Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub
the flesh.
(1.3.261–64)
Contrary to modern expectations, the homoerotic experience recalled by Martha is neither cause nor symptom of her illness; rather, it is the protracted keeping of her “Maiden-head” that has given rise to her virgin’s melancholy and obsession with “child-getting.” It is not just that Martha’s ignorance is its own form of knowledge or that her knowledge is overwritten as a form of ignorance, but that her ill health is a result of her ignorance. It is from this position that her “virgin’s melancholy” authorizes her quest for carnal knowledge.12
The play is quite clear about the need for Martha’s marriage to be consummated, and it pursues this end via a medical discourse and therapeutic intervention that diagnoses Martha as “full of passion,” “distracted,” “mad for a child,” and, my personal favorite, “sicke of her virginity” (1.2.211; 2.1.769; 2.1.770, 2.1.770, emphasis mine). Under the dominant Galenic medical dispensation, the conventional treatment for virgin’s melancholy was a wedding, the presumption being that legitimate sexual congress would bring about the orgasm that purges the sexually congested body of its built-up humors.13 Absent regular vaginal intercourse, an alternative treatment prescribed in several medical textbooks was the manual manipulation of the genitals by a female midwife;14 given that Martha’s sexless marriage is diagnosed as the cause of her melancholy, it is significant that The Antipodes does not allude to this method of cure. To do so, of course, would be to call further attention to the same-sex contact that the play introduces only in order to forget. Instead, Martha’s narration calls little attention to itself and is quickly passed over as the text focuses on the means of bringing Peregrine back to a state of mental health capable of the penetrative sexual performance demanded by the tight early modern linkage of marriage to reproduction.15
Despite the fact that Martha “presents” as both a melancholic and hysteric, and, in seeking Barbara’s help, positions herself as a patient, it is Peregrine who is judged to be sicker than his wife, and it is he who holds the promise of the couple’s return to sexual health. Peregrine’s melancholy, initially caused by an overindulgence in reading travel literature, was exacerbated by his parents’ refusal to allow him to travel the world; instead, seeking to bind him close to home—and in spite of his overdetermined name—they married him off to Martha. Forbidden to travel, he is now “in travaile” (1.3.230), his mind fully taken up in wandering “beyond himselfe” (1.2.198). His refusal to consummate his marriage apparently derives from an overly credulous reading of Mandeville’s Travels, which includes a description of the “Gadlibriens” who employ other men to deflower their wives because of the risk of being stung by a serpent lodged within the female body.16 There is much that could be said about Peregrine’s resistance to marital sexuality and the specific form that his resistance takes. Motivated in part by the desire for travel,17 his “Mandevile madnesse” (4.10.2400) could also be motivated by other desires—homoerotic ones, perhaps—that would render this unhappy family multiply queer. Given that travel in this period offered Englishmen opportunities for a variety of sexual encounters—travel narratives are full of descriptions of both cross-sex and same-sex liaisons, whether fantasized or real, consensual or coercive—it would be a mistake to view Peregrine’s resistance to marital sexuality as a rejection of sex altogether.
Nonetheless, the play enacts Brome’s customary belief that the best way to remedy madness is by humoring delusions through metatheatrical fantasy. Under the direction of a doctor and a rather eccentric lord, Peregrine’s family and a troupe of actors collude in convincing the patient that he has journeyed to the Antipodes (when he actually has been under the influence of a sleeping potion). Not surprisingly, the Antipodes, also called anti-London in the play, provides Brome with the opportunity for an extended dramatization of the world turned upside down, where lawyers are honest, servants govern their masters, and men are ducked as scolds.18 The climax of this theatrical inversion therapy occurs when Peregrine, who, in good colonialist fashion, proclaims himself king of the realm, marries and takes to bed the Antipodean queen: Martha, thinly disguised.19 Thus tricked into consummating his marriage by committing mock adultery, Peregrine is cured of his melancholy. As the lord Letoy surmises, Peregrine’s
much troubled and confused braine
Will by the reall knowledge of a woman
… be by degrees
Setled and rectified.
(4.12.2444–47)
In fulfillment of the expectations of Galenic psychophysiology, coitus proves to be a potent restorative. The newly unified spouses emerge from their bedroom kissing, caressing, and cooing, to the obvious delight of the other characters, who, throughout much of the stage action, have functioned as onstage voyeurs. Peregrine confirms his cure: “Indeed I finde me well.” While Martha responds: “And so shall I, / After a few such nights more” (5.2.3016–18).
The Antipodes is extremely canny about staging its interest in sex through metatheatrical means. Although the consummation of the Joyless marriage takes place offstage, this does little to minimize its erotic interest;20 indeed, the play’s dramatization of onstage voyeurs who are deeply invested in the success of the coital cure saturates the performance space with eroticism.21 A subplot dramatizing the attempted seduction of another woman, Diana, by the fantastic lord Letoy (who turns out to be her long-lost father) adds to the erotic effect.22 In addition, roughly half of the vignettes staged to convince the delusional Peregrine that he has voyaged to the end of the earth concern sexual matters: courtiers who complain of being “jested” sodomitically from behind (4.6.2105–11); old women who “allow their youthfull husbands other women…. And old men [who] give their young wives like license” (2.7.1085–86); a maid who attempts to sexually assault a gentleman (4.2.1934–72); and a tradesman who procures a gentleman to sexually pleasure his wife, to the acclaim of the gentleman’s lady (2.7, 2.8, 3.8). With its sexual thematic and innuendos, with its treatment of voyeurism as entertainment and entertainment as cure, The Antipodes publicizes sex in such a way as to come very close to making sex public.
At issue, of course, is not only what Martha or Peregrine knows, but, given that this play was written for the stage, what the performers and audience know. What kind of sexual knowledge is being produced and exchanged, not only among the characters involved in this metatheatrical sex play, but also among the performers, and between them and the audience? Given the cultural context of the original production—wherein cross-dressed boy actors played the female parts—some audience members may have experienced an additional homoerotic frisson. Yet, while transvestite boy actors may ironize Martha’s assertion of erotic ignorance, their performance of femininity does not resolve the issues raised by it. Evidently, The Antipodes was designed to meet the needs of Christopher Beeston’s company with its large numbers of children.23 One might well ask, how did this play function pedagogically for these young players? Just what was it that they were learning? No less salient is the pervasive interpretation of Brome’s drama, which, based on the play’s Jonsonian commitment to theater as comic therapy, submits that the “real patients” are those who are watching the play.24 To what kind of “therapy” is the audience being subjected through The Antipodes’ public discourse about sex?
To speak of public sexual discourse in the early modern era may seem odd, especially insofar as modern relations between public and private were only beginning to emerge.25 Yet certain aspects of sexual life that we now tend to consider private were performed “publicly” in a variety of ways, including the sexual contact that arose, either consensually or through acts of violence, out of the practice of sharing beds (especially common among servants and between servants and masters); the sex unwittingly witnessed by travelers, both male and female, sleeping in communal inn rooms; and deliberate acts of group sex and voyeurism in taverns, fairs, and, later in the century, molly houses.26 More conventionally, the early modern community was unabashedly concerned with the status of marital consummation. Until the urban elite started to separate themselves off from communal celebrations after the Restoration, wedding festivities across all status groups were accompanied by a good deal of sexual innuendo and