Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature

Jennifer C. Vaught

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351919395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The first full length treatment of how men of different professions, social ranks and ages are empowered by their emotional expressiveness in early modern English literary works, this study examines the profound impact of the cultural shift in the English aristocracy from feudal warriors to emotionally expressive courtiers or gentlemen on all kinds of men in early modern English literature. Jennifer Vaught bases her analysis on the epic, lyric, and romance as well as on drama, pastoral writings and biography, by Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Jonson and Garrick among other writers. Offering new readings of these works, she traces the gradual emergence of men of feeling during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the blossoming of this literary version of manhood during the eighteenth century.

PART ONE
The Intertextual Poetics of Scholarly Men: Affect in Arboreal Works by Spenser and Jonson

Both Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson were scholars whose notions about manhood were shaped by the Christian–Humanist tradition. These literary rivals present themselves as men worthy of the laurel crown by alluding to famous literary predecessors in Book I of The Faerie Queene (1590) and in Timber: Or Discoveries Upon Men and Matter (1623–35).¹ I have placed key arboreal episodes in Book I of The Faerie Queene in dialogue with Timber because these parallel works deal with masculinity and emotion in relation to literary production. Not surprisingly, Spenser and Jonson were both accomplished writers who exhibit contrasting sensibilities as readers of prior texts. As a result, they allude to different kinds of literary authorities in The Faerie Queene and Timber. In Book I Spenser refers frequently to Ovid, Virgil, Chaucer, and Ariosto, whereas in Timber Jonson prefers the Roman writers Seneca, Cicero, and Quintilian and the Renaissance humanist Juan Luis Vives (1493– 1540). Interestingly, both Spenser and Jonson allude to these multiple predecessors in episodes or works related to trees, motifs that stand for the literary and cultural matter that has shaped and informed their poetics. Their contrasting intertextual methods of reading and responding to prior works reveal important differences in how these men of feeling imagine their roles as scholarly men.

As humanists, Spenser and Jonson read and digested a variety of classical, medieval, and Renaissance works. Spenser achieves fame as an epic poet by adding individuating Protestant nuances to the words and phrases he borrows from Ovid, Virgil, Chaucer, and Ariosto among others. His intertextual allusions to their works are multiple and varied in the episodes of the Wandering Wood; the grove of Fradubio, a man metamorphosed into a tree; and the wasteland of Despair, who hangs himself to no avail on “old stockes and stubs of trees” (ix.34.1). I have selected these particular arboreal episodes because they are representative of how Spenser digests and refashions fragments of prior texts in Book I. As Jonson states in the Latin epigraph to Timber, the Greek term silva, meaning “woods” or “forest,” functions as a metaphor for the “multiplici materia” out of which a writer constructs his works as a craftsmen builds a house from timber.² According to Jonson, a writer labors to shape this silva, referring to the “pieces of raw material” he collects from his predecessors, into a whole, new work of art.³ My focus on the arboreal dimension of works by Spenser and Jonson provides a useful way for grouping together sections of these writers’ varied and disparate texts that are most relevant to my larger discussion of masculinity and emotion. Whether intentionally or not, both Spenser and Jonson allude to numerous literary predecessors in these texts related to trees. Such allusive networks provide vital seed beds for comparing their intertextual poetics. Unlike Spenser, who defends passionate Protestantism in his innovative epic The Faerie Queene, Jonson advocates classical rigorism in his collection of fragments from Roman, stoical writers in Timber.

As we might expect, early modern conceptions of masculinity—whether in reference to scholars, kings, chivalric knights, family men, or rogues—are far from heterogeneous and vary according to factors such as a man’s profession, social rank, and age. Spenser and Jonson’s profoundly different masculine sensibilities as literary scholars were shaped in part by their contrasting views of the emotions. In general, Augustinian defenders of passionate Protestantism focused on the spiritual value of the emotions, whereas representatives of stoical classicism advocated indifference toward them. From the classical period through the Renaissance, Stoics emphasized the perfection of the rational faculties of the mind and the cultivation of apatheia, or indifference toward bodily impulses and affections.⁴ The stoical branch of humanism, which took hold around 1550 in Europe and England, continued to exert a profound influence on Jonson’s Works published in 1616. Jonson praises the stoical ideal of rational self-sufficiency and distrusts the passions in Timber. G.W. Pigman III remarks upon Jonson’s emphasis on restraining the emotion of grief in his elegies published in his Works by stating, “Jonson is far from representative of the seventeenth century: his attitude towards mourning is a throwback to the 1550s.”⁵

In Book I of his epic The Faerie Queene first published in 1590, by contrast, Spenser exhibits remarkable tolerance for male and female expressions of emotions, including grief, sorrow, and joy. He represents male weeping and wailing as spiritually restorative. In this way he depicts in a positive light those means of expressing emotion that are traditionally associated with women in Western culture. The view of women as prone to emotional excess persists throughout early modern England. As Thomas Wright states in Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), the passions of his female audience are “most vehement and mutable (3). In “On the Emotions, or Perturbations of the Mind” (1658) Thomas Hobbes similarly remarks “that those that weep the greatest amount and more frequently are those, such as women and children, who have the least hope in themselves and the most in friends.”⁶ Yet excessive displays of emotion are not necessarily limited to women and children in the early modern period. In the “Ballad of St. George for England” (1658–64) St George “bitterly did waile and wéep” in the dungeon.⁷ In this way he resembles Spenser’s Una, who begins to “waile and weep” when Redcrosse abandons her (I.ii.7.9). In Book I of The Faerie Queene Redcrosse’s sorrow for his sins ultimately leads to repentance, a fact that supports Wright’s Augustinian position that the emotions are powerful and useful in a Christian context. As he comments, “sadness bringeth repentance” (17).

My comparison of Spenser’s poetics in Book I of The Faerie Queene with Jonson’s in Timber: or, Discoveries upon Men and Matter highlights their vastly different perspectives on masculinity in relation to femininity as well as the emotions. One of the many factors that distinguishes Book I of The Faerie Queene from Timber is Spenser’s celebration of men who depend on women. Redcrosse receives hope of eternal salvation toward the end of Book I as a result of his reliance on Una in the Wandering Wood and the cave of Despair. In addition, the female figure of Mercy serves as his guide at the spiritually purifying House of Holiness. Likewise, Spenser depends on the support of Elizabeth I in order to receive the promise of the laurel crown. He dedicates The Faerie Queene to Gloriana, a mirror reflection of the Queen, and fittingly glorifies femininity in a number of cases throughout his epic. Jonson, who was writing during the reign of James I, attempts to distance or separate himself from what he perceives as the threat of femininity in Timber. He thereby epitomizes the anxiety of some early modern men toward what they fear is the “contaminating” or “debilitating” influence of women.⁸ In this way Spenser and Jonson provide a “double vision” of how early modern writers conceived of masculinity, femininity, and the emotions.

Early modern, literary responses to the decorum for male expressions of emotion are widely ambiguous and tend to stress either the dignity of or dangerousness and inappropriateness of powerful displays of affect. Spenser, a Protestant writer emphasizing the need for grace and the Augustinian value of tears, fashions male figures whose demonstrations of emotion, ranging from sorrow for sin to heavenly joy, are spiritually liberating rather than weakening. He focuses on chivalric knights who are emotionally expressive as well as martially aggressive. Jonson, however, stresses the role of reason, rather than emotion in the classical education of scholarly men. He perceives the emotions as dangerous forces that Stoics such as himself and his literary followers need to combat and overcome. Nevertheless, Jonson’s own anger over social inequalities fuels his critique of aristocratic versions of manhood in Timber. Moderate, timely expressions of emotion function as vital aspects of the professional identities for both these scholarly men.

Notes

^1. The topic of masculinity in relation to Spenser’s and Jonson’s literary ambitions has received relatively little critical attention. Although a number of critics have discussed Spenser’s launching of a career as an epic poet in imitation of Virgil, few have discussed the issue of manhood in relation to his fashioning of a professional identity as a scholarly writer. This issue is particularly worthy of discussion given that Virgil’s Rome is inherently linked with virility and manliness: Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, p. 25. Well-known studies of Spenser’s and Jonson’s professional ambitions are Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); David Lee Miller, “Spenser’s Vocation, Spenser’s Career,” ELH 50 (1983): 197-231; and Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). A number of critics have discussed Jonson’s laureate pursuits and his rivalry with other writers: see, for example, Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates and James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Few, however, have explored how Jonson grounds his professional identity on representations of his manhood.

^2. Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925-52), 8: 562. Future quotations from this edition of Jonson’s Works are cited as H amp; S, Works, by volume, page, and line numbers. In Works, 9: 213 Herford and Simpson conjecture that 1623 to 1635 cover the dates of Jonson’s “collection” of Timber: Discoveries upon Men and Matter that was published posthumously in the 1640 Folio. For a discussion of “woods” as a metaphor in the Renaissance for the selection of passages for contemplation see Timothy Murray, Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in Seventeenth-century England and France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 48. In Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 106, Judith H. Anderson notes the specific association of silva with words and mentions that in Jonson’s translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica the term “is associated both with uncultivated wilderness–raw material–and with Orpheus, the poet as civilizer.”

^3. Don E. Wayne provides this literal translation of the term silva in “Jonson’s Sidney: Legacy and Legitimation in The Forrest” in Sir Philip Sydney’s Achievement, ed. M.J.B. Allen, Dominic Baker-Smith, and Arthur F. Kinney (New York: AMS Press, 1990), p. 231.

^4. Bouwsma, A Usable Past, p. 25.

^5. Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy, p. 1.

^6. Thomas Hobbes, “On the Emotions, or Perturbations of the Mind,” in Man and Citizen (1658), trans. Charles T. Wood, T.S.K. Scott-Craig, and Bernard Gert (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), p. 59.

^7. “A most excellent ballad of S. George for England and the kings daughter of Aegypt, whom he delivered from death, and how he slew a mighty dragon the tune is Flying fame” (London: Printed for F. Coles, T. Vere, and W. Gilbertson, 1658-64).

^8. See, for example, Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, pp. 3-4, and Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England, p. 9.

1.
Passionate Protestantism: Spenser’s Dialogic, Feminine Voice in Book I of The Faerie Queene

Book I of The Faerie Queene marks the beginning of Spenser’s distinctly Protestant epic in English. A number of arboreal episodes in Book I—Redcrosse Knight’s adventures in the Wandering Wood, his dialogue with Fradubio, the bleeding, speaking tree, and his temptation by Despair—highlight important stages in Redcrosse’s quest for spiritual liberation through grace. The Wandering Wood illustrates that he is prone to error without Una; his dialogue with Fradubio accentuates Red...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• PART I The Intertextual Poetics of Scholarly Men: Affect in Arboreal Works by Spenser and Jonson
• PART 2 Emotional Kings and their Stoical Usurpers in Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Richard II
• PART III Chivalric Knights, Courtiers, and Shepherds Prone to Tears in Pastoral Romances by Sidney and Spenser
• PART IV Demonstrative Family Men: Masculinity and Sentiment in Works by Shakespeare, Lanyer, Cary, Donne, Walton, and Garrick
• Bibliography
• Index