Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England

Literature and the Erotics of Recollection

John S. Garrison, Kyle Pivetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317548874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria del periodo medievale e dei primordi dell'età moderna

This volume brings together two vibrant areas of Renaissance studies today: memory and sexuality. The contributors show that not only Shakespeare but also a broad range of his contemporaries were deeply interested in how memory and sexuality interact. Are erotic experiences heightened or deflated by the presence of memory? Can a sexual act be commemorative? Can an act of memory be eroticized? How do forms of romantic desire underwrite forms of memory? To answer such questions, these authors examine drama, poetry, and prose from both major authors and lesser-studied figures in the canon of Renaissance literature. Alongside a number of insightful readings, they show that sonnets enact a sexual exchange of memory; that epics of nationhood cannot help but eroticize their subjects; that the act of sex in Renaissance tragedy too often depends upon violence of the past. Memory, these scholars propose, re-shapes the concerns of queer and sexuality studies – including the unhistorical, the experience of desire, and the limits of the body. So too does the erotic revise the dominant trends of memory studies, from the rhetoric of the medieval memory arts to the formation of collective pasts.

Part I
Legacies of Desire

1 Intimate Histories

Desire, Genre, and the Trojan War in The Araygnement of Paris

Joyce Green MacDonald

George Peele’s The Araygnement of Paris (1584) doesn’t have much of a critical history. Its standing as an example of Elizabethan courtly entertainment was established by the end of the nineteenth century,¹ and discussion of the play well into the twentieth used its courtly status as a device to normalize its readily apparent formal messiness.² More recent historicist readings of the play also work to support a notion of its coherence, a coherence perceived as ideological and not formal. These views of the play’s unity focus on its strongly gendered reproduction of the operations of royal patronage or on Queen Elizabeth’s role as arbiter of justice. Both formalist and new historicist understandings of the play and the work it does insist on its consistency as it aims toward a single purpose. Whether unfolding a political allegory through its masque-like presentation aimed at equating “the social harmony of its ideal world with the actual hierarchy of the court,”³ offering an extended meditation on the power of “healthy imagination”⁴ in the morally conscious exercise of critical judgment, or delineating the terrible vulnerability of poets who sought literary patronage from the mighty⁵, the Araygnement has been understood in absolutes, as a document of court culture centered on the imaginative or material presences of the Queen.

Both formalist and new historicist readings of the play assert that the Araygnement tells one story. This paper, though, begins from the recognition that it contains many stories, many kinds of stories, and tells those stories from various points of view. By drawing attention to its narrative and textual richness, I want both to revisit the notion of the play’s closure and unification and to question whether the portrait it offers of royal authority and power in the public realm is as final and assured as both formalist and historicist critics have had it.

The play falls into three rough parts: the first three acts, unified around the mythological materials of Paris’ choice of Helen as more beautiful than Diana, Juno, or Venus; most of act four, focusing on uncouth Vulcan’s unsuccessful pursuit of one of Diana’s nymphs and on the actual judgment itself; and the royal apotheosis of Act Five. Taking the busy contemporary courtiership of act five as its main subject requires us to overlook the self-contained quality of the first three acts, to which the last two were probably added at a later date.⁶ By rereading the first three acts with their textual and generic affinities in mind, I want to emphasize the degree to which its representations of worldly authority are shaped by the relationship they bear to the experience of private individuals and to decenter the questions of its larger formal coherence that have dominated its criticism.

To insist that the play reconciles all contraries on its way to celebrating monarchical authority requires us to overlook its rich textuality—apparent in the variety of genres and texts it calls on to shape itself—and thus to ignore that narrative texture’s role in the story it tells us. Rather than ignoring the gender of most women except the Queen and gendering authorship and courtiership as primarily male processes, it imagines women as poetic makers and speakers in negotiation for public authority. However much the play as a whole can be identified as a document of Elizabethan court culture, its first three acts self-consciously position themselves in relation to literary as well as mythological and historical pasts, personal as well as national histories, and invest this deep historicity with moods of erotic heartbreak. As it dramatizes the initiating event in the Trojan War, and thus the mythological origins of the British nation, The Araygnement of Paris insists on reminding us that public, epic events detailing the clash, fall, and rise of civilizations have their origins in the affective realm.

This paper thus imagines its literary subjects not only as the products of historical and political processes, but as equally constructed within the frequently contradictory and painful structures of desire. They cannot keep themselves from taking public, historical events personally because the power of their personal emotions is the frame through which they exist in and perceive the world. My belief in the formative power of the subjective and its resonance beyond the lives or experiences of individuals thus responds to a classic new historicist notion of what power is, how it operates, and what makes it visible in the lives of those subjected to it by insisting that we enlarge our analysis to pay critical attention to those literary places where manifestations of public political power and private erotic desires seem to cross.⁷

The beginning of a discussion of how deeply private feelings make themselves known in the ways in which Peele’s goddesses and shepherds encounter an epic history of Troy is a good place to admit that in some ways the very notion of sharply demarcated private and public domains is merely an organizing fiction. Under the terms of this fiction, the domestic and personal notionally function as a kind of training ground for the development of a civic subject, whose participation in a Habermasian public sphere is recognized as one of the hallmarks of modernity.⁸ The domestic is most significant as a kind of pre-qualification for public engagement and is primarily relevant in relation to it. But in tracing the expression of early modern political duties in terms of personal, intimate obligations within families and between husbands and wives, Melissa Sanchez insists that the division between public and private was much less distinct and hierarchical in that period. To talk about desire was often to talk about politics, and representations of political hierarchies and relationships were inevitably shaped by the waywardness of the erotic feelings that were understood to be their prototypes. Political life is thus constituted as both personal and relational—like love, becoming legible in terms of the nature of one’s connection to others. Given the dominance of Petrarchan discourse as a way of talking about intimate connection, Sanchez notes that it was perhaps inevitable that ways of talking about love would be shaped by compulsion, loss, and pain and that the pain accompanying subjection—in her view, whether romantic or civic—was one of its characteristic emotional valences.⁹ Shakespeare’s Cleopatra assumes not only that love hurts—her skin is “black” (1.5.28) with bruises from Phoebus’ rough sexual play—but that social experience becomes legible through this pain. Even fearful death is like “a lover’s pinch, / That hurts, and is desired” (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.290–291).¹⁰

Sanchez connects her attention to the ways in which love was narrated to languages of politics and interpersonal relationship. Although not immediately concerned with the early modern, contemporary theories of affect and its place in civic life also offer valuable support for inquiries into the relationship between the personal and the public and the implications of applying the emotional structures of the first to the second. Intimacy strives toward “a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out a particular way,” Lauren Berlant tells us.¹¹ However much we may want our love stories to “turn out a particular way,” we have no assurance that they will, subject as such an organized, sustained imposition of narrative order must be to the wayward possibilities built into sharing life and space with the ones we love.

Another way of putting this, in terms more relevant to what I will be saying about The Araygnement of Paris, is that the stories lovers tell about their loves and the varied ways in which they tell them are complicated by contact not only with the public world of affairs, but with other kinds of stories others tell, even if those others are using the same tropes and textual tools. As we shall see, the poetic kinds in the first part of Peele’s play—epic, pastoral, complaint, love, elegy—blur and mix together. Allusions to specific texts or bodies of texts and different ways of telling stories—or of retelling the same story—about the dangers and pleasures of intimacy jostle against each other, sometimes flowing together and sometimes springing apart. These allusions and cross-references historically contextualize Paris’ choice within the epic “tragedie of Troie,”¹² thus providing a mythological and quasi-historical backstory for romantic lament. But the historical, epic import of his decision to accept Venus’ bribe of sexual access to Helen shares narrative and generic space with the pastoral, elegiac tone the play reserves for the story of his love affair with the nymph Oenone—a love begun while he mistakenly believed he was only a humble shepherd and before he learned he was actually an abandoned prince of Troy. New accounts of sexual intimacy will support and inform Paris’ newly revealed royal status, just as the play’s sense of epic fate and historical dread is infused with broken and rejected pastoral in the first three acts. Emotions, prerogatives, genres all blur together.

The Araygnement of Paris connects ways of imagining intimacy and ways of imagining social identity, as well as ways of writing about love and ways of writing about imperial standing. But its lack of differentiation between what modern readers might regard as distinct registers of experience (and the narrative forms thought appropriate or those separate kinds) is typical of early modern literary practice. As historian Blair Worden reminds us, Renaissance poets “engaged not only with the literature and languages of the past but also, on broader fronts, with its history. Poets and historians were … the same individuals.”¹³

As both poet and popular historian, Peele himself participated in this categorical blurring. His Farewell Entituled to the Famous and Fortunate Generalls of our English Forces, a topical salute to Sir Francis Drake and Sir Thomas Norris as they set off to attack Spanish shipping after the failure of the armada, was first printed in a volume along with his Beginning, Accidents and Ende of the Warre of Troy, commonly known as the Tale of Troy, in 1589. Together the texts exemplify the process of conveying historical meanings through terms that are expressive, allusive, and comparative, rather than objective. Drake and Norris’ job was to press the English military advantage as much as possible, up to and including installing an English-approved pretender on the throne of Portugal. Peele’s account of their mission illustrates Sanchez’s contention that political events were understood in emotional and sensual terms. The poem draws an implicit connection between the brave spectacle of the new English armada and the kinds of exotic shows available on the public stages of his day:

Bid all the lovelie brittish Dames adiewe,
That under many a Standarde well advanc’d,
Have bid the sweete allarmes and braves of love.
Bid Theatres and proud Tragedians,
Bid Mahomets Poo and mightie Tamburlaine,
King Charlemaine, Tom Stukeley and the rest
Adiewe. …¹⁴

Conflating the serious present occasion of the military counteroffensive with the shows staged by “proud Tragedians” as they sought to amaze and arouse their audiences, Peele finds the latter a fitting analogy for the former. The current military mission is like a particularly thrilling stage performance. Fiction and history melt together so that “mightie Tamburlaine” and Francis Drake become the same kind of hero, embarked on the same kind of imperial errand. The passage also contains another, equally striking analogy between apparently unlike things, this time set in the bedroom instead of at the waterside. Instead of or in addition to being akin to seeing a play, setting off to war is similar to when ladies challenge their lovers by soliciting sweet, private erotic combat. The heroic actions of warfare and nation-building feel just like sex, or martial aggression is remarkably similar to being put on the spot by a lady and peremptorily “bid” to perform...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: The Erotics of Recollection
• Part I Legacies of Desire
• Part II Bodies, Remember
• Part III Intimate Refusals
• Afterword: “A Prescript Order of Life”: Memory, Sexuality, Selfhood
• Contributors
• Selected Bibliography
• Index