Ben Jonson’sThe Alchemist(1610) begins with a perhaps notorious quarrel in which the title character Subtle tells Face, “I fart at thee” (1.1.1), and directs him to “Lick figs / Out at my—” ...(1.1.3–4).¹ With the “fart” directing us to the backside of the body, we can safely supply the missing conclusion of “arse,” which, with the command to lick, makes the barb akin to the modern “kiss my ass.”² As with many insults, such as “jerk,” “kiss my ass” draws on and intensifies meanings associated with a sexual practice—in this case, anilingus, or colloquially rimming
Happily ever after: narrative closure and affective relationsTo many readers of Renaissance texts, Christopher Marlowe's name serves as a by-word for dissident sexuality in the period. Yet, as ...Stephen Orgel has recently suggested, though work on Marlowe has made sexual dissidence in the Renaissance visible for modern readers, the assumption that Marlowe himself was a sexual rebel rests on the testimony of his enemies and on a conflation of the author with his characters. A narrow pursuit of the biographical relevance of his texts obscures questions about how those texts are situated within his culture; furthermore, such a dualistic view – either he (or his text) is or is not queer – effaces the complexities of both Marlowe's writing and Renaissance attitudes toward sexuality. Though the intimate sphere was coalescing around long-term monogamy in the period, the modern outcome of this process was by no means inevitable, and neither marginality nor outsider status was a prerequisite for contesting it. Marlowe's Hero and Leander, in its representation of short-term, situational intimacy, challenges the centrality of the long-term monogamous couple in terms that were also widely available to his culture and accessible to his readers.Historical research into intimate life reveals that while texts from the period touted long-term coupledom, practices differed markedly from this ideal because of low life expectancies, the late age of marriage, and the frequency of remarriage in the period. Lawrence Stone argues that “the incessant preaching on the imminence of death must have been a constant reminder of the essential transience of all human relationships. In practice, the probability of a durable marriage was low, since it was likely to be broken before very long by the death of the husband or the wife.” According to Stone, the average early modern English first marriage lasted about seventeen years and almost a quarter of all marriages performed during the period were remarriages. While seventeen years is not short-term, it stands to reason that individuals entertained the possibility that for at least one partner, a marital relationship might be temporary and succeeded by another. Stone, controversially, has concluded from this high mortality rate that closeness, between parents and children and between husband and wife, must have been unlikely and imprudent. In contrast, Alan Macfarlane advises caution in deducing from these figures early modern attitudes toward marriage: “If marriages were relatively vulnerable and partners often replaced, does this tell us anything of the depth of the emotion involved? The problem is a complex one, for swift remarriage can be interpreted in two ways: as evidence of lack of affection – or as the opposite.” The “opposite” situation, according to Macfarlane, is one wherein a widow or widower finds affection in marriage so plentiful and pleasurable in spite of the possibility of losing a partner, that one is willing to risk marriage again. Macfarlane exposes the equation of longevity and intimacy that operates in Stone's interpretation of these data, and he suggests that relations in the Renaissance, including marriage itself, may not all have been evaluated based on their longevity. Only when marriage attempts to assert itself over the entire relational field does it elevate longevity as a signifier of pleasure and value and, in turn, advance itself, somewhat fantastically and fictitiously, as the definitive long-term relation. One has to remain open to the possible significance of short-term relations in texts from the Renaissance, when this transition had not been fully achieved.
How do you solve a problem like Isabella?As the previous chapter's discussion showed, violence characterizes relations between men at the court in The Nice Valour, and Lapet tried to transform the ...violence of that space into a form of intimacy. Place similarly exerts a shaping influence over the intimate economy of many early modern texts in which convents play a role because the convent offers a space for non-marital intimacy. For instance, at the end of Measure for Measure (1603–1604), the Duke's offer of marriage to Isabella is met with her silence. The text refuses to guarantee a future for the couple, and this textual indeterminacy has prompted critical discussion of the implications of the choice Isabella faces between returning to the convent and marrying a man in whom she has not shown the slightest interest romantically, an act which would involve her reintegration into the city-state of Vienna. While Measure for Measure does not stage Isabella's decision, a number of Renaissance dramatic texts do represent a heroine choosing or compelled to choose between a convent and a husband, often in favor of the husband. Frances E. Dolan argues that some early modern texts ridicule nuns for taking themselves out of marital circulation in order to manage concerns that “normative expectations for women institutionalized through marriage and the family are just as excessive and doomed as those institutionalized through the cloister.” However, as I will show, Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589), the anonymous Merry Devil of Edmonton (c. 1602), and Measure for Measure at the very least fail fully to denounce, ridicule, or manage their representations of convents in ways that we might expect in English drama after the Reformation. To the extent that these texts invest in the Catholic cloister as a potentially desirable alternative to Protestant marriage, the nun remains a subversive figure.The nun's subversion is only partly related to religion, however. Kate Chedgzoy rightly notes that the convent is “a fictive space in which women's ambiguous relation to central institutions of early modern society could be reimagined.” Targeting Chedgzoy's analysis to the nation as a whole, I argue in this chapter that the figure of the nun is a threat because of her simultaneous involvement in a supranational religious organization and a single-sex community; this threat reveals that our assessments of the early modern analogies between the female body and the space of the early modern nation and between the early modern household and the monarchical state are limited insofar as they fail to account for marriage as an intimate economy of mediated circulation. Renaissance dramatic representations of the convent challenge the nationalist uses and implications of the consolidation of intimacy around marriage, interiority, and futurity. When the plays I discuss in this chapter show women desiring to be installed in economies of insufficient circulation with men and unprofitable, non-reproductive circulation with other women, by implication they imagine alternatives to dominant understandings of the nation as a space and the subject's participation in the life of the nation. Advancing this book's rethinking of Renaissance intimacy, my analysis of representations of convents reveals that intimate life was situated along a continuum of sexual and non-sexual relations of care and that forms of affiliation not usually associated with intimate life, such as national identity and political subjection, were in fact tethered to the Renaissance intimate sphere.
Introduction: intersections of race and sexualityTo extend the previous chapter's discussion of representations of female same-sex intimacy in early modern texts, this chapter focuses on the public ...status of bonds between women in the work of Lady Mary Wroth. While I have discussed drama in the last three chapters, by shifting genres I hope to show that the definitional struggle over intimacy was carried out in multiple literary venues in the period. Wroth's prose romance and verse are not literary in the same way as the period's commercial drama, though the dramatists themselves hardly agreed on the literariness of plays. Nevertheless, Wroth's texts and the dramatic texts I discussed in previous chapters share many of the same concerns about relationality. I hope that the scope of my analysis will encourage Renaissance scholars to develop their own rubrics through which they might assemble unexpected canons, break down traditional generic boundaries, and bring women writers into further dialogue with male-dominated milieux of literary production, such as the commercial theatre.Several affective economies structure Wroth's work, but the relationship between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus seems to be the organizing principle of both the prose romance The Countess of Montgomery's Urania and the sonnet sequence that bears their names. Yet the centrality of this relationship is complicated by the significance Wroth invests in her texts’ female-female relations, which interact with the cross-gendered bond of Pamphilia and Amphilanthus and other heteroerotic bonds. Wroth repeatedly returns to the problem of publicizing intimate bonds that are based on private, interiorized desire. This psychic depth model's near-exclusive control over intimacy in Wroth's work is also exclusionary. As I will show in this chapter, homoerotic and heteroerotic bonds do not achieve representational parity despite both being underwritten by interiorized desire in her work. In fact, the psychic depth model inhibits the achievement of parity. Though her sonnet sequence and prose romance are different as narratives, the teleology structuring both erases, appropriates, and transforms female-female bonds in order to advance the public status of marriage and heterosexual coupling.
In the preceding chapters, I have insisted that many more intimate possibilities, especially those detached from an interiorized sense of embodiment, were imagined throughout Renaissance texts than ...appeared to be authorized at their moments of closure. Insofar as these texts circulate, readers who follow the cues that separate textual endorsement from narrative closure can recover their value and make use of them. Along the way, I have tried to emphasize the defamiliarizing aspects of Renaissance texts and show how these aspects are forms of protest to a cultural shift in the definition of intimacy. In my last chapter, I discussed how Lady Mary Wroth emphasized interiority and privacy in affection, and how her narrative's trajectory in part established these two aspects of affection as the basis for distinguishing privileged heteroerotic bonds from subordinated homoerotic ones. These distinctions are part of a terrain that is, arguably, familiar to the modern reader, but the boundary in Wroth's work is inchoate and permeable, making it possible to read her texts against the grain of their own narrative tendencies to delimit the intimate sphere. Thus, though my discussion of Renaissance texts concludes with a resemblance to modernity in which the intimate is remarkably homogeneous and centralized around abiding coupledom, I have tried to argue throughout that this historical trajectory was not inevitable. Instead, the contraction of the intimate sphere around coupling was hotly contested through these texts’ representations of alternative possibilities for affective relations. Even in Wroth's narratives, other voices disturb the texts’ ostensible orientation toward a narrower understanding of intimacy. In the context of the arguments of the earlier chapters of this book, this orientation seems more like a departure from polyvocality than a progression because I did not start with modernity as a given. More generally, then, when these representations circulate among readers and audiences in print, in manuscript, and in performance, the possible alternative lives that authors imagine for their characters circulate as persistent reminders, not of a world to which we can or should return, but of the avenues of resistance to dominant ideologies that the circulation of texts opens up.
The stroke of death, the lover's pinch: masochism and ambivalence in renaissance textsIn the 1599 collection of epigrams by John Davies and elegies by Christopher Marlowe, a reader can find one of ...the frankest descriptions of masochistic sexual practices in Renaissance England: Davies's Epigram 33. “In Francum” depicts a scene of pleasure through pain and then concludes with the speaker's wish to be a part of it:
When Francus comes to sollace with his whooreHe sends for rods and strips himselfe stark naked:For his lust sleepes, and will not rise before,By whipping of the wench it be awaked.I envie’him not, but wish I had the powre,To make my selfe his wench but one halfe houre.The concluding moment of identification is less straightforward than it might appear, for, as Ian Frederick Moulton argues, the phrase “whipping of the wench” could refer either to Francus's whipping the wench or the wench's whipping of Francus in order to arouse him. Since the epigram's speaker wants to be the wench, it is unclear whether he wants to be beaten by or to beat Francus himself. The ambiguous relationship of Renaissance satire to dominant culture further complicates the meaning of these lines. That the Davies-Marlowe collection and other verse satire would be thought subversive enough for the Bishops to ban them in 1599 may seem curious because epigrams and satire usually reserve their scorn for departures from a social norm. In the act of imagining such departures only to critique them, the Bishops worried, epigrams would provide scripts for readers to discover and act on their own potentially transgressive sexual tastes.Like the other “failures of intimacy” I discuss in this book, Renaissance texts’ representations of masochism are suffused with this tension between making pleasures available and calling into question whether such pleasures ought to be desired. For example, in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1606–1607), Cleopatra eroticizes death when she tells Charmian, “The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch / Which hurts and is desired.” For the audience, her imminent suicide shrouds the masochistic pleasure of the lover's pinch that she imagines. What is briefly referenced in Antony and Cleopatra becomes in other Renaissance plays a fuller exploration of the politics of alternate forms of sexual practice, and in this chapter, I hope both to map the ideological terrain surrounding these dramatic representations and to complicate our understanding of early modern intimacy by turning to non-Shakespearean drama. Through a transgressive re-enactment of hierarchical relations, between and within classes and genders, masochistic pleasures offered Renaissance readers and audiences an opportunity to reimagine social relations. Bringing same-sex and opposite-sex relations together in this chapter, I seek to expand the scope of queer inquiry to shed light on what Jonathan Goldberg has called “the open secret of the imbrication of alternative possibilities within normative sexualities.” In the Renaissance, certain types of same-sex and cross-sex relations were cast as potentially disruptive to sexual normalcy, and such disruption is especially illuminated by focusing not on nascent forms of identity but instead by attending to the history of sexual practices, especially those where the gender of object choice does not play the same role as it does in modern parsings of sexuality, though it may still be influential in shaping a practice's form and meaning.
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