the Netherlands was tied to Leicester). Nor does it reflect what we know about Renaissance aesthetics. Given that Jonson set himself the task to write plays “near and familiarly allied to the time,” his famous praise of Shakespeare as “not of an age, but for all time,” which continues to exert undue influence over Shakespeare’s literary reputation, may have been tinged with irony.120 Certainly Hamlet, who commends players for being “abstract and brief chronicles of the time,” shares in Jonson’s theatrical values; his warning to Polonius that the “ill report” of players should be avoided “while you live” (2.2.526) identifies court figures as proper targets for satiric representation on stage. Not surprisingly, the clearest statement of anxiety about theatrical personation in the period is from a high-ranking member of the court, Elizabeth’s last favorite, the disgraced Earl of Essex, who worried in 1600 that “they shall play me in what forms they list upon the stage.”121 The earl’s anxieties were well-founded. The representation of actual “gentlemen of good desert and quality that are yet alive under obscure manner” did occur.122 If Jonson denounces the allegorical readings of “narrow-eyed decipherers,” he also provides them with plentiful fodder for speculation.123
In this introduction as in the rest of this book, I draw on the early modern vocabulary for describing the timely content of plays, because this vocabulary helps to elucidate the nature and function of theatrical allusions. Richard Dutton sensibly proposes that the problem with most topical readings is that they insist on too precise a correspondence, when theatrical analogies were “incomplete, titillatingly so.”124 As his adverb indicates, ambiguous allusions to contemporary persons have a stimulating effect on audiences, then as now. While Téa Leoni’s character in the television show Madam Secretary is not Hillary Clinton, she confronts similar situations, prompting comparisons to her historical counterpart. These comparisons are integral to the pleasure we experience in watching the show, a pleasure fundamentally cognitive in nature. When, as happened during the 2017 season of Madam Secretary or the 1624 run of A Game at Chess, an actual figure takes offense at a fictional representation, the relationship between the two may be more one of identity. The early modern “personate” implies such a one-on-one correspondence between fictional character and historical person. Other expressions, like “sport,” “device,” “glance,” and “pastime” suggest more complicated processes are at work, however. The verb “glance,” for example, means “to strike obliquely,” to “pass by without touching,” or “to allude or refer to obliquely or in passing, usually by way of censure or satire; to hit at, reflect upon.”125 “Glance” conveys an almost imperceptible touch (as opposed to a heavy-handed identification), a skewed perspective, and motivations that range from playfulness to aggression. An inferior discussing a superior in public might only “glance” for fear of repercussions; so Shakespeare’s Adriana “in company often glanced” at her husband’s abusive behavior (Comedy of Errors, 5.1.66).
As this example suggests, early modern expressions for personal allusions emphasize a social dimension and consider their effect on real or imagined audiences (Adriana’s “company”), including those constituted by authorities. When glancing at persons in an “obscure fashion,” playwrights eager to avoid repercussions could apply principles
of selection or concentration, thus making what Hamlet calls an “abstract.” They could also fragment their target into multiple “forms,” to use Essex’s locution, or conflate several different targets into one form. Hamlet describes Luciano in the Murder of Gonzago not as brother to the murdered king but as nephew to the king (3.2.244): a reflection of Claudius’s past actions, of Hamlet’s future actions, and of the incestuous and murderous practices of the Danish court more generally. Hamlet can assert that the play contains no offense because it is not a perfect match for his intentions or for Claudius’s crimes—ultimately, like all plays using glancing allusions, it allows its author to claim that “it touches us not” (3.2.242).126 Glancing allusions are a form of “functional ambiguity,” to borrow Annabel Patterson’s phrase; they capitalize on the arousing effects of timely content while avoiding “directly provoking or confronting the authorities.”127
Such allusions also encourage audiences to bring anterior knowledge to bear on matters set before them by the play. No matter what topic they point to, extratextual references stimulate an audience’s cognitive functions, including those involving memory, asking members to participate in the play. References to analogic interpretation as a “sport” or “pastime”—the bearbaiting trope comes to mind, as we will see—suggest that such participation provided playgoers with an extra measure of pleasure. Like Castiglione’s courtiers, whose ambiguous references to real persons provoke knowing laughter, playgoers express a shared understanding of proper regard for “time and place” when laughing. Positioned as competent interpreters, auditors can speculate about a range of possibilities and collaborate in the construal of meanings.128 Where a one-one correspondence asks the audience to accept a playwright’s criticism or praise of a historical figure, a more diffuse resemblance prompts comparative thinking; weighing how a particular character both is and is not like that public figure, audience members learn to form judgments of their own. Hamlet, eager to secure a judgment of Claudius, does not have his actors play the murder of his father. Instead, he has them play “something like the murther of my father” (2.2.595). The relationship between Shakespeare’s age-in-love figures and actual Elizabethan courtiers also tends to be one of evocative likeness, the “fat meat” (2 Henry IV, epilogue, 27) on which such speculative judgment feeds, rather than absolute identity, food only for censorship.
When glancing references provoke communal “sport” or collective laughter, audiences are transformed into publics, joined together not just by shared emotions and experiences in the theater but also by the shared cultural memories that produce those emotions and experiences. As Marvin Carlson puts it, when we laugh at theatrical parody “the parallel response by our fellow audience members is evidence that they share our memory of the material whose comic iteration we are witnessing.”129 Carlson’s emphasis on evidence indicates that participating in a theatrical public involves both feeling together and thinking together. What he calls the “memory machine” aspect of the theater, especially powerful in repertory theatres with continuity in personnel and audiences like Shakespeare’s, replicates in theatrical terms the reflexive “circulation of texts among strangers” over time that Michael Warner argues constitutes publics.130 For Warner public-making is a print-based phenomenon. As his emphasis on reflexivity suggests, however, human memory plays a fundamental role in linking texts over time. The theatrical “fashion” for “age in love” drew on printed pamphlets and books, and it drew on theatrical and cultural performances, prompting audiences to remember these varied “texts” and to compare them to one another, thus generating the common ground that brought them together as a public. Shakespeare’s uncanny survival as an artist may derive from his ability to secure an enduring public by reproducing these effects within his own canon. When modern audiences watch Falstaff, they might catch a glimpse of Bottom’s ghost, especially if the same actor has played both parts (as Will Kempe likely did). Early modern playgoers had a far richer series of predecessors to draw on, from plays, pamphlets, poems, and other sources. By reconstructing this context, I hope to shed light on how Shakespeare transformed timely material into timeless art.
The Earl of Leicester is a key figure in this book because he embodied a pattern of courtly behavior (of the erotic and upwardly mobile variety) for his contemporaries, who left an extensive written record of their reactions to him.131 By the time Shakespeare joined in the debate about royal favoritism, both Leicester and Hatton had died. Leicester had made such an impact on the collective memory, however, that the “new” and “strange” conversation about him continued unabated long after his death. Shakespeare’s attraction to these haunting and haunted materials reflects his interest in afterlives—in what makes certain events, patterns, or individuals so memorable that they earn “a place i’ th’ story” (Antony and Cleopatra, 3.13.46).
By remembering the extraordinary performances of the queen’s suitors, Shakespeare’s plays capitalize on their audience’s conscious and unconscious associations for a variety of purposes. While we cannot know with certainty whom the playwright meant to catch with his “unsavory similes” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.79), it is possible to speculate responsibly about how these worked, especially given the metatheatrical moments that guide interpretation. Shakespeare’s allusions often work in unexpected ways. They do not plead on behalf of a particular court faction or promote a particular political agenda so much as they encourage an expanded and expanding public to laugh, to take pleasure in reflecting on the Elizabethan regime, or to think through the ramifications of new modes of publicity. Taken together, the plays that concern me in this book also constitute Shakespeare’s career-long meditation on the memorializing functions of the theater, a process that endows past individuals with a kind of secular immortality. While no eyewitness report testifies to the validity of connections that I make, three generations of playwrights reproduce a set of interlinked patterns with remarkable consistency. If I worry at times that I am becoming too much like Jonson’s “narrow-eyed decipherers,” I am comforted by the fact that I am in good company, since Shakespeare read Lyly’s age-in-love tropes analogically and Middleton read Shakespeare’s that way.
Chapter 1 sets the stage for the rest of the book by situating the senex amans in the context of the Elizabethan court, where it came to accumulate the culturally specific meanings on which Shakespeare later drew. I examine the ways in which Elizabeth I’s approach to rule caused her favorites to deviate from normative standards of behavior, thereby triggering unprecedented public concern. Opposition tracts like Leicester’s Commonwealth and Cardinal Allen’s Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland (1588) exploited these anxieties by depicting the queen’s favorites as threatening, buffoonish, or animalistic figures. I propose that the scandal to which Lyly’s Endymion refers is the crisis of publicity that ensued on the circulation of these slanderous materials to a broad public. Leicester in particular became subject to “all vulgar relations” and to the “libels” generated by “men in passion and discontent.”132 These attacks on the earl alarmed members of Elizabethan government, who felt that they compromised the regime as a whole. Where other critics contend that Endymion either praises or criticizes the queen, I argue that Lyly’s “tale of the Man in the Moon” responds to “libels” about Elizabeth’s courtiers, and that its main focus is on their behavior, which it aims to reform through its didactic portrayal of old men in love. Lyly’s theatrical treatment of senescent male sexuality proved influential; despite their divergent approaches and affiliations, later playwrights and pamphleteers all present “old men lustful” as theatrical creatures, who in “show[ing] like young men” threaten normative values.133 They also associate generational violations with other forms of usurpation, including that of class privilege and of monarchical authority.
Shakespeare’s amorous older men dominated the public stage for over a decade after the publication of Endymion. In the second chapter, “Falstaff among the Minions of the Moon,” I
argue that Hal’s favorite knight offers a provocative reflection of Elizabeth’s favorite knights. My argument is rooted in posthumous descriptions of Leicester, who died in 1588, but had achieved a kind of cultural immortality. By repurposing key aspects of anti-Leicestrian materials, Shakespeare endows his fat favorite with the haunting qualities that have ensured his survival over the centuries. Of particular significance to the characterization of Falstaff are satiric depictions of the earl as a bear baited for his lechery. Although the baiting pattern is consistent across the three plays that feature Falstaff, it is most explicit in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Shakespeare is uninhibited in his solicitation of “pastimes.” The established connections among the queen, her aging favorite, and the theater also help Shakespeare make the lecherous old man a device for situating his plays in relation to the Elizabethan court. By encouraging comparative analysis, the Falstaff plays urge audiences to make political and aesthetic judgments, and thus to usurp the sovereign’s position.
The third chapter argues that Falstaff’s ghost haunts Twelfth Night. In this late comedy, Shakespeare experiments with the same materials in a different generic register, reflecting in the process on the consequences of the fat man’s success. Multiple allusions to Endymion, the Falstaff plays, Ben Jonson’s satirical comedies, and Sir John Harington’s A New Discourse on a Stale Subject, or the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) establish Twelfth Night’s preoccupation with “th’unmuzzled thoughts” (3.1.118) of satirists. While Twelfth Night participates in the discursive processes it examines, it also records misgivings about doing so. The play strains against the conventions of satire by giving us a surfeit of amorous old men; where the portrayal of Malvolio accords with popular forms of anticourt satire, Shakespeare offers an emended portrait of the amans senex in Orsino. A new Endymion, Orsino embodies the generative and artistic potential of this protean figure by his nostalgic aestheticism.
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