Renaissance Hybrids

Culture and Genre in Early Modern England

Gary A. Schmidt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317066514
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the first book-length study explicitly to connect the postcolonial trope of hybridity to Renaissance literature, Gary Schmidt examines how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English authors, artists, explorers and statesmen exercised a concerted effort to frame questions of cultural and artistic heterogeneity. This book is unique in its exploration of how 'hybrid' literary genres emerge at particular historical moments as vehicles for negotiating other kinds of hybridity, including but not limited to cultural and political hybridity. In particular, Schmidt addresses three distinct manifestations of 'hybridity' in English literature and iconography during this period. The first category comprises literal hybrid creatures such as satyrs, centaurs, giants, and changelings; the second is cultural hybrids reflecting the mixed status of the nation; and the third is generic hybrids such as the Shakespearean 'problem play, ' the volatile verse satires of Nashe, Hall and Marston, and the tragicomedies of Beaumont and Fletcher. In Renaissance Hybrids, Schmidt demonstrates 'postmodern' considerations not to be unique to our own critical milieu. Rather, they can fruitfully elucidate cultural and literary developments in the English Renaissance, forging a valuable link in the history of ideas and practices, and revealing a new dimension in the relation of early modern studies to the concerns of the present.

Chapter 1
Towards a Renaissance Theory of Hybridity

E Pluribus Multum

Recent cultural and literary studies have elevated the status of terms such as hybridity, creolization, mestizaje (or métissage), transnationalism, and hyphenated identity.1 One of the achievements of poststructuralist theory, suggests Nikos Papastergiadis, has been ‘to liberate the subject from notions of fixity and purity of origin’ (257). Whereas the great narratives of modernism sought to fashion universal truths and mythic patterns from the fragmentation of experience, postmodern theory has opened up, instead, an examination of the value of the multiple, the contingent, the temporary, and the performative. The advances made in multicultural studies in the past decade owe their vitality and intensity to this new set of emphases. As an heir to this poststructural legacy, I concur with Pnina Werbner’s assessment that ‘ours is a heterophilic age …. The new, postmodern freedom depends on recognising the rights of all – of strangers qua individuals – while at the same time denying the right of anyone to define who strangers are’ (17). Like Werbner, I see the current move toward emphasizing cultural interaction and cross-fertilization as a liberating alternative to the stultifying reductiveness of homogeneous national cultures.

In the present study, therefore, I will attempt to show that these ‘postmodern’ considerations are not in fact unique to our own critical milieu but can fruitfully elucidate cultural developments dating back four centuries or more.2 Such a connection may at first seem specious: historically speaking, the English progression toward ‘recognising the rights … of strangers qua individuals’ was a slow one, tempered by centuries of nationalism and xenophobia. Furthermore, though the Renaissance was an age of exploration and discovery, critics such as Anthony Pagden, Margaret Hodgen, J.H. Elliott, and Stephen Greenblatt have argued persuasively that explorers (and their literary counterparts) tended overwhelmingly to assimilate or ‘attach’ their new experiences to familiar, contemporary, sometimes medieval schemata, even if that meant ignoring empirical evidence.3 Thus, to label Renaissance authors such as Spenser, Sidney, and Guarini as somehow ‘postmodern’ or socially ‘progressive,’ even in light of their contributions to what we might call an emerging cultural anthropology, is undoubtedly to overstate the case. It would be a mistake, for example, to refashion Spenser – the man who witnessed, with questionable complicity, the massacre of three hundred Irish and Spanish soldiers, women, and children at Smerwick in 1580 – as a kind of postmodernist avant la lettre, one whose work fully articulated a liberal proto-hermeneutics of hybridity and cultural intermingling.

At the same time, an exploration of this sort is gravely needed in order to forge a link in the history of ideas and practices, and to reveal a new dimension in the relation of Renaissance studies to the concerns of the present. Many English authors, artists, explorers, and statesmen of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did, on the whole, exercise a concerted (if somewhat diffuse) effort to frame questions of cultural and artistic heterogeneity – an extension, perhaps, of the encounter with and assimilation of classical culture that had occurred decades earlier. Their inchoate attempts to theorize difference, and to wrestle more seriously with the political and generic dimensions of such an endeavor, both reflected and sparked the nascent interest in ‘mungrell forms’ that is the subject of this study. In describing their efforts, I conflate the literal and figurative senses of ‘exploration’ in the trope of the intellectual voyager, one whose assimilation of the cultural capital of foreign lands might be paralleled to a kind of literal encroachment or transgression of geographic boundaries. Indeed, during the Renaissance these two forms of exploration were never far removed from one another: while injunctions against literal travel abroad were routine, the intellectual ‘travel’ involved in absorbing classical and continental models was tacitly sanctioned (often in the same text) as a means to dignify and elevate the native culture. This paradoxical position is inscribed, finally, in the minds and bodies of hybrids such as Ascham’s ‘Italianate Englishman’ – a symbolic monstrosity incarnating the vices of present-day Italy – and the humanist scholar himself, as emblematized in the archetypal schoolmaster of the Greek mythic tradition: the centaur Chiron.

Some Theories of Hybridity

Nikos Papastergiadis has noted that the generally positive, productive connotation currently attached to the term ‘hybridity’ marks a radical inversion of the historical status that has followed the concept. As he points out,

For as long as the concepts of purity and exclusivity have been central to a racialised theory of identity, hybridity has, in one way or another, served as a threat to the fullness of selfhood. The hybrid has often been positioned within or beside modern theories of human origin and social development, mostly appearing as the moral marker of contamination, failure, or regression. (258)

This view of hybridity as impurity or contamination was stated plainly by John Stubbs in his Discovery of a Gaping Gulf (1579), a forceful diatribe against the possible marriage of Queen Elizabeth to a French nobleman. From almost the beginning of her reign in 1558, the Queen was pressed by Privy Council, Parliament, and Court to resolve the problem of succession. Men of letters and the gentry were equally strident in their urgings. Potential candidates seemed to abound – among their number the Earl of Leicester, the Archduke Charles, Philip II, and Henry III – but the fact that most of the suitors were Catholic proved an insurmountable obstacle. By 1572, when Catherine de Medici, the Queen Mother of France intervened to suggest her youngest son – Francis of Valois, Duke of Alençon – as a match, England seemed to be overrun by Catholic plots and pressures from all sides. That Alençon was apparently less obstinate and less papistical than the other suitors made little practical difference to a nation whose loathing for all things Catholic seemed to have reached a new intensity.

It is this perspective that informs Stubbs’ pamphlet, and reacting with horror to the prospect of a French marriage for the queen, the Gaping Gulf uses the rhetoric of beastly hybridism to describe the inevitable outcome – ‘to match a daughter of God with one of the sons of men’ (6).4 As Stubbs goes on to point out, ‘St. Paul, speaking of contrary couplings together, compareth them to the uneven yoking of the clean ox to the unclean ass, a thing forbidden in the law’ (9).5 If we choose to ignore that law, Stubbs warned, ‘then might we intermarry with Turks, Jews, Muscovites, and divers other paynims’ (12) – clearly an abomination to reason and nature.

The philosophy espoused by Stubbs depends upon two fundamental premises that are revisited time and again in the nationalist polemics of the period: that there is a fixed boundary between ‘the English’ and ‘divers other[s],’ and that interaction between the two – even the socially ‘legitimate’ interaction represented by marriage – threatens to compromise or even nullify the integrity of this boundary. This definition of cultural identity posits purity and exclusion as its safeguards, treating England as if it were an island unto itself (as John of Gaunt does), and viewing crossing over as a surefire invitation to pollution. For Stubbs, the French themselves are hybrids par excellence, doubly indeterminate in their adoption of ‘Turkish and Italian practices’; through the proposed marriage they ‘do now seek notably to infect our minds’ and ‘seduce our Eve, that she and we may lose this English paradise’ (3–4).

To compare Stubbs’ rhetoric to Shakespeare’s in Henry V, on the other hand, is to begin to imagine a positive valuation for cultural hybrids. At that play’s end, the King envisions an English-French marriage of the type Stubbs condemned. ‘Shall not thou and I,’ he proposes to the French princess Katherine, ‘between Saint Denis and Saint George, compound a boy, half French, half English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard?’ (V, ii, 206–209) King Henry’s witty flirtation is of a piece with the play’s prevailing spirit of inclusivity, as seen in its gestures toward solidarity among the Welsh Fluellen, the English Gower, the Scottish Jamy, and, more problematically, the Irish Macmorris.6 In Henry V, the abhorrence of hybridity is largely displaced onto the French, who scorn their attackers as ‘Norman bastards’ and lament that ‘Our scions, put in wild and savage stock,/ Spirt up so suddenly into the clouds,/And overlook their grafters’ (III, v, 7–10). While the xenophobic Dauphin adopts a Stubbsian rhetoric of miscegenation –

Our madams mock at us, and plainly say

Our mettle is bred out and they will give

Their bodies to the lust of English youth

To new-store France with bastard warriors … (III, v, 29–32)

– the pluralistic English are not given to such anxieties. Whether that pluralism existed in fact and not merely in psychological projection is subject to debate: the Henriad generally presents the mixture of nations as a good thing, but with the caveat that in doing so the English are civilizing the ‘uncorrected, rank’ (V, ii, 50) wilderness that still exists outside of England. Furthermore, while Welsh and English and Scotsmen can learn to get along, and English men and French women can even get married once in a while, the tentative embrace of hybridity by the English can still only occur in the context of displacement (fear of its dangers being articulated by the French) and exclusion (the Turk is still the Turk).

Various twentieth century theorists, particularly in the latter half of the century, have articulated concepts germane to Renaissance figurations of hybridity. The structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, discussed the ambiguous figure of the trickster in mythology and anthropology, stressing that persona’s twin roles as boundary-breaker and cultural mediator (Structural Anthropology, 1963); his work was expanded in the last decade by Lewis Hyde’s excellent study, Trickster Makes This World (1998), which attempts to describe the inherent paradoxes of hybrid trickster figures as mediators and subversive culture heroes. More generally, the anthropologist Mary Douglas, discussing concepts of pollution and taboo in her landmark study Purity and Danger (1966), famously described dirt as ‘matter out of place’ (35), and concluded that most pollution rituals are at bottom an effort to reorder the world by either integrating or dismissing ‘foreign’ matter. Her work focused on the dangerous potential of ‘hybrids and other confusions’ (53) in upsetting social orders: ‘danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable’ (96). Elaborating, she suggests that

In the course of any imposing of order, whether in the mind or in the external world, the attitude to rejected bits and pieces goes through two stages. First they are recognisably out of place, a threat to good order, and so are regarded as objectionable and vigorously brushed away. At this stage they have some identity: they can be seen to be unwanted bits of whatever it was they came from, hair or food or wrappings. This is the stage at which they are dangerous; their half-identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude is impaired by their presence. But a long process of pulverizing, dissolving, and rotting awaits any physical things that have been recognised as dirt. In the end, all identity is gone …. In its last phase then, dirt shows itself as an apt symbol of creative formlessness. But it is from its first phase that it derives its force. The danger which is risked by boundary transgression is power. Those vulnerable margins and those attacking forces which threaten to destroy good order represent the powers inhering in the cosmos. Ritual which can harness these for good is harnessing power indeed. (160–61)

Douglas’s account of the breakdown and reintegration of transitional beings derives from the work of the Dutch anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep, who in his Rites of Passage (1909) described a similar process of separation, transition, and incorporation as common to all such rites. Van Gennep saw the transitional state as a tremendously vulnerable one, in between two identities but therefore fundamentally fragile. Victor Turner, like Douglas and Van Gennep, also addressed the disruptive/generative power of transitional states, terming them liminal (from the Latin limen, threshold). Turner also saw liminal states as specially charged, potentially bearing the energy either of the cursed or the sacred.7 His work with the Ndembu people of northwestern Africa refined his conviction that Van Gennep’s ‘rites of passage’ pertained not only to individual life narratives but to cultural and social rituals as well. Later, Turner applied this theory to literature, particularly Shakespearean drama, and found that an attention to characters occupying the ‘limbo of statuslessness’ (97) explained much about the individual’s relationship to society in the tragic agon.

The groundbreaking projects of these anthropologists draw much-deserved attention to the functions and significance of transitional figures, recasting their social marginalization or outright demonization as signs of power. As Pnina Werbner notes, ‘these outstanding contributions to modernist anthropology stressed the capacity of hybrid symbolic monstrosities to challenge the taken-for-granteds of a local cultural order, and thus to recover a critical cultural self-reflexivity’(2). Among twentieth-century theorists, however, Mikhail Bakhtin offers perhaps the most direct engagement with ‘hybridity’ as a grounding metaphor for cultural interchange. In his Dialogic Imagination (pub. 1981), Bakhtin discussed two forms of ‘hybridization’ resulting from the encounter between different linguistic consciousnesses. Conscious or ‘intentional’ hybridity, states Bakhtin, occurs when symbols from disparate realms are brought together and fused, creating a ‘dialogic’ relationship in which each element redefines, reshapes, and casts new light on the others.8 ‘Organic’ or unconscious hybridity, on the other hand, is the common and largely unnoticed form of fusion that occurs when cultures borrow, appropriate, and assimilate the languages, values, arts, and customs of other cultures. Such appropriations, Bakhtin argues, take place beneath the surface and therefore do not disrupt the continuity of a society; they are seamlessly integrated into the overall fabric of cultural life. Bakhtin’s suggestion is seconded by Lévi-Strauss, who, assessing the ‘multiculturalism’ of the past decade, claims that

The term [monocultural] is meaningless, because there never has been such a society. All cultures are a result of a mishmash, borrowings, mixtures that have occurred, though at different rates, ever since the beginning of time. Because of the way it is formed, each society is multicultural and over the centuries has arrived at its own original synthesis. Each will hold more or less rigidly to this mixture that forms its culture at a given moment.9

Skepticism of this sort has furthered a reexamination of ‘hybridity’ itself by contemporary critics such as Jonathan Friedman, who sees the concept as essentially meaningless. Friedman contends that because societies have always borrowed, the postmodern focus on hybridity is a chimera, one ‘discovered’ by intellectual elites who mean to elevate their own status by claiming to view and classify hybrids from above and outside the system. In doing so, he argues, these intellectuals are merely perpetuating another kind of essentialism – one that treats the hybrid identity itself as something innate and binding to its constituents. To label a person as ‘Black Atlantic,’ as Paul Gilroy does in a book of that title, is to replace the singular categories ‘Black’ and ‘Atlantic’ with a new and equally confining definition as if it were a monolithic and accurate means of description. For such ultimately fruitless intellectual sleights of hand, Friedman blames ‘the cultural ‘theorists’ who have now begun to define this world for the rest of us’ (73). Finally, Friedman warns, such ‘creolising … from above,’ despite seeming to urge pride in the heterogeneous elements of one’s identity, can ultimately have a negative and even coercive effect. As an example, he cites the case of the Miskito Indians in Central America, whose supposed hybrid or ‘creole’ identity was used as a weapon against them by hegemonic colonialists: ‘Hybridisation … opened their bounded social identity in such a wa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Renaissance Hybrids: Culture and Genre in Early Modern England
• 1 Towards a Renaissance Theory of Hybridity
• 2 Giant Aspirations: Cultural Archaeology in Spenser’s 1590 Faerie Queene
• 3 The View from Ireland: Spenser in 1596
• 4 Satire and Politics in the English Renaissance
• 5 Jacobean Absolutism and the Rise of Tragicomedy
• Afterword: Hybrids Past and Present: The Final Boundary
• Works Cited
• Index