Showing Like a Queen. Katherine Eggert
with Sidney himself posthumously refashioned by his elegists from courtier-soldier into paterfamilias of English literature.22 From that point dated experiments in genres and modes heretofore untried in England, and undreamt of in ancient Greek and Roman literary philosophy: the history play, the romantic tragedy, the epic-romance.
But my argument concerns more than just analogizing the way two disesteemed necessities, political and literary—queenship and the English language—became mothers of Tudor-Stuart invention. Recent studies in genre criticism assert that new literary forms come about as ways of managing (or, conversely, repressing) historical circumstance.23 In part, I want to reaffirm this view by similarly asserting that, at significant moments in the trajectory of literature with which I am concerned, female authority itself is the leitmotif around which issues of experimentation in literary form emerge and cluster. This contention has to do partly with the widespread Renaissance perception that writing fiction of any sort was an effeminate occupation, and that publishing one’s work either on stage or in print particularly lent itself to a destabilized gender and class identity: the writer as prostitute.24 (I will return to this topic shortly.) But some kinds of fiction are more dangerous in this regard than others. Anticipating Helene Cixous’s and Luce Irigaray’s postmodern visions of a feminine language, Renaissance poets and playwrights had definite ideas of which modes of fiction writing especially promoted effeminacy, both of the text itself and, by extension, of its reader. Central to this classification is the notion that femininity was a matter not so much of inhabiting a certain variety of body, as it was an essential state of disorderly being. Even in terms of their physiques, of course, women were thought of as as more unstable than men—colder and wetter in bodily humours, and even likely to suffer their reproductive organs’ shifting position inside their bodies.25 Such corporeal unruliness, however, was not exclusive to women; it could also be communicated across the sexes. It was commonly believed, in accordance with Galenic medical theory, that individual human bodies occupy positions along a continuum from super-masculine to super-feminine, so that a woman might ascend the scale to resemble or even become a man, whereas a man might equally slide downward into femaleness.26 But more important, in my view—and more productive for literary analysis than attending exclusively to literature’s portrayal of human reproductive equipment—is the fact that femininity, for the Renaissance, is a state of mind: a mind that is similarly disorderly, unstable, unwilling to remain within acceptable bounds or to focus upon acceptable aims.27
Modes of literature that promoted this unstable state of mind were thus entirely suspect. Lyric poetry, an unmanly “toy” viewed as at best an exercise for adolescents, threatened to distract its readers from more active, useful pursuits by enrapturing them in lyric loveliness. The romance mode as well was subject to such charges. Not only did it share with much of lyric poetry a concern with heterosexual love, and hence a concern with men in danger of being overcome by women, it also embodied in its very form a kind of triviality and inconclusiveness, qualities that do not lend themselves to masculine ambition.28 Patricia Parker notes that Sir John Harington, as translator of Ariosto’s romance Orlando Furioso, worried “that, in becoming ‘a translator of Italian toys,’ he was wasting his education.”29 Drama as a medium and a form of literary work was also under particular suspicion. Theater’s collapsing of genders (men in women’s clothing) and of self-identity in general struck critics as a tool for “effeminizing the mind.”30 Responding to such charges, Thomas Nashe proposed the dramatic genre of the history play—an English invention—as a salutary means of reviving male heroes and hence reforming “these degenerate effeminate days of ours.” A masculine form grows up around what Nashe calls “our forefathers’ valiant acts,” pursuits that evidently preclude the influence of the women of lyric or romance—Laura, or Stella, or Angelica.31
Lyric, romance, and drama are seen as so dangerous only because their charms are undeniable. Far from successfully reforming feminine into masculine literary form, in fact, the authors with which this book is concerned take, at least on occasion, the opposite tack: they rework masculine forms so that those forms both accommodate feminity, and are reshaped by it as an overwhelming force. In the end, these reformations of form turn to positive or at least to startlingly inventive uses the suspicion of an effeminizing fiction. In a recent study, Catherine Gallagher has outlined how women writers of the Restoration seized upon notions of the feminine self as a commodified body—always alienated, dispossessed, indebted to others—as a way of reconceiving authorial labor itself as a process of exchange, rather than of production. Turning feminine disability into literary strategy, these writers altered prevalent notions of what a fictional self consists of, as well as of what it means to be an author.32 My sense is that such an inversion is made possible because it is explored in advance, however tentatively and covertly, by the authors I address in this book, each of whom indulges in fantasies of an unmitigatedly feminized literary form.
It may seem strange and even patronizingly sexist to suggest that male authors, and especially the three authors who epitomize the Renaissance literary canon, shape femininity for the future cadre of female writers who are the objects of Gallagher’s attention. A book on “female authority and literary experiment” might logically be expected to contain quite a different set of writers, beginning with queens who were themselves writers or literary patrons. And indeed, the literary writings of Queen Elizabeth, along with those of the French queen Marguerite de Navarre, have made their way into the canon in recent years, if inclusion in standard classroom texts like The Norton Anthology of English Literature is any indication. The literary efforts of nonroyal women, both aristocrats and others, have also finally begun receiving some richly deserved attention, though some other royal women writers—particularly, in my view, Mary, Queen of Scots, who was a very talented poet—still await serious consideration.33 But these authors are not the object of my study; nor do I consider, except briefly at the conclusion of this book, the ways in which women writers of the Tudor-Stuart period either did or did not derive literary confidence from the example of women who held political power. My reasons for focusing on Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, to the exclusion of other authors in general and women authors in particular, are twofold. First, since my topic is literary innovation, women writers of this period would tend not to fit the bill. For reasons that are too complex to enumerate here but that would richly repay a study of their own, women of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries tend to write in literary veins that have already been well worked: Queen Elizabeth, for example, composes relatively predictable Petrarchan love lyrics thirty or forty years after Wyatt and Surrey; Mary Wroth writes a prose romance modeled after her uncle Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, composed some four decades earlier; and Elizabeth Cary designs her tragedy Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry along Senecan lines, even while alluding to contemporaries such as Shakespeare who had left such well-worn models behind years before. I do not mean to belittle the literary quality of these pieces; indeed, their very belatedness is an extremely interesting feature, one that can amount to an inventiveness of a very different kind. And it is also the case that the male authors I discuss in this study are also interested in retro forms—Spenser in Chaucerian tales, Shakespeare in revenge tragedy, and Milton in all things Elizabethan. But they are also on the vanguard, creating new literary modes that in turn will be imitated by others.
Imitation and influence constitute the second reason I have chosen Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton for this study, rather than other authors (including women authors). Because their influence on other authors—including, in succession, each other—was so immediate and so profound, these writers’ experiments in form are central to any study of how authors take up and challenge their predecessors’ literary patterns. It is partly because Spenser’s extraordinarily influential poem centers national history upon queenship, for example, that Shakespeare’s histories, in their attempt to adapt and even supercede The Faerie Queene in the medium of drama, also feature authoritative women as makers and breakers of national destiny. Milton, even more ambitious, is engaged in both absorbing and rewriting the entire oeuvres of both Spenser and Shakespeare, even while he attempts topics that these titanic predecessors never dared. If the feminine authorial voice becomes important to English literary history, then, it is in part because these authors, in particular, take it up as a way of making their own way into that literary history.
Because