George Peele

David Bevington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351933919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

David Bevington's volume on George Peele looks at the literary achievement of that dramatist and author, who was born in London some time around 1556-8, was educated at Oxford, and returned to London to become a prolific writer until his death in 1596. He died at the age of forty, in poverty, and was never far from the threat of debtors' prison throughout his adult life. Peele, like Greene and Marlowe, was caricatured in his immediate afterlife as the embodiment of a popular and thriving literary culture in London of the late sixteenth century: a world that was competitive and relentlessly unforgiving in its economic pressures, but also colourful, adventuresome, and vital. This volume collects together for the first time the best contemporary published work on Peele by a group of renowned scholars. They discuss Peele's Lord Mayor's Pageants, Court Entertainments, occasional poems, and his plays The Arraignment of Paris, The Old Wives Tale, The Battle of Alcazar, Edward I, David and Bathsheba, and Titus Andronicus. The essays are accompanied by David Bevington's substantial introduction which discusses Peele's life and works, particularly in the context of the other five University Wits.

Part I

Lord Mayor’s Pageants, Court Entertainments, Occasional Poems

[1]

Entertainments for Court and City

A.R. Braunmuller

Public ceremony, festival, show, the drama of street and hall, village green and innyard, permeated Elizabethan life. Many of these events were deliberately, if subtly, political. Ruled and ruling classes expressed their loyalty, their power, and their sense of community in ways generally foreign to modern nation states, especially those states which emphasize the individual rather than a group as the fundamental social unit. A modern citizen’s allegiance may still employ public totems—the eagle, lion, or bear, for example—but the emblems have neither a vital connection with a single individual leader nor the power to evoke unified and delimited ideas, attitudes, and meanings. In Elizabethan society—a society divided over religion, the distribution of political authority, and indeed the state’s very definition—images of power and ceremonies of mutual responsibility asserted, and even seemed to “prove,” the existence of a splendidly reassuring universal order.¹ Court drama, city pageant, and the renewal or invention of medieval and pseudo-medieval public ceremonies all worked to announce and exploit the public values essential for public harmony. Thus, a great deal of what today appears to have been independently conceived “literature” or “art” served also, perhaps even primarily, as propaganda.

Elizabethan patrons might not have stipulated the philosophical and political programs of their artistic employees with quite the tenacity or rigor of Italian princes, but they could trust the power of convention and the purse to “guide” and shape that artistic product. Moreover, the hired artist (like Peele or Lyly) and the amateur one (like Sidney) almost certainly shared the patrons’ values and ambitions, at least in general.² Consequently, a substantial body of literary and subliterary works promoted various public myths, national self-conceptions, and the half-begged, half-demanded desires of many different social groups. Courtly recreation became not only a recognized way to affirm larger social, political, and religious values, but also a means to promote specific policies and to advance specific individuals.³ Eager, ambitious, and poor, Peele attempted to supply what his society seemed to want. At the start of his professional career, he offered The Araygnement of Paris to the court and sometime later contrived The Old Wives Tale, possibly for a similar audience. He also sold his talents to others, individual and corporate. Like his father before him, he tapped an important middle-class and mercantile vein by writing pageants for the annual installation of London’s Lord Mayor, and he exploited some of Elizabeth’s most successful minglings of honor and publicity, the elaborately revitalized Knights of the Garter and the annual tournaments celebrating her accession to the throne. This chapter examines Peele’s works deliberately tailored to specific courtly and civic occasions, the Accession Day tilts, the Lord Mayor’s pageants, and the Garter installation ceremony. These occasional poems provide an excellent context for two of Peele’s finest dramatic works, The Araygnement of Paris and The Old Wives Tale, the subjects of the next chapters.

Accession Day Poems

The tilts, or jousts, which marked the anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession, 17 November, were the most spectacular regular public events of the period. Shortly after the day had been established as the year’s most significant secular holiday, that is, from the early or mid-1570s, the annual events became elaborate and costly extravaganzas. Roy Strong describes them as “a marriage of the arts in the service of Elizabethan state-craft,” a phrase which describes virtually every major form of court revel.⁴ Like other entertainments, the Tiltyard shows served as coded exchanges between subjects and sovereign. Through his choice of armor, supporting cast, and allegorical decoration—for example, the riddling visual motifs painted on his shield—a nobleman could protest, palliate, request, or advocate some royal action or reaction. Other tilters might amplify, or challenge, that “speech” to the queen, and she, in turn, might respond very bluntly or join in the allusive symbolic conversation.

Polyhymnia (1590) and Anglorum Feriae (1595) record two Accession Day tilts and introduce very clearly some of the “conversational formulae” exchanged by court and monarch. A pastoral and chivalricambience, for example, or repeated contests requiring the queen to act as an arbiter appear and reappear in the tilts, in the country-house entertainments which Elizabeth saw on her frequent progresses, and mutatis mutandis in The Araygnement of Paris and many other works of court literature. Just as the country-house entertainments became individually and collectively “a … serial … in which courtiers cast themselves in whatever rôle suited the moment and their plea,”⁵ so too, the tilts apparently develop a slightly disjointed continuous story. This continuity of material and political design appears in all forms of court entertainment and literature. Thus, the “pastoral preoccupation” of the country-house revels and the Tiltyard pageants passes—in demonstrably textual ways—into literature as diverse as The Arcadia, the lyric poetry of the 1580s, John Lyly’s plays, and The Araygnement of Paris.⁶

Peele himself first appears as a recorder, rather than inventor, of court festivities in Polyhymnia, his account of the 1590 Accession Day tilt. Polyhymnia has the chief advantages of an Elizabethan occasional poem—immediacy, a kind of breathless vivacity—and the main disadvantage—a dreary duty to include every event and every participant. Consequently, Peele divides his poem into sections recording (often in no very specific detail) the combats of thirteen pairs of eminent Elizabethans. Sometimes this journalistic determination makes for a “then-and-then-and-then” structure with hardly any individual features to distinguish the parts. Nonetheless, verbal archaisms do catch the “gothick” quality of Elizabethan nobles pretending to be medieval knights:

Wherefore it fares as whilom and of yore,

In armour bright and sheene, faire Englands knights

In honour of their peerelesse Soveraigne:

………………………………………

Make to the Tylt amaine…. (12–14, 16)

This same early passage underlines the tilt’s official and very political purpose: honoring Elizabeth (see also lines 78–79, 90–93, and 172). While every Accession Day tilt made a uniform political statement, they permitted many eccentric individual performances and could simultaneously, as in 1590, seem to create an overall theme.

The unofficial and unannounced theme in 1590 might be called “change and continuity.” Peele’s chief poetic problem was welding thirteen different but virtually indistinguishable pseudomedieval pseudocombats into some sort of coherence. He took his clue from the 1590 tilt’s most prominent event, the retirement of Sir Henry Lee as Queen’s Champion, and from the tilt’s most extravagant individual display, the earl of Essex’s appearance, “all in Sable sad” (98), mourning Sir Philip Sidney’s death. Using Cumberland’s succession to Lee and Essex’s replacement (matrimonial and political) of Sidney, Peele refers the changes within unchanging patterns to the queen herself, semper eadem, always the same. To distinguish one pair of combatants from another, Peele chose to emphasize the contrasting colors of their armor and the variety of heraldic detail each combatant bore on his shield.

This emphasis upon appearance—the colors, emblematic details, the order and number of participants—makes Polyhymnia a fascinating record of Elizabethan society amid its serious pastimes and reminds us that the slightest detail in such events almost certainly had a significance. Thus, even when Peele cannot explain something, he assumes it has an interpretation: “… gentle Gerrarde, all in white and greene, / Collours (belike) best serving his conceit” (56–57).⁷ More often, of course, the details of appearance could be explained. Lee’s “Caparison charg’d with Crownes, / Oreshadowed with a withered running Vine” (22–23) represents the aged Champion’s retirement, and “the golden Eagle” Lord Ferdinando Strange bore was the “Stanleyes olde Crest and honourable badge” (40–41). The choice and use of some costly and often enigmatic emblem or more elaborate decorative scheme pleasantly puzzles the spectators and compliments the sovereign; thus, Peele found William Knowles, “in his plumes, his colours and device, / Expressing Warriors wit and Courtiers grace” (179–80).

Peele’s determination to record the tilt’s visual aspects produces detailed accounts of the knights’ ceremonial entries. Some tilters simply rode into the yard, saluted the queen, and approached the barriers to fight. More costly and elaborate equipment would include a “pageant,” or horse-drawn wagon, carrying the tilter and his symbolically clad servants, the tilting horses and armor (usually painted or adorned with emblematic designs), and finally a “Trounch-man” (47), or interpreter, to explain the symbolism and present the knight, who then “Dismountes him from his pageant” (50). The “shows” and “devices” often seem like vivified illustrations from contemporary emblem books.⁸ Robert Cary entered with a common emblem, a heart surrounded by flames, probably painted on his shield or a scroll (lines 154–58), and Anthony Cooke offers other images familiar from emblem books (lines 189–93). If allegorical interpretations were easy, so were classical and mythological analogies: Robert Knowles appears “with golden boughes” (probably his lances, or perhaps some image on shield or armor), “Entring the listes like Tytan, arm’d with fire, / When in the queachy plot Python he slew” (211–13) and Thomas Sidney “So well behav’d himselfe … As Paris had to great Achilles Launce / Applied his tender fingers and his force” (242–44).

The most extravagant “show” of the tilt belonged to the earl of Essex and commemorated the friend, Philip Sidney, whose widow Essex had married and whose political and “mythological” heir he hoped to be.⁹ Peele carefully surrounds the central event with details of other tilters’ bright, contrasting colors—red and green for Lord Burgh and Edward Denny, Lord Strange’s gold, “Or and Azure” and “Orenge-tawnie” for Sir Charles Blunt and Thomas Vavasor. The color contrast and a long grammatical suspension which refuses to name the subject intensify the entry’s surprise:

Then proudly shocks amid the Martiall throng,

Of lustie Lancieres, all in Sable sad,

Drawen on with cole-blacke Steeds of duskie hue,

In stately Chariot full of deepe device,

Where gloomie Time sat whipping on the teame,

Just backe to backe with this great Champion;

Yoong Essex, that thrice honorable Earle,

Yclad in mightie Armes of mourners hue,

And plume as blacke as is the Ravens wing,

That from his armour borrowed such a light,

As bowes of Vu [Yew] receives from shady streame,

His staves were such, or of such hue at least,

As are those banner staves that mourners beare,

And all his companie in funerall blacke,

As if he mourn’d to thinke of him he mist,

Sweete Sydney, fairest shepheard of our greene,

Well lettred Warriour, whose successor he

In love and Armes had ever vowed to be. (97–114)

Peele’s affection for Sidney, mentioned in lines 225–26, and his profound admiration for Essex give this passage an unusual density and attractiveness.¹⁰ Varying hues of black and the pageant’s funereal purpose allow two nicely judged similes: the black colors reflect one another as a stream’s dark waters reflect the symbolically mournful yew tree, while the banners Essex’s servants carry remind Peele of the banners carried in Sidney’s own funeral procession. Time hastens us all toward death: first Sidney and now his dear friend making this ceremonial and memorial entry.

Essex’s magnificent “device” echoes throughout the poem. Thomas Knollys, a “friend and follower” of Essex, also appears “In mourning Sable dight by simpathie” (201), and Cooke of course portrayed “Life and Death … in his show” (189). Despite time’s destruction and sorrow’s shows, Peele ends his description of the tilt by promising renewal and perpetuation because 17 November is “that golden time … the byrth-day of our happinesse, / The blooming time, the spring of Englands peace” (262–64).

After the tilt comes a coda describing Sir Henry Lee’s resignat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I LORD MAYOR’S PAGEANTS, COURT ENTERTAINMENTS, OCCASIONAL POEMS
• PART II THE ARRAIGNMENT OF PARIS
• PART III THE OLD WIVES TALE
• PART IV THE BATTLE OF ALCAZAR
• PART V EDWARD I
• PART VI DAVID AND BATHSHEBA
• PART VII PEELE AND TITUS ANDRONICUS
• Name Index