The Queen's Mercy: Gender and Judgment in Representations of Elizabeth I [1st ed. 2014] 1349475777, 9781349475773

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QUEENSHIP AND POWER Series Editors: Carole Levin and Charles Beem This series brings together monographs, edited volumes, and textbooks from scholars specializing in gender analysis, women’s studies, literary interpretation, and cultural, political, constitutional, and diplomatic history. It aims to broaden our understanding of the strategies that queens—both consorts and regnants, as well as female regents—pursued in order to wield political power within the structures of male-dominant societies. In addition to works describing European queenship, it also includes books on queenship as it appeared in other parts of the world, such as East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Islamic civilization.

Editorial Board Linda Darling, University of Arizona (Ottoman Empire) Theresa Earenfight, Seattle University (Spain) Dorothy Ko, Barnard College (China) Nancy Kollman, Stanford University (Russia) John Thornton, Boston University (Africa and the Atlantic World) John Watkins (France and Italy) Published by Palgrave Macmillan The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History By Charles Beem Elizabeth of York By Arlene Naylor Okerlund Learned Queen: The Imperial Image of Elizabeth I By Linda Shenk High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations Edited by Carole Levin, Debra Barrett-Graves, and Jo Eldridge Carney The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe By Sharon L. Jansen The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Elizabeth I By Anna Riehl Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch By Ilona Bell Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth By Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen By Catherine Loomis

Queenship and Voice in Medieval Northern Europe By William Layher The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I Edited by Charles Beem The French Queen’s Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Europe By Erin A. Sadlack Wicked Women of Tudor England: Queens, Aristocrats, Commoners By Retha M. Warnicke AMonarchyofLetters:RoyalCorrespondenceandEnglishDiplomacyintheReignofElizabethI By Rayne Allinson Three Medieval Queens: Queenship and the Crown in Fourteenth-Century England By Lisa Benz St. John Mary I: Gender, Power, and Ceremony in the Reign of England’s First Queen By Sarah Duncan The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography, 1440–1627 By Kavita Mudan Finn Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship By Jo Eldridge Carney Mother Queens and Princely Sons: Rogue Madonnas in the Age of Shakespeare By Sid Ray The Name of a Queen: William Fleetwood’s Itinerarium ad Windsor Edited by Charles Beem and Dennis Moore The Emblematic Queen: Extra-Literary Representations of Early Modern Queenship Edited by Debra Barrett-Graves Queenship in Medieval Europe By Theresa Earenfight The Queens Regnant of Navarre: Succession, Politics, and Partnership, 1274–1512 By Elena Woodacre QueenshipintheMediterranean:NegotiatingtheRoleoftheQueenintheMedieval and Early Modern Eras Edited by Elena Woodacre The Queen’s Mercy: Gender and Judgment in Representations of Elizabeth I By Mary Villeponteaux

THE QUEEN’S MERCY GENDER AND JUDGMENT IN REPRESENTA TATIONS OF ELIZABETH I Mary Villeponteaux

THE QUEEN’S MERCY

Copyright © Mary Villeponteaux, 2014. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-37174-4 All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-47577-3 ISBN 978-1-137-37175-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137371751 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Villeponteaux, Mary. The queen’s mercy : gender and judgment in representations of Elizabeth I / Mary Villeponteaux.—First edition. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Great Britain—Politics and government—1558–1603. 2. Great Britain—History—Elizabeth, 1558-1603. 3. Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 1533–1603. 4. Women—Political activity—Great Britain— History—16th century. 5. Queens—Great Britain—Biography. 6. Mercy in literature. 7. Clemency in literature. 8. Justice in literature. I. Title. DA355.V55 2014 942.055—dc23

2014002963

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2014 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of my parents, AnneBellingerVilleponteauxandLorenzAimarVilleponteaux,Jr.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Note on Texts

xi

1

“By Nature Full of Mercy”: The Clemency of the Queen

2

“The Sacred Pledge of Peace and Clemencie”: Elizabethan Mercy in The Faerie Queene

35

“Proud and Pitilesse”: Elizabethan Mercy and the Sonnet Tradition

67

3 4 5 6

1

“A Goodly Musicke in Her Regiment”: Elusive Justice in The Merchant of Venice

107

“Pardon Is Still the Nurse of Second Woe”: Measure for Measure and the Transition from Elizabeth to James

133

“Good Queene, You Must Be Rul’d”: Feminine Mercy in the Plays of Heywood and Dekker

157

Notes

175

Bibliography

207

Index

219

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

am grateful to the editors of Palgrave’s Queenship and Power series, Carole Levin and Charles Beem, for their encouragement and support of this project. Several of the ideas in this book were first aired in papers I presented at meetings of the Queen Elizabeth I Society. To the members of that group of erudite and congenial scholars I owe a debt of thanks for valuable suggestions, stimulating discussions, and new insights about Queen Elizabeth and her culture. Georgia Southern University helped me with a Scholarly Pursuit Award that gave financial support for the summer of 2013; I am grateful for that award as well as for the generosity of my department chair, David Dudley, who gave me a course release during my final semester of work on this book. Graduate student Collin Kimmons assisted with the proofreading and formatting of quotations and notes; I greatly appreciate her cheerful willingness to help. The anonymous reader for Palgrave Macmillan and the reader who revealed her identity, Linda Shenk, both offered excellent advice that I very much appreciated. Their careful readings and suggestions for revision helped me immeasurably. I would also like to thank my colleague and friend Julia Griffin for her generous help in reading chapters and offering knowledgeable and thoughtful suggestions. Thanks also go to Larry Weiss, lawyer and Shakespearean, for his commentsontheMeasureforMeasurechapterandmattersofequity. I am grateful, too, for the friendship of my colleague Maria Magoula Adamos, with whom I had several enlightening conversations about the philosophy of forgiveness. Part of Chapter Two was originally published in Spenser Studies 25 (2010) as “Dangerous Judgments: Elizabethan Mercy in The Faerie Queene,” and is used with the permission of AMS Press. A version of Chapter Four appeared as “‘A Goodly Musicke in Her Regiment’: Elizabeth, Portia, and the Elusive Harmony of Justice” inExplorations inRenaissanceCulture37.1(Summer2011):71–82,andisreprintedwith permission of the South-Central Renaissance Conference. My special thanks to Thomas Herron, editor of EIRC, and David Ramm, editor-in-chief of AMS Press, for making the process of obtaining

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permission painless. The cover image, the title page of the 1569 Bishops’ Bible, is reproduced courtesy of the Houghton Library: call number WKR 15.2.2, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Finally, my greatest debt of gratitude is to my wonderful husband, David Wheeler. Though his academic field is the eighteenth century, he gamely read chapters and gave me helpful advice. More important, he offered boundless support and encouragement while I was working on this project.

NOTE ON TEXTS

A

ll quotations retain the spelling and punctuation found in the edition cited, but u/v and i/j have been modernized throughout, with one exception: quotations from The Faerie Queene keep the spelling found in Hamilton’s edition.

CHAPTER 1

“BY NATURE FULL OF MERC R Y”: THE CLEMENCY OF THE QUEEN

I

nhisfamousdefenseofqueenship,AnHarboroweforTreweand FaithfullSubjectes,JohnAylmervalorizesElizabeth’smercyas one of the qualities that make her a perfectly virtuous woman. “There is a mervelous mercy and no rigour, an exceding pacience, and no desire of reveng in her.” In these terms Aylmer praises Elizabeth I and disputes the claim of John Knox that a woman’s rule violates the laws of God and nature.1 Throughout his treatise, Aylmer takes great pains to depict Elizabeth in terms that his age considered ideally feminine. For example, when he praises her learning, he couples his claims about her knowledge with parallel claims about her modesty. Aylmer quotes Elizabeth’s first schoolmaster: “I teach her wordes (quod he) and she me things. I teache her the tongues to speake: and her modest and maidenly life, teacheth me workes to do.” In this way, Aylmer reassures his reader that despite her great learning, Elizabeth retains idealized feminine virtues such as modesty, as well as a “marvelous meeke stomacke.” 2 Similarly, he emphasizes her mercy, a virtue often depicted as fundamentally feminine. After recounting Elizabeth’s persecution during Mary’s reign, Aylmer insists that Elizabeth has no desire to seek revenge, and in fact prays for her enemies: Are not these great tokens thou good subject, of much mercy to follow? Marke her comming in, and compare it with others. She commeth in lyke a lambe, and not lyke a Lyon, lyke a mother, and not lyke a stepdam. She rusheth not in at the fyrst chop, to violate and breake former lawes, to stirre her people to chaunge what they list, before order be taken by lawe. She hangeth no man, she behedeth none. She burneth none, spoileth none.3

Of course, Aylmer means to contrast Elizabeth with Mary Tudor, but his focus on her clemency also contributes to his portrait of a

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“natural” woman and queen, who is “lyke a mother” in her patience and mercy. Aylmer seems to praise Elizabeth’s judgment when he describes her as a monarch who follows divine guidance “by using correction without severitie, by sekyng the loste with clemencie, by governing wisely without fury, with weying and judging withoute rashness.””4 Yet elsewhere in this treatise, he registers serious distrust of woman’s rule as well as a woman’s ability to make wise judgments. In an earlier passage, Aylmer observes that a woman’s rule could do less harm in England than in most countries because of England’s mixed monarchy.5 Aylmer reassures his readers, “If she shuld judge in capitall crimes: what daunger were there in her womannishe nature? none at all. For the verdict is the 12 mennes, whiche passe uppon life and deathe, and not hers.”6 Thus, in the course of a single treatise, Elizabeth’s femininity is praised as a maternal wellspring of mercy and denigrated as a “womannishe” nature that renders her unfit to make independent judgments. The mercy expected to characterize Elizabeth’s judgments is depicted as both desirable and disquieting. This tension between veneration and suspicion of monarchical mercy, particularly a queen’s mercy, is the subject of the present study. The Queen’s Mercy y is the first book to study the image of Elizabeth as a clement queen, and the first to consider how attitudes toward her exercise of justice shaped literary representations of mercy.7 My analysis of Elizabeth’s image as a merciful queen is informed by studies of her representation by scholars such as Louis Montrose, Susan Frye, and Carole Levin. Louis Montrose’s work on the “shaping fantasies” of Elizabethan culture makes us aware of the imaginative accommodations required by Elizabeth’s role as queen of a patriarchal culture.8SusanFrye’sbookElizabethI:TheCompetitionforRepresentation draws our attention to the contested images of the queen and the way Elizabeth’s subjects sometimes sought to construct her in conventionally feminine terms in order to bolster their own authority.9 CaroleLevin’sHeart s andStomachofaKing:ElizabethIandthePolitics of Sex and Power examines the intersection of gender and politics in Elizabeth’s rule and shows how representations of the queen in many venues, including gossip and other popular forms, respond to traditional constructions of women.10 My understanding of the dynamics of Elizabeth’s representation as a merciful queen owes a great deal to these and other studies of what Louis Montrose has called the Elizabethan “political imaginary,” a term that designates “the images, tropes, and other verbal and iconic resources that provided

The Clemency of the Queen n

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a growing and changing matrix for the varied and sharply contested processes of royal representation.”11 The construction of Elizabeth as an icon of mercy was influenced by traditional ideas about women; it was a process that changed over time in response to religious and political pressures, and it was often contested. Elizabethan culture—its literature, political and legal treatises, religious writing, as well as visual representations—was engaged in an ongoing conversation about the rightness and efficacy of clemency. Controversy about mercy was generated not only by the presence of a woman on the throne but also by the Tudor program of centralizing power in the hands of the monarchy. The decades of Elizabeth’s reign witnessed a struggle over the site of legal power, a struggle that encompassed both the role of equity and the Chancery court in the English system of justice as well as the related question about the monarch’s prerogative. Furthermore, zealous Protestants were chronically unhappy with Elizabeth’s failure to support their causes, which often involved prosecuting and punishing the enemies of Protestantism, whether at home or abroad. At a moment when political and religious factors produced a climate in which debates about justice were inevitable, the presence of a queen on the throne intensified questions about mercy and shaped the debate. Mercy was a problematic concept even without the complications of the monarch’s gender and the particular political and religious circumstances of Elizabeth’s reign. Monarchs have an obligation to be merciful, according to Christian beliefs based on scripture: “Mercie and trueth preserve the King: for his throne shalbe established with mercie” (Proverbs 20:28).12 Yet, while mercy is regarded as an essential attribute of a Christian monarch, it is also a quality regarded with suspicion in classical and Christian philosophy as well as in sixx teenth-century political discourse. For many writers the problem lies in the relationship between mercy and its misguided counterpart, pity. For instance, Seneca praises mercy but warns against pity, which he describes as the product of a weak nature.13 In The City of God, Augustine takes issue with this Stoic depiction of pity as a vice, but he too distinguishes between the human emotion of pity and divine mercy, which comes from God’s goodness. Acknowledging that pity is “a kind of fellow-feeling in our own hearts,” Augustine argues that such “passions” may nonetheless be virtuous if they are subordinated to God; passions are not vices if they do not undermine a wise man’s reason. Augustine stipulates that pity must be shown in such a way that it does not encroach upon justice.14 Sixteenth-century political

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theorists often attempt to make a similar distinction between the mercy appropriate for a prince and the inappropriate clemency that might be a product of human weakness. For example, Elyot in The Governour devotes a chapter to the importance of mercy but near the end asserts that mercy must always be “joyned with reason” if it is not to degenerate into that “sickenesse of the mynd” that he calls “vaine pitie.”15 Nevertheless, despite such attempts to differentiate between mercy and pity, the distinction between the two erodes during this period. It is not unusual to find writers using the terms interchangeably,asdoesLipsiusinhisSixe s BookesofPolitickesorCivilDoctrine: “It is profitable for a good, and gracious Prince, sometimes to passe the limites of equitie, to shew his clemencie, were it but in regard of mercie, & pitie, to which all other vertues do in honor give place.”16 Mercy is a contested concept in the sixteenth century: while some writers take pains to separate virtuous mercy from emotional pity, others, like Lipsius, ignore this distinction, and increasingly the two terms, mercy and pity, are treated as though they are synonymous. If mercy and pity are considered one and the same, then mercy is regarded as springing from human passions. Political writers often voice strong concern about the impact the passions can have on govv ernance, and argue that mercy, despite being a Christian virtue, can weaken the commonwealth because it is a product of human emotion. Religious and political tradition demands that mercy be venerated, but more often than not, early modern writers who ostensibly revere mercy are much more fervent in blaming clemency than they are in praising forgiveness. For example, Elyot not only tries to distinguish between princely mercy and weak pity; he also registers his suspicion of clemency in his own age by stating that “at this daye the more parte of men be disseased” with the “sicknesse” that is pity.17 Yet, monarchical mercy—the virtue that Shakespeare’s Portia describes as “enshrined in the hearts of kings”—can never be completely dismissed because of its importance in Christian tradition. Even those who are the most suspicious of the deleterious effects of too much mercy at play in the governance of the commonwealth do not reject it outright. Jacques Hurault omits discussion of mercy almostentirelyinhisPoliticke,Moral,andMartialDiscourses,buteven while warning that clemency “is a kind of consenting to the sin, when it is willingly permitted to goe unpunished,” he feels compelled to acknowledge the common understanding that rulers should be merciful, and rather grudgingly states, “I know well it will be said, that a prince ought to be mercifull, and I deny it not.”18

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InThe Prince, Machiavelli offers a similarly ambivalent account of mercy, but for him, the value of mercy has nothing to do with its being a Christian virtue. Rather, Machiavelli regards a merciful reputation as beneficial to a monarch’s public image, but detrimental if it goes too far. “Every prince should prefer to be considered merciful rather than cruel, yet he should be careful not to mismanage this clemency of his.”19 For Machiavelli, a virtuous image can help the prince, but vice—if it is a vice that might help save the state—is often preferable to virtue. Thus, if cruelty might bring order and unity to the state, then cruelty should be practiced. “No prince should mind being called cruel for what he does to keep his subjects united and loyal; he may make examples of a very few, but he will be more merciful in reality than those who, in their tender-heartedness, allow disturbances to occur, with their attendant murders and lootings.”20 It is in this chapter that Machiavelli raises the famous question, “Whether it is better to be loved or feared.” He answers that, although every prince would like to be both, it is safer to be feared than to be loved. Machiavelli implies that a merciful prince will be more greatly loved than a cruel one, an idea that Elizabeth clearly embraced. But Machiavelli also insists that the people’s love is fickle; their fear gives better assurance of their support—thus cruelty can be salutary to the security of the ruler. However, Machiavelli implicitly genders his prince as masculine in this particular discussion; for instance, he says that the most important time for a prince to display cruelty is when he leads an army in wartime; without a reputation for cruelty, he cannot hope to control his men.21 This example is not one that would be meaningful for Elizabeth; and as we shall see, when a woman has a reputation for cruelty, early modern culture condemns her as monstrous. That a prince truly should be merciful is a tenet of Christian belief; outside of a Christian framework, Machiavelli still recommends that the prince seem merciful, if possible. Indeed, it is a commonplace in classical thought that a merciful ruler wins the loyalty and support of his subjects. As Seneca says in De Clementia, “Mercy, then, makes rulers not only more honored, but safer.” The merciful ruler is secure on the throne because by mercy he earns the people’s loyalty: the king “who is inclined to the milder course even if it would profit him to punish . . . such a one the whole state loves, defends, and reveres.”22 In sixteenth-century England, monarchical mercy was not regarded only as a Christian virtue; it was also understood in these practical terms, as a means of displaying and consolidating power. K. J. Kesselring has argued that Tudor monarchs deliberately

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reduced the common law courts’ power to pardon in order to have a monopoly on public displays of clemency designed to enhance their authority, and expanded and consolidated the royal pardon along with the power of the royal courts in an effort to increase the power of the crown.23 And while she does not think that the monarch’s power to pardon was ever seriously questioned or challenged during this period, the larger question of the monarch’s prerogative was indeed debated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, partly in terms of the concept of equity. Equity is a concept often invoked in the Renaissance. Its most frequentlycitedsourceis Aristotle’sNicomacheanEthics,whichexplains equity as correcting the law in order to bring about greater justice. According to Aristotle, equity is “a rectification of law where law is defective because of its generality.” Equity is a “special kind of Justice, not a different quality altogether.”24 But Renaissance uses of the term “equity” do not limit it to an aspect of law. Mark Fortier argues that early modern England was a “culture of equity,” meaning that equity was a key idea in general currency, invoked in the discourse of not only law, but also politics, religion, and poetry.25 Equity is often equated with mercy: “the rigour of the Law is tempered with the sweetness of Equity, which is nothing more but Mercie qualifying the sharpness of Justice,” says one writer.26 But the term “equity” is capacious in the Renaissance: it could also mean flexibility, or fairness, or righteous severity, or equality. In early modern England, equity was associated with the Court of Chancery, known as the “court of the king’s conscience” because of its origin in subjects’ pleas to the king to rectify injustices they had suffered in the common law courts, pleas that were funneled through the Lord Chancellor. Chancery Court was supposed to complement the common law courts by ruling on cases where application of the letter of the law would not render true justice. Though Chancery Court may not have been, in actuality, a vehicle of royal authority and the king’s unencumbered power, it was often represented that way in early modern England. The equity of Chancery Court was closely associated with royal prerogative, and there were many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers who opposed placing equitable prerogative over the law. The conflict between the prerogative court and the common law court came to a head after James’s accession but was brewing during the reign of Elizabeth. Though the equity practiced by Chancery Court was not necessarily an expression of absolutism or of mercy, it was associated with both of these concepts.

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Thus in early modern England, the proper role of mercy in govv ernance was contested. The practice of the royal pardon and the activity of the “court of the king’s conscience” could both be understood as expanding the power of the crown and reducing the power of the Parliament and the common law courts. Actual expressions of monarchical mercy were often criticized and could easily be dismissed as the products of emotional frailty rather than rational virtue. And this was especially true of a queen’s mercy because of the early modern belief that women were ruled by their passions.

Gendered Mercy Many contemporary discussions of clemency associate this quality with women. In his treatise on the emotions, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, Thomas Wright states categorically that women are more merciful than men: “Women, by nature, are enclined more to mercie and pitie than men, because the tendernesse of their complexion moveth them more to compassion.”27 Many writers suggest that compassion and tenderness come naturally to women because of their physical softness. For instance, The Ladies Dictionary lists “Compassion and a Merciful Disposition” as a virtue of the female sex: This chiefly should reign in the lovely tender breasts of the female sex, made for the seats of mercy and commiseration. They being made of the softest mould, ought to be most pliant and yielding to the impression of pity and compassion.28

Feminine beauty is another “natural” attribute of women that promises tenderness; as Donne claims that he said to his “profane mistresses,” beauty should signify a woman’s readiness to feel pity: “Beauty, of pity, foulness only is / A sign of rigour” (Sonnet 13).29 In these examples, pity and compassion are attractive feminine qualities. But compassion is often attributed to women not because of feminine virtue but because of feminine weakness. Even a strong advocate of clemency like Lipsius, who calls it “the other light” (along with justice) and argues that clemency carries more “grace and comelinesse” in a king or prince than in any other person, nonetheless warns against its excess in these terms: “For without discretion it [clemencie] should be too much effeminatenesse, and lenitie, and vice rather then vertue.”30

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This “effeminatenesse” is a pliability and lack of emotional restraint often attributed to women. Women are supposedly more subject to their passions than are men, a quality that makes them suggestible and easily moved. Thomas Wright, for example, who ascribes compassion to a woman’s tender disposition, suggests that this compassionate tendency allows women to be manipulated much more easily than are men. Describing a preacher in Italy whose oratorical power was such that he could readily move his audience from tears to laughter, Wright comments that this gifted speaker knew “the Art of moving the affections of those auditors, and besides that, the most part were women that heard him (whose passions are most vehement and mutable) therefore he might have perswaded them what hee listed.”31 Those who opposed female rule frequently expressed exactly this concern: that a woman’s judgment cannot be trusted because women are so easily swayed by passions and so lackk ing in reason. It was a commonplace of Renaissance thought that women by nature lacked the capacity to rule.32 One aspect of women’s nature that purportedly made them unfit for sovereignty was their subjection to their passions. Humanist educator Juan Vives limited a woman’s realm to her home, telling her that she was forbidden by wise men to rule or govern. Addressing a woman, he says, “You attempte to drawe all thynge after your fantasye without discretion.”33 Sharon L. Jansen has pointed out that this famous passage was not actually written by Vives but inserted by his English translator, Richard Hyrde.34 Nevertheless, the sentiment is true to Vives, who frequently characterizes women as unreasonable and passion driven. As he says, “the man resembleth the reason, and the woman the body: Now reason ought to rule and the body to obey.”35 Theodora Jankowski identifies this idea as a subtext in the work of many Renaissance political theorists: reason should rule the prince; men are rational and women emotional; therefore the possibility of a “female prince” is excluded. Jankowski also finds that some Elizabethan dramas that depicted queens privileged the body natural (and hence, the passions of the queens) over their political identities.36 Paige Martin Reynolds offers a nuanced analysis of representations of Elizabeth’s judgment, arguing that the queen’s frequent references to judgment and her own impartiality “indicate her self-consciousness about this aspect of sovereignty.”37 Reynolds’s reading of George Peele’s Araygnement of Paris reveals a text that reinforces limits on Elizabeth’s sovereignty by making her the subject rather than the arbiter of judgment. The

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present study will narrow the focus on the queen’s judgment to representations of her mercy, which sometimes do raise questions about the efficacy of women’s rule by suggesting that a woman’s judgment is determined by her “womanish pity.” Given that women’s supposedly merciful dispositions could be regarded as a sign of feminine weakness, it is somewhat surprising that depictions of Queen Elizabeth as a loving and merciful monarch abound during her reign. Traditionally all rulers are expected to show mercy and are praised for their mercy, but in the case of Elizabeth I, this aspect of the monarchical image received special emphasis. Why did contemporary representations of the queen so often highlight her clemency? And why did Elizabeth herself frequently stress her own clement nature? The long-standing tradition of locating mercy in iconic female figures such as the Virgin Mary, as well as earthly queens and mothers, may be part of the reason. Helen Hackett suggests that the celebration of Elizabeth’s mercy may have owed something to the Cult of the Virgin Mary. While she challenges blanket assertions that the “Cult of Elizabeth” filled a gap left when Protestantism tried to eradicate Roman Catholic Mariolatry, Hackett does explore the way that certain elements of Queen Elizabeth’s representation, including her images as a merciful mediatrix and tender mother, are traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary. As Dante describes her, she sits in heaven grieving for sinners, and “her compassion breaks Heaven’s stern decree.”38 Marina Warner’s analysis of Marian imagery shows how these two images, mother and mediatrix, were often in fact conflated, sometimes quite starkly, as in the medieval iconography Warner discusses in which Mary bares her breast before Christ and in one case says, “Because of the milk I gave you, have mercy on them.”39 Paul Strohm, in his analysis of medieval queens as intercessors, also finds a connection between maternity and mercy: he analyzes a fourteenth-century account of the intercession of Queen Philippa on behalf of the burghers of Calais and finds a strong emphasis on Philippa’s maternity in the description of her self-abasement at the feet of Edward III, where her advanced state of pregnancy is repeatedly mentioned.40 Hackett asserts that both of these traditional, Marian images—mother and intercessor—were used as “safely” feminine ways of praising Queen Elizabeth: “Mercy and grace were virtues that could comfortably be identified with a female monarch without suggesting either that she was inadequate as a ruler, or that she was unnaturally mannish.””41 While significant critical attention has been paid to the maternal

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imagery adopted by and projected onto Queen Elizabeth, her image as a wellspring of mercy—with merciful intercessor being one aspect of this idea—has not been the subject of any extended consideration. It may be that the association of mercy with femininity, the Virgin Mary, and motherhood is enough to explain why the image of a merciful Queen Elizabeth was so popular, and apparently so desirable to Elizabeth herself. And there is also a long historical tradition of queens as merciful intercessors that should be considered. Christine Coch has shown that Elizabeth adopted motherhood as part of her self-representation early in her reign.42 In explaining Elizabeth’s depiction of herself as “mother of my country,” Coch suggests that motherhood was almost the only “positive paradigm for public power” that patriarchal sixteenth-century society conceded to women.43 However, I would add that the role of intercessor was another such potentially powerful stance. Certainly both Elizabeth and her predecessor, Mary I, inherited a long tradition of queens as merciful intercessors, a tradition suggested by the medieval adage, “If the king is law, the queen is mercy.””44 This could provide another explanation for the pervasive depiction of Elizabeth as a merciful monarch: not only is it a safely feminine role because of its attribution to the Virgin Mary and its frequent conjunction with motherhood, but actual queens traditionally were expected to be merciful and to sue the monarch for mercy on behalf of their subjects. Though queens were often figured as intercessors, the question of how this image of queenship was perceived still remains. Is the queen-as-merciful-intercessor formula one that preserves patriarchal authority? Or does intercession confer power on the interceder? It has been argued that the role of intercessor actually serves to circumscribe rather than enhance queenly power: scholars generally agree that emphasis on the medieval queen’s role as intercessor grew as the institutional basis for queenly power shrank. Lois Huneycutt says that “as the possibility for direct exercise of power became more remote, writers began to stress the queen’s duty to use the less direct, but no less potent, means of persuasion and intercession.””45 Yet not everyone would agree that the role of intercessor confers the same power as that enjoyed by queens before the twelfth century. Paul Strohm argues that earlier medieval queens, though they had access to the role of mediatrix, emphasized more powerful roles such as royal counselor, mistress of the households, and property owner. According to his analysis, the role of mediatrix limits a queen’s power and is often a marginalized position that serves to buttress

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kingly authority by casting the queen not as a joint ruler but as a humble supplicant.46 Strohm’s analysis of Queen Philippa’s intercession with her husband Edward III, mentioned above, highlights her humility, weakness, marginalization, and another quality that I will consider more fully later: her emotional identification with others’ suffering.47 But even this long-standing tradition of representing queens as merciful intercessors should not be dismissed as unambiguously “safe,” or as necessarily subordinating women to patriarchal authority. Just as Christine Coch and Mary Beth Rose have shown that even maternal authority was sometimes constructed as threatening in the Elizabethan age, so too the power of the queenly intercessor in the Middle Ages could be seen as subversive.48 Strohm gives as examples some mediating queens who enhance their authority by adding the purveyance of wise advice to their role as intercessor. Strohm claims that these sage counselors (such as Richard II’s queen, Anne of Bohemia) diverge from “those Marian mediatrices whose actions are grounded in a capacity for condolence.””49 John Carmi Parsons makes a parallel point about interceding medieval queens when he shows how some of them used that role to create networks of obligation that could bind subjects to the queen’s service even in future generations.50 Certainly one could argue that successful intercession confers power on the intercessor, and as many scholars have pointed out, there is nothing inherently feminine about intercession: male courtiers and advisors to kings often play that role. Furthermore, even representations of the Virgin Mary as an intercessor do not always cast her as a humble supplicant. Warner shows that the medieval figure of a merciful Mary often seems rather amoral, flying in the face of justice to save sinners who trust in her. Mary, in medieval tradition, can subvert heavenly justice, as suggested by iconography analyzed by Catherine Oakes in which Mary interferes—sometimes quite vigorously—with the weighing of souls in the scales of justice in order to save the sinners, despite the heaviness of their sins. Oakes notes that this iconography flourished in England from the fourteenth century to the Reformation.51 Of course, Protestants objected to the implicit claim that Mary exerted such authority. Thus even this traditional role—queen as merciful, Marian intercessor—may be perceived from opposing viewpoints, as weak or powerful, serving to enforce or to undermine women’s subordination to masculine authority. In this study of queenly mercy in early modern English culture, I find that representations of a queen’s mercy

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are similarly ambivalent. To imagine Elizabeth as a tender, merciful queen might be to idealize her as the perfect Christian monarch and Renaissance woman, and such a portrayal may also resonate with the old image of the Virgin Mary. Or, such a depiction may suggest the queen’s weakness: she is vulnerable to emotion and foolishly led by her “womanish pity” instead of her reason. If Elizabeth is depicted as a mediatrix between her people and God, along the lines of medieval queens consort who interceded between the people and the King, then perhaps this serves to position her as subordinate and reduce people’s sense of her power. Or the queen’s clemency may be one important aspect of her power, because her mercy binds subjects to her in obligation and service and increases her popular support. The quality of mercy is the subject of disagreement already in this age; when a reigning queen exercises mercy, or is portrayed as merciful, the subject is even more complicated by her gender. Cultural images and expectations for women contributed to the insistence by Elizabeth as well as her people that she was an exceptionally merciful monarch. One further aspect of that image that should be explored is its opposite: the figure of the cruel queen. Probably the most ubiquitous label for an unpopular queen in the sixteenth century was “Jezebel.” Readers today sometimes assume that when a woman is labeled a Jezebel, she is being accused of sexual impropriety.52 However, as we examine the application of this label, what becomes clear is that a Jezebel, in the sixteenth-century discourse of opponents of women’s rule, connotes not whoredom (in its obvious sense) but rather the wickedness of a woman ruler, with special attention to her cruelty. Elizabeth wanted to avoid accusations of Jezebeldom almost as much as she welcomed praise for her clemency. It is John Knox who provides the earliest instance cited in the OED of the term “Jezebel” when, in his 1558First 8 Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, he uses it to describe the “mischievous Marys”—Mary Stuart, and also Mary of Guise, Scotland’s regent, but primarily Mary Tudor, whose reign is the main focus of Monstrous Regiment. t 53 Not only Knox but also others such as Christopher Goodman, Thomas Becon, and Anthony Gilby used the label Jezebel to vilify Mary I.54 Jezebel is a popular example of a “bad woman” in early modern discourse; she is mentioned in several of the literary attacks on women that proliferated during the sixx teenth and early seventeenth centuries in England.55 What did the biblical Jezebel represent for these writers?

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Goodman calls Mary a Jezebel in order to emphasize her crime of subjecting England to the power of Spain as well as her cruelty. The biblical Jezebel was herself a foreigner, a Phoenician who married the Hebrew king Ahab and exerted a strong influence over him: by following Jezebel in the worship of Baal, Ahab is said to have done “worse in the sight of the Lord then all that were before him” (1 Kings 16:30–31). All of these writers find a parallel between Mary’s institution of Roman Catholicism and Jezebel’s worship of Baal. Ahab and Jezebel’s reign is also marked by persecutions and abuses of power; thus, Goodman refers to Mary as an “unlawful Governesse, wicked Jesabel,” who is “suffred to raigne over us in Goddes furie,” and whose rule is “contrarie to nature.””56 Immediately, he refers to those who support this “Jesabel” as ones who “most wickedlie betrayed Christe, their countrie, and them selves . . . to become slaves to a strange and foren nation, the prowde Spaniards.””57 Goodman goes on to excoriate Mary’s counselors and justices for their impiety, failure to defend true religion, and especially the violence and cruelty to which they subject the English. Goodman later emphasizes these corresponding crimes of false religion and cruelty when he again refers to Mary as Jezebel: And the counterfeyte Christians this day, which everie where (but especiallie in our miserable countrie) imprison, famishe, murther, hange, and burne their owne countriemen, and deare children of God, at the commandement of furious Jesabel, and her false Priestes and Prophetes.58

God condemns them as “blasphemers, idolaters, and cruell murtherers,” according to Goodman, summing up the qualities of Mary that are reflected in Jezebel: the persecution of true religion, and the practice of cruel violence upon the people. In the first Book of Kings, these are precisely the crimes of Jezebel, who not only brings false gods to the Israelites but also persecutes Yahweh’s prophets. Her feud with Elijah is the heart of Jezebel’s story: she “slewe the Prophetes of the Lord,” inciting Elijah to arrange a contest between himself and Jezebel’s prophets, at the end of which he kills the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:13–40). When Ahab brings this news to Jezebel, she sends Elijah a message that she will make his life “like one of their lives by tomorrow this time” (1 Kings 19:2). Gilby’s use of the Jezebel label is similar to Goodman’s, and though Gilby only once directly names Mary a Jezebel, he invests the name with the

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same meanings Goodman did: England “murthereth the sainctes, it mainteineth Baals prophetes by the commaundement of Jesabel.”59 Similarly, Becon emphasizes Mary’s heretical religion through a reff erence to Jezebel, saying that the histories of Queen Jesabel, Queen Athalia, and “such like” show that queens are for the most part “wicked, ungodly, supersticious, and given to idolatry.”60 Obviously Elizabeth was aware of these excoriations of her half sister as a monstrous Jezebel, and I would suggest that she was careful to try and avoid becoming the target of similar accusations. John Knox, in his infamous tract, frequently alludes to Jezebel in a way that voices specific complaints about the rule of Mary I. A reading of hisMonstrous Regimentshows t clearly that, for him, the name “Jezebel” connotes “the monstruous empire of a cruell woman.”61 Of course, Knox’s overall purpose in this treatise is to demonstrate that woman’s rule is, as he frequently asserts, “contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance.”62 Thus, often when calling Mary a Jezebel, Knox focuses on the unnaturalness of the exercise of authority by a woman: The insolent joy, the bonefiers and banketing, which were in London and elsewhere in England, when that cursed Jesabell was proclaimed quene, did witnesse to my hart, that men were becomen more then enraged. For els howe coulde they so have rejoyced at their own confusion and certein destruction? For what man was there of so base judgment (supposing that he had any light of God) who did not see the erecting of that monstre, to be the overthrowe of true religion, and the assured destruction of England, and of ancient liberties thereof?63

The passage emphasizes how monstrous female rule is, how perverse it is for men to rejoice in such a monarchy, and also, correspondingly, how this unnatural gynecocracy has resulted in the overthrow of true religion. Like Goodman and Gilby, Knox alludes to the biblical Jezebel’s enmity toward Yahweh and his prophets. In the queens of his age, according to Knox, one finds “the spirit of Jesabel and Athalia, under them we finde the simple people oppressed, the true religion extinguished, and the blood of Christes membres most cruellie shed.”64 But in Knox’s treatise, even more prominent than the association of Jezebel with religious oppression is the association of Jezebel with cruelty. Almost without exception, Knox uses the label Jezebel to characterize Mary as cruel and her reign as bloody. Predicting God’s

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vengeance on the “mischievous Marys,” Knox asserts that both Jezebel and Athalia were “convicted in their cankered consciences, to acknowledge that the murther, that they had committed . . . [was] repugnant to justice.”65 He closes his treatise with the assurance that “the day of vengeance, which shall apprehend that horrible monstre Jesabel of England, and suche as maintein her monstruous crueltie, is alredie apointed in the counsel of the Eternall.”66 For Knox, the biblical Jezebel is an emblem of cruelty, and he will state repeatedly that Mary is cruel and her reign tyrannous. “The devil,” says Knox, “doth reign over suche tyrannes,” not God.67 Knox’s reiteration of the theme of tyrannical cruelty resonates with an interesting gloss in the Geneva Bible (written by Marian exiles of whom Knox was one). In I Kings, when Ahab wants to buy Naboth’s vineyard and Naboth will not relinquish it, Jezebel tells her husband that she will arrange for him to have his desire. Jezebel uses trickery to have Naboth accused of blasphemy he did not commit; he is then stoned to death, and Ahab gets his vineyard. The gloss on this episode in the Geneva Bible reads: “This example of monstrous crueltie the holy Gost leaveth to us to the intent that we shulde abhorre all tyrannie, and specially in them, whome nature & kinde shulde move to be pitiful and inclined to mercie.”68 This revealing interpretation suggests another way of understanding the nature of the “monstrosity” that Mary and Jezebel share: both are tyrants, and because they are women their tyranny is particularly abhorrent, since as women they should by nature be merciful rather than cruel.69 Literary evidence also suggests that the cruel woman is a powerfully negative cultural image. For example, in Shakespeare’s plays, cruel women are repeatedly characterized as monstrous, their lack of pity a violation of nature itself. Regan and Goneril, the heartless daughters of Lear, are characterized as “unnatural hags” (II. iv.278).70 Though Lear wants to believe them to be of “tender-hefted nature,” daughters who will follow “the offices of nature,” he must finally describe them as monstrously bestial, “serpent-like,” “wolvish” (II.iv.171, 178, 161; also I.iv.308). In a telling moment, Cornwall’s servant says that if Regan lives to old age and meets a natural death, “women will all turn monsters,” suggesting not only that a cruel woman like Regan is a monster but also that other women might choose a similar transformation if this behavior is not punished (III.vii.102). Another example is the excessive cruelty of Tamora in Titus Andronicus, who incites her sons to murder Bassianus and also to rape and kill Lavinia. When Lavinia begs the queen to “show a

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woman’s pity” and kill her on the spot rather than allow Demetrius and Choron to assault her first, Tamora replies, “I know not what it means,” signaling the complete lack of pity that characterizes her as not a woman but a tiger (II.iii.147, 157). When Tamora announces her intention to be “pitiless,” Lavinia cries, “No grace? No womanhood? Ah, beastly creature, / The blot and enemy to our general name!” (II.iii. 162, 182–83). Like Cornwall’s servant, Lavinia suggests that one counterexample to the “rule” of feminine tenderness calls into question feminine nature itself. The most vivid Shakespearean example of feminine cruelty is Lady Macbeth, whose invocation of the spirits makes explicit the idea that a pitiless woman violates nature. Her famous plea, “Unsex me here,” proposes that the absence of femininity is a precondition for the act of murder; unable to harbor both femininity and cruelty simultaneously, she must be “unsexed” if she is to be filled from top to bottom with “direst cruelty,” as she desires (I.v.41–43). Shakespeare’s examples of cruel women are all monarchs. The recurring image of the cruel queen suggests that women in power were thought likely to become cruel, an idea stated outright in Gosynhyll’s ScholehouseforWomen,oneoftheearliestandmostfamousoftheantiwoman texts in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century controversy. Gosynhyll uses Jezebel and Herodias as examples of women’s cruelty but quickly expands his claim to encompass all women: Recorde, the wycked Jesabell, Which would have slayne good Helyas [Elijah] Recorde also of the gospell The wife of Phylyp Herodyas Which through her doughter, brought to pas That Herode her graunted, or that they wiste To give her the heed of John Baptyst Thus were them selfe, may lytle do As in regard of corporall might Of cruelness they rest not so But stere theyr husbandes, for to fight.

Gosynhyll goes on to elaborate this final point: women’s physical weakness does not impede their cruelty. If necessary, they will use others (as Herodias used Herod) to enact their evil deeds. Furthermore, when women gain power, they are merciless: though they are “weake and feble . . . of body,” yet “the upper hande, yf they ones get,” they will be “malyvolente” and “without pyte.”71 This claim

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is echoed by Spenser in Book V of The Faerie Queene, when, describing the Amazon queen Radigund, he says, “Such is the crueltie of womenkynd, / When they have shaken off the shamefast band, / With which wise Nature did them strongly bynd, / T’obay the heasts of man’s well ruling hand” (V.v.25.1–4).72 However, Spenser is not suggesting that women are naturally cruel and therefore must be restrained by men, but rather that women in “unnatural” positions— that is, free of masculine rule—will act unnaturally in other ways as well. Should a woman prove unnatural by assuming authority, further monstrous behavior might follow.73

The Problem with Elizabeth’s Mercy Thus a regnant queen in the sixteenth century inherited a complicated and contradictory series of assumptions about her nature, her ability to judge, and her mercy. Women are assumed to be compassionate by nature, but their merciful natures are alternately celebrated and derided. That women are supposedly ruled by their passions means that their ability to judge is mistrusted and their mercy suspected of being merely weak-minded, emotional pity. Nevertheless, there is a strong cultural tradition of positive associations between women and mercy: from the intercessions of the Blessed Virgin to those of medieval queens, the virtuous woman who tempers harsh judgments with her compassionate mercy is a common and revered image. Yet the opposite image also exists: the specter of the cruel Jezebel haunts Elizabethan culture. Cruel women are considered monstrously unnatural, and powerful women, it is hinted, are likely to be cruel. A queen would surely have to tread carefully; her severe judgments might brand her a cruel and tyrannous Jezebel, but her clement judgments might easily be dismissed as products of womanish pity. Indeed, despite Elizabeth’s reputation as a superbly educated and wise monarch, her ability to judge properly does seem to have been doubted because of her gender. As we have seen, even that apologist for woman’s rule and supporter of Elizabeth, John Aylmer, discourages the idea of a queen as absolute ruler precisely because of his belief that a woman is not capable of judging offenses “according to her wisdom.” When Queen Elizabeth was reluctant to enact a harsh penalty, her councilors were likely to attribute this clemency to feminine weakness. Writing to Lord Burghley about the delay in executing the Duke of Norfolk in 1572—a delay on the queen’s part, discussed below, that sparked complaints about her clemency—Lord

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Hunsdon bewails the danger to the kingdom and to Elizabeth herself caused by this heedlessness. He predicts the ruin of the commonwealth and the subversion of true religion, should Elizabeth be killed. “And if by her negligence or womanish pity these things happen, what she hath to answer for to God she herself knows.”74 Despite having stated a few sentences earlier—perhaps with a tinge of sarcasm—that “the whole world knows her [Elizabeth] to be wise,” Hunsdon is ready to attribute what he perceives as an unconscionable and dangerous delay in executing justice to the queen’s “womanish” disposition, specifically a tendency toward pity. Many Elizabethan men, like John Aylmer, assumed that female rule needed a corrective: male counsel. In his treatise defending Elizabeth’s queenship, as we have seen, Aylmer both lauds Elizabeth’s mildness that promises she will judge without harshness, and also hints that, as a woman, she will need male guidance. In another rather remarkable passage, Aylmer asserts the innate tenderness of a woman’s nature, in the case not of Elizabeth but of Mary Tudor. Aylmer claims that Mary herself cannot have been responsible for the cruelties and injustices of her reign. Why not? Because she was a woman: The late Quene Mary, who bearinge, and wearing, a womans hart, coulde not (I thincke) have used such rigoure and extremitie, in imprysoning, banishinge, rackinge, hanginge, drawinge, hedding, burninge, flesinge, and fleainge withal manner of extremitie.75

The cardinal, bishops, and churchmen who “bewitched” her are to blame, according to Aylmer. The parenthetical “I thincke” speaks volumes about Aylmer’s uncertain footing at this moment: treading carefully as he traverses the topic of Queen Elizabeth’s sister’s reign, Aylmer nonetheless clearly asserts the belief that a woman’s heart is by nature tender and merciful rather than rigorous and cruel. His remark also implies that because she was a woman she was vulnerable to the manipulations of the men around her. This passage suggests how a woman’s tenderness, her inclination to feel pity, could be represented as simultaneously praiseworthy and problematic: according to Aylmer, Mary’s feminine tenderness renders her both innocent of her reign’s cruelties but also less powerful because she is a woman, subject to—“bewitched by”—the powerful men who surrounded her. The assumption of Aylmer and others was that Elizabeth, by contrast, would be surrounded by godly men, who would provide proper

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guidance. This led to a struggle during Elizabeth’s reign between the ideology of mixed monarchy, in which the queen rules through her male councilors, and a more absolutist ideology that places authority in the person of the monarch herself. 76 Assumptions about a woman’s inability to make sound independent judgments bred this conflict. Elizabeth herself seems to have cherished her reputation for mercy. As William Cecil observed, “The Queens Majesty hath been alwaies a merciful Lady, and by mercy she hath taken more harm then by justice, and yet she thinks that she is more beloved in doing her self harm.” Cecil wrote these words to Francis Walsingham on January 23, 1571/72, expressing his frustration over the queen’s delay in executing the Duke of Norfolk for his part in the Ridolfi Plot.77 It had been thought that the Duke would be executed in January, soon after his trial, but the queen delayed. She waffled over the death warrant, signing it on February 9 and then rescinding it, at which point Burghley again wrote to Walsingham: “I cannot write you what is the inward cause of the stay of the Duke of Norfolks death.” After describing Elizabeth’s vacillations, he closes: “Gods Will be fulfilled, and aid her Majestie to doe her self good.”78 Elizabeth’s desire to show mercy in particular cases was sometimes a source of tension for her councilors, and the delay in executing Norfolk foreshadowed the much more violent crisis that emerged in the 1580s concerning the Queen of Scots. Furthermore, Cecil explains the queen’s clemency, which he regards as excessive, in terms of her own desire to be loved by her people. Elizabeth’s assertion of mutual love between herself and her people became a hallmark of her reign. Judith Richards traces the gradual emergence of love as a metaphor for the monarch/subject relationship during the sixteenth century, and finds that Elizabeth’s frequent insistence on this mutual love was partly a result of her uncertain hold on the throne at the start of her reign.79 As she said in the famous speech at Tilbury, “I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects.”80 That the queen believed in the sustaining power of her people’s love seems borne out by a conversation recounted by Sir John Harington. He reports that Elizabeth praised his wife for the way she maintained her husband’s affection by constantly persuading him of her love for him. The queen went on to say, “After suche sorte do I keepe the good wyll of all my husbandes, my good people; for if they did not reste assurede of some special love towarde them, they woud not readily yeilde me such goode obedience.”81 Thus Cecil’s claim that

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by acting mercifully Elizabeth believed she would be more beloved has serious implications, if she felt that her people’s obedience—and thus the stability of her throne—was predicated on their affection for her. This belief contradicts Machiavelli’s assertion that fear, rather than love, guarantees the prince’s hold on his throne. But as we have seen, Machiavelli’s recommendation that a prince should show cruelty seems more apt for a male monarch, given that his leadership of the army is the example given by Machiavelli. Did Elizabeth’s insistence that she ruled by love weaken her? According to an anonyy mous Member of Parliament who wrote a letter of advice to another Member in 1581, the people’s disposition “to love her Majesty, being so good a one, does so far exceed the fear of her, being a woman and so merciful, that her lovingest means doth make them most obsequious.”82 This intriguing assertion points in two directions: toward Elizabeth’s powerful hold on her people’s affections as well as her perceived weakness because of her gender and concomitant mercy. The main thrust of this writer’s argument is similarly two-sided; he concludes by recommending that the mutual affection between queen and Parliament be nourished, but as Neale points out, he earlier promised that the House of Parliament would be most “obsequious” if granted maximum liberty. Thus the question of the degree of authority achieved by the queen through her rhetoric of mutual love remains unanswered: Is her power undermined by a Parliament that claims to obey her because of mutual affection but also, as the writer hints, fears her so little that they could make their own “liberty” a condition for their obedience? As we shall see, struggles between queen and Parliament were often over fundamentally religious issues in which Elizabeth’s supposedly feminine mercy—an aspect of her image as a loving and beloved queen—played an important part. This image of Elizabeth as a merciful and beloved queen was promulgated early in her reign. Richard Mulcaster’s account of Elizabeth’s progress through the city of London before her coronation is a veritable manifesto for the idea of reciprocal love between the new queen and her people. Elizabeth’s mercy is an important aspect of the persona that both Mulcaster in his account and the people of London in their pageants ascribe to Elizabeth. For example, the third pageant presented to the queen is based on the eight Beatitudes in Matthew’s gospel; a child reads verses that explain that the Queen has been blessed with all of these qualities, among them meekness of spirit, mildness, a hunger for justice, and mercy. As did Aylmer, the Londoners who created this pageant emphasize that Elizabeth has

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remained merciful despite having been treated unmercifully in the past, crediting her with “mercy shown, not felt.”83 Mulcaster portrays the queen as embodying the mercy that the people have attributed to her: when she encounters children from a school for poor boys, the queen “did cast up her eyes to heaven, as who should say, ‘I here see this merciful work toward the poor, whom I must in the midst of my royalty needs remember.’”84 She then hears an oration by one of the students, in which she is told that the pupils have no doubt “of the mercy of the Queen’s most gracious clemency.” Mulcaster’s Passage ofOurMostDreadSovereignLady,QueenElizabethwas h publisheddurring the first year of Elizabeth’s reign and, like Aylmer’s Harborowe, constructs an image of the queen as gracious, mild, and merciful, an image that can be understood as an important part of the rhetoric of mutual love that sustained Elizabeth’s reign.85 Christine Coch suggests another possible reason for the centrality of this idea of mutual love: it can be seen as part of Elizabeth’s role as tender and affectionate mother, one that allowed Elizabeth to frame her authority in a socially understandable and acceptable way. The claim of mutual love between Elizabeth-as-mother and her subjects/ children serves to redefine “political exigencies as acts of generosity,” allowing the queen to exercise authority in the name of motherly love.86 Indeed, Elizabeth often accompanied authoritarian actions with claims of femininity; as part of this strategy, she would invoke both her “natural” tenderness and her history of clemency as she simultaneously laid down the law. A good example is her 1570 proclamation on the suppression of the Northern Rebellion, designed to be read aloud by curates. Here Elizabeth enters into a lengthy discussion of her “natural Disposition” to have her subjects obey her out of love rather than fear and reminds them of her clement behavior in the past; she also claims a personal tendency to kindness rather than harshness. All this is a preface to her announcement of the measures used to suppress the rebellion: “Notwithstanding this our natural and private Dulcenes [sweetness], yet we have not . . . neglected to our Power the due and derect Administration of Justice for the suppressing of Malefactors.”87 To say that Elizabeth’s power to suppress the rebellion was not neglected is something of an understatement— her response to this uprising was surprisingly harsh and punitive. But the queen frames the announcement that the rebels are being suppressed and punished with assertions of her own historical and personal tendency toward mercy, which she repeatedly describes as “natural.”

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The theatricality of Elizabeth’s regime and the care with which she deployed her image have been discussed by many scholars, and the queen’s—and her councilors’—frequent assertions of her great mercy are part of this image. Elizabeth’s proclamation about the executions following the Northern Rebellion may suggest another reason she so ardently desired to be thought merciful: the political realities of her rule were at times brutal, and by promoting an image of herself as merciful, she hoped to circumvent a reputation for cruelty. Elizabeth’s concern about public opinion included a desire to distance herself not only from brutality in her own reign, but in the reign preceding hers. Having inherited a kingdom recently torn by religious strife, Elizabeth wished to establish herself as a Protestant “Prince of Peace” and thus distinguish her reign from the violent reign of the Roman Catholic Mary Tudor. In his study of Tudor iconography, John King demonstrates how Elizabeth’s image as a Protestant ruler was fashioned. One of the images he analyzes is the allegorical title page introduced in the 1569 edition of the Bishops’ Bible. This portrait of Elizabeth (pictured on the cover of this book) shows the queen as the summation of the four virtues depicted in the corners of the woodcut. These are the classical cardinal virtues of Justice, Prudence, and Fortitude, but instead of Temperance, the expected fourth virtue, Mercy sits on the queen’s left side. Though the figures of Justice and Mercy are acting together to crown the Queen, Mercy’s preeminence is indicated by the Bible she holds in her hand.88 The substitution of Mercy for Temperance may be part of the portrait’s Protestant ideology: Elizabeth’s mercy and the peace that resulted distinguish her reign from Mary’s. Thus, the image of a merciful queen may be an important aspect of Elizabeth’s Protestant identity because it establishes not only what she is, but what she is not. But Protestants who initially regarded Elizabeth as their champion became increasingly dissatisfied with her stance on causes and situations important to them.89 At her accession, many of her godly subjects had seen in their queen the promise of a new King David who might lead England in the establishment of true religion on earth. Elizabeth’s clemency was praised in contrast to Mary’s severity, but Elizabeth’s mercy also contributed to her image as a heroine of international Protestantism. In her analysis of the 1569 Christian PrayersandMeditationsattributedtoQueenElizabeth,LindaShenk comments that the prayers composed in French present Elizabeth as a refuge and protector of French Protestants. The queen’s compassion for the suffering of persecuted Christians is emphasized; the

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French prayers “connect Elizabeth’s tranquil, divinely endorsed govv ernance with her ability to exercise and extend her compassionate rule to other nations.” Elizabeth prays to God for true compassion and the grace to be a true nurse of the people.90 However, this image of the compassionate queen became tarnished when Elizabeth proved much less zealous in protecting and promoting Protestants than many had hoped. In fact, her compassion became a cause for complaint rather than celebration. During the late 1560s, 70s, and 80s, a number of admonitions were aimed at Elizabeth that focused on her reluctance to punish appropriately those who threaten the true church. Domestically the queen was much more frequently subjected to criticism for her leniency and demands for greater rigor than she was to claims that her policies were too harsh. Particular events and struggles that were important to fervent Protestants precipitated the loudest calls for rigor: the Northern uprising, the situation in Ireland, and the demand for church reform that was particularly strong in the early decades of her reign. Ironically, many of the same subjects who initially praised Queen Elizabeth for her mildness soon turned to chastising her for her clemency. TheoriginaleditionofJohnFoxe’sActesandMonuments(1563)provides a good example of early acclaim for the merciful new queen. Foxe praises Elizabeth’s clemency and its result: relief from the persecution that occurred under Mary. In his dedication to Elizabeth in the 1563 book, Foxe compares her to the Emperor Constantine, who accepted Christianity and stopped the persecution of Christians: “At length the Lord sent this mild Constantinus, to cease bloud, to staye persecution, to refreshe his people.” Foxe emphasizes not only God’s “pitifull grace” that rescues his persecuted people, but also the pity and mildness of the ruler who is God’s means of rescue; like Constantine, Elizabeth is praised for her mercy: “What mekenesse and clemencie was in that noble and great Emperour, which is and hathe not beene greater in you?”91 But by the time of the next editionoftheActesandMonuments,Foxe’spointofviewhaschanged.He still dedicates the 1570 book to Elizabeth, but now the comparison to Constantine is gone, as is the praise of the queen for meekness and clemency in her treatment of her people. The new dedication suggests instead that she has a responsibility to punish sin. “God’s greate mercies and judgements in preserving his Church” are now detailed by Foxe not solely in terms of bringing peace and rescuing the persecuted. Now Foxe lists a number of other manifestations of God’s mercies, including “Idolatry punished, blasphemy plagued,

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contempt of Gods holy name and Religion revenged, murder with murder rewarded, Adulterers and wedlocke breakers destroyed, perjuries, extortions, covetous oppressions, and fraudulent counsels come to naught, with other excellent workes of the Lord.”92 Like many of Elizabeth’s more fervently Protestant subjects, by the end of the 1560s, Foxe apparently believed that the queen needed, not praise for her clemency, but exhortations to punish.93 Criticism of the queen for her leniency is an essential part of the era’s most sensational sermon: Edward Dering’s 1569/70 drubbing of the queen for her failure to support radical Protestant reforms.94 Sometimes called the “Unruly Heifer” sermon because of an unflattering comparison of the queen to Jeremiah’s “untamed and unruly heifer,” this sermon proved hugely popular in print.95 Dering’s text (Psalms 78:70) is about God’s elevation of David, and David’s consequent duty to feed the people of Jacob. The sermon’s opening reiterates the theme of God’s great mercies shown to David, to Israel, and to the Queen. Dering explains how mercy displayed by the powerful serves to bind inferiors: Nothing maketh so trusty the bondservant, as to remember he hath a gentle Maister. Nothing maketh the subject more faithful unto his Prince, then to feele by good experience his Princes clemency.96

Like Seneca and other classical authorities, Dering advocates clemency not only as a spiritual ideal but also as a profitable practice, since masters and princes can win their inferiors’ loyalty by treating them gently and mercifully. But Dering’s sermon follows a diff ferent course from the one this passage leads us to expect. Having praised the practice of clemency and reminded Elizabeth of God’s mercy to her, Dering might logically conclude that the queen should show mercy to her subjects in imitation of God. After all, this is exactly Portia’s argument in her famous “quality of mercy” speech in MerchantofVenicewhensheremindsShylockthatourexpectationof God’s mercy teaches us that we, too, should be merciful. Similarly, Isabel in Measure for Measure says to Angelo: “How would you be / If He, which is the top of judgment, should / But judge you as you are? Oh, think on that, / And mercy then will breathe within your lips” (II.ii.75–78). But Dering is not advocating mercy; rather, he is reprimanding the queen for leniency. His message is that, because God has shown mercy to Elizabeth, in return she must forcefully defend her people against false religion. His sermon explicitly criticizes the

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queen for being too mild when confronting sin. He tells her that worldly peace is not enough and lectures her about a prince’s duty to chastise and punish. “The true Israelite . . . commeth with violence to clayme the kyngdome of heaven,” he proclaims, and later warns, “Let not the Princesse deceave her selfe, the spirite of God doeth not possesse her hart, if she heare dayly lyinge and blasphemous swearing, and see the peoples ignoraunce, and yet leave all unpunished.”97 The intense fear of Catholic threats to the Protestant Church of England is one reason why some of her subjects chastised their queen for leaving “all unpunished.” Anxieties about the succession, about Spain and foreign policy, about Ireland, about Mary Stuart: all of these have the Catholic-Protestant conflict at heart. But doubts about a woman’s ability to rule also resulted in a readiness to perceive Elizabeth as foolishly lenient, even in situations where in reality she showed very little mercy. The Northern Rebellion provides a striking example of the way public perception of the queen’s clemency far exceeded reality. Elizabeth was surprisingly harsh with the Northern Catholic rebels, demanding executions despite pleas from local officials and those in her service. K. J. Kesselring, in the first book-length study of this rebellion, demonstrates that on a number of occasions, Elizabeth was asked either to refrain from taking action, or even to pardon outright the rebels. Repeatedly the Queen refused. In a letter to Elizabeth dated November 15, 1569, the Earl of Sussex, her lieutenant in the North, suggests that she pardon the earls and their followers and call the earls to court as a way of dismantling the rebellion. According to Kesselring, Sussex “urged the pragmatic use of mercy as a tool of statecraft,” arguing that “all the wisest Protestants” agree: “You should offer mercy before you try the sword.”98 The letter Elizabeth wrote in response reveals not a tender and clement heart, but rather a harsh and unforgiving stance toward the rebels. She begins by addressing Sussex’s concern that the troops under his command may be seduced by the rebellion and prove faithless. Elizabeth suggests that Sussex should do his best to intercept anyone trying to spread mutiny among the troops and speedily execute “two or three of them, to make an Example of Terror to others of their Nature and Qualitie.” Having shown herself an advocate, in this case, of terror rather than clemency, Elizabeth goes on to reject Sussex’s proposed pardon, though she understands well its potential benefit, as she debates “on the one Syde, what may be hoped for, by granting Pardon unto the Earles and theyr Partakers; and on the other, what may be

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doubted of by hazarding of Battayle against desperat Men.”99 She emphasizes her own history of clemency, and just as she did in her response to the crisis over Mary Stuart and her later proclamation on the suppression of the rebellion, Elizabeth makes much of her own merciful nature: And truly as we have byn allwayes of our awne Nature inclined to Mercie, and have shewed and contynued the same from the fyrst Begyning of our Reigne; (Peradventure in farther Degree then might well stande with the Suretie of our Estate and Person:) Yet in a Matter that toucheth us so nere, we can in no wyse fynd it convenient to grant Pardon or other shewe of Favor unto those, that doo not humblie and earnestly sue for the same; yea, and though they sholde so sue for it, yet we doubt not but you can consider, that it standeth not with our Honor, to pardon the Earles and theyr principall Adherents withowt farther Deliberation by us.100

This passage illuminates not just Elizabeth’s insistence that her own nature is merciful, an insistence that I argue is motivated by her culture’s abhorrence of the “unnatural” cruel woman. These lines also suggest the depth of the queen’s reluctance to pardon, in this case. She has heard and she understands the practical benefit of offering a pardon. Issuing a pardon early in a rebellion to all those who will put down their arms is a time-honored way of stopping an uprising; as Kesselring notes, the offer of clemency was used by Elizabeth’s predecessors, Mary I and Henry VIII, to good effect in dousing the flames of rebellion. But even the prospect of avoiding the hazard of open conflict with “desperate men” does not sway her. She feels that her own honor is at stake, and even after hinting that a show of humility on the part of the Earls might convince her, she seems to retract that idea, saying that even if they sue for her pardon, she would have to deliberate more before she could agree. The rebels finally took action on November 29 and took the town of Hartlepool, and then later Barnard Castle. But when the bulk of the southern army arrived in mid-December, the rebellion quickly collapsed. Kesselring observes that in the weeks following the collapse of the rebellion in England, Elizabeth’s agents exacted harsh retribution, far more deadly than that after the Pilgrimage of Grace or most other past English rebellions. . . . Certainly, lenience was lacking in the early weeks of 1570. Unlike previous rebels, the 1569 rebels had surrendered on the field

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without negotiations for mercy. The only pardon in effect was that given on November 19, which had offered a few days grace to those who would abandon their protest and return to their homes. Anyone who had persisted in rebellion past November 22 faced the full danger of the laws and the crown’s determination to provide plentiful examples of the dangers of dissent.101

Sir George Bowes, the provost marshall, went from town to town during the month of January staging executions and eventually, according to his own estimate, he put to death around 600, a huge number when one considers that there were probably only 6,000 rebels in arms. Kesselring makes it clear that all this bloodshed was at Elizabeth’s behest; according to her account, Sussex at one point in January urged Bowes to speed up the pace of killing since the queen was becoming impatient. Bowes asked Sussex to persuade the queen to offer a pardon, but she held back for a while more, until finally on February 18 she decided to proclaim a pardon for the humbler sort.102 The truly remarkable aspect of this story is that, despite her unforgiving and harsh response to the Northern Rebellion, the queen was accused of foolish clemency by some. Dering’s “Unruly Heifer” sermon dates from this period, as does a sermon by Thomas Drant, who preached before the queen in January 1569/70—at the very time the mass executions were taking place—and lectured her on the need for severity. Drant refers explicitly to the “Northern rebels,” asserting that gentle correction will not suffice: “Correct a wise man with a nodde, & a foole with a clobbe. If these Northern rebels had had any sober witte in their head, by this time so many noddes, and so many nots, would have stayed them.” Drant implies that the “nods and nots” have been the queen’s policy and have failed. Harsh punishment is needed: “It must be a clobbe, or it must be an hatchet, or it must be an halter.”103 According to Drant, Queen Elizabeth has been far too lenient: David destroyed all Gods enemies: her Majestie hath destroyed none of Gods enemies. David did it in the morning of his kingdome: it is now farreforth dayes since her Majestie began to raigne, and yet it is undone.104

Despite the queen’s quick and lethal response to the uprising, Drant still accuses her of negligence; he implies, not surprisingly, that womanish tenderness is to blame. Interestingly, Drant also suggests that the queen’s vanity is at fault. He accuses her of listening to those who

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“tel the Prince commonly, that shee hath a goodly amiable name for mildnesse, and that now to draw the sword in this sort, were the losse of that commendation.”105 This sermon provides further evidence that Elizabeth cherished her “name for mildnesse” despite objections from some that she was too mild; the sermon also suggests that the tendency to characterize women as weak and irrational could lead to serious misperceptions of the queen, opening her to charges of indulgence even when she was in reality quite severe. Perception is everything, as Elizabeth well knew: she might punish harshly and be accused of foolish leniency, or mercifully forgive and be accused of cruel tyranny. The actions and words of all public figures are subject to constant interpretation by the community, of course, but I would argue that when the monarch is female, assumptions about women play a large role in shaping the monarch’s image. In the case of a response such as Drant’s to the Northern Rebellion, it seems that assumptions about feminine tenderness (and perhaps vanity as well) skew his understanding of events. Thus Elizabeth’s reputation—for mercy or cruelty—might bear little relationship to the realities of her reign, and depending on the audience, she might be interpreted as either harsh or lax. But extremes often prevailed. Catholics from within and without England were ready to affix the “Jezebel” label to Elizabeth, describing her as cruel and merciless in her policies, prompting defenses of Elizabeth and perhaps strengthening the queen’s determination to be represented as merciful.106 Since, as we have seen, the powerful and cruel woman—the female tyrant or Jezebel—was such a fraught image during this time, it is unsurprising that Elizabeth displayed particular sensitivity about accusations of tyranny. When news of Mary Stuart’s execution reached Scotland, an outpouring of anger repeatedly characterized Elizabeth as a Jezebel. On the day of Mary’s funeral, a poem “Concerning the Parricides of the Jezebel of England” was posted on the cathedral door; it was followed by fifty or more poems of this sort published across Europe for the next two years. Described by James E. Phillips as the de Jezebelis poems, these works attempted to arouse Catholic Europe against England. Their central theme is “the charge that Elizabeth, in executing Mary, revealed herself as an English Jezebel.” The poems included attacks on Elizabeth’s ancestry and sexual morality, and focused on Elizabeth’s personal responsibility for Mary’s death and her “motiveless and malicious cruelty

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toward the Scottish Queen.”107 Elizabeth anticipated such libels as she tried to decide her course of action in 1586. Her speech before Parliament in November of that year as she responded to their petition urging Mary’s execution sounds as though it could be a direct response to the accusation of “Jezebeldom.” Elizabeth predicts that she will be labeled a tyrant if the Scottish Queen is executed. She responds to those “good fellows abroad” who have published books and pamphlets against her and her government, “giving me for an t that from which always my alms (I thank them for it) to be a tyrant, nature above all things hath most abhorred” (emphases mine).108 The language of this statement recalls the Geneva Bible gloss on Jezebel, which exhorts us to “abhor” the tyranny of those whose “natures” should incline them to mercy. Tellingly, Elizabeth vehemently protests the accusation not simply of tyranny, but more specifically the accusation that she has a tyrannical nature. She emphasizes her tendency toward mercy rather than cruelty: “But to clear myself of that fault [tyranny], this I may justly say: I have pardoned many traitors and rebels, and besides I well remember half a score treasons which have been either covered or slightly examined or let slip and passed over, so that mine actions have not been such as should procure me the name of tyrant.”109 Mercy and tenderness, then, are the qualities in Elizabeth’s nature that would cause her to abhor tyranny above all things. Indeed, since the criticism Elizabeth most often received from her own councilors was that she was too merciful, it seems especially ironic that she reveals such a fear of being labeled a tyrant in this speech to her Parliament; most of them, after all, were frustrated by her resistance to the idea of executing Mary. This is a speech made in answer to a petition that she allow the execution, but rather than defending her reluctance to permit it, she spends more time defending herself from the charges of tyranny that she anticipates should she permit it. Elizabeth’s cherished reputation for mercy was obviously threatened by the crisis. She conveyed her awareness that monarchy is theater in her assertion that “we princes . . . are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world.” That she made this famous statement in the context of the crisis over Mary suggests her own sense of vulnerability as she renders a difficult judgment while the whole world watches the performance.110 As A. N. McLaren explains, even after Elizabeth accepted the necessity of Mary’s death, she hoped for a private solution in opposition to her councilors, who insisted that Mary’s trial

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and execution should be public.111 Her sensitivity about how her performance might be interpreted is evident in a later speech, made at a time when Parliament was poised for Mary’s execution: If any there live so wicked of nature to suppose that I prolonged this time only pro forma, to the intent to make a show of clemency, thereby to set my praises to the wire-drawers to lengthen them the more: they do me so great a wrong as they can hardly recompense.112

In another version of this speech, Elizabeth suggests that some will think she prolonged her decision in order to seek “the more to be commended for clemency and gentleness of nature” and that her delay “proceeded from a vainglorious mind.”113 Both versions of the speech reveal her fear that her reluctance to execute Mary will be interpreted as theatrical instead of genuine; she is aware of criticisms such as Thomas Drant’s that interpret her leniency as a product of her vanity, her desire to be commended for gentleness and clemency. Whether Elizabeth’s reluctance to prosecute Mary was genuine or indeed theatrical, we do not know; certainly she attempted to distance herself from Mary’s fate for obvious reasons, including the way her reputation might suffer.114 Her sense of vulnerability emerges when she talks about how “narrowly” her “actions are like to be sifted and finely scanned by some good fellows abroad,” and her fear of being accused of unnatural cruelty is reflected in the passage, discussed above, when she protests against the pamphlets and books that have characterized her as a tyrant.115 Elizabeth’s desire to stress her natural clemency and deny accusations of tyranny reverberates through this speech, as does her concern about how such accusations will reflect on her as a woman. She goes on to give a lengthy justification of her rule in which she carefully identifies herself as a just Christian monarch, the opposite of a tyrant. 116 Elizabeth explains that she has dedicated herself from the beginning to true religion and desired from God that he grant her the wisdom to rule rightly, saying, “I have had always care to do as Augustus Caesar, who being moved to offense, before he attempted anything was willed to say over the alphabet.”117 Janel Mueller has noted that in this speech, Elizabeth claims three of Plato’s four political virtues—justice, temperance, and wisdom— when she says, “I sought to learn what things were most fit for a king to have, and I found them to be four, namely, justice, temper, magnanimity, and judgment.”118 However, she omits courage, substituting

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“magnanimity” instead. Mueller suggests that the crisis over Mary Stuart caused Elizabeth to retreat from a position implied in many of her earlier speeches: that her gender is irrelevant to her rule, that as a woman she can embody the same virtues as a king, including that of courage. Now, in her distress, she backs away from representing herself as a courageous, masculine ruler, with the potential for violence that image might imply.119 Instead, she adamantly genders herself feminine when she imagines how she will be represented in the wake of Mary’s death, expressing her grief “that by me it should be said hereafter, a maiden queen hath been the death of a prince, her kinswoman.”120 The case of Mary, Queen of Scots, produced not only accusations of tyranny after Mary’s death, but also the most direct attacks on Elizabeth’s mercy seen during her reign. The queen’s reluctance to allow Mary’s trial and later her execution resulted in impassioned rhetoric along the lines of Job Throckmorton’s speech during the 1586 Parliament, in which he recalled Elizabeth’s 1572 veto of a Parliamentary bill against the Queen of Scots: Oh! but mercy, you will say, is a commendable thing and well beseeming the seat of a Prince. Very true, indeed: but how long? Till it bring justice in contempt, and the state of the Church and Commonwealth in danger? . . . And what got her Majesty, I pray you, by this her lenity? Even as much as commonly one shall get by saving a thief from the gallows: a heap of treasons and conspiracies. . . . It is now high time for her Majesty, I trow, to beware of lenitives and to fall to corrosives.121

Mercy’s meaning is contested here, as it so often is in the rhetoric of the period. No one wants to be guilty of disparaging the Christian virtue of mercy, so even as he lambasts Queen Elizabeth’s leniency, Throckmorton has to acknowledge that mercy is “commendable” and especially appropriate to a prince. These conflicting representations of Elizabeth’s mercy—her own insistence on her natural disposition toward clemency and her apparent belief that merciful behavior would secure her throne versus the various public representations of her mercy as foolish and dangerous—can be fruitfully understood in the context of the emerging public sphere in Elizabethan England. The queen was obviously concerned about public perception of and reaction to her decisions. But speeches, published tracts, and sermons urging severity and chastising Elizabeth for “womanish pity” might also be seen

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as attempts to shape public opinion. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus have argued that we can see the emergence of a public sphere during Elizabeth’s reign. Building on Jurgen Habermas’s theory of the four phases of the public sphere—the ancient, the medieval, the bourgeois, and the degraded or transformed—Lake and Pincus alter that chronology to introduce what they call “a post-Reformation period and mode of political manoeuvre and public politics.”122 They argue that Elizabeth’s reign was the formative period for this mode, and they discuss attempts from within and without Elizabeth’s regime to mobilize various publics in order “to induce the Queen to take actions that she did not wish to do, or to prevent her from doing things that she wanted to do.” 123 This study adds a more pointed consideration of the role played by the monarch’s gender in the development of public spheres during Elizabeth’s reign. Not only was there increased emphasis on counsel and the obligations of godly citizens of the commonwealth, a notion that is linked to the queen’s gender, since she was thought to need special guidance from godly men because she was a woman. We should also take notice of the way Elizabeth’s gender is used to shape public response to her judgment. For example, when members of Elizabeth’s Privy Council and their agents sought to turn public opinion against Mary Stuart and pressure the queen to execute her, they called upon gendered notions of the queen’s excessive mercy to criticize her forbearance. In an anonymous pamphlet published in 1571,, Salutem in Christo, the author outlines Mary’s responsibility for the Northern Rebellion and describes a conspiracy in which Mary would be freed from prison and proclaimed Queen of England and Scotland, with the aid of Spain. While he never directly blames Elizabeth for the danger of Mary’s continuing presence, he does remark that the Queen is “voyd of a revenginge nature (as in all Ages hath so appeared that some sorte of wyse men have noated it a faulte for a Prince).”124 The same quality—absence of vengefulness—that Aylmer invoked as a sign of both Elizabeth’s perfect feminine virtue and her fitness to rule is deployed in order to suggest her mishandling of Mary’s case. Peter Lake identifies this and other pamphlets written about Mary as emanating from councilors who worked through surrogates to try and shape public opinion; it was “a whispering campaign designed to tar both Norfolk and Mary with the brush of foreign conspiracy and treason and to force the queen’s hand.”125 The queen’s “nature,” with implications of her femininity, is cited and criticized as one way of manipulating public opinion.126

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Literary representations of mercy, and particularly Elizabeth’s mercy, participate in constructing and debating the image of the merciful queen. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser is deeply concerned with questions of mercy, equity, justice, and judgment. Chapter Two is a study of the ambivalent representations of mercy in The Faerie Queene. Throughout the poem, Spenser reveres Elizabeth’s mercy as an aspect of her royal image even as he criticizes mercy as a policy. Other kinds of literary representation provide different points of view on a queen’s mercy. The third chapter of this book examines the idea of mercy in Elizabethan love poetry, arguing that the lover’s typical pleas for the lady’s pity take on political dimensions in poetry written with Queen Elizabeth in mind as a potential reader. Though the poet-lover typically pleads for the lady’s mercy, sonnet sequences by Sidney, Daniel, and Spenser also warn against mercy and indicate its dangerous consequences. Chapter Four is an extended reading of Merchant of Venice that focuses on questions of religion and their effect on tensions surrounding Queen Elizabeth’s mercy, and the idea of mercy as performance that Shakespeare also addresses in Henry V. Merchant t contains, in the figure of Portia, Shakespeare’s most complex representation of Elizabeth, and the play engages the paradoxical demands upon the queen for mercy and rigor. Chapter Five examines Measure for Measure, arguing that the play responds to the transition between Elizabeth and James with particular focus on the expected differences between them in matters of justice and judgment.MeasureforMeasureraisesquestionsabouttheefficacyof mercy, as well as the role of publicity and public discourse in a sovv ereign’s execution of justice. The final chapter focuses on posthumous representations of Elizabeth’s mercy: Heywood’s If You Know NotMeYouKnowNobodyand y Dekker’sWhoreofBabylon.Inboth plays, the queen’s vulnerable feminine tenderness is restrained by male counsel. Protestant playwrights in the years immediately following Elizabeth’s reign recuperate her “womanish pity” as a virtue: her mercy contributes to her status as Protestant icon, and any risk posed by her excessive clemency is neutralized by the interventions of the godly men who surround her.

CHAPTER 2

“THE SAC A RED PLEDGE OF PEAC A E AND CLEMENCIE”: ELIZABETHAN MERC R Y IN The Faerie Queene

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ercy and its close kin, pity, make numerous appearances in The Faerie Queene: many a fallen knight or distressed lady pleads for mercy in the course of the story; virtuous characters frequently feel compassion for others, and the narrator sometimes describes his own intense feelings of pity as he observes the plight of victimized women. The virtue of mercy is personified in two allegorical figures: Mercy in Book I’s House of Holiness and Mercilla in Book V. Like most qualities explored in The Faerie Queene, mercy and pity are complex and nuanced, making Spenser’s treatment of them at times seem contradictory: he shows both the efficacy and the danger of human acts of mercy; he characterizes pity as both a sign of nobility and a fatal weakness. As always in The Faerie Queene, context is important. Mercy means one thing in the context of holiness and something different in the context of justice. But throughoutThe Faerie Queene, Spenser’s exploration of earthly mercy reflects many of the issues discussed in Chapter One: the concern that mercy renders the giver vulnerable, and the anxiety that a queen’s mercy, though the hallmark of a Christian monarch, might be an expression of effeminate weakness; the Protestant demand for more rigor, especially in matters of religion; the desire to praise mercy as a Christian virtue and avoid offending a queen who cherishes her reputation for clemency; and finally, the tension over whether a corporate masculine entity or the person of the female sovereign should be empowered to pardon or to punish. These and other questions about mercy complicate their representation in the poem, and though generalizations about mercy in The Faerie Queene should be offered with caution, it does seem that human mercy and pity are rarely if ever wholly positive; even depictions of the most praiseworthy compassion are often

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juxtaposed with moments in which pity is manipulated, abused, and dangerous. InEpicRomance:HomertoMilton, n ColinBurrowanalyzessympathy in the epic tradition, offering an extended critical consideration of pity in The Faerie Queene. In his chapter on Spenser, he examines several instances in the poem where the impulse to pity is resisted, emphasizing the way Spenser adopts and revises epic tradition in order to circumscribe sympathy but also affirm a vision of life. Thus, Guyon may reject his pitiful instincts and destroy the Bower of Bliss, but Spenser counters that destructive impulse by providing visionary moments such as the Garden of Adonis. Burrow’s discussion of The Faerie Queene is most valuable in its analysis of Spenser’s treatment of his sources: Ovid, Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso. Elizabethan political culture is not his main concern, though he fruitfully explores the connection between pity and tyranny. Despite the importance of acknowledging this connection, I am not convinced that, as Burrow suggests, Spenser’s main objection to monarchical clemency derives from a fear that a charismatic and clement monarch exacts a kind of servitude from her subjects—that queenly bounty, including clemency, might be an aspect of tyranny. Spenser’s objection to Elizabeth’s clemency has more to do with the political and religious results of what his culture was inclined to regard as feminine weakk ness. Burrow alludes briefly to the specific political context in which Spenser wrote; he reads Spenser’s rejection of both pity and rigid virginity as a response to Elizabeth’s mode of supremacy, though his analysis of the queen’s authority is strangely contradictory: within a single paragraph, he refers to her expressions of pity as both strategically deployed and willfully random.1 While he asserts that Spenser resists Elizabeth’s image as a clement queen, Burrow does not consider her gender as a factor in the production of her image or in the way Spenser and other writers represent her clemency. To his valuable analysis of pity in The Faerie Queene should be added a consideration of gender as well as religion; further, as I will try to demonstrate, the context of each book of The Faerie Queene must be considered, for each new context alters Spenser’s portrayal of mercy in telling ways. Book I, the Legend of Holiness, presents the most straightforward account of mercy and pity found in The Faerie Queene. The relatively simple depiction of mercy in this book makes sense given the book’s central virtue; in Book I, mercy is a crucial requirement for the Red Cross Knight’s salvation. After the knight has experienced true repentance, Una brings him to Charissa—Charity—a maternal

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figure who nurses and cares for “a multitude of babes” (I.x.31.1).2 Mercy is closely associated with Charity; she is summoned by Charissa to help the Red Cross Knight. Like Charissa, Mercy is associated with childbirth and the care of children. Hamilton notes that her title of “Matrone” specifically suggests one who has knowledge of childbirth, and her attitude toward the knight is overtly maternal: she leads him by the hand and “held him fast, and firmely did vpbeare, / As carefull Nourse her child from falling oft does reare” (I.x.35.8–9). Though the gender of allegorical figures is not necessarily meaningful, in the case of Charissa and Mercy, Spenser emphasizes their femininity by placing them in the traditional woman’s roles of mother and nurse, suggesting the long-standing connection between women and mercy discussed in Chapter One. Mercy here is an aspect of man’s salvation and presented in a positive light; while in that sense this is a straightforward passage, it is nonetheless controversial because of the apparently anti-Calvinist dogma at work here. Does the figure “Mercy” represent God’s mercy or human mercy? The maternal figure Mercy leads the Red Cross Knight to the seven beadsmen, who represent the corporal acts of mercy featured in Roman Catholic doctrine; their presence in the House of Holiness certainly seems to suggest the efficacy of works in man’s salvation.3 Thus even in a strictly religious context, in an allegory of salvation, mercy inspires controversy. Even if Spenser is claiming that human acts of mercy aid in man’s salvation, the ultimate source of that mercy in the House of Holiness is divine. Mercy the nurse, who seems to represent divine mercy, as well as human acts of mercy in the House of Holiness are all virtuous and necessary components of salvation. The only other character in The Faerie Queene who directly represents mercy is Book V’s Mercilla, the queen of mercy. But in Book V, mercy is presented in the context of Justice rather than Holiness, so “mercy” does not mean God’s mercy to humanity, but rather human expressions of mercy in the context of the pursuit of justice in human society. Though monarchical mercy was traditionally regarded as a reflection of the monarch’s position as God’s earthly representative, the difference between Spenser’s characterizations of Mercy in the House of Holiness and Mercilla in the Legend of Justice highlights the divine nature of the former and the problematic nature of the latter. Even in the Legend of Holiness, when Spenser portrays acts of mercy outside of the House of Holiness that are clearly human rather than divine, they are complicated and ambiguous in a way that heavenly mercy is not.

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Book I initially seems to commend human acts of mercy and feelings of pity; virtuous characters show compassion and evil ones are merciless. Thus Sans Loy, an evil “Saracen,” rejects Una’s pleas for mercy after he unseats the knight he thinks is Red Cross, nor does his “stony hart” heed her “piteous plaints” as he seizes her and carries her away (I.iii.44. 2–3). By contrast, when the heroic Arthur meets the desolate lady, he listens sympathetically to her story and puts himself at her service. The satyrs’ pity for Una suggests that such compassion might be natural: when they come upon her in the forest, They in compassion of her tender youth, And wonder of her beautie souerayne Are wonne with pitty and vnwonted ruth. (I.vi.12.5–7)

Their “ruth” is “unwonted,” that is, unaccustomed. They have not been taught to react compassionately but do so spontaneously. 4 However, the satyrs’ response, laudable on the surface, raises questions, since their compassion for Una leads to idolatry: the line that follows the report of their “unwonted ruth” describes how they prostrate themselves to Una and “kisse her feete”; later we are told that the satyrs “made her th’Image of Idolatryes” (I.vi.12.9 and 19.7). The episode has been interpreted in a number of different ways, though always there is the general sense that the satyrs reflect some natural human inclination toward God even if one has not been taught what Spenser and his audience would regard as religious truth. Early critical commentary onThe Faerie Queene often identified the satyrs with various non-Christian groups (those encountering Christianity for the first time, or Jews, or believers in folklore or myth). 5 More recent readings usually locate the “salvage nation” closer to home: the satyrs might represent the Irish or the uneducated English masses whose understanding of reformed religion was, according to some views, still imperfect.6 But one might also understand the satyrs more traditionally as emblematic of the passions. This interpretation of the satyrs seems at first glance to be irrelevant to the episode: as Todd Butler comments, their adoration of Una is surprisingly chaste, given that the Elizabethans usually associated satyrs with lust.7 Yet, though these satyrs do not display the traditional sexual passion that their counterparts in Book III do, they are still identified with a kind of passion: the emotion of pity moves them, or more specifically their compassion, the ability to experience another person’s emotion. Is this emotional empathy good or bad? The satyrs’ emotional reaction

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to Una is both praiseworthy and dangerous: critics often assume that their compassion is part of the “natural” inclination toward goodness and God, which Spenser seems to be representing here. But the satyrs’ pity for Una does not ultimately lead them toward God but toward idolatry; their tendency to experience compassion is part of a larger portrayal of the satyrs as simple, ignorant beings. Thus, compassion for feminine suffering may be a sign of virtue, but Spenser also hints that such emotional responses are characteristic of the lower orders, who, by the same token, tend to worship idolatrously rather than properly. Book I also shows how compassion can be manipulated so as to allow evil—specifically the evil of false religion—to thrive. In a recent essay, Jennifer Rust has read the story of Una and the satyrs as both criticizing the retrograde idolizing tendencies of the “salvage,” as well as shadowing the way Elizabethan political culture has grafted the old Mariology onto reverence for the queen. Rust also suggests that Una’s vulnerability to “idolatrous framing” bespeaks the poem’s larger unease with the image of feminine authority, and feminine images in general, which so often in Spenser turn out to be “false shows.”8 InThe Faerie Queene, the image of the victimized woman is often revealed to be one of the false feminine images that Rust mentions; Spenser several times shows that the pity inspired by distressed women can endanger the man who feels it. The narrator of Book I voices his own intense pity for Una’s plight in what is the first of several such passages in The Faerie Queene that express his emotional response to women’s suffering: Nought is there vnder heau’ns wide hollownesse, That moues more deare compassion of mind, Then beautie brought t’vnworthie wretchednesse Through enuies snares or fortunes freakes vnkind. I, whether lately through her brightnesse blynd, Or through alleageance and fast fealty, Which I do owe vnto all womankynd, Feele my hart perst with so great agony, When such I see, that all for pitty I could dy. (I.iii.1)

Several aspects of this opening to canto iii are noteworthy. For one, the narrator, in sharing the distress of Una, truly exemplifies the meaning of compassion, the empathic experience of others’ emotions: what Montaigne refers to as “co-suffering.”9 The speaker’s pity

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pierces his heart with such agony that he feels he could die; the emotion described is so acute that the narrator seems in greater danger than is Una. The threat of death-by-pity is raised again in Book II, where Guyon’s great compassion for Amavia indicates a tendency to emotional extremism that must eventually be corrected. At this point in Book I, we can only wonder how to understand the narrator’s heart-piercing agony: Is such compassion desirable or excessively emotional? Another noteworthy aspect of this passage is the narrator’s emphasis on gender: not just any human suffering, but the suffering of feminine beauty elicits this intense pity, and he speculates that his reaction emerges from his debt to womankind, which suggests that masculine suffering would not elicit the same pity. Again, compassion is associated with women, though now women inspire this emotional response in others rather than feeling it themselves. Further, the narrator’s rhetoric of “fast fealty” to womankind suggests the code of chivalry, so perhaps one function of his protestation of pity is to elevate him socially: like a chivalric, questing knight, the narrator has sworn fealty to ladies, the weak, and the innocent. Kathleen Williams suggests that, in these passages, the narrator is reflecting the likely response of the simplest reader.10 If this passage is meant to reflect an unsophisticated, even natural response to human suff fering, then the narrator shares that natural impulse with the satyrs. Perhaps the connection is intended, because his lament for Una is followed directly by a similar incident, the story of the savage lion’s compassionate response to her “wronged innocence.” Thus narrative pity for Una may characterize the speaker as “gentle,” or it may characterize the emotion of pity itself as not only natural but also unsophisticated, or even ignorant. The question of pity’s relationship to social standing has been raised though not answered; it is a question to which Spenser will return in Book VI. Though the narrative response of pity for Una may elevate the narrator or valorize pity itself, the passage when read in the context of the previous canto also contains a submerged warning about pity. For when the narrator expresses chivalric compassion for a distressed lady, he echoes the emotions that the Red Cross Knight has just experienced in canto ii. After Sans Foy is killed, his companion, Duessa, flees; when Red Cross catches her, she cries “Mercy mercy Sir vouchsafe to show / On silly Dame, subiect to hard mischaunce” (I.ii.21.2–3). In terms similar to those used to express the narrator’s feelings for the desolate Una, the Red Cross Knight responds to the

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apparently desolate Duessa and her plea for mercy: her plight “did much emmoue his stout heroicke heart,” just as the narrator depicts himself as “moved” by compassion when he regards Una (I.ii.21.6). Duessa’s pitiful lament is of course theatrical rather than genuine. She plays the part of the desolate dame to perfection, “melting in tears” as she tells Red Cross about her abduction by Sans Foy: In this sad plight, friendlesse, vnfortunate, Now miserable I Fidessa dwell, Crauing of you in pitty of my state, To doe none ill, if please ye not doe well. (I.ii.26.1–4)

Red Cross responds to “Fidessa” just as the narrator responds to Una: “He in great passion al this while did dwell,” just as the narrator describes how his heart is “empassioned so deepe” for pity of Una (I.ii.26.5 and I.iii.2.1). Red Cross’s response to Duessa/Fidessa introduces a theme that runs through the entire poem: the emotion of pity can render one vulnerable, and pity can be manipulated and misdirected. The knight’s allegiance to Duessa wreaks his utter downfall, and it begins with her plea for mercy, to which he responds as chivalric knights are supposed to respond: he feels compassion, attraction, and a sense of duty toward her. The narrator’s response to Una, whose plight is real and who deserves the pity he feels for her, nonetheless must be read in the context of this parallel moment when Red Cross, through a similarly passionate pity, falls under the spell of a witch. Spenser structures the Legend of Holiness around the parallel figures of Una and Duessa in part to show the difficulty of distinguishing good from evil, so perhaps the parallel responses of the knight and the narrator could be seen as simply part of the book’s overall pattern. Specifically, these two female figures represent false religion (Duessa, the daughter of the West, Rome) and right religion (Una, the one truth). The two pitying responses we see, one based on a false show and one based on real distress, suggest how the claims of false religion can engage people’s hearts and emotions. When we read Duessa as figuring Mary Stuart, Roman Catholic competitor for Elizabeth’s throne, the pity men feel for Duessa takes on historical resonance. Guyon almost makes the same mistake of pitying Duessa in Book II, and in Book V that pity almost deflects punishment from this avatar of Mary, Queen of Scots. But the object of pity need not be Duessa/Mary Stuart to render pity problematic in The Faerie Queene. Throughout subsequent books, Spenser continues to

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present apparently positive depictions of mercy that he undermines through juxtaposition and irony. Spenser’sLegendofTemperanceinvestigatesthenatureandeffectsof the passions, so mercy must be understood in the context of temperance rather than holiness. Book II provides a submerged analysis of the dangers of pity and compassion using the same kind of juxtaposition that we saw in Book I, but in Book II the critique of compassion directly implicates Queen Elizabeth, though it is carefully distanced from her. For example, Guyon describes Gloriana, Elizabeth’s acknowledged avatar, in a passage that reflects Elizabeth’s image as a clement queen. This passage is one of the most elaborate depictions of the eponymous Fairy Queen, and it emphasizes her mercy. When Guyon is asked by Medina to explain his quest, the Knight of Temperance praises Gloriana in these terms: Great and most glorious virgin Queene aliue, That with her soueraigne powre, and scepter shene All Faery lond does peaceably sustene. In widest Ocean she her throne does reare, That ouer all the earth it may be seene; As morning Sunne her beames dispredden cleare, And in her face faire peace, and mercy doth appeare. (II.ii.40.3–9)

This stanza identifies Queen Elizabeth with Peace and Mercy, the daughters of God who defend humanity against the charges of Truth and Justice.11 Further, the description proclaims not only Elizabeth’s merciful disposition but also her reputation for mercy: Gloriana’s throne may be seen “ouer all the earth” and her fair face, reflecting peace and mercy, shines over the world like the sun. Two stanzas later, Guyon will again describe Gloriana with the announcement that her mercy is not just local but global: his queen is one whose “glory is in gracious deeds” and who “ioyes / Throughout the world her mercy to maintaine” (II.ii.43.6–7). These lines suggest that Elizabeth is a beacon for Protestants on the continent; her compassion was sometimes invoked early in her reign to suggest that she would provide a refuge for persecuted Protestants abroad.12 Despite this traditional praise of Elizabeth as a Prince of Peace and merciful Christian monarch, the action of Book II nowhere praises the efficacy of human mercy, if by mercy we mean clemency or forgiveness.13 Gloriana’s mercy is praised in the abstract, but human mercy and the pity and compassion that might inspire merciful

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behavior are identified as futile or even dangerous in Book II. Just a few stanzas before Guyon praises Gloriana’s mercy and peace, we see Medina try to bring peace to the brawling knights Huddibras and Sans Loy, who are fighting each other and then turn on Guyon as well. Spenser emphasizes Medina’s pity as she runs among them “with her tresses torne, / And naked brest, in pitty of their harmes” beseeching them in emotional terms (“by the womb, which them had born”) to cease (II.ii.27.2–5). Medina’s naked breast recalls the traditional association of women’s breasts with women’s tender emotions.14 Yet Medina’s pity and the resulting emotional appeal seem to have little effect except to incite her sisters, Elissa and Perissa, to shout her down and urge the knights to more violence. It is when Medina applies “pitthy words and counsell sad” that she finally gets results; the knights suppress their “fury mad” and “hearken to the sober speaches, which she spoke” (II.ii.28.5–9). Thus, canto ii of Book II not only offers praise of mercy and peace in the form of an encomium to Gloriana but also demonstrates peace being obtained not through an emotional display of pity but through “pitthy words” and sober speeches. Both pity and peace are satirized in an episode parallel to this one, when in canto vi Phaedria runs between two combatants, Guyon and Cymochles. Just as Medina intervened “in pitty of their harmes,” Phaedria beseeches the knights: How can Your cruell eyes endure so pitteous sight, To shed your liues on ground? (II.vi.32.5–7)

She begs them to find a place for pity in their “yron brestes” and seek peace instead of war. Of course, the peace she has in mind is the “louely peace, and gentle amity” found “in Amours”; she asserts that Mars is Cupidoes frend, And is for Venus loues renowmed more, Then all his wars and spoiles. (II.vi.35.3–9)

In this episode, pity acts to lure knights into idleness and passivity; certainly this is true for Cymochles, who remains on Phaedria’s island where he has been spending his time slumbering in an “idle dreme” (II.vi.27.2). After Guyon and Cymochles yield to Phaedria’s pleas, the narrator comments, “Such is the might / Of courteous clemency

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in gentle hart” (II.vi.36.5–6). This assertion is rendered ironic when we recall that it is Phaedria who has been urging clemency. Pity and clemency are represented here as potentially emasculating and enervating, capable of derailing the proper activity of knighthood. Though Guyon escapes the idleness that Phaedria terms “peace” in canto vi, he is vulnerable throughout Book II to the emotion of pity. Guyon’s “great pittie” for Duessa, whom he sees in her disguise as a “virgin cleene” assaulted by a lewd knight, almost leads him to attack Red Cross (II.i.10.4 and 14.3). His next encounter, with the dying Amavia, ironically underscores the Knight of Temperance’s intemperance as he allows his compassion to overpower him: Tell then O Lady tell, what fatall priefe Hath with so huge misfortune you opprest: That I may cast to compas your reliefe, Or die with you in sorrow, and partake your griefe. (II.i.48.6–9)

Like the narrator regarding Una’s plight in Book I, Guyon experiences compassion, or “co-suffering,” and as in Book I, such extreme compassion is risky: the idea that Guyon might partake of Amavia’s grief to the point of death underlines the danger of too much compassion. And when Amavia herself dies a few stanzas later, though Guyon does not die with her, he “could vneath / From teares abstayne” and “for griefe his hart did grate” (II.i.56.5–6). As A. C. Hamilton points out, Guyon is “much given to pity that leads to ‘womanish teares’” until the final canto in which he displays “rigour pittilesse.”15 Spenser highlights the irony of Guyon’s emotional response to Amavia’s plight when, in the midst of his own emotional display, Guyon blames Amavia’s suicide on her lack of temperance: “When raging passion with fierce tyranny / Robs reason of her dew regalitie” (II.i.57.4–5). Guyon’s susceptibility to the emotion of pity is obviously a motif in Book II, and will be corrected in the final canto by his “pitilesse” destruction of the Bower of Bliss. Gerald Morgan argues that Spenser is warning that “pity is no more than a passion” and must be tempered by rationality and linked to justice in order to become the virtue, mercy.16 However, it seems that Spenser makes very little if any distinction between pity and mercy in Book II, and no human act that is called merciful in Book II has any positive consequences, nor does Morgan identify any. For example, in canto v, merciful acts along with expressions of remorse and pity all work in concert to

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create chaos. Two acts of mercy—Guyon’s mercy on Pyrochles and his merciful release of Occasion and Furor at Pyrochles’ request— lead to renewed violence. When the defeated Pyrochles begs Guyon for mercy in canto v, few readers would blame Guyon when he tempers his passion and releases Pyrochles. Nevertheless, later events call for a reevaluation of Guyon’s mercy at this point in the narrative. First of all, Pyrochles shows no remorse. He blames his downfall on “fortunes doome” and as soon as he is released begins to grind his teeth “for great disdeigne” (II.v.12.8 and 14.3). Second, Guyon places no conditions upon the release of Pyrochles. He reminds Pyrochles that he owes allegiance to “him, that giues thee life and liberty,” but in fact Pyrochles will show no such allegiance to Guyon and will even try to strip him of his armor while Guyon lies in a faint in canto viii (II.v.13.6). Furthermore, the release of Pyrochles leads directly to another act of mercy, the release of Furor and Occasion, which has dire consequences. Pyrochles demands their release, eliciting a peculiar reaction from the Knight of Temperance: Thereat Sir Guyon n smylde, And is that all (Said he) that thee so sore displeased hath? Great mercy sure, for to enlarge a thrall, Whose freedom shall thee turne to greatest scath. (II.v.18.1–4)

Is Guyon’s smile ironic? The reader certainly finds it ironic that Guyon has, only moments earlier, shown the “great mercy” to release Pyrochles, an act that will soon turn to Guyon’s “greatest scath.” As he did in the first canto when he commented on Amavia’s lack of temperance, Guyon lectures on a failing that he himself displays. Harm will soon come to Guyon, and Pyrochles too will suffer as a result of what this canto clearly terms “mercy”: Furor and Occasion when released turn on Pyrochles and Guyon, and while they have no success with Guyon, Pyrochles is soon being battered and dragged through the dirt and mire by Furor. Guyon’s response to Pyrochles’s suffering is another clear instance of an emotional, pitying response that must be corrected. While Guyon is “greatly moued” by Pyrochles’s plight, the Palmer has to stop him from “yielding pitifull redresse” (II.v.24.1–4). The Palmer’s intervention makes it obvious that this passage is a warning against emotional pity: “Deare sonne, thy causelesse ruth represse, / Ne let thy stout hart melt in pitty vayne” (II.v.24.5–6). But the canto, taken in its entirety, seems to warn not just against the emotional response to another’s misfortune

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that would melt one’s heart, but also against acts of mercy that might at first glance appear to be magnanimous. Just as Elizabeth’s councilors warn that more harm than good will result from her apparently gracious acts of mercy, Spenser suggests that the mercy offered to a fallen foe can lead to more violence and suffering. Not only does Guyon suffer because he spared Pyrochles, Pyrochles also suffers. We see him attacked, beaten, and dragged through the dirt in this canto; in his next appearance at the end of canto vi, Pyrochles is literally burning (he describes himself as “most wretched man aliue” and tries to drown himself); finally, when he and Cymochles try to attack Guyon and want to despoil his “corpse” in canto viii, Arthur intervenes and ultimately kills Pyrochles. Neither Guyon nor Pyrochles in any way benefits from Guyon’s mercy in canto v. Arthur’s battle with Pyrochles in canto viii also forces us to reevaluate Guyon’s earlier act of mercy. Arthur has the “Paynim” down, just as Guyon did in canto v. Arthur too is reluctant to take Pyrochles’s life. But rather than freely releasing the knight, Arthur makes demands: Yet if thou wilt renounce thy miscreaunce, And my trew liegeman yield thy selfe for ay, Life will I graunt thee for thy valiaunce, And all thy wrongs will wipe out of my souenaunce. (II.viii.51.6–9)

Not surprisingly, Pyrochles refuses disdainfully. In a moment that foreshadows Mercilla’s condemnation of Duessa, Arthur beheads Pyrochles between the lines; there is no direct narration of the act: “His shining Helmet he gan soone vnlace, / And left his headlesse body bleeding all the place” (II.viii.52.8–9). Arthur is angry, yet also regretful: “Wroth was the Prince, and sory yet withall” (II.viii.52.5). Like Mercilla, who weeps for Duessa yet also allows her execution, Arthur does not let his sorrow prevent him from eschewing mercy and acting decisively and punitively. The final episode of Book II, in which Guyon razes the Bower of Bliss without pity, is not surprising in the context of this book’s representation not only of pity but also of mercy. Guyon’s final temptation to pity occurs as he and the Palmer are crossing the sea to Acrasia’s island and they see and hear a maiden wailing in “great sorrow and sad agony,” and calling for succor (II.xii.27.6–9). Just as we might expect the code of chivalry to approve a knight’s mercy to his defeated foe, here we might expect the code of chivalry to demand that a knight

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come to the aid of a distressed maiden. But no: the Palmer warns Guyon (again) against “foolish pitty” and we are reminded of the way that the Red Cross Knight’s chivalrous compassion for Fidessa/Duessa led to his downfall in Book I (II.xii.29.2). The Legend of Temperance represents not only heart-melting, tear-producing pity as dangerous but also warns against merciful acts that seem rational and even noble. Arthur’s beheading of the unrepentant Pyrochles and Guyon’s destruction, “with rigour pittilesse,” of Acrasia’ Bower, are apparently considered acts of temperance (II.xii.83.2). Yet these knights act in the service of Gloriana, who is persistently associated with mercy: “Far reach her mercies,” proclaims Arthur in canto ix (4.8). Book II embodies a paradox: mercy is praised and attributed to Queen Elizabeth as one of the chief glories of her reign; yet the events of Book II repeatedly characterize both pity and mercy as dangerous and even destructive, and temperance is defined as rigor rather than some golden mean between excessive clemency and harsh punishment. Book V reflects the same tension between the praise of mercy in the abstract and the rejection of mercy in the actual. Arthegall, the Knight of Justice, allows pity to disarm and ultimately enslave him, and Britomart must set things right by the use of violent punishment. Mercilla is represented as the queen of mercy, but like Britomart enacts punishment rather than forgiveness; furthermore, the portrayal of Mercilla herself positions her against a corporate masculine body and suggests that judgment is a dangerous business for a woman. Mercilla’s position, simultaneously exalted and hidden, reminds us not only of the danger of clemency but the danger inherent in any judgment made by a queen, who may, like Elizabeth, be vilified no matter what she does. Book V opens with a proem that names Arthegall as the instrument of Elizabeth’s justice, if we understand the “Dread Souerayne Goddesse” of the proem’s final stanza to be Spenser’s queen. Arthegall’s encounters with various forms of injustice in the Book’s first few cantos are easily won: with the help of Talus, the Knight of Justice rapidly doles out rigorous justice to Sanglier, Munera, and the Giant with the scales. It is only in his encounter with the Amazon Radigund that Arthegall stumbles, and his downfall is specifically attributed to the pity inspired by the sight of Radigund’s face: At sight thereof his cruell minded hart Empierced was with pittifull regard, That his sharpe sword he threw from him apart. (V.v.13.1–3)

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As he casts aside his sword and stands “with emptie hands all weaponlesse,” Arthegall is unmanned by the “ruth” that has “mollifie[d]” his hard heart and cruel hand (V.v. 14.2 and 13.5–6). The knight’s catastrophic experience of pity for a heartless—but beautiful—foe may be read as the culmination of the pattern that was established with the Red Cross Knight’s mistaken compassion for Duessa in Book I. Arthegall’s pity stands in sharp contrast to the cruelty of Radigund, which the narrative repeatedly emphasizes: she renews her “former cruelnesse” as soon as she wakes from her swoon, and her actions are described as “outrage mercilesse” as she continues to attack an adversary who refuses to fight back (V.v.14.4–7). Of course, once he becomes Radigund’s thrall, Arthegall’s emasculation, suggested by the loss of his sword, is literal: Then tooke the Amazon this noble knight, Left to her will by his own wilfull blame, And caused him to be disarmed quight, Of all the ornaments of knightly name, With which whylome he gotten had great fame, In stead whereof she made him to be dight In womans weedes, that is to manhood shame, And put before his lap a napron white, In stead of Curiets and bases fit for fight. (V.v.20)

This episode underscores the two extremes often attributed to femininity in Spenser’s age. Radigund is cruel in a way characterized as specifically feminine; it is the cruelty expected of unnatural women, who have “shaken off the shamefast band / With which wise Nature did them strongly bynd” (V.v.25.2–3). On the other hand, when Justice, that is, Arthegall, allows pity to rule, Justice/Arthegall is completely feminized: this is the “effeminate pity” that so many authors warn about. It takes a woman to straighten out this feminine perversion of justice. Britomart, often understood as an avatar of Queen Elizabeth, rides to the rescue, but her intervention is carefully presented so as to venerate her as an emblem of equity while simultaneously praising her rigor. Britomart’s mysterious encounter with the idol in Isis Church has been variously interpreted, but one aspect of this experience is quite clear: the crocodile who threatens and then seduces her in her vision is identified by Isis’s priests as her lover, Arthegall, who is “like to Osyris in all iust endeuer” (V.vii.22.5). In her dream, Britomart becomes Isis herself; her “Moon-like Mitre” changes to a “Crowne

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of gold,” like that of Isis (V.vii.13.6) and she mates with the crocodile, whom the priests identify as Osiris: “For that same Crocodile Osyris is” (V.vii.22.6). Initially, Britomart controls the crocodile by beating it back when it threatens her, which parallels the idol Isis’s suppression of the crocodile. According to the priests, Isis’s stance shows that “clemence oft in things amis, / Restraines those sterne behests, and cruell doomes of his” (V.vii.22.8–9). Positioned as Isis, Britomart thus represents the clemency that restrains severe justice. We have been told that Isis “in her person cunningly did shade / That part of Iustice, which is Equity” (V.vii.3.3–4). Just as Book II elevates the image of Gloriana as a merciful queen, Book V invites us to see Britomart as a goddess of equity, defined as “clemence” in this particular passage and often understood as a form of mercy in the Renaissance. In reality, equity does not necessarily equate to or result in mercy. Most simply, equity means making exceptions to the strict interpretation of a law in order to achieve a truly just end. Nevertheless, equity was often equated with mercy in early modern thought. So an apparent contradiction informs Book V: if Isis Church and the Court of Mercilla are the two iconographic centers of the book and both represent equity—usually aligned with mercy—then why is the execution of justice in this book so merciless?17 Some critics have attempted to explain equity in Book V as rigor rather than mercy: it has been argued that equity here is the restraint not of cruelty but of too much leniency.18 Indeed, if the point of equity is to produce a truly just result, then equity does not necessarily mean softening the law’s strictness; it could mean being more severe than the law demands. However, this version of equity is not indicated by the definition offered in the Isis Church episode: we are told that the figure of Isis shows that clemency “restraines” the “cruell doomes” of Osiris (V.vii.22.8–9). Yet the vision that associates Britomart with Isis, and thus establishes Britomart as one who would restrain the “cruell doomes” of justice, is followed immediately by her fight with Radigund, where Britomart acts as a punitive, merciless agent of justice. This contradiction echoes the one found in Book II: Gloriana is praised for her mercy in the abstract at the same time that the narrative repeatedly shows the dangers of mercy in the actual. A queen’s mercy must be lauded for all the reasons detailed above: tenderness is a desirable feminine quality; mercy is traditionally expected of monarchs and especially of queens; a queen who is not tenderly merciful runs the risk of being labeled monstrous. As a figure of Elizabeth,

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Britomart should be understood symbolically, even mystically, to embody the equity that is associated with clemency. But when Britomart beheads Radigund, she enacts the kind of harsh punishment that many of Eizabeth’s subjects deemed necessary. However, at the moment when Britomart shows the least mercy, she also destroys the specter of the monstrous and cruel queen, rejecting the label of Jezebel even as she embraces the need for severity. Andrew Majeske reads this episode as evoking a particular version of equity: a Greek tradition, based on Aristotle, that Majeske argues was one of two strands of classical thought that informed Renaissance ideas about equity, the second being the Roman idea of aequitas.19 According to Majeske, Britomart-as-Isis suggests the Greek tradition, which depicted epieikeia as a slow, flexible, and above all secret deliberation that intervenes between the law and particular cases. Majeske argues that Spenser genders this brand of equity feminine, in contrast to the masculine, Roman equity that would enforce laws equally and evenly, eliminating any need to take particular circumstances into account. He asserts that Britomart’s vision in Isis Church persuades her to give up her public authority to Arthegall and, like Isis, work behind the scenes to “exercise the controlling power of equity over Arthegall.”20 Since there is no indication that Britomart, once she reestablishes the rule of men in Radegone, ever makes any effort to control Arthegall, I am not convinced by this argument.21 However, Majeske’s depiction of the Greek epieikeia as a slow, secret process that might be criticized as unstable and dilatory does coincide interestingly with the way Queen Elizabeth’s deliberations were sometimes depicted. Though Majeske says that he has found no evidence associating equity more closely with queens than with kings, if we remember that equity is popularly—if incorrectly—understood as a form of mercy, then indeed, there is a long history of representing queens as the conduits of mercy who intercede with kings to mollify their stern judgments.22 That this kind of equitable decision making, gendered feminine, should be carried on in private is also relevant. Britomart’s association with this style of equity in Book V reflects the idea that women’s judgments require private spaces, an idea reinforced in the Mercilla episode. Mercilla’s punishment of Duessa echoes Britomart’s punishment of Radigund in several ways, including the role played by privacy and the tension generated when an icon of mercy enacts a severe punishment. Like Britomart, Mercilla is an Elizabeth-avatar; by general agreement, she is one of the clearest representations of Elizabeth in the

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poem, and the episode concerning the judgment of Duessa was immediately understood as an allegory of Elizabeth’s judgment of Mary Stuart.23 Mercilla’s palace has been said to resemble Hampton Court, and Mercilla’s door warden, the giant Awe, recalls the queen’s porter, who was reportedly eight feet tall.24 Caroline McManus mentions that even the bevy of white-clad virgins surrounding Mercilla may be an allusion to Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, who typically wore white.25 The elaborate symbolism of this court serves as an encomium to Elizabeth: Mercilla’s rusty sword suggests the “long rest” from war enjoyed by her kingdom, her scepter is described as a “sacred pledge of peace and clemencie”; even her person is “Angellike” (V.ix.29–30). Mercilla is surrounded by the “louely daughters of high Ioue” who calm Jove’s anger and his “cruell vengeance stay,” in much the same way that Isis’s clemency restrains the “cruell doomes” of Osiris (V.ix.31.4–9). This queen of mercy hears a raft of arguments against Duessa, who represents Mary Stuart in this episode but has represented false religion throughout the poem. The reaction that Duessa inspires in those who hear her case recalls Spenser’s critique of pity in Book I. Just as the Red Cross Knight initially pitied “Fidessa” and suffered for it later, so too does Arthur pity her now: “With the neare touch whereof in tender hart / The Briton Prince was sore empassionate” (V.x.46.1–2). Arthur is “inclined much vnto her part” at first, because of the emotion kindled in his tender heart by her plight; the Red Cross Knight also experienced “passion” upon hearing Duessa’s story, and assured her that even a heart of flint would “rew” her woes (I.ii.26.5–9). The intense emotional response of these knights is generated by a performance: just as Duessa in Book I was playing the role of the wronged Fidessa, here too she generates sympathy because she appears to be an attractive noblewoman, though the reader recalls that in Book I she was revealed as a hideous witch. Interestingly, Duessa in Book V never speaks on her own behalf, but the “rare beautie in her face,” along with her generally wretched condition, elicits a pitying response. Twice Spenser uses the word “allure” to describe the way Duessa inspires emotion: “she did sure / The peoples great compassion vnto her allure”; and in the following stanza, Zele tries to convince those “whom she to pitie had allured” that they should loath her instead (V.ix.38.8–9 and 39.8). Pity is an emotion that can be “allured,” suggesting manipulation and deception, as Spenser’s narrative so often attests. But not everyone feels compassion for Duessa. Various “graue persons,” such as Zele, Kingdomes Care, Authority, and the Law

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of Nations, urge but cannot enact the penalty of death (V.ix.43.6). When a final judgment is demanded of the merciful queen, she appears to be responding as Arthur did initially: her tender pity is most manifest. Mercilla weeps tears of grief for Duessa and, rather than speaking any sentence of doom, draws a purple pall across her face to hide her tears: But she, whose Princely breast was touched nere With piteous ruth of her so wretched plight, Though plaine she saw by all, that she did heare, That she of death was guiltie found by right, Yet would not let iust vengeance on her light; But rather let in stead thereof to fall Few perling drops from her faire lampes of light; The which she couering with her purple pall Would haue the passion hid, and vp arose withall. (V.ix.50)

The canto ends at this dramatic point, with judgment against Duessa suspended. Spenser has depicted a queen who literally embodies tender mercy, emphasizing the idea that Mercilla’s “ruth” is found in her “Princely breast.” At this point, the “perling drops” from Mercilla’s eyes replace vengeance; her tears are “let . . . thereof to fall” “in stead” of just vengeance, suggesting the victory of the queen’s personally clement nature over an externally located vengeance, which is nevv ertheless described by Spenser as “just.” Yet, when the next canto opens, this icon of sacred mercy has condemned Duessa to death. Mercilla’s final judgment contrasts with Una’s decision in Book I to let Duessa live. After the witch is captured, Arthur tells the Red Cross Knight that it is in his power to let Duessa live or die, but Una quickly answers, “To doe her die (quoth Vna) were despight, / And shame t’auenge so weake an enimy” (I.viii.45.7–8). Duessa is memorably despoiled, revealing her true monstrosity, but she is not killed. Perhaps these different judgments—assuming Spenser endorses both—result from the two different contexts. The Book of Holiness explores a personal virtue, while Book V is about justice, a public virtue. The private woman Elizabeth may be compassionate; like Una and Mercilla, she may be personally merciful. But Mercilla, like Elizabeth, has a public role to fulfill, and in the interest of justice and the welfare of the state, Duessa must die. Spenser lavishes praise on mercy as an ideal through the beautiful and detailed symbolism of Mercilla and her court. But just as in so

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much Elizabethan prose directed to and descriptive of the queen, merciful actions are discouraged even while the ideal of mercy is praised.26InhisViewoftheStateofIreland,Spenserengagesthesame problem—how both to praise and to condemn mercy—and uses the same technique. Of course, Elizabeth’s policies regarding Ireland often drew fire for being too lenient (as well as parsimonious and waff fling). Spenser’s speaker Eudoxus describes Queen Elizabeth thus: If it shall happen, that the state of this miserie and lamentable image of things shall bee tolde, and feelingly presented to her Sacred Maiestie, being by nature full of mercy and clemency, who is most inclinable to such pittifull complaints, and will not endure to hear such tragedies made of her poore people and subiects . . . then she perhappes, for very compassion of such calamities, will . . . stoppe the streame of such violences.27

This passage follows Irenaeus’s haunting description of famine in Munster and might sound like praise for the sacred queen’s mercy and tender regard for her people. Nevertheless, when put in context this passage can only be read as a lament that tragedies such as the famine can be used to change the English crown’s policy of “the sword” in Ireland; Irenaeus has just assured Eudoxus that when the Soldiers “spoyleth” so that “nothing is very shortly left . . . this is very necessary to bee done for the soone finishing of the warre.”28 That the queen is “by nature”” full of mercy is, according to a closer reading of this passage, the real problem. But Christian tradition and the feminine ideal demand that Queen Elizabeth should be exactly thus: merciful rather than cruel, gentle rather than tyrannical, so Spenser overtly praises her mercy as a quality even as he clearly criticizes it as a policy. Spenser’s account of Mercilla embodies the same paradox. Even the iconography of the Queen of Mercy, glorious and ostensibly positive, is nevertheless at times ambiguous. The “bright steely brand,” the sword that lies at Mercilla’s feet, has been rusted by “long rest,” and though the narrator says that “she could it sternely draw,” clearly she has not drawn it in a very long time (V.ix.30.6–9). A rusty sword often carries negative connotations of idleness and impotence, as when an unused sword that rusts is compared to a slothful man eaten awaybyviceinthemedievalPilgrimageoftheLifeofMan.29Andgiven that Book V follows Arthegall as he imposes true justice in one situation after another, almost always by use of his sword, the emblem of

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Mercilla’s rusted and unused sword is double-edged. Elizabeth herself refers to her “rusty sword” in the poem “The Doubt of Future Foes.” There, Elizabeth asserts, “My rusty sword through rest / Shall first his edge employ / To pull [poll] their tops who seek such change / Or gape for future joy.”30 In her threat to draw her sword and “poll their tops”—cut off their heads—Elizabeth refers specifically to the “daughter of debate,” Mary Stuart, and her advocates. But as we know, her reluctance to prosecute, try, and finally execute Mary caused immense fear and frustration for many of her subjects. As long as it remains rusty—unused—the sword reflects the message that the narrator ascribes to Mercilla’s scepter: it is the “sacred pledge of peace and clemencie,” suggesting that the queen’s mercy has produced a peaceful reign. But not everyone in Elizabethan England desired peace. The rusty sword is also an emblem of Elizabeth’s failure to act as many of her Protestant subjects wished her to act: to execute Mary speedily, to send English troops to support Protestants in the Low Countries and elsewhere on the continent, and to complete the conquest of Ireland through brutal means if necessary. In Book V, Mercilla’s apparent indecision during the trial of Duessa also bespeaks the paradox Spenser highlights here: Mercilla embodies mercy, but rigor is demanded in this situation. Though Mercilla knows Duessa’s guilt, she “would not let iust vengeance on her light,” an ambiguous statement that could mean either that Mercilla will w Duessa to be punished, or that she will not prevent t Duessa not allow from being punished.31 Though the canto ends with Mercilla’s withdrawal and silence, a few stanzas later, Arthur and Arthegall are said to have “seene and heard” Mercilla “doome a rights” Duessa (V.x.4.3). These paradoxes of course represent Queen Elizabeth’s famous vacillations in the case of Mary Stuart, but these contradictory statements can exist—and Spenser allows them to coexist—because of Mercilla’s protective hiddenness. Mercilla is described as “seene and heard” by Arthur and Arthegall, and Spenser shows her sitting “on high, that she might all men see / And might of all men royally be seene” (V.ix.27.3–4). In fact, the visual availability of Mercilla is heavv ily emphasized throughout canto ix: some form of the word “see” is repeated frequently throughout the knights’ encounter with Mercilla, beginning with the stanza where they approach her palace: Loe now, right noble knights, arriu’d ye bee Nigh to the place, which ye desir’d to see: There shall ye see my souerayne Lady Queene

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Most sacred wight, most debonayre and free, That euer yet vpon this earth was seene. (V.ix.20.4–8)

But though Arthur and Arthegall are “shewed all the sight” of Mercilla and her palace, though the queen may “of all men royally be seene,” her person is never described and she is never actually exposed; rather, she is always surrounded and veiled. In the first description, she is covered with a cloth of state that is “like a cloud” and surrounded by thousands of Angels that “encompassed the throne” (V.ix.28.4 and 29.6). Later, when she weeps for Duessa, she covers her face with a “purple Pall.” Though Mercilla is on display, she is always protected by clouds, angels, and veils. Spenser regards such protection as vital to the rendering of challenging judgments, especially when the judge is female. An iconic analogue to Mercilla occurs in Book IV: another veiled, hidden, and ambiguous judge, Venus, who stands “right in the midst,” yet like Mercilla is both veiled and protectively surrounded by angels, though in the case of Venus it is a “flocke of litle loues” that fly around her (IV.x.42.2). Both Mercilla and Venus are importuned by their subjects, though Venus hears the personal pleading of lovers rather than the legal pleading of councilors. Both must render a judgment, and both do so in utterly ambiguous ways. Scudamour wants to seize Amoret from the lap of Womanhood and looks to Venus for a judgement. He chooses to read her response, a laugh, as one of approval, but whether he has really received permission to take Amoret remains uncertain. Like Mercilla, Venus judges from behind a veil. Reminiscent of Elizabeth’s anxiety about “being on stage” as she decides Mary’s fate, Mercilla is given a protective cover that Elizabeth lacked. We know that Elizabeth wished for a private solution to the problem of Mary Stuart. According to A. N. McLaren, the queen’s godly councilors, led by Burghley and Walsingham, were determined that Mary’s trial and execution should be carried out publicly, conducted by the “majesty of the state,” so that the justice of Mary’s fate could be witnessed by all. They feared that Elizabeth would hold out for a private solution, probably in the form of a secret assassination of Mary. The queen tried to remove herself from the proceedings against Mary, violating precedent by not attending the opening of the 1586 Parliament that had been summoned specifically to deal with Mary’s execution. “The queen’s absence allowed the male political nation to enact justice without mercy, hence civic virtue uninformed by a monarchical prerogative—mercy—claimed

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by Elizabeth.”32 Elizabeth’s failure to exercise her merciful prerogative undermines the monarchical principle that she embodies; it also threatens her image as a clement queen. A decision to execute Mary could, and did, result in her characterization as a Jezebel, but a decision to pardon Mary would open her to charges of effeminate weakness. Spenser responds to the danger of judgments by providing protective spaces where they can occur in The Faerie Queene. The shocking description of a poet whose tongue has been nailed to a post in stanzas 25 and 26 of this canto may also reflect Queen Elizabeth’s fears about how her judgment of Mary Stuart will be interpreted. The poet Bonfont, whose name has been changed to “Malfont,” is being punished because he did “foule blaspheme that Queene for forged guyle,” a phrase which is usually interpreted as meaning that he blasphemed the queen through his own “forged guyle,” but which could just as easily mean that he accused her of forged guile (V.ix.25.5). Given the context of this episode, given what we know about Elizabeth’s concern that her treatment of Mary would be interpreted as guileful rather than genuine, and especially given the images of protective veiling that Spenser employs in his depiction of Mercilla, the more obvious reading seems to be that the queen is punishing a writer who accused her of guile, nailing his tongue to a post in an attempt to control how her performance is interpreted and represented. Notably, Mercilla’s condemnation of Duessa in this account does not result from her enaction of the sovereign’s personal prerogative: the product of her “princely breast” is pity, not justice. Some critics have interpreted Mercilla as representing equity in this episode, if equity is understood as the prerogative of an individual, be it sovereign or judge, to mitigate the law’s harshness in an individual case.33 Whether we understand Mercilla as a representation of the queen’s personally merciful nature or as a figure who embodies the possibility of equity, the outcome is the same: condemnation results not from the queen’s prerogative but from the arguments of counsel. A figure named “Zele,” whom Louis Montrose has characterized as “a personification of the godly political nation,” prosecutes Duessa and “vrge[s] her punishment” (V.ix.49.7).34 This is a moment that exemplifies the theory of mixed monarchy; Spenser ultimately suggests that the queen of mercy will rule according to the advice of male councilors rather than basing her judgment on her personal inclinations. Spenser does not represent Mercilla’s judgment of Duessa, leaving the question unanswered at the end of Canto ix. Canto x opens not

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with a report that Mercilla pronounced Duessa’s doom, but rather with a philosophical discussion of mercy itself. Spenser asserts that mercy holds a place equal to that of justice and that mercy comes from the Almighty; he suggests that “it is greater prayse to saue, then spill,” and tells us that it is “better to reforme, then to cut off the ill” (V.x.2.8–9). As critics have long noted, there is poetic evasion going on here, as Spenser obfuscates the outcome of an extremely controversial episode in the reign of Elizabeth. But this is also typically Spenserian misleading; as readers we are invited to misjudge Mercilla and the nature of mercy itself, and assume that Mercilla’s tears and mercy’s exalted place will save Duessa’s life—only to have our misconceptions corrected a few stanzas later. Spenser also places heavy emphasis on the honor and praise that Mercilla enjoys because of her justice and mercy. In a moment reminiscent of Guyon’s depiction of Gloriana’s worldwide reputation for mercy and peace, Spenser emphasizes that Mercilla’s honor shall be raised Vp to the skies, whence first deriu’d it was, And now on earth it selfe enlarged has, From th’vtmost brinke of the Armericke shore, Vnto the margent of the Molucas. (V.x.3.4–7)

In both Book II and Book V, Spenser focuses on an issue that was of deep concern to Queen Elizabeth: her reputation, and here, in particular, her concern about how the execution of the Queen of Scots might affect her reputation as a merciful Prince of Peace. Spenser’s insistence on the praise that Mercilla garners, not only from distant lands but from her own people, and from Arthegall and Arthur as well, suggests that he recognized how important her image was to her and sought to reassure her that she had enhanced rather than tarnished it when she signed Mary’s death warrant. Spenser was acutely aware that harsh judgments could result in a sullied reputation: Book V ends with its hero, Arthegall, being assailed by figures named Envie and Detraction, who rail at him, accusing him of cruelty.35 In Books II and V of The Faerie Queene, Spenser lavishes praise on the ideal of mercy through his representation of Gloriana, Britomart, and Mercilla, but in the action of these books, mercy is dangerous and often rejected altogether. While Books I and II suggest the dangers of compassion and even of a mercy that appears to be magnanimous, the Mercilla episode of Book V suggests that for a maiden queen, the choice between mercy and rigor is itself fraught

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with danger. Spenser emphasizes Mercilla’s visibility, reminding us that, like Elizabeth, Mercilla is onstage. Yet the poet affords her the protective covering of the cloud, the purple pall, and the break in the narrative itself. A queen’s mercy may be readily interpreted as womanish pity; yet her rigor may quickly earn her the label “unnatural.” Spenser is deeply suspicious of leniency but he also recognizes that judgments, particularly those made by a woman, may pose a danger not only to the commonwealth but also to the queen herself. In Book V, then, Spenser treats pity as an aspect not of holiness or temperance, but of justice: Mercilla’s pity for Duessa may make her personally admirable but cannot serve as the basis for justice. Similarly, Arthegall, the knight of justice, feels pity for Radigund and pays dearly for it. In Book VI, Spenser returns to the subject of pity, but in yet another context: that of courtesy. Book VI refers often to pity and mercy, but instead of showing the danger of acceding to pleas for mercy and feelings of pity, this book posits pity as a condition of nobility and mercy as the proper response of a chivalric hero. John D. Staines claims that in Book VI, Spenser revalues pity, authorizing the feminine passions that were dangerous and suspect in earlier books of The Faerie Queene. He convincingly argues that “Book V is most notable for its absence of pity, while Book VI has a sudden excess of it.”36 While I agree that pity is reclaimed in Book VI, as will become apparent, I disagree that the valorization of compassion in Book VI constitutes an authorization of feminine emotions. Throughout the Legend of Courtesy, questions about nobility arise. Is nobility innate or can it be learned? Is true nobility a quality of birth or the mind? We know that such questions were debated in Spenser’s age; his own commendatory sonnet to the 1595 translation yalertsusthatSpenserhadconsidoffNennio,oraTreatiseofNobility ered the questions raised in that treatise about whether true nobility is a product of noble blood or a noble mind. In her 2012 essay on Book VI, Patricia Wareh concludes that Spenser directs the reader to observe the shifting relationship between courtesy and nobility, alerting us that outer actions, even courteous ones, do not always reflect inner truth.37 Thus, in the Legend of Courtesy, Spenser questions what true nobility is and whether courteous conduct is its index. This exploration of courtesy and nobility creates an interesting context for The Faerie Queene’s ongoing interrogation of mercy, for the mercy that was such an ambiguous quality in Books I, II, and V seems to be a crucial marker of true nobility in Book VI. However, just as the motives

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behind courteous speech and behavior are sometimes questionable in Book VI, so are the motives of mercy. Furthermore, this new valorization of mercy, and of compassion as well, may also be the product of Book VI’s retreat from feminine authority into a realm where masculine knighthood and chivalry reign. Some critics have argued that in Book VI Spenser displaces Queen Elizabeth, though the nature of that displacement and the reasons for it vary from critic to critic. William Nelson observes that this is the only book of The Faerie Queene that contains no overt praise of the queen, though Nelson regards this as part of the larger theme of digression from duty: like Calidore, the poet is diverted from his proper obligations.38 Or by omitting Elizabeth, Spenser may be registering his disillusionment with the royal court— this is an explanation commonly proffered. Richard McCoy reads the conspicuous lack of praise for Gloriana in Book VI as part of the work’s larger depiction of chivalry in tension with monarchy, arguing that the exclusion of Elizabeth in Book VI is the culmination of a chivalric allegory designed to keep Elizabeth and the authority of the court at a distance.39 Finally, some critics find that Book VI repudiates not just Elizabeth but feminine authority itself.40 Calidore’s first adventure in Book VI lays the groundwork for this new rendition of mercy. He sees the squire bound to a tree and, after freeing him, learns about Briana’s treatment of ladies and knights: her seneschal, Maleffort, accosts them and shaves the women’s hair and men’s beards as payment for their passage by her castle. Both Calidore and the narrator comment on how shameful and cruel this behavior is, and Maleffort’s pitiless nature is emphasized by the narrator (“Ne would he spare for pitty” VI.i.17.9). After Calidore chases Maleffort back to the castle and kills him there, Briana upbraids our hero in the harshest terms, despite Calidore’s attempt to lecture her about the value of civility. The knight waits with Briana at the castle while her dwarf goes to fetch her champion, Crudor, so that he can fight Calidore. The narrator describes this rather awkward scene in terms that emphasize Calidore’s masculine self-control and Briana’s feminine tantrum: Where that discourteous Dame with scornfull pryde, And fowle entreaty him indignifyde, That yron heart it hardly could sustaine: Yet he, that could his wrath full wisely guyde, Did well endure her womanish disdaine, And did him selfe from fraile impatience refraine. (VI.i.30.4–9)

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Briana’s foul “entreaty,” that is, treatment, of the knight is described as “womanish,” while Calidore’s wisdom and restraint enable him to guide his wrath rather than allowing himself to be overcome by emotion, as she is. This emotional self-control that is specifically opposed to “womanish” behavior is also, a few stanzas later, the basis for Calidore’s act of mercy. For Calidore defeats Crudor, who begs for mercy, and Calidore’s reaction to this plea is the opposite of the emotional responses, based on pity, to which the reader has become accustomed. Calidore calms his “wrathfull heat / With goodly patience” before he answers Crudor, just as earlier he had wisely controlled his wrath when dealing with Briana (VI.i.40.2–3). Further, Calidore’s answer—another lecture about civility—aligns mercy with self-control. He tells Crudor that nothing is more blameworthy in a knight than pride and cruelty, then says, “In vaine he seeketh others to suppresse, / Who hath not learnd him selfe first to subdew,” followed by a similarly structured maxim: “Who will not mercie vnto others shew, / How can he mercy euer hope to have?” (VI.i.41.5–6 and 42.1–2). The man who cannot “subdue” himself, that is, control his passions, is also the man who refuses mercy to others. Calidore offers mercy not because the emotion of pity gets the better of him, but as a result of his emotional self-control. It is instructive to compare this episode with the similar one in Book II, when the defeated Pyrochles begs Guyon for mercy. Guyon spares Pyrochles’s life but fails to place conditions upon his clemency, while Calidore’s more rational approach leads him to “propound” a series of three conditions: Crudor must promise to behave better to knights, to aid ladies, and to accept Briana as his love, since it was his callous treatment of her—agreeing to love her only if she could provide a mantle made of human hair—that led to the attacks on passing knights and ladies in the first place. Guyon exacts no promises or oaths from Pyrochles, though he naively reminds Pyrochles that he owes allegiance henceforth to the man who spared his life. Of course, this reminder has no effect on Pyrochles, who later tries again to attack Guyon. By contrast, Calidore has Crudor swear a solemn oath on the cross-shaped hilt of his sword. In comparison to Guyon’s approach, Calidore’s brand of mercy produces very diff ferent results, including the fact that Crudor, unlike Pyrochles, is reconciled to the conditions propounded by the victor. Calidore’s mercy also reaps more benefits. Mercy was long promoted as a practical political tactic because the clemency of the powerful can potentially bind their subjects in gratitude and loyalty. Ironically, when

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Guyon grants Pyrochles his clemency, he not only fails to extract any binding oaths, he also allows his foolish clemency to go so far as to unbind Occasion, a serious error in judgment. Calidore’s mercy has the opposite effect: Briana is so grateful that she throws herself at his feet and “her selfe acknowledg’d bound for that accord, / By which he had to her both life and loue restord” (VI.i.45.8–9). Spenser repeats the idea in the following stanza, suggesting its importance: Briana freely gives her castle to Sir Calidore along with “her selfe bound to him for euermore.” Spenser remarks that she is “so wondrously now chaung’d, from that she was afore” (VI.i.46.8–9). Guyon’s foolish clemency, which the narrative of Book II aligns with feminine emotionalism, brings chaos, suggested by the unbinding of the dissonant force of Occasion. By contrast, Calidore’s clemency, offered rationally, carefully—with conditions—and clearly distinguished from any “womanish” passion, has the desired effect of binding his former enemies to him. This mercy establishes a better order and is transformative.41 Thus in Book VI, mercy has been recuperated by distinguishing it from feminine lack of restraint and emotional fluctuation; mercy is rational, the product of a self-control that Spenser associates with proper masculinity. Chivalry is an important imaginative force in The Faerie Queene, and Spenser’s depiction of its traditions is alternately celebratory, critical, and even mocking. As McCoy points out, the trappings of chivalry are mostly rejected in Book VI, signaled by the frequent discarding of armor that occurs in this book with no ill results.42 If this rejection of the forms of knighthood is a way of distancing chivalry from the queen’s court, then one could argue that chivalry itself is recuperated, and the mercy that should be a part of the chivalric code is elevated by Spenser in this fully masculine context. Mercy in Book VI is one index of nobility and is associated not only with masculine restraint and reason, but also with courage. Many critics have analyzed the discourse of nobility that runs through Book VI. One important passage that highlights the question of nobility’s origins is the narrator’s reflection on the Salvage Man, who rescues Calepine and Serena from Turpine. We are told that, given his wild upbringing, the Salvage Man had never known gentleness or pity until he heard Serena shrieking and saw Turpine attacking Calepine. At the sight, “Euen his ruder hart began to rew, / And feele compassion of his euill plight” (VI.iv.3.5–6). This description is reminiscent of the satyrs’ “unwonted ruth” on witnessing Una’s distress. But in Book VI, the Salvage Man’s compassion is, according

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to the narrator, a clear sign that he has gentle blood: even though he was raised among “saluage beasts,” he “shewd some token of his gentle blood, / By gentle vsage of that wretched dame” (VI.v.2.5–6). The context of a different book results in a different conclusion: there was no suggestion that the satyrs in Book I were anything but fauns; certainly they were not of gentle blood. But in Book VI, Spenser tells a similar story in a different context: while the entire poem could be described as a romance, in Book VI the elements of romance are intensified; while the entire poem concerns knighthood, Book VI foregrounds the knights’ code of courtesy. This chivalric code calls for knights to protect and care for those weaker than themselves; the chivalric response to a damsel in distress is supposed to be one of sympathy and succor. That courtly impulse was questioned in Book I and rejected outright in Book II when the Palmer stopped Guyon from offering succor to a distressed damsel in canto xii. Here in the Legend of Courtesy, in a different context and far removed from the problem of feminine authority, the pity that a knight might feel for a distressed lady is a crucial sign of his “gentleness.” But even in this context, Spenser reminds his reader that this code can be abused. The story of Turpine in Book VI emblematizes pity’s role in courtly conduct. Turpine is the antithesis of chivalry: he refuses to help Calepine and Serena after Serena has been badly wounded by the Blatant Beast, and then he attacks Calepine while the knight is traveling with the fragile, injured lady. Calepine ends up hiding behind Serena, who begs Turpine to spare her knight, but Turpine ignores her pleas and cruelly wounds Calepine, leaving him for dead. Later, Arthur goes to Turpine’s castle to get revenge. Pretending to be a wounded knight in need of shelter, Arthur proves the discourtesy of Turpine’s house by the reaction elicited by his situation. The prince asks Turpine’s groom “to pitty his ill plight,” but the groom— called “outrageous” by the narrator—demands that Arthur leave at once, saying that his master refuses lodging to all errant knights (VI.vi.20.9 and 21.1). Just as Turpine showed a complete lack of pity for the wounded Serena, his servant refuses to pity the supposedly wounded Arthur. Of course, such a pitiless knight turns out to be utterly base. Turpine is a coward who flees Arthur’s attack and tries to hide behind his lady, Blandina. Arthur hits Turpine on the head with his sword but stops short of killing him because of the pleas of the lady, Blandina, who covers Turpine with her skirts and begs Arthur for mercy. Arthur “with the ruth of her so wretched case, / . . . stayd his second strooke, and did his hand abase” (VI.vi.31.8–9). Arthur’s

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“ruth” stands in obvious contrast to Turpine’s lack of pity for Serena in the parallel episode when he, Turpine, was the aggressor and forced Calepine to hide behind Serena. Thus, as it does through most of Book VI, the capacity for pity indicates nobility; the pitiless are the base in the Legend of Courtesy. However, even in this context, we are reminded that the tendency toward pity, though it is a mark of “gentleness,” can also render one vulnerable. Arthur in this episode grants mercy to Turpine in part because of Blandina’s pleas, but he does punish the cruel and coww ardly knight: Yet since thy life vnto this Ladie fayre I giuen have, liue in reproch and scorne; Ne euer armes, ne euer knighthood dare Hence to professe. (VI.vi.36.1–4)

Arthur acknowledges that he spared Turpine’s life because of Blandina, whose tears and prayers he pitied, but a few stanzas later the narrator explains that Blandina is an expert actress: Yet were her words and lookes but false and fayned, To some hid end to make more easie way, Or to allure such fondlings, whom she trayned Into her trap vnto their owne decay: Thereto, when needed, she could weepe and pray. (VI.vi.42.1–5)

Arthur’s chivalrous response to Blandina’s tears was to show mercy to Turpine, and while this is the correct response, indicative of nobility, Arthur is nonetheless being manipulated. Reminiscent of Duessa’s false tears and pleas for mercy in Book I, Blandina’s ability to “weepe and pray” when it suits her purposes is a reminder that a virtuous person’s natural sympathy can easily be abused. And just as Pyrochles in Book II, after being spared by Guyon, is angry rather than grateful and returns to try and harm him later, so too Turpine, despite Arthur’s mercy toward him, seethes with rancor and wants vengeance: [Who] notwithstanding that in former fight He [Turpine] of the Prince his life receiued late, Yet in his mind malitious and ingrate He gan deuise, to be aueng’d anew For all that shame, which kindled inward hate. (VI.vii.2.3–7)

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Thus as soon as Arthur rides away, Turpine pursues him with vengeful intentions, eventually enlisting two naïve young knights to attack Arthur on his behalf. Arthur is unhurt in the encounter, but one of the young knights is killed. Arthur again shows mercy when the second knight begs for his life, and again he puts conditions on his mercy, demanding that the defeated knight seek out the one who incited the attempt. In the end, the knight who received Arthur’s mercy is true to his word and proves to be virtuous when he refuses to attack a sleeping Arthur as Turpine wants him to do; Turpine is again captured by Arthur, who this time baffles him, that is, hangs him by the heels in a tree so that his shame will be public. When Turpine and the second young knight approach the place where Arthur is sleeping, they see the body of the first knight who was killed attacking Arthur at Turpine’s behest. As Blandina did earlier, Turpine feigns emotion, but the emotion he feigns is pity: Much did the Crauen seeme to mone his case, That for his sake his deare life had forgone; And him bewayling with affection base, Did counterfeit kind pittie, where was none. (VI.vii.18.1–4)

Here the narrator makes a surprising comment: “For wheres no courage, theres no ruth nor mone” (VI.vii.18.5). Ruth, or pity, is a quality of the courageous. This remark takes us back to the role of pity in knighthood, suggesting again that the capacity to feel pitiful emotions is an index of nobility and that pity is the proper response of knights to those who suffer distress. Pity is here fully recuperated as a masculine virtue; the experience of pity leads men to courteous actions throughout Book VI. Yet even here, in the midst of this positive portrayal of pity, Spenser warns of the way one’s pity can be manipulated, and shows how Arthur’s initial mercy to Turpine—as a result of a woman’s manipulation of his pity—has fatal results. Genuine pity for the suffering of another is more positively represented in Book VI than anywhere else in The Faerie Queene, but even here, in the context of masculine authority, the tears of women— whether real or fake—make mercy problematic. Calidore’s pity must be practiced with a self-control that is carefully contrasted with the “womanish” passion of Briana, and Blandina’s sham emotions elicit an undeserved pity from the noble prince Arthur, just as did Duessa’s plight in Book V. A love poet and one who venerates the goodly flame of authentic emotions in human relationships, Spenser nevertheless

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warns repeatedly against the emotion of pity: men who succumb too easily to pity, like Arthegall, are feminized, and they suffer for their failure to control their passions. The treatment of mercy in The Faerie Queene should be read in the context of tensions about Elizabeth’s image and practice of mercy. In the public arena, mercy practiced by—or elicited by—a woman raises the suspicion that frail emotions, easily misguided, are the basis for faulty judgments. The image of the clement queen is simultaneously celebrated and undermined, as Spenser praises the mercy and peace of Gloriana and Mercilla, even as he shows the dangers of merciful judgments.

CHAPTER 3

“PROUD AND PITILESSE”: ELIZABETHAN MERC R Y AND THE SONNET TRADITION

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any writers participate in the construction of Elizabeth’s image as a merciful queen, even if, like Spenser, they also question and challenge the clemency enshrined in that image. It is no coincidence that there are so many literary representations of mercy in this period: Shakespeare explores the theme in many of his plays; questions about mercy and justice are central in The Faerie Queene, and the lack of mercy shown by Euarchus is an important focus of the fifth book of Sidney’s Arcadia. But mercy also plays a crucial role in that very popular late sixteenth-century genre, the love sonnet. The sonneteers plead for the lady’s pity, but their depictions of mercy are often more complicated than they seem at first glance, and are inflected by tensions surrounding Queen Elizabeth’s clemency. In the English love poetry that might be described as “Petrarchan” in themes and form, the speaker’s usual stance is supplicating: he accuses his beloved of being hard-hearted or cruel and begs for her mercy. While the motif of the “cruel fair” is found in the continental poetry that served as model and inspiration for the Elizabethan sonneteers, late sixteenth-century English writers were far more interested in this trope than were their predecessors. Petrarch does portray Laura as a “cruel fair” at times in his Rime Sparse: he complains that she has a “cor di smalto” (heart of stone) in Poem 70, for instance, and speaks of his lady’s “cruel side” from which he tries to force a sigh (Poem 131) and laments that the “road of mercy is closed” to him in Poem 130.1 But pleas for Laura’s mercy and accusations that she is cruel occur less frequently in Petrarch’s sequence than do similar complaints in the poems of the English writers under consideration here.2 Continental Petrarchists also place less emphasis on the “cruel fair.” Ronsard, for example, in Sonnets Pour Helene often

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laments his lady’s coldness and makes liberal use of the love-as-war motif, but only occasionally accuses his beloved of cruelty or wishes for her pity.3 Certain English poets—Samuel Daniel and Edmund Spenser, for example—make this commonplace notion of the lady’s cruelty a dominant theme in their poetry. Why did this motif enjoy such popularity in late sixteenth-century English sequences? Many critics have analyzed the way that Elizabethan courtiers depict the public world of the court in terms of the private world of love.4 But the connection between the political subtext of Elizabethan love poetry and the dominance of the “cruel fair” motif in that same poetry has not been remarked; no one has considered the sonnet tradition’s specific focus on feminine cruelty and pity in the context of debates about Queen Elizabeth’s mercy and the representations of her policies and her person as both cruel and excessively pitying. In this chapter, I will examine the sonnet sequences written by three poets who may be described as members of the Sidney circle: Philip Sidney, Samuel Daniel, and Edmund Spenser.Theirthreesonnetsequences—AstrophilandStella,Delia, and Amoretti—all foreground questions about cruelty and pity that can be more fully understood if we read them in the context of tensions that surrounded the queen’s mercy. In the lover’s traditional plea for pity, we can hear not only the poet’s desire for political position and preferment, but also his warning about the danger of granting mercy. Pleas for pity are constructed critically in the poems of Sidney, Daniel, and Spenser, and the outcomes that occur when women offer the “mercy” demanded by their wooers demonstrate the vulnerability of those who respond mercifully. The popularity of the “cruel fair” topos in the English sonnet tradition is surely part of the interplay between the rhetoric of love poetry and that of the Elizabethan court. After all, the language of love poetry, while it could serve the general purpose of flattering the queen, was most often used by courtiers who wanted something from their monarch: positions, preferment, payment, or sometimes true mercy in a more legal sense. The situation of the pleading lover and the cold-hearted lady in love poetry is well suited to expressing the political desires of courtiers. Leonard Forster, in his classic book The Icy Fire, was the first modern critic to analyze the Petrarchan rhetoric used to address and represent Queen Elizabeth; he states bluntly that the queen played a role in the renewed vogue of Petrarchism in late sixteenth-century English literature because she saw that this style was one that could benefit her: “She was the only sovereign in

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Europe who was fitted to assume the character of the petrarchistic ideal; she was the only Virgin Queen, who could combine in her own person political sovereignty and ideal domination over men’s hearts.””5 But the very examples Forster cites show the aptness of Petrarchan language not just for flattering Elizabeth, but specifically for pleading for her mercy. Thus Forster uses the example of the Earl of Essex, for instance, writing to the queen from custody and paraphrasing Petrarch in order to beg forgiveness and reinstatement. The examples used by Forster suggest that Petrarchan rhetoric may have provided male courtiers with more than a language of flattery: because it positions the man as the petitioner and the woman as the wielder of power, Petrarchan rhetoric offered men in an otherwise male-dominated culture an established and thus comfortable way of supplicating a female superior. So when Elizabethan love poetry is read through a political lens, we might assume that pleas for the lady’s mercy reflect the courtier’s (or would-be-courtier’s) desire for the queen’s mercy, or at least benevolence and favor. Yet, as discussed in the first chapter, during Elizabeth’s reign her councilors, Parliaments, and preachers were more likely to condemn her “mildness” and clemency than to praise it. Nevertheless, disapproval of excessive mercy and desire for that same mercy—seemingly two contradictory stances—can and do exist simultaneously, at times. Even those courtiers who regularly urged Queen Elizabeth to be more punitive probably neither anticipated nor desired that her rigor should be directed toward them. By the same token, Elizabethan courtiers who used the language of love poetry to plead for favors, preferment, or mercy from the queen might generally disapprove of her mercy. An interesting example is provided by William Davison, Puritan-leaning Member of the Parliament of 1586–87 that is famous for the intense pressure it brought upon Queen Elizabeth in the matter of Mary, Queen of Scots. Both Houses were unanimous in petitioning Queen Elizabeth to proceed with the death sentence against Mary. Neale states that “on this occasion, unlike 1572, there was not even a single voice in favour of lenity. Mary must die.”6 Davison was made Secretary of the Privy Council just in time to play a crucial part in the proceedings against Mary; in the queen’s eyes he was responsible for dispatching the death warrant—which she had signed—before she had given permission. Whether Davison was complicit in trying to force the queen’s hand or was simply a scapegoat for blame that should have been borne by Privy Council members or the queen herself, no one

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knows for sure.7 Nevertheless, he was actively opposed to mercy for the Queen of Scots and may have been instrumental in hastening her death. But when the queen’s wrath fell upon him, he used Petrarchan rhetoric to plead for the compassion that he (along with the rest of Parliament) had rejected for Mary: If once I might Astraea’s grace regain; If once her heart would on my sorrows rue, Alas, I could these plaints forgo, And quite forget my former woe. ................. Ah, if I might But gain her sight, And show her, ere I die, my wretched case!8

To ask the queen to rue, that is, pity, his sorrows and look on him again—even though his state is so wretched that he is dying—echoes the rhetoric of countless love poems in which a man claims to be dying for love and begs a woman to take pity on him.9 Some Elizabethan love poetry, then, might express the poet’s desire for political favor or forgiveness when the lover pleads for “mercy” from a hard-hearted lady—and this might be the case even if, in the actual political arena, the same poet would normally object to the queen’s clemency. On the other hand, some sonnet writers who plead for the pity of the “cruel fair” complicate this convention by subverting it. As Catherine Bates shows in her book The Rhetoric of Courtship, Petrarchan rhetoric allows a complex posture that is at once wooing—courting, supplicating—and self-analytical, one in which the speaker is highly conscious of his predicament and its possibilities. “The structural and semantic ambivalence of courtship provided Elizabeth’s subjects with a rich and varied means of exploring relations with their sovereign.”10 Though Bates does not consider mercy—personal or monarchical—as a component of courtship, some important English sonneteers look closely at the meaning and outcomes of mercy, and the role that demands for mercy might play in a subject’s relationship with his sovereign. In three important sonnet sequences, Sidney, Daniel, and Spenser express the desire for a poww erful woman’s pity, but they also analyze the motives and outcomes of such desires. Thus, in these sonnets, supplication is the posture of the speaker and may certainly express the poet’s real hopes for advancement or reinstatement at court—but pleas for a woman’s pity are also examined critically and revealed to be sometimes manipulative, often

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even dangerous, in a way that corresponds to the kinds of warnings against excessive mercy that were directed at Queen Elizabeth.

Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella That Philip Sidney had a particular and personal point of view on the nature of Elizabeth’s justice is undeniable. His problems and disappointments at Elizabeth’s court are often cited, even though exactly what transpired between Sidney and his sovereign is unknown.11 His absence from court during the time he resided at his sister’s estate, Wilton, may have been forced or may have been chosen. But indisputably his withdrawal from Elizabeth’s court followed close on the heels of his father and mother’s withdrawal, as well as the fall from favor of his uncle, the Earl of Leicester. In general, the Sidney family and their circle declined in power during the years 1578–1579, signaled by their increasing distance from the queen. Michael G. Brennan states that by the end of 1579, Philip Sidney’s father, Henry, “seems to have largely withdrawn from court life” after incurring the queen’s anger by his handling of Ireland while he served as the queen’s viceroy.12 The year 1579 also saw Sidney’s mother’s formal retirement from court life: plagued by family demands, poor health, and scarred by smallpox, she, like her husband, suffered a sharp decline in status and, according to Brennan, became an “embarrassment” to Elizabeth.13 In June of 1579, Elizabeth also learned, to her fury, the news of Leicester’s secret marriage to Lettice Knollys the previous year: his uncle’s temporary fall from the queen’s favor probably damaged Sidney’s career, but the birth of his uncle’s son in 1579 also meant that Sidney was no longer Leicester’s heir. And in 1579, Sidney had his famous quarrel with the Earl of Oxford over the use of a tennis court and was excoriated by the queen in a private audience. Finally, at the end of 1579, Sidney wrote his outspoken letter to the queen advising her against the Anjou match. Whether Sidney’s subsequent withdrawal to Wilton in 1580 was imposed by an angry queen or not, clearly the previous two years had not been kind to the Sidney family, and it is impossible to think that Sidney’s prose and poetry from this period was untouched by his and his family’s declining fortunes and removal from court. The exact date off Astrophil and Stella’s composition is unknown, but most scholars believe that it was written in the early 1580s, and it has become commonplace to read the poems as reflecting Sidney’s frustrated attempts to win not romantic love but political

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preferment. Arthur Marotti asserts that Sidney uses love as a metaphor for political ambition and that Penelope Rich, the inspiration for the figure of Stella, is a fitting symbol of what he wants to obtain. According to Marotti’s influential analysis, the coterie audience for whom Sidney wrote would have understood the context of Sidney’s ownfrustratedambitionsandreadAstrophilandStellaaccordingly.14 Along with Marotti, Peter Stallybrass, Ann Rosalind Jones, Maureen Quilligan, and others have found political significance in the tale of Astrophil’s desire for Stella, but this is not to say that historicist readings necessarily reduce Astrophil and Stella to an allegory of political frustration.15 On the contrary, most critics grapple with the complexity of Sidney’s sequence and its tonal and referential shifts. The poems sometimes invite an autobiographical reading: the sonnets that pun on the name “Rich” are testament to that, and some critics have assumed that, to a greater or lesser extent, the sequence reflects Sidney’s real-life desire for Lady Penelope Devereux, who married Robert Lord Rich in 1581.16 Ilona Bell convincingly argues that sonnet sequences like Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella are first and foremost about love and courtship, and reminds us not to overlook the real women who served as ideal readers and participatory audiences of men’s poetry. Marion Wynne-Davies says that the sequence has “two layers of meaning: an external narrative in which the characters of Astrophil and Stella are located, and an inner, intimate circle where the seemingly true identities of Philip Sidney and Penelope Rich may be discovered.” She argues that the reader of the sequence must continually move between inner and outer layy ers of meaning. By contrast, other critics emphasize the separation between Sidney-the-poet and Astrophil-the-lover. Michael R. G. Spiller argues that “Sidney created the first deconstructive lyric persona in the sonnet’s history,” meaning that the artifice of the text is heightened so that the reader is constantly reminded that the text is a fiction. Spiller offers the actual history of Sidney’s relationship with Penelope Devereux as a reason for this metafictional approach: if Sidney wrote the poems knowing the ultimate failure of his courtship, the whole sequence would be infused with irony.17 Other critics who emphasize the distance between Sidney and Astrophil find in Astrophil a negative example, a warning against the rejection of reason and Christian values, and the dangers of sexual passion. Thus, critics who focus on the sequence’s narrative of love (rather than on its political subtext) differ in the degree to which they expect the reader to sympathize with the protagonist. Are we to read Astrophil as a sympathetic reflection of Sidney’s own frustrated desire for

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Penelope Rich, or should we regard Astrophil as an object of criticism, even ridicule?18 This question might be profitably applied to political readings of the sequence as well. Readings—such as Marotti’s—that focus not on the sequence’s overt topic of passionate love, but rather on the submerged political content, usually operate on the assumption that Astrophil’s political complaints, desires, and strategies reflect Sidney’s.19 But we should not uncritically assume that the speaker is voicing Sidney’s own political feelings any more than we should assume that the poems genuinely express Sidney’s passion for Penelope Devereux. Rather, we should understand the poet-speaker Astrophil not only as an ironically portrayed lover, but also, at times, an ironically portrayed courtier. Astrophil demands two things of Stella that many courtiers, and probably Sidney himself, desired from their queen: her presence, and her pity. But the course of the sequence, which shows the use Astrophil makes of these boons when Stella grants them, suggests that while the poems may give voice to Sidney’s desire to be in the royal presence and be treated mercifully, even generously, when he’s there, the poems also show the dangers, for women and for monarchs, of granting access to one’s presence, and the dangers of listening with too much sympathy to an importuning subject. In a well-known political reading of Astrophil and Stella, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass make the interesting observation that the fulfillment the poet-lover’s desires can be provided by his queen but not by his beloved: “For her [Stella] to submit to Astrophil’s lust would radically lower her status, while Elizabeth’s accession to a courtier’s ambitions would normally enhance hers.”20 I will argue that, on the contrary, these sonnets suggest the danger both to Stella and to the queen of acceding too readily to a courtier’s desire. Just as we can read Astrophil and Stella as both an iteration of Sidney’s desire for Penelope Rich and, simultaneously, an ironic deployment of the Petrarchan tradition that shows the moral danger of unbridled passion, so we can read in the history of Astrophil both an expression of Sidney’s thwarted ambition as well as a warning for women and queens about the dangers of pity. The opening poem of the sequence famously charts Astrophil’s plan to obtain Stella’s “grace” by inspiring her pity: Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That she (dear she) might take some pleasure of my pain: Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know; Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain. (1.1–4)21

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Sidney’s poet-speaker regards the lady’s pity as a step toward the fulfillment of his desire: as Olivia says in Twelfth Night t when Cesario offers her pity rather than returning her love, pity is “a degree to love” (III.i.123). As was demonstrated in Chapter One, though there may be a distinction between mercy, a godly virtue, and pity, a product of human emotion, the distinction seems to be lost in much discourse of the sixteenth century. Here, Astrophil wants to engage Stella’s pity, but he also wants her grace, a nuanced word that can suggest, among other things, heavenly grace, which in Christian thought accompanies God’s mercy: both are freely given, undeserved, and save mankind.22 If we interpret Astrophil as a courtier as well as lover, we can find evidence as early as this opening poem that he will say or do whatever is expedient to win that pity and grace from his sovereign: he will seek “fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,” suggesting that his grief might be as much posture as reality. Throughout the sequence, Astrophil will repeatedly claim to be sincere, and will characterize himself as Stella’s suffering slave. He contrasts his simple sincerity with the “sweetest style” of other poets who write in traditional Petrarchan oxymorons: “living deaths, dear wounds, fair storms, and freezing fires,” while he displays “all the map of my state . . . / When trembling voice brings forth, that I do Stella love” (6.9, 13–14). Sir Walter Ralegh makes a similar claim of sincerity in one of his poems to Queen Elizabeth when he says, Silence in love bewrays more woe Than words, though ne’er so witty; A beggar that is dumb, you know, Deserveth double pity. 23

Astrophil’s attempt to win Stella’s pity is likewise based in part on his assertion of sincerity: he is silent, or speaks in few words, because his love is authentic. Despite such claims that Astrophil is a plainspoken and heartfelt poet, Sidney provides glimpses throughout the sequence of the manipulative speaker who emerged in the very first poem. Though in Sonnet 40, Astrophil declares himself “a wretch” who has long sought Stella’s “grace,” and says to Stella, “I by thee am overthrown,” a few poems later he begs for grace again in such a way that calls his claims of sincerity and subordination in doubt. In Sonnet 45, Astrophil complains that, though “Stella oft sees the very face of woe / Painted in my beclouded stormie face,” nevertheless she “cannot

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skill to pity my disgrace” (45.2–3). The first two lines echo the opening sonnet in which Astrophil seeks fit words “to paint the blackest face of woe”; again, the reference to “painting” troubles the claim of sincerity. Furthermore, according to Astrophil, a “fable” that Stella heard about two tragic lovers inspired her pity: “Pity thereof gate in her breast such place. / That, from that sea derived, tears’ spring did flow” (45.7–8). Astrophil’s response to this event is striking: Alas, if fancy drawn by imaged things, Though false, yet with free scope more grace doth breed Then servant’s wrack, where new doubts honour brings; Then think, my dear, that you in me do reed Of lovers ruin some sad tragedy: I am not I, pity the tale of me. (45.9–14)

Hinted earlier in the sequence, Astrophil’s willingness to use any means to inspire Stella’s pity is bluntly stated here. The language of this and some of the surrounding poems also reminds us of the figure of the queen as she is shadowed in Stella: Astrophil is her “servant” in Sonnet 45 and, in the following sonnet, he complains to Cupid that she “rules” both of them “with a beck” and “tryannizeth” Cupid by banishing him. These poems invite us to read Astrophil not only as a lover but also as a courtier who feigns emotion in order to elicit his queen’s pity. Sonnet 45 also hints at the conventional belief that women are easy to manipulate because of their emotional nature. Stella heard a “fable” and wept copiously; Astrophil suggests she regard him as a “tragedy,” a “tale,” in order to win a similarly passionate response from her. Astrophil’s words imply that he may be able to sway Stella’s judgment by playing on her emotions, specifically her pity. We can read this poem, and the outcome of Astrophil’s attempts to win Stella’s pity, in the context of anxieties that the queen might prove a poor judge because of her womanish tendency to feel unwarranted pity. The poem that immediately precedes 45, Sonnet 44, is also focused on the lady’s pity, but introduces a new idea that will come to dominate the sequence: the important, even life-giving power of the lady’s presence. Astrophil begins Sonnet 44 by saying that his “smart”—his pain—“may pity claim of any hart” (44.2–3). He argues that Stella’s “sweet heart is of no tiger’s kind.” Nevertheless, no pity is forthcoming: “And yet she hears, yet I no pity find; / But more I

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cry, less grace she doth impart” (5–6). So far, the sonnet is unremarkk able and traditional. In the sestet, however, Sidney introduces a novel idea as he answers the question posed in the octave: How can the sweet and noble Stella be so devoid of pity? I much do guess, yet find no truth save this: That when the breath of my complaints doth touch Those dainty doors unto the court of bliss, The heavenly nature of that place is such That once come there, the sobs of mine annoys Are metamorphosed straight to tunes of joys. (9–14)

Several aspects of these lines are noteworthy. First is the imagery of Stella as the court itself, reminiscent of the elaborate metaphor in Sonnet 9 comparing Stella’s face to “Queen Virtue’s court.” Both images imply Stella’s queenship. The sonnet also dramatizes the situation many readers off AstrophilandStella assumeto be the context in which Sidney wrote this sequence: he is on the outside of the court, bemoaning his lot, finding that the doors are shut against him and that no one inside shows him mercy. The poem establishes a crucial connection between pity and presence: because he is outside, his attempts to inspire Stella’s pity fail miserably. Astrophil has no control over the way his laments are heard inside the “court of bliss” because they are “metamorphosed,” changed from their original form and out of his control. The situation of the absent courtier is vividly imagined in Sidney’s poem, just as it is portrayed in many surviving letters to Elizabeth from various noblemen. In the world of court, being in the actual presence of the monarch was a privilege for which there was keen competition. Paul E. J. Hammer asserts that, because of Elizabeth’s gender, “the status and rewards traditionally to be obtained by physical intimacy with the monarch could not be sought through membership in the privy chamber.”24 Hammer argues that the convention of expressing romantic love for the queen replaced that physical intimacy, but the fact that writers often used the language of romantic love to plead for physical presence suggests that the relationship between presence and romantic language is more complicated than Hammer allows.25 The conventions of Petrarchan love include expressions of intense longing for the presence of the beloved, makk ing it well suited for courtiers who desire to attend on the queen and reap the potential benefits that result from that presence. Absent

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courtiers sometimes write to the queen in the idiom of romantic love to express their anxiety about falling out of favor while away from court. Some of the famous romantic passages from the letters of Sir Christopher Hatton to Queen Elizabeth reflect the anxiety of the absent courtier. Hatton, a great personal favorite of the queen’s, left court to travel to Antwerp for his health in 1573. Far from banished, Hatton was the beneficiary of the queen’s concern to the extent that she sent her personal physician to accompany him overseas. Nevertheless, Hatton’s letters to the queen from this period suggest the insecurity that even a favored courtier feels when he must be away from court. “No death, no hell, no fear of death shall ever win of me my consent so far to wrong myself again as to be absent from you one day,” he writes to her in June of 1573.26 The next month, he writes that “The lack I feel doth make me know your greatest worth. . . . I love yourself. I cannot lack you.”27 Hatton’s passionate protestations of love are coupled with the anxiety that his love will be doubted: “I pray God, you may believe my faith,” he writes in the same passage.28 Courtiers who attended constantly on the queen could presumably provide daily persuasion of their faithful devotion and reap the consequent rewards: after his return from abroad, Hatton continued to serve Elizabeth and was made a privy councilor and vice-chamberlain of the queen’s household in 1577. Sonnet 44 suggests other reasons why access to the powerful woman is important. When Astrophil begs for Stella’s pity, his laments are “metamorphosed” when they enter the court of bliss. Stella’s pity is not forthcoming for Astrophil because she never hears his “sobs.” Absent courtiers often express acute anxiety that they will be misrepresented or misunderstood while they are not present; they fear the queen’s harsh judgment if they are not present to defend themselves. For example, in 1591 when the Earl of Essex led an expedition to assist Henri IV with the siege of Rouen, his letters to Elizabeth reiterate how he longs to be in her presence: “I must nott let this second day passe without complaining to your majestie of the misery of absence. I shall thinke my lyfe very unpleasant till I have ridd myself of this fr[ench] action that I may once againe enjoy the honor the pleasure the sweetnes which your presence is accompanied with.”29 But a reading of the entire sequence of letters suggests that lacking the sweetness of the queen’s presence was not Essex’s most powerful motive for “misery.” Even more acute is his anxiety about how his actions will be interpreted when he is not in

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the queen’s presence to represent himself. He frets about “slander” and writes self-justifying letters to Elizabeth that anxiously express his fear that, in absence, he has lost her favor: “If your majesties favor be no more assured to me then that slander and suspition, which are the basest enemies a man can have, dare threaten to take yt from me I have lived too long. Many men have lived happily by your favor but none shall dye so resolutely for your unkindness.”30 Sidney’s father, Sir Henry Sidney, also wrote letters to Queen Elizabeth that reveal the same worry about being slandered by his political enemies while he was absent from court. Writing from his post in Ireland, Sidney defended himself against her criticisms of the way he was handling his role as viceroy and expressed the belief that he and his actions were being misrepresented by his enemies at court. In one letter, Henry Sidney prepares to answer charges and objections the queen has raised about his conduct; but he reveals his anxiety about the risks of this epistolary explanation, “which . . . I could not so plaineley set downe in Writinge, were it never be so large a Discowrse . . . but having there soche Ennemies to me, and Adversaries to your Prerogatyve and Proffitt, they would impugne (as they have donne) as moche as lay in theim any thinge I should write.” At the end of the letter, Sidney begs that, if the queen is still not satisfied with his explanation, he might himself be allowed to come to court “to answere myne owne Matters, and to prove unto you that to be trewe which I have saied, to the Disprofe of theim, whosoever have informed you to the contrarie.”31 The situation of the absent courtier is particularly precarious because his enemies at court have direct access to the sovereign’s ear, while he, from a distance, must rely on the slow and unreliable progress of a letter which, even when it arrives, may be “metamorphosed,” as was Astrophil’s complaint, so that its intended message is subverted or altogether contradicted. We have few letters written by Philip Sidney to the queen, his letter of advice about her courtship with the Duke of Anjou being a famous exception. One brief letter that he wrote her from Gravesend in November 1585, while on his way to Flushing, does reflect the desire to be well-regarded and judged fairly when away from court. After assuring her that if he learns of any important matter he will inform her of it (“to yowr own handes . . . recommend it”), Sidney writes, In the mean tyme I beseech yowr Majesti will vouchsafe legibly to reed my hart in the cowrce of my lyfe, and though it self bee but of a mean worth, yet to esteem it lyke a poor hows well sett.

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Roger Kuin glosses Sidney’s request that the queen read his heart in the course of his life as “an elegant expression of continuing duty, and a plea for not being misunderstood.” He comments also on the metaphor of Sidney’s heart as a poor house: “its nearness to the Queen confers upon it a choice location.”32 As he departs England, Sidney expresses concern about being misunderstood but also constructs a metaphor that emphasizes the value of closeness to the queen. Astrophil’s desperate desire to be in Stella’s presence may be read both personally and politically: the lover longs for the presence of the beloved and the courtier competes for the privilege of monarchical presence. The plea for presence is closely akin to the plea for mercy, or pity, in the worlds of both the courtier and the courting poet: only in the presence of the powerful woman can her suitor make his case most effectively; he fears her harsh judgment if he is misrepresented; furthermore, he knows that pity is harder to withhold in a personal interview. Astrophil’s attempts to be with Stella, and the uses he makes of that presence when he obtains it, dominate the rest of the sequence. This is a departure from the tradition in which Sidney is working: Petrarch often wishes for the actual presence of Laura but spends much more time recalling her image than actually seeing or attempting to see her. And while Petrarch’s sonnets sometimes testify to the life-giving power of the beloved’s physical presence—in Poem 191, for example, Petrarch compares the sight of Laura to the sight of God, which grants eternal life: “Why should not I live on the life-giving sight of you?”—the poet rarely experiences that actual presence and certainly never abuses it, as Astrophil does. Astrophil and Stella dramatizes the lover-courtier’s desire for the lady-queen’s presence as a means to obtaining her pity and grace, but the sequence also dramatizes the way physical presence can render the lady, or the queen, vulnerable. Sidney’s sequence suggests the risk of offering pity as well as presence. Queen Elizabeth was often chastised because her clemency and forbearance made her realm—and her person—vulnerable. Allowing her subjects to approach her was also a risky business; how to control access to the queen was a problem that perpetually plagued her household. Mary Hill Cole, in her analysis of Elizabeth’s progresses, calls access to the queen a two-edged sword: “Elizabeth’s belief that her dynastic security lay in her popularity . . . ran headlong into the reality that her progresses made her more vulnerable.”33 The queen could and did use public progresses to reward subjects with her presence, and her subjects often used the opportunity of an audience

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with the queen to try and press certain suits. But Cole also describes several assassination plots that revolved around taking advantage of access to her physical presence while she was on a progress.34 The best-known example from Elizabeth’s reign of the way personal access to the monarch could be abused involves the Earl of Essex, who famously rushed to the queen’s bedchamber the moment he arrived at the palace after having left his Irish post without permission in 1599. The story as told by contemporaries emphasizes the queen’s dishevelment (he found her just having arisen from bed with her hair down) as well as the intimacy between the two of them, as Essex is said to have kissed her hands and neck and had a long private conversation with her. No one knows exactly what transpired or exactly how Elizabeth reacted, but we do know that she later commanded him to keep to his chamber and eventually banished him from court. Essex’s desperation to gain access to the queen bespeaks his fear of losing her favor because of the slanders of his enemies; he did fear, perhaps justly, that his letters to the queen from Ireland had been intercepted by his political enemies and that his eloquent pleas on his own behalf had never been received. Astrophil desperately desires Stella’s presence for all of the reasons implied in the accounts of courtiers who want access to the queen: Stella has the power to confer grace on him; her judgment of him might be harsh if he is not present to make his own case; further, there is the suggestion that he can use a personal audience to manipulate her emotions. In Stella’s presence, Astrophil can observe and evaluate her responses. For example, in Sonnet 45, Astrophil watches her reaction to the tale of sad lovers and so learns what moves her. In the sonnets immediately preceding Sonnet 44 in which Astrophil is on the outside of the “dainty doors” of the court of bliss, the poet devotes two poems to Stella’s eyes, which taken together demonstrate the desire for and dangers of presence. In Sonnet 42, Astrophil begs Stella’s eyes to “ever shine on me” (42.8). Interestingly, he apostrophizes the eyes as “O eyes, where humble looks most glorious prove” and as “only loved tyrants, just in cruelty,” before he begs, “Do not, O do not, from poor me remove” (42.5–7). This poem clearly depicts Stella as a sovereign in whose powerful gaze the poet longs to stand; he describes her force as the “majesty of sacred lights,” and begs, “Yet still on me, O eyes, dart down your rays” (11–12). The humble, supplicating tone of the poem and the references to Stella’s majesty (and tyranny) open up the possibility that the poem refers to Sidney’s actual majesty, Elizabeth, and his desire to be in her presence,

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perhaps to regain a position he has lost. The next poem abandons the language of state for a more personal love language, in which the “fair eyes, sweet lips, dear heart” of the woman are enumerated by the speaker. Yet his admission that, with Cupid’s help, he hopes “to prey” on these attributes of the woman justifies her withdrawn and protected heart, the place Cupid goes when he wants “for quiet’s sake [to] remove / From all the world,” for he knows well that in her heart, “no man to him can come” (43.12–14). The two poems are companion pieces about the woman’s withdrawal and the man’s desire for her presence, with the first poem’s language inviting a political reading and the second poem eliciting a more personal reading. But the second poem, with its language of predation, also provides a justification for female withdrawal. The poems work on several levels: the speaker could be expressing political or romantic desire; and the poet could be presenting the speaker straightforwardly or ironically. These three sonnets that register the speaker’s longing to be in the presence of the lady are followed by Sonnet 45, in which the speaker’s willingness to dissemble in order to win Stella’s pity is plainly stated: “I am not I, pity the tale of me” (45.14), which may serve as a final ironic commentary on the way Astrophil will use Stella’s presence to try and gain her pity by any means. Sidney’s sequence also makes apparent the risk that physical presence poses for the lady. When Astrophil is in Stella’s presence, he is increasingly opportunistic and eventually physically aggressive. Even before Astrophil reaches this point, his language bespeaks aggression when he describes his attempts to win Stella’s pity. In Sonnet 61, for example, he says, Oft with true sighs, oft with uncalled teares, Now with slow words, now with dumb eloquence, I Stella’s eyes assail, invade her ears; But this at last is her sweet-breathed defense. (61. 1–4)

The language of assault is obvious, as Astrophil’s words “invade” Stella’s ears and she must mount a defense against them. This language foreshadows what actually happens when Astrophil is alone with Stella. In the Second Song, Astrophil finds Stella asleep and decides to “teach her that she, / When she wakes, is too too cruell” (3–4). His method of correcting her “cruelty” is to kiss her while she sleeps, a moment that he describes using language similar to that of Poem 61: “Now I will invade the fort,” says Astrophil as he realizes

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that her hand, that “waking gardeth, / Sleeping, grants a free resort” (Second Song 13–15). The stealing of the kiss earns Stella’s anger, not only for the act itself but even more for Astrophil’s publicizing of it: he devotes a series of poems to the joys of the kiss, and it becomes clear that Astrophil has gained a kind of power over Stella. Apostrophizing the kiss itself, Astrophil declares, “How fain would I paint thee to all men’s eyes” (81.7). To Stella’s protest, he suggests the only way to silence him: “Stop you my mouth with still still kissing me” (81.14). A moment in which Stella was unguarded and Astrophil had physical access to her led to his veiled threat that he can “paint” that kiss for the world, which she forbids “with blushing words,” stating that she “builds her fame on higher seated praise” (81.8–9). Stella’s fame, that is, her reputation, is threatened because of Astrophil’s access to her physical presence. That threat intensifies in the Fourth Song. This song presents Astrophil and Stella alone together at night, a moment when the two are in each other’s presence with more privacy than ever before in the sequence. Astrophil does not provide any more information than that his “only joy,” Stella, is here—we do not know if he has come uninvited to her room, or fortuitously found her alone in the house, or arranged a clandestine meeting with her. In other words, we do not know the extent of his willfulness or her willingness. But what the reader does know is that, now that they are together and Astrophil begins to press his suit, Stella’s one consistent response is “No.” “No, no, no, no, my dear, let be” is the refrain spoken by Stella at the end of each stanza. We can also infer that in this private moment when he is in Stella’s presence, Astrophil becomes physically aggressive. He importunes her verbally at first—“Take me to thee and thee to me” is his refrain—but in the eighth stanza he asks, “Sweet, alas, why strive you thus? / Concord better fitteth us. / Leave to Mars the force of hands” (43–45). Stella’s “striving” could be verbal, except that Astrophil explicitly refers to “force of hands,” indicating that Stella has had to push him away. Unsurprisingly (to most readers), the very next poem records Stella’s “change of looks,” and Sidney once again uses political imagery to depict Stella as the “judge,” though of course Astrophil protests that he is guilty of nothing but “all faith, like spotlesse ermine” (86.5). Ultimately, time spent in Stella’s physical presence, intimately rather than publicly, leads to Stella’s rejection of Astrophil and a series of poems on absence. Thus the dangers of presence and the pains of absence are the theme of the sequence’s later poems. Poems 87, 88, and 89 all bemoan Astrophil’s absence from Stella, which the poet characterizes as a

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departure forced upon him by duty: “When I was forced from Stella, ever dear, /. . . . / By iron laws of duty to depart” (87.1–4). Yet duty and the “cruel might” of honor, which Astrophil also blames for the separation, do not prevent Astrophil from fantasizing about Stella’s physical presence. In the Tenth Song, Astrophil directs his thoughts to “take up the place for me” (14) and imagines this act in terms that suggest an invasion: “Thought, see thou no place forbear; / Enter bravely everywhere, / Sieze on all to her belonging” (19–21). In this fantasy, in which Astrophil’s thought storms the castle, the roles are reversed, and Astrophil imagines himself as the Prince: Think of my most princely power, When I, blessed, shall devour, With my greedy lickerous senses, Beauty, music, sweetness, love, While she doth against me prove Her strong darts but weak defences. (31–36)

Stella’s pity is no longer necessary; in Astrophil’s fantasy, the ability to “enter bravely everywhere” into the presence of Stella allows him to master her, so that his is the “princely power,” not to be resisted, and her defenses are “weak.” In Astrophil and Stella Sidney dramatizes both his own very real desire to be in the presence of the queen as well as his understanding of the way that a courtier’s access to the queen’s pity and presence can render her vulnerable. Sidney, along with other sonneteers of his period, chose to highlight the role of pity in courtship; we should read their examination of pity not only in the context of political struggles over the queen’s mercy but also in the context of fears about the queen’s ability to judge wisely because of her supposed tendency to be foolishly moved by pity. If on one level Astrophil and Stella voices a courtier’s desire for the queen’s mercy, it also cautions against mercy. It is well known that Sidney favored the Protestant causes that often spawned opposition to the queen’s forbearance and clemency. He was committed to the English cause in Ireland, especially given his father’s role as viceroy; he had witnessed the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre; he was devoted to the defense of Protestants in the Netherlands, a cause for which he gave his life. If he desired Elizabeth’s “mercy” for himself, he was also aligned with those who protested the queen’s mercy on many other fronts.35 Thus Sidney might well contest the image of the clement queen even as he desired her clemency for himself. In his Defence of Poesy, y Sidney proclaims the power of poetry to

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inspire its interlocutors to virtuous action. His philosophy of poetry suggests that Astrophil and Stella might provide an example that could offer guidance to its readers, among them Queen Elizabeth. As Sidney makes clear, both positive and negative literary examples teach important lessons: “If the poet do his part aright, he will show you in Tantalus, Atreus, and such like, nothing that is not to be shunned; in Cyrus, Aeneas, Ulysses, each thing to be followed.”36 Sidney says that the poet can more readily direct the prince by the feigned examples he creates than can the philosopher by the counsel that he offers.37 Astrophil’s attempts to manipulate Stella through inspiring her pity, and the result when she relents, can serve as instruction to Sidney’s prince about the dangers inherent in showing mercy.

Samuel Daniel’s Delia SamuelDaniel’ssonnetsequence,Delia,istiedtoAstrophilandStella by several different threads. A year before the first edition of Delia was published in 1592, twenty-eight of Daniel’s sonnets were appended to an unauthorized printing of Sidney’s sequence. Also, Sidney’s sister Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, was Daniel’s patron and Daniel dedicated the 1592 edition to her.38 Further, there are many echoes off Astrophil and Stella in Daniel’s sonnets. Lisa Klein, inThe ExemplarySidneyandtheElizabethanSonneteer,analyzestheimpactof Sidney’s sequence on the work of several writers who followed him, arguing that contemporary poets who praised and imitated Sidney not only used him to authorize their own poetic vocations but also contested and modified Sidney’s image; thus, their engagement with the exemplary Sidney was fundamentally ambivalent. In her chapter on Daniel, Klein reads Delia as engaged with Sidney’s sequence at its core, imitating and alluding to poems from Astrophil and Stella. For Klein, the sonnet persona crafted by Daniel “significantly refashions Sidney’s desiring Astrophil while acknowledging his debt to the prior poet.”39 Though Klein addresses the Petrarchan rhetoric of Elizabeth’s court and acknowledges that the virtuous beloved of the English Petrarchists might be “one alter ego of the virgin queen,” her reading of Delia omits any mention of the way that Daniel’s construction of Delia and his relationship to his Petrarchan model might signal the poet’s attitude toward the queen herself or the power dynamics of her court. Rather, Klein assumes another real-life powerful woman, the Countess of Pembroke, as the one to whom Daniel addresses his poetic “courtship.””40 This follows the way most critics read Delia; it

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is not a sequence that seems rooted in a genuine love affair. Rather, Delia seems to be an exercise, albeit a very successful one, the first of Daniel’s multivalent writing career in which he tried his hand at lyric, drama, epic, as well as literary criticism. To read Daniel’s sequence with the Countess of Pembroke in mind as his ideal reader and to understand the figure of Delia herself as shadowing the Countess makes perfect sense. Not only does the 1592 Delia open with a dedication to the Countess, but there are also references to Delia’s location that suggest Wilton: Delia “beautifies” the west and lives not on the Thames but on the Avon in Sonnet XLVIII. We should be cautious about making this reading too pronounced, however: Klein points out that we do not know the extent of Mary Herbert’s actual support of the poet, nor do we know when Daniel’s association with the Countess began.41 Nevertheless, the dedication does suggest that Daniel either had or sought her support. But while Daniel pursued aristocratic patronage, clearly he also aspired to royal recognition. His early career included bids for the attention of such court favorites as Sir Edmund Dymoke, the queen’s champion, and Sir Francis Walsingham. According to John Pitcher, Daniel was a favorite of the courtly elite after the publication of his Civil Wars (1595) and he dedicated his Works (1601–1602) to Queen Elizabeth. The queen and various members of her court are known to have owned copies of this folio.42 If Delia is written in homage to Philip Sidney and also as a bid for patronage and preferment from a powerful woman, it only makes sense to perceive not only Mary Sidney but also Queen Elizabeth herself as a possible reader and honoree of the sequence. The name Delia is an anagram of Ideal, suggesting that behind this poetic figure stands not a real woman but the Ideal Woman: beautiful and chaste. The name Delia also alludes to Cynthia, one of the most common representations of Queen Elizabeth; Delia means “of Delos,” the island of Mount Cynthus where Cynthia (Diana) was born. After her death, Elizabeth was memorialized as Delia by Thomas Newton in his poem “Atropoïon Delion, or the Death of Delia.””43 Certain poems in Delia do allude directly to the queen. For example, the very first lines of the sequence call the lady’s beauty a “boundless Ocean” to which the poems, like a river, run 44: Unto the boundles Ocean of thy beautie Runs this poore river, charg’d with streames of zeale: Returning thee the tribute of my dutie, Which heere my love, my youth, my playnts reveale. (I. 1–4)45

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Spenser uses the same image explicitly to compliment Queen Elizabeth in Book VI of the 1596 Faerie Queene: Then pardon me, most dreaded Soueraine, That from your selfe I do this vertue bring, And to your selfe doe it returne againe: So from the Ocean all riuers spring, And tribute backe repay as to their King. (VI.Pr.7.1–5)

In both the first poem of Delia and this Spenserian stanza, not only is Queen Elizabeth represented as the ocean, but the tribute of her subjects is like a river that both springs from and returns back to the ocean. The sonnet inscribed on the famous Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth appears to include the exact same image, suggesting that it was a typical one to describe the relationship between the queen and her subjects: “Rivers of thanckes still to that oc[ean . . . ] / Where grace is grace above.””46 Helen Hackett suggests that it became conventional to associate Elizabeth with the ocean because she was so often figured as the moon that controls the ocean, an idea “used to assert English claims to imperial power.””47 Daniel uses this idea as well in a sonnet that names Cynthia: “My Cynthia hath the waters of mine eyes” (XL). Of all his sonnets, this one most clearly alludes to Queen Elizabeth. Delia is compared to the moon and he, in his devotion, to the sea: Th’Ocean never did attende more duely, Uppon his Soveraignes course, the nights pale Queene: Nor paide the impost of his waves more truely, Then mine to her in truth have ever beene. (XL 5–8)

The words “Soveraigne” and “Queene” together in one line make it difficult to overlook the allusion to Elizabeth. Daniel is comparing his devotion to Delia to the faithfulness of the sea that ever attends on the moon, and by implication to the dutiful attendance of courtiers upon their sovereign. The lines may also allude to Sir Walter Ralegh’s “The Ocean to Cynthia,” or at least to the conceit Ralegh adopted that he was the ocean (Queen Elizabeth’s nickname for him being “Water”) and she the moon that controlled him. In this poem as in so many others in the sequence, Delia is portrayed as hard-hearted: “Yet nought the rocke of that hard hart can move” (9), a metaphor that, found in combination with the idea of this lady as

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a moon goddess, may remind us of Spenser’s portrayal of Belphoebe, who is the moon, the virginal huntress, and also the possessor of a heart like a “rock of stone.” A final Elizabeth reference in the sequence is also a Spenserian one: in Sonnet XLIIII, Delia is found in the “joyfull North” where she “joys” in her honor, “fayrer than the sun” (3–7). The placement of Delia in the north is not in keeping with other references to the Countess of Pembroke’s home in the southwest of England. But it soon becomes clear that the poet’s “joyfull North, where all my fortune lyes” is England itself: Florish faire Albion, glory of the North, Neptunes darling helde betweene his armes: Devided from the world as better worth, Kepte for himselfe, defended from all harmes. (9–12)

This nationalistic image makes much more sense as a compliment to Queen Elizabeth than to Mary Herbert: Delia’s home and the place where the poet’s fortunes lie is England, surrounded by oceans (held in Neptune’s arms) and thus protected from the world (“defended from all harms”). The image of a woman “fayrer than the sunne” on whom “the world smyleth,” one who appears to be seated in the Ocean itself (in Neptune’s arms) recalls Guyon’s description of Gloriana in The Faerie Queene Book II: In widest Ocean she her throne does reare, That ouer all the earth it may be seene; As morning Sunne her beames dispredden cleare; And in her face faire peace, and mercy doth appeare. (II.ii.40.6–9)

Like Delia, this queen is a sunlike beauty reigning over the ocean and visible to the entire world. The language used to describe both Delia and Gloriana in this passage hints at the image of Queen Elizabeth as a beacon for Protestants at home and on the continent: the world smiles on Delia, the woman fairer than the sun, which recalls the woman clothed with the sun in Revelation, an image associated with Queen Elizabeth early in her reign. Even the idea of Gloriana’s peace is captured in Daniel’s final couplet: “Still let disarmed peace decke her [Albion] and thee; / And Muse-foe Mars, abroade farre fostred bee” (13–14). The only quality mentioned by Spenser that Daniel omits is mercy.

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In these passages, Daniel’s descriptions of Delia echo Spenser’s portrayals of Gloriana, suggesting not only that Delia, like Gloriana, shadows Queen Elizabeth, but also that Daniel may share some of Spenser’s political and religious attitudes. Given his association with the Sidney family and his later connection to the Earl of Essex and his circle, Daniel may be voicing, in the context of Protestant causes, the same misgivings as did Spenser and Sidney about the royal image of forbearance and clemency.48 The poet’s complaints about Delia’s merciless cruelty take a central place in this sequence, for reasons that have not been explored fully.49 Pleas for the lady’s “grace” are to be expected in a sequence that most critics understand as an exercise in which the Petrarchan model has been adapted as a vehicle for flattery of an actual or potential patron. But in this sequence, the speaker repeatedly protests Delia’s cruelty, though these protests, as I will demonstrate, are represented ironically by Daniel. Critics who write about Delia inevitably focus on Daniel’s use of the carpe diem theme because he is the first in the English tradition to make use of this idea within a Petrarchan sequence: starting at Sonnet XXX the poet begins to remind Delia that time will eventually destroy her beauty but that his poems will immortalize her; as Klein says, this idea too corresponds to a reading of the sequence as a plea for patronage, since the poet is using the carpe diem theme not to seduce Delia but to remind a devout lady of her mortality and highlight his promise to eternize her through his poems.50 But how to understand the first thirty sonnets in this sequence of fifty, since they relentlessly play on the idea of the lady’s cruelty and the poet’s desperate but unfulfilled desire for her pity? More than half of the first thirty sonnets refer explicitly to the lady’s cruelty and/or the poet’s pleas for mercy, and many others suggest the same idea by characterizing the lady as a tyrant or focusing on her disdain, making this the dominant idea in the sequence. Even in the last twenty sonnets, XXX through L, when the poet turns to his consideration of mortality and the eternizing power of poetry, he still returns to the theme of the cruel fair (Sonnets XXXIX and XLIII). The prominence of this motif in Delia has been noted but not fully explained: Lowry Nelson comments that Daniel “rather too insistently” harps on the “cruel fair,” but takes this observation no further.51 I would suggest that both the pleas for mercy and the reminders of time’s depredations are presented ironically by Daniel; and that like Sidney, whom he imitates in other ways, Daniel is asking his reader to recognize a seduction attempt as just that. Whether Daniel’s

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ideal reader is Mary Sidney Herbert or Queen Elizabeth, Daniel is asking her to read his poems on several levels: they are adept sonnets in the Petrarchan mode; they are flattering portrayals of a beautiful, virtuous, and powerful woman; they certainly could be read as pleas for patronage, but they are also poems that hold their speaker up to a certain amount of ridicule as he exaggerates his claims of his suffering and her cruelty. Like Sidney, Daniel writes a sequence of poems that allows the reader multiple points of view. The poet-lover may on one level be Daniel himself wooing a woman or flattering a patron, but Daniel also expects his reader to recognize this speakk er’s self-deception and attempts at manipulation of a woman. Like AstrophilandStella,Deliaaandthepoemthatfollowsit,TheComplaint of Rosamond, serve as a warning for women against those who would use demands for mercy to render them vulnerable. The endless repetition of the complaint that Delia is cruel lessens the impact of the lament: the speaker characterizes it as a “Hydra,” and indeed his sorrows are a self-enclosed and self-replicating litany of woe (XVI). That his laments are more self-serving than they are sincere is suggested many times in the sequence, perhaps most baldly in Sonnet VI, which begins “Faire is my love, and cruell as sh’is faire.” But at the end of the sonnet, he remarks And had she pittie to conjoine with those, Then who had heard the plaints I utter now. O had she not been faire, and thus unkinde, My Muse had slept, and none had knowne my minde. (VI. 9–12)

The lady’s supposed cruelty therefore provides the excuse for the poet’s self-promotion. Though he claims in the next sonnet that his poems reveal his “error” and bring about his “disgrace,” the later sonnets in which he exalts the eternizing power of his poetry belie these claims. Characterizing Delia as inhumanly cruel serves the speaker’s purpose of poetically pressuring her for “pity” and thus of publicizing himself. As early as the second sonnet, Daniel implies the same idea when his speaker calls his laments about Delia’s cruelty a “monument”: Sigh out a story of her cruell deedes, With interrupted accents of dispayre: A Monument that whosoever reedes, May justly praise, and blame my loveles Faire. (II.5–8)

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These lines suggest not only the self-serving nature of the claim that the lady is cruel but also the inherent threat here—and often found in Astrophil and Stella—that the poems depicting her this way will negatively publicize her. But, like almost every declaration made by Daniel’s speaker, this assertion too is contradicted later in the sequence in the sonnets that claim to immortalize the lady’s beauty and virtue. In fact, this claim completely undercuts the argument that the lady should be “kind,” because if she were, the monument of poetry would not exist. That his poems about Delia will immortalize her despite the depredations of time is a claim that the speaker makes forcefully in the final poems of the sequence: These are the Arkes the Tropheis I erect, That fortifie thy name against old age, And these thy sacred vertues must protect, Against the Darke and times consuming rage. (XLVI. 9–12)

Of course, Delia’s “sacred vertues” would no longer exist were she to yield to the speaker’s incessant demands for her “pitie,” just as the poems themselves would not exist were she not “unkind.” Thus, when the sequence is read in its entirety, the speaker undermines his fundamental argument that Delia is cruel and should show him mercy. We are meant to see this and to understand, finally, that the speaker and the Petrarchan mode in which he writes are self-enclosing and self-consuming. The entire sonnet sequence ends with a four-stanza ode that encapsulates the speaker’s solipsism; it reminds us that the eternal memory of Delia depends upon her refusal to pity the speaker: Eccho daughter of the ayre, Babbling gheste of Rocks and Hills, Knows the name of my fearce Fayre, And soundes the accents of my ills: Each thing pitties my dispaire, Whilst that she her Lover kills. (Ode 13–18)

The echo embodies the eternizing power of these poems: they will forever resound—echo—through the rocks and hills, memorializing the name of Delia because she was fierce and resisted the speaker’s pleas for her pity. The poet may never experience her pity, but he relies on the pity of the world to keep her memory, and his, alive. The

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echo is also a common Renaissance trope for solipsism; as such it reflects the self-contradiction of the poet, who demands a pity that, had it been granted, would have obviated the very poetic achievement that he celebrates. The role of pity in Daniel’s poems is rendered even more complex by the last poem in the original 1592 edition of Delia: The Complaint of Rosamond. Daniel is the first writer to append a complaint to a Petrarchan sonnet sequence, and many critics regard Shakespeare’s sonnets and the “Lover’s Complaint” that follows them to be influenced by the structure of Daniel’s volume.52 The relationship between the sonnet sequence and the complaint is a complex one, with many of the themes and images from Delia reprised and very differently inflected in the complaint. As Pitcher says, there is a “rich flow of internal reference between these poems”: “silence set against speech, life against death, secrecy against open scandal.”53 Obviously the stance of the Delia speaker, importuning a chaste lady for her pity and love, is severely undercut when the sequence is followed by the story of a woman who did relent and suffered a tragic outcome as a result. The story of Rosamond Clifford was familiar to Elizabethans: a country girl of unusual beauty, she was sent to the court of Henry II, became his mistress, and was consequently murdered by his jealous wife, Queen Eleanor. Daniel retells the story in the voice of Rosamond’s ghost, speaking to and through the poet’s Muse, whose words provide an ironic counterpoint to many ideas at play in the preceding sonnets. For example, Rosamond begins her story by speaking of the shame that still attends her even after death: “A sheete could hide my face, but not my sin, / For Fame finds never tombe t’inclose it in” (6–7). Now the fame that the poet promises Delia takes on a sinister new meaning: Rosamond possesses fame that outlives her, just as the poet promised Delia that she would, but in the case of a woman who acquiesced to a lover’s demands, fame is actually infamy, a shameful reputation. Furthermore, the carpe diem theme from the last twenty Delia poems is very ironically presented in Rosamond, since the matron uses exactly that argument to persuade Rosamond to accept the king as her lover.54 But the most complex connection between the sonnets and the complaint lies in the construction of pity and mercy in both poems. Rosamond asks the poet to tell her story in order to inspire pity for her in those who hear it. She refers specifically to Delia, establishing

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a parallel between herself and the poet, since both of them want Delia’s pity: Delia may happe to deygne to read our story, And offer up her sigh among the rest, Whose merit would suffice for both our glorie, Whereby thou might’st be grac’d, and I be blest, That indulgence would profit me the best. (43–47)

Some critics have assumed that this implied identification between Rosamond and the poet predisposes us to feel sympathy for Rosamond, as she and the poet share the common aim of inspiring Delia’s pity.55 But other critics find Rosamond an unsympathetic character: Ronald Primeau finds her a “self-centered, fame-seeking hedonist” rather than a truly repentant and sympathetic character.56 As John Kerrigan says, Rosamond’s “unredeemed nature” has troubled some readers, and it is true that she is less interested in drawing a moral lesson from her downfall than she is in ensuring the sympathetic attention she believes she deserves.57 I would argue that Rosamond is a seductive figure whose rather self-justifying account of her affair with Henry II inspires pity but also has the potential to mislead the reader. Here Rosamond’s language can be read against itself: she says that she has come to “solicit” the poet to “forme” her “case” and “register” her “wrong,” terms that suggest that this complaint will be less a confession and more a self-defense, which indeed it is (33–35). Rosamond’s ghost also describes the pity she wants from Delia in these terms: “That indulgence would profit me the best” (47). The word “indulgence” hints that Delia’s pity would not be truly deserved by Rosamond, not to mention the religious implication—surely troubling to a Protestant reader—that the “indulgence” of a living person could help a dead soul enter heaven, or Elysium. Rosamond’s statement that Delia’s sighs would “profit” her also suggests her self-interest. Taken altogether, Rosamond’s language in the complaint’s introductory stanzas leads us to read her character’s demand for pity just as critically as we read the same demand made by the poet of Delia. The most striking representation of pity in the Complaint t occurs in the description of the casket that Henry sends Rosamond the day before their affair begins (372). The casket has not attracted the critical attention that it deserves; it obviously plays an important role in the poem, coming as it does at the exact midpoint of the work. The

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Complaint t has 106 stanzas; as the first half of the poem comes to an end, Rosamond describes her decision to give in to the King in a line that evokes the image of balanced halves: “Thus stood I ballanc’d equallie precize, / Till my fraile flesh did weigh me downe to sinne” (351–52). Thus, as the poem’s second half begins, the balance has tipped and Rosamond has begun her fall into sin; we are in the brief space of time between Rosamond’s acceptance of the king’s suit and the beginning of the affair itself. As stanza 53 begins, exactly halfway through the poem, Rosamond begins a six-stanza description and discussion of the casket that she received from the king on “the day before the night of my defeature” (372). As Rosamond describes this gift, she elaborates at great length upon the story that is engraved on the lid of the casket: that of Amymone, daughter of Danaus, and her sexual encounter with the god Neptune. Critics often focus on the disparity between the usual story of Amymone and the story as the casket—or Rosamond’s interpretation of the casket—depicts it. Rosamond describes Amymone struggling with Neptune and ultimately being “forc’d to goe” with the god against her will (384). In most versions, Amymone is not violently raped, though in some versions she is coerced by Neptune. She is seeking water when the sea god finds her, and she becomes his lover; in exchange he gives her the gift of the water her family needs. Kelly Quinn explains Rosamond’s depiction of the Amymone scene as an attempt to manipulate the reader: according to Quinn, Rosamond misreads the story, changing Amymone from a woman who sleeps with a king for personal gain into a helpless victim of rape, thereby suggesting that she herself is a rape victim rather than one who succumbed to the temptation of riches and pleasures.58 Kenji Go disagrees, reading these stanzas as a verbal emblem, in which a picture is combined with an interpretation—Rosamond’s in this case—one that invites the reader to unlock its meaning. According to Go, the story that Rosamond tells is not really a departure from the original myth, because the engraving actually depicts, not the rape of Amymone, but the moment when she capitulates. Rosamond describes the tears on Amymone’s face as she lies at Neptune’s feet and says, “O myracle of love, / That kindles fire in water, heate in teares” (394–95). Go says that Rosamond understands the engravv ing to show the moment when Amymone capitulates, stops resisting Neptune, and willingly becomes his lover, just as Rosamond has done / will do in regard to the King.59 Both Quinn and Go focus on the relationship between the original myth and these stanzas, a

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problematic approach given that there are different versions of the story and we do not know which one Daniel knew or is referring to here.60 I suggest that the more obvious disparity in these stanzas lies not in the relationship between the story Rosamond tells and some other version of the myth. Rather, the notable disparity is between what is actually pictured in the engraving and Rosamond’s interpretation of it. What Rosamond sees on the casket is Amymone lying at Neptune’s feet: There might I see described how she lay, At those proude feete, not satisfied with prayer: Wailing her heavie hap, cursing the day. (386–88)

Presumably the line “wailing her heavie hap, cursing the day” is Rosamond’s interpretation, as is the following: “In act so pittious to expresse dispaire” (389). Rosamond cannot hear wails or curses, and she is attributing motive and meaning to Amymone’s cries when she says that they “expresse dispaire.” But apparently she can see a crying figure lying at Neptune’s feet, and she says that tears are also visible: “Her teares upon her cheekes poore carefull gerle, / Did seeme against the sunne cristall and perle” (391–92). But these tears are “all in vaine,” we are told, and though the word “cruel” in never used to describe Neptune, when Amymone lies at his “proude feete, not satisfied with prayer” we should hear an echo from the sonnets; this could describe the relationship between the abject poet-lover and the “cruel” woman who exercises her power over him. In Sonnet XX, for example, the poet bemoans the “cruelst faire, that sees I languish for her, / Yet never mercy to my merit giveth”; he goes on to say that she “tread[s] me downe with foote of her disgrace” (7–8 and 10). A sonnet lady is quite likely to be depicted metaphorically as a cruel tyrant who ignores the pleas for pity by the victim that lies at her feet. And as we shall see, Rosamond eventually will attribute cruelty not to Neptune, but to Amymone. In the following stanza Rosamond continues to focus on Amymone’s tears, which apparently are visible “upon her cheekes” in the picture, and begins the process of shifting the role of victim from Amymone to Neptune. Rosamond addresses the “myracle of love” that kindles “fire in water, heate in teares,” and in this stanza love not only kindles heat, it also “makes neglected beautie mightt ier prove: / Teaching afflicted eyes affects to move” (396–97). The “fire” and “heat” are Neptune’s because these are the “affects,” the

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emotions, that Amymone and her tears are able to “move,” that is, produce, in Neptune—a god of water—as she lies at his feet weeping, a posture which in Rosamond’s telling is now proved “mightier” because Amymone’s beauty provokes Neptune’s desire.61 These lines echo the typical love sonnet rhetoric: the lady’s beauty is powerful and, according to Rosamond, even “afflicted eyes”’—that is, weeping eyes—can be mighty because they can kindle desire. The final lines of the stanza are these: “To shew that nothing ill becomes the fayre, / But crueltie, that yeeldes unto no prayer” (398–99). As Go points out, this is the “moral” that Rosamond takes from the engraving, and it is the point of much of the rhetoric in Delia as well: it does not become a fair maiden to resist; it is cruel to refuse a man’s sexual advances, and cruelty is unbecoming in a fair maiden. But while Go takes this as a straightforward reading of the engraving on the casket, I find it extremely ironic. Rosamond has reversed the roles of Neptune and Amymone, despite the evidence of her own eyes. A situation in which a man is cruelly oppressing a woman has been turned into the sonnet cliché in which the lady—even one who is lying at the feet of her rapist weeping—is “cruel” for not submitting. When Rosamond began telling the story engraved on the casket, she described herself, newly persuaded to accept Henry’s advances, as “wrought to sinne” and so taken away to a solitary grange where she would await the king (365–66). On the day before the king is to come to her, he sends the “casket richly wrought” that Rosamond describes (373). The repetition within two stanzas of the word “wrought” to depict both the casket, “richly wrought,” and Rosamond herself, “wrought to sinne,” is noteworthy. Rosamond has been “wrought,” shaped like a work of art, by King Henry’s wooing and the persuasions of the matron. The casket thus represents Rosamond herself as well as the story that she is telling, which is also a work of art, her work of art designed to inspire pity. The casket was “wrought” for the purpose of “presaging to Rosamond” her fall; Rosamond herself is “wrought” through her own self-describing and justifying words; Daniel’s sonnets were also “wrought” for Delia: all these works of art should be understood as persuasive, and all of them are self-serving in their attempts to persuade. During the Renaissance, anxiety about the persuasive power of both visual images and poetry was common: Peter Herman shows that early modern condemnations of poetry were based on various objections, including the often-voiced opinion that love poetry can entice people, especially women, into unchaste behavior.62 By ironically representing the cliché of the powerful and

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cruel sonnet lady, Daniel invites the reader to consider the potentially destructive effect of this rhetoric. Early in the Complaint, t Rosamond depicted herself using sonnet clichés: King Henry, despite his political power, is her subject: “Whom Fortune made my King, Love made my Subject” (157). She claimed that there was no armor that could defend the king from the “transpearcing rayes” of her “Christall-pointed eyes” (170) in an echo of Sonnet XXIII of Delia in which Delia’s “fairest eyes doe penetrate so deepe” (7). Yet despite these echoes of the sonnet rhetoric that depicts the “cruel” woman overpowering her male subject, Rosamond eventually acknowledges the king’s power over her: “But what? he is my King and may constraine me” (337). The rhetoric of love poetry is used by and against Rosamond: her own false sense of her power helps lead to her downfall, and when she misreads Amymone’s story according to the terms of love poetry, transforming a powerless female victim into a powerful and “cruel” sonnet lady, she reinterprets herself from victim of a powerful king into a powerful woman who is doing what is right—showing mercy and eschewing cruelty—when she submits. It is true that Rosamond’s interpretation is self-serving, but it also parrots the persuasive rhetoric of the sonneteers, positing women who resist as cruel, even in the face of visual evidence that it is the male aggressor who is cruel and the female victim who is suffering, not the other way around. Thus the description of the casket—the actual “picture” of Amymone and Neptune—and the meaning Rosamond derives from it are purposely misaligned by Daniel. We are reminded that art might well misrepresent in order to persuade. The poet-lover might falsely represent the lady as cruel; Rosamond might falsely represent the casket engraving as an instance of female cruelty; Rosamond might misrepresent herself as a helpless victim of King Henry. By the end of The Complaint of Rosamond, the ideal reader of Delia—an authoritative woman such as the Countess of Pembroke or Queen Elizabeth herself—has been asked to reevaluate the idea presented most forcefully in the sequence: that the resisting woman is cruel and that her response to the importuning lover should be pity. Rosamond’s story shows the potentially tragic outcome for the woman if she does not resist, as well as showing, through Rosamond’s interpretation of the casket engraving, the danger of the sonnet rhetoric that positions the lady who refuses as a cruel tyrant in order to persuade her that relenting is virtuous.

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Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti In the Amoretti Spenser shares some of the same concerns that are expressed in Astrophil and Stella and Delia. Like Samuel Daniel, Spenser was connected to the Sidney family and perhaps could be described as a member of the Sidney circle: in 1579–1580 he was at Leicester House in the service of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who was Philip Sidney’s uncle. Spenser and Sidney may have known each other during this time. That Spenser promoted the connection is clear from his dedication of his first major work, The Shepheardes Calender, to Sidney. Spenser also pays tribute to Daniel, praising him, inColin Clouts Come Home Againe, as one who “doth all afore him far surpasse”(417).63Spenser’sAmorettiialsosharesthetripartitestructure that seems to have been Daniel’s innovation—the “Delian” structure noted by Katherine Duncan-Jones and also found in Shakespeare’s sonnets—but with a twist: while the 1592 Delia volume contains the sonnets, followed by Anacreontics, and finally the Complaint of Rosamond, Spenser’s 1596 Amoretti volume features the sonnets, followed by Anacreontics, followed not by a complaint but rather by a celebration of marriage, the Epithalamion. Despite this suggestion that Spenser’s courtship poems lead to a happy resolution, the sonnets still share with Sidney’s and Daniel’s poems a concern with the Petrarchan trope of the cruel fair, and an implicit warning to women about the dangers of pity. Also, like his predecessors, Spenser may have Queen Elizabeth in mind as a potential reader of his poems, despite the seemingly personal nature of the courtship he records. And like Sidney and Daniel, Spenser’s Protestant sympathies might well cause him to criticize rather than celebrate the political mercy of the queen. Critics have read Spenser’s sequence from a variety of perspectives, emphasizing its artistry, its theology, its exploration of gender roles, and often, its strongly autobiographical feeling. Because the poems allude directly to the “Elizabeth” being courted, and we know that Spenser married Elizabeth Boyle around the time the poems were published, it was once assumed by critics that the speaker in the poems should be understood as Spenser himself and that the poems record the courtship of Elizabeth Boyle. The title Amoretti even implies that the poems are tokens of love offered to his beloved as a sign of the engagement that finds its culmination in their wedding day, recorded in the Epithalamion. But even some critics who read the

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sequence autobiographically acknowledge a gap between Spenser and his speaker. For example, S. K. Heninger characterizes the poems as a highly personal wedding gift for the bride, but he also notes that the gift is “a sort of self-conscious joking with the sonnet tradition” in which Spenser “takes a wry stance” vis-à-vis the poet-speaker of the poems.64 Other critics have remarked on this distance that is created between Spenser and his poet-lover, and some have analyzed the different voices and different tones in which this poet-lover speaks, a variety regarded as a weakness by some critics and a strength of the sequence by others.65 Spenser’s sequence, despite its seemingly personal context, can and should be read as a public performance: like Sidney and Daniel, Spenser creates a complex poetic persona and invites his reader to view that persona through a critical lens. But who is Spenser’s reader? If we regard the sequence as autobiography, we would assume Elizabeth Boyle, of course. But even if Amoretti is not, like Daniel’s Delia, explicitly linked to a quest for patronage, Spenser’s publication of these poems suggests the public nature of the project, even if the sequence originated in a private context. These poems were not circulated in manuscript or obtained by an opportunistic printer. Spenser oversaw their publication, apparently shortly after his marriage: if the dates implied in the poems themselves accurately refer to real-life events, Spenser married Elizabeth Boyle in June of 1594; the volume was entered in the Stationer’s Register in London in November of 1594.66 Furthermore, Spenser gestures beyond the private context of the poems by alluding to his “Empresse” Elizabeth and drawing our attention to the name she shares with his beloved (Sonnets XXXIII and LXXIII). Spenser’s direct references to Queen Elizabeth invite the reader to consider the personal and political as analogous and suggest that, as she is for his epic, Queen Elizabeth may also be an assumed audience for this 1596 publication. Ilona Bell, in her persuasive reading off Amoretti, highlights the role of the wooed lady, Elizabeth, as the poems’ auditor and respondent, depicting her as a resisting reader who teaches the poet “to undertake a far more probing exploration” of courtship and his assumptions about women and love.67 According to Bell, the sequence dramatizes the way a self-assured woman time and again challenges the poet’s claims about her and about their relationship, so that the poems may be read not only as the history of a courtship, but also as a dialogue about courtship between lover and lady. One topic of this ongoing conversation about courtship is the appropriateness of Petrarchan

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conventions. Bell examines the poet-lover’s use of Petrarchan exaggeration, along with the lady’s mockery of his conventional love language, pointing out that there is a serious critique embedded in her mockery: the lady wants the lover to know that she recognizes the flattering and manipulative falsehoods of this convention.68 Thus Spenser in his sequence both follows the Petrarchan model so popular in the 1590s, but also, as do Sidney and Daniel, critiques certain aspects of Petrarchism. To the observation that Spenser’s Amoretti contains a serious critique of Petrarchan wooing, I would add this: the Petrarchan trope that dominates this sequence, as it did Daniel’s Delia, is that of the cruel fair. Spenser repeatedly characterizes his lady as cruel and himself as seeking mercy: roughly a third of the sonnets in the first half of the sequence contain references to the lady’s cruelty and/or the speaker’s desire for her mercy or pity. The many overstated allusions to the blood-lust and cruelty of this lady have been taken seriously by some readers, but most critics recognize some form of parody in the more exaggerated poems in the sequence, as for example in Sonnet XX where the speaker characterizes the lady as “more cruell and more salvage wylde, / then either Lyon or the Lyonesse” (9–10). Though the speaker defends his lady’s “portly pride” in an early sonnet (V) as “the thing which I doo most in her admire,” apparently, like courtiers who might decry a sovereign’s too-easy mercy toward others but expect it for themselves, this speaker quickly becomes frustrated when the lady’s proud resistance to the base things of the world extends to his seduction. Her “portly pride” is renamed “rebellious pride” in Sonnet VI, though he still insists that her resistance to seduction is a sign of the lady’s virtue. But by Sonnet X, the virtuous lady has been reframed as a “Tyrannesse” who enjoys seeing “the huge massacres which her eyes do make” (5–6). In Sonnet V, the poet praised the lady’s pride because it implied “scorn of base things”; now, five sonnets later, the speaker asks the Lord of Love to shake the lady’s “proud hart” and make her “bow to a baser make [mate],” presumably himself (11). Like Daniel, Spenser allows the reader to see the speaker’s self-contradictions on the matter of the lady’s resistance, which is called cruelty in men’s love rhetoric. From Sonnet X until the turning point mid-sequence, the accusations of the lady’s cruelty come thick and fast: she is a “cruell warriour” in Sonnet XI, one who entraps him in “cruell bands” in Sonnet XII, and she refuses to “looke with pitty” on his pain in Sonnet XVIII. Spenser allows us not only to hear the lady’s refutation of this accusation against her; he

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also allows the reader to observe the poet’s self-contradictions, so that the typical lover’s complaint about the resisting woman’s cruelty is revealed to be false. The lady’s response also draws our attention to the fact that this accusation is an attempt to manipulate her; it is part of a seduction that fails. In fact, when this lover tries to “soften her hard hart” with his tears, she laughs: But when I pleade, she bids me play my part, and when I weep, she sayes teares are but water: and when I sigh, she sayes I know the art, and when I waile she turnes hir selfe to laughter. So doe I weepe, and wayle, and pleade in vaine, whiles she as steele and flint doth still remayne. (XVIII.9–14)

In the Amoretti, Spenser dramatizes the relationship between two constructed characters: both the poet-persona’s self-contradictions and the lady-persona’s mocking response to his pleas for pity lead the reader to examine critically these pleas, along with accusations that she is cruel. In many of the Amoretti sonnets about mercy and cruelty, the language of monarchical power is used to portray the lady: Fayre cruell, why are ye so fierce and cruell? Is it because your eyes have powre to kill? then know, that mercy is the mighties jewell, and greater glory thinke to save, then spill. (XLIX 1–4)

Mercy is the jewel of the “mighty,” by which the lady can gain “glory,” a claim that recalls Portia’s assertion that mercy is “mightiest in the mightiest” and “becomes / The throned monarch better than his crown” (IV.i.188–89). Conversely, in poems that complain of her cruelty, the lady is called a “Tyrannesse” (Sonnets X and XLIII), and in one poem is depicted as the judge to whom the speaker complains in order to gain justice (Sonnet XII). The argument about mercy and cruelty has political implications, and just as the reader is invited to take the lady’s part and recognize the self-serving manipulation in a lover’s pleas for a woman’s “mercy,” so too the reader can recognize that accusations of cruelty and pleas for mercy in the political sphere should not necessarily be taken at face value. Sidney and Daniel both examined the threat of slander as one tool that might be used in the manipulation of a woman: Astrophil threatens to publicize the kiss (and thus shame Stella) and Daniel’s

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poet-persona tells the story of Delia’s “cruell deeds” in order that readers might praise him and blame her (Sonnet II). Spenser’s speaker never makes this threat—in fact he expresses his own outrage over the “false forged lyes” that someone has told, lies that stirred the anger of his lady (LXXXVI). But the poet of the Amoretti is concerned with the question of how to represent his beloved and expresses doubt about his ability to portray her in terms very like those he uses to address Queen Elizabeth in the proem to Book III of The Faerie Queene. There, he famously asks his “dredd Soverayne” to pardon him for his inability to paint her “glorious portraict” plainly and clearly. InAmoretti XVII, the poet asks “what pen, what pencil” can fully express the “glorious portraict” of his lady’s angelic face. In both the Proem and the sonnet, the poet expresses his fear that he will sully the lady’s / queen’s inexpressible perfection in his attempt to express it. The Proem refers the queen to Ralegh’s “The Ocean to Cynthia” as a work wherein she can see herself portrayed in “living colours, and right hew”; Amoretti XVII ends with the similar declaration that “a greater craftsman’s hand” is needed to express “the life” of his lady. Such similar language and ideas suggest again the correspondence between the poet’s lady and his queen and also that it might profit us to read the Amoretti in dialogue with The Faerie Queene. The two poems share language about the difficulty and danger of describing an indescribable woman, and Spenser depicts his lady in terms similar to those he uses in The Faerie Queene to portray Belphoebe, the figure in whom he invites Elizabeth to see a reflection of her “rare chastitee” (III.proem.5). Both Belphoebe and the lady off Amoretti are remote, self-assured, chaste, and stern enemies of the “sparke of filthy lustfull fyre” ( (Amoretti LXXXIIII). Both are asked to pity a forlorn lover, though it would be closer to the truth to say that the lover off Amoretti repeatedly demands his lady’s pity. The speaker in Amoretti exclaims that his listener must be “no woman, but a sencelesse stone” to remain unmoved by his pleas (LIIII); he characterizes her as having a hard heart (like steel or flint) because she will not “look with pitty” on him (XVIII). “Fayre be ye sure but proud and pitilesse,” he proclaims, “hard and obstinate, / as is a rocke” (LVI). Naturally Spenser never characterizes Belphoebe, acknowledged reflection of Queen Elizabeth, in such harsh terms, but when the virgin huntress is pierced with pity at the sight of the wounded Timias, we are told that the sight is so “heauy” that it “could haue made a rocke of stone

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to rew”—and then a few lines later we are told that “the point of pitty perced through” Belphoebe’s heart, suggesting a correspondence between her heart and that “rocke of stone” (III.v.30). Timias recovers from his physical wound only to sustain an emotional wound when he falls in love with Belphoebe. His lovesickk ness is such that Belphoebe fears for his life, though she does not understand herself to be the cause. She applies “costly cordialls” that do no good because the cure, according to the narrator, would be that “sweet Cordiall, which can restore / A loue-sick hart” (III.v.50). Sonnet L describes a similar situation, in which the poet says that he is suffering from a “double malady,” of “harts wound” and “bodies griefe.” A physician seeks to appease his suffering with “some cordialls”—but the “sweet Cordialls” that would give his heart ease “passe Physitions art.” Though verbal parallels connect Belphoebe to Spenser’s sonnet lady, and Timias to the Amoretti speaker, several important differences exist, maybe most crucially that the poet-lover off Amoretti is not nearly as self-effacing as Timias. Timias never pleads for Belphoebe’s pity or love in Book III; in fact, he castigates himself for ingratitude: Vnthankfull wretch (said he) is this the meed, With which her souerain mercy thou doest quight? Thy life she saued by her gratious deed, But thou doest weene with villeinous despight, To blott her honour, and her heauenly light. (III.v.45.1-5)

Timias resolves to “dye rather, dye” than “so disloyally / Deeme of her high desert, or seeme so light” (III.v.45.6–7). Of course, the situations are different: Belphoebe is a clear representation of Queen Elizabeth; part of Timias’s sense of his unworthiness comes from his “lowly place” as a “meane Squire.” Difference of degree is not a problem that plagues the speaker of Amoretti. However, Timias’s sense that courtship of Belphoebe would be poor thanks for the mercy she has offered him, and would blot her honor, is not a sentiment shared by the lover in Amoretti. Even after the rift between Belphoebe and Timias in Book IV, there is no pleading on the part of the squire; rather, he lives in miserable silence at a distance from his beloved, until the turtle dove helps reunite them, and Belphoebe finally relents and pities him. Spenser’s speaker is no Timias. Rather than suffering in silence, he pleads loudly and often; rather than characterizing the beloved

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as merciful even when she is not providing exactly what he wants, he hyperbolically characterizes her as cruel. Spenser portrays Timias as admirable in his forbearance and respect for his beloved. And though Timias’s attitude toward Belphoebe is colored by her high position, which reflects her role as Elizabeth’s avatar, the speaker in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe expresses a nearly identical attitude toward his beloved Rosalind, who is a shepherdess, not a queen. After describing his visit to Cynthia’s court, Colin is asked about his fair Rosalind by the other shepherds, who speak critically of her because of her “cruelty”: Hobbinol says that Rosalind had repaid Colin’s devotion with “scorne and foule despite” (905), and Lucid says, I have often heard Faire Rosalind of divers fowly blamed: For being to that swaine too cruell hard, That her bright glorie else hath much defamed. (907–910)

But Colin defends Rosalind for her “cruel” resistance in terms reminiscent of Timias, as well as the Amoretti speaker’s defense of his lady’s pride: For she is not like as the other crew Of shepheards daughters which emongst you bee, But of divine regard and heavenly hew, Excelling all that ever ye did see. Not then to her that scorned thing so base, But to my self the blame that lookt so hie: So hie her thoughts as she her selfe have place, And loath each lowly thing with loftie eie. Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to grant To simple swaine, sith her I may not love: Yet that I may her honour paravant, And praise her worth, though far my wit above. (931–42)

The lady of the Amoretti was originally described in similar terms as having a lofty countenance that scorned to look on base things (XIII), and like Belphoebe, whose face is a “heuenly portraict of bright Angels hew,” Rosalind is “of divine regard and heavenly hew” ( Q II.iii.22.2). Most notably, Colin’s final stance is identical to that (FQ of Timias: he claims to be content to honor and praise Rosalind, apparently accepting that he is not worthy to love her or to expect love from her in return. Rosalind plays the part of both the idealized

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beloved and the idealized queen, and indeed critics have noted parallels between Rosalind and Cynthia (Queen Elizabeth) inColin Clout. Colin himself at this moment defends woman’s so-called cruelty, a word that could refer either to the resistance of a chaste lady, or to the virtue of a queen who will not be swayed from the path of righteousness by manipulative pleas for her pity. By contrast to both Colin and Timias, the Amoretti speaker is portrayed as manipulative and aggressive. Though the BelphoebeTimias episode in The Faerie Queene contains some submerged criticism of Queen Elizabeth’s obduracy in the face of her courtiers’ desires, in Amoretti Spenser allows us to look critically at the other side of the coin: the way accusations of cruelty and pleas for mercy can be used to manipulate and ultimately render the woman vulnerable.TheeAmoretti,likeeAstrophilandStellaaandDeliaandtheComplaint of Rosamond, suggests what the lady risks when she does take pity on an importuning lover. There seems to be a turning point in the sequence after which the dominant cruelty-pity motif completely vanishes: the “assurance” sonnets that are numbered LVIII and LIX. The halfway point numerically follows on the heels of these sonnets: Poem LXII, the New Year’s sonnet.69 After this point, the accusations of cruelty and pleas for pity disappear, though it is not clear what, if any, resolution has been reached. The speaker seems to have returned to his earlier assessment of the lady’s “pride,” which is praised again, rather than being characterized as cruelty: in Sonnet LXI, he warns against accusing her of pride, saying that her perfection makes reasonable her “scorne / [of] base things that to her love too bold aspire” (11–12). In Sonnet LXIII, a revision of the traditional Petrarchan sonnet in which the ship sails through stormy seas without finding its port, the poet at last achieves the “happy shore” that he has sought (5). This poem comes immediately after the mid-point New Year poem and signals that the lady has finally accepted the lover. In the next sonnet, the lover kisses her lips: “Comming to kisse her lyps, (such grace I found)” (LXIIII.1). However, these two sonnets that celebrate his success are followed by the first of several that record the lady’s fear: “The doubt which ye misdeeme, fayre love, is vaine / That fondly feare to loose your liberty” (LXV.1-2). Her fear is explained in several sonnets that depict their developing relationship in terms of her captivity. For example, in Sonnet LXVII, the speaker, in another revision of Petrarch, envisions the lady as a deer that he once pursued who now returns only to be “fyrmely tyde” by her erstwhile hunter. Just as in the earlier part

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of the sequence, the poet’s own language as well as the lady’s objections invite the reader to perceive these images of captivity as problematic: in the final line of Sonnet LXVII, the poet describes his “deer” as “with her owne will beguyld”; the ambiguity of that word “beguyld,” suggesting as it does that the lady has been deceived and perhaps victimized, is emphasized by its placement as the final word of the poem. In Sonnet LXXI, the lady has embroidered a picture of herself as a bee captured by a spider, the poet, who assures her that he will make her prison “sweet.” But the lady’s doubt remains embodied in the embroidery that the speaker describes. The remainder of the sequence, while it leads toward a conclusion in marriage and the Epithalamion, suggests that, once she shows mercy, no longer offers “cruel” resistance, and accepts the lover, the lady’s liberty, peace, and even reputation are at risk. The lovers’ “hungry eyes” are never satisfied with gazing on “the object,” as he characterizes the lady in Sonnet LXXXIII, a poem that is followed by his reprimand: “Let not one sparke of filthy lustfull fyre / breake out, that may her sacred peace molest” (LXXXIIII). Almost immediately following this poem is the most troubling one of all, which opens with a very Fairy Queene-like image of slander: Venemous toung tipt with vile adders sting, Of that selfe kynd with which the Furies fell theyr snaky heads doe combe, from which a spring of poysoned words and spitefull speeches well. (LXXXVI.1–4)

Spenser’s sequence does lead toward a happier conclusion than do other sonnet sequences, but the road is neither straight nor smooth. The poet shows how the lover suffers from the lady’s refusal of his suit and joys in her ultimate acceptance. But once the lady takes pity on the lover and relents, her situation becomes less stable and more problematic. Characterized as a captive, vulnerable to lust and slander, the lady was better protected when she maintained her so-called cruelty. Ilona Bell mentions that, by the end of the sequence, the beloved “seems less like a conventional sonnet lady than like Elizabeth I” in her determination to chart her own course and defend her own liberty.70 We do not have a report of Queen Elizabeth’s response to any of the three sonnet sequences discussed here, but we do know that the queen was well able to read between the lines and that on one occasion, she responded in verse to a Petrarchan lament written to

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her by Sir Walter Ralegh in such a way that suggests her understanding of the way Petrarchan rhetoric is being used to persuade her.71 Courtiers, or would-be courtiers, would expect to find in Elizabeth a canny reader who was likely to understand their critical construction of the Petrarchan plea for mercy. If the Amoretti sonnets map the speaker’s education by a self-assured woman, he and his readers are educated politically as well as personally; the lessons learned by the speaker might be taught by his beloved or by his queen. The speaker learns that what a desiring male subject represents as cruelty might, instead, be the female (and female sovereign’s) necessary selfprotection. If her pity is too easily won; if her heart is tender rather than stony; if she shows mercy under strong rhetorical pressure, she may render herself vulnerable to masculine control and lose the sovv ereignty that allows her to be the paragon described by the poet in Sonnet LIX: “Thrise happie she, that is so well assured / Unto her selfe” (1–2). Perhaps this is a lesson that the poet-speaker of Amoretti learns, but it may also be a lesson he hopes to convey to one of his imagined readers, Queen Elizabeth. Sidney, Daniel, and Spenser all write with Elizabeth in mind as an ideal reader, and their poems foreground accusations of cruelty and pleas for pity. Sidney and Spenser may write to woo real-life women; Daniel may write to gain the patronage of the Countess of Pembroke, but all three poets also shadow their queen in the cruel mistress who denies their suits. These poems reflect the cultural tensions generated by Elizabeth’s image as a merciful queen: as individual courtiers, all three poets desire the queen’s “mercy,” understood as her favor, forgiveness, and preferment. However, all three poetic sequences— AstrophilandStella,DeliaandtheComplaintofRosamond,andthe Amoretti—also display mercy’s detrimental consequences. The fear that the queen judges according to emotion rather than reason, and that her mercy makes her, her realm, and her religion vulnerable, is reflected in the warnings against pity expressed in the poetry of Sidney, Daniel, and Spenser.

CHAPTER 4

““A GOODLY MUSICKE IN HER REGIMENT”: ELUSIVE JUSTICE IN The Merchant of Venice

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complex set of factors, including conceptions of femininity, cultural expectations, political expediency, and perhaps personal inclination, shaped an image of Elizabeth as an exceptionally merciful queen. This image was constructed in and by a culture that at times resisted the very clemency that it enshrined. For example, the love poetry discussed in the previous chapter shows that a courtier could simultaneously demand the queen’s mercy for himself and repudiate her clemency when it was extended to others. The resistance to mercy was strongest from fervent Protestants who wanted their queen to take much harsher measures to protect the realm from Catholicism, whether that meant punishing dissenters more rigorously, seeking out treason more vigorously, or taking military action on the continent or in Ireland. Originally, the image of Elizabeth as a clement queen suggested her role as a champion of transnational Protestantism; eventually, however, that image was at odds with the actions demanded by her militantly Protestant subjects.Shakespeare’sMerchantofVeniceengagesthesetensionsbystaging a queenly figure, Portia, whose judgments drive the play and in whom mercy and rigor are apparently reconciled. The tension between sustaining and resisting the image of the clement queen is nowhere clearer than in sermons preached before Elizabeth on the subject of religious enemies. A happy balance between revered queenly mercy and punitive monarchical justice was necessary but elusive, according to the complaints voiced in some of these sermons. In Thomas Drant’s 1570 sermon chastising Elizabeth for her supposed “mildnesse” in the face of the Northern Rebellion, the preacher uses an unfavorable comparison between his queen and the biblical King David to make this point. Besides

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contrasting David’s destruction of “Gods enemies” with the queen’s failure to eradicate religious threats, Drant also claims that David achieved a balance that Elizabeth lacks: David played a song of judgment and mercy, plucking both strings and creating a harmonious kingdom as a result. “Our Prince,” says Drant, “hath yet but stricken the one string, and played upon mercy: but if she would now strike upon both the stringes, and let her song be of mercy, and judgment, then there would be a goodly musicke in her regiment.”1 As the sermon proceeds, the definition of “goodly musicke” becomes clear. Drant wants Elizabeth to render harsh judgment, not against all, but against her religious adversaries; he assures Queen Elizabeth that it is “both good policie and good divinitie, to punish Gods enemies, and her enemies,” though at first he names no specific foes. But after promising her repeatedly that she can be severe—like Moses, or Solomon, or David—and yet still be called “a milde, and a mercifull Prince,” Drant explicitly names Roman Catholics as the enemies of the queen and of God: “The worst traitors to God, and most rebels to the Prince, are those Papistes.”2 Drant’s demand that Elizabeth execute harsher justice against “Gods enemies” is a frequent refrain during the queen’s reign, but so is the desire for “goodly musicke.” A harmonious balance between severity and lenity seems, for Drant and many others, to mean that the queen should maintain her reputation as a mild and merciful prince even as she treats her religious enemies with great severity. In this chapter, I will argue that Portia in The Merchant of Venice is Shakespeare’s most complete and complex representation of the mercy paradox: the conflicted fantasy that the queen should stand for mercy, yet enact rigorous punishment, especially against those whom Drant called “Gods enemies.” Like Spenser’s Mercilla, Portia simultaneously represents tender mercy and enables harsh justice; she embodies the demand for “goodly harmony” in that she prevents violence and vengeance, but she also enables punitive “justice” to be directed at Shylock, who can be read as one of those enemies against whom Elizabeth’s preachers warned: a threatening religious “other.” But after the harsh judgment handed down in the courtroom scene, Portia’s final, private act is to grant to Bassanio the mercy that was denied Shylock. In these and other respects, Merchant of Venice, in its representation of Portia, interrogates the paradox of Elizabethan mercy. Though we do not know for certain when Shakespeare wrote Merchant, t it probably dates from the mid-1590s, some years after the

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particular crises of Elizabeth’s reign that produced the strongest calls for rigor: the Northern Rebellion (1569) and the trial of Mary Stuart (1586). However, one could say the same about Book V of The Faerie Queene; yet Mercilla’s condemnation of Duessa was immediately recognized as an allegory of Elizabeth’s condemnation of Mary when the second edition of The Faerie Queene was published in 1596, despite the fact that Mary Stuart had been executed nearly ten years earlier, in 1587. I do not suggest that we read Portia’s treatment of Shylock as an allegory of some particular incident. Rather, I suggest that Portia is a character who reflects certain aspects of Elizabeth’s representation that were in tension throughout her reign. Furthermore, debate about the queen’s response to religious conflict and arguments that she was too mild were still fully present in the 1590s. As discussed in Chapter Two, Elizabeth’s Irish campaigns had sparked criticism that she was inconstant and parsimonious, though Spenser in his View of thePresentStateofIrelandattributesElizabeth’ssporadicIrishpolicy to the fact that she is “by nature full of mercy” and cannot bear to hear of her Irish subjects’ suffering. The queen was also under pressure in the 1590s to take stronger action against Spain: the threat of a second Spanish armada loomed, motivating the Cadiz expedition of 1596 with its controversial results. Though she was not subject to attacks on her clemency as direct as those voiced in the 1570s and 1580s, Elizabeth was still subject to strong criticism for her lack of severity in responding to these political situations, all of which were religious conflicts at heart. The Earl of Essex and his faction passionately urged a strong military response to Spain and vehemently opposed the possibility of a negotiated peace. Reading Merchant of Venice in the context of ongoing tensions over Elizabeth’s mercy as well as the immediate context of Catholic threats from the continent and Ireland permits a more complex understanding of the way the play interrogates ideas of Elizabethan justice and mercy. During the first three acts of the play, Portia has no direct connection to the struggle between Antonio and Shylock or to the debate between justice and mercy. But even before Portia steps into the legal battle over the pound of flesh, Merchant t invites us to see her as a queen and a judge. The contest to win her hand, for example, seems to hint at the courtships of Queen Elizabeth and the queen’s difficult task of choosing the proper husband.3 Portia’s damning judgments of the suitors derive from national stereotypes: the French lord is giddy and shallow; the German lord is a drunkard; and the Scottish lord quarrels with the English lord. These national stereotypes

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contribute to the play’s exploration of prejudice; however, they also might have reminded the original audience of the difficulties the queen had faced in the past as she tried to make decisions about potential husbands. Popular objections to Elizabeth’s foreign suitors were the main deterrent to marriage, and these objections often reflected the era’s religious tensions, as Catholic suitors were seen as especially problematic.4 Though Elizabeth was long past marriageable age in the 1590s when Merchant t was composed, Portia as well as other androgynous heroines of Shakespearean comedy written during this decade recall legendary aspects of the famous queen. As Leah Marcus has argued, the sexually composite women of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies—Rosalind, Viola, Beatrice, and Portia—resonate with the image of the young Elizabeth: authoritative and powerful but still potentially a wife and mother. These characters, says Marcus, “offer a fecund, generative vision of the cross-dressed yet sexually available virgin—a vision which gains some of its nostalgic energies from the fact that it comes too late.””5 Portia’s very name conjures an image of a woman who, like Queen Elizabeth, is exceptional in her virtue, strength, and wisdom—all the qualities necessary for proper judgment. When Bassanio speaks of Portia to Antonio in the first scene of the play, he provides this context: “Her name is Portia, nothing undervalu’d / To Cato’s daughter, Brutus’ Portia” (I.i.165–66). By alluding to Portia, the wife of Brutus, Bassanio calls to mind Shakespeare’s character inJulius n Caesar as well as the source for that play, Plutarch’s Lives. In that work, Portia is described as “excellently well seen in philosophy, loving her husband well, and being of noble courage, as she was also wise.”6 Before she approached her husband to ask him to confide in her, she tested herself in order to prove that she was reliable and able to keep a secret by privately wounding herself, giving herself a “great gash in the thigh” with a razor. She bore the pain and subsequent fever silently and stoically; only after proving herself did she demand Brutus’s confidence, saying, “I confess that a woman’s wit commonly is too weak to keep a secret safely. But yet, Brutus, good education and the company of virtuous men have some power to reform the defect of nature. And for myself, I have this benefit moreover: that I am the daughter of Cato and wife of Brutus.”7 Like Queen Elizabeth, Plutarch’s Portia is an exception to the “rule” that women are weak, and she transcends a woman’s natural infirmities through education and the company of virtuous men. As Linda Shenk has demonstrated, the

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image of Elizabeth as a “learned queen” was powerful and popular, and suggested not only the queen’s capability but also positioned her as champion of transnational Protestantism.8 Shakespeare’s Portia is similarly strong-minded and learned; and when she plays the “wise young judge” in the courtroom, she asserts Christian hegemony against a threatening religious other. Her ability to control a Venetian courtroom and use the law to undermine the bond and defeat Shylock sets her apart from other heroines of Shakespearean comedy. Rosalind, Viola, and Beatrice are all clever, but none is learned in the way that Portia appears to be. Furthermore, none of the other heroines of Shakespearean comedy uses a masculine disguise to infiltrate an exclusively male institution such as the court of law. Rosalind and Viola (and later Imogen) adopt their disguises for self-preservation, and Rosalind and Viola use their male personae to pursue a romantic relationship. In all of these cases, we could say that the characters are reminiscent of the queen in their androgyny: each dons a masculine role just as she does, arguably, as a reigning monarch. But only in Portia’s case is the parallel truly apt, because only Portia inhabits a masculine role in a public space. Portia’s rhetoric throughout the play is also reminiscent of a strategy that was often employed by Queen Elizabeth: the disarming claim of feminine weakness coupled with an assertion of monarchical power that occurs in a number of Elizabeth’s speeches, none so familiar as the words with which she exhorted the troops in 1588: “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too.”9 This strategy also played a part in Elizabeth’s judgments, as she often insisted on her naturally clement nature at moments when she executed justice most harshly. Portia frequently employs a similar strategy, as, for instance, in her conversation with the Prince of Aragon: here she is simultaneously majestic and mild, to paraphrase Sir John Hayward’s description of Queen Elizabeth’s “coupling mildness with majesty.”10 Portia authoritatively asserts the rules of this contest— “If you fail, without more speech, my lord, / You must be gone from hence immediately”—but humbles herself at the same time: “To these injunctions every one doth swear / That comes to hazard for my worthless self” (II.ix.7–18). To the audience, privy to Portia’s caustic remarks about her unwanted suitors, it is clear that the authoritative Portia is the real Portia; her humility is a guise. But as her failed suitors read aloud the scrolls’ harsh judgments, Portia’s meek pose seems to relieve her of any responsibility for their fates.

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This strategy is most apparent in her speech following Bassanio’s choice of the correct casket. When he steps forward and asks her to confirm that he has indeed won her hand in marriage, rather than offering a definitive judgment, Portia modestly declares herself merely “an unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpracticed,” who will submit herself to the direction of her new husband. Portia’s depiction of her own deficiencies quickly gives way to her assertion of power: “But now I was the lord / Of this fair mansion, master of my servants, / Queen o’er myself” (III.ii.159, 167–69). In making a disarming though surely insincere statement of her inadequacies and claiming that she needs to be directed by Bassanio, Portia follows a common rhetorical tactic of Elizabeth’s, deploying her supposed “feminine weakness” in order to make her subsequent assertion of power more palatable to her audience.11 Portia has in fact declared herself a queen, though she refers to a queenship over herself, a kind of self-determination. Bassanio’s response to her speech explicitly compares Portia to a prince: Madam, you have bereft me of all words, Only my blood speaks to you in my veins, And there is such confusion in my powers, As, after some oration fairly spoke By a beloved prince, there doth appear Among the buzzing pleased multitude, Where every something, being blent together, Turns to a wild of nothing, save of joy Express’d and not express’d. (III.ii. 175–83)

By comparing his internal “confusion” to the response of the “buzzing pleased multitude” after a prince’s oration, Bassanio not only imagines Portia as a monarch but himself as her subject; thus Portia’s “queenship,” which in her speech seemed a personal quality, has been recast in Bassanio’s speech as a public quality, in that he envisions Portia as a prince who has given a public oration to the multitude. When Portia dons her masculine disguise and appears as the doctor of law in a Venetian courtroom, she most fully embodies the conflicting fantasies of Elizabeth as a judge who can act as both a tender, merciful queen and rigorous scourge of religious enemies. Portia’s words and actions project a merciful image even as they simultaneously enact a punitive justice. Portia’s is the voice of mercy, responding to the apparently hopeless case against Antonio with the words, “Then must the Jew be merciful” (IV.i.182). In her speech to Shylock,

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“The quality of mercy is not strained,” she supposedly attempts to persuade him of mercy’s inherent value. Critics have pointed out that Portia’s role, interceding with Shylock on behalf of Antonio, suggests that of the Virgin Mary in the medieval Processus Belial, in which Mary intervenes with a strict judge—the devil—on behalf of mercy for a sinner.12 But Portia’s seemingly Marian intercession should not be read as a sincere attempt to win Shylock’s mercy for Antonio. Portia speaks of mercy as a kingly y attribute that “becomes / The throned monarch better than his crown” (IV.i.188–89). Mercy is “mightiest in the mightiest,” she claims, and monarchs are most godlike when they practice it: His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this sceptred sway, It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice. (IV.i.190–97)

Fully half of this famous speech is devoted to an analysis of the role of mercy in kingship. Portia’s claims about the importance of monarchical mercy are completely traditional: mercy is a godlike virtue, and in practicing mercy, monarchs reveal their true greatness and reflect their quasi-divine natures. But why should these claims about monarchical mercy be the focus of Portia’s speech to Shylock? This is probably not a portrayal of mercy that would appeal to the relatively powerless Shylock. Rather, the beautiful paean to kingly mercy suggests that Portia shadows Queen Elizabeth; the speech identifies her with a monarch’s godlike mercy while at the same time alienating Shylock even further from the demand that he must show mercy to Antonio. Portia brilliantly manages this courtroom drama: she succeeds in reclaiming her money, saving Antonio, defeating Shylock, and entrapping Bassanio. Her position in the Venetian court reflects that of Queen Elizabeth: asked to render judgment but expected, because of the traditions that adhere both to femininity and queenship, to propose mercy. As Drant expressed it in his sermon, Queen Elizabeth must play both the string of judgment and the string of mercy. Portia successfully answers both demands by apparently pleading the case for mercy but actually luring Shylock to reject that mercy and insist

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upon the letter of the law by repeatedly assuring him that “lawfully” he may claim the pound of flesh (IV.i.231–32). Though the “quality of mercy” speech is very familiar, we often overlook the last few lines. After concluding her meditation on mercy, Portia says to Shylock, I have spoke thus much To mitigate the justice of thy plea, Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice Must needs give sentence ’gainst the merchant there. (IV.i.202–5)

In essence, Portia is telling Shylock that if he presses his suit against Antonio, he will win. If her true intention is to convince him to drop his plea, these lines make little sense; Portia covertly invites Shylock to continue demanding the pound of flesh even as she overtly discourages him. Both at this moment and later, in her dealings with Bassanio, Portia employs a tactic that Queen Elizabeth frequently used, according to the memoir of her godson, Sir John Harington. He describes the way that the queen would invite, even encourage, someone’s opinion, and then use that opinion against them later. Harington quotes Sir Christopher Hatton as saying, “The Queene did fish for men’s souls and had so sweet a baite, that no one coude escape hir network.” Harington expands on this idea, describing how Elizabeth would “cause everie one to open his moste inwarde thought to her,” sometimes to their consequent regret when she “disprove[d] to their faces what had been delivered a month before. Hence she knew every one’s parte, and by thus fishinge, as Hatton sayed, she caught many poor fish, who little knew what snare was laid for them.”13 Portia uses a similar strategy with Shylock and, later in the scene, with Bassanio. In her guise as the doctor of law, Portia “fishes” for the “inward thought” of both men, which will allow her, later, to place the blame for the consequences on them rather than on herself. Shylock, of course, has openly pursued Antonio’s pound of flesh, but at the end of Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech, when she promises him success in the court if he demands strict justice, that is precisely what he continues to do, committing himself more and more adamantly to the exact letter of the law. In her “quality of mercy” speech, Portia reminds Shylock that “in the course of justice, none of us / Should see salvation” if it were not for God’s mercy (IV.i.199–200). But after Portia goes on to suggest that Venetian law will inevitably rule against Antonio, Shylock explicitly rejects

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that mercy and embraces strict justice: “I crave the law, / The penalty and forfeit of my bond” (IV.i.206–7). Shylock’s demand for pure law, unseasoned by mercy, is a stance that Portia will use against him moments later when she grants him exactly what he has demanded, the letter of the law: flesh but no jot of blood. “The Jew shall have all justice. Soft, no haste. / He shall have nothing but the penalty” (IV.i.321–22). If we assume that Portia comes into the courtroom knowing that a precise reading of the bond’s language will free Antonio from the threat of Shylock’s knife, then we can see that much of what she says and does here serves another purpose: throughout this scene, Portia repeatedly distances herself from the severity she will eventually enact. She is willing to take credit for attempts at mitigation: “I have spoke thus much / To mitigate the justice of thy plea” (IV.i.202–3). But when she voices a harsh judgment, she attributes that judgment to the law, or the language of the bond, or Shylock’s previous demands—never herself. By seeming to argue for mercy, she leads Shylock to insist publicly that he wants only what the bond decrees. Just as she initially seemed to stand for mercy, Portia seems to stand for charity when she asks him to have a surgeon nearby before he cuts the pound of flesh from Antonio. When Shylock reiterates his reliance on the bond—“Is it so nominated in the bond?”—Portia responds with, “’Twere good you do so much for charity.” Shylock’s answer, “I cannot find it, ’tis not in the bond,” further relieves Portia of responsibility for what she is about to do: rule that Shylock shall have nothing but the bond he has repeatedly demanded. Of course, Portia has not finished playing the string of judgment when she denies Shylock the pound of flesh. Critics who would see her as a figure of Marian mercy must contend with what Portia does next: “Tarry, Jew, / The law hath yet another hold on you” (IV.i.346–47). Surely a Marian figure who stands for mercy and charity would not persecute her defeated enemy in this way. But even as Portia introduces the new charge that Shylock, an alien, has broken Venetian law by seeking the life of a citizen, she still manages to distance herself from the process of Shylock’s destruction. Unlike Spenser’s Mercilla, Shakespeare’s Portia does not execute justice between the pages or between the acts: both the dismantling of Shylock’s claim and the destruction of Shylock himself happen onstage. But Portia is safely distanced from the final judgment of Shylock. Not only does she portray Shylock himself as responsible for the loss of the bond and his principal, but as soon as Portia raises

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the issue of Shylock’s supposed violation of the law of Venice, the actual decisions about Shylock’s money, life, and religion are placed in the hands of the Duke and Antonio. According to Portia, the law of Venice has a hold on Shylock and his life “lies in the mercy / Of the Duke only, ’gainst all other voice” (IV.i.355–56). The Duke spares Shylock’s life but takes his money and goods, which leads Shylock to cry, “Nay, take my life and all, pardon not that: / You take my house when you do take the prop / That doth sustain my house” (IV.i.374–76). And it is Antonio who demands that Shylock convert to Christianity under the threat of losing even more of his money and property, and the Duke who adds a renewed threat of death to Antonio’s demand that Shylock renounce his religion. Portia has given the Duke and Antonio the tools and the instructions to dismantle the “alien threat,” but her hands, one might argue, remain clean. We might recall the strange history of the execution of Mary Stuart and find a parallel: Elizabeth in that case signed the death warrant and then apparently tried to withhold it. She claimed that the warrant had been dispatched without her approval, and the story of her rage when she learned about Mary’s execution is legendary. What no one knows is the extent to which Elizabeth’s disavowal of knowledge or complicity was sincere. When she signed Mary’s death warrant, Elizabeth provided her councilors with the tool they needed to destroy Mary, but by claiming that she never agreed to dispatch the warrant, Elizabeth tried to deny responsibility for that execution. What Portia does in Act IV of Merchant t is similar, in that she provides the tool to eradicate a man who might be seen as a threat to the Venetian state without taking direct action against him. If Elizabeth was concerned about losing her reputation for “mildnesse,” then it would have been important for writers to tread carefully when depicting any rendering of judgment by the queen. Thus Spenser’s Mercilla condemns Duessa between the cantos; and thus Portia herself provides only the means by which to destroy Shylock, leaving the actual destruction to the Duke and Antonio. In this ability to divest herself of responsibility for harsh actions, Portia resembles one of Shakespeare’s most memorable monarchs, Henry V. Both Henry and Portia use rigor and mercy as aspects of a performance designed to achieve their ends while avoiding accusations of severity. Many critics have read Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V as interrogations of political authority, and as part of that interrogation, the plays explore the uses of theatricality. Stephen Greenblatt comments that Henry V’s insistent reminders of its own

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theatricality—such as the Prologue’s demand that the spectators use their own imaginary powers to construct the king and his wars— are a reflection of Elizabeth’s mode of power, which depends on the engagement of spectators in a theatrical display.14 Just so, the theatrical displays of kingly mercy and rigor in Henry V generate the same sort of tension between image and action described in this book. The play dramatizes the promotion of an image—Henry V as a merciful Christian monarch—alongside harsh and often violent actions that contradict that image. The critical history of Henry V suggests this tension: some have regarded Henry as the “mirror of all Christian kings” praised by the Chorus, while others see him as a Machiavellian politician embarking on an unjust war in order to solidify his own power. Henry’s own words and actions can produce these divided reactions, and as Gunter Walch has shown, the Chorus’s mythologizing of Henry often conflicts with what is actually represented on stage, drawing the audience’s attention to the actual process of representation; thus Shakespeare in Henry V explores the process by which representations of power serve an ideological function.15 Henry’s self-representation, often achieved theatrically, serves to promulgate the image that many critics accept, that of the ideal Christian king. It is true that Henry does not always paint himself as exceptionally merciful, as Queen Elizabeth did; however, in a play that depicts the invasion of France, the sentencing to death of traitors and criminals, an assault on a city, and a bloody battle, the man responsible for all of these actions consistently denies responsibility and makes others answerable for his decisions. Henry uses stage management and rhetoric so that the absence of mercy is always attributed to someone else. In the second scene of the play, Henry seeks justification for his claim of the throne of France by ceremoniously asking the Archbishop—in front of the court—to “justly and religiously unfold / Why the law Salique, that they have in France, / Or should, or should not, bar us in our claim” (I.ii.10–12). Henry also emphasizes the importance of an honest answer, reminding everyone of the violence and bloodshed that will result from a war with France. “Take heed how you impawn our person, / How you awake our sleeping sword of war,” says Henry; and he claims that he will hear whatever the Archbishop tells him “and believe in heart, / That what you speak is in your conscience wash’d / As pure as sin with baptism” (I.ii.21–22 and 30–32). This demand for sincerity serves to establish the persona that Henry will claim a moment later when confronting the Dauphin’s messenger: “We are no tyrant, but a Christian

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king, / Unto whose grace our passion is as subject / As is our wretches fett’red in our prisons” (I.ii.241–43). Henry claims that his “sleeping sword” is not roused by passion, as a tyrant’s might be; only a righteous moral justification will compel his rigor. But the audience knows that Henry is well aware of Canterbury’s ulterior motive for promoting war with France, a fact that calls into question Henry’s supposedly heartfelt belief in Canterbury’s sincerity. In the first scene, we learn that the Archbishop has offered Henry what is in essence a bribe, to obtain his support for the Church in opposition to a bill now in Parliament. The bribe concerns the invasion of France: “to give a greater sum” of church money than ever offered to a monarch before, for use “in regard of causes now at hand, /. . . . As touching France” (I.i.77–79). Though the private conversation between the bishops in the first scene does not unequivocally establish that Henry has already decided to invade France, it does suggest that plans may have gone farther than the following public scene suggests they have. When Henry asks the Archbishop publicly if he can “with right and conscience” claim the French throne, the Archbishop answers, “The sin upon my head, dread sovereign!” (I.ii.96–97). Surely this answer is exactly what Henry has been seeking. As R. Scott Fraser says, “The king has . . . stage-managed a scene in which the justification for the war is put on another’s head.”16 Henry casts himself as righteous by assuring that the Archbishop publicly accepts responsibility for the justice of the war, much as Portia leads Shylock to say, “My deeds upon my head!” (IV.i.206). Shylock is responding to Portia’s claim that we ought to show mercy to others because we expect and need God’s mercy: “We do pray for mercy, / And that same prayer doth teach us all to render / The deeds of mercy” (IV.i.200–2). When Shylock asserts that he will bear all responsibility for the justice or injustice of his deeds, without reference to mercy, he has (arguably) publicly absolved Portia of responsibility for the harsh judgment he will receive. Henry places responsibility for the impending war not only upon Canterbury but also upon the French themselves, specifically the Dauphin. After he is insulted by the Dauphin’s gift of tennis balls, Henry takes the opportunity to shift the responsibility for the war’s bloodshed away from himself and onto the French prince. The Dauphin’s joke will make “thousands weep” as wives lose their husbands and mothers lose their sons: And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his Hath turn’d his balls to gun-stones, and his soul

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Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance That shall fly with them. (I.ii.281–84)

Henry acknowledges that he will be vengeful—as he says, “I am coming on / To venge me as I may” (I.ii.291–92). But, according to this speech, the Dauphin’s soul will bear the responsibility for Henry’s violent vengeance and its effects on the French people. Henry’s speech to the citizens of Harfleur is similar: it simultaneously threatens and disclaims cruelty. Henry conjures up a horrible vision of rape, pillage, and savagery, telling the citizens that unless they surrender, he will unleash his soldiers to prey upon their daughters, bludgeon the elderly, and spit babies on pikes. In this extremely theatrical speech, Henry explicitly rejects mercy: “The gates of mercy shall be all shut up” (III.iii.10). Nevertheless, he claims that, if his soldiers ravage the city, the responsibility will lie with the citizens themselves; in reality, it is they who will have rejected mercy: “Therefore, you men of Harflew, / Take pity of your town and of your people” (III.iii.27–28). In this scene, Henry uses rhetoric alone to claim that someone else, not he, lacks mercy. An even more theatt rical method of achieving the same end occurs when Henry discovv ers and condemns the traitors Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey. Just as, in Act I, Henry characterized the Dauphin as responsible for a war that Henry himself had already decided to undertake, here he sets a scene and manipulates events, not in order to reach a decision about the fate of the three traitors, but in order to place the responsibility for his unmerciful response on them and remove it from himself. Just as Portia leads Shylock to reject mercy, so also Henry manipulates Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey to recommend against mercy in the case of a man who railed against the king. Having led them to commit themselves to harsh punishment in a case where the king’s security is threatened, he is able to make them, rather than himself, responsible for their own death sentences. When the three lords beg mercy, Henry responds, “The mercy that was quick in us but late, / By your own counsel is suppress’d and kill’d. / You must not dare (for shame) to talk of mercy” (II.ii.79–81). Henry has again staged a scene that allows him to project the responsibility for harsh or unmerciful actions onto others. Like Shakespeare’s Henry, Portia ultimately can place the blame for her judgment elsewhere. Portia and King Henry are similar in their aims and methods, takk ing a harsh course of action but projecting the responsibility for that harshness onto others. But neither Portia nor any avatar of Queen

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Elizabeth is likely to claim openly the role of punisher or avenger, as King Henry does. One of the primary distinctions between representations of kingly and queenly power lies in this: Henry plays the role of avenger—of his honor which has been insulted by the Dauphin and the French refusal to recognize his right to the throne. He plays the role of attacking warrior—and he makes it clear that this is indeed a theatrical role in the speech wherein he explains to his soldiers how to act the warrior’s part. Henry plays the role of punitive judge when he sentences the three traitors to death or endorses the execution of his old friend Bardolph. Queens are traditionally expected to play a different role. Portia’s first act in the courtroom, memorialized by a powerful and beautiful speech, is to adopt the traditional queenly role of intercessor. The echo of Marian intercession that critics have noted in Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech could just as well be described as an echo of medieval queenship, since the queen’s conventional posture of intercession derives from the identification of earthly queens with Mary, the queen of heaven in medieval Christian tradition.

The Case of Roderigo Lopez Shylock is a religious “other” and an alien; Portia’s claim that he is now vulnerable to prosecution under the law of Venice is based on his status as a foreigner who has threatened the life of a citizen. Jews were no particular threat to Elizabeth’s throne, though the recent case of Roderigo Lopez, Elizabeth’s personal physician who was found guilty of plotting to murder her, may have inspired a wave of anti-Semitism, as some have argued. Many critics have read Merchant as a commentary on or reflection of the Lopez case, emphasizing Lopez’s Jewish heritage and the anti-Semitism that was certainly present in the proceedings against him. That Lopez was a Jew who had converted to Christianity obviously hurt his credibility with many of the English: like Shylock, Lopez is often referred to as “the Jew” by those who wrote about him.17 The laughter that greeted his final words, when he protested that he loved Queen Elizabeth as he loved his lord and savior Jesus Christ, is a famous aspect of his story. Shakespeare may well have had this anti-Semitism in mind when he wrote Merchant. t But it has also been argued that we should read Shylock as a representative not of Judaism specifically but of the religious “other,” and specifically as an emblem of Roman Catholicism.18 We can identify an even more precise context when we remember

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that the accusations against Lopez situated him as an agent of Spain, plotting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. To the English public, the Lopez case was presented as one strand in a web of Catholic intrigue against the Elizabethan state: David Katz comments that the evidence put before the jury during Lopez’s trial linked his conspiracy with another alleged plot by Irish Jesuits that was uncovered at the sametime.19Andina1594publication,ATrueReportofSondryHorrible Conspiracies, the Lopez Plot is included with those of Catholic conspirators in order to “place greater emphasis on the complicity of Philip II and the Roman Catholics.”20 The case of Dr. Lopez also displayed again the queen’s reluctance to punish, and entailed a familiar conflict between the queen and some of her councilors, Essex especially, who was the moving force in Lopez’s arrest and interrogation. Lopez was actually under house arrest at Essex House in January 1593/94 when the Earl had an audience with the queen in which she called him “a rash and temerarious youth” and generally lambasted Essex for accusing against her physician.21 It is still unclear whether the queen was ever completely persuaded of Lopez’s guilt, though even Essex’s enemies at court seem to have been convinced after the trial in February 1593/94.22 She did eventually sign his death warrant, but after his death, she allowed his widow to retain his property, a merciful act that may have signaled the queen’s continuing doubt about whether Lopez had received justice. Her reluctance to sign the death warrant may also have reflected her doubts. The reason given for Elizabeth’s delay is unknown, though an account by Bishop Goodman, who was a child at the time of the Lopez affair, claims that Elizabeth had secretly corresponded with Lopez and promised him that he would eventually be freed.23 Clearly, too, the procrastination angered many of Elizabeth’s councilors, who complained that the people were disgruntled and wanted to see the execution occur. Lopez himself is supposed to have said, when asked about the delay, that “he did appeal to the Queen’s own knowledge and goodness for the acquitting of him.”24 We will never know exactly what transpired, but the story does sound familiar: as she did in the cases of Norfolk and Mary Stuart, Elizabeth hesitated to authorize a harsh punishment and was criticized for it. All three were cases in which the accused person embodied a threat to established religion. If the case of Roderigo Lopez served as an inspiration for Merchant of Venice, anti-Semitism is only one of the issues that the case raises and the play engages. The Lopez affair foregrounds the question

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of Elizabeth’s clemency and the complaint that she is inadequately cautious and punitive when it comes to dealing with threats to her throne. As the summary of evidence against Lopez states, the phyy sician was “not suspected, especially by her, who never fears her enemies nor suspects her servants.”25 But the arrest, trial, and death of Dr. Lopez also should be understood in the context of a larger struggle over England’s policy toward Spain. Paul Hammer offers a detailed and suggestive account of Essex’s handling of the Lopez affair: the Earl’s prosecution of Lopez was the incident that “truly signalled Essex’s arrival as a politician whose views carried genuine weight with Elizabeth and his colleagues,” according to Hammer, who suggests that Essex may have “projected” this plot in order to play the starring role in its discovery and punishment.26 The queen and Burghley initially ridiculed Essex for his accusation of treason against Lopez, possibly because they were well aware of Lopez’s dealings with the Spanish and believed Essex’s “revelation” to be old news about an affair in which Lopez had tricked the Spanish out of money. Essex returned days later and raised the stakes, now accusing Lopez of having plotted against the queen’s life. This was a charge that could not be ignored, and Hammer describes Essex’s relentless pursuit of evidence in the case: he interrogated the old physician and met with other councilors almost daily through February and March 1593/94, eventually obtaining enough evidence to convict Lopez. Hammer suggests that Essex “worked very hard to turn this political victory into a public triumph,” but the triumph was not solely one of personal ambition.27 Essex used the Lopez affair to secure his position at court and shape his public image as an important political force; but the conviction of Lopez on charges that he received money from Spain to assassinate Elizabeth also scuttled plans for renewed peace talks with Spain, plans that Essex opposed. Understanding the accusations against Lopez as part of an effort to sway public opinion against peace with Spain introduces a new context in which to read Merchant of Venice and its engagement with the image of Queen Elizabeth. Essex competed with other councilors and with Elizabeth herself throughout the 1590s as he sought to control England’s foreign policy and assure his own preeminence at court. He used the spectacles of Elizabethan chivalry to promote himself as the exemplar of masculine aristocratic virtue, as analyzed by Richard McCoy in The Rites of Knightood.28 Paul Hammer details how Essex courted public approval and also relentlessly “tried to mobilize public support for aggressive war policies which

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the queen disliked and his rivals opposed.”29 After the Cadiz expedition of 1596, Essex pressured the queen into using the returning army to attack Calais, then held by the Spanish. Essex embarked on what Hammer calls “the Elizabethan equivalent of a multi-media campaign” to achieve these goals, a campaign that was underway at precisely the time Shakespeare was writing Merchant. t There is probably an allusion to the Cadiz expedition in the opening scene of Merchant, t when Salerio refers to the “wealthy Andrew” as he discusses Antonio’s fears for his merchant ships. The St. Andrew (San Andres) was one of the Spanish galleons captured in this expedition. Merchant t appeared in the Stationers’ Register in July 1598, so it was composed between the summer of 1596 and July 1598.30 Among Essex’s self-promotions during the years 1596–98 was an account of the capture of Cadiz that glorified his role; when this pamphlet, the “True Relacion,” was banned from publication, it was instead circulated in manuscript, as were copies of a letter Essex had earlier sent to the Privy Council in which he announced his plan to ignore the queen’s instructions of a limited scope for the Cadiz expedition.31 In 1597, Essex presented a large psalter, booty from the Cadiz raid, to King’s College, Cambridge, where it was publicly displayed with a Latin dedication that praised Essex as a Hercules.32 In 1598, Essex wrote his Apologie, framed as a letter to Sir Francis Bacon, defending himself against charges of warmongering. Though this letter was not published until later, it circulated in manuscript for years. One theme in these various representations is the characterization of Essex as a warlike hero—a Hercules—whose self-sacrifice and worldly wisdom stands opposed to the foolish effeminacy of those who seek peace with Spain. Essex never directly accuses the queen of naively pitying Lopez, nor does he bluntly characterize her pacific Spanish policies as effeminate. But all of this is implied in the contrasting image of himself that he promotes: an aristocratic war hero, actively uncovering and punishing Catholic treason, a Hercules whose exploits bring to England an honor that has been lacking. Essex’s self-promotion includes strong hints of the contrast between himself and his queen, as well as the message that his valor and virtues should prevail for the good of England and the queen herself. In his Apologie, a vehement argument against peace with Spain, Essex repeatedly warns against the appearance of weakness: “Now if we shew our selves so weake, that wee follow not the advantage we have, we shall hereafter be thought so weak, as we may have any condicions bee inforced upon

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us.”33 According to Essex, Spain is now militarily and financially crippled; it is the perfect moment for England to seize the advantage. To display forbearance rather than force would be folly: “Wee give the enimy as good as he can desire, in forbearing him when hee is weakest, and letting goe our advantage, when it is greatest, wee shew, that nothing can draw us to warre, if wee may have peace.”34 To strike while the enemy is weak strengthens England; to forbear is to be weak in the face of “the chiefe enimy of our religion.”35 But Essex reveals his belief that England already has a reputation for weakness when he compares the ten years since the 1588 Armada attack to the ten-year siege of Troy: “They have prepared a Sinons horse, which cannot enter if we cast not downe our walles.” But Essex goes on to say that “we are thought more credulous then the Trojans were.”36 Never does he directly blame any of this on the queen, though he recounts times when the queen restrained his desired scope of military action or refused his proposals. But he implies that forbearance toward Spain has cost England its honor: “And is this such a degenerate age, as we shall not be able to defend England? No, no, there is some seede yet left of the auncient virtue.”37 Though Essex wrote his Apologie four years after Roderigo Lopez’s trial and execution, in this letter he actually alludes to the Lopez affair, making it part of his argument against peace negotiations with Spain. The Lopez case apparently still had enough currency and impact to be cited as a reminder of Spanish perfidy but also, by implication, evidence that Essex’s aggressive stance had been successful at rooting out real threats to the queen and the English nation. Forbearance and a desire for peace, qualities for which Elizabeth is hailed, are denigrated by Essex as dishonorable and potentially disastrous. ThusthecaseofRoderigoLopezthatinspiredMerchantofVenice gestures toward more than anti-Semitism. It invokes the threat posed by Catholic Spain, the debate over peace negotiations with Spain, and implicitly a struggle for dominance between Essex and his queen. The Lopez affair became one of many weapons in the Earl of Essex’s propaganda war against the Elizabethan regime. Paul Hammer points out that Essex’s appeals to public opinion can be understood as contributing to the growth of a public sphere in Elizabethan England. As I have argued, the queen’s gender plays a role in this development: traditional ideas about woman’s nature allowed those who would mobilize public opinion against her policies to suggest that she was dominated by the common deficiencies of her sex, such as excessive emotion, fearfulness, or inconstancy. Essex’s

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campaign to sway public opinion insinuates two competing, and implicitly gendered, images: Essex the bold and active warrior versus Elizabeth the pacific and passive queen. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Henry V reflects the first image: a warrior whose audacious attack on his country’s enemy demonstrates England’s honor. By contrast, the portrayal of Portia responds to the conflict between these two images. In Portia, Shakespeare imaginatively engages two competing versions of the ideal ruler and creates a figure simultaneously punitive and merciful. She takes action against a religious other with the severity and aggression that Essex wished England to employ against Catholic Spain, but rather than being openly vengeful and harsh, she distances herself from the destruction of Shylock and acts through others. Further, she still projects the traditional, merciful image that was desirable in so many ways to Elizabeth and her subjects. The question of the queen’s relationship to a masculine corporate body, such as her Privy Council or Parliament, is also raised by the Lopezaffairandengagedin MerchantofVenice. Obviously,thequestion of peace or war with Spain was one that divided her councilors and pitted her (and Burghley) against Essex. When she protested Lopez’s innocence, Elizabeth hotly opposed Essex and his allies; she was also in conflict with the special commissioners who had tried Lopez when she would not sign the death warrant, despite their requests. She stood in a similarly oppositional position with her Parliaments and privy councilors when she vacillated over the prosecution and execution of Mary. Spenser captures this conflict in his allegory of Mary Stuart’s trial; as discussed in Chapter Two, his Elizabeth-avatar, Mercilla, is positioned between the figure of Duessa, representing Mary, and a host of male figures, emblematic of the queen’s godly councilors calling for severe justice. Spenser valorizes the idea of mixed monarchy in the Mercilla episode, as the queen of mercy appears to forego her prerogative and accede to the advice of the men who guide her. Portia is similarly situated: like Mercilla, she stands between a religious “other” and a masculine, corporate body that argues against that “other.” Mercilla’s councilors argue for the punishment of Duessa; Antonio’s male cohort urges the dismissal of Shylock’s claim against Antonio. Portia may appear, initially, to defend Shylock’s claim against the importuning of the men in the courtroom, just as Mercilla seems initially to resist the demand for Duessa’s death sentence. But like Mercilla, ultimately Portia enacts their will; unlike Mercilla, Portia goes much farther than anyone expects when she contends that Shylock has actually committed a capital crime. Though Portia

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ultimately does what the men in the courtroom want her to do, she never appears to heed their advice or “take counsel” from them or from anyone else; nevertheless, these Christian men witness not only her successful defense of their co-religionist; they also see her lay the groundwork for the destruction of their religious enemy. Spenser may be allegorizing his ideal vision of queenship when he depicts Mercilla forgoing her own personal inclinations and acceding to the wishes of her godly councilors. Shakespeare dramatizes a powerful woman who rejects masculine guidance but ultimately achieves even more than these men have asked. As an avatar of Elizabeth, Portia maintains the image not only of the queen’s mercy but also of her sovereignty, but at the same time, accedes to the desires of the masculine cohort she seems initially to oppose. When Antonio’s friends demand that Shylock’s suit be overturned, Portia tells them flatly that they are wrong: “Why, this bond is forfeit, / And lawfully by this the Jew may claim / A pound of flesh” (IV.i.230–32). Though Portia’s dismissal of masculine advice and ability to render her own judgment might suggest an assertion of the value of individual prerogative, ironically Portia speaks against the claim of prerogative in the course of the scene. Bassanio asks the Duke to intervene in terms that suggest the role of Chancery, a court of equity that was sometimes characterized as representing the prerogative of the ruler to take into account the particulars of an individual case and mitigate the harshness of the law, if appropriate. Elizabethan England witnessed a conflict between common law courts and Chancery, the court most strongly associated with royal prerogative. As several critics have noted, this conflict is raised in Merchant’s ’ courtroom scene when Bassanio says to the Duke, “And I beseech you, / Wrest once the law to your authority: / To do a great right, do a little wrong” (IV.i.214–16).38 Portia’s response upholds the primacy of the law and appears to reject prerogative: It must not be, there is no power in Venice Can alter a decree established. ‘Twill be recorded for a precedent, And many an error by the same example Will rush into the state. It cannot be. (IV.i.218–22)

Portia insists that there is no power in Venice higher than the law; the Duke’s prerogative cannot change the law. If we understand Portia as figuring Elizabeth, this assertion becomes quite intriguing: the

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ruler valorizes common law above her own prerogative. Just as Portia advocates mercy yet practices rigor, she advocates the precedence of law yet undermines the law. The debate between equity and law is quickly raised, quickly dropped, and ultimately rendered pointless by Portia’s handling of the matter: she will not overturn the law; rather, she will subvert the law by reading the bond to an absurdly literal degree, thus producing a loophole in the law. Put simply, she maintains the letter of the law but violates its spirit, undermining her own assertion that she will uphold the “intent and purpose of the law” and award Shylock the pound of flesh (IV.i.247). Portia’s words and actions in the courtroom scene suggest the tensions generated by the contradictory demands on Queen Elizabeth. Portia upholds and subverts the law. She stands for mercy and enacts rigor. She opposes and accedes to the demands of a male assembly. The final scene of the play continues this engagement with the paradoxical attitudes toward the merciful queen by staging a moment of generous forgiveness. In the courtroom scene of Act IV, even as Portia settled one conflict she instigated another by demanding from Bassanio the very ring she placed on his finger in Act III. Portia’s treatment of Bassanio corresponds even more closely to the tactic described by Harington: as the doctor of law, she urges Bassanio to give her the ring; when he agrees, he has opened himself to the reproaches she will aim at him later. After hearing her husband prefer his friend’s life to hers—when he announces that he would sacrifice his wife in order to deliver Antonio—she tests a loyalty that is now in doubt (IV.i.282–87). Arguably she proves her new husband disloyal when, in her disguise as Balthazar, she manages to obtain the ring that he swore never to give away. The end off Merchant t dramatizes the resolution of this second conflict, a resolution permitted by Portia’s decision to forgive her errant husband rather than treat him harshly, as she did Shylock. Though Portia forgives Bassanio, she uses his indiscretion (which he committed at her own insistence, when she demanded the ring in her disguise as Balthazar) to establish her dominance over him. When she gave him the ring in Act III, she declared that her house, her servants, and herself were all bestowed upon him along with the ring: I give them with this ring, Which when you part from, lose, or give away, Let it presage the ruin of your love, And be my vantage to exclaim on you. (III.ii.171–74)

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Whether or not Bassanio’s decision to part with the ring foretells the ruin of their love, we cannot know, but certainly Portia has secured her “vantage” by playing a part and manipulating Bassanio. “Exclaim” on Bassanio she certainly does when the subject of the ring is discussed in the final scene, chastising him for failing to recognize the “virtue” of the ring and the “worthiness” of she who gave it (V.i.199–200). As critics have recognized, Portia asserts not only her own worth and honor in this scene, she also asserts control.39 She lays claim to her own body and her own honor when she tells Bassanio, in a jest the audience understands, that she’ll have the doctor of law for her bedfellow, swearing it “by mine honor, which is yet my own” (V.i.232). But Portia’s bountiful forgiveness is registered in this final scene just as forcefully as is her dominance. After Bassanio begs several times for pardon, Portia finally grants it when Antonio offers his own soul as the collateral that will guarantee Bassanio’s faith: “I dare be bound again, / My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord / Will never more break faith advisedly” (V.i.251–53). Portia’s forgiveness binds Bassanio to her even more closely, and draws her rival Antonio into the bond as well. Monarchs were often advised to be merciful in order to win their subjects’ love and create a sense of obligation, thus strengthening their own position. In the final scene of Merchant, t the powerful Portia, having punished Shylock, allows those in her personal orbit to experience her clemency, thus putting them in her debt. She has challenged the bond between Bassanio and Antonio, which was strengthened by Antonio’s willingness to sacrifice himself for Bassanio, so that Bassanio would always be bound to Antonio when he recalled his friend’s generosity. By saving Antonio from Shylock and forgiving Bassanio for parting with the ring, Portia has trumped Antonio and created an even stronger bond of obligation between both men and herself. Portia is represented as a bountiful nurse and nourisher of her people in the play’s last scene. Bestowing on Lorenzo and Jessica the deed of gift from Shylock and mysteriously in possession of news that three of Antonio’s argosies have after all come safe to harbor, Portia feeds everyone, a point emphasized in the final line spoken to her in the play when Lorenzo exclaims that she “drop[s] manna in the way / Of starved people” (V.i.294–95). By comparing Portia to Yahweh as he preserved his chosen people, Lorenzo invokes the idea of Queen Elizabeth as protector and nurse of the Church of England. The figure of Portia embodies a number of contradictions. She is not only a character who advocates and practices mercy, but also

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one who enacts severe punishment. She is both married and a virgin; both humble and proud; both feminine and masculine—all contradictions found in the complex representations of Queen Elizabeth. In a brief moment near the opening of Act V, Portia and Nerissa approach the house after having been on their secret mission in the courtroom of Venice. In this scene, Shakespeare repeatedly draws our attention to the moon—that emblem of inconstancy and symbol of Queen Elizabeth’s chastity. The first line of this scene is Lorenzo’s assertion that “the moon shines bright” (V.i.1). Ninety lines later, as Portia and Nerissa, approaching the house, spy the candle burning n the moon shone brightly, they in the window, Nerissa says that when couldn’t see the candle. A few minutes later Gratiano swears “by yonder moon” that he gave his ring to the judge’s clerk (V.i.142). The moon shines, then it doesn’t, then it does. But Portia’s comment may hold the key to interpreting this inconstant moon’s meaning: she invokes the myth of Endymion with her line, “The moon sleeps with Endymion, / And would not be awak’d” (V.i.109–10). Though there are various versions of the Endymion story, the one most contemporarytoMerchant tisLyly’sEndymion,aplaywellknowntoShakespeare, and a play that was performed before the queen and openly represents her as Cynthia. At this moment in Shakespeare’s play, we might hear the suggestion, through the reference to Endymion and the moon, that Portia, like Lyly’s Cynthia, shadows the queen. As Leah Marcus has suggested, the identification of a dramatic character with Queen Elizabeth could easily have been intensified during performance if the actor imitated the inflections and mannerisms of the queen. 40 Portia goes on to reinforce the possibility when she says, “A substitute shines brightly as a king” (V.i.94). n represent Queen Elizabeth in Not only does Lyly’s play Endymion the figure of Cynthia, but it has also been interpreted as a commentary on her relationship to Catholics in her realm. The play is about Endymion’s unrequited love for Cynthia, but it also dramatizes a conflict between Cynthia and a lady-in-waiting named Tellus who vies for Endymion’s love. Tellus recalls some aspects of Mary Stuart: a rival to Cynthia, she is also unscrupulous in contrast to Cynthia’s virtue. In a situation reminiscent of Mary’s, Tellus is imprisoned and manages to captivate her jailer, Corsites. At the end of the play, Cynthia rescues Endymion from a forty-year sleep caused by the sorceress Dipsas at Tellus’s request. Tellus’s crimes are revealed, but she is penitent and Cynthia forgiving. David Bevington reads Endymion as a plea for tolerance for Catholics, and both Bevington and John

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Staines in his more recent work on the play identify the figure of Tellus as Mary Queen of Scots.41 Staines argues that pity is Cynthia’s distinguishing feature, citing her assertion, “It shall never be said that Cynthia, whose mercy and goodness filleth the heavens with joys and the world with marvels, will suffer either Endymion or any to perish if he may be protected” (III.i.60–63). Staines emphasizes the phrase “Endymion or any” to highlight the claim that Cynthia’s mercy extends to everyone. Truly, Cynthia does take mercy on her rival Tellus at the end of the play, leading Staines to read Endymion n as a wish fulfillment wherein Elizabeth’s pity can transform an enemy into an ally and restore the commonwealth. I would add to this compelling reading the fact that Cynthia’s clemency, though praised fervently in the course of the play, is not universally endorsed. Lyly portrays Elizabeth as supremely, divinely merciful, and he portrays mercy as an effective means of reconciliation and healing. But he also voices the other view of Elizabeth’s mercy: that it endangers her and the commonwealth. For instance, Cynthia’s courtiers complain about her habitually merciful judgments as they anticipate how she will treat Tellus once she learns that Tellus is ultimately responsible for Endymion’s forty-year sleep. “I marvel what Cynthia will determine in this cause,” muses Panelion. “I fear as in all causes,” says Zontes, “hear of it in justice and then judge of it in mercy. For how can it be that she that is unwilling to punish her deadliest foes with disgrace will revenge injuries of her train with death?” (V.iii.9–13). A less blunt but more elaborate assertion of the danger caused by Elizabeth’s mercy occurs in Endymion’s dream. This vision, which he recounts to Cynthia, includes a psyy chomachia of sorts in which a beautiful lady is torn between malice and pity. Once she chooses mercy, she becomes ravishingly beautiful yet greatly endangered. Endymion describes her thus at the moment when “mercy overcame anger”: “There appeared in her heavenly face such a divine majesty, mingled with a sweet mildness, that I was ravished with the sight above measure” (V.i.105–8). The description obviously refers flatteringly to Queen Elizabeth, using the familiar idea of her majesty mixed with mildness; the interesting thing is that this same lady was described at the beginning of Endymion’s dream as threatening, angry, “passing fair but very mischievous” (V.i.88). Surely her choice of mercy over anger is a positive one, since when mercy triumphs, the lady’s “mischief” is transformed into majesty. Yet, in the next vision recounted by Endymion, Cynthia is threatened by a multitude of enemies, including barking wolves, and

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allegorical figures of Treachery, Ingratitude, and Envy. As do many Elizabethan writers, Lyly engages the paradox of Elizabeth’s clemency, invoking both the beautiful image of a merciful queen and the anxiety inspired by her acts of mercy. Though the representation of Queen Elizabeth in Endymion n is at times ambiguous, and her mercy inspires both devotion and anxiety, Endymion’s great opening speech in celebration of his Cynthia offers a way of understanding some of these contradictions. Portia seems to echo this speech when she reflects on the moon at the start of Act V. Endymion says that his queen may be labeled wavering and inconstant by malicious men and fools, but that Cynthia, the moon, displays her greatest virtue in the constancy with which she changes. She “waxeth young again” even at the moment when she is in “the pride of her beauty and latter minute of her age” (I.i.57–59). Her perfection is that of the seasons: “Flowers in their buds are nothing worth till they be blown, nor blossoms accounted till they be ripe fruit; and shall we then say that they be changeable for that they grow from seeds to leaves, from leaves to buds, from buds to their perfection?” (I.i.45–50). This is very similar to Portia’s meditation as she approaches her home and thinks about the difference the right moment makes to our understanding and valuation of things. The “crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark” if it is heard alone in the silence of the night. “How many things by season season’d are / To their right praise and true perfection!” (V.i.102–8). Like Cynthia in Endymion’s laudatory speech, Portia acts in accordance with what a particular situation or moment demands. In Merchant of Venice, when Portia confronts Shylock, apparently the moment is right to play the string of judgment and to punish, if she is to “destroy Gods enemies,” as many Protestants demanded of their queen. If the play also allows us to criticize Portia for cruelty to Shylock, that potential criticism might be offset by her powerful rhetoric extolling mercy, as well as her mercy toward those in her personal orbit. Shakespeare constructs a queenly figure in whom the conflicting demands for feminine compassion and masculine rigor are both fulfilled.

CHAPTER 5

“P PARDON IS STILL THE NURSE OF SECOND WOE”: Measure for Measure AND THE TRANSITION FROM ELIZABETH TO JAMES

forMeasurewasperformedatthecourtofthenew ames I, in December, 1604, and was probably composed earlier that year or late in 1603. Thus the play, written soon after Elizabeth’s death, is the product of a moment of transition. Feelings about the passing of Elizabeth and the accession of the new king were not uniform; clearly some subjects welcomed the change while others greeted it with apprehension. Posthumous panegyrics for Elizabeth were often combined with celebrations of James, but the degree to which the feelings expressed in either one were genuine is impossible to determine.1 Catherine Loomis offers a nuanced portrait of the country’s mood in her analysis of literary responses to the transition from Elizabeth to James. In the hundreds of poems written after her death in March 1603, Elizabeth was celebrated for her peaceful reign, her foreign policy successes, and her learning.2 However, not every writer depicted both the former queen and the new king in wholly positive terms. Some worries about the transition itself were openly expressed, such as the objection to James as a foreign-born king, or the fear that civil war might result if the succession was uncertain or if the people refused to accept James. In response to such concerns, some writers tried to naturalize the transition: James was depicted as the sun following the moon just as the day follows the night, or imagined as Elizabeth’s son and heir.3 Not only were there concerns about whether the transition itself would go smoothly and whether the English people would accept the new sovereign. There were also many writers who hinted or remarked outright on the expected difference between the two rulers, whether

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the difference was forecast to improve or worsen the political situation. For example, some expressed concern that James might not continue Elizabeth’s policy of peace, while, by contrast, other elegists suggested that a more militaristic king would be an improvement. John Watkins asserts that many of Elizabeth’s subjects welcomed the change from female to male leadership, citing the Venetian ambassador’s claim that Elizabeth’s ministers believed England to be weak militarily because of Elizabeth’s incompetent rule.4 Writing a few decades later, Bishop Godfrey Goodman looked back and recalled that the people were “generally weary of an old woman’s government.””5 But even if the English did, in general, welcome the promise of a male monarch, the monarch in question raised concerns because of his views on the nature of kingship. James’s monarchical theories were well known in England even before his arrival because of his political treatises. Both the treatise on the divine right of kings, The TrewLawofFreeMonarchies,andthebookofadviceforhissonHenry, Basilicon Doron, had been written in 1598 and subsequently printed in Edinburgh. Both were reprinted in London in the year of James’s t accession,1603.6TheTrewLawofFreeMonarchiesclearlyandrepeatedly states James’s belief that the people’s allegiance and obedience to their king should be “as to Gods Lieutenant in earth, obeying his commands in all things.”7 James explicitly rejects the idea that the people can ever have any right to judge, reject, or rebel against a monarch: God is the only one who can sit in judgment on the rightful king.8 Along with anticipating a more absolutist ideology, James’s new subjects may also have expected that the new king would execute justice with more rigor than did his predecessor. James’s own remarks about the role of clemency are fairly conventional: in the Basilicon Doron, he advocates moderation in all things. “Use Justice, but with such moderation, as it turne not in Tyrannie”; in the next paragraph, he says the same about clemency: ““Nam in medio stat virtus” (Virtue resides in the middle).9 Nevertheless, James’s admonition to Henry that a king should be most severe at the outset of his reign promised a different brand of justice, at least initially, than English people had known under Elizabeth. James advises: “When yee have by the severitie of Justice once setled your countries, and made them know that ye can strike, then may ye thereafter all the daies of your life mixe Justice with Mercie.”10 As with the other anticipated changes James might bring, this newfound severity might be regarded as either salutary or harmful. In a sermon preached before James in 1604, Henry Hooke welcomes the new king’s promised rigor. Hooke

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focuses rather pointedly on the gender difference between the two sovereigns, describing Elizabeth as a phoenix and emphasizing the miraculous way that a man—James—has risen from the ashes of a woman.11 Immediately following this image, he establishes two parallels: between Elizabeth and David, and between James and Solomon, arguing that the Solomon-like James will perfect the “good order and civille peace” that David, in his zeal, began to establish in the “Lord’s house.” But the final item on Hooke’s list registers a complaint about Elizabeth’s clemency, along with the hope that James’s justice will be stricter: “What sinnes David winked at, being overswayed by the greatness of his nobles, whose imployments otherwise were necessary, Solomon in his wisdom found meanes to drawe unto punishment.”12 While dissatisfaction with Elizabeth’s rigor is unsurprising, especially coming from a Puritan-leaning preacher, it is rather surprising that Hooke blames her nobles for the late queen’s tendency to “wink” at sin. Perhaps Hooke is employing the traditional subterfuge of blaming the monarch’s councilors rather than directly accusing the king or queen. But the complaint that Elizabeth’s leniency was the fault of powerful nobles hints at another of Hooke’s points: James, as a king, is expected to be more powerful than the late Elizabeth, who was, after all, only a woman. Hooke says that “what was not possible for a woman to effect, man should be both able and industrious to perform,” and asserts that the hearts of the elect rejoice in this hope.13 Elegies written for Elizabeth and poems in celebration of the new king rarely express the expectation of greater rigor as bluntly as Hooke does in his sermon. Nonetheless, the hints are there. For example, Robert Pricket in his “Souldiers Wish,” a poem written to celebrate James’s accession, paints a portrait of Elizabeth that focuses on her merciful bearing toward her people. By contrast, he paints James as a warlike figure, expressing the hope that James will do more than Elizabeth, a “Mayden Queen,” could accomplish, and offering his soldier’s sword to the efforts of the new king.14 Others who anticipate greater rigor from James dread it rather than welcome it. Sir John Harington, not an elegist but a diarist, clearly expresses the worry that James’s brand of justice will be more severe and arbitrary than Elizabeth’s. In a well-known passage dated 1603, Harington laments the passing of Elizabeth, his “gracious Queene” and “goode mistresse.” Of course, the queen was Harington’s godmother and he enjoyed a close and affectionate relationship with her, so his sense of loss at her death is probably not typical. But it is interesting that the concern he next expresses about

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the incoming monarch stems not from his own anticipated loss of position; rather, Harington comments on the brand of justice he expects from James: I heare our new Kynge hath hanged one man before he was tryede; ’tis strangely done: now if the wynde blowethe thus, why may not a man be tried before he hathe offended.15

John Aylmer said of Elizabeth at the start of her reign that she came in like a lamb, not a lion: “She hangeth no man, she behedeth none.”16 By contrast, one of James’s first acts was to order a man hanged, bypassing a trial in a manner that may have been troubling to many English subjects. The incident occurred in April of 1603 when James was traveling toward London for his coronation and stopped in Newark-Upon-Trent. A man was arrested and reportedly confessed to being a cutpurse; James ordered his hanging on the spot. The officially sanctioned account of James’s progress reports the episode as an example of the king’s dedication to justice, and mentions in the same passage that James also issued a general pardon for the prisoners in the town’s jail.17 But the incident raises questions: Why was a cutpurse deemed to deserve hanging when other criminals rated the king’s pardon? The king’s attitude toward justice seems arbitrary and perhaps personally motivated here, and those who were concerned about James’s more absolutist views may have seen in this incident a harbinger of future woes. While criticism of Measure often situates the play in the context of James’s reign—his political writing and the events of his first year as king—few critics connect the play to the reign of Elizabeth. Stephen Cohen is an exception: in a study of the generic tensions in the play, he reads Measure as a cross between romantic comedy and the disguised ruler play, a genre which was popular immediately after James’s accession. Thus Measure’s mixed genre reflects the transition from Elizabeth to James: the play has elements of romantic comedy, a genre that displaces traditional masculine authority in favor of vibrant and conciliatory heroines. However, the play ultimately shifts from being a romantic comedy to being a disguised ruler play, a genre that valorizes the masculine ruler’s personal fiat.18 Though not a study of generic tensions, this chapter will also focus onthewayMeasureforMeasureregistersthedifferencesbetweenthe two monarchs. The moment of transition from Elizabeth to James is indeeddiscernibleinShakespeare’sMeasurefor Measure,aplaythat

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is deeply engaged with questions about political authority. More specifically, I will argue that the difference between the ideologies and practices of the two monarchs when it comes to dispensing justice is one of the play’s important topics, and that the Duke himself—past and present—reflects the tension between their different approaches to mercy. A dominant critical approach is to analyze Measure for Measure in terms of its engagement with the new king’s ideology of rule and to find in the play’s concluding scene a reflection of James’s absolutism. Critics differ not so much on whether Shakespeare represents James’s rule in Measure, but on how he represents it. One older critical approach was to read Measure for Measure as an entertainment specifically designed to flatter James, a reading mocked by Richard Levin as the “King James Version” of the play.19 But even critics who avoid reducing the play to flattery often interpret Measure as reflecting the ideology of the new king. For instance, Leonard Tennenhouse argues that with James’s accession, the stage mounted a defense of patriarchy, participating in the cultural shift that occurred when the throne passed to a man who invoked his role as authoritarian father to represent his power. According to Tennenhouse, Measure and the other absent ruler comedies that suddenly dominated the London stage dramatize the need for such a monarch by showing the disorder that his absence spawns, and his ability to discern truth and restore order in the end.20 Jonathan Dollimore also reads the play’s ending as empowering the Duke, who “embodies a public reconciliation of law and morality,” though it is a “fantasy resolution” in which the very fear of social disorder that spawns authoritarian rule is validated and assuaged by the Duke’s exercise of power.21 By contrast, other critics read the play not as an endorsement but rather as a critique of absolutism in general and James’s use of power in particular. Carolyn E. Brown, for instance, finds in the play, and especially its final scene, a scathing criticism of James’s cruel exercise of partisan power.22 Most critics find the play neither an endorsement nor an indictment of James’s rule, but something in between: a play that interrogates James’s brand of kingship. As Leah Marcus points out, Measure may at once promulgate and question James’s ideas about rule; it is open to a range of interpretations and reactions from its audience.23 Measure for Measure may valorize, subvert, or interrogate James and his absolutist ideology through the character and actions of the Duke, but the play also presents more than one version of Duke Vincentio. Measure for Measure does not represent the Duke solely

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as he appears in the final scene: there we see him—arguably—as a ruler whose personal authority and wisdom enable him to execute true justice. But Measure also reflects upon the Duke as he was in the past, by highlighting the effect of his previous leniency. Therefore, it is possible to see in the Duke himself the transition from Elizabeth to James, from one ruler’s personal clemency to another’s apparently strict execution of justice. Whether Elizabeth was truly lenient or not, the image of her as a loving and gentle mother was often deployed during her reign and even more often after her death. Her frequent claims of abiding and mutual love between her and her subjects formed part of that image; and as discussed in Chapter One, Elizabeth seems to have embraced the traditional idea that clemency makes a ruler well loved.24 We know that Cecil, frustrated by her reluctance to execute the Duke of Norfolk, lamented the queen’s belief that mercy made her more popular with her people. But as we have seen, the same clemency that may have enhanced Elizabeth’s popularity also caused anxiety and, in the view of some, put the kingdom itself at risk. This paradox about the ruler’s leniency is suggested in the Duke’s interview with Friar Thomas. The Duke explains his withdrawal from Vienna in terms of the problems caused by his previous clemency. According to the Duke, Vienna’s “strict statutes and most biting laws” have been allowed to slip for these fourteen years (I.iii.19).25 The Duke’s self-characterization recalls Queen Elizabeth’s: he depicts himself as a masculine version of her image as a tender mother; he was a “fond father” who cautioned his children with punishments that were never enacted, sticking the “threat’ning twigs of birch” in their sight to frighten them—but for lack of use, “in time the rod / Becomes more mock’d than fear’d” (I.iii.23–27). True, James often depicted himself as a father to his people, but he typically used the paternal metaphor to emphasize the people’s duty to obey him or his own responsibility to execute justice: The King towards his people is rightly compared to a father of children, and to a head of a body composed of divers members. . . . For from the Head, being the seate of Judgement, proceedeth the care and foresight of guiding, and preventing all evill that may come to the body or any part thereof.26

James emphasizes the king/father/head’s duty to protect the people against evils of various kinds, including internal evil, just as at the

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start of the treatise, he asserted that, like a father, the king must correct any of his children that offend. Here he goes on to recommend that the king, in his role of father/head, cut off any incurably rotten members so as to prevent the spread of infection in the body politic. Duke Vincentio, by being a clement rather than a chastising father, has failed to do this. The resulting social disarray necessitates more rigorous justice in the future, but the Duke does not want to execute strict justice because he fears what such harshness might do to his image. His exact words are “I have on Angelo impos’d the office, / Who may, in th’ambush of my name, strike home, / And yet my nature never in the fight / To do in slander” (I.iii.40–43). This curious statement is suggestive of more than the Duke’s concern that his popularity might wane if he were to enforce the laws. He is also afraid that his “nature” might be put in disrepute: people might make judgments not simply about his actions but also about his innate character. The line is reminiscent of Elizabeth’s frequent claims to be “by nature” compassionate, which suggest her anxiety that a woman perceived as harsh might be judged “unnatural,” since women are supposed to be naturally tender-hearted. The Duke’s anxx ieties about being the enforcer reflect a concern about public opinion that is more Elizabethan than Jacobean: while Elizabeth frequently asserted her reliance on her people’s love, this was a position that James, the absolutist, rejected.27 The Duke uses the word “slander” here, introducing an important theme in Measure that is related to questions of mercy and judgment. Hoping to remove himself not just from the public eye but also from the arena of public discourse, the Duke seeks to control the force of public opinion, reflected in gossip and slander. Ironically, it will turn out that the Duke’s withdrawal from the public eye has done more to inspire slanderous speculation thantostifleit.MeasureforMeasuresuggeststhatslander,alongwith other powerful and uncontainable forces, such as passion, is difficult if not impossible to control. Measure for Measure speaks a language of unruly excess, which creates a troubling discontinuity in that the play appears to promise somethingthatisneverdelivered.Theverytitle,MeasureforMeasure, embodies a perfect balance and enclosed circularity, the opposite of what the play actually dramatizes: things uncontrollable and ever-increasing by their very nature. The play is rife with images of things breeding, seething, thronging, and multiplying; slander is one such unruly force. The Duke describes a Vienna where corruption boils and bubbles “till it o’errun the stew” (V.i.318–19), so that the

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stews—brothels—are imagined as actual stewpots whose contents are uncontrollably overflowing. The image suggests not only the ungovernable nature of sexual passion but also the literal increase brought about by sex: the “teeming foison” of the “plenteous womb” of a pregnant Juliet, for instance (I.iv.43). Just as sexual passion is uncontrollable and has uncontrollable results in the play, so also the public itself and its discourse on the ruler are outside any individual’s control. The Duke’s reluctance to “stage himself” in his people’s eyes has long been thought to reflect King James’s response to crowds: there is much evidence that James disliked the noisy hoi polloi. Eighteenth-century critic Thomas Tyrwhitt was the first to propose thatseveralpassagesinMeasureforMeasurealludetoJames’sdistaste for crowds, a connection fully explicated by David L. Stevenson in 1959.28 Stevenson cites the now-familiar description of James’s reaction when, during a 1604 visit to the Merchants Exchange before his royal entry, he encountered enthusiastic crowds of Londoners who excitedly and noisily ran up and down when they realized who the passenger in the carriage was. James was vocal about his distaste for what he deemed the “untaught love” of the multitude and contrasted their behavior unfavorably with the decorum of the merchants in the Exchange, who stood silent and still before their sovereign.29 Jeffrey Doty has elaborated on this idea in Measure, arguing that the play interrogates the idea of the unruly populace and its corollaries: news, gossip, and political analysis. Doty finds that the characters’ frequent exchanges of news, opinion, and gossip—much of it concerning affairs of state and the Duke himself—constitute an emergent public sphere. According to Doty, this kind of public commentary on the ruler suggests that his authority is not absolute but rather dependent on his popularity, an idea that Elizabeth cultivated and James rejected. The Duke aims to restore his sacred authority, in Doty’s reading, which he apparently does in the end when he manages to silence the unruly voices of his people. Doty also finds a link between sex and discourse in the language of the play: both are forms of circulation, exchanges between people, and both are unruly and dangerous.30 IinterprettheendingoffMeasureforMeasuredifferentlythandoes Doty, but his reading of the play’s engagement with questions of popularity and public discourse is very convincing. Notably for my reading, the world of uncontrolled passions and unruly public discourse is the world created by the “old” Duke, whose clement reign, depicted

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as weak, suggests the style of Elizabeth. The play’s language underlines the role that the ruler’s mercy played in producing this Vienna, in which the forms of exchange that Doty mentions, sexual activity andpublicdiscourse,rununchecked.MeasureforMeasurealsoaligns mercy with these unruly words and passions. Just as “liberty,” the lack of restraint that Claudio bemoans, produced a new person growing inside Juliet, so too the “freedom” or generosity of legal pardon produces new transgressions, according to many characters in the play. The Duke explains how his reluctance to punish gave the people “scope,” and that same scope, or liberty, has led to the production of t moreevildeeds(I.iii.35–38).InMeasureforMeasure,mercyisrepeatedly aligned with sexuality, the fruits of pardon with the fruits of intercourse: Escalus casts pardon as a maternal figure when he says that “Pardon is still the nurse of second woe” (II.i.284). Angelo, too, imagines the production of future crimes (a propagation permitted by mercy) in terms of conception and birth. He tells Isabel that the law Like a prophet Looks in a glass that shows what future evils, Either now, or by remissness new conceiv’d, And so in progress to be hatch’d and born, Are now to have no successive degrees, But here they live, to end. (II.ii.94–99)

In other words, the law, by imposing a severe penalty on Claudio, will end what otherwise would be an endless succession of evils, “conceived” and “hatched and born” in the future. The “severe” Angelo, as he is frequently called, will literally sever Claudio’s head to cut off that succession of future sins, just as James recommended that the king should cut off the corrupt members of the body politic to prevent the spread of infection.31 The Duke’s clemency permitted this endless breeding of sin, just as unrestrained sexuality permits endless breeding; as Angelo would cut off the breeding of sin by cutting off Claudio’s head, Pompey suggests that a literal cutting off of sex organs is the only way to control sex: “Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city?” he asks Escalus in response to the magistrate’s assertion that fornication is against the law (II.i.230–31). The association of mercy with sex is most dramatic in Isabel’s words to Claudio: “Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd,” meaning that if Claudio were mercifully pardoned, that pardon would simply allow him to reproduce his crimes.

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Jeffrey Doty notes that sex and public discourse are based on exchange between people; both result in a kind of public circulation (of disease and of news).32 In Measurefor Measure,mercy is imagined in similar terms, as a bawd promoting a sinful exchange between two people, resulting in the reproduction of crimes. After telling Claudio that mercy would prove a bawd in his case, Isabel says that his sin was “not accidental, but a trade,” meaning that he is a habitual sinner. Mercy, like a bawd or pimp, would simply allow him to continue committing the sexual sins that she now characterizes as no better than the “trade” of whores and their customers. Lucio’s joking name for Mistress Overdone, “Madame Mitigation,” takes on new significance when seen in this light. As a bawd, Mistress Overdone allays or mitigates sexual desire, but the term “mitigation” is most commonly used in regard to judgments. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century uses of the word “mitigate” refer to the abatement of the law’s severity or the softening of a harsh punishment.33 The fact that the nickname “Madame Mitigation” brings together sexual and legal connotations emphasizes the link between the two uncontrollable forces of sex and mercy. Mistress Overdone and her house of prostitution sow disease in Vienna, but the play repeatedly suggests the difficulty of stopping or controlling the circulation of sex and sexual disease. When Mistress Overdone is being escorted to prison in Act III, Escalus says, “Double and treble admonition, and still forfeit in the same kind!” (III.ii.193–94). His next words—“This would make mercy swear and play the tyrant”—hint that she has previously been shown a mercy that allowed her brothel to continue operating, reminding us of the way mercy is seen as propagating evil in this play. InMeasureforMeasure,Isabelfollowstraditionallinesinarguing, as Portia does, that mercy is a godly virtue. She makes the conventional claim that god’s mercy should be imitated by man, specifically the magistrate, Angelo. But the current state of Vienna in the wake of the Duke’s fourteen years of leniency, as well as the language that registers mercy’s uncontrollable results, undercuts her claim. Isabel also asks Angelo to feel compassion for Claudio as a way of inspiring him to act mercifully; yet compassion itself seems suspect in this play. As we have seen, detractors of mercy often cited its supposed basis in emotion: though some writers tried to distinguish between emotionally generated compassion and true mercy, feminine mercy was always suspected of being nothing more than womanish pity. UpuntilthefinalsceneinMeasureforMeasure,pleasforcompassion cause harm rather than good. When Isabel tries to inspire empathy

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in Angelo for Claudio, she asks him to imagine himself feeling similar feelings, experiencing similar temptations. Escalus raises the same point with Angelo, but these appeals to the magistrate’s empathy have the unexpected effect of generating not mere sympathy but rather an overpowering emotional response, suggesting the danger of emotional contamination. Empathy is a term not coined until the early twentieth century, but the sympathetic experience of someone else’s passions was discussed in the early modern period in several different ways.34 Treatises on rhetoric identify real passion as the basis of eloquence; the goal of the rhetorical transaction is to express one’s own passions effectively so as to “move the like affections” in the listeners.35 Thus a shared experience of emotion could be said to lie at the heart of rhetorical persuasion. Such moving of another’s affections might be represented as salutary or dangerous, depending on one’s point of view. Puritan objections to theater have become well known, and while these objections included the licentious subject matter of many plays, the cross-dressing actors, and the idleness and “effeminacy” of the audience members, many of these writers also warned of the power of theater (or imaginative literature in general) to sway the affections of theapprehender.AnthonyMunday,intheThirdBlastofRetraitfrom Playes and Theaters, reports that some “citizen wives,” on their death beds, have tearfully confessed that theater-going turned them into whores: they “received at those spectacles such filthie infections, as have turned their minds from chast cogitations, and made them of honest women light huswives.”36 Gosson’s School of Abuse, a pamphlet that primarily attacks the stage, opens with an assault on poets that suggests a similar poisoning effect when he likens their works to “cups of Circe, that turn reasonable men into beasts.” Sidney’s response, the Defence of Poesy, does not refute the infectious quality of imaginative literature, but calls for poetry to move us to “right action” rather than sin. Stephen Greenblatt famously identifies empathy as a form of power; the “ability to transform given materials into one’s own scenario” is called “improvisation” by Greenblatt. He sees improvisation as a central mode of Renaissance behavior; the ability to understand another’s symbolic structure permits the subject to insert himself into another’s scenario for the purposes of domination.37 In Greenblatt’s formulation, there is no reciprocity and little sympathy: the subject does not share the other’s symbolic structure but rather is able to inhabit it and improvise within it for his own power. By contrast,

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the Renaissance idea of compassion, or fellow feeling, does assume reciprocity, but it similarly implies the vulnerability of the one who apprehends the “affections” of another. Thus some treatises on emotion suggest that feelings can be dangerously contagious, harkening back to Seneca’s description of pity as a sickness of the mind brought on by seeing someone else’s unhappiness.38 Just as Sidney does not dismiss the idea of poetry’s powerful effect but argues that we should be moved to good actions by its power, some Renaissance writers disagree with the Stoic denigration of the passions while tacitly agreeing that passions can be contagious: Thomas Wright, for example, notes that sometimes the passions should be stirred up in the service of virtue.39 Thus passions—whether a display of genuine emotion, or passions played out in theater, in poetry, or in rhetoric—could infect the apprehender with similar passions, and this experience of empathy, shared emotions, might be salutary or detrimental. InMeasureforMeasure,theattempttoinspireempathyinAngelo has an unexpectedly detrimental result that suggests this anxiety about emotional contagion. Both Isabel and Escalus try to make Angelo feel empathy for Claudio by suggesting that he may have experienced the same kind of sexual passion that led Claudio into fornication. It is not coincidental that Angelo’s sudden passion for Isabel follows upon two consecutive scenes in which he is asked to empathize with Claudio’s sexual desire. Act II opens in the middle of what appears to be an argument between Escalus and Angelo over the death sentence the latter has imposed upon Claudio. Escalus asks Angelo whether he might not have erred just as Claudio has done if, at some point in his life, the “working of his [your] own affections” had occurred at a time and place convenient for him to act upon his desire (II.i.8–16). Angelo does not deny having felt such sexual passion, but he makes a distinction between feeling and acting: “’Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, / Another thing to fall” (II.i.17–18). By distinguishing between feeling and action, and thus between himself and Claudio, Angelo refuses to empathize with the condemned man. But in the next scene, Isabel makes the same plea: “Go to your bosom, / Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know / That’s like my brother’s fault” (II.ii.136–38). When Thomas Wright describes the way our passions are moved, it is in strikingly similar terms: imagination works on the heart, which produces the emotion and draws forth the bodily humors that will increase it.40 It is at this moment, when Isabel asks Angelo to examine his heart, seat of the passions, for an emotional experience like that of her brother, that Angelo speaks

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the first words—in an aside—that indicate his desire for Isabel: “She speaks, and ’tis / Such sense that my sense breeds with it” (II.ii.141–42). Playing on two meanings of the word “sense,” Angelo suggests that the meaning of Isabel’s words—their “sense”—has aroused his senses. The word “sense” has many possible meanings in this period, but among them are two contrasting ideas. “Sense” can denote signification or meaning as well as, more broadly, intelligence and sound judgment. But “sense” can also be used as a collective singular to mean faculties of corporeal sensation that are considered “channels for gratifying the desire for pleasure and the lusts of the flesh.” 41 On one level Angelo is simply saying that his senses are aroused either by imagining or remembering the feeling of sexual desire, as Isabel asks him to do. But he is also suggesting that the interaction of her meaning and his faculties of sensation have created something; his sense has “bred” with hers; powerful feelings were generated in him by her appeal to his empathy. Moments earlier, Angelo described the endless progeny of evils that would be “hatch’d and born” in the future if Claudio’s sin were not decisively punished (II.ii.97). The interaction that characterizes public discourse and sexuality, with unmanageable results, occurs here as well. The breeding of Angelo’s senses with Isabel’s meaning—a call for empathy—will indeed create future sins, in a way that the play represents as ultimately uncontrollable. Thus, at least initially, Measure for Measure represents mercy as dangerous. The language of the play aligns mercy with other uncontrollable elements whose essential character is exchange: public discourse and sexual passion. Mercy breeds unmanageable results, and is spawned by compassion, which suggests the possibility of dangerous emotional contagion. This negative representation of mercy is connected to the ruler’s past style and behavior, suggesting the past of Elizabeth’s reign. But if all this is true, how do we explain the play’s resolution? Though few today would argue that Measure for Measure has a satisfying comic ending, still the play does follow a comic trajectory, and so the ending features near-universal forgiveness, including pardons for all from the Duke, despite his purported plan to enforce the law more strictly. As has often been noted, by the end of the play he has done nothing of the kind, and even Lucio’s original sentence of whipping, pressing to death, and hanging—his “forfeitures”—are remitted and his slanders forgiven by the Duke (V.1.519–20). The Duke’s practice of mercy characterizes the ending as comic, and clemency for Angelo and Lucio allows the typical marriages of comic conclusions, though these are admittedly rather

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disturbing unions. If the Duke’s pardons constitute the comic resolutionoffMeasureforMeasure,thenwhyismercydepictedasproblematic, even dangerous, throughout the rest of the play? How can mercy be the progenitor of woes and also generate a happy ending? Is there a distinction between what the Duke does at the end of Measure and the versions of clemency seen up to this point in the play?

The Private and the Public How mercy is deployed, and specifically whether the granting of clemency is a public or private matter, seems to be the pivot upon which this question turns. If there is one fundamental difference between the Duke as he was, and the Duke who renders justice in the play’s final scene, that difference lies not in his rigor. The difference lies in the public, performative quality of his mercy in the final scene. The Duke’s earlier clemency has apparently been a private matter, if we take him at his word that he has never liked to “stage” himself to the eyes of the people (I.i.68–69). Lucio’s explanation to Isabel in I.iv about the Duke’s absence and Angelo’s consequent stewardship does indeed suggest that the Duke was a ruler who kept his decisions and their motives secret. Lucio is speaking not of the Duke’s judgment on any particular man, but rather about the way the Duke misled them into thinking that they were about to enter a war (presumably with Hungary): The Duke is very strangely gone from hence; Bore many gentlemen (myself being one) In hand, and hope of action; but we do learn By those that know the very nerves of state, His [givings]-out were of an infinite distance From his true-meant design. (I.iv.50–55)

Why Lucio should explain all of this to Isabel is unclear: the point he needs to convey to her is simply that the Duke is gone and that Angelo, whose “blood / Is very snow-broth,” is now in charge and unlikely to remit the death sentence he has imposed on Claudio (I.iv.57–58). But Lucio’s depiction of the Duke in this passage establishes an important idea about him: he has been a secretive ruler and even deliberately misled his subjects. The spatial metaphor that Lucio uses—the Duke’s assertions were at “an infinite distance” from the truth—suggests the private spaces in which the Duke operated. Apparently, at least some

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people were familiar with this interior space—the “nerves,” that is, inner workings—of his government, but Lucio and many other gentlemen of Vienna were not. The private spaces in which the Duke operated are suggested in Lucio’s memorable characterization of him in a later scene as the “Duke of dark corners” (IV.iii.157). That the Duke’s past judgments and their motives were hidden is also implied in Lucio’s claim that “the Duke yet would have dark deeds darkly answer’d, he would never bring them to light” (III.ii.176–78). The problem with such private judgments is revealed in this very scene, when Lucio draws his own conclusions about the reason for the Duke’s clemency in cases of sexual transgressions: “He had some feeling of the sport; he knew the service, and that instructed him to mercy” (III.ii.119–20). The Duke’s history of retreating from the public eye and privately conferring mercy seems to have made him especially vulnerable to public discussion and interpretation of his motives. Lucio even claims to know the reason for the Duke’s alooff ness: “A shy fellow was the Duke, and I believe I know the cause of his withdrawing” (III.ii.130–32). Though he never reveals the purported reason, Lucio makes it clear that it does the Duke no credit: “No, pardon; ’tis a secret must be lock’d within the teeth and the lips. But this I can let you understand, the greater file of the subject held the Duke to be wise” (III.ii.134–37). When the Duke, in his disguise as a friar, avers that the Duke was indeed wise, Lucio scoffs: “A very superficial, ignorant, unweighing fellow” (III.ii.139–40). Lucio implies that the Duke retreated from the stage of public life to hide his own ignorance, with an emphasis on his poor judgment hinted in the adjective “unweighing.””42 Lucio’s judgment of the Duke is doubtless unreliable, but the point is that the Duke’s habitual privacy has allowed a man like Lucio to invent explanations for things that are unknown, making the withdrawn Duke paradoxically more, rather than less, subject to the speculation and gossip of his subjects. Though James may have abhorred the noisy public, he understood the connection between the monarch’s public appearance and public opinion. In Basilicon Doron, he complains of the fault that common people share: “to judge and speak rashly of their Prince,” and the solution he offers is that the Prince rule so well as to “stop their mouthes from all such idle and unreverent speeches.””43 This advice seems uselessly vague, but in the third chapter of Basilicon Doron, James elaborates on how a king should behave, and in so doing reveals his awareness that the impressions a monarch makes on the public are crucial. The chapter begins with James’s acknowledgment that “a

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King is as one set on a stage,” and continues with specific advice about how his son should comport himself in the future, recognizing that “the people, who seeth but the outward part, will ever judge of the substance, by the circumstances.””44 Therefore, he advises his son on everything from his behavior at table, his dress, and his gestures, to his choice of friends and behavior with women. This chapter reveals that like Elizabeth, James knew and accepted the necessity of a certain amount of public show on the part of a king, given that people are always formulating judgments about the king based on what they see. Nowhere does James recommend withdrawing from the public eye; rather, he advises Henry to create a public image that will allow his people to draw favorable conclusions about his character. PrivacyandpublicityarecrucialfactorsinMeasureforMeasure,not just in its treatment of mercy and judgment in general. Private spaces such as Isabel’s convent and Mariana’s moated grange can be protective, but private spaces can also be dangerous. The play registers a deep distrust of the use of private spaces for rendering judgment. The fact that Angelo sees Isabel privately when she comes a second time to ask him to mitigate his judgment against Claudio allows the magistrate to abuse his power. That this private space makes Isabel vulnerable is emphasized when she threatens to “proclaim” Angelo’s corruption to the world, demanding that he sign Claudio’s pardon, “Or with an outstretched throat I’ll tell the world aloud / What man thou art” (II.iv.153–54). The hexameter line emphasizes Isabel’s threat to break the bounds of this private space and, like a rooster crowing, draw public attention to the truth about Angelo. But the magistrate’s terrifyingly simple response says everything about the dangers of privacy: “Who will believe you, Isabel?” (II.iv.154). The private space within which Angelo works as a magistrate permits his abuse of power. Though the Duke may want to withdraw from the public eye, this scene suggests how easily the power to judge can lead to corruption if the judgments are decided and rendered behind the scenes. There is also an echo of the sonnet writers’ warnings to women about giving private access to their presence: Isabel’s private audience with Angelo allows a plea for pity to be abused. Though we have no reason to think that the Duke’s previous customary mercy was similarly corrupt, his habitual privacy led the public to speculate about aspects of his life that remained hidden, allowing Lucio to spread rumors that the Duke’s leniency was somehow personally motivated or a product of his own moral laxity. This depiction of privacy’s dangers may also invoke early modern debates about equity: to

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rely on the “king’s conscience” to resolve legal questions means that judgments are made according to the personal and private inclinations of one person. A common scholarly approach toMeasure for Measure is to read the play in terms of Renaissance ideas and debates about equity.45 Aristotle explains that in some matters it is impossible to make a general statement that will always be correct. Thus, equity rectifies a deficiency in the law and also fulfills the law’s original intention (“deciding as the lawgiver would himself decide if he were present on the occasion”).46 Many critics have pointed out that Claudio’s situation is a perfect example of the need for applying the principle of equity to legal judgments: an equity that includes consideration of the specifics of any case, or the application of the spirit of the law.47 According to Claudio, Juliet is “fast” his wife on the basis of a “true contract,” and the postponement of their wedding was caused by a dispute over a dowry (I.ii.145–53). By providing this explanation for the couple’s sexual activity and by creating the sexually corrupt Vienna as a context for Claudio’s “crime,” Shakespeare directs our attention to the inequity of Claudio’s death sentence. The audience recognizes the difference between Claudio and Lucio, who has impregnated a woman and refuses to support her and the child; nor is Juliet a prostitute like Mistress Overdone or Kate Keepdown. In its spirit, the law against fornication seems aimed at the habitués of the brothel, not two people who are contracted to be married (and may well have been considered married according to Elizabethan customs).48 Thus the play seems to advocate for equity under the law, since in the case of Claudio, justice would be mitigated if his particular circumstances and the law’s intention were taken into consideration.49 Escalus is the voice of this sort of equity in the play, pointing out as he does the potentially mitigating circumstances in Claudio’s case, to no avail. Though equity as a general principle may have been relatively uncontroversial in early modern England, the association between equity and royal prerogative led to debates about both the principles and the practice of justice. According to opponents of equity, the fact that the practice of equity allows an individual to interpret the law makes possible a very subjective, or personally interested, interpretation; equity potentially puts an individual (the judge or Lord Chancellor or monarch) above the law.50 Unsurprisingly, James I championed equity and connected it to royal prerogative in his writings, in ways that did not comfort those already concerned about

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his absolutist ideology. In his History of the Common Law, w Theodore Plucknett observes that the characterization of Chancery as an arbitrary court dependent on the king’s prerogative was false; he blames royalists for trying to argue that the system of equity was an outgrowth of absolutist doctrine.51 The controversy about equity famously came to a head in 1616, in two interrelated cases that pitted Sir Edmund Coke against Chancery. In the end, Coke, who objected to Chancery’s overturning of common law in these cases, was removed from the King’s Bench.52 Just as some critics have argued that Measure for Measure shows the need for equity in legal decisions, as seen in the case of Claudio and Juliet, others have argued that the play registers distrust and disapproval of Jacobean ideas about royal prerogative, which were seen as undergirding the claims of equity. I would suggest that in Measure, equity is called into question by the play’s treatment not only of prerogative but also of privacy. Advocates of the king’s prerogative tended to speak of the monarch’s private judgments as “mysteries” not necessarily apprehensible to common men. James, when w specifically linked it with a he wrote about equity in The Trew Law, royal prerogative based on secret knowledge he might hold: And where he sees the lawe doubtsome or rigorous, hee may interpret or mitigate the same, lest otherwiseSumma ius beesumma iniuria: And therefore generall laws, made publikely in Parliament, may upon knowen respects to the King by his authoritee bee mitigated, and suspended upon causes onely knowen to him.53

James refers to the “causes onely knowen to him,” the secret knowledge of the king, suggesting one of the mysteries of state among which he included his royal prerogative.54 Opponents of royal prerogative of course took exception to this notion of a semidivine monarch with a mysterious, even superhuman ability to judge correctly. James’s treatise on The Trew Law of Free Monarchies was written partly in response to one such opponent: his former tutor George Buchanan, who argued in De Juri Regni Apud Scotos (1579) that monarchs must be subject to the law. In this dialogue, Buchanan writes that kings share the faults of all humankind, arguing that therefore a king who is not subject to the law could bend the law “to all actions for his own benefit and advantage.” He argues that it would be better to have no laws than to allow the king such power over the law. If the king is allowed such authority, then “what he pleaseth the Law doth say,

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what pleaseth him not, it doth not say.””55 For Buchanan, a king who is above the law will inevitably bend the law to serve his private interests; for James, the king’s private knowledge qualifies him to correct the law in certain cases. These two opposing points of view are reflected in the ambivalent treatment of legal equity by William Lambarde in his 1591 work kArcheion n,subtitled dADiscourseUpontheHighCourtsofJusticein England. This important late Elizabethan analysis of England’s legal and political institutions was based on Lambarde’s many years of experience as a common lawyer; thus he might be expected to share in the hostility that advocates of the Common Law felt toward institutions such as Chancery and the Star Chamber. However, Lambarde was also a friend of Sir Thomas Egerton, who would soon be Lord Chancellor under James.56 Lambarde’s discussion of equity seems balanced between the two sides and is instructive for that reason. According to Lambarde, the law as written is generally good and just, but it may need correction when circumstances arise that the law does not foresee. This is the usual argument for equity: Lambarde says that “to apply one generall Law to all particular cases, were to make all Shooes by one Last, or to cut one Glove for all Hands.”57 But he also warns that equity should be appealed to only in “rare and extraordinary matters,” for a single human being should not normally wield so much power. “If the Judge in Equitie should take Jurisdiction over all, it should come to passe (as Aristotle saith) that a Beast should beare the rule: For so he calleth man, whose Judgment, if it bee not restrained by the Chaine of Law, is commonly carried away, with unruly affections.””58 Buchanan warns against investing the king with too much power; Lambarde warns against investing a judge with too much power; but the argument against both is the same, based on human nature’s subjection to its own unruly passions and the unfitness of any single person to wield so much unchecked authority. In Buchanan’s dialogue, Maitland, whose arguments oppose those of Buchanan, likens the public to a many-headed beast. From the absolutist’s point of view, the public is the out-of-control bestial force that needs to be governed by the ruler’s absolute authority. Buchanan and Lambarde warn of the opposite: the private, powerful individual, be he a king or a judge, is the beast who cannot hope to control his passions. In Measure for Measure, as we have seen, the public and its discourse are imagined as uncontrollable; however, as Angelo, invested with such authority as a judge, begins to lust after

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Isabel, he describes his passions as an unruly public that crowd and eventually overpower his reason: Why does my blood thus muster to my heart, Making both it unable for itself, And dispossessing all my other parts Of necessary fitness? (II.iv.20–23)

Angelo goes on to compare the blood that rushes to his heart at the arrival of Isabel to the crowds who swarm around a monarch: And even so The general subject to a well-wish’d king Quit their own part, and in obsequious fondness Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love Must needs appear offense. (II.iv.26–30)

It has become traditional to see in these lines an allusion to the behavior of the crowds that James so disliked on his visit to the Merchants Exchange in 1604. This image also brings together the two contrasting ideas that undergird the debate about equity and, more broadly, absolutism. In comparing personal passions to the tumultuous public, this passage raises the question: Who is unruly and needs to be controlled? Is the public the unruly entity—the many-headed beast— that requires the firm hand of the monarch? Or is human nature itself—including the monarch’s human nature—the beast that must be subjected to law? Further, Measure suggests that even if one is not abusing the right to make private judgments, one can be perceived that way by a slanderous public: the unruly crowd that the Duke avoids. But Measure shows how a single person’s access to this kind of power can lead to corruption, because the individual is also subject to unruly passions. In his rigidity regarding Claudio’s sentence, Angelo may represent the rejection of equitable interpretation of the law; however, his secret abuse of his power to interpret the law representstheworstfearsoftheopponentsofequity.MeasureforMeasure allows us to see not only the necessity of equity, but also the danger of equity, since the power to grant it resides in an individual. In the final scene off Measure for Measure, Isabel embodies all the problematic aspects of mercy previously described in this chapter when she makes an emotion-based plea for undeserved clemency for Angelo. She also functions as a voice of equity when she says, “I partly

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think / A due sincerity governed his deeds, / Till he did look on me” (V.i.445–47). Her attempt to judge Angelo’s original motive reflects one aspect of equitable decision making. Her plea for Angelo’s life is also an instance of emotional contagion. She kneels down not for herself but out of compassion for another: Mariana, who passionately begs Isabel for help: “Sweet Isabel, take my part!” (V.i.430). Mariana’s pleading makes clear her love for Angelo: when the Duke tells her that she will inherit Angelo’s possessions so that she can buy herself a better husband, she replies, “O my dear lord, / I crave no other, nor no better man” (V.i.425–26). Isabel responds compassionately to the other woman’s love, grief, and pleading. Isabel’s plea embodies the mercy and compassion that were depicted as damaging earlier in the play. When she acts as an intercessor between the Duke and Mariana, kneeling to beg mercy of the Duke, Isabel’s position reflects the traditional image of medieval queens as well as the Blessed Virgin, who intervenes in heaven’s stern judgment of even the most deplorable sinners, which Angelo certainly is. Arguably, mercy for Angelo might permit the endless generation of sin invoked earlier in the play, but at this moment Isabel’s compassionate plea for mercy is represented as revealing a heretofore hidden truth rather than spawning a sinful progeny. When Isabel says to the Duke, “Look, if it please you, on this man condemn’d / As if my brother liv’d,” her generous interpretation of Angelo and his position turns out to be factually correct (V.i.444–45). Isabel embodies not only the myth of the Blessed Virgin here but also the myth of the merciful queen Elizabeth (a name which is the English form of Isabel). Richard Mulcaster describes how Elizabeth, on her entrance into London for her coronation, passed a weeping man who turned his head away at the sight of her. Though it seems likely—given his averted face—that this man lamented her accession, the new queen chose to put the best possible interpretation on his behavior; when asked whether she thought the man wept for sorrow or gladness, the queen replied, “I warrant you it is for gladness.” Mulcaster remarks, “A gracious interpretation of a noble courage, which would turn the doubtful to the best.””59 The fact that Isabel’s merciful and imaginative “reading” of the situation—that Claudio still lives—turns out to be true seems to valorize, even celebrate, qualities that have earlier troubled this play: compassion, mercy, and equity. If the Duke’s past leniency, carried out behind the scenes, recalls the reign of Elizabeth, then that image of the clement queen, responding with feminine pity and generous in her interpretations—and thus

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judgments—is now refracted in Isabel. But these qualities no longer seemproblematicinActV.Thelanguageoff MeasureforMeasure,up until this final scene, repeatedly registers the danger of mercy, compassion, intercession—when they are private. But in public, staged, and under the control of the Duke, mercy no longer poses a threat. The merciful judgments of the Duke can produce a comic ending, because he uses mercy in the way that James did when, in 1603, he remitted the death sentences for three conspirators in the Main Plot. On this occasion, James signed death warrants and then reversed them at the last moment, when the men were actually on the scaff fold. Robert Cecil’s description of what happened is instructive: I doubt not but you would equally with us admire, the excellent Mixture of the King’s Mercy with Justice; for even after he had first absolutelytaughtusallourDuties,toleaveallMediationinthisCase,(Mercy being only his) he signed three warrants for the Execution of the two Lords Cobham and Grey y with Sir Griffin Markham.60

After each man came to the scaffold and made full preparation to die, each was recalled by the king’s messenger. Finally, all three were brought to the scaffold together and the King’s pardon was publicly announced, which was received by “all of the Standers by, with such Joy and Admiration, as so rare and unheard of a Clemency most worthyly deserved.”61 The public reception of the king’s mercy is wholeheartedly positive, according to Cecil; no one warns about foolish clemency, as so often happened in Elizabeth’s time, despite the fact that these men were accused of a treasonous plot. But this monarchical mercy is staged in such a way that it dramatizes James’s power: as Cecil says, James began by teaching them their duty and his own absolute power by refusing to allow anyone to intercede for the condemned men. But having asserted his authority, James, theatrically and very publicly producing last-minute pardons, stages himself as a figure of godlike power. It forms a striking contrast to the way Elizabeth was so often represented in these cases, as a weak monarch whose “womanish pity” caused her to waffle behind the scenes. Jeffrey Doty argues that the Duke inMeasure for Measure stages a final scene intended to establish his sacred authority. Since Doty has also argued that the Duke desires to free his authority from any dependence on popularity, it seems counterintuitive to suggest that this theatrical final scene could accomplish that. But Doty’s point is that this is a different kind of public performance from those staged

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by Elizabeth: rather than evoking love and cheers, the Duke’s performance produces “awe and silence.”62 I would like to amplify this difference by noting that Elizabeth’s merciful judgments were never staged in the theatrical fashion that James employed with the Main conspirators. Elizabeth’s reluctance to execute harsh justice was usually carried on behind the scenes, resulting in frustrated assertions from her courtiers such as Cecil’s to Walsingham when the execution of Norfolk was delayed: “I cannot write you what is the inward cause of the stay of the Duke of Norfolk’s death.”63 The phrase “inward cause” suggests how privately the queen deliberated: even an insider like Cecil is unsure of her motives. Elizabeth’s public performances resulted in adoring cheers rather than awed silence in part because she typically staged herself as a loving queen and mother to her people, not as a judge, whether harsh or merciful. Her judgments, as we have seen, were often hidden, perhaps because, as a woman, she was likely to be condemned no matter whether she was harsh or mild. Unlike Elizabeth, James attended Star Chamber hearings in person, a practice that made his personal judgments more public but also potentially cast a court of law as an embodiment of personal monarchy. Thus legal historian Theodore Plucknett suggests that the “greatest blow” to the Star Chamber “came from its friend rather than its enemies,” for when James attended in person, “the spectacle of the sovereign sitting for five days and giving judgment in a libel action” must have seemed “a triumph of the principle of personal monarchy.”64 Plucknett’s use of the word “spectacle” to describe James’s attendance attests that the principle of personal monarchy is strengthened by the public nature of the king’s judgment; whether the judgment is merciful or rigorous is not the point.65 James’s interactions with and attempts to control his Parliaments were similarly public in a way that Elizabeth’s were not. Elizabeth and James both followed the tradition of addressing Parliament in an opening and closing speech, but James’s words to Parliament were much more highly publicized. Only rarely were Elizabeth’s speeches to Parliament printed, the Golden Speech of 1601 being the best-known exception. James, by contrast, had his first speech to the Parliament of March 1604 printed by the royal printer in London and also in Edinburgh, a practice that would continue throughout his reign.66 Despite our impression of James as a withdrawn and private monarch and Elizabeth as one who permitted much more public access to her person, the distinction between the two is finer than this. James staged himself differently. His progress into London for his coronation was his first

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and last; such celebrations of mutual love between himself and his people were not his chosen theater of power. However, public and publicized appearances before legislative and judicial groups such as Star Chamber and Parliament worked to establish James as a different kind of authoritative figure, one who believed in the supremacy of his personal judgments and who believed in staging them. Does the end of Measure valorize this idea of kingship as invested absolutely in a single figure whose judgments do and should supersede those of the law? I would say rather that the play stages this brand of authority and suggests its reliance on public show. The Duke at the end of Measure may not have silenced the unruly discourse of a burgeoning public sphere: Lucio is still talking, though the Duke does have the last word. But he has performed his mercy in such a way as to brand it a sign of power rather than weakness. Paradoxically, mercy exercised behind closed doors subjected him to unregulated public discourse much more so than does a mercy exercised in public. Isabel’s moment of intercession recalls an older model of mercy associated with the late queen: traditionally feminine, based on compassion, and enacted not as a sign of power but undertaken from a posture of subordination. Queen Elizabeth’s mercy in reality probably had none of these traits, but as we have seen, her clemency was often represented as a sign of feminine weakness rather than monarchical power. James may have regarded his predecessor’s reliance on popularity as another weakness, one that undercuts absolutist ideology,butMeasureforMeasureshowsthepotentialpowerconferredon a male monarch as a result of his public performance of mercy.

CHAPTER 6

“GOOD QUEENE, YOU MUST BE RULL’D”: FEMININE MERCY R IN THE PLAY A S OF HEYWOOD AND DEKKER

A

fter the death of Elizabeth in March of 1603, panegyrics remembered her as a loving mother to her people, a virtuous and wise princess who, by God’s special care, was able to survive and thrive despite the many dangers that surrounded her. Often, writers celebrated the peace enjoyed during her reign: “Full foure and fortie yeares foure months seven dayes, / She did maintaine this realme in peece alwayes.”1 But as discussed in Chapter Five, not everyone lamented the end of Elizabeth’s peaceful reign. In Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderful Year (1603), courtiers, lawyers, merchants, citizens, and shepherds mourned the queen’s death; only the soldier, walking on wooden legs, “brisseld up the quills of his stiffe porcupine mustachio, and swore by no beggers that now was the houre come for him to bestirre his stumps.”2 Those who hoped that James might prove less irenic than Elizabeth would soon be disappointed, of course, but some of her subjects initially welcomed a man’s accession, expecting an end to certain traditionally “feminine” qualities associated with the queen, such as an aversion to war and an excess of clemency. This chapter addresses three plays written within a few years of Elizabeth’s death that directly represent her: Thomas Heywood’s IfYouKnowNotMeYouKnowNobody, y PartsIandII,andThomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon. In all three, we can identify the celebration of masculine authority that was occasionally expressed openly as James came to power. The queen’s clemency is an important topic in these plays and is clearly associated with her gender; however, there is little fear that her actual judgments will endanger herself and her realm. Elizabeth’s mercy causes less tension in Heywood’s and

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Dekker’s plays than it does in most literary representations that we have seen because the queen’s agency is reduced; her councilors seem to exercise more authority than she does. Heywood’s plays, in particular, stage Elizabeth as a much more docile and conventionally feminine figure than she actually was, despite his dramatization of her famous visit to the troops at Tilbury. By the time this rousing scene is reached, however, Elizabeth has been inscribed in very conventionally feminine terms and her dangerously merciful nature has been restrained by the men around her. Both Heywood and Dekker return to a figuration of her mercy present at the outset of her reign: Elizabeth’s mercy identifies her as a champion of Protestantism and distinguishes her from the Roman Catholic Mary Tudor. Both playy wrights also emphasize God’s control over events to such an extent that Elizabeth herself finally seems less the agent of her own fate and more a passive creature directed by the men around her and by God’s providence. Thomas Heywood was a professional playwright whose dramatization of Elizabeth’s trials during the reign of Mary Tudor was entitled dIfYouKnowNotMeYouKnowNobody y.Subtitled“TheTroubles of Queene Elizabeth” and first printed in 1605, it was followed the next year by If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, PartII. This second play focuses not on Queen Elizabeth but on the merchant Thomas Gresham. In her introduction to the Malone Society reprint of Part II, Madeleine Doran speculates that Heywood, wanting to capitalize on the popularity off If You Know Not Me, may have taken a play about Thomas Gresham that he had written earlier and interpolated scenes about Queen Elizabeth into the already existing play, resulting in “a single two-part play recording the troubles and glories of Elizabeth’s life and reign.”3 Heywood’s plays were indeed extraordinarily popular; there were eight editions of Part I and four editions of Part II within thirty years after they were first published. What accounts for this popularity? Teresa Grant says that the story of Elizabeth’s youthful trials was a familiar and beloved tale in early modern England that “tugged at its collective heartstrings.””4 Catherine Loomis suggests that the uncomplicated world depicted by Heywood was comforting.5 Perhaps Heywood’s portrayal of the queen is comforting not only because it is so simplified, familiar, and celebratory. Heywood also depicts an Elizabeth who exemplifies conventionally feminine qualities, yet is still able to triumph and rule successfully. Her successes, however, have little to do with her own agency; some other force promotes Elizabeth’s cause and protects

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her, whether that force is aristocratic males, London merchants, or God’s providence. In If You Know Not Me, Heywood emphasizes the youth and innocence of the Princess Elizabeth. Catherine Loomis points out that our very first glimpse of Elizabeth in this play highlights her vulnerability, as the sickbed on which she lies is carried onto the stage. Her agency is elided, according to Loomis, and her survival attributed to divine intervention rather than any efforts of her own.6 Certainly Heywood’s young Elizabeth does not resemble the courageous Elizabeth of the Armada story. For example, Heywood’s Princess Elizabeth repeatedly expresses her fear of impending death. When she is about to be examined by Mary’s councilors, she implies her willingness to die by naming herself “a Virgine and a Martyr” (v.342), and she reiterates her trust in God; she also refuses to admit guilt and proclaims her innocence when questioned by the Bishop of Winchester.7 Despite her brave words in these situations, when she is alone with her gentlewomen, she says that her fear and the queen’s displeasure, though they have cured her body’s illness, have made her “hart sick, braine sick, and sick even to death” (v. 313–15). “My hart is fearfull,” she tells Gage in a later scene (xiv.985). After she is released from the Tower into the guardianship of Beningfield, Elizabeth says, “What fearfull terror doth assayle my hart? / Good Gage come hether and resolve me true / In thy opinion; shall I out live this night?” (xiv.976–78). Even when she finally gets her desired audience with her sister, Elizabeth weeps what she calls a “womanish teare, / In part compeld by joy, and part by feare” (xviii.1255–56). This portrait of a frightened young woman adds to the pathos of her situation and contributes to the play’s power to tug at the heartstrings of the audience, as noted by Grant. It also, however, represents Elizabeth as traditionally feminine. As Janel Mueller suggests about Elizabeth’s omission of courage as one of the cardinal virtues she embraced as a ruler, “courage” was coded masculine and connoted the possibility of violent action that Elizabeth resisted when she had to decide Mary Stuart’s fate.8 If You Know Not Me removes traditionally masculine qualities from Elizabeth and celebrates her merciful nature as part of this picture of perfect femininity. Despite her imprisonment and ill use, when Elizabeth comes to power at the end of the play, she treats her former enemies with mercy. The Constable treated her harshly when she was in the Tower; the audience heard him say, “Oh that I could but draine her harts deare blood, / Oh it would feede me, do my soule much good” (ix.755–56). In

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the final scene, when Elizabeth is queen, he begs forgiveness: “Pardon me gratious Madame ’twas not spleene, / But that alegance that I ow’d my Queene” (xxiii.1528–29). Elizabeth immediately pardons him: “We do as freely pardon as you truly serve” (xxiii.1532–33). Though she toys a bit with her next petitioner, Beningfield, the outcome is the same. After referring to him as her jailer, she says, “When we have one we would have hardly us’d / And cruelly delt with, you shall be the man.” But she follows this dig with the promise of clemency: “This is a day for peace, not vengeance fit, / All your good deeds wee’le quit, all wronges remit” (xxiii.1546–49). Immediately after she speaks these lines, she is presented with the sword of justice, her words having suggested the lenient brand of justice she is expected to purvey. Grant notes that Heywood deliberately contrasts Elizabeth’s clemency with her sister Mary’s “perfidious cruelty” in order to characterize Elizabeth as the antithesis of her predecessor: “After gaining the throne Mary persecutes her religious enemies and returns the country to the errors of the Catholic faith; but Elizabeth metes out no punishments—even to those who have done her substantial wrong—and embraces the true Protestant religion.”9 Her claim that the contrast implies the distinction between their respective religions agrees with the way claims of Elizabeth’s merciful nature were used early in her reign to promote her image as a champion of Protestantism. However, I would argue that Mary’s portrait is a bit more ambivalent than Grant allows. True, we are meant to compare Elizabeth’s leniency in the final scene with Mary’s severity toward Master Dodds in the first scene. But Mary is not unrelentingly cruel. Her harshness toward Dodds, who asks for the freedom to practice their Protestant faith that was promised to the men of Suffolk, certainly characterizes Catholicism as the religion of oppression. But our clearest impression of Mary is not that she is personally cruel, but rather that she is dominated by the men around her. The pillorying of Dodds is not her command, but that of the Bishop of Winchester. Winchester and Beningfield convince Mary that Elizabeth poses a danger, resulting in the order that Elizabeth be brought to court and questioned. Elizabeth’s greatest peril occurs when Winchester tries to have her death warrant signed—but not by Mary, rather, by Philip, who is alerted to the fact that the warrant has been slipped into papers he is sealing in time to recall it. It is Philip, not Mary, who orders Elizabeth released from her confinement and brought to Hampton Court. At his urging, Mary accepts her sister into her presence. Heywood depicts both queens as dominated by the men

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around them.10 Mary’s allegiance to Catholicism and domination by cruel men like the Bishop of Winchester contribute to her severity. Elizabeth’s clemency signals her virtuous adherence to the true faith; that her supporters are godly men is signaled by their compassion. Heywood does not characterize Mary as a cruel Jezebel, as did Knox and Becon. She does not have Elizabeth’s (or Philip’s) degree of compassion, but the play suggests repeatedly that, were Elizabeth actually in her presence, Mary would relent and pity her. Historically, Mary did resist giving Elizabeth a personal audience during the time she was under suspicion. Both the real-life events and Heywood’s portrayal suggest how a personal audience with the monarch can provide access to pity.11 The first person to speak to Mary on Elizabeth’s behalf insists that the princess “only craves but to behold your face, / That she might cleare her selfe of all supposed treasons” (ii.116–18). When Elizabeth is being conveyed to the Tower in the famous barge, Winchester asks Beningfield, “Did you not marke what a pitious eye she cast / To the Queens window as she past a long?” (vii.517–18). Recognizing that Elizabeth wants to linger near Mary’s window, Winchester insists that the bargeman row away hastily. Shandoyse, having witnessed the princess’s conveyance to the Tower, says, “Yet who shall hinder these my eyes to sorrow / For her sorrow: By Gods marry deere, / That the Queen could not, though her selfe were here” (vii.550–52). Elizabeth craves the personal meeting with Mary for the very reason that Shandoyse suggests here: if Mary actually saw and spoke to the dejected Elizabeth, she would be more likely to pity her. When the sisters finally meet, at Philip’s urging, Mary eventually forgives Elizabeth, but Heywood leaves her motive obscure. Obviously, Mary is partly swayed by her husband’s insistence. Before Elizabeth even enters, Mary promises Philip that she will bestow her favor on Elizabeth, though she says, rather caustically, that her favor shall be “farre bove her desert” (xviii.1239). Mary is not as tenderly inclined toward Elizabeth as is Philip. She tells him to step behind the arras, saying “There shines too much mercy in your face” (xviii.1244). Once Elizabeth enters, Mary questions her sister, but Elizabeth pleads effectively for herself (as Mary says, “We know you can speake well”) (xviii.1267). This too suggests the potency of the personal audience; Elizabeth finally gets a chance to speak for herself and powerfully insists that even torture, imprisonment, and death cannot cause her to die as anything but Mary’s “true subject, and true sister” (xviii.1281). Mary’s questioning ends with her sudden command that Elizabeth should rise and kiss her hand. “Sister

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this night your selfe shall feast with me, / To morrow for the country you are free” (xviii.1303–4). Whether Mary was influenced by her husband, convinced by Elizabeth’s speech of self-defense, or moved by pity is never clear. Perhaps Heywood means to suggest none of the above: Elizabeth’s final word to Mary is that “God hath kept his promise . . . To rayse them frends that on his word relie,” implying that her reconciliation with Mary was God’s work (xviii.1298). That explanation accords with Heywood’s providential theme (following Foxe’s account) but also, notably, it removes the agency for this reconciliation from either woman. If You Know Not Me, Part II provides a dramatic portrayal of Queen Elizabeth’s mercy toward her would-be assassin, Dr. Parry. In Heywood’s sequel, Elizabeth is a secondary character, appearing only three times. In her first appearance, she visits Gresham’s newly constructed Royal Exchange and names it. Here she has a comic encounter with the merchant Hobson. The play ends with a long scene dramatizing her visit to the troops at Tilbury during the attack of the Spanish Armada. In between these two is the scene in which Dr. Parry attempts to assassinate her. William Parry’s 1585 plot to murder Elizabeth as she walked in the Palace Gardens had caused an uproar when it was revealed, though Parry lost his nerve when he approached the queen and did not actually attack her. He was executed in 1585.12 In dramatizing this event, Heywood provides a nuanced portrayal of Elizabeth’s mercy. She is in her garden when Parry first approaches her, comparing the plants to her subjects and herself to the gardener: In such a Garden may a Soveraigne Be taught her loving subjects to maintaine; Each Plant unto his nature and his worth, Having full cherishing, it springeth foorth. Weedes must be weeded out, yet weeded so Till they doe hurt, let them a Gods name grow. (xv. 2325–30)

Painting Elizabeth as a nurturer who cherishes each subject, this speech constructs the popular maternal image of the queen, an image that requires that she be tenderly merciful. Her paradoxical desire both to destroy and sustain the weeds points clearly to the problem with the queen’s clemency. Her generous forbearance is an important part of her image, but it can also be dangerous, given that the weeds can hurt the garden.

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These words foreshadow the complexities of Elizabeth’s relationship with Dr. Parry, who has just delivered a soliloquy expressing his indebtedness to Elizabeth because she showed him mercy once before, a gratitude that conflicts with the oath he has taken to kill her. Her previous mercy has indeed had the effect described in statecraft literature that advises a monarch to grant clemency in order to bind and obligate his subjects. Parry meditates on the queen’s earlier pardon, saying, I had been eaten up with wormes ere this, Had not her mercie given a life to this; And yet these hands if I performe my oth, Must kill that life, that gave a life to both. (xv.2282–85)

Heywood shows that the queen’s mercy had the effect of creating a sense of obligation in Parry, but the crucial point seems to be that his sense of obligation is not strong enough to override his intention. Parry reflects not only on Elizabeth’s merciful nature and his debt to her, but also on the solemn oath he took to kill her and the promises he made to “holy fathers and grave Catholikes” (xv. 2297). He finally decides to go forward: “And by a subjects hand, a Soveraign dies” (xv. 2301). After he makes two false starts, the queen sees his weapon and cries, “Parry, Villaine, Traitour, / What doost thou with that Dagge?” (xv.2350–51). Her lords hurry to her, Parry’s attempt is foiled, and he immediately asks for her mercy. The first part of this scene emphasizes Elizabeth’s image as a merciful, loving mother; it shows the political benefits of mercy in dramatizing Parry’s sense of obligation to the queen, but it also suggests that the potential benefit of granting clemency is outweighed by the risks. But at the end of the scene, any sense that mercy might be salutary vanishes. Elizabeth’s personally merciful nature endangers her and requires external control. When Parry, having just threatened to shoot Elizabeth, says, “Mercie dread Queene,” she immediately responds, “I thanke my God I have mercie to remit / A greater sinne, if you repent for it: Arise” (xv.2366–68). Heywood depicts Elizabeth’s mercy as a boundless, God-given gift; she is represented as an icon of sacred mercy here, but she is not allowed to enact that mercy. Instead, Leicester intervenes, outraged, and tells the other lords to take Parry away: Let her alone, sheele pardon him againe: Good Queene we know you are too mercifull, To deale with Traitours of this monstrous kinde. Away with him to the tower, then to death. (xv.2370–73)

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When Elizabeth protests, his reply is startling: “Good Queene, you must be rul’d” (xv.2377). Elizabeth’s voice is not authoritative. She is not trusted to act independently: if left alone, she will pardon Parry again. She is overruled by her lords, specifically Leicester; his imperious statement, “You must be ruled,” is the scene’s final line. In staging this scene, Heywood is able to characterize Elizabeth as a loving, nurturing figure and an icon of sacred mercy. But the queen’s excessive mercy is no threat because she submits to the authority of Leicester and her other lords, recalling Aylmer’s words, “If she shuld judge in capitall crimes: what daunger were there in her womannishe nature? none at all. For the verdict is the 12 mennes, whiche passe uppon life and deathe, and not hers.”13 As John Watkins has pointed out, Heywood’s plays efface memories of Elizabeth as an absolute monarch. This stage Elizabeth, who makes concessions to her people and has limited agency herself, emerges as what Watkins calls “an icon of anti-Stuart resistance.”14 In If You Know Not Me Part II, the merchants rather than the queen take center stage and seem to be responsible for the success and continuity of the nation. Repeatedly, these non-aristocratic men display an agency that Heywood’s Elizabeth does not possess. They are virtuous, generous, and their contributions—such as charitable gifts to the poor, loans to the crown, and the building of the Royal Exchange—promote English prosperity and are markers of their nobility. Gresham is several times referred to as royal, suggesting that he displaces Elizabeth as the most authentic monarch in the play. Not only are these men extraordinarily generous, but Heywood specifically emphasizes the capacity to feel pity and the merciful judgments of one of them, old Hobson.15 He takes pity on John Rowland, a man who owes him money that he cannot repay. “I am the man whom you call’d Tawniecote,” Rowland says, to which Hobson replies, “And I the Hobson that will pitie thee” (xi.1661–62). When Tawny-Coat describes his wife and children’s hunger and his own inability to earn more than threepence a day, Hobson responds, “Alas the while, poore soules I pittie them” (xi.1678). Tawny-Coat tries to pay Hobson five shillings that he has saved as a start on repaying the twenty pounds he owes, but Hobson returns it, telling him to use it to buy bread for his children. A few scenes later, Hobson learns that his former employee Tim is about to be hanged for an earlier theft in which he stole a hundred pounds from his master. Hobson is horrified to learn that Tim will hang: “A hundred thousand pound cannot make a man; / A hundred shall not hang one by my meanes: / Men

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are worth more then monie” (xiv. 2178–80). He goes charging off to save him, riding a horse without saddle, bridle, boots, or spurs, leading Nowell to say, “They will take him for a mad man.” Tawny-Coat replies, “Als one to him he doo’s not stand on bravery / So he may doe men good” (xiv.2198–99). This insistence on Hobson’s mercy contributes to the play’s construction of the merchant class as England’s nobility. In Renaissance culture, mercy is often adduced as a sign of true nobility; a long-standing tradition associates mercy with monarchy.16 Notably, Hobson’s acts of mercy do not have dangerous or problematic repercussions, as does Elizabeth’s forgiveness of Dr. Parry. The aftermath of his pity for Tawny-Coat is glimpsed near the end of the play in the words of Lady Ramsie: Amongst these, I hold old Hobson well deserv’s To be ranckt equall with the bountiful’st. He hath rais’d many falling, but especially One master Rowland, once called Tawnicote, But now an able Citizen late chosen A Maister of the Hospitall. (xiv.2126–31)

Hobson deserves “to be ranckt equal with the bountiful’st,” an interesting choice of words that hints at the connection between the merchant’s merciful deeds and social rank. If You Know Not Me Part II celebrates mercy as a noble quality that is most salutary and unproblematic when practiced by the men of the merchant class. Queen Elizabeth is represented as the loving, merciful mother whose generous lenity toward Parry is admirably virtuous but politically foolish and fundamentally feminine. The play ends with the Spanish Armada scene, but even here, at the moment in her reign when the queen was most openly figured as masculine, Heywood’s Elizabeth draws attention to the limitations posed by her gender: Oh had God and Nature Given us proportion man-like to our mind, Wee’d not stand here fenc’t in a wall of Armes, But have been present in these Sea alarmes. (xvii.2544–47)

As Watkins says, “Although Elizabeth distinguishes between her masculine mind and her female body, she concedes the intransigence

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of the body’s limitations.”17 In a scene that appears in the 1633 edition of this play, the Spanish belittle England as “a petty island govv ernd by a woman”; Don Pedro scoffingly suggests that the queen and her ladies will greet the Armada “in their smocks, willing to pay / Their maidenheads for ransome.”18 Of course, these lines are ironic given the well-known outcome of the Spanish invasion. But this disparagement of Elizabeth’s gender is not completely repudiated in Heywood’s dramatization, since the queen does indeed acknowledge her limited ability to defend her country.19 England is instead defended by aristocratic men of war, and also, by implication, the merchants who supply the funds. The Armada scene’s heroes are Drake, Furbisher, Leicester, and the other martial men whom the queen repeatedly thanks. If You Know Not Me Part II constructs an Elizabeth of diminished personal authority, investing that authority in men of both the aristocratic and merchant classes. In this context, the queen’s mercy can be celebrated as an aspect of her loving, maternal care of her subjects. Thomas Dekker’s Elizabeth play followed Heywood’s plays by a couple of years. If You Know Not Me was first printed in 1605, followed by Part II in 1606; Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon n dates from 1607. Like Heywood, Dekker was a professional writer and a man of the theater who wrote with commercial interests in mind. Heywood’s Elizabeth plays were extraordinarily popular, which may have motivated Dekker to write The Whore of Babylon.20 But the play also accords with the fervent Protestantism he displays in other works. Julia Gasper labels Dekker a “militant Protestant” and calls The Whore of Babylon n “the definitive militant Protestant play.”21 Unfortunately for Dekker, his play did not attain the popularity of Heywood’s Elizabeth plays; The Whore of Babylon n was only published in one edition. Whereas Heywood’s play is a mixture of city comedy and history, Dekker’s generic approach is quite different, which may explain its lesser popularity. Dekker allegorizes his subject matter, so that the Roman Catholic Church is depicted as the Empress of Babylon; Elizabeth is Titania, queen of Faerie Land; one of her councilors, in a nod to Spenser, is named “Florimell.” Catherine Loomis finds that the play’s spectacular scenes and long, ornamented speeches link it to the Jacobean court masque.22 Julia Gasper calls itcomoedia apocalyptica, by which she means that it interprets history according to Protestant historiography based on the Book of Revelation and other scriptural texts.23 Certainly the play echoes Protestant interpretations of Revelation that identified the

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Whore of Babylon with the papacy: Dekker’s Empress of Babylon rides a seven-headed beast and has cardinals and kings at her command. Titania is her great enemy because she “calls her selfe Truth,” in opposition to the Empresse’s claims to embody truth (I.i.59).24 Dekker dramatizes the same Catholic plots against Elizabeth that Heywood does—Dr. Parry’s assassination attempt as well as the Spanish Armada—but adds another important Catholic antagonist in Edward Campion (called Campeius). He also includes a brief account of the Lopez affair. Given the militantly Protestant tone of Dekker’s play, it is unsurprising that The Whore of Babylon n evokes Elizabeth’s image as a champion of international Protestantism much more emphatically than does Heywood’s play. The queen’s mercy is central to that image. However, Titania’s mercy closely echoes that of Heywood’s Elizabeth in other respects. The mercy of Titania serves to contrast her with the cruel Empress of Babylon, as Elizabeth’s mercy contrastedwithMary’sgreaterseverityinIfYouKnowNotMePartI.But like Elizabeth in Part II of Heywood’s play, Titania is endangered by her own mercy. She twice forgives Dr. Parry, allowing him to return again to try and kill her. But her mercy is ultimately unthreatening because of our sense that Titania is constantly protected by God and the guidance of her “fairy peers.” Dekker depicts Titania as willing to punish when necessary, but personally disinclined to do so. Both playwrights construct Elizabeth figures whose triumphs are less the product of their own abilities and actions, and more the result of their careful councilors and God’s providence. Mercy is almost immediately introduced as a contested quality in The Whore of Babylon. In the play’s first scene, the Empresse of Babylon complains that “Our royall signet, / With which, we, (in a mothers holy love) / Have sign’d so many pardons, is now counterfeit” (I.i.28–30). She means that Titania is challenging the Empresse’s claim to “true Soveraignty” (I.i.20) by asserting that the Empresse’s mercy is counterfeit, her proclamations lies, and her churches (“Babylonian Sinagogues”) unclean (I.i.28–35). The Empresse’s claim to have signed so many pardons out of her motherly love is a parody of Elizabeth’s image of the loving monarch who, as she often reminded her subjects, was always by nature inclined toward mercy. But the Empresse’s claim to be a merciful mother quickly collapses, as the audience hears her persuading the three attendant kings of the danger posed by Titania, which inspires their hatred for the Fairy Queen. As one of the kings says,

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I could be glad to loose the divine office Of my creation, to be turn’d into A dogge, so I might licke up but her blood, That thrusts us from our vineyards. (I.i.129–32)25

Despite their desire for Titania’s blood, their first attempts will be guileful as they attempt to woo her, always secretly acting on behalf of the Empresse. The Empresse alleges her mercy as part of her larger claim to be the world’s true sovereign. The fraudulence of that claim is revealed immediately. Titania’s mercy to a neighboring country, by contrast, validates her true sovereignty. Fideli, one of her councilors, tells her: The Sea-God hath upon your maiden shores, (On Dolphin’s backs that pittie men distrest) In safetie sett a people that implores, The Soveraigne mercie flowing from your brest. (II.i.229–32)

These neighbors represent the Netherlands, whose plight is described by Fideli. Unlike the historical Elizabeth, who resisted the level of English involvement in the Netherlands that many committed Protestants desired, Titania immediately says, “Give them our presence” (II.i.257). Dekker conflates the plight of the Protestant states in the Netherlands with that of the dispossessed heir to the throne of Portugal. Just after Fideli recounts the troubles of the Netherlands, Titania’s councilor Parthenophill tells her of the Prince’s plight: he is identifiable as another antagonist of Spain, Don Antonio of Portugal, who opposed Philip II’s claim to the throne of Portugal. Essex and other Protestants supported Don Antonio’s claims, in the face of Queen Elizabeth’s opposition.26 But in Dekker’s play, just as she immediately agreed to help the Netherlands, Titania quickly offers succor to the disinherited Prince: Pittie and we had talk before you came, She hath not taken yet her hand from ours, Nor shall shee part, until those higher powers Behold that Prince: good works are theirs, not ours. (II.i.271–74)

Pity, envisioned as a woman, holds the queen’s hand in this emblematic image that genders pity feminine and also suggests the queen’s intimate reliance on that emotion. But Titania’s adoption of pity

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carries no threat: first, her pity serves a cause that Protestants supported, and second, she immediately subjects her own power to that of heaven, suggesting that everything, including her feminine emotion of pity, is under God’s control. Like Heywood’s Elizabeth, Dekker’s Titania bows to the will of her male councilors. When wooed by the three kings, clearly representative of courtships by Catholic princes (the most famous and controversial being the Duke d’Anjou), Titania listens to the objections of her “fairy peers,” then says, “Princes are free-borne, and have free wills, / These are to us, as vallies are to hills, / We may, be counceld by them, not controld” (I.ii.209–11). But this surprising assertion of her sovereignty is quickly revealed to be nothing more than a means of taunting the suitors: Titania promises that, despite the opposition of her councilors, she will bestow her love on the suitors at a later time. When asked to “name that most happie hour,” she answers in a riddle: When Lambes of ours, are kild by wolves of yours, Yet no blood suckt; when Heaven two Suns endures . . . (I.ii.231–32)

Having cited a long list of impossibilities, Titania concludes: “But then (and not till then) I sweare, / Shall your bewitching charmes sleepe in mine eare” (I.ii.250–51). By raising the possibility of Titania’s absolute authority and then turning it into a joke played on her suitors, Dekker radically undermines it. The scene also suggests the way Titania’s personal sovereignty could imperil her and her realm: had she truly believed her own absolutist rhetoric and acted on it by opposing her council, she would have been the victim of these bloodthirsty kings (who, after she exits the stage, threaten to tear her limb from limb). In the following scene, Titania calls her councilors “wise pilots” and says, how it agrees When Princes heads sleepe on their counsels knees: Deepe rooted is a state, and growes up hie, When Providence, Zeale, and Integritie Husband it well: Theis fathers twill be said (One day) make me a granddame of a maid. (II.i.33–38)

This rhetoric of mixed monarchy is unmistakable, and vividly gendered. As the prince, Titania is the most passive figure, sleeping with her head on the knees of her peers. They are the “fathers”

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who “husband” well the state. Through their decidedly masculine efforts, she will be preserved and also fruitful: they will make her a “granddame”—suggesting both old age and progeny—though she is a maid. This valorization of masculine authority and activity occurs again in a speech made by the first Cardinal to the kings who are seekk ing Titania’s life. He suggests that her death may not solve all their problems: Say that Titania were now drawing short breath, (As that’s the Cone and Button that together Claspes all our hopes) out of her ashes may A second phoenix rise, of larger wing, Of stronger talent, of more dreadfull beake. (III.i.232–36)

This prophecy of the accession of James I reflects the attitude expressed in Henry Hooke’s 1604 sermon, in which he describes James as a phoenix rising from Elizabeth’s ashes and predicts that, as a man, James will be able and eager to accomplish what a queen could not.27 The assumption that Elizabeth’s masculine successor will prove larger, stronger, and more powerful than the queen aligns with the play’s portrayal of a queen dependent on the judgment of her male peers.28 A long scene dramatizing several threats against Titania’s life foregrounds the question of the queen’s mercy in The Whore of Babylon. In the course of this scene, IV.ii, Titania is asked to sign the death warrant for a rebellious peer, avoids an attack from an unnamed gentleman who has sworn to kill her, is given a cup of poison by Dr. Roper (Lopez), and hears Parry confess that he was enlisted by foreign poww ers to kill her. Each situation displays Titania’s personally clement nature, but she never opposes the advice of her “fairy peers” by arguing for leniency. The scene opens with Fideli presenting Titania with a death warrant for someone described as the moon, a person who borrowed her light from the sun (Titania) and then tried to eclipse Titania’s brightness. The incident has led all the Fairies to entreat the queen on their knees to pull this menace “out from the firmament.” As her councilor urges Titania to sign the death warrant for this unnamed threat (probably Mary Stuart), we can see the resemblance and difference between Titania and Spenser’s Mercilla.29 Like Spenser, Dekker creates an Elizabeth-figure who simultaneously embodies tender mercy and enacts rigorous justice: Titania does sign the warrant. The difference is that Titania puts up very little

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resistance to the will of her council. Mercilla’s hesitation to permit Duessa’s death resembles more accurately what Queen Elizabeth actually did. Dekker’s maiden queen proclaims her merciful nature just as Elizabeth often did, but she departs from the behavior of the real-life Elizabeth when she quickly agrees to sign the death warrant. Though Titania protests that her “hand was made to save, but not to kill,” she easily accedes to Fideli’s wishes, though as she does, she emphasizes her own quite different personal inclination: Yet if we needs must bow, we would incline To that [the scale] where mercy lies, that scale’s divine: But so to save were our own breast to wound, Nay (which is more) our peoples: for their good, We must the surgeon play, and let out blood. (IV.ii.26–30)

Titania stresses her own inclination to mercy and characterizes herself as divinely merciful. In proposing—momentarily—to wound her own breast by saving a condemned man, she invokes the popular image of the pelican, a symbol of Christ’s mercy often associated with Elizabeth. However, she quickly recalls that to save a condemned criminal would potentially wound not just herself, but her people. Thus, when Titania signs the death warrant, she claims to be motivated not by vengeance or personal considerations, but by her loving concern for her people. Dekker continues this pattern of showing Titania’s personal clemency joined with her willingness to take severe action. After Fideli discovers that Roper has offered Titania a poisoned cup in exchange for payment from those who seek her overthrow, the queen exclaims, Our mercy makes them cruell, hunt out these Leopards: Their own spots will betray them: they build caves Even in our parkes: to them, him, and the rest, Let death be sent, but sent in such a shape, As may not be too frightfull. Alacke! what glorie Is it to buffet wretches bound in gives? (IV.ii.132–37)

Titania acknowledges that her own mercy has encouraged these attempts on her life: “Our mercy makes them cruell.” These words echo the complaints of Elizabeth’s councilors that she does herself harm by being too lenient. But even as Titania seems to reject that

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harmful mercy, declaring, “Let death be sent,” her natural tenderness emerges: “but sent in such a shape, / As may not be too frightfull.” Her reluctance to strike is also seen in her first encounter with Dr. Parry, which follows immediately. Here Titania is effectively alone: her peer Florimell is described in the stage direction as “aloofe.” Only in this scene and in her later interview with Dr. Parry is Titania ever alone; in these two scenes, when no councilors are there to urge her severity or mete out punishment, she shows nothing but mercy. In this, their first encounter, Paridell (Dr. Parry) confesses his confederacy with the “monsters” from foreign lands who are “fighting against the heaven of your blest raigne” (IV.ii.153–57). Titania exclaims, “How durst you (being our subject) wade so far?” Paridell’s answer is ambiguous: “Your eare of mercy” (IV.ii.163–64). Is he requesting permission to carry on with his story and receive a merciful hearing? Or is he, as Titania herself did in the case of Dr. Roper, blaming her mercy for his own willingness to transgress? Paridell claims to have abandoned his earlier intent to kill her and insists that he is now a loyal subject who can be useful to her. Titania apparently accepts this, takes no further action, and exits the stage. But the next time we see Paridell, he is discussing his plan to murder Titania. In Act V, when Paridell is in her presence again, Titania sends her guard away and speaks with him alone. This time she asks him if he knows of plans to kill her, and he answers no. Paridell “offers to stab her from behind,” but when she turns, he kneels down and tells her that he was about to kill himself out of grief that she suspects him. Titania is again kind and comforting, causing him to say, “O machlesse; I’me all poison, and yet she / Turnes all to goodnes by wise tempering me” (V.ii.5–6). Just as did Heywood, Dekker raises the possibility that the prince’s clemency could have a salutary effect; but just as in Heywood’s play, Dr. Parry’s sworn oath to kill the queen trumps his gratitude and admiration for her. Titania’s mercy, offered three times, makes Paridell hesitate but does not finally stop his attempt on her life. As he vows to do the deed—“Now, now, knit all your sinews in this arm”—and steps toward her again, her councilors enter and stop this final attempt. Finally, Titania allows justice to take its course. When Paridell says that nothing can save him now but her mercy, she responds, “It must not: Princes that would safely live, / May grieve at traytors fall but not forgive” (V.ii.159–60). Dekker’s Titania fulfills the wishes of militant Protestants in a way that her real-life counterpart never did. Titania’s peers curb her feminine pity, and when she is in their presence, she always accedes

Feminine Mercy in the Plays of Heywood and Dekker

173

to their demand for harsh measures, though never without stressing her natural clemency and tender pity for those she must punish: she “may grieve” at Paridell’s treachery but she may not forgive it. Furthermore, Titania’s mercy inspires her to be an unhesitating champion for Protestant and anti-Spanish forces abroad, thus glossing over Elizabeth’s real-life resistance to that role. The prominence of mercy as a topic in these plays testifies to its continuing importance in representations of Queen Elizabeth. While she lived, the queen’s mercy generated conflict; because her image as a clement queen inscribed her in traditionally feminine terms, it was both comforting and troubling. As militant Protestants grew increasingly disappointed by the queen’s tepid support of their aims and fearful of the realm’s vulnerability to Catholic forces, Elizabeth’s mercy was often denigrated and resisted. As the preceding discussion has shown, The Faerie Queene, the love poetry of Sidney, Spenser, andDaniel,andShakespeare’splaysMerchantofVeniceandMeasure for Measure all inscribe mercy in ambivalent terms and often suggest that clement actions and decisions have damaging results. After the queen’s death, Heywood and Dekker still acknowledge the risks of Elizabeth’s mercy but contain those risks by constructing a queen who is far more biddable than the real-life Elizabeth ever was. Both Heywood and Dekker recuperate the troublesome mercy of Queen Elizabeth, placing it under the control of men and using it to signal her status as a champion of the true faith and a sacred figure whose reign is God-ordained. In these plays, performed within a few years of Elizabeth’s death, the image of the clement queen that was contested during her reign now serves the cause of Protestants who most resisted it.

NOTES

1

“By Nature Full of Mercy”: The Clemency of the Queen

1. JohnAylmer,An , Harboroweforfaithfullandtrewesubiectess(London, 1559), O1r. 2. Aylmer, Harborowe, N3r. 3. Aylmer, Harborowe, N4v. 4. Aylmer, Harborowe, O2r. 5. Jacqueline Vanhoutte analyzes the way Aylmer’s pamphlet, ostensibly a defense of female rule, becomes a celebration of English masculinity, seen as superior because it was capable of correcting aqueen’s“womanish”excesses.Strange . Communion:Motherlandand MasculinityinTudorPlays,Pamphlets,andPoliticss(Newark:University of Delaware Press, 2003), 105–11. 6. Aylmer, Harborowe, H3v. 7. An historian who addresses the mercy of Tudor queens in relation to their gender is Sarah Duncan, “‘Most godly heart fraight with al mercie’: Queens’ Mercy During the Reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I,” in nQueensandPowerinMedievalandEarlyModernEngland,ed.Carole Levin and Robert Bucholz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 31–50. She identifies concerns about the practice of clemency by both Mary I (her main focus) and Elizabeth I. 8. Louis Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and PowerinElizabethanCulture,”Representations2(Spring1983):61–94. MorerecentworkincludesTheSubjectofElizabeth:Authority,Gender, and Representation n (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 9. SusanFrye,ElizabethI:TheCompetitionforRepresentation(New n York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 10. Carole Levin,The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 11. Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 3. 12. Allbiblicalreferences are toTheGenevaBible:AFacsimileofthe1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). See the discussion of Mercilla inThe Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 169. 13. Seneca, Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore. Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1928–1935), I: 439.

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14. Saint Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, Volume 3, trans. David Weisen. Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press and London: William Heinemann, 1968), IX, v: 167–71. 15. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Governour (London: J. M. Dent & Sons and New York: E. P. Dutton, 1907; rpt. 1937), 145. 16. JustusLipsius,Sixe , BookesofPolitickesorCivilDoctrine,trans.William Jones (London, 1594), 33. 17. Elyot, Governour, 145. 18. JacquesHurault,Politicke,Moral,andMartialDiscourses,trans.Arthur Golding (London, 1595), 191–92. 19. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 47. 20. Machiavelli, The Prince, 47. 21. Machiavelli, The Prince, 48. 22. Seneca, Moral Essays, 391 and 397–98. 23. K.J.Kesselring,MercyandAuthorityintheTudorState(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 24. Aristotle,TheNicomacheanEthics,trans.H.Rackham.LoebClassical Library (London: William Heinemann Ltd. And Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), V.x.6–8, 317. 25. Mark Fortier, The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 2. 26. Quoted by Fortier as “a common early modern way of looking at equity,” Culture of Equity, y 20. 27. ThomasWright,ThePassionsoftheMindeInGenerall,intro.Thomas O. Sloan (London, 1604; rpt. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 40. 28. The Ladies Dictionary y (London, 1694), 135–36. 29. John Donne,The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (New York: Penguin Books, 1971; rpt. 1982), 314. 30. Lipsius, Six Bookes, 30–32. 31. Wright, Passions, 3. 32. Foranoverview,seeA.N.McLaren,PoliticalCultureintheReignof Elizabeth I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 47. 33. Juan Luis Vives,The Instruction of a Christian Woman, ed. Virginia Walcott Beacham et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 131. 34. SharonL.Jansen,DebatingWomen,Politics,andPowerinEarlyModern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 96. 35. Vives, Instruction, 98. 36. TheodoraA.Jankowski,WomeninPowerintheEarlyModernDrama (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 59–60 and 122–46. 37. Paige Martin Reynolds, “George Peele and the Judgment of Elizabeth I,” Studies in English Literature 50.2 (Spring 2010): 263–79.

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38. Dante,InfernoII.96.TheDivineComedyin y ThePortableDante,trans. and ed. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1995), 12. 39. MarinaWarner,AloneofAllHerSex:TheMythandtheCultofthe Virgin Mary y (Vintage Books, 1983), 200. 40. PaulStrohm,Hochon’ , sArrow:TheSocialImaginationofFourteenthCentury Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 99–102. 41. HelenHackett,VirginMother,MaidenQueen:ElizabethIandtheCult of the Virgin Mary y (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 168–69. 42. Christine Coch, “‘Mother of my Contreye’: Elizabeth I and Tudor Constructions of Motherhood,” English Literary Renaissance 26.3 (Autumn 1996): 423–50. In her study of the idea of England as motherland, Jacqueline Vanhoutte adds that Elizabeth “laid claim to the maternal authority habitually reserved for the nation.” Strange Communion, 118. 43. Coch, “Constructions of Motherhood,” 445. Vanhoutte analyzes Elizabeth’s eventual abandonment of maternal rhetoric in the context of the pervasive image of England itself as the mother in Strange Communion, 125–29. 44. John Carmi Parsons, “The Queen’s Intercession in ThirteenthCenturyEngland,”inPoweroftheWeak:StudiesonMedievalWomen, n ed. Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth MacLean (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 147. 45. Lois L. Huneycutt, “Intercession and the High-Medieval Queen: TheEstherTopos,”inPoweroftheWeak:StudiesonMedievalWomen, n ed. Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth MacLean (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 131. 46. Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, w 95. 47. Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, w 102–03. 48. See Coch, “Constructions of Motherhood,” and Mary Beth Rose, “WhereAretheMothersinShakespeare?””ShakespeareQuarterly y42.3 (Fall 1991): 291–314. 49. Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, w 111. 50. Parsons, “Queen’s Intercession,” 151. 51. Catherine Oakes, “The Scales: An Iconographic Motif of Justice, Redemption,andIntercession,”Maria:AJournalofMarianStudies1 (August 2000): 12. 52. A good example is Paul E. J. Hammer’s essay “Sex and the Virgin Queen: Aristocratic Concupiscence and the Court of Elizabeth I,” SixteenthCenturyJournal31.1(Spring2000):82.Hammerarguesthat Thomas Becon and John Knox’s labeling of Mary I as a Jezebel was one reason that Elizabeth I was such a strict guardian of sexual propriety at her court. Hammer assumes that when Becon and Knox refer to Jezebel, they are accusing female monarchs of a tendency to “fleshly weakness”; he suggests that Mary Stuart’s “disastrous liaisons” seemed to fulfill the prediction Knox made when he used

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Notes

53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

this label. Though I agree that Elizabeth wanted to avoid the kind of scandal that resulted from Mary’s indiscretions, Becon and Knox used the term “Jezebel” primarily to signify female cruelty and tyranny. OxfordEnglishDictionary, y secondedition(Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press) http://www.oed.com. Janet Howe Gaines provides an overview of the biblical Jezebel as well as the history of Jezebel as a symbol of women’s transgressions, including her use by Knox and Goodman in their treatises. Gaines recognizes that the Jezebel label carries many different connotations, not only sexual, but her main purpose is not to analyze the many allusions to Jezebel she cites. Her chapter on “Prose Adaptations of the Jezebel Story” offers thumbnail sketches of Jezebel allusions from medieval commentaries to a 1993 speech by Jesse Helms. Gaines notes that the Jezebel label was a popular one during sixteenthcentury religious struggles and that for Catholic and Protestant writers during this period, “any woman on the opposing side is consideredaJezebel”(99).MusicintheOldBones:JezebelthroughtheAges (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). Linda Woodbridge discusses several lists of “bad women” that includeJezebel.WomenandtheEnglishRenaissance:Literatureand the NatureofWomankind,1540–1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984). ChristopherGoodman,How , superiorpowersoughttobeobeyedoftheir subjects (Geneva, 1558), 34. Goodman, Superior Powers, 34–35. Goodman, Superior Powers, 61–62. AnthonyGilby,AnadmonitiontoEnglandandScotlandtocallthem torepentance,inTheappellationofJohnKnoxefromthecruelandmost injustsentencepronouncedagainsthimbythefalsebishoppesandclergieof Scotland (Geneva, 1558), 72. ThomasBecon,,AnhumblesupplicacionuntoGodfortherestoringofhys holye woorde, unto the churche of Englande (Strasburgh, 1554), 11. JohnKnox,TheFirstBlastoftheTrumpetagainsttheMonstrousRegiment of Women, facsimile edition (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., 1972), 2. Knox, Monstrous Regiment, t 9. Knox, Monstrous Regiment, t 30. Knox, Monstrous Regiment, t 41. Knox, Monstrous Regiment, t 38. Knox, Monstrous Regiment, t 56. Knox, Monstrous Regiment, t 33. Geneva Bible, 163. Constance Jordan points out that Goodman implies and Knox asserts outright that “for a woman to step out of her subordinate position in

Notes

70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

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the creational hierarchy is tantamount to an act of tyranny,” 434. But Knox also devotes attention to the specifically tyrannous qualities of Mary as a ruler, especially her cruelty. Constance Jordan, “Woman’s Rule in Sixteenth-Century British Political Thought,” Renaissance Quarterly y 40.3 (Autumn 1987): 421–51. This and all citations of Shakespeare’s plays refer to The Riverside Shakespeare, second edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). EdwardGosynhyll,,HerebegynnethalytlebokenamedtheScholehouseof women n (London, 1541), 21. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, second edition, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (London: Longman, 2001). All subsequent quotations from the poem refer to this text. This notion that cruelty would accompany woman’s authority may be based in part on Aristotle’s notion that women exhibit virtue only in response to authority, not as an expression of their own authority. Constance Jordan notes this and concludes that “Authoritative male virtues in a woman are therefore aberrations and constitute something like viciousness.” “Woman’s Rule,” 434. See also Judith Richards, “‘To Promote a Woman to Beare Rule’: Talking of Queens inMid-TudorEngland,”Sixteenth-Century ” Journal28.1(Spring1997), 120. She discusses the anxiety that the exercise of power might cause a woman to lose her femininity. JamesAnthonyFroude,A , HistoryofEnglandfromtheFallofWolseyto the Death of Elizabeth, Volume 10 (London: 1862–70; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1969), 333. Aylmer, An Harborowe, D3v. A. N. McLaren discusses Aylmer’s distrust of woman’s rule and analyzes the struggle between Elizabeth and her councilors over the idea of mixed monarchy in Political Culture, 59–69. Dudley Digges, The Compleat Ambassador (London, 1655), 164. Digges, Ambassador, 165–66. Judith M. Richards, “Love and a Female Monarch: The Case of ElizabethTudor,””JournalofBritishStudies38.2(April1999):133–60. Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 326. Sir John Harington, Nugae Antiquae, Volume 1 (London, 1804; rpt. AMS Press, 1966), 178. The letter is discussed and quoted at length by J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1559–1581 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953), 422–24. RichardMulcaster,ThePassageofOurMostDreadSovereignLady, QueenElizabeth h(London,1559),inElizabethIandHerAge,ed.Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 98. Mulcaster, Queen’s Passage, 104.

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85. Linda Shenk examines Elizabeth’s rhetoric of love in a Latin oration she delivered in 1593 and finds that the queen celebrates her subjects’ profound love for her in an echo of 1 Corinthians, substituting herself for God and placing herself at the heart of her people’s religious devotion. Shenk argues that this stress upon her subjects’ love is a call for unity in the face of religious divisions both within England and across Europe that threaten national stability. Linda Shenk, LearnedQueen:TheImageofElizabethIinPoliticsandPoetry(New y York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). See Chapter 4, “PhilosopherQueen,” especially123–32. 86. Christine Coch, “Constructions of Motherhood,” 446. 87. Burghley,WilliamCecil,Baron.ACollectionofStatePapers(London, 1740), 590. 88. JohnN.King,“TheRoyalImage,1535–1603”inTudorPoliticalCulture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 124– 25. Janel Mueller discusses another instance of substitution in the four cardinal virtues, as given later in the chapter. King also points out the emphasis on the Sword of Justice in images of Henry VIII. In Hans Holbein the Younger’s design for the title-page border of the 1535 Coverdale Bible, Henry VIII holds a prominently displayed sword in his right hand and the Bible in his left hand. In his discussion of this composite image of sword and book, King comments that the sword tends to disappear in images of Elizabeth, or undergoes subordination to the image of the book (104–6). 89. Carole Levin offers a good overview of this subject, Heart and Stomach of a King, 17–18. She also tells a story that exemplifies the queen’s often mild response to religiously motivated dissent: during a service in her chapel, a fervent Protestant pulled down her silver cross and candlesticks and stamped on them. The Spanish ambassador de Silva was surprised at her lenient response; she dismissed the attack as the act of a madman. 90. Shenk, Learned Queen, 44–45. 91. JohnFoxe,ActesandMonumentsoftheselatterandperillousdayes (London, 1563), B1v-B2r For an account of how some privy councilorspromotedthe1570editionoffActesandMonuments, seeElizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, “Print, Profit, and Propaganda: The Elizabethan Privy Council and the 1570 Edition of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs,’” English Historical Review w 119 (2004): 1288–307. 92. JohnFoxe,Thefirstvolumeoftheecclesiasticallhistorycontayningthe actes and monumentes of thynges passed (London, 1570), B2v. 93. Thomas Freeman points out that in later editions Foxe dropped the 1569 edition’s lavish dedication comparing Elizabeth to Constantine. According to Freeman, the absence of that comparison as well as a new emphasis on Elizabeth’s obligations suggest that Foxe is pushing the queen toward a thorough reformation

Notes

94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

181

of the Church, which she has, disappointingly, failed to provide. “Providence and Prescription: The Account of Elizabeth in Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs,’” in The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 38. Freeman argues that Dering’s sermon was based on the Actes and Monuments, and that it uses Foxe’s text to identify Elizabeth as a persecutor of the godly. “Providence and Prescription,” 44–45. Peter E. McCullough reports that Dering’s sermon rebuking the queen went through eleven editions in the sixteenth century, more than any other sermon. Sermons At Court: Politics and Religion in ElizabethanandJacobeanPreaching g(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998), 90. EdwardDering,,ASermonPreachedBeforetheQuenesMajestiee(London, 1570), B2r. Dering, Sermon, C2v, C4r. K.J.Kesselring,TheNorthernRebellionof1569:Faith,Politics,and Protest in Elizabethan England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 77. Burghley, State Papers, 557. Burghley, State Papers, 557. Kesselring, Northern Rebellion, 119. Kesselring, Northern Rebellion, 125–26. ThomasDrant.TwoSermonsPreached(London,1570),K3r.Kesselring lists this sermon as one that voiced support of Elizabeth’s severity, but actually Drant seems to be arguing for greater severity and criticizing the queen for being too lenient. Drant, Two Sermons, K1r. Drant, Two Sermons, J4r. The best-known examples are Cecil’s defense of Elizabeth’s policies,TheExecutionofJusticeinEngland,andtheresponsebyCardinal WilliamAllen,ADefenseofEnglishCatholics,whichaccusesElizabeth of cruelty and religious persecution. Allen says that those who “extol the equity and mercy used in Her Majesty’s regiment” are “libelers,” . DocumentsofTudorandStuartCivilization,ed.RobertM. 101.Folger Kingdon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965). JamesE.Phillips,ImagesofaQueen:MaryStuartinSixteenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 162–64. Marcus, Mueller, Rose, Collected Works, 197. Marcus, Mueller, Rose, Collected Works, 197. Speech to Parliament, November 12, 1586. Marcus, Mueller, Rose, Collected Works, 194. A. N. McLaren, Political Culture, 225. Many issues converge in this question of a private versus a public solution, including the queen’s participation in an action that could be understood as undermining the principle of monarchy itself.

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112. Speech to Parliament, November 24, 1586. Marcus, Mueller, Rose, Collected Works, 201. 113. Marcus, Mueller, Rose, Collected Works, 199. 114. In an interesting reading of Elizabeth’s self-presentation during this difficult time, Paola Baseotto concludes that Elizabeth exploited conventional ideas about femininity in order to distance herself from the affair of the Queen of Scots. I find some of her analysis compelling, especially her reading of Elizabeth’s selfrepresentation in her correspondence with James. But some of the sources Baseotto cites, including others’ complaints about the queen’s effeminate and dangerous clemency, seem to me to bespeak the way Elizabeth’s male subjects tended to represent her rather than her own self-representation. See “Mary Stuart’s Execution andQueenElizabeth’sDividedSelf”inRepresentationsofElizabeth I in Early Modern Culture, ed. Alessandra Petrina and Laura Tosi (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2011), 66–82. 115. Marcus, Mueller, Rose, Collected Works, 197. 116. Reynolds discusses Elizabeth’s speeches about how her judgment of Mary will be interpreted, though with a somewhat different emphasis than mine. Reynolds argues that the queen is trying to combat the idea that as a woman she is controlled by her passions; she claims impartiality because she does not want to be perceived as tyrannical. I argue that Elizabeth wants to be seen not only as fair but also as clement, so that she is not accused of unnatural cruelty— which is one aspect of tyranny, to be sure. Reynolds, “Judgment of Elizabeth I,” 273. 117. Marcus, Mueller, Rose, Collected Works, 198. 118. Marcus, Mueller, Rose, Collected Works, 198. 119. Janel Mueller, “Virtue and Virtuality: Gender in the SelfRepresentation of Queen Elizabeth I,” in Form and Reform in RenaissanceEngland:EssaysinHonorofBarbaraKieferLewalski (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 231–34. 120. Marcus, Mueller, Rose, Collected Works, 196-97. 121. J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584–1601 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 111. 122. PeterLakeandStevenPincus,eds.ThePoliticsofthePublicSpherein Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 3. 123. Lake and Pincus, Public Sphere, 3. 124. R. G., Salutem in Christo (London, 1571), A4r-v. 125. Peter Lake, “The Politics of ‘Popularity’ and the Public Sphere: The ‘Monarchical Republic’ of Elizabeth I Defends Itself,” inThe Politics ofthePublicSphereinEarlyModernEngland(Manchester: d Manchester University Press, 2007), 59–93. See also Michael Graves, “The

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183

Management of the Elizabethan House of Commons: The Council’s Men-of-Business,”ParliamentaryHistory y2(December1983):11–38. Graves analyzes the role of men such as Thomas Norton, a member of Parliament who “consistently allied himself with the Council, not only to hurry the Commons along, but also to pressurize an obstinate, vacillating queen for her own good” (18). As Lake shows, the means used to “pressurize” the queen was often an appeal to the court of public opinion. Graves focuses on the 1572 Parliament’s attempts to push through the execution of Norfolk and have Mary Stuart attainted and barred from inheriting the crown. 126. The writer also proposes the very course of conduct Elizabeth resisted in Mary’s case: a public accounting of her crimes. In the closing lines of the pamphlet, he claims that his “report” will be proved true “when her Majestie shal cause the parties now imprisoned to answeare openly thereto, by order of her laws, as there is no doubt but she wyl observe to all maner of subjectes that course.” Salutem in Christo, A7r. The author expresses his confidence that the public handling of Mary—an approach that Elizabeth vehemently opposed—will soon be undertaken by the queen. As discussed in Chapter Two, Elizabeth’s resistance to, and anxiety about, public display in the cases of Mary Stuart and others may have resulted in part from concerns about violating expectations of femininity.

2

“The Sacred Pledge of Peace and Clemencie”: Elizabethan Mercy in The Faerie Queene

1. ColinBurrow,EpicRomance:HomertoMilton(Oxford: n Clarendon Press, 1993), 101. 2. The Faerie Queene, second edition, ed. A. C. Hamilton etal. (London: Longman, 2001). All further quotations from the poem refer to this edition. 3. SeeDarrylGless,InterpretationandTheologyinSpenser r(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 156–57. Carol V. Kaske reads this as an instance of the biblical poetics of contradiction, or equivv ocation.Spenser . andBiblicalPoetics(Ithaca:CornellUniversityPress, 1999), 111–18. 4. See Graham Hough for the argument that the satyrs are governed by natural law alone, and natural law reveres the truth. A Preface to The Faerie Queene (New York: Norton, 1963), 150. 5. Richard Douglas Jordan argues for reading the satyrs as the Jews in“UnaamongtheSatyrs:TheFaerieQueene,1.6,”ModernLanguage Quarterly y 38.2 ( June 1977): 123–31. 6. Andrew Hadfield, “The ‘Sacred Hunger of Ambitious Minds’: Spenser’s Savage Religion,” in Religion, Literature, and Politics in

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7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688, ed. Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 27–45. Hadfield links the savage nations of Books I and VI with the Irish; he finds a number of ironic reversals in both episodes that problematize the idea of a single and accessible truth. He connects the explanation of Ireland’s adherence to Catholicism offered by Irenius in the View w to this episode: in both, the “savages” act in good faith and their mistaken belief is the result of ignorance, not evil (38). Todd Butler, in his excellent essay “That ‘Saluage Nation’: Contextualizing the Multitudes in Edmund Spenser’s The FaerieQueene,”readsthisandotherepisodesfromTheFaerieQueene alongside religious commentary from the period and suggests that the satyrs’ behavior in their first encounter with true religion conforms to the way many zealous Protestants saw their fellow English Protestants: tepidly Protestant, failing to become enthusiastic and devoted in their faith. Spenser Studies 29 (2004): 104–8. Todd Butler, “That ‘Saluage Nation,’” 105. Jennifer Rust, “‘Image of Idolatryes’: Iconotropy and the TheoPolitical Body inThe Faerie Queene,” Religion and Literature 38.3 (Autumn 2006): 140–41. Montaigne uses this term in “By Divers Meanes Men Come to a LikeEnd,”inTheEssayesofMichaelLordofMontaigne,trans.John Florio, 1603 (London: J. M. Dent and Sons and New York: E. P. Dutton, 1928), 18. Kathleen Williams, “Vision and Rhetoric: The Poet’s Voice in The Faerie Queene,” ELH H 36.1 (1969): 139. See Hamilton’s note, Faerie Queene, 178. This idea is discussed in Chapter One. Notably, in Book II the one fruitful act that is called “mercy” comes from God, who after Guyon faints sends a guardian angel to aid the fallen knight. The narrator tells us of a God who “loues his creatures so, / And all his workes with mercy doth embrace, / That blessed Angels, he sends to and fro” (II.viii.1.6–8). Of course, here “mercy” means not forgiveness but succor. The connection between women’s breasts and women’s tender natures is frequently invoked in this period; for example, a seventeenth-century “guide” to the female sex claims that women’s “soft breasts were made to entertain tenderness and pity.” The Whole Duty of a Woman, or A Guide to the Female Sex(London, x 1696): 21. Along the same lines, we have the iconography of charity as a nursing mother, as reflected in Spenser’s Charissa. Hamilton, Faerie Queene, 169. Gerald Morgan, “The Idea of Temperance in the Second Book of The Faerie Queene,”Review of English Studies, n.s. 37 (February 1986): 32.

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17. Mark Fortier addresses this question and reviews the various critical answerstoitin TheCultureofEquityinEarly ModernEngland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 116–21. 18. See for instance Sean Kane, Spenser’s Moral Allegory y (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 160. 19. AndrewMajeske,EquityinEnglishRenaissanceLiterature:Thomas More and Edmund Spenser (New York: Routledge, 2006). 20. Majeske, Equity, y 102. 21. Majeske reads the episode in Isis Church as one where Britomart foolishly lets down her guard and is taken in by the priests’ suspect interpretation of her dream. “It is dubious whether there really is such a thing as the controlling power of equity; instead it appears to be an invention created by the Isis priest who uses it to fool Britomart into acting on men’s behalf to help preserve and maintain men’s dominance over women” (107). Majeske points to Britomart’s reestablishment of men’s rule and her own disappearance from the poem as evidence. 22. Majeske, Equity, y 100. The tradition of queenly intercession is discussed in Chapter One. 23. Critical readings of this episode abound, with most critics either explaining how Mercilla’s condemnation of Duessa befits her representation as Queen of Mercy, or explaining the cause of the rupture between her name and her actions. Several critics attribute the rupture to a decline in Spenser’s idealism; see for example Thomas H. Cain, Praise in n The Faerie Queene (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 141–46, and Mihoko Suzuki, MetamorphosesofHelen:Authority,Difference,andtheEpic(Ithaca: c Cornell University Press, 1989), 193. Critics Rene Graziana and James Phillips have argued that Mercilla shows mercy toward her own people in protecting them from Duessa. See James E. Phillips, “Renaissance Concepts of Justice and the Structure of The Faerie Queene,BookV,”inEssentialArticlesfortheStudyofEdmundSpenser, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972), 482–83. Rene Graziana, “Elizabeth at Isis Church,” PMLA 79 (1964): 376– 89. T. K. Dunseath argues that Mercilla represents the harmony between justice and mercy, and that mercy in her case means the suppressionofwrath.SeeeSpenser’sAllegoryofJusticeinBookVof The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 216–18. I am less interested in whether or not Spenser endorses Mercilla’s judgment and more interested in the way the episode resonates with particular tensions about Elizabethan mercy and its representations. In Epic Romance, Colin Burrow does examine the episode partly in terms of tensions about Elizabethan mercy, though his understanding of Elizabethan mercy differs considerably from mine. Burrow reads Spenser as offering, throughout The

186

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24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Faerie Queene, a corrective to Elizabeth’s “wilfully random mode of supremacy,” 101. He says that, in the Mercilla episode, Spenser supplies a mode of pity less “impulsively arbitrary” than the queen’s, 132. I don’t think Elizabeth’s supposed capriciousness is the main problem Spenser grapples with in The Faerie Queene or in this episode, though I agree that how to represent the personal mercy of the sovereign is the central and problematic issue for Spenser. TheSpenserEncyclopedia,ed.A.C.Hamilton(Toronto:Universityof Toronto Press, 1990), 169. CarolineMcManus,Spenser’ , sFaerieQueeneandtheReadingofWomen (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 19. An essay that focuses on the representation of mercy in this episode is John D. Staines, “Elizabeth, Mercilla, and the Rhetoric ofPropagandainSpenser’ssFaerieQueene,”Journal ” ofMedievaland EarlyModernStudies31.2(Spring2001).StainesarguesthatSpenser’s account derives in part from propaganda justifying the execution of Mary, and that Spenser’s use of this rhetoric of propaganda serves to subvert the “official” position. Staines is interested in the “slippery meaning of mercy” (291) in this canto, but we arrive at different conclusions. He regards the era’s discussions of the difference between pity and clemency as “doublespeak,” whereas I think there is real concern that a female monarch cannot exercise godly mercy without lapsing into weak pity. Staines also suggests that the episode “draws attention . . . to the political program that produces an appearance of Justice and Mercy” (302), suggesting a wholesale cynicism that I don’t find in this episode. I argue not that Spenser is cynical about Elizabeth’s claims to be merciful but rather that he is sensitive to the dangers of both merciful and harsh judgments. EdmundSpenser,AViewoftheStateofIreland,ed.AndrewHadfield and Willy Maley (London: Blackwell, 1997; rpt. 1988), 102. Spenser, A View, w 102. William Nelson offers this and other examples of negatively connoted rusty swords in “Queen Elizabeth, Spenser’s Mercilla, and a Rusty Sword,” Renaissance News 18 (1965): 113–14. Marcus,Mueller,andRose,CollectedWorks,134.Afootnoteexplains that all other manuscripts of this poem read “poll” rather than “pull.” Thomas Roche argues that “let” in this context means “prevent or hinder.” See The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche Jr., with the assistance of C. Patrick O’Donnell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 1205. I doubt that “prevent” is the primary meaning since the line suggests that Mercilla would not let just vengeance fall on Duessa despite her evident guilt. However, the two possible meanings of “let” nicely embody the paradox that informs the entire episode.

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32. A.N.McLaren,PoliticalCultureintheReignofElizabethI(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 225–26. 33. Mark Fortier provides a helpful survey of the early modern debate about equity’s role in the law, detailing diverse opinions ranging from those who regard equity as a necessary force to correct the law and bring about true justice, to those who regard equity as a threat to law, the undermining of true justice by the conscience, or whim, of anindividual.TheCultureofEquityinEarlyModernEngland,59–86. Perhaps because one can find such radically different perspectives on equity in this period, critics have been able to apply the idea of equity to Spenser’s Legend of Justice and reach very different conclusions. For example, James Nohrnberg explains equity as “a kind of temperance within the execution of justice” (385) and sees the changing of Arthur’s mind away from “vain pity” to a well-balanced sense of justice as crucial to the point of this episode.The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 366. In Epic Romance, Colin Burrow reads the Mercilla episode as a reflection of Spenser’s unease with Queen Elizabeth’s lenity and refers to the context of early modern opinions that equity threatens the law. Others discuss equity as the sovereign’s ability not only to mitigate punishment but also to impose punishment; for instance, Michael O’Connell suggests that Britomart’s dream and her subsequent defeat of Radigund reflect Elizabeth’s ability as sovereign to apply equity in Mary Stuart’s case and punish her more harshly thanthelawpermits.MirrorandVeil:TheHistoricalDimensionof Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 145–46. What all such readings have in common is the recognition that the person of the sovereign and the force of law are two different aspects of justice; critics differ on whether these two forces work together or in opposition to one another in Spenser’s allegory, just as legal writers differed on whether equity was a complement or threat to law. 34. Louis Montrose, “Spenser and the Elizabethan Political Imaginary,” ELH H 69 (2002): 936–37. Douglas Northrop argues that the descrip tion of Mercilla’s court would lead contemporary readers to recognize Parliament, with Elizabeth/Mercilla presiding. “Mercilla’s Court as Parliament,”Huntington Library Quarterly y 36 (February 1973): 153–58. 35. Arthegall’s end in Book V is generally understood to represent the outcome of the career of Arthur, Lord Grey, Lord Deputy Governor of Ireland from 1580 to 1582. Spenser served as Lord Grey’s secretary. Grey was recalled because of his harsh policies, especially the massacre at Smerwick where 700 Irish, including women and children, were killed. See Ciarin Brady, “Grey, Arthur, Fourteenth Baron of Wilton,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, 341–42.

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36. John D. Staines, “Pity and the Authority of Feminine Passions in Books V and VI of The Faerie Queene,”Spenser ” Studies 25 (2010): 131. 37. Patricia Wareh, “Competitions in Nobility and Courtesy: Nennio and the Reader’s Judgment in Book VI of The Faerie Queene,”Spenser ” Studies 24 (2012): 163–89. That a complex relationship exists between courtesy and nobility has long been recognized. Frank Whigham offers a succinct explanation of some of the complexities in his entry on the social code of courtesy inThe Spenser Encyclopedia. Courtesy as a social code has been described as a way of trying to block upward mobility: prescribing a code of behavior that demarcates the true elite can unmask those who would pretend to a status they were not born to. On the other hand, the very act of codifying the rules and techniques that distinguish the noble from the common can serve the cause of upward mobility. Strategies such as those explained in The Courtier, if put into print, may be learned. 38. WilliamNelson,ThePoetryofEdmundSpenser(NewYork:Columbia University Press, 1963; rpt 1965), 293. 39. RichardC.McCoy,TheRitesofKnighthood:TheLiteratureandPolitics of Elizabethan Chivalry y (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). See especially 133–49. 40. See for example Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female AuthorityandLiteraryExperimentinSpenser,Shakespeare,andMilton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 41. Catherine Bates reads the motif of binding in Book VI as a reflection of Spenser’s ambivalent stance toward the court in general and Queen Elizabeth in particular: she analyzes the bonds in Book VI in the context of the bonds of reward and gratitude between patron and poet, providing a valuable way of thinking about the oftennoted mood of disillusionment present at the end of The Faerie Queene. But her argument that “any form of restriction or bond in Book VI thus proves to be as ineffectual as it is unwelcome” seems to me an overstatement (161). Briana’s transformation is a case in point.TheRhetoricofCourtshipinElizabethanLanguageandLiterature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 42. McCoy, Rites of Knighthood, 144.

3

“Proud and Pitilesse”: Elizabethan Mercy and the Sonnet Tradition

1. All references to Petrarch’s Canzoniere are to Robert M. Durling’s translation. Petrarch’sLyricPoems (Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press, 1976). 2. Among the 366 poems that comprise the Rime Sparse, there are approximately ten that directly accuse Laura of cruelty. There are

Notes

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

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a number that depict her iciness or hauteur. Petrarch is more likely to say that he spied pity in her expression than he is to accuse her of cruelty; in part, this is because of the transformation Laura undergoes after her death part way through the sequence. Anne Lake Prescott describes the connection between Ronsard and a number of Elizabethan writers inFrench n Poets and the English Renaissance:StudiesinFameandTransformation(New n Haven:Yale University Press, 1978), 91–131. Elizabeth Harris Sagaser, in her analysis of Samuel Daniel’s Delia, comments that the popularity of the “cruel-fair” topos during the reign of Queen Elizabeth is probably not coincidental, but she takes the discussion no further. “Sporting the While: Carpe Diem and the CruelFairinSamuelDaniel’s DeliaandTheComplaintofRosamond,” Exemplaria 10.1 (Spring 1998): 145–70. LeonardForster,TheIcyFire:FiveStudiesinEuropeanPetrarchism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 147. J.E.Neale,ElizabethIandHerParliaments,1584–1601(NewYork:W. W. Norton, 1958), 113. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 136–43. Davison had his son, the poet John Davison, write this verse, which appears inThe Queen’s Garland, ed. M. C. Bradbrook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 19–20. Forster points out that this poem echoes Tasso’s Aminta. Icy Fire, 140–141. CatherineBates,TheRhetoricofCourtshipinElizabethanLanguageand Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 4. Michael G. Brennan, in his 2006 history of the Sidneys and the monarchy, offers a detailed account of the decline of the Sidney family’s position and influence at court during the years 1578 and 1579. But when Brennan examines Philip Sidney’s extended stay at Wilton, which he thinks lasted from March until August of 1580, he is unsure whether Sidney “chose (or was obliged) to withdraw from court and takeupresidencewithhissister”(80–81).TheSidneysofPenshurstand the Monarchy, 1500–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Brennan, The Sidneys, 75. Brennan, The Sidneys, 70. Arthur F. Marotti, “‘Love Is Not Love’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,” ELH H 49.2 (Summer 1984): 396–428. Like Marotti, Michael Spiller suggests that “it may well be that, in writt ing to, for and about Stella, Sidney was displacing his frustrated political ambitions.”TheDevelopmentoftheSonnet:AnIntroduction(New n York: Routledge, 1992), 118. Others have taken the political reading of the poems in different directions. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass note that the Petrarchan idiom posits the man as humble suitor but also performs an act of public mastery. “The Politics of Astrophil and

190

16.

17. 18.

19.

Notes Stella,”Studies ” inEnglishLiterature24(1984):53–68.Quilliganthinks Sidney is turning the Petrarchan forms of Elizabeth’s court to his own purposes, asserting his mastery by making the Petrarchan sequence hisown.“SidneyandHisQueen,”inTheHistoricalRenaissance:New EssaysonTudorandStuartLiteratureandCulture,ed.HeatherDubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), 171–96. Peter Herman focuses on Sidney’s attitude toward poetry itself: “The fall from political favor is analogized as a fall into poetry; domination by a female monarch as domination by the feminine imagination.” Astrophil is effeminized in a reflection of the way Sidney felt emasculated by the queen’s exercise of power over him. Squitter-Wits and Muse-Haters:Sidney,Spenser,Milton,andRenaissanceAntipoeticSentiment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 121. Katherine Duncan-Jones warns against exaggerating the political dimensionoffAstrophilandStellabutalsowarnsagainsteasyassumptionsaboutSidney’sfeelingsforPenelopeDevereux.Sir . PhilipSidney: Courtier Poet t (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 223–50. A less sophisticated reading is found in a biography of Sidney that suggests that, if Sonnet 41 depicts the “Four Foster Children of Desire” tilt, this must mean that Penelope Devereux was still a controlling force in Sidney’s life in 1581 (238). Despite the author’s tendency to read AstrophilandStellaasautobiography,heneverthelessacknowledges that “Stella is often only a cipher, a means to explore the many sides of Astrophil—lover, poet and courtier.” Alan Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 240. Marion Wynne-Davies,Sidney to Milton, 1589–1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 14. Bell, Poetry of Courtship. Spiller, Development of the Sonnet, t 108 and 112–13. Another important approach to Astrophil andStella considers what the sequence reveals about Sidney’s views on poetry itself. As S. K. Heninger states, Sidney distinguishes between “fictive lover and actual poet.” By so doing, Sidney can comment not only on Astrophil as a lover but also on Astrophil as a poet. “Sidney and the SecularizationofSonnets,”inPoemsinTheirPlace:TheIntertextuality andOrderofPoeticCollections,ed.NeilFraistat(ChapelHill:University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 82. There are many political readings of Astrophil and Stella, some of which posit a more complex stance for the speaker than simple supplication. Maureen Quilligan reads Sidney as resistant to the queen’s power in “Sidney and His Queen.” Elizabeth Mazzola examines the language of maternity and infancy in the sequence to claim that Sidney both desires and resists Elizabeth as a maternal figure. See FavoriteSons:ThePoliticsandPoeticsoftheSidneyFamily(New y York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

Notes

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20. Jones and Stallybrass, “Politics of Astrophil and Stella,” 66. 21. This and all further quotations from Sidney’s work refer to Katherine , PhilipSidney:TheMajorWorks(Oxford:Oxford Duncan-Jones,Sir University Press, 2002). 22. For example, Hebrews 4:16, “Draw near the throne of grace and find mercy” or Ephesians 2:4–9, “Because God is rich in mercy you have been saved by his grace.” 23. Bradbrook, Queen’s Garland, 30. 24. PaulE.J.Hammer,ThePolarisationofElizabethanPolitics:ThePolitical CareerofRobertDevereux, 2nd EarlofEssex,1585–15977(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 57. 25. Whether the intimacy of the queen’s privy chamber was forbidden to all men or only to some, many women experienced that intimacy. Membership in Elizabeth’s inner circle conferred significant power on certain ladies of the court. 26. SirHarrisNicolas,MemoirsoftheLifeandTimesofSirChristopher Hatton n (London: Richard Bentley, 1847), 25. 27. Nicolas, Christopher Hatton, 28 28. Nicolas, Christopher Hatton, 28. 29. Hulton Manuscript, Letter 4. Forty-three letters from Essex to Queen Elizabeth are found in the Hulton collection, a bound volume of manuscript letters with facing-page transcriptions. Some of these letters have never been published. The British Library bought the manuscript in 1999. BL Additional MS 74286. 30. Hulton Manuscript, Letter 9. 31. Arthur Collins,Letters and Memorials of State, Volume 1 (London 1746; rpt. AMS Press 1973). Letter from Henry Sidney to Queen Elizabeth, September 1577, 218 and 220. See also the letters of August 1577 (204–06) and February 1578 (235–238). 32. Roger Kuin, ed.The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney, y Volume 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1123. 33. Mary Hill Cole,The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony y (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 163. 34. Cole, Portable Queen, 165–66. 35. That Sidney might represent royal favor as mercy is demonstrated in a letter from Sidney to Sir Christopher Hatton (December 1581) in which he refers to the queen’s offer of the share in a patent for the seizure of some recusants’ goods as “a Princes mercie.” See Kuin, Correspondence, 1046. 36. Sidney, Major Works, 224. 37. Sidney, Major Works, 224. 38. The first edition of Delia contained the sonnet sequence, an ode, and The Complaint of Rosamond, discussed below. Daniel quickly published a second edition of Delia with a few changes, and then a third edition two years later in which he added his play The Tragedy

192

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49.

Notes of Cleopatra. See John Pitcher for a fascinating and detailed account of Daniel’s many publications. “Essays, Works, and Small Poems: Divulging, Publishing, and Augmenting the Elizabethan Poet, y ed. SamuelDaniel”inTheRenaissanceText:Theory,Editing,Textuality, Andrew Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 8–29. Lisa Klein,The Exemplary Sidney and the Elizabethan Sonneteer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 137. Klein, Exemplary Sidney, y 28 and 143. Klein, Exemplary Sidney, y 139. Pitcher, “Essays, Works, and Small Poems,” 12–13. ThomasNewton,,AtropoïonDelion,orthedeathofDeliawiththeteares of her funerall (London 1603). Klein remarks that this conceit is often applied to Queen Elizabeth, but assumes that this imagery simply serves to exalt the lover’s mistress, Exemplary Sidney, y 146. AllquotationsfromDaniel’spoemsreferto o SamuelDaniel:Poemsand a Defense of Rhyme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930). The sonnet, visible on the portrait, is nonetheless damaged. Roy Strong providesatranscriptioninGloriana:ThePortraitsofQueenElizabethI (London: Pimlico, 2003), 137. It seems that the queen is depicted as the sun at the sonnet’s start and then as a “boundless ocean” to whom the “rivers of thanckes retourne” at the sonnet’s end. HelenHackett,VirginMother,MaidenQueen:ElizabethIandtheCult of the Virgin Mary y (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 176. Ralegh’s poem The Ocean to Cynthia figures the queen as Cynthia and her lover—himself—as the ocean, but he also uses the imagery of rivers returning to the ocean to represent his devotion to the queen. A few years after writing Delia, Daniel became closely associated with Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, a devoted follower of Essex. According to Rees, “Through Mountjoy he met Essex and came to love him.” Daniel was called before the Privy Council and questioned about his 1605 play, Philotas, which some interpreted as a seditious comment on the Essex affair. See Joan Rees, Samuel Daniel: ACriticalandBiographicalStudy y(Liverpool:LiverpoolUniversity Press, 1964), 64 and 97–98. Elizabeth Harris Sagaser argues that Delia and Rosamond, taken together, valorize the “cruel fair” as an autonomous and self-possessed woman who can reap the pleasure of her beauty and the glory it brings her. Sagaser’s reading of the poems is compelling and complements mine, though she is more interested in analyzing the carpe diem poems from the end of the sequence than she is in the first thirty sonnets. But my reading also differs from hers in several respects, including that I do not regard Daniel’s use of the “cruel

Notes

50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

193

fair” motif as typical. Sagaser asserts that Delia is “cruel and fair, as sonnet beloveds almost always are,” but there is only one other sonnet beloved whose cruelty gets the amount of attention that Delia’s does, and that is Spenser’s Elizabeth in the Amoretti. “Sporting the While,” 148. Klein, Exemplary Sidney, y 148–49. Lowry Nelson, “The Matter of Rime: Sonnets of Sidney, Daniel, and Shakespeare,” inPoetic Traditions of the EnglishRenaissance, ed. Maynard Mack and George deForest Lord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 130. Shakespeare’sSonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997), 88–89. Pitcher, “Essays, Works, and Small Poems,” 9. Sagaser analyzes the logical fallacies in the advice given to Rosamond by the “matron,” advice that echoes the carpe diem themes in Delia. She also provides a good analysis of the way the carpe diem poems in Delia invite a critical reading of their own surface claims. “Sporting the While,” 164. See Laura G. Bromley, “The Lost Lucrece: Middleton’s The Ghost of Lucrece,” Papers on Language and Literature 21.3 (Summer 1985): 260–61. Ronald Primeau, “Daniel and the Mirror Tradition: Dramatic Irony in The Complaint of Rosamond,” SEL L 15.1 (Winter 1975): 23. JohnKerrigan,,MotivesofWoe:Shakespeareandthe“FemaleComplaint”: A Critical Anthology y (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 164. Kelly A. Quinn, “Ecphrasis and Reading Practices in Elizabethan NarrativeVerse,”Studies ” inEnglishLiterature44.1(Winter2004):22. Kenji Go, “Samuel Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond and an Emblematic Reconsideration of A Lover’s Complaint,” t Studies in Philology y 104.1 (Winter 2007): 92–97. Both Quinn and Go mention the story as told by Apollodorus and Hyginus. But Quinn also mentions Lucian’s account in which Amymone is raped, and there is another possibility that neither considers: Philostratus’s Imagines, in which Amymone is indeed described as pale and trembling with fear when pursued by Neptune (Book I.8). Philostratus, Imagines, trans. Arthur Fairbanks (London: William Heinemann Ltd. and Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931; rpt. 1960). Go interprets this line to mean that Amymone, through her weeping, begins to feel desire for Neptune. I do not find this argument convincing; I think it is clear that Rosamond is talking about the “fire” that is kindled in Neptune as he looks at the weeping woman at his feet: not only do Amymone’s tears inspire “heat” in Neptune, but of course he is the god of the sea and the whole myth is based on his control over water: he has dried up a well, Amymone needs

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Notes

62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

the water and is seeking it when they become lovers. “Fire in water” encapsulates the story itself, in which a search for water leads to a passionate encounter. PeterC.Herman,Squitter-Wits , andMuse-Haters,97.Hermancites William Prynne’s Histriomastix x (1633) where he complains that love poems entice people to lust and adultery. He also discusses William Alley’s The Poore Mans Librarie (1571) where a poet is punished for reciting wanton verses before a woman, whose chastity is threatened merely by the hearing of such poems, 50. Herman discusses several objections to poetry, including idleness, effeminacy, and the Protestant association of the imagination with the beliefs and practices of Roman Catholicism. ThisandfurtherquotationsfromSpenser’sColinClout tandAmoretti refertoTheYaleEditionoftheShorterPoemsofEdmundSpenser,ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press 1989). S. K. Heninger, “Sequences, Systems, Models,” 85–86. SeeforexampleDonnaGibbs,Spenser’s , Amoretti:ACriticalStudy ((Scolar Press, 1990), 61–97 and Michael R. G. Spiller, TheDevelopment of the Sonnet, 148. See Alexander Dunlop’s introduction, Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, 583. IlonaBell,ElizabethanWomenandthePoetryofCourtshipp(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 184. Bell, Poetry of Courtship, 160. Oram, Shorter Poems, 637. Bell, Poetry of Courtship, 183. See Ilona Bell’s discussion of this lyric dialogue in Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch h (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 20–23.

4

“A Goodly Musicke in Her Regiment”: Elusive Justice in The Merchant of Venice

1. Thomas Drant. Two Sermons Preached (London 1570), K2r. 2. Drant, Two Sermons, K1r and K4r. 3. Samuel Johnson mentions the potential allusion in his notes on Shakespeare, but neither Johnson nor subsequent critics pursue the parallel any farther. Johnson says simply, “Perhaps in this enumeration of Portia’s suitors, there may be some covert allusion to those ofQueenElizabeth.”Notes to Shakespeare,Volume1:Comedies,125. Project Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org r . Marjorie Garber also mentions the possible allusion, saying, “It is possible to see Portia in a historical-allegorical frame as a figure for Queen Elizabeth here— a lady richly left, whose dead father’s hand seems to control the choice of a husband. Elizabeth, like Portia, was the target of suitors

Notes

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

195

from many nations as well as a number of wellborn Englishmen.” Shakespeare after All (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 288. Perhaps there is also a reference to the queen’s lack of autonomy in her marital decision. The scene opens with Portia’s lament about her own lack of choice in the matter, which may suggest the position of the younger Elizabeth in the days of her courtships. As Susan Doran has convincingly argued, Elizabeth ultimately rejected her various suitors not primarily because of her personal desires or to uphold her virginal image, but because every serious courtship generated controversy rather than consent. According to Doran, had Elizabeth’s council ever united behind one of her suitors, it is likely she would have gone forward with the match. “Why Did Elizabeth NotMarry?”inDissingElizabeth:NegativeRepresentationsofGloriana, ed. Julia M. Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 30–59. Elizabeth herself alluded to the power of her people’s will, sometimes as unhappily as does Portia, who laments, “O me, the word choose! I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curb’d by the will of a dead father” (I.ii.22–25). As the queen wrote in a poem she inscribed on the flyleaf of a book, “To others’ will my life is all addressed, / And no way so as might content me best.” Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 300. LeahS.Marcus,PuzzlingShakespeare:LocalReadingandItsDiscontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 97. Perhaps there is even a sly nod to the contrast between this nostalgic vision and the reality of the present when Portia says to Nerissa, “If I live to be as old as Sybilla, I will die as chaste as Diana, unless I be obtain’d by the manner of my father’s will” (I.ii.106–8). As my student Francine Koenig pointed out to me, this allusion to a chaste but ancient Sybil reflects the reality of Queen Elizabeth’s image in the 1590s: in her 60s and unmarried, she was an aging Virgin Queen. Shakespeare’s Plutarch, ed. T. J. B. Spenser (Hammondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1964), 118. Spenser, Shakespeare’s Plutarch, 300. LindaShenk,LearnedQueen:TheImageofElizabethIinPoliticsand Poetry y (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Marcus,Mueller,andRose,CollectedWorks,326.MaryBethRoseprovides a list of scholars who have commented on this rhetorical strategy. While Rose agrees that the queen employed this technique—asserting the conventional inferiority of the female only to supersede that convention when she appropriates the power of a king—she argues that Elizabeth also claimed a specifically female authority grounded in lived experience. “The Gendering of Authority in the Public Speeches of Elizabeth I,” PMLA 115.5 (October 2000): 1077–82.

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10. JohnHayward,TheBeginningoftheReignofQueenElizabeth(1636). h Quoted in Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch, Elizabeth I and Her Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 642. 11. Ironically, her claim that she is “unschooled” and “unlessoned” is spoken in the context of an eloquent speech, not unlike the way Queen Elizabeth seems to have opened her Latin orations before a university audience with similar disclaimers: “Although feminine modesty, most faithful subjects and most celebrated university, prohibits the delivery of a rude and uncultivated speech in such a gathering of most learned men. . . . ” Latin Oration at Cambridge University, August 7, 1564. Marcus, Mueller, and Rose, Collected Works, 87. 12. See John D. Rea, “Shylock and the Processus Belial,” Philological Quarterly y 8 (1929): 311–13. James O’Rourke explains that the cult of virgin was a phenomenon contemporaneous with the eleventhcentury rise of anti-Semitism. “Racism and Homophobia in The Merchant of Venice,” ELH H 70.2 (Summer 2003): 384. 13. Sir John Harington, Nugae Antiquae Volume 1 (London, 1804; rpt. AMS Press, 1966), 358–59. 14. Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority andItsSubversion,”inPoliticalShakespeare:NewEssaysinCultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985), 44. 15. Gunter Walch, “Henry V as Working-house of Ideology.” Reprinted inShakespeare n andPolitics,ed.CatherineM.S.Alexander(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004), 198–205. 16. R.ScottFraser,“HenryVandthePerformanceofWar,”in nShakespeare and War, ed. Ros King and Paul J. C. M. Franssen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 74. 17. See for example a letter of Robert Cecil reprinted in Arthur Dimock, “The Conspiracy of Dr.Lopez,” The English Historical Review9.35 w ( July 1894): 466. 18. See for example Chris Jeffery, “Is Shylock a Catholic?” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 16 (2004): 37–51. Also Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies off The Merchant of Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 78–81. Danson also mentions that Shylock has been read as a Puritan by many critics. For a recent example, see Cedric Watts,“WhyIsShylockUnmusical?”in nHenryV,WarCriminal?And OtherShakespeareanPuzzles,ed.JohnSutherlandandCedricWatts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 148–53. 19. DavidS.Katz,TheJewsintheHistoryofEngland,1485–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 90. 20. Katz, Jews, 97. The Lopez plot is similarly treated in an address by Elizabeth, probably written by Burghley, also from 1594 and discussed by Arthur Dimock, “Conspiracy,” 468. 21. Katz, Jews, 86.

Notes

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22. Katz, Jews, 90–92. 23. Godfrey Goodman, The Court of King James I, Volume 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1839), 154. 24. Katz, Jews, 95. 25. Quoted by Katz, Jews, 91. 26. PaulE.J.Hammer,ThePolarisationofElizabethanPolitics:TheCareer ofRobertDevereux,2ndEarlofEssex,1585–15977(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1999), 138 and 159. 27. Hammer, Polarisation, 161. 28. RichardC.McCoy,TheRitesofKnighthood:TheLiteratureandPolitics of Elizabethan Chivalry y (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 79–102. 29. Paul Hammer, “The Smiling Crocodile: The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan‘Popularity,’”inThePoliticsofthePublicSphereinEarly Modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (Manchester : Manchester University Press 2007), 103. 30. See John Drakakis in the introduction to the Arden Merchant of Venice.MerchantofVenice,ArdenShakespeareThirdSeries,ed.John Drakakis (London: Methuen and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), 31. See also the footnote on “Andrew,” 172. 31. Hammer, “Crocodile,” 99. 32. Hammer, “Crocodile,” 101. 33. RobertDevereux,2ndEarlofEssex,AnApologieoftheEarleofEssex (London 1600) D4v. 34. Essex, Apologie, E1r. 35. Essex, Apologie, D4v. 36. Essex, Apologie, B4r. 37. Essex, Apologie, D3v. 38. W. Nicholas Knight reads the entire courtroom scene as representing Chancery procedure and argues that Shakespeare means to advocate for common law and show that Chancery should not impinge upon it. “Equity, ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ and William Lambarde,” Shakespeare Survey y 27 (1974): 95–96. Maxine MacKay also argues that the courtroom scene emphasizes the conflict between Chancery court and courts of law in Elizabethan England. “The Merchant of Venice: A Reflection of the Early Conflict between Courts of Law y 15.4 (Autumn 1964): and Courts of Equity,” Shakespeare Quarterly 371–75. Richard Wilson analyzes the conflict between Chancery and common law in this scene and finds common law’s victory limited. He characterizes Elizabethan Chancery as a court where the bourgeoisie were fighting to curtail royal power and make the common law an agent of protection for their economic liberty. Wilson characterizes the common law as victorious in Merchant t but finds the mercantile society of Venice merciless as it uses a strained legalism to cripple Shylock. “The Quality of Mercy: Discipline and

198

Notes

Punish in Shakespearean Comedy,”Seventeenth ” Century y 5.1 (Spring 1990): 1–42. 39. The seminal article on this is Karen Newman, “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange inMerchant of Venice,” ShakespeareQuarterly y38(1987):19–33.Newmanusesanthropological theory to show how the gift-giving in Merchant t is a bid for power. By giving more than can be reciprocated, Portia unsettles the gender hierarchy and short-circuits the system of exchange that conventionally solidifies male bonds and positions women as objects of exchange. 40. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, 99. 41. See Bevington’s introduction. John Lyly, Endymion, ed. David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 33. All quotations from the play refer to this edition. John D. Staines, The TragicHistoriesofMaryQueenofScots,1560–1690:Rhetoric,Passions, and Political Literature (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 112–15.

5 “Pardon Is Still the Nurse of Second Woe”: Measure for Measure and the Transition from Elizabeth to James 1. Helen Hackett, in her analysis of these elegies, reminds us that “questions of sincerity are notoriously unfathomable”: some elegists probably did regard the dead queen as a “sainted heroine,” while others were seeking patronage or displaying their patriotism or literary skill.VirginMother,MaidenQueen:ElizabethIandtheCultoftheVirgin Mary y (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 221. 2. Catherine Loomis, The Death of Elizabeth: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen n (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 50. 3. Loomis discusses the sun-and-moon references, 52. Hackett also mentions the conceit of James as the sun following the moon, 220. John Watkins finds the allusions to James as Elizabeth’s son in bothsermonsandpoetry.RepresentingElizabethinStuartEngland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15–17. 4. Watkins, Representing Elizabeth, 18–19. 5. Godfrey Goodman, The Court of King James I, I Volume I (London: Richard Bentley, 1839), 97. 6. TheTrewLawofFreeMonarchieswasfirstprintedwithouttheauthor’s name in 1598. Basilicon Doron n was printed in 1599 for private distribution but reprinted in Edinburgh in 1603 in a revised edition. See KingJamesIandVI:PoliticalWritings,ed. Johann P. Sommerville. CambridgeTextsintheHistoryofPoliticalThought t (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Notes 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

199

Sommerville, Political Writings, 72. Sommerville, Political Writings, 81–83. Sommerville, Political Writings, 43. Sommerville, Political Writings, 22. HenryHooke,,AsermonpreachedbeforethekingatWhite-halll(London, 1604), C3v. Hooke, A sermon, C3r. Hooke, A sermon, C4v. In a treatise on the succession written a few years earlier, Hooke had expressed his hope that “the infirmitie, and inconveniency of woemanhead” might be reformed by the vigor of a male monarch. See Katherine Eggert’s discussion, Showing LikeaQueen:FemaleAuthorityandLiteraryExperimentinSpenser, Shakespeare, and Milton n (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 82. RobertPricket,A , SouldiersWishUntoHisSoveraigneLordKingJames (London, 1603). Sir John Harington, Nugae Antiquae, Volume I (London 1804; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1966), 180. Aylmer, Harborowe, O1v. TheTrueNarrationoftheEntertainmentofHisRoyallMajestie(London, e 1603), E1v-E2r. Stephen Cohen, “From Mistress to Master: Political Transition and FormalConflictinMeasureforMeasure,”Criticism m41.4(Fall1999): 431–64. Leonard Tennenhouse regards Measure and other city comedies from early in James’s reign as replacing the romantic comedies that showed powerful, aristocratic women restoring order, a genre that he reads in the context of Elizabeth’s queenship. The city comedies replace the powerful woman with a male ruler who restoresorder.LeonardTennenhouse,PoweronDisplay:ThePolitics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986). Richard Levin,New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the ReinterpretationofRenaissanceDramaa(Chicago:UniversityofChicago Press, 1982), 171–93. Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display, y 147–59. Jonathan Dollimore, “Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure,”in nPoliticalShakespeare:NewEssaysinCulturalMaterialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 83–84. CarolynE.Brown,“DukeVincentiooffMeasureforMeasureandKing James I of England: ‘The Poorest Princes in Christendom,’” CLIO 26.1 (1996): 51–78. LeahMarcus,PuzzlingShakespeare:Local : ReadingandItsDiscontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 164. This is an old idea, expressed for instance by Seneca. Fourteen years is an interesting choice. Might it perhaps remind the audience of the late queen’s forty-four year reign?

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26. Sommerville, Political Writings, 76. 27. See for example James’s advice to Henry in the Basilicon Doron: he advocates a middle ground between too much and too little affability, stating that too much bowing and nodding to the people somehow implies illegitimacy: “for that form of being popular, becometh better aspiring Absalons, then lawfull Kings.” Sommerville,Political Writings, 54. 28. ThomasTyrwhitt,ObservationsandConjecturesUponSomePassages of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1766), 36–37. Cited in David L. Stevenson, “The Role of James I in Measure for Measure,”ELH H 26.2 ( June 1959): 188–208. 29. Stevenson, “The Role of James I,” 190–95. 30. JeffreyS.Doty,““MeasureforMeasureandtheProblemofPopularity,” English Literary Renaissance 42.1 (Winter 2012): 32–57. 31. Sommerville, Political Writings, 77. 32. Doty, “Problem of Popularity,” 48. 33. OxfordEnglishDictionary,secondedition(Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press) http://www.oed.com. 34. “Empathy” is a term first used in German psychology; the earliest OED examples are from the first decade of the twentieth century. Oxford English Dictionary. y 35. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593), intro. William G. Crane (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1977), 143–44. 36. Asecondandthirdblastofretraitfromplaiesandtheaterss(London1580), 53–54. The “second blast” is a translation of the work of Salvian of Marseilles; the “third blast,” from which this passage comes, is attributed to Anthony Munday. 37. Stephen Greenblatt,Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 222–54. 38. See Jacqueline Miller, “The Passion Signified: Imitation and the Construction of Emotion in Sidney and Wroth,” Criticism 43 (2001): 407–21. She argues for a different idea of emotion where the representation of a passion comes first and actually produces the passion. De Clementia II.v.4–6. 39. ThomasWright,ThePassionsoftheMindeInGenerall,intro.ThomasO. Sloan (London, 1604; rpt. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 17. 40. Wright says that the imagination, either by sense or by memory, produces an object to be known. At this moment, Isabella is askk ing Angelo to remember the feeling of sexual passion, but he is also looking at and listening to her, so his senses are engaged. According to Wright, the imagination’s spirits “flocke from the brayne, by certain secret channels to the heart, where they pitch at the dore,” 45. The heart then draws forth the bodily humors that will increase the emotion and prompt the body to act upon it.

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41. Oxford English Dictionary. 42. In Doty’s reading, Lucio’s remarks highlight the problem with a public that “liberally discusses its rulers.” “Problem of Popularity,” 45. I would modify this to place some of the blame on the Duke: his withdrawal from the public eye, rather than assuring his autonomy as Doty intimates, has rather given the public too much room to speculate about him. 43. Sommerville, Political Writings, 30–31. 44. Sommerville, Political Writings, 49. 45. For an early example, see Wilbur Dunkel, “Law and Equity in MeasureforMeasure,”Shakespeare ” Quarterly y13.3(Summer1962):275–85. Dunkel argues that the play shows the necessity of administering justice with equity. 46. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (London: William Heinemann Ltd. and Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), V.x.5, 317. 47. For a recent example of such an argument, see Constance Jordan, “InterpretingStatuteinMeasureforMeasure,”inShakespeare n and theLaw:AConversationamongDisciplinesandProfessions(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 101–20. Jordan cites Plowden, Lambarde, Egerton, and James I to elucidate some of the recommended principles and practices of equitable interpretation of the law in English legal tradition. Angelo does not undertake the careful questioning, introspection, probing of motives, mitigation of severity, and other aspects of equitable practice that Jordan identifies. 48. See Victoria Haynes, “Performing Social Practice: The Example off Measure for Measure.” She points out that it was a common social practice in Elizabethan England for couples to live together as husband and wife after they were betrothed.Shakespeare Quarterly y 44.1 (Spring 1993): 1–29. 49. See for instance John W. Dickinson, “Renaissance Equity and MeasureforMeasure,”Shakespeare ” Quarterly y13.3(Summer1962):287–97. Dickinson discusses how Escalus’s approach exemplifies equity, 295–96. 50. Mark Fortier’s study of equity in Renaissance thought begins by citing this “repeated attack on equity”: that it removes the impartiality and stability of the law, making outcomes subject to the predilections of an individual. He quotes John Selden on the “roguish” nature of such equity and comments that “self-serving partiality” isimpliedintheseobjections.TheCultureofEquityinEarlyModern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 1. 51. TheodoreF.T.Plucknett,AConciseHistoryoftheCommonLaw, w fifth edition (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1956), 193–94. He argues that to call Chancery a “prerogative” court in the fullest sense is inaccurate; the court transacted business along settled lines with

202

52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

Notes little that was arbitrary. However, “the wild speculation of many royalists to the effect that the Court of Chancery and the system of equity were dependent upon a personal prerogative of the monarch threw the whole legal system of the country into the political arena.” See Fortier, Culture of Equity, y 76–81. Sommerville, Political Writings, 75. Though Elizabeth did not invoke this “mystery” as James did, it was a concept certainly present during her reign. For example, Sir Francis Knollys, reacting in 1571 to a Puritan-sponsored bill to reform the Book of Common Prayer, argued that the Parliament should not meddle with matters of the queen’s prerogative: What “secret cause or scruple there may be in the hearts of princes, it is not for all people to know.” J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments: 1559–1581 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953), 199. GeorgeBuchanan,DeJureRegniApudScotos,oraDialogueConcerning theDuePrivilegeofGovernmentintheKingdomofScotland(London d 1689), D4v-E1r. See McIlwain’s introduction, Archeion n by William Lambarde, ed. Charles H. McIlwain and Paul L. Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), vii. Lambarde, Archeion, 43. Lambarde, Archeion, 44. RichardMulcaster,ThePassageofOurMostDreadSovereignLady, QueenElizabeth h(London,1559),inElizabethIandHerAge,ed.Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 106. RalphWinwood,MemorialsofAffairsofStateintheReignsofQueen Elizabeth I and King James I, Volume 2 (London, 1725; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1972), 11. Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State, 11. Doty, “Problem of Popularity,” 50. Dudley Digges, The Compleat Ambassador (London, 1655), 165–66. Plucknett, Common Law, 192. Elizabeth, like the other Tudors, seldom attended meetings of her Privy Council, according to G. R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary y (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 92. See Chris R. Kyle’s study of the Stuart Parliament and its increasinglypubliccharacter.TheaterofState:ParliamentandPoliticalCulture in Early Stuart England(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 157–58. Kyle also reports that James’s first speech to an English Parliament was invaded by members of the public who crowded in and were mistaken for members of the Commons. James’s dislike of the English Parliament is well known; he avoided calling one for nearly ten years, leading historian Andrew Thrush to describe the

Notes

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years 1611–1620 as those of Jacobean Personal Rule. Andrew Thrush, “The Personal Rule of James I: 1611–1620,” in Politics, Religion, and PopularityinEarlyStuartBritain:EssaysinHonorofConradRussell, ed. Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 84–102. However, those years were still to come when Shakespeare was writing Measure; in 1604 Shakespeare would have known only about James’s handling of his first English Parliament and the publicizing of his opening address.

6

“Good Queene, You Must Be Rul’d”: Feminine Mercy in the Plays of Heywood and Dekker

1. A Mournfull Dittie, Entitled Elizabeths Losse (London, 1603). 2. Thomas Dekker, The Wonderful Year (London 1603), B2r. 3. MadeleineDoran,IfYouKnowNotMeYouKnowNobody, y Malone Society Reprints, Volume 65 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), xvii. 4. Teresa Grant, “Drama Queen: Staging Elizabeth in If You Know Not MeYouKnowNobody,” y inTheMythofElizabeth,ed.SusanDoranand Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 121. 5. Catherine Loomis, The Death of Elizabeth: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen n (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 124. 6. Loomis, Death of Elizabeth, 121–22. 7. This and all further quotations from If You Know Not Me, Parts I and II, refer to Madeleine Doran’s edition, Malone Society reprints, Volume 65 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–35). The scene and line numbers are given in parentheses. 8. Janel Mueller, “Virtue and Virtuality: Gender in the SelfRepresentation of Queen Elizabeth I,” in Form and Reform in RenaissanceEngland:EssaysinHonorofBarbaraKieferLewalski, i ed.Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 231–34. 9. Grant, “Drama Queen,” 123–24. 10. McLuskie suggests that the sympathetic portrayal of Philip supports the notion of aristocratic virtue in a play that she sees as negotiating “between a popular politics and a proper sense of hierarchy.” I agree that mercy is often adduced as a sign of true nobility; I argue that this is the case in If You Know Not Me, Part II. In Part I, Mary is contrasted with Elizabeth in terms of her relative lack of mercy, but Heywood also portrays both women as lacking agency. Hence, Mary is cruel when advised to be by Winchester and merciful when advised to be by Philip. Kathleen E. McLuskie,Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 45.

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11. This issue—the access to pity potentially provided by an audience with the monarch—is discussed in Chapter Three. 12. See Carole Levin, The Reign of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 94. 13. JohnAylmer,An , Harboroweforfaithfullandtrewesubjectess(London, 1559), H3v. 14. JohnWatkins,RepresentingElizabethinStuartEngland d(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 36. 15. Jean E. Howard reads Gresham and Hobson as contrasting figures: Gresham is the new breed of international merchant-capitalist who takes staggering risks, deals in huge sums of money, and whose grand contribution, the Royal Exchange, benefits himself as well as London. By contrast, Hobson represents the traditional London crafts-guilds and their values. He is modest, sober, and selflessly charitable. “Thomas Heywood: Dramatist of London and Playwright of the Passions”inTheCambridgeCompaniontoShakespeareandContemporary Dramatists, ed. Ton Hoenselaars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 127. 16. Anita Gilman Sherman analyzes the centrality of charity in Heywood’s play, finding many different constructions of charity, from charity as a social expression of medieval piety to charity as a means of status-building for the merchant class. Interestingly, she notes that, in his meeting with Queen Elizabeth, Hobson takes an antiquated personal approach to finance while the queen is hardnosed and impersonal: “the Queen is behaving like a businesswoman and the merchant like a nobleman.” “The Status of Charity inThomasHeywood’sIfYouKnowNotMeYouKnowNobodyII,” inMedievalandRenaissanceDramainEngland,Volume12,ed.John Pitcher (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 114. 17. Watkins, Representing Elizabeth, 53. 18. ThomasHeywood,TheDramaticWorksofThomasHeywood,Volume 1 (New York: Russell & Russell Inc, 1874; rpt. 1964), 334. 19. In the 1633 edition of the play, the final Armada scene was expanded to add a speech in which Elizabeth claims to have put on a “bold and masculine spirit,” but this speech does not appear in the earlier editions. 20. Darryll Grantley notices “an element of opportunistic pragmatism shaping Dekker’s oeuvre for the stage” and wonders if the title Whore of Babylon n was meant to be provocative, following as it does popular plays of the two preceding years, The Honest Whore and The Dutch Courtesan. Darryll Grantley, “Thomas Dekker and the Emergence of City Comedy” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, ed. Ton Hoenselaars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 86.

Notes

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21. JuliaGasper,TheDragonandtheDove:ThePlaysofThomasDekker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 9. 22. Loomis, Death of Elizabeth, 125. 23. Gasper, Dragon and Dove, 62–63. 24. This and all further quotations from The Whore of Babylon n refer to TheDramaticWorksofThomasDekker,Volume2,ed.FredsonBowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955; rpt.1964). 25. This little speech is particularly interesting because it casts Titania as a Jezebel. Throughout, the Empresse and her henchmen characterize Titania and Faerie Land in terms that actually apply to themselves. 26. Gasper provides a detailed interpretation of the Prince in terms of the Portuguese succession, Dragon and Dove, 84–85. 27. See Chapter Five for a discussion of Hooke’s sermon. 28. By the time Dekker wrote The Whore of Babylon, it might have been clear that Elizabeth’s successor would not prove to be the resolute, masculine champion of Protestant causes that some had expected. McLuskie assumes, in fact, that this passage voices opposition to the peaceful policies of James rather than celebrating him. Dekker and Heywood, 51. 29. Julia Gasper argues that the rebellious “moon” is probably Essex, but she also takes note of the similarities between this episode and the trial of Duessa from The Faerie Queene, Book V. She concludes that the similarities between the two result from their drawing on a common source about clemency, Seneca’s De Clementia. So many of the ideas expressed in this treatise were familiar maxims in Renaissance discourse that it is hard to support the claim that De Clementia was a specific source used by both authors. See Dragon and Dove, 89–90.

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INDEX

Adams, Robert M., 176n19 Ahab, in Book of Kings, 13, 15 Alexander, Catherine M. S., 196n15 Allen, William, 181n106 Alley, William, 194n62 Anne of Bohemia, Queen of England, 11 anti-Semitism, 120–1 Apologie of the Earl of Essex, 123–4 Aristotle,NicomacheanEthics,6,149, 201n46 Augustine, City of God, 3 Aylmer, John, An Harborowe for FaithfullandTreweSubjectes, 1–2, 17, 18, 32, 136, 161 Bacon, Francis, 123 Baseotto, Paola, 182n114 Basore, John W., 175n13 Bates, Catherine, 70, 188n41 Beacham, Virginia Walcott, 176n33 Beatitudes, 20 Becon, Thomas, An humble supplicacion unto God, 12, 14 Bell, Ilona, 72, 98–9, 105, 190n17, 194n71 Berry, Lloyd E., 175n12 Bevington, David, 129–30 Bishops’ Bible, 1569 portrait of Elizabeth, 22 Blount, Charles, 192n48 Boesky, Amy, 182n119, 203n8 Bowers, Fredson, 205n24 Bowes, George, 27 Boyle, Elizabeth, 97–8 Bradbrook, M. C., 189n8, 191n23 Brady, Ciarin, 197n35

Brennan, Michael G., 71, 189n11 Bromley, Laura G., 193n55 Brown, Carolyn E., 137 Buchanan, George, 150–1 Bucholz, Robert, 175n7 Burghley, William Cecil, Lord, 17, 19, 55, 138, 180n87, 181n99–100, 181n106 Burrow, Colin, 36, 185–6n23, 187n33 Butler, Todd, 38 Cadiz expedition (1596), 109, 123 Cain, Thomas H., 185n23 cardinal virtues, 22, 30 Carpenter, Jennifer, 177n45 Catholicism as a threat, 25, 108, 120–4, 160–1, 167 Cecil, Robert, 154, 196n17 Cecil, William. See Burghley, William Cecil, Lord Chancery Court, 3, 6–7, 126, 150–1 chivalry, 40, 58–9, 61–2, 64, 122 ChristianPrayersandMeditations (1569), 22 Clifford, Rosamond, 91 Coch, Christine, 10, 11, 21 Cogswell, Thomas, 202–3n66 Cohen, Stephen, 136 Coke, Sir Edmund, 150 Cole, Mary Hill, 79 Collins, Arthur, 191n31 common law court, 6–7 compassion, 7, 38–41, 44, 143–5 and contamination, 143–5 manipulated, 39, 41, 51, 63–4, 74–5 for women’s suffering, 39–40, 51 see also mercy

220

Index

“Concerning the Parricides of the Jezebel of England” (1587), 28 corporal acts of mercy, 37 Crane, Mary Thomas, 182n119, 203n8 Crane, William G., 200n35 cruelty of a prince, 5 of queens, 12–17 Cult of Elizabeth, 9 Cult of the Virgin Mary, 9 Cust, Richard, 202n66 Daniel, Samuel Complaint of Rosamond, 89, 91–6 Delia, 33, 68, 84–96, 97 Danson, Lawrence, 196n18 Dante Alighieri, 9 Davison, John, 189n8 Davison, William, 69–70 Dekker, Thomas characters Empress of Babylon, 167–8 Fideli, 168, 170, 171 Paridell, 167, 170, 172–3 Parthenophill, 168 Dr. Roper, 170, 171 Titania, 166–73 works The Whore of Babylon, 33, 157–8, 166–73 The Wonderful Year, 157 Dering, Edward, 24–5, 27 Devereux, Robert. See Essex, Robert Devereux, Earl of Dickinson, John W., 201n49 Digges, Dudley, 179n77–8, 202n63 Dimock, Arthur, 196n17, 196n20 Dollimore, Jonathan, 137, 196n14 Donne, John, 7 Doran, Madeleine, 158, 203n7 Doran, Susan, 180–1n93, 195n4, 203n4 Doty, Jeffrey S., 140–1, 154–5, 201n42 Drakakis, John, 197n30 Drant, Thomas, 27–8, 107–8 Dubrow, Heather, 190n15

Dudley, Robert. See Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of Duncan, Sarah, 175n7 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 97, 190n16, 191n21, 193n52 Dunkel, Wilbur, 201n45 Dunlop, Alexander, 194n66 Dunseath, T. K., 185n23 Durling, Robert M., 188n1 Dymoke, Edmund, 85 Edward III, King of England, 9, 11 Egerton, Sir Thomas, 151 Eggert, Katherine, 188n40, 199n13 Elijah, in Book of Kings, 13 Elizabeth I, Queen of England Bishops’ Bible portrait, 22 as a Christ figure, 171 clemency attributed to feminine weakness, 17–18, 83, 124, 156 compassionate by nature, 17, 26, 52–3, 139, 167, 171–3 as Constantine, 23 courage and, 30–1, 159 courtships of, 109–10, 169 crisis over Mary Stuart, 28–32 criticized as too lenient, 23–5, 27–32, 53, 69, 122, 130–1, 135, 171 as cruel, 17 as Cynthia/the moon, 85, 86, 129–31 as David, 22, 24, 107–8, 135 as Delia, 85 Ditchley portrait, 86 “Doubt of Future Foes,” 54 image as clement queen, 3, 9–10, 12, 19–22, 28, 67, 107, 138, 156, 162–4 as Jezebel, 12, 28–9, 56 judgment and, 2, 17, 19, 47, 65, 75, 83 lack of vengeance, 1, 29, 32 as a learned queen, 110–11 male councilors and, 18–19, 56, 125–6, 135, 158, 160–1, 163–4, 166, 167, 172–3 (see also mixed monarchy) as mediatrix/intercessor, 9–10, 12, 17

Index x as a merciful monarch, 9–10, 12, 17, 19–22, 26, 28, 29, 33, 42, 52–5, 57, 65, 83, 138, 153 mercy and rigor balanced, 107–8, 112, 113 as a mother, 9–10, 12, 21, 138, 162, 167 mutual love between herself and people, 19–21, 138–9 Northern rebels and, 21, 25–8 as Portia, 109–16 posthumous representations of, 133–5, 157–73 progresses of, 79–80 Protestantism and, 3, 22–5, 33, 42, 54, 87–8, 107, 111, 128, 158, 160, 167–9, 172–3 rhetoric of feminine weakness, 111–12 Shakespeare’s comic heroines and, 110–11, 136 Spanish Armada and, 19, 111, 165–6 speeches to Parliament, 29–30 theatricality, 22, 116–17, 155–6 Tilbury speech, 19, 111, 165–6 as a tyrant, 17, 29–30, 36 as the Virgin Mary, 9–10, 12, 17 as a weak monarch, 20, 124–5, 141, 154 as the woman clothed with the sun, 87 Elizabethan political imaginary, 2 Elton, G. R., 202n65 Elyot, Thomas, The Governour, 4 empathy, 143. See also compassion equity, 3, 6, 49–50, 56, 126, 148–53 Essex, Robert Devereux, Earl of, 69, 77, 80, 109, 121–5 mobilization of public opinion, 122–4 promotion of heroic self-image, 123–4 Evans, G. Blakemore, 179n70 Evenden, Elizabeth, 180n91 Fairbanks, Arthur, 193n60 Felch, Susan M., 179n83, 195n10, 202n59

221

Florio, John, 184n9 Forster, Leonard, 68–9, 189n9 Fortier, Mark, 6, 185n17, 187n33, 201n50, 202n52 Foxe,John,,ActesandMonuments,23–4 Franssen, Paul J. C. M., 196n16 Fraser, R. Scott, 118 Freeman, Thomas S., 180n91, 180–1n93, 181n94, 203n4 Froude, James Anthony, 179n74 Frye, Susan, 2 Gaines, Janet Howe, 178n54 Garber, Marjorie, 194–5n3 Gasper, Julia, 166, 205n26, 205n29 Geneva Bible, 15, 29 genre,offMeasureforMeasure,136–7 of Whore of Babylon, 166 Gibbs, Donna, 194n65 Gilby, Anthony, An admonition to EnglandandScotland,12,13–14 Gless, Darryl, 183n3 Go, Kenji, 93–4, 95, 193–4n61 Golding, Arthur, 176n18 Goodman,Christopher,Howsuperior powersoughttobeobeyed,12–13 Goodman, Godfrey, 121, 134 Gosson, Stephen, 143 Gosynhyll, Edward, Scholehouse for Women, 16–17 Grant, Teresa, 158–9, 160 Grantley, Darryll, 204n20 Graves, Michael, 182–3n125 Graziana, Rene, 185n23 Greenblatt, Stephen, 116–17 Gresham, Thomas, 158 Grey de Wilton, Arthur, Lord, 187n35 Habermas, Jurgen, 32 Hackett, Helen, 9, 86, 198n1, 198n3 Hadfield, Andrew, 183–4n6, 186n27 Hamilton, A. C., 37, 44, 175n12, 183n2, 184n11, 185n23, 186n24 Hamilton, Donna B., 183–4n6

222

Index

Hammer, Paul E. J., 76, 122–3, 177–8n52, 197n31–2 Harington, John, 19, 114, 127, 135–6 Hatton, Christopher, 77, 114, 191n35 Haynes, Victoria, 201n48 Hayward, John, 111 Heninger, S. K., 98, 190n18 Henry II, King of England, 91 Henry VIII, King of England, 26 Herman, Peter C., 95, 190n15 Heywood, Thomas characters Beningfield, 159, 161 Bishop of Winchester, 159–61 Constable, 159–60 Dodds, 160 Elizabeth, 158–66 Gage, 159 Gresham, 162, 164 Hobson, 162, 164–5 Leicester, 163–4 Mary, 160–2 Parry, 162–3 Philip, 160–1 Shandoyse, 161 Tawny-Coat, 164–5 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody,PartsIandII,33,157–66 Hoak, Dale, 180n88 Hoenselaars, Ton, 204n15, 204n20 Hooke, Henry, 134–5, 170 Hough, Graham, 183n4 Howard, Jean E., 204n15 Huneycutt, Lois, 10 Hunsdon, Henry Carey, Lord, 18 Hurault,Jacques,Politicke,Moral,and Martial Discourses, 4 Hyrde, Richard, 8 Ireland, 23, 53, 109 James I, King of England ( James VI of Scotland), 6, 33, 170 accession, responses to, 133–6 Basilicon Doron, 134, 147–8

as a father, 138–9 public and, 140, 147–8, 152, 155–6 severity and, 134–6, 138 as Solomon, 135 theories of monarchy, 134, 137, 149–51 TrewLawofFreeMonarchies,134,150 Jankowski, Theodora A., 8 Jansen, Sharon L., 8 Jeffery, Chris, 196n18 Jezebel, 12–16, 28, 29 poems, de Jezebelis, 28–9 popular example of a bad woman, 12, 16 as representing woman ruler’s cruelty, 12–15, 28–9, 161 Johnson, Samuel, 194n3 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 72, 73 Jones, William, 176n16 Jordan, Constance, 178–9n69, 179n73, 201n47 Jordan, Richard Douglas, 183n5 Kane, Sean, 185n18 Kaske, Carol V. 183n3 Katz, David S., 121, 196n20, 197n22, 197n24–5 Kerrigan, John, 92 Kesselring, K. J., 5, 25–7, 181n101, 181n103 King, John, 22 King, Ros, 196n16 Kingdon, Robert M., 181n106 Kings, Book of, 13, 15 Klein, Lisa, 84, 192n44 Knight, W. Nicholas, 197n38 Knox,John,First , BlastoftheTrumpet againsttheMonstrousRegiment of Women, 1, 12, 14–15 Koenig, Francine, 195n5 Kuin, Roger, 79, 191n35 Kyle, Chris R., 202n66 Ladies Dictionary, y7 Lake, Peter, 32, 197n29, 202n66

Index x Lambarde, William, 151 Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of, 71, 97 Levin, Carole, 2, 175n7, 180n89, 204n12 Levin, Richard, 137 Lipsius, Justus, 4, 7 Loomis, Catherine, 133, 158–9, 166, 198n3 Lopez, Roderigo, 120–6, 170 Lord, George deForest, 193n51 love poetry, 33, 67–71 carpe diem theme in, 88, 91 courtiers and, 68–70, 75, 76–7, 83, 106 cruel fair in, 67–8, 88–9, 94–6, 99–100 Elizabeth I and, 68–70, 73, 76, 79–80, 83–4, 85–8, 97–8, 101, 105–6 as immortalizing, 88–91 Petrarchan rhetoric and, 67–70, 74, 76, 98–9 presence and, 75–83 Lyly, John, Endymion, 129–31 Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince,5, 20 Mack, Maynard, 193n51 MacKay, Maxine, 197n38 MacLean, Sally-Beth, 177n45 Main Plot, 154 Majeske, Andrew, 50, 185n21 Maley, Willy, 186n27 Marcus, Leah S., 110, 129, 137, 179n80, 181n108–10, 182n112–13, 181n115, 181n117–18, 181n120, 186n30, 195n4, 195n9, 196n11 Marotti, Arthur, 72, 73 Mary I, Queen of England, 1, 10, 12–14, 18, 22, 23, 26, 160 Mary of Guise, 12 Mazzola, Elizabeth, 190n19 McCoy, Richard C., 59, 61, 122 McCullough, Peter E., 181n95 McIlwain, Charles H., 202n56 McLaren, A. N., 29, 55, 176n32, 179n76

223

McLuskie, Kathleen E., 203n10, 205n28 McManus, Caroline, 51 mercy attributed to mothers and the Virgin Mary, 9–10, 17 Christian monarchy and, 4, 5, 12, 17, 31, 113 as a Christian virtue, 3, 5, 31, 37 courage and, 61, 64 distinguished from pity, 3–4, 44 as emasculating, 44, 48 emotion, product of, 3, 4, 7–8, 17, 38–9, 43–4, 45, 48, 51, 65, 142 equity and, 6, 49–50 (see also equity) as feminine, 1, 7, 9–10, 17, 138, 142, 159, 168 as harmful, 4, 19, 22–5, 31, 45–7, 48, 68, 71, 73, 84, 130, 138, 141–6, 163, 171–2 as a human weakness, 3, 4, 7 justice and, 37, 49 nobility and, 58, 61–4, 164–5 popularity and, 5, 12, 19–20, 57, 138 practical benefits of, 24, 25–6, 29–31, 60, 128, 163 presence and, 76–7, 79, 83, 161 proper role in governance, 5–7 as public performance, 146–56 self-control, product of, 60–1 sexuality and, 141–2 tyranny and, 36 Miller, Jacqueline, 200n38 monarchy mixed monarchy, 19, 32, 56, 125, 169 personal authority of, 19, 155, 169 prerogative and, 3, 6, 55–6, 125, 126–7, 149–50 presence and, 76–80, 83, 161 Montaigne, Michel de, 39 Montrose, Louis, 2 Morgan, Gerald, 44 Mueller, Janel, 30–1, 159, 179n80, 180n88, 181n108–10, 182n112–13, 182n115, 182n117–18, 182n120, 186n30, 195n4, 195n9, 196n11

224

Index

Mulcaster, Richard, Passage of Our MostDreadSovereignLady, Queen Elizabeth, 20–1 Munday, Anthony, 143 Murphy, Andrew, 191–2n38 Musa, Mark, 177n38 Naboth, in Book of Kings, 15 Neale, J. E., 20, 69, 179n82, 182n121, 189n6–7, 202n54 Nelson, Lowry, 88 Nelson, William, 59, 186n28 Nennio,oraTreatiseofNobility, y 58 Netherlands, 54, 83, 168 Newman, Karen, 198n39 Newton, Thomas, 85 Nicolas, Harris, 191n26–8 Nohrnberg, James, 187n33 Norfolk, Thomas Howard, Duke of, 17, 19, 32, 138 Northern Rebellion, 21, 23, 25–8, 32, 107–8 Northrop, Douglas, 187n33 Norton, Thomas, 182–3n125 Oakes, Catherine, 11 O’Connell, Michael, 187n33 O’Donnell, C. Patrick, 186n31 Oram, William A., 194n63, 194n69 O’Rourke, James, 196n12 Parliament, 20, 29–30, 31, 55, 125, 155 Parry, William, 162, 167, 170, 172 Parsons, John Carmi, 11, 177n44 Peacham, Henry, 200n35 Peele, George, Araygnement of Paris, 8 Petrarch, Rime Sparse, 67, 79 Petrina, Alessandra, 182n114 Philip II, King of Spain, 168 Philippa of Hainault, Queen of England, 9, 11 Phillips, James E., 28–9, 185n23 Philostratus, 193n60 Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, 53

Pincus, Steven, 32, 197n29 Pitcher, John, 85, 91, 191–2n38, 204n16 pity. See compassion, mercy: distinguished from pity Plucknett, Theodore F. T., 150, 155 Plutarch, Lives, 110 Prescott, Anne Lake, 189n3 presence. See love poetry: and presence, mercy: and presence, monarchy: and presence Pricket, Robert, 135 Primeau, Ronald, 92 privacy, 50, 54–5, 82, 139, 146–56 Privy Council, 32, 125 Processus Belial, 113 providence, 158, 162, 169 public discourse, 139–40, 147–8 public sphere, 31–2, 124–5, 140 Puritan objections to imaginative literature, 143 queens as cruel, 12, 14, 17 as given to idolatry, 14 as Jezebels, 12, 17 as merciful intercessors, 9–12, 17, 50, 120, 153, 156 Quilligan, Maureen, 72, 190n15, 190n19 Quinn, Kelly A., 93–4 Rackham, H., 176n224, 201n46 Ralegh, Walter, 74, 192n47 The Ocean to Cynthia, 86, 101 Rea, John D., 196n12 Rees, Joan, 192n48 Reynolds, Paige Martin, 8, 182n116 Rich, Penelope Devereux, 72 Richards, Judith M., 19, 179n73 Ridolfi Plot, 19 Roche, Thomas P., 186n31 Ronsard, Pierre de, Sonnets Pour Helene, 67–8

Index x Rose, Mary Beth, 11, 179n80, 181n108–10, 182n112–13, 182n115, 182n117–18, 182n120, 186n30, 195n4, 195n9, 196n11 royal pardon, 6–7 Rust, Jennifer, 39 Sagaser, Elizabeth Harris, 189n4, 192–3n49, 193n54 Salutem in Christo (1571), 32 Selden, John, 201n50 Seneca, De Clementia, 3, 5, 24, 143, 199n24, 205n29 sermon, “Unruly Heifer,” 24–5, 27 Shakespeare, William characters Angelo, 141–5, 148, 152–3 Antonio, 109, 110, 112–16, 127–8 Archbishop of Canterbury, 117–18 Bassanio, 108, 110, 112–16, 127–8 Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey, 119 Chorus, 117 Claudio, 141–5, 149 Dauphin, 118–19 Duke of Venice, 116 Duke Vincentio, 137–41, 145–8, 153–6 Escalus, 141, 144 Goneril, 15 Gratiano, 129 Henry V, 116–20, 125 Isabel, 24, 142–5, 148, 152–4 Jessica, 128 Lady Macbeth, 16 Lavinia, 15–16 Lorenzo, 128 Lucio, 142, 146–7, 149 Mariana, 153 Mistress Overdone, 142 Nerissa, 129 Pompey, 141 Portia, 4, 24, 107–16, 118, 119–20, 125–31

225

Regan, 15 Shylock, 108, 109, 112–16 Tamora, 15–16 comic heroines, 110–11, 136 works Henry V V, 33, 116–20 Julius Caesar, 110 Lear, 15 Macbeth, 16 Measure for Measure, 24, 33, 133–56 MerchantofVenice,24,33,107–31 Sonnets, 91 Titus Andronicus, 15–16 Shenk, Linda, 22, 180n85 Sherman, Anita Gilman, 204n16 Sidney family, 71 Sidney, Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, 84–5, 87 Sidney, Philip, 84, 97 letters of, 78–9 Protestantism and, 83 works AstrophilandStella,33,68,71–84 Defence of Poesy, y 83–4, 143–4 Sinfield, Alan, 196n14 Sloan, Thomas O., 200n39 Smith, A. J., 176n29 Sommerville, Johann P., 198n6, 199n7–10, 200n26–7, 200n31, 201n43–4, 202n53 Spain, 25, 109, 122–4, 165–6 Spenser, Edmund characters Amavia, 44 Amoret, 55 Arthegall, 47–8, 57 Arthur, 38, 46, 51–2, 62–4 Belphoebe, 87, 101–2 Blandina, 62–4 Blatant Beast, 62 Bonfont, 56 Briana, 59–61 Britomart, 47–50 Calepine, 61–3

226

Index

Spenser, Edmund—Continued Calidore, 59–61 Charissa, 36–7 Crudor, 59–61 Cymochles, 43 Duessa, 40–1, 44, 46, 51–7, 109, 125 Furor and Occasion, 45 Gloriana, 42–3, 87 Guyon, 42–7, 60–1, 87 Huddibras, 43 Isis, 48–9 lion, 40 Maleffort, 59 Medina, 43 Mercilla, 35, 37, 46, 47, 50–7, 109, 125, 170–1 Mercy, 35, 37 Osiris, 48–9 Palmer, 45–6 Phaedria, 43–4 Pyrochles, 45–6, 60–1 Radigund, 17, 47–8 Red Cross Knight, 36–7, 40–1 Salvage Man, 61–2 Sans Foy, 40 Sans Loy, 38, 43 satyrs, 38–9 Scudamour, 55 Serena, 61–3 Timias, 101–2 Turpine, 61–4 Una, 38–41, 52 Venus, 55 Zele, 51 places Bower of Bliss, 46–7 House of Holiness, 36–7 Isis Church, 48–9 works Amoretti, 68, 97–106 ColinCloutsComeHomeAgaine, 97, 103–4

Epithalamion, 97 Faerie Queene, Book I, 36–41; Book II, 42–7, 87; Book III, 101–3; Book V, 17, 47–58, 109; Book VI, 58–64, 86 Shepheardes Calender, 97 ViewoftheStateofIreland,53,109 Spenser, T. J. B., 195n6 Spiller, Michael R. G., 72, 189n15, 194n65 Sprague, Arthur Colby, 192n45 Staines, John D., 58, 130, 186n26 Stallybrass, Peter, 72, 73 Star Chamber, 155 Stevenson, David L., 140 Stewart, Alan, 190n16 Stoic philosophy, 3 Strier, Richard, 183–4n6 Strohm, Paul, 9, 10–11 Strong, Roy, 192n46 Stuart, Mary, 12, 19, 25, 28–31, 32, 41, 51–7, 69–70, 109, 125, 129–30, 159, 170–1 Stump, Donald, 179n83, 196n10, 202n59 Sussex, Thomas Radclyffe, Earl of, 25–7 Sutherland, John, 196n18 Suzuki, Mihoko, 185n23 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 137, 199n18 Throckmorton, Job, 31 Thrush, Andrew, 202–3n66 Tobin, J. J. M., 179n70 Tosi, Laura, 182n114 True Report of Sondry Horrible Conspiracies, 121 Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 140 Vanhoutte, Jacqueline, 175n5, 177n42–3 Virgin Mary, 9, 113, 120 as intercessor, 9–10, 11, 153 Vives, Juan, 8

Index x Walch, Gunter, 117 Walker, Julia M., 195n4 Walsingham, Francis, 19, 55, 85 Ward, Paul L., 202n56 Wareh, Patricia, 58 Warner, Marina, 9, 11 Watkins, John, 134, 164, 165–6, 198n3 Watts, Cedric, 196n18 Weisen, David, 176n14 Whigham, Frank, 188n37 Williams, Kathleen, 40 Wilson, Richard, 197n38

227

Winwood, Ralph, 202n60–1 women as cruel, 5, 26, 28, 48 as emotionally susceptible, 8–9, 28, 75 judgment and, 2, 8–9, 17, 19, 28, 65 as merciful, 1, 17, 18, 37, 139 as rulers, 1–2, 8–9, 14–15 as tyrants, 15–17, 28 Woodbridge, Linda, 178n55 Wright,Thomas,PassionsoftheMinde In Generall, 7, 8, 144 Wynne-Davies, Marion, 72, 190n17