Age in Love

by Jacqueline Vanhoutte

  I do not know whether Elizabeth and her elderly courtiers recognized themselves in Lyly’s pointedly mocking portrait of an old man enamored of old meat.205 I do know that Lyly never obtained the preferment he had hoped for from the queen, and that the Earl of Oxford withdrew his patronage later in the same year that Endymion was performed at court.206 And I know that when Shakespeare decided to stage versions of this scene, he made his amorous asses in love with enchanting and dominating fairy queens. Sir Tophas is the prototype for all the aging Shakespearean males who preposterously cause the “reversal of priority, precedence, and ordered sequence” by acting on sexual urges, to quote Patricia Parker. Because age was as important a factor as “gender and social place” in the “right ordering” of early modern society, the preposterous figure of “age in love” signaled categorical degradation, the violation of natural sequence, and the subversion of natural hierarchies.207 To bring this point home to an aging court, Lyly bends generational categories in Endymion as adeptly as he bends gender categories in Gallathea. His theatrical treatment of superannuated male sexuality—Lyly imagines it as a kind of acting against type, where an elderly male character literally takes on the costume and the role of an “untutor’d youth” (Sonnet 138.3)—influenced Shakespeare, who made the old man in love a favorite of the public stages. To those reading Lyly’s play in the nineties, as Shakespeare did, senescent male sexuality presented itself as the definitive problem confronting the late Elizabethan court. Representations of amorous old men in later Elizabethan and early Jacobean literature invite a range of reactions to the perceived sexual transgressions of elderly courtiers like the Earl of Leicester, from uneasy amusement to savage contempt to empathetic embrace. By their variety, these responses suggest just how ambivalent Elizabeth’s subjects felt about the men who surrounded the Virgin Queen, and whose unorthodox means to power challenged notions of masculinity and class hierarchy.

  2

  Falstaff among the Minions of the Moon

  In the long cultural tradition that has sought to relate Elizabeth I and her most talented subject, Sir John Falstaff plays a starring role.1 Anecdotal evidence suggests that the queen intervened repeatedly in Shakespeare’s shaping of this character. So, according to his eighteenth-century biographer Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597) because Elizabeth “was so well pleas’d with that admirable Character of Falstaff . . . that she commanded him to continue it for one Play more, and to shew him in Love.”2 A previous generation of scholars used this posthumous “tradition” of royal interference to speculate that the inconsistencies between Falstaff in The Henriad (1596–99) and his “impostor” in The Merry Wives of Windsor resulted from artistic compromises made to an unperceptive royal command.3 We might consider these stories as evidence of a different sort. Regardless of their veracity, anecdotes like Rowe’s bear witness to a vestigial connection between the Virgin Queen and Shakespeare’s fat knight in his aspect as a senescent lover. Although recent critics have shown little interest in this association, Falstaff does introduce himself as one of “Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon . . . men of good government, being govern’d, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.25–29).4 The old man’s fondness for such euphuisms is no accident; a web of references binds Shakespeare’s plump Jack to Elizabeth’s “minions” and “men of good government” as they were described in antigovernment tracts or represented in John Lyly’s Endymion (1588)—especially the greatest minion of them all, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is, among many other things, a vehicle for thinking about the sexual and generational transgressions of the late Elizabethan court.

  The word “minion” referred to the male favorites of sovereign princes.5 Given the prevalence of the moon cult in the 1590s, Falstaff’s opening invocation of Diana invites audience members to consider his relationship to Elizabeth I. Although David Scott Kastan argues that Falstaff’s self-description does not signal “a submission to authority but an authorization of transgression; he serves not the monarch whose motto . . . was ‘semper eadam alwaies one,’ but only the changeable moon,” the moon cult allowed for and indeed celebrated the paradoxical concept of constancy-in-change.6 The eponymous hero of Endymion, a source for Merry Wives, defends his beloved Cynthia against charges of inconstancy, for example, by praising her ability to wax and wane while keeping “a settled course.” Elizabeth embraced the identification, and had herself portrayed as Cynthia in the famous Rainbow Portrait (ca. 1600; see figure 6). The moon’s properties helped court writers portray a queen who claimed constancy, but whom they perceived as an agent of transformation. Most famously, Sir Walter Ralegh used lunar imagery to describe Elizabeth’s adulterating effect on his watery speaker in “The Ocean to Cynthia”: a change in “Belphoebe’s course” here converts the smooth “ocean seas” into “tempestuous waves” there.7 When Falstaff compares himself to a sea, influenced by his “noble and chaste mistress the moon,” he identifies himself, and his transgressions, with the men about the Virgin Queen.

  As a royal favorite “fat-witted with drinking of old sack” and given to taking “purses . . . by the moon and the seven stars,” Falstaff evokes the picture of the “moon’s men” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.2, 14, 31) not just as it was drawn by adherents of the court but also as it was drawn by its most assiduous detractors. In 1584, the authors of Leicester’s Commonwealth had asked that Elizabeth grant their “lawful desire and petition” to try Leicester in court, because of the earl’s “intolerable licentiousness in all filthy kind and manner of carnality,” and because he was guilty

  of theft, not only by spoiling and oppressing almost infinite private men, but also whole towns, villages, corporations, and countries, by robbing the realm with inordinate licenses, by deceiving the crown with racking, changing, and embezzling the lands, by abusing his prince and sovereign in selling his favor both at home and abroad . . . in which sort of traffic he committeth more theft oftentimes in one day than all the waykeepers, cutpurses, cozeners, pirates, burglars, or other of that art in a whole year within the realm.

  The earl, the authors opined, was a figure of misrule who should be arraigned under the same “laws” that Elizabeth used “daily to pass [judgment] upon thieves.”8 Cardinal Allen concurred, qualifying Leicester’s military activities in the Netherlands as “publike robberies,” and arguing that under the earl’s leadership English soldiers had become “companions of theeves and revenous woolves: and publike enimies of al true Kinges and lawful Dominion.” From the perspective of Elizabethan dissidents, the queen was not a “noble and chaste mistress” but a changeable moon, a monarch who had countenanced the multiple robberies of her “amorous minion,” the “cheife leader” of her “wicked and unwonted course of regiment.”9

  By echoing these attacks on the queen’s favorite while showing us an unruly favorite in the company of his prince, the second scene of 1 Henry IV positions its audience to think about the loaded topic of monarchical judgment generally and Elizabeth I’s judgment more specifically. Machiavelli, who was in the revolutionary business of defining the criteria by which one might judge princes, held that “the first thing one does to evaluate the wisdom of a ruler is to examine the men that he has around them.” Thomas Blundeville agreed that “the sufficiency of the manne” was an accurate gauge of “the choyse of the Prince.”10 Falstaff, well-versed in politic authors, endorses this logic when he claims that “it is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, one of another; therefore let men take heed of their company” (2 Henry IV, 5.1.75–77). Under such conditions, the “Inclination of Princes to some men, and their Disfavour towards others” might indeed become “fatal,” as William Camden averred, in reference to the great favor that Elizabeth I showed the Earl of Leicester.11 Because “mignonnerie” captured “the straying king personally,” Laurie Shannon thinks it “p
osed a constitutional conflict” for royal advisors and for “the monarchy itself, as embodied in a king who always has the capacity to act ‘unkingly.’”12 A royal favorite reputed a thief, a drunk, and a lecher was also “fatal” in that people might be persuaded the monarch’s lack of judgment offered “just cause” for rebelling, when subjects technically were, as the pro-government pamphlet A Briefe Discoverie of Dr. Allen’s Seditious Driftes (1588) insists, “private men, and subjects, and therefore can have no lawfull authority . . . to judge.”13

  This pamphlet describes the “infamous libels” aimed at Leicester, examined in the previous chapter, as part of an innovative assault on Elizabeth I’s prerogative. The author’s fear that “private men” might arrogate to themselves the place of “judge, corrector, and executioner of Iustice” substantiates Curtis Perry’s claim that “debates about court favoritism” laid “the groundwork for larger transformation of the kind theorized by Habermas.”14 Shakespeare’s contemporaries were aware of these changes, even if they lacked the critical vocabulary to describe them. Habermas defines the bourgeois public sphere, which he sees as emerging in the eighteenth century, as constituted of “private people come together as a public” to engage “in a debate over the general rules governing relations”; what is at stake is in part the rights of the private subject to pass judgment on the sovereign.15 The development of a public sphere had roots in earlier phenomena, including Machiavelli’s secular approach to historiography; according to Michel de Certeau, “When the historian seeks to establish, for the place of power, the rules of political conduct”—like those that govern the selection of political advisors—“he plays the role of the prince that he is not.”16 De Certeau’s metaphor imagines this as a form of theatrical usurpation. By construing Leicester as a “carped . . . knight” who had “never had merited . . . to be so highly favored of [her Majes]tie,” the earl’s detractors urged “private men” to pass judgment on Elizabeth’s judgment, a necessary preliminary to playing the prince by passing judgment on the sovereign herself.17 In the first play of the Henriad Shakespeare signals his interest in this process by having Bolingbroke preface his usurpation and deposition of Richard II with the execution of two royal favorites who have “misled a prince, a royal king” (3.1.8). Although Richard II does not pursue the implications of this sequence of events, granting little stage time to the king’s favorites, the Bishop of Carlisle’s related question—“What subject can give sentence on his king?” (4.1.121)—haunts the rest of the tetralogy in the form of a fat old man.

  The issue of the prince’s fallible judgment, as manifested in the injudicious treatment of favorites, is raised explicitly in 1 Henry IV when Falstaff admonishes Hal, “Do not thou, when thou art king, hang a thief” (1.2.62). This admonition is self-interested; as soon as Hal is crowned, his “fat rogue” of a minion (1.2.187) intends to emulate Leicester in letting “his gredy appetite” range free.18 Even though critics like Kastan equate transgression with resistance to monarchical authority, the fascination exerted by Elizabeth’s eldest minion shows unruliness came in other forms than political dissidence for Tudor subjects. In his eagerness to have “England . . . give him office, honor, might,” Leicester was accused, as Falstaff is, of committing “the oldest sins the newest kind of ways” (2 Henry IV, 4.5.126–29), and committing them “upon her Majesty’s favor and countenance towards him.”19 That Hal appears at first willing to “countenance” the “poor abuses of the time” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.156) in Falstaff thus raises all manner of questions, for, as Falstaff asks of Poins, “if men were to be sav’d by merit, what hole in hell were hot enough for him?” (1.2.107–8).20 By casting these questions in the familiar terms favored by Catholic dissidents, Shakespeare places his “most comparative, rascalliest, sweet young prince” (1.2.80–81) in relation to his own prince, and his “lugg’d bear,” the subject of “the most unsavory similes” (1.2.74, 79), in relation to the queen’s “Bearwhelp,” the subject of “all pleasant discourses at this day throughout the realm.”21

  The Falstaff plays allude to the recent past to constitute their audiences as a “remembering public.” By always leaving us wanting “one Play more,” Falstaff is the poster boy for theatrical “ghosting”—the recycling of actors, plots, props, patterns, allusions and so on that, according to Marvin Carlson, encourages audiences “to compare varying versions of the same” material.22 Such “base comparisons” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.250) engage faculties of judgment, and, when they involve historical persons, prompt what Castiglione calls “words of severe censure, of modest praise, and of cutting satire.”23 A Briefe Discoverie objects to Allen’s “offering a comparison betweene the D. Parmaes glorious exploits, and his Lordships [that is, Leicester’s] famous factes . . . as though his vertues were so farre inferiour, to the others” on precisely these grounds. Similarly, when anticourt polemicists likened Leicester to Richard II’s favorites, they were implicitly comparing Elizabeth I to a monarch deposed for showing “too much favor towards wicked persons.”24 Elizabeth’s famous identification with Shakespeare’s Richard II betrayed her well-founded anxiety about the provocative function of such analogic “pastimes,” made particularly dangerous, perhaps, by a theatrical setting. In 1 Henry IV, Henry IV attributes Richard’s downfall to his taste for “shallow jesters” and his consequent vulnerability to “every beardless vain comparative” (3.2.61, 67) before castigating his own son: “For all the world / As thou art to this hour was Richard then” (3.2.93–94). The king’s censure places Hal in the same comparative relation to Richard II as the authors of Leicester’s Commonwealth had placed the queen. As such comparisons show, to go from evaluating the merits of a royal favorite to evaluating the merits of the prince is but a short step—and one abetted by Shakespeare’s introduction of a measure of contrast into comparative relations. The Falstaff plays encourage their audiences to take this step by doing what no dissident pamphlet could do. They provide theatrical substitutes for Elizabeth I, who shine more brightly than she does. The audience is asked to weigh these substitutes’ “glorious exploits” against Elizabeth’s “famous factes,” at least in the matter of countenancing an “old fat man, a tun of man” as chosen “companion” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.448).

  The ways in which Falstaff’s multiple transgressions prompt “discourses” is key to these comparative processes. Gossip, slander, and rumor follow Falstaff at the heel, a sure indication of his public notoriety and of his hold on collective memory. In an argument that highlights Falstaff’s connection to the figure of Rumor, Harry Berger Jr. proposes that Falstaff stands for judgment, in that he both represents judgment and asks to be judged.25 Like Berger’s Falstaff, Leicester was a knowing collaborator in his prince’s project, “growne so far” in her “Majesties favor” as to inspire “much talke . . . muttered in [every] corner, [and] much whisperinge.”26 Although commentators disagreed in their assessment of the earl, they agreed that he generated compulsive chatter and found themselves retelling his story in an effort to substantiate their judgments. The attacks of the 1580s had initiated a series of responses and imitations over the next few decades—an unprecedented phenomenon that the theorist Michael Warner might identify as the “concatenation of texts through time” that conjures a public.27 This public was not organized around the ideological values of the exiled Catholics who helped call it into being: several of the texts concerned came out of court circles, show signs of Protestant affiliation (e.g., the anonymous News from Heaven and Hell), or reflect the mixed motivations of theatrical entrepreneurs (e.g., The Henriad and The Merry Wives of Windsor). What the audiences for these works did have in common was a taste for satiric representations of fat, vain, thieving, lecherous, cowardly, lubricious, hypocritical old men: the kind whom “men of all sorts take a pride to gird at,” the ones who are “the cause that wit is in other men” (2 Henry IV, 1.2.6, 10).

  By situating Falstaff in the context of anti-Leicestrian discourses, I show that Shakespeare’s old knight is a vehicle not jus
t for thinking about the Elizabethan court, but also for thinking about the public theater’s relation to that court and the society it governed. In making Falstaff, Shakespeare transformed the raw materials of Leicester’s “black legend” through his distinctive modes of theatricality, self-reflection, and showmanship.28 Like his own “honey-tongued Boyet,” Shakespeare is in this “wit’s pedlar,” retailing courtly “wares” while “grac[ing them] with such show” that he outperforms his models (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.317–34). I mention Boyet not only because Berowne’s description articulates in Shakespeare’s own terms the “populuxe” appeal, subversive impact, competitive motivations, and commercial value of early modern theatricality, but also because Boyet is the resented servant of a convention-defying princess. Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594–95) thus calls attention to a category of analysis—gender—often disregarded in public sphere approaches to Shakespeare’s works but crucial to the evaluation of Elizabethan political phenomena.29 Falstaff is more closely associated in the critical tradition with the transcendent “agency of [Shakespeare’s] theater itself” than any other character, with the possible (and significant) exception of Cleopatra.30 To take seriously Falstaff’s contention that he is Diana’s minion is to accept Elizabeth’s central influence on the transformative powers of Shakespeare’s art. This chapter traces one aspect of that influence, the way that the unconventional and scandalous relationship between the aging queen and her elderly favorite contributed to a Shakespearean theater that sought sport and profit from exposing political material to public evaluation.