Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558–1581 0198769423, 9780198769422

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Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

Title Pages (p.i) Lawyers at Play (p.ii) (p.iii) Lawyers at Play

(p.iv) Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Jessica Winston 2016 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the

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Title Pages prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2015956027 ISBN 978–0–19–876942–2 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Preface

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

(p.v) Preface Jessica Winston

Many early modern poets and playwrights were also members of the era’s legal societies, the Inns of Court, and these authors shaped the development of key genres of the English Renaissance, especially lyric poetry, dramatic tragedy, satire, and masque. But how did the Inns come to be literary centres in the first place, and why were they especially lively at particular times? Early modernists have long understood that urban setting and institutional environment were central to this phenomenon: in the vibrant world of London, educated men with time on their hands turned to literary pastimes for something to do. Lawyers at Play proposes an additional, more essential dynamic: the literary culture of the Inns intensified in decades of profound transformation in the legal profession. Focusing on the first half of Elizabeth’s reign, the period when a large literary network first developed around the societies, the book demonstrates that the literary surge at this time grew out of and responded to a period of rapid expansion in the legal profession and in the career prospects of members. Poetry, translation, and performance were recreational pastimes; however, these activities also defined and elevated the status of inns-of-court men as qualified, learned, and ethical participants in England’s ‘legal magistracy’: those lawyers, judges, justices of the peace, civic office holders, town recorders, and gentleman landholders who managed and administered local and national governance of England.

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Preface Versions of four of the chapters have appeared in print already. Combined and further contextualized here, these essays map the literary terrain of a formative but understudied period in the English Renaissance; they also provide a framework for understanding the connections between the literary and legal cultures of the Inns over the whole of the early modern period. The original venues of publication are as follows, and I am grateful to the publishers for permission to include these materials here: Chapter 3: ‘Lyric Poetry at the Inns of Court: Forming a Professional Community’, in The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court, ed. by Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 223–44; Chapter 5: ‘A Mirror for Magistrates and Public Political Discourse in Elizabethan England’, Studies in Philology, 101 (2004), 381–400; Chapter 6: ‘Seneca in Early Elizabethan England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006), 29–58, ©2006 University of Chicago Press; and Chapter 7: ‘Expanding the Political Nation: Gorboduc at the Inns of Court and Succession Revisited’, Early Theatre: A Journal Associated with the Records of Early English Drama, 8:1 (2005), 11–34. In addition, a couple of paragraphs in the opening of Chapter 7 first appeared in ‘National History to Foreign Calamity: A Mirror for Magistrates and Early English Tragedy’, in Shakespeare’s Histories and CounterHistories, ed. by Dermot Cavanagh, Stuart Hampton-Reeves, and Steve Longstaffe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 152–65. In what (p.vi) follows, these segments have been adapted to function as parts of the larger argument and updated to incorporate and respond to recent criticism, as well as to refine elements of argument and style, correct incidental errors, and standardize citations. Many of the early modern texts discussed have only been printed once. Although I have consulted original, printed texts and some manuscripts, I have tried to cite the most accessible versions of these sources, usually from Early English Books Online (EEBO) as well as printed editions of manuscript sources. For ease of reference, for the works cited from EEBO, I have included the bibliographic Short-title Catalogue (STC) numbers. To facilitate reading, with the exception of a couple of quotations from Edmund Spenser, I have modernized spelling, expanded abbreviations, and lightly adjusted the punctuation in quotations from the primary texts to conform to modern British conventions. For consistency and readability, I have also standardized the spelling in quotations from modern critical works (i.e. honour, not honor). Printers’ names accord to the spellings in the index of printers in the STC. When they are first mentioned, printed texts and plays are followed by their initial date of publication or performance. For inns-of-court writers of the 1560s, life dates and dates of admission to the Inns are listed in Appendix 1. Unless otherwise indicated, life dates are taken from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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Preface Except when formulating an adjective (e.g. ‘inns-of-court author’) or using an indefinite article (i.e. ‘an inn’), I have capitalized ‘Inns of Court’ and ‘Inn’ (as in ‘the Inn’ or ‘his Inn’) on a loose analogy with Oxford University or Cambridge University and their colleges, since one foundational idea here is that, although they were made up of individuals and autonomous, discrete ‘houses’, in terms of the development of the legal profession and early modern literary culture, the Inns should be understood as a distinct and singular, if complex and multifaceted, set of institutions. In a book about institutions and intellectual networks, it is fitting to acknowledge the organizations and professional and personal ties that helped me to shape and complete it. I am grateful for the support of several institutions, especially the Idaho Humanities Council, the University of Aberdeen, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as onetime and ongoing research funding from Idaho State University’s Department of English and Philosophy, College of Arts and Letters, and Office of Research. In addition, staff at the following libraries and archives gave necessary and generous assistance: ISU Oboler Library (especially the interlibrary loan staff), the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, the Middle Temple, and the National Portrait Gallery. I am also beholden to Sharyn Brooks and Michael Lobban who located Figures 2.1 and 2.2 in the papers of the late Christopher Brooks so that they could be republished here.

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Preface As I have worked, I have benefited from the support and guidance of a number of individuals. For their encouragement and constructive comments, I am indebted to those who read and commented on drafts, including Nancy Moore Goslee, (p.vii) Lorna Hutson, Scott Lucas, Wilfrid Prest, Cathy Shrank, Virginia Lee Strain, Robert Tittler, and Phil Withington. I am also grateful for the conversations with and advice from Christopher Brooks, Dermot Cavanagh, Norman Jones, James Ker, Sarah Knight, Alan Nelson, Michelle O’Callaghan, Mike Pincombe, Jennifer Richards, and Ian Williams. Beyond those named, my work on this book has profited from dialogues at conferences and seminars, in particular with participants in several meetings about the early modern Inns, which were vital proving grounds for the argument, namely ‘The Intellectual and Cultural Worlds of the Early Modern Inns of Court’ (2006), the Folger seminar on ‘The Legal and Cultural Worlds of the Inns of Court’ (2012), ‘Renaissance Men in the Middle Temple’ (2013), and the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) seminar on ‘Inn-wards: Literary-Legal Culture of the Inns of Court’ (2014). Katie Van Heest at Tweed Editing attentively line-edited several chapters, and proofed a draft of the manuscript, saving me from numerous formatting errors and stylistic infelicities. Closer to home, members of the Department of English and Philosophy at Idaho State University have provided valuable comments on my work over the years, especially Susan Goslee who has been a supportive and challenging interlocutor as I have written. Jim Skidmore gave much-needed practical and intellectual support. Finally, I want to take this opportunity to remember the late Richard Helgerson, who saw the beginnings of this project in my doctoral research on the Inns and whose work on literary generations has deeply shaped my own. I will forever miss his good humour and incisive mind. Without the encouragement, queries, references, suggestions, and criticisms of all those listed here and many others, this book would have been a significantly lesser piece of scholarship. Any errors or oversights that remain are entirely my own. (p.viii)

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List of Figures

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

(p.xi) List of Figures 1.1. Map of London and area, c. 1620, prepared by Subhash Shanbhag. Originally published in REED: Inns, I, pp. xcviii–xcix. 28 Reprinted with permission of the Records of Early English Drama. 2.1. Impressionistic sketch of the volume of central court litigation, c. 1200–1750, from Brooks, LLES, p. 66, 57 used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2.2. Cases in advanced stages in common pleas and King’s Bench, 1490– 1830, from Brooks, LLES, p. 68, 57 used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 5.1. Recto of the remaining leaf of A Memorial of All Suche Princes, the suppressed edition of the Mirror (c. 1554–5). 135 © British Library Board, shelfmark c.40.m.9.25. 5.2. A page from A Mirror for Magistrates (1559), sig. E4v, RB 60324, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 136 C.1. Portrait of William Naylor. Unknown Anglo-Netherlandish artist, 1562. Oil on panel, dimensions unknown, location unknown. Photograph in National Portrait Gallery, London, reference Z7939, 214 photograph. © A C Cooper (Colour) Ltd. C.2. The Judgement of Solomon. Unknown Anglo-Netherlandish artist, c. 1570. Oil on panel, approximately 1270 × 1270 mm. Middle Temple Hall, London. Photograph by Todd White. 223 © Middle Temple and published by kind permission of the Masters of the Bench of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. (p.xii)

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Abbreviations and Symbols

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

(p.xiii) Abbreviations and Symbols The text employs the following abbreviations and symbols. For web-based sources, the abbreviation is followed throughout by the date of access [day– month–year] in brackets.

Abbreviations for Individual Inns of Court and Inns of Chancery BI Barnard’s Inn (Inn of Chancery affiliated with GI) CI Clifford’s Inn (Inn of Chancery affiliated with IT) GI Gray’s Inn IT Inner Temple MT Middle Temple LI Lincoln’s Inn SI Staple Inn (Inn of Chancery affiliated with GI) TI Thavies Inn (Inn of Chancery affiliated with LI)

Other Symbols and Abbreviations ? Unknown or ambiguous information, e.g. date of death, date of admission to an inn of court, etc. adm admitted (to an inn of court) Brooks, LLES Page 1 of 3

Abbreviations and Symbols Christopher Brooks, Lawyers, Litigation, and English Society since 1450 (London: Hambledon, 1998) Brooks, LPS Christopher Brooks, Law, Politics, and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) fl. floruit, i.e. ‘flourished’ Intellectual Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight, eds., Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011) Machyn A London Provisioner’s Chronicle, 1550–1563, by Henry Machyn: Manuscript, Transcription, and Modernization (electronic scholarly edition), ed. by Richard W. Bailey, Marilyn Miller, and Colette Moore (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Publishing / University of Michigan Library) (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/machyn/index.html) ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (oxforddnb.com) OED Online Oxford English Dictionary Online (www.oed.com) Prest, Inns Wilfrid Prest, Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590–1640 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972) Prest, Rise Wilfrid Prest, Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar, 1590–1640, Oxford Studies in Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) (p.xiv) REED: Inns Records of Early English Drama: Inns of Court, ed. by Alan H. Nelson and John R. Elliott, Jr., 3 vols (Cambridge: Brewer, 2010) spec. special admission STC Alfred W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, 3 vols, 2nd ed. rev. and enl. by W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katherine F. Pantzer (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976) Wing

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Abbreviations and Symbols Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, Wales and British America and of English Books Printed in Other Countries 1641–1700, rev. and ed. by Timothy J. Crist, with the Assistance of Janice M. Hansel et al (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1982) References to plays and poems by Shakespeare are to William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, 2nd ed., ed. by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

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Introduction

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

Introduction Lawyers at Play Jessica Winston

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords Why were the early modern Inns of Court such vibrant literary centres? This introduction sets out the central argument of Lawyers at Play: the literary culture of the Inns was bound up with, energized by, and responsive to transformations in early modern political and legal culture, especially changes in the legal profession and related transformations in the professional and career opportunities of members. The introduction also explains the central focus of the book on the early Elizabethan period, especially the 1560s; the principles governing the organization of the book by genre; and the significance of the book’s argument, especially in terms of studies of law and literature and early modern political culture. Keywords:   Inns of Court, law and literature, political culture, genre, literary culture, legal profession, early modern, early Elizabethan period, The Misfortunes of Arthur

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Introduction In the late 1580s, members of the London legal society Gray’s Inn joined together to write and perform The Misfortunes of Arthur for Queen Elizabeth. In the prologue, several gentlemen of the Inn argue for members’ divided allegiance to Astraea, the goddess of justice, and the Muses. Despite their first duty to Astraea, a figure associated with Elizabeth,1 the men of the Inn ‘with Muses still […] intercourse allow’, prizing ‘eloquence’, ‘poetry’, and ‘history’, even as they ‘devote’ their ‘attentive minds and serious wits’ to the ‘word of law’ and ‘deep judicial acts’. The prologue initially appears to be a defence of members’ time wasting, their having abandoned serious legal matters to pursue comparatively frivolous playwriting and performance. Astraea herself is said to align literature with folly, placing ‘poesy’ ‘next Folly’s scorned place’. Law ‘doth deride the poet’s law’.2 Yet the play belies the idea that poetry is next to foolishness. Misfortunes is a sober tragedy about familial strife and civil war in the time of King Arthur, and the prologue guides Elizabeth to take the tale as a sincere, if elaborate, compliment: [S]ince your sacred majesty In gracious hands the regal sceptre held, All tragedies are fled from state to stage.3

Misfortunes is even more relevant than this tribute suggests, offering high-toned commentary on contemporary politics. This significance is signalled first through form. Misfortunes is written in blank verse with acts divided by choral odes and dumb shows. These stylistic features deliberately recall an earlier inns-of-court (p.2) play, Gorboduc, which was composed and performed by members of the Inner Temple nearly thirty years earlier, in the winter of 1561–2. Gorboduc melds ancient British history with Senecan tragedy to address the Elizabethan succession and Queen Elizabeth’s marriage policy.4 Misfortunes likewise blends British legend and Senecan style,5 and it marshals this politically inflected form to demonstrate the dangers of empire: imperial expansion leads to domestic degeneration.6 As one character observes of his rebellion: ‘Since Arthur thus hath ransacked all abroad, | What marvel is’t if Mordred rave at home?’7 The prologue also makes a different but salient case that legal men maintain ‘unimpeached’ (i.e. undisrupted, unimpeded) the stability of the nation in times of change: Our industry maintaineth unimpeached Prerogative of prince, respect to peers, The commons’ liberty and each man’s right; Suppresseth mutine force and practice fraud.8

Echoing ancient debates over the authority of the monarch and the law, the prologue backs the lawyers. They ensure ‘prerogative of prince’ and the peace, welfare, and liberty of the commonweal. Page 2 of 29

Introduction Here poetry supports law: the men of Gray’s Inn use dramatic verse to further political and legal positions. In the prologue, they profess their dedication to the law, even as they assert their intellectual and communal independence in verse. In this way, they construct literature as a field distinct from legal practice, yet this distinct literary space functions as a platform from which to announce the significance of legal ‘industry’ within and to the commonweal. Hardly a folly, Misfortunes was serious business, an adaptation of literary history that comments on political dominion and legal authority. Poetry authorizes and facilitates legal and political engagement. The Misfortunes of Arthur was not an anomaly. When the men of Gray’s Inn claim that they ‘still’, or continuously, ‘converse’ with the Muses, they invoke and anticipate the long association of the London legal societies, the Inns of Court, with literary and intellectual activity. During the period from 1558 to 1642, over one hundred major and minor writers were members of an inn— Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, the Middle Temple, and the Inner Temple, or an affiliated Inn of Chancery. Many important literary networks centred on the societies, involving (p.3) writers like John Donne and John Marston in the 1590s, George Wither and William Browne in the 1610s, and the poet and classical scholar Thomas Stanley in the 1640s. Early modernists have long recognized the significance of the Inns, attributing their literary vibrancy to setting and intellectual culture.9 Wilfrid Prest explains: ‘Simply by concentrating large numbers of students in an exceptionally lively metropolitan environment, virtually free of academic and other supervision, the Inns could have hardly failed to play an important part in the English Renaissance’.10 Prest pinpoints two crucial reasons why the Inns have been associated with writers from the medieval period through to the present day.11 The early modern period was different, however: the only time when there were significant and large clusters of writers at the Inns over an extended period of time. What put the Renaissance in inns-of-court men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Lawyers at Play argues that the literary culture of the Inns was bound up with, energized by, and responsive to transformations in early modern political and legal culture. The central claim is that networks of writers associated with the Inns developed at key moments of change in the legal profession, and related transformations in the professional and career opportunities of members. In other words, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, literature served as an extracurricular activity, an escape from the rigours of legal study, and a kind of play fostered by the setting and institutional culture as well as the numerous and inexorable intellectual forces that produced the Renaissance. Fundamentally, however, the phenomenon was bound up with developments in the legal profession, and more specifically the changing role of the legal profession in the rule and administration of the Elizabethan and Jacobean state.

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Introduction (p.4) The Misfortunes of Arthur stands as one example. The play appears at a transitional moment in the status of the law and governance, in the shift from what John Guy identifies as two parts of the reign of Elizabeth.12 The early part is characterized by cooperation between monarch, Parliament, and Privy Council, what has been called England’s ‘mixed polity’ and ‘monarchic republic’. The second part is distinguished by Elizabeth’s increased use of monarchic prerogative. With its emphasis on the role of law in the polity and its criticism of imperial ambition, as well as its deliberate recollection through Gorboduc of an earlier literary and political moment, Misfortunes uses the values and literary forms of Elizabeth’s ‘first reign’ to resist the transition to the second. The prologue to Misfortunes presents the members of Gray’s Inn as central to the commonwealth, demonstrating both their fervent patriotism and essential part in maintaining civic harmony. The authority of the queen is ‘underwritten by the common law and the “industry” of lawyers’. Together the prologue and play present ‘the gentlemen of Gray’s Inn as politically sophisticated citizen-subjects offering service and admonitory advice to the queen’.13 The legal performers do not simply advise the queen but also fashion themselves as a legitimate, distinctive, and essential group within the early modern commonwealth. They support, but also criticize, the reach of the monarch and not just over other lands with respect to imperial expansion, but also implicitly over domestic institutions, such as common law and the Inns of Court. Whatever institutional and geographical dynamics enabled the men of Gray’s Inn to write and perform this play for the queen in the late 1580s, this particular work is a response to a crucial moment of challenge to the status of the common law and to the role of legal men in the governance of the nation. Lawyers at Play looks beyond Misfortunes to consider the interconnections of literature, law, and politics in the period spanning from 1558 to 1642. The book proposes a fundamental connection between literature and the professional culture of the Inns—that is, the legal and political trends that affected members and their career opportunities. While this pattern exists over time, central to this book’s approach is the recognition that literary history consists of generational waves of writers. Writing about this ‘succession of synchronies’ in the Renaissance,14 Richard Helgerson observes that each age group is a ‘temporal location in which a certain language is spoken’; the language generations speak, each one’s typical modes, genres, and topoi change over time, often with reference to, as well as a rejection of, the languages of the past.15 This point applies to the Inns, where the languages of (p.5) member-writers—the genres and modes in which they wrote—altered over successive generations. Each generation’s temporally specific languages respond to or reject the literary past. At the same time, as in Misfortunes, each generation deploys or dismisses this literary past to react to present developments.

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Introduction A couple of well-known genres at the Inns in the 1590s and 1610s provide brief examples. The first is the Ovidian epyllia and satirical poetry popular at the Inns in the 1590s. These works are in conversation with Petrarchan tradition, as popularized by Sidney and Spenser. Nonetheless, Jim Ellis and Arthur Marotti demonstrate that, in this verse, members of the Inns also responded to immediate professional, legal, and political changes, ones that altered their job opportunities and the relationship of individuals to the law. These include the reconceptualization of the political subject in the years following a landmark case in contract law, Slade v. Morley (1596–1602), as well as anxieties about a collapsing job market at a time when the economy was contracting.16 In a different way, the masques produced at the Inns in the 1610s react to a different professional trend. Masques were also popular at the royal Court, and men at the Inns may have produced such dramas to raise the status of legal professionals relative to their social betters at court at a time when barristers were coming into their own as a distinct professional class.17 The literary culture of the Inns, in other words, reflects shifts in literary styles and tastes, but it also engages with specific and changing trends in the professional and legal environment in which the men of the Inns wrote.

The Inns in the 1560s Lawyers at Play focuses on one significant literary generation at the Inns, those junior members of the societies in the 1560s. This focus has to do with the decade’s function as a ‘threshold’ moment, the point when a system—in this case the culture of the Inns—fundamentally and permanently changes its behaviour.18 It is in the 1560s that a large literary network first coalesced around the legal societies. In literary criticism, the early Elizabethan Inns most commonly appear in discussions of the verse and miscellany collections of George Gascoigne, George (p.6) Turberville, and Barnabe Googe; translations of Ovid, Cicero, and Senecan tragedy; as well as original masques and plays, especially Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc, George Gascoigne’s Jocasta, and the multiauthored Gismond of Salerne. These works are only the beginning, however, and there are many now obscure figures who participated in this literary network, such as Thomas Peend, a translator of Ovid, or John Vaughn, a member of Gray’s Inn, to whom Gascoigne addressed a poem. Overall, over thirty major and minor writers of the decade were also active members of the Inns.19 By attending to a single decade, we can chart the specific circumstances that influenced the intensification of literary activity at one time: What legal and political factors modulated the literary languages of this one generation? At the same time, this generation’s writings deeply inflected the literatures of later inns-of-court authors, such as the authors of Misfortunes in their reworking of early Elizabethan Gorboduc. To understand the later literary culture of the early modern Inns, it is necessary to begin here.

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Introduction Lawyers at Play is also a project of recovery and revaluation. Criticism on the English Renaissance focuses on the decades closest to 1600, especially Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne. The trend is understandable, but the result is that authors of the 1560s are overlooked, and when they are discussed, they are examined traditionally in terms of their literary innovations in pastoral, lyric, and drama—as ‘drab’ authors who laid the ground for the later Elizabethan golden age.20 In the past decade, early modernists have reconsidered pre-1580 writing, and two edited collections, the Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature (2009) and the Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama (2012), are important examples.21 Organized chronologically—and by individual or paired sets of authors or works—these collections work against the tradition of analysing ‘Tudor literature’ in terms of seriatim influence, instead placing authors and texts in their immediate biographical, literary, and political contexts. In so doing, the anthologies show that recovery is not an aim in itself but a means to another end—to (p.7) demonstrate the personal or cultural issues that shaped writing and performance, and to understand literary influence in expansive ways in terms of impacts on politics and society. Even with this recovery, critics rarely discuss the 1560s. Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank explain that, while the 1560s constitute ‘a decade of unprecedented literary ferment’, the era ‘remains hardly recognized and certainly little charted’.22 This book maps this territory, traversing the most important literary ground for the time. It would be difficult to exaggerate the Inns’ significant, even outsize, role in the literary culture of the 1560s. With the possible exception of Arthur Golding, every major writer of the decade was either a member of the Inns or connected to them through literary, social, or familial ties: Sackville, Norton, Gascoigne, Googe, Turberville, Jasper Heywood, and John Studley, to name just a few. Even Golding had relatives at the Inns, and this social and literary network extends to Isabella Whitney, who as a woman was necessarily excluded from the Inns. Her Sweet Nosegay (1573) adapts the Flowers of Philosophy (1572) of Hugh Plat, a member of Lincoln’s Inn, and her ‘Will’ to London bequeaths copies of her work to inns men, leaving them ‘a store of books […] at each bookbinder’s stall’.23

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Introduction The literary culture of the 1560s grew out of a generational phenomenon among a cohort of men at the Inns: mainly twenty-something, nonaristocratic, university-educated, Protestant, junior members, who turned to literature as part of a career trajectory that aimed for positions in law, at court, or elsewhere in the bureaucratic infrastructure of the Elizabethan state. Their literary turn resulted from the confluence of a number of long-term and immediate factors, which affected both the career prospects of men at the Inns and the nature of the legal profession—humanism; the mid-Tudor rise in litigation rates; a related, growing concern about the qualifications of legal magistrates and officers who could meet these needs; the advent and expansion of the new Elizabethan regime; and the ‘commonweal’ values of the chief men in the government, William Cecil and especially Sir Nicholas Bacon. (These contexts and trends are discussed in Chapter 2.) In these contexts, members’ writings functioned in multifaceted ways and had equally multifaceted effects. Yet through their literary endeavours, members fostered the emergence of the legal societies as a cultural and political hub with an inconsistent, sometimes contradictory, relationship to the central institutions of the English political nation—monarch, Privy Council, and Parliament. The writing of imaginative works helped men in a network of mainly Protestant writers, educated in the ethos of civic humanism, to reinforce a related idea of the Inns as a distinct professional and political space, where members shared values of personal decorum and civic responsibility. On the one hand, these shared values helped to foster a communal sense of identity at the Inns and to raise the prestige of inns-of-court men, thus assisting the writers, indeed all members, in the move into careers (p.8) in law or politics, as lawyers, as justices of the peace, or in service to the Privy Council or Parliament.

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Introduction On the other hand, these writings promulgated the view that the Inns, and the legal profession generally, constituted an ‘alternative polity’, to borrow Laurie Shannon’s phrase, one that had the potential to challenge the authority of the central institutions of government, especially the monarchy—institutions that members at least individually seemed to support.24 Members consistently imagined this alternative polity by invoking a rhetoric of commonweal. While the idea and ideal of commonweal appears throughout the sixteenth century, the keyword appears frequently in the writings of early Elizabethan inns-of-court men, such as in the Middle Templar William Bavand’s Good Ordering of a Commonweal (1559). His book contains the first appearance of the term on a title page of something other than statutes or acts in England.25 Paul Slack observes that rhetorically commonweal language served as ‘a flexible, allpurpose tool’. Anyone could use it, and any group ‘could rightly claim to be “good commonwealthsmen”’. For this reason, the language of commonweal was potentially dissident; the term always had ‘participatory and hence potentially subversive associations’.26 Like patriotism in the United States nowadays, the language of commonweal at the Inns worked to galvanize men to act in the service of the political nation, even as it had the potential to embolden individuals and groups who were not fully under the control of the main institutions of the political nation to act in ways that were not necessarily supportive of the monarch, or other institutions. While literature and drama were recreational activities, these forms of play facilitated the serious legal and political ambitions of individual writers, and the consolidation of the Inns as a significant and autonomous social, legal, political, and professional domain in early Elizabethan England. In a sense, in the late 1580s The Misfortunes of Arthur inherited and revived this legacy. It is striking that as it formally hearkens back to the early Elizabethan Gorboduc, Misfortunes also resurrects this commonweal language as characters talk about the ‘common good and each man’s care’ and the ‘country’s weal’, although in the play this vocabulary often justifies personal ambition rather than civic altruism.27 Overall, the play demonstrates the common care of the inns men for their country’s order and prosperity, and it suggests that this common concern, bolstered by legal training, legitimates independent legal and political commentary both within and outwith the play. Members of the Inns imagined themselves, and the legal profession generally, as a group that functioned independently of England’s central governing institutions.

(p.9) Law and Literature

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Introduction The idea of the authorization, even legality, of expression raises a central issue that this argument helps to address: what is the relationship between law and literature at the Inns of Court? One might expect that at the Inns legal and literary forms inflect each other, or that legal incidents, metaphors, and tropes appear consistently in writings and drama. There are examples, but these are not widespread. Instead, Lawyers at Play argues for a different relationship between literature and law: literary production at the Inns intensifies in response to important periods of legal-professional change. Literature helped members to navigate their own changing status and that of their institutions at times when the size and role of the profession were in transition. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were periods of extraordinary legal change throughout Europe. In England, these changes were marked by a dramatic rise in litigation rates, the rise of the common law as the dominant legal system in England, the creation of a two-tiered system of legal professionals (barristers and attorneys), the increase in parliamentary ‘enactments’ in terms of both number and range of issues, and the upsurge in legal printing, among numerous other transformations.28 It is now generally agreed that in the early modern period such transformations in legal forms, procedures, and jurisdictions had a profound impact on English literature, and the literary culture of England both registered and commented on these changes.29 The Inns of Court have been relatively neglected, however. This marginalization stems from the nature of the studies so far: most focus on the pervasive popular knowledge of and engagement with law—the ways that popular forms of literature, and especially drama, took up legal subjects.30 ‘[L]aw is everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays’, write several recent scholars, and ‘[t]his (p.10) is because, most simply, it was everywhere in his culture’.31 These studies necessarily focus on texts that were more widely disseminated and viewed than ones specifically associated with the Inns, such as Gorboduc or Misfortunes. When the Inns do appear in scholarship on law and literature, they figure as conduits for the movement of legal ideas into more popular forms. That ‘languages and procedural structures of the common law […] find their way into literary representations’ makes sense, write Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson, given how ‘closely identified were the cultural spaces of both legal and literary writing’. Subha Mukherji emphasizes the ‘immediate proximity between the professional worlds of theatre and law in the cultural geography of London’.32

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Introduction How precisely did law ‘find its way into’ literature at the Inns, and what, if anything, did it do there? Literary critics focused on the Inns generally sidestep this question, demonstrating ways that geography and social environment are central to literary production, but they do not attend to the law: legal study, legal procedures, or legal forms, or as the present book argues, trends in the legal profession and in employment opportunities for ‘legal’ men.33 Historians also have not usually addressed this issue, and when they do, they tend to suggest that law did not make its way into literature in a sustained or systematic way. Wilfrid Prest writes that literature at the Inns was produced mostly by young men of the gentry who, having little intention of studying the common law, flocked to the schools because of their proximity to London and to the powerful court: ‘The status of common lawyers in Tudor and early Stuart England was not high’ and literary activity was one of numerous styles and behaviours adopted by young gentlemen, ‘which would clearly distinguish them from the common lawyers with whom they were nominally associated’.34 Prest later modifies this idea, observing that some men who were or wanted to be lawyers took up literary and intellectual activities to distance themselves from average men of law, too. Lawyers were relatively ‘unlearned men, at a time when polite—that is, classical—learning was increasingly becoming a mark of social status’. For this reason, many legal men sought ‘to distance themselves from their colleagues by the public cultivation of such extra-legal accomplishments and activities’.35 For early modernists, then, the Inns functioned in opposing ways, serving as a conduit for law into literature and yet also promoting an opposition between the fields. When members of the Inns explicitly mention law in poetry and drama, they do play up this sort of opposition, commenting on law in derogatory ways. In ‘Satyre II’, John Donne, a member of Lincoln’s Inn, complains that men who choose law ‘practice for mere gain’ and are worse than ‘imbrotheled strumpets (p.11) prostitute’.36 Nicholas Trotte, to return to that prologue to Misfortunes, writes that law ‘doth deride the poet’s law’.37 Moreover, it is not clear that law influenced literary reception and output at the Inns in a consistent or uniform way, and indeed many of the literary forms and traditions most strongly associated with the early modern Inns—Senecan drama, Ovidian epyllia, lyric poetry, neo-Spenserian pastorals—draw directly on practices and modes learned in other educational environments, especially the grammar schools, or experienced through the world of print and manuscript circulation, not from legal cases or exercises (a point also developed further in the chapters below).

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Introduction Despite members’ regular promotion of literature’s difference from and antagonism to the law, the Inns’ legal and cultural environment seems, at times, to have activated, or at the least intensified, literary activity at the Inns. Thus, critics have persuasively argued that specific literary works and genres at the Inns are in conversation with particular legal forms. (This is the case, even though the literary models on which those works are based were studied somewhere other than the Inns.) For instance, there is an important connection between the legal exercises—which were known as moots and preoccupied with property law—and Gorboduc, and likewise between the point-by-point combative nature of arguments in the moots and the vituperative back-and-forth of satirical epigrams and poetry in the 1590s.38 Yet again, the moots, with their combativeness and emphasis on property and inheritance, existed back into the thirteenth century. Why would literature become especially receptive or responsive to the moots’ specific legal concerns and intellectual style at particular times? One key to this issue lies in the shared culture of the Inns. As Chapter 1 explains, this shared identity was in fundamental ways shaped by the Inns’ legal purpose and the knowledge, dispositions, and outlook they promoted. The Inns’ corporate (i.e. collective) culture, in turn, participated in and responded to broader changes in the legal profession and in the common law.39 In this way, the activation and intensification of literary activity results from especially important moments of change (p.12) in the legal profession as it affected the corporate identity and raison d’être of the Inns themselves. The idea that literature intensifies in response to particular moments of transformation in the legal profession helps to explain why there was, indeed, a significant, persistent connection between law and literature at the early modern Inns, as well as why this connection was not systemic, and does not manifest itself in consistent, continuous ways at the level of practices and forms. To respond to specific legalprofessional issues at specific times, members turned to literature, although they took up literary genres and forms that were not native to the Inns (usually these forms were initially studied or popularized elsewhere), and members composed in ever-changing genres and modes over succeeding generations.

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Introduction Rather than look for extended, consistent patterns of influence between the Inns’ legal practices on their literary culture (or vice versa), Lawyers at Play instead points to the ways that literature was the other, even the alter ego, of the law, and more precisely, the legal profession. Despite the numerous changes in legal culture and practice throughout the period, taken as a whole, the literary culture of the Inns primarily functioned to help negotiate and define the status of the legal professionals who resisted, implemented, and navigated broader jurisdictional and procedural transformations. On the one hand, as Prest explains, literary activity (poetry, translation, drama) was an acceptable way to display the elite cultural capital of classical learning and knowledge, and in this way it helped individual members, whether they aimed to be lawyers or not, to raise their status and reputation. On the other hand, because of their close affiliation with the Inns, such writings helped to raise the status of the Inns and legal men, too. Literature had this cachet, even though poetry and drama were sometimes denigrated or positioned as mere leisure or playtime pursuits, dilettante, even prodigal activities against which some inns-of-court men were able to cast barristers as members of a serious, sober profession. Some types of writings, moreover, such as the legal satires of the 1590s, sought to articulate appropriate behaviour for inns-of-court men and legal men generally. Lawyers at Play thus describes the separate but associated existence of law and literature at the Inns. Literary play was not simply an aspect of social life, or a replication of legal procedures and forms; instead, literary activities helped to raise the status of early modern legal men and the common law. Here, again, the prologue of Misfortunes is a useful exemplar. It initially argues for the opposition between poetry and law but then goes on to use poetry to defend the legal expertise of the men who are performing: their ‘industry maintaineth unimpeached | Prerogative of prince, respect to peers’. Poetry also provides access to the queen: would the men of Gray’s Inn have been able to say this if they were not on stage? Law might ‘deride the poet’s law’, but the legal profession, and the common law it served, benefitted from the cultural capital of poetry and the political access it allowed, even as individual members sometimes played up their scorn for these connections.40

(p.13) ‘The Resources of Kind’: Genre at the Inns Members of the Inns wrote to appeal in a general way to literature’s cultural capital or social cachet, and to leverage such works for patronage and political access.41 Equally crucial is that they advanced specific purposes by writing in specific genres and forms. To understand the literary culture of the Inns, it is important to be attuned to the common genres of the time, and when and how they were used. Indeed, genre is especially important as a critical category, making it possible to link sociological and cultural trends with formalist analysis. Genre offers a schema for understanding the relationship between social phenomena and the content and form of specific literary works.

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Introduction The central chapters of Lawyers at Play are organized by genre. This organizational structure builds on the work of Lawrence Manley and Jean Howard, both of whom integrate New Historicism and historical formalism to investigate how genres respond to history. Howard explains: ‘[G]enre is a crucial category not only for engaging history but also for negotiating between single texts and the whole of a culture’s literary production’.42 Genres are essentially shared conventions, with social meaning, and each exists in a system, or economy, holding different and dependent relationships with each other.43 Networks of texts ‘collectively receive and shape the form and pressure of the times by mediating social change and contestation’, although different genres ‘receive and shape’ the ‘pressure of the times’ in different ways.44 Barbara Fuchs captures this point: ‘the relationship between texts and the material world of readers, shirts, and money is mediated by genre’.45 While genres mediate between ‘the whole of a culture’ and ‘the material world of readers, shirts, and money’, the following chapters extend and qualify this line by attending to the crucial, intermediate role of genre in shaping smaller-scale social networks, which in turn mediate relationships between texts and the culture more broadly conceived. Genre provides a useful entrée into the relationship between individual works and a specific cultural environment. As we will see in Chapter 3 (on lyric poetry), inns-of-court authors defined themselves as individuals and as a group both with (p.14) and against the social meanings of the genres in which they wrote. This is not surprising, since with their humanist training, authors habitually approached writing as a system of genres. ‘[T]he Renaissance was largely generic’, Rosalie Colie writes, and the ‘transfer of ancient values was largely in generic terms and accomplished by generic instruments and helps’.46 The ‘new learning’ of humanism relied on the arts of imitation, making ‘modes of classical texts’ and ‘increasingly stress[ing] structures as well as styles to be imitated’.47 Humanism trained students to think in terms of genre, since genre provided ‘a ready code of communication’.48 For this reason, Colie demonstrates, genre allows critics to make connections between ‘topic and treatment’ and ‘to connect literature with kinds of knowledge and experience’.49 Colie and Howard focus on the public stage and those dramatic professionals who aimed to live by writing. Yet their points hold for literary amateurs at the Inns who approached writing as a pastime, even if this pastime contributed to literary tradition and served non-literary personal and professional ends. Inns-ofcourt authors took up specific genres, since these genres provided a ‘code of communication’ with readers who were well versed in the generic system and who understood how its ‘code’ could be deployed for self- or institutional definition.

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Introduction To develop this point, Lawyers at Play explores an entire generic system, placing individual genres next to each other to clarify their role in a larger structure. Wai Chee Dimock explains why this larger structure matters: ‘[T]he concept of genre has meaning only in the plural’; genres only have definable characteristics, ‘mean’ something, when contrasted with something else.50 The popular genres at the Inns in the 1560s were lyric poetry, Latin and neo-Latin translations, de casibus poetry, Senecan drama, and original plays and masques, such as Gorboduc, Jocasta, and Gismond of Salerne. Such genres emerge with reference to each other and to specific social and institutional practices. For instance, Chapter 3 on lyric poetry argues that Barnabe Googe and George Turberville wrote verse to laud duty and denounce love to show that they were not the sorts of men who composed amorous lyrics, a genre that was historically associated with prodigality and the neglect of familial and civic duties.51 Lyric poetry and other genres, in other words, provided the forms through which innsof-court writers understood themselves and their experiences, and established their relationships with each other and other institutions of the state. In a different way, members of the Inns produce drama—a collaborative and institutional form of cultural production—when they explore the relationship of their entire institution and the legal profession to the political nation, as in Misfortunes, with its impassioned plea by members of Gray’s Inn about their legal ‘industry’. Yet every genre, not just lyric or drama, is a form of shared communication. As Timothy Hampton observes of the collective expression implied in generic (p.15) choices, ‘it is through the notion of genre that one may grasp the collective dimension of literary form, the power of form to shape collectivity by moulding the experience of time and space. Genres are bearers of collective values and fantasies’, even as those genres are ‘crisscrossed by other genres, by conventions and commonplaces linked to other forms of collective experience’.52 Thus, like Manley in Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, the present book emphasizes the generic system, as well as the traditions, topics, and habits of thought, that maintain this system and that change both with and because of it.53

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Introduction To underscore the importance of thinking generically to approach the Inns, it is useful to consider the limitations of other analytical categories. Another format might feature prominent early Elizabethan discourses, such as love, duty, service, ambition, and commonweal. These discourses, however, have altered valences depending on the genre in which they appear. For instance, Gascoigne writes a poem addressed to Francis Kinwelmersh (his coauthor in Jocasta) which offers a tongue-in-cheek commendation of ambition, or at least boldness: ‘Fortune helps the boldest to advance’. Meanwhile, Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta includes an epilogue by Christopher Yelverton warning in the most didactic and stringent terms against ambition: ‘See, ruin grows when most we reach to rise’.54 These different takes on ambition stem from authorship and immediate context, but they also stem from genre. Lyric verse in this period often developed aphoristic commonplaces, and the wit of the verse stemmed from the ability to develop or refute the aphorism, only sometimes treating aphorisms seriously as guides for living. Drama, instead, was more earnest and more explicitly didactic, warning monarchs and magistrates about behaviour that could lead to a downfall. In this context, ambition is often presented as a negative attribute of power. To read Gascoigne and Yelverton’s statements about ambition as ironic or earnest, it is necessary first to register the genres in which those statements appear. Another organizational structure could highlight the careers of particular and prominent literary men such as Googe, Gascoigne, and Norton. This has other drawbacks. While literary work assisted the careers and self-definition of individual men, their generational positions would determine the literary forms they used to define themselves, and to understand themselves and their experience.55 To unpack their self-presentation, then, it is necessary to look closely at the social meanings of the specific forms through which they presented themselves, and this again means looking first at genre.

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Introduction Yet again, each genre is not only defined in relation to others of the time but also develops out of past literary traditions, allowing inns-of-court men to fashion themselves as individuals and as a group in different ways. The main chapters describe the (p.16) traditions and significances of the most popular genres at the Inns in the 1560s, moving from kinds that promoted individual and interpersonal self-definition to ones that promoted collective, public forms of expression. Chapters 1 and 2 lead with crucial institutional and historical context, describing first the corporate and institutional culture of the Inns and second significant educational, political, and legal transformations of the 1560s. Chapters 3 and 4 analyse lyric poetry and classical translations, kinds of writing that facilitated individual social networking and the expression of a communal, commonweal ethos among members of the Inns. These two genres, in other words, undergird and foster the associational networks that promote and present the Inns as a kind of mini-commonweal and alternative polity.56 Chapters 7 and 8 take up drama, a genre in which members collectively present themselves and jointly claim authority to comment on the intellectual and political debates. The middle two chapters (5 and 6) are excurses on the Mirror for Magistrates and Senecan translations, two types of writing that directly informed the dramatic genres of the Inns in the 1560s; these establish a precedent for using dramatic form as collective political expression.

The Public Sphere in Early Modernity The Inns are an alternative polity and the drama produced there is collective, politically charged expression—this idea broaches a final issue: the development of the sixteenth-century public sphere. Jürgen Habermas’s historical and theoretical description of the public sphere has been crucially important to early modern studies since the mid-1990s. In the broadest terms, the public sphere is an arena in which critical conversations about issues of common concern are a routine part of life.57 For Habermas, the public sphere emerges in Europe in relation to specific social, institutional, and market conditions in the eighteenth century, and is best exemplified by England in that century. Early modernists have argued for pushing back the timeline of the public sphere into the seventeenth and even the sixteenth century,58 demonstrating that the term has ‘real efficacy’; it is possible to ‘talk coherently’ about the coalescence of a public sphere in the early modern period.59 Although often defined loosely, the concept of the ‘public sphere’ allows scholars to identify practices, from writing satires to bell ringing, as part of a broader (p.17) historical trend—the emergence and development of public political discourse from the Reformation through to the Civil War.60

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Introduction If one agrees that a public sphere coalesces over the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, then one needs to ask what specific ‘associational cultures’—places and forms of ‘talking and meeting’—contributed to the formation of the public sphere.61 How did individual spatial and institutional cultures promote—and differently promote—political discourse? As one conference asks, ‘Where Was Political Thought in England, c.1600–1642?’62 How did it differ from place to place? Lawyers at Play locates one set of answers in the overlapping legal, social, and literary space of the Inns in the 1560s. This locale facilitated and intensified the production and sharing of poetry, drama, and other kinds of writing, and these, in turn, helped to authorize conversations that could support or challenge the Elizabethan government—monarch, Privy Council, and Parliament. Here, again, The Misfortunes of Arthur stands as an illustration. The drama grows directly out of the associative environment of the Inns. The principal author was Thomas Hughes, but at least seven others from Gray’s Inn contributed to it. The play was produced and performed by even more men of the Inn. In this way, the intellectual and associational culture of the Inns energized this endeavour and, because there is strength in numbers, perhaps helped to authorize the admonition it contains. Moreover, this admonition develops directly out of the Inns’ environment, since it emerges from an argument that was especially, perhaps primarily, relevant to inns-of-court men— the centrality of law and legal men in maintaining the state and the limits of monarchic authority domestically and overseas—but it also comes in a form that was at that point native to the Inns: Senecan-style tragedy. The Inns of Court shaped the form, content, and expression of the play’s political ideas; indeed, it is hard to imagine this political idea emerging in this form from another institution—either the university or the public theatre—or even from the Inns of Court at another time.

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Introduction The early Elizabethan period represents a moment when one can see in the Inns’ culture of letters the formation of something like a protopublic sphere. Even so, from a historiographical perspective, the interconnection of the Inns and the public sphere in the 1560s is intriguing, since the 1560s also stand as a time when (p.18) something like a public sphere emerges, but does not take hold. The literary-political culture of the Inns in the early 1560s influenced writers through the decade. For instance, John Studley, a translator of four of Seneca’s plays published in and around 1566 and a member of Barnard’s Inn, directly compares his work to that of Heywood, Googe, and Neville. Yet the force and intensity of this literary culture dissipates by the 1570s (even if it had a brief revival in Misfortunes). By 1570, the figures who dominate the Inns’ literary scene in the previous decade disperse: Thomas Norton takes an important role in Parliament, becomes remembrancer to the lord mayor of London, and is appointed as a commissioner in examining Catholic prisoners; Barnabe Googe travels in embassies to Spain and then to Ireland; George Turberville leaves with an embassy to Moscow. As members left the Inns throughout the 1560s, the specific culture they created gradually dissolved. For this reason, it is not clear how to link the associational culture of the 1560s in any obvious historiographical line to the later rise of the public sphere in the middle of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One can argue that some of the ideas and ideals of members in this period continued through a sort of ‘history of ideas’ or ‘circulation of social energy’,63 yet ideas are expressed by people in specific relationships, and when these networks dissipate—often, as in this case—the ideas circulated among them often do, too.64 The departure of the main actors in this literary community, as well as the protopublic sphere fostered there, thus demarcates the 1560s as a distinctive moment politically, legally, and socially. This fact signals one of the challenges, even limitations, of this book’s decade-specific, case-study approach. This challenge is best grasped by seeing it as a subset of a broader issue in early modern studies—the connection of the particular to the general, and the past to the present.

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Introduction This broader problem has been highlighted by Phil Withington, who observes that there is a contradiction at the heart of early modern studies, whereby historians of early modernity view the period with a kind of prolepsis, seeing in early modernity the forms and categories of modernity. This tendency is not ‘whig’ history, whereby the present betters the past; instead, this tendency involves finding in the sixteenth century the signs of distinctly modern economic and social arrangements, such as capitalism, the professions, freedom of expression, and the public sphere. Yet even with this goal, scholarship in early modern studies often involves case studies of particular communities and particular moments. Such studies allow researchers to recover and analyse popular ‘experience’ in a way that ‘facilitates the liberation of past lives from anachronistic and teleological straightjackets’. But the result, in Withington’s words, ‘is that early modernity is a confusing concept—one that promises the presciently familiar but increasingly delivers the perplexingly foreign’.65 (p.19) Withington identifies a persistent critical and historiographical problem: how does one cogently connect the particular to the longue durée? Nonetheless, it is useful to recognize that at the heart of this tension is an underlying logic as well as hope: by recovering the particular—‘foreign’ and local—arrangements of the past, early modernists will be better able to understand the specific associations—those interactions, relationships, events, and ways of thinking— that accompanied and brought about the slow change from pre-modernity to modernity. To be sure, this logic and hope cannot be fully realized. The ‘paradox’ of early modern studies does not stem simply from method: we want the familiar, but our methods produce the foreign. The paradox lies in the very nature of the objects of inquiry, which seem at once recognizably modern and yet historically disconnected from modern institutions. The disconnect occurs because the social arrangements that create ‘presciently familiar’ social, institutional and especially political formations are short lived, cut off from the present often by the political ruptures of war or—perhaps more often, as at the early Elizabethan Inns—by the dissipation of the peculiar conditions, people, and social dynamics that brought these protomodern formations into being. Putting this point in terms of the emergence of the public sphere, Chris Kyle aptly observes that this emergence is not ‘a linear progression, but something that ebbs and flows around a series of political and religious flashpoints’, and, this book adds, around communities.66

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Introduction The problem that Withington observes of early modernism in general could be said of this study, too: what allows us to move from one ‘synchrony’ to the next at the Inns, from the specific case to the literary and political diachrony that the case seeks to exemplify? Even as the personnel and types of writings changed at the Inns after the 1560s, this was not the last time a cluster of writers formed around the early modern societies. What makes possible the later instances of the same phenomenon when many of the dynamics that produced the original phenomenon altered so dramatically once the 1560s were gone? While these later periods are not discussed at length in this book, the methods of this study can be used to extend the analysis of the relationships among literature, law, and politics at the Inns in the 1590s, 1610s, and 1630s. Later literary networks are also bound up with transformations in professional and legal culture, but not in ways that exactly replicate the 1560s. One reason for the recurring pattern is that, in the midst of so much change, some features of the Inns remained consistent or at least changed more slowly than the legal and political cultures in which they participated. These features are the Inns’ geography, their communal life, and their members’ sense of a corporate identity, even if the nature of that identity changed over time. These characteristics are, indeed, the principal foundation that allowed the literary-cum-political and -legal engagements of members in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to develop with special force at particular times. In other words, in talking about the ‘succession of synchronies’ that make up the literary culture of the early modern (p.20) Inns, one must turn back to those common characteristics that critics have long identified as a central reason for their association with intellectual activity in the first place: location and institutional culture. It is important, then, to examine these foundational features of the legal, intellectual, and literary life of the Inns. What are the Inns of Court, precisely? How were they organized? How similar were each of the Inns? How did one learn the law there? What was it like to be a member of the societies? How did these aspects of the communal life of the Inns relate to literary and dramatic activities? And what exactly happened to intensify and energize the interest in literature in the 1560s? It is to these topics that the first part of this book now turns. Notes:

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Introduction (1) The connection is explicit in writings by other inns-of-court men. See, for instance, John Davies, Hymnes of Astraea in Acrosticke Verse, in which the first letter of each poem, including hymns 1 and 2, ‘Of Astrea’ and ‘To Astrea’, spell out ‘Elisabetha Regina’ (London: [R. Field] for I. S[tandish], 1599), STC 6351, sigs. A2r–v. See also John Marston, Histrio-Mastix, or The Player Whipt (London: [George Eld for] Th. Thorpe, 1610), STC 13529. Next to the entrance of ‘Astraea’ at the end of the play, a marginal note says ‘2 Elizabeth’, sig. H2r. On associations between Astraea and Elizabeth, see also Margarita C. Stocker, ‘Astraea’, in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. by A. C. Hamilton and others (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 74. (2) [Misfortunes of Arthur] Certaine Deu[is]es and Shewes Presented to her Maiestie by the Gentlemen of Grayes-Inne at her Highnesse Court in Greenewich (London: Robert Robinson, 1587), STC 13921, ll. 95; 68–70; 74–6; 17–18; 28. The prologue appears as a four-page, handwritten ‘Introduction’ to this printed text. To facilitate reference, I have numbered the lines in the introduction and refer to these here. References to the text of the play itself are to signatures in the printed text. (3) Misfortunes, lines 132–3. (4) See Chapter 7. (5) The play derives almost a third of its lines from Seneca; it also includes lines from Seneca’s nephew Lucan’s poem about civil war, De bello civili (i.e. Pharsalia). The following quote from Mordred is adapted from this poem. On Lucan in the play, see George M. Logan, ‘Hughes’ Use of Lucan in The Misfortunes of Arthur’, Review of English Studies, n.s., 20 (1969), 22–32. (6) For two discussions of the play’s criticism of imperialism, see Curtis Perry, ‘British Empire on the Eve of the Armada: Revisiting The Misfortunes of Arthur’, Studies in Philology, 108 (2011), 508–37; and Derrick Spradlin, ‘Imperial Anxiety in Thomas Hughes’ The Misfortunes of Arthur’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 10:3 (2005), 1–20. (7) Misfortunes, sig. C4r. (8) Misfortunes, ‘Introduction’, ll. 87–90. For the phrase ‘practice fraud’, read perhaps as ‘actions or deeds of fraud’.

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Introduction (9) This line of argument is implicit in the most influential studies of the literary culture of the Inns: Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Arthur Marotti’s chapter on ‘John Donne as an Inns-of-Court Author’, in John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986; repr. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), pp. 25–95; Stella P. Revard, ‘Thomas Stanley and “A Register of Friends” ’, in Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Early Modern England, ed. by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000), pp. 148–72; Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheard’s Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 10–59; Patrizia Grimaldi Pizzorno’s chapter ‘Lawyers as Readers and Writers in Elizabethan London’, in The Ways of Paradox from Lando to Donne (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2008), pp. 67–127; Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of  Wit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. pp. 12–24. See also Jessica Winston, ‘Literary Associations of the Middle Temple’, in Middle Temple History, ed. by Richard Havery (Oxford: Hart, 2011), pp. 147–71. (10) Prest, Rise, p. 193. (11) For a survey of the literary associations of several of the Inns from the Medieval period into the twentieth century, see H. H. L. Bellot, The Inner and Middle Temple: Legal, Literary, and Historic Associations (London: Methuen, 1902); J. M. Gover, Literary Associations with the Middle Temple: A Reading Delivered before the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple (London: Pitman, 1935); W. B. Odgers, ‘Literary Men Connected with the Inns of Court and of Chancery’, in Six Lectures on the Inns of Court and Chancery: Delivered in the Middle Temple Hall during Easter and Trinity Terms, 1912 (London: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 220–58. More recent overviews of literary and artistic associations of the Inns appear in C. Rider and V. Horsler, eds., The Inner Temple: A Community of Communities (London: Third Millennium, 2007), esp. pp. 150–65; A. Holdsworth, ed., A Portrait of Lincoln’s Inn (London: Third Millennium, 2007), esp. 70–83; and Winston, ‘Literary Associations’, esp. pp. 158–69. (12) In this paragraph, the argument about Misfortunes and the two reigns of Elizabeth draws directly from Curtis Perry’s important article on the play, ‘British Empire’, pp. 534–5, which itself applies the work of Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchic Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), pp. 31–57; and John Guy, ‘The Elizabethan Establishment and the Ecclesiastical Polity’, in The Reign of Elizabethan I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. by John Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 126–50. Page 22 of 29

Introduction (13) Perry, ‘British Empire’, pp. 531–7 (quotations from pp. 534; 535–6). (14) The phrase is Emile Benveniste’s in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 5. The application to Renaissance literary generations is Richard Helgerson’s in Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), p. 18. (15) Helgerson, Self-Crowned, p. 18. (16) Jim Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), esp. pp. 35–9; and Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet, pp. 25–95. Although the job market contracted in the 1590s, the demand for barristers and attorneys continued to increase. See ‘Lawyers Wanted’ in Chapter 2. (17) On the development of barristers as a professional class, see C. W. Brooks, ‘The Common Lawyers in England, c. 1558–1642’ and Wilfrid Prest, ‘The English Bar, 1550–1700’, both in Prest, ed., Lawyers in Early Modern Europe and America (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), pp. 42–64; 65–85. On the presentation of royal and legal authority in the masques, see Paul Raffield, Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 138–44. (18) The term ‘threshold’ is borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux (1980), translated as A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); a summary of the concept appears in Daniel Smith and John Protevi, ‘Gilles Deleuze’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 ed.), ed. by Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/deleuze/ [07 January 2014]. For more on social and demographic changes at the Inns in the late 1550s and 1560s, see Chapter 2.

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Introduction (19) See Appendix 1 for a list of writers associated with the Inns in the 1560s. There are numerous studies of individual works and authors associated with the Inns in the 1560s, and a handful of scholars have discussed individual genres associated with the early Elizabethan Inns of Court. No one has yet surveyed the whole literary culture of the legal societies. For studies of particular genres at the Inns: On translations, see C. H. Conley, The First English Translators of the Classics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1927). On poetry, see Richard J. Panofsky, ‘A Descriptive Study of Mid-Tudor Short Poetry’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1975); Jennifer Richards’ discussion of the eclogues of Googe and Turberville in Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 146–67; Laurie Shannon, ‘“Minerva’s Men”: Horizontal Nationhood and the Literary Production of Googe, Turberville, and Gascoigne’, in Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603, ed. by Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 437–54; and Stephen Hamrick, The Catholic Imaginary and the Cults of Elizabeth, 1558–1582 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). On drama, see Giles Yardley Gamble, ‘Institutional Drama: Elizabethan Tragedies at the Inns of Court’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Stanford University, 1969) and Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), esp. pp. 38–60. (20) ‘Drab’ is C. S. Lewis’s enduring phrase in English Literature of the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954) in his chapters on ‘Drab Age Verse’, pp. 222–71 and ‘Drab and Transitional Prose’, pp. 272–317. (21) Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, ed. by Tom Betteridge and Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). (22) Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, ‘Doing Away with the Drab Age: Research Opportunities in Mid-Tudor Literature (1530–1580)’, Literature Compass, 7:3 (2010), 160–76 (p. 167). (23) Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, or Pleasant Posye (London: R. Jones, 1573), STC 25440, sig. E7r. The literary culture of the Inns in the 1560s is further described in Chapter 2. See also Appendix 1. (24) Laurie Shannon, ‘Minerva’s Men’, p. 440. (25) Based on a search in Early English Books Online (EEBO) for the words (and alternate spellings of) ‘commonweal’, ‘common weal’, ‘commonwealth’, and ‘common wealth’. Prior to 1559, the only works published with ‘common weal’ (or variants) in their title were books of statutes and proclamations and other official documents promulgated by the monarch. On ‘Commonweal’ vocabulary on title pages, see Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), p. 145; on Bavand, see p. 151. Page 24 of 29

Introduction (26) Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England, Ford Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford, 1994–5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 12. (27) Misfortunes, sig. C2v and E1v. (28) For a complete survey of these changes, see Baker, Oxford History of the Laws of England, volume VI: 1483–1558 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). (29) See, for instance, Luke Wilson, Theatres of Intention: Drama and the Law in Early Modern England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Brian Jay Corrigan, Playhouse Law in Shakespeare’s World (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004); Subha Mukherji, Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Bradin Cormack, A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Lorna Hutson, Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham, eds., Law in Shakespeare, Early Modern Literature in History Series (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Andrew Zurcher, Spenser’s Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Brewer, 2007); and Holger Schott Syme, Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare’s England: A Culture of Mediation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). (30) The most influential examples of this tendency appear in Cormack’s A Power to Do Justice and Hutson’s Invention of Suspicion. Although Hutson has a chapter that addresses George Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), which was performed at Gray’s Inn, she is primarily interested in the interaction between drama and ‘popular legal culture’ (p. 1). The critical interest in popular engagement with the law makes sense. Legal historian Christopher Brooks has demonstrated that litigation rates were very high from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. Consequently, he observes that ‘the percentage of the population which resorted to courts has always been much greater than has normally been assumed’. See Brooks, LLES, pp. 63–128 (quotation from p. 73). (31) Bradin Cormack, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare and the Law’, in Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation among Disciplines and Professions, ed. by Cormack, Nussbaum, and Strier (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 1–18 (p. 3). (32) Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson, ‘Introduction: Renaissance, Law and Literature’, in Literature, Politics, and Law in Renaissance England, ed. by Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1–22 (p. 3) and Mukherji, Law and Representation, p. 3.

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Introduction (33) See, for instance, Finkelpearl, John Marston; Marotti, John Donne, pp. 25– 95; and O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheard’s Nation’ and The English Wits, pp. 10–59. (34) Prest, Inns, pp. 40–1. (35) Prest, Rise, p. 208. (36) John Donne, ‘Satyre II’, in Complete English Poems, ed. by C. A. Patrides, Everyman’s Library (New York: Knopf, 1991), pp. 219–24, ll. 63–4. (37) Misfortunes, ‘Introduction’, l. 28. (38) For the 1560s, two articles discuss the influence of the readings and moots on the themes of Gorboduc: Terry Reilly, ‘“This is the Case”: Gorboduc and Early Modern English Legal Discourse Concerning Inheritance’, in Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare, 1485–1590: New Directions for Research, Criticism, and Pedagogy, ed. by Lloyd Edward Kermode, Jason Scott-Warren, and Martine van Elk (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 195–210 and Karen Cunningham, ‘“So Many Books, So Many Rolls of Ancient Time”: The Inns of Court and Gorboduc’, in Solon and Thespis: Law and Theatre in the English Renaissance, ed. by Dennis Kezar (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 197–217. Cunningham does not discuss whether the influence of moots is evident in other inns-of-court dramas, but it seems likely that her argument could be extended to the ‘outlandish what-ifs’ of Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta (Gray’s Inn, 1565–6 or 1566–7), Gismond of Salerne (1566?), and the Misfortunes of Arthur (Gray’s Inn at Greenwich, 1587/88). (39) Here and throughout the text, I use the term ‘corporate’ to mean shared, collective, or group, but not in the sense that they were legally incorporated entities. The early modern Inns were voluntary associations, and were never incorporated. See J. H. Baker, Legal Profession and the Common Law (London: Hambledon, 1986), esp. the chapter on ‘The Inns of Court and Chancery as Voluntary Associations’, pp. 45–74. Margaret McGlynn uses the phrase ‘corporate identity’ in discussing the Inns, a phrase I also adopt from time to time. See Royal Prerogative and the Learning of the Inns of Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 9. (40) Paul Raffield develops a version of this argument in Images and Cultures. He argues that between 1550 and 1660, the Inns created a system of customs and visual signs that helped to secure and promulgate the authority of the common law legal profession and the common law itself. Raffield tends to collapse chronological and generic differences, so he does not address what might have prompted this system of signs to develop in the early modern period, the ways that various genres of writing functioned differently within it, or the ways that this ‘system’ altered and adjusted over the period. See also ‘Institutional Status’ in Chapter 2. Page 26 of 29

Introduction (41) The phrase ‘the resources of kind’ comes from the title of Rosalie Colie’s influential lectures on Renaissance genres, published as The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. by Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973). (42) Howard, ‘Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage’, Modern Language Quarterly, 64 (2003), 299–322 (p. 304). See also Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 11–13. (43) John Frow, Genre, New Critical Idiom Series (Abington: Routledge, 2006), p. 102. (44) Howard, ‘Shakespeare and Genre’, in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. by David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 297–310 (p. 299). (45) Barbara Fuchs, ‘Forms of Engagement’, in Genre and History, a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly, 67 (2006), 1–6 (p. 1). (46) Colie, Resources, p. 16. (47) Colie, Resources, p. 4. (48) Colie, Resources, p. 8.     (49) Colie, Resources, p. 29. (50) Wai Chee Dimock, ‘Genres as Fields of Knowledge’, in Remapping Genre, a special issue of PMLA, 122 (2007), 1377–88 (p. 1380). (51) Richard Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), esp. pp. 16–43. (52) Timothy Hampton, Language and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 28. (53) Manley, Literature and Culture, p. 11. (54) George Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowers, ed. by G. W. Pigman III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), poem 58, l. 14 (p. 275) and ‘Epilogus’ to Jocasta, l. 4 (p. 139). (55) For a discussion of the ways that individual authors define themselves in relation to their generational moment, see Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates. (56) See ‘The Inns in the 1560s’ in this chapter and ‘Humanism, Commonweal, and the vita activa’ in Chapter 2.

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Introduction (57) Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). (58) See, for example, David Norbrook, ‘Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere’, in Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Criticism, and the Public Sphere, ed. by Richard Burt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 3–33 and Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), 270–92; Phil Withington, ‘Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England’, American Historical Review, 112 (2007), 1016–38. (59) Lake and Pincus, p. 271. (60) See, for instance, Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire, and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse. Some have challenged the applicability of Habermas’s theory to the early modern period: See, for example, Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Marrku Peltonen argues that the political discourse of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century cannot be called a public sphere, in part because it was deliberately heated and partisan, and not dispassionate and rational (see Rhetoric, Politics and Popularity in Pre-Revolutionary England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), yet many critics do not strictly adhere to Habermas’s definition of the public sphere, which depends on rationality as well as capitalism. Following an established critical trend, I also use the term more loosely to connote political discourse and debate, and political thought more generally. (61) These are Withington’s questions in ‘Public Discourse’, p. 1023. (62) Folger Institute, Fall symposium, 20–1 September 2013. (63) Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). (64) See also ‘Literary Play and Political Culture’ in the Conclusion. (65) Withington, Society in Early Modern England, pp. 4–5. (66) Chris R. Kyle, Theater of State: Parliament and Political Culture in Early Stuart England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 3. Page 28 of 29

An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court Jessica Winston

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords Taking Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ as a key term, this chapter introduces the early modern Inns of Court, examining tensions between the multifaceted and multigenerational aspects of the Inns on the one hand, and their more coherent institutional culture on the other. Looking at legal education and other topics, such as religious nonconformism, the chapter argues that the Inns were dynamic institutions and changed over the period; nevertheless, the existence of a sense of shared culture is a constant. At moments of legal change, the nature and characteristics of this culture were reshaped. The literary culture of the Inns helped to promote and shape broader intellectual and communal life at the societies. In decades of significant political and legal transformation, literary production intensified, helping to define and reinforce communal and institutional identity, or to challenge and remake it. Keywords:   Inns of Court, institutional culture, Pierre Bourdieu, habitus, intellectual life, legal education, religious nonconformism, communal identity

Midway through Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV (c. 1596), two country justices, Robert Shallow and his cousin Silence, reminisce about their time as young men at the Inns: SHALLOW: ‘A must, then, to the Inns o’ Court shortly. I was once of Clement’s Inn, where I think they will talk of mad Shallow yet. Page 1 of 30

An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court SILENCE: You were called ‘lusty Shallow’ then, cousin.

SHALLOW: By the mass, I was called anything; and I would have done anything indeed, too, and roundly, too. There was I, and little John Doit of Staffordshire, and black George Barnes, and Francis Pickbone, and Will Squeal, a Cotswold man; you had not four such swinge-bucklers in all the Inns o’ Court again. And I may say to you, we knew where the bona-robas were and had the best of them all at commandment.1

Although set in the early fifteenth century, the conversation captures the multiple functions of the early modern Inns of Court. The Inns of Court—and their affiliated Inns of Chancery, such as Shallow’s Clement’s Inn—were London legal societies where young, hearty and ‘lusty’ sons of nobles, aristocrats, and well-to-do commoners came to learn the common law. Often, however, law was a secondary concern, and men at the societies ran ‘roundly’ in other pursuits, ‘swinge-buckling’ the ‘bona-robas’, heartily swaggering with each other and with local prostitutes. At the same time, senior lawyers and judges resided at the Inns, or as in the now aged Shallow’s case, met up with others while visiting from the countryside. Youth and age, lust and law, quarrels and debates, trysts and tête-à-têtes—these oppositions characterize the early modern Inns of Court. To fully understand the literary culture of the Inns it is crucial to grasp the relationships among these oppositions, the connections between the multifaceted and multigenerational aspects of the institutions on the one hand, and their more coherent institutional culture on the other. Despite the Inns’ social, legal, and political functions, they were relatively socially homogeneous and characterized by a lively intellectual and social culture. This corporate (here meaning communal) character helped to foster and homogenize the diverse attitudes, ideals, and (p.24) outlooks of ‘Inns men’. It is true that the Inns changed over the early modern period, growing in size, changing in the relationship between the ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ branches of the legal profession, and in the various ways that the law was learned. Nevertheless, the existence of some sense of shared identity is a constant. At moments of legal change, however, the nature and characteristics of this identity were contested and reshaped. Literary activities at the Inns grew out of and helped to promote and shape the broader intellectual and communal life at the societies. In decades of significant political and legal transformation, literary production intensified among small but influential networks of writers associated with the Inns, helping to define and reinforce communal and institutional identity, or to challenge and remake it.

The Inns of Court: A Complex Institution

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court What are the Inns of Court, precisely? The four inns—Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, the Middle Temple, and the Inner Temple—are voluntary legal societies. Located just west of the old City of London, between High Holborn to the north and the Thames to the south, the Inns make up the heart of London’s legal district (see Figure 1.1). Today they have the sole authority to call men and women to the English Bar, but their original purpose is obscure. They began sometime in the fourteenth century, perhaps as temporary accommodation for lawyers, or more possibly as residential schools for legal apprentices, conveniently located just to the east of the courts at Westminster.2 This residential-legal function probably gave rise to the now otherwise obscure name the Inns of Court. Over time, the Inns grew in size and professional importance as educational and credentialing institutions. By the middle of the sixteenth century, they had established practices of legal training that outfitted men, typically the sons of the aristocracy and the gentry, with the knowledge and skills they would need to pursue careers in the common law and to plead cases in the central courts at Westminster.3 The four inns were and are different organizations, existing in proximate but separate locations, and they have diverse physical and social characteristics. The Inner and Middle Temples are built on land once occupied by the Knights Templar. They lie close to each other, along the Strand, and they share the Templar-built twelfth-century round church, which still stands today. Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s (p.25) Inn lie a way off from the Temple, with Gray’s farthest to the north, half a mile away, on the northern side of Holborn. Each inn also has a distinct character. In the early modern period, the four differed in their average populations and drew members typically from different geographical regions.4 They also differed in terms of their relative conformity and resistance to the religious dictates of the monarch.5 Variations remain today and are reflected in several commonly circulated doggerel rhymes, such as this one about architecture: Gray’s Inn for the walks, Lincoln’s for a wall; Inner for a garden, And Middle for a hall.

Or this one about class and social life: Inner for the rich, Middle for the poor, Lincoln’s for the gentlemen, And Gray’s Inn for the whore.

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court In addition to these perpetual differences in character, there are the Inns of Chancery, each of which is overseen by an inn of court. Each of these also has its own character, and as a group, they also have their own history that differs from the main Inns: over the early modern period, the Inns of Chancery became associated with the training of the less prestigious and more practical ‘lower branch’ of the legal profession, the attorneys or solicitors, as opposed to the more elite and theoretical ‘upper branch’, the barristers, trained at the four main inns.6 Despite these differences, the four main inns are best understood as a single, if complex, entity, whose social culture, especially in the mid-sixteenth century, extended to the Inns of Chancery. As the rhymes above suggest, the Inns are usually grouped together because they are more alike than not. The Inns seem to have developed by the fourteenth century;7 they each created processes of legal education, and these processes were broadly similar across the Inns. By 1558, when Elizabeth took the throne, the variations among the Inns were minimal, and in the words of J. H. Baker, ‘the Inns had begun to harmonize their arrangements by making joint regulations’.8 After 1558, they also experienced similar histories of (p.26) expansion (in terms of population) and, as a result of this growth, saw parallel trends in renovation and building, especially in the construction and restoration of their communal halls.9 The links among the individual Inns were reinforced by social connections. Members of an inn of court or inn of Chancery often socialized with members of other Inns, and in this way the social and cultural experience of members of any of the Inns was more universal than unique. Most members of the Inns previously belonged to an inn of Chancery, and those at the junior inns socialized with fellows of the ‘greater’ inns. For instance, the poet Barnabe Googe, of Staple Inn, wrote poems and dedications to several members of Gray’s Inn, to which Staple Inn belonged.10 Often the identification went further to include the Inns collectively.11 Several poets dedicate their writings to the societies. Thomas Lodge, a member of Lincoln’s Inn, dedicated his Alarum against Usurers (1584), whose central character is a junior inns-of-court man, to ‘my courteous friends, the gentlemen of the Inns of Court’.12 Shakespeare alludes to this broader identification in 2 Henry IV. Although Justice Shallow belonged to Clement’s Inn and explicitly mentions that institution, he imagines that this institutional connection makes him part of an overarching community, the Inns of Court, when he compares his activities to others of the legal societies: ‘you had not four such swinge-bucklers in all the Inns o’ Court again’.13 In a similar vein, Ben Jonson famously characterizes inns-of-court men as a group when he dedicates Every Man Out of His Humour (c. 1600), a play about ‘characters’ and ‘types’ to ‘The Inns of Court’, confessing that he understands inns-of-court men, but not the individual ‘houses’ to which they belong: ‘I understand you, Gentlemen, not your houses’.14 Page 4 of 30

An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court (p.27) To the extent that the Inns of Court are a collective unit, here meaning a shared culture with a broadly similar set of institutional practices, this collectivity was forged out of variety and complexity. We should understand the early modern Inns as ‘multidimensional’ institutions in their functions and roles, as well as crossroads and meeting places for individuals and groups.15 They provided legal education, and some of their members returned to their home communities outside of London, where they would advise clients on legal cases and contracts while also sharing news about legal developments in the capital. The Inns offered meeting places and accommodation for provincial lawyers who came to London during term time to plead cases at court.16 They were thus centres for the trade of opinion, as lawyers carried legal, political, and social news and gossip from the provinces to London and back. Additionally, the Inns served as ‘finishing schools’,17 where sons of the aristocracy and the gentry who did not intend a common law career came to acquire some legal knowledge and to develop the urbanity and social connections that would help them to thrive at court and in other elite social and political circles.18 What forged singularity out of this plurality? An answer lies in the overlapping, sometimes competing roles of the Inns, as well as the groups associated with them—law students, barristers, writers, dilettantes. The dialogue, even friction, among these groups created the character of the societies, as well as members’ general aim to become part of a growing political and bureaucratic group of legal magistrates.

Legal Training In the early modern period, legal training was the sine qua non of the Inns, a principal reason for their existence and a dominant part of their public reputation, even though the majority of their members did not pursue serious legal study or legal careers. In 1602, the lawyer Edward Coke observed that the Inns were the ‘most famous university for profession of law only’, and George Buck called them ‘schools of law’ and the central reason why London, next to Oxford and Cambridge, was the ‘third university of England’.19 In 1614, the Pensioners of Gray’s Inn asserted that the ‘societies were ordained for the profession of law’, and only secondarily serve other purposes.20 (p.28)

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court (p.29) (p.30) The Inns had a wellestablished tradition of legal training and a structural hierarchy. Newly admitted junior members were called ‘inner barristers’ or ‘pusnies’ (pronounced ‘punies’).21 These men studied the law by attending and, eventually, participating in moots (multiday exercises in oral pleading) and hearing readings (lectures on statutes by senior members of the Inns). They also observed at the courts and took notes on cases, a practice known as commonplacing and, increasingly over the period, they read printed law books.22 After about seven years, a junior member could be called ‘to the bar’, a physical object, perhaps a long seat, that separated junior and senior members in the hall.23 At this point, the member called to the bar would participate in a moot. Based on often far-fetched legal scenarios, the object was to find the right procedure to pursue in a court of law.24 Upon satisfactory completion of a set number of requirements, junior members would become outer, or utter, barristers. These requirements evolved over the sixteenth century but by the 1590s usually involved membership for seven years, attendance at four or six ‘learning vacations’ prior to a call, periods between legal Page 6 of 30

Figure 1.1. Map of London and area, c. 1620, prepared by Subhash Shanbhag. Originally published in REED: Inns, I, pp. xcviii–xcix.

An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court terms when ‘readings’ (lectures on parliamentary statutes) were held, and satisfactory completion of a given number of

Reprinted with permission of the Records of Early English Drama.

moots.25 Once they were utter barristers, members were obligated to attend ‘learning vacations’, and they could remain utter barristers indefinitely, but they were sometimes called to be ‘readers’, senior members who wrote and gave lectures on statute law, usually a first reading in autumn and a second, just over five years later, during Lent.26 Readers could become leaders of their Inn, called ‘Benchers’ (or ‘Pensioners’ at Gray’s Inn), and eventually, upon completion of two or three readings, they were eligible to become serjeants-at-law, at which point they left the Inns of Court to join different societies.27 These practices were broadly similar across the Inns, even though the exercises occurred within individual Inns, and sometimes specific points of law are associated with a single inn of court.28 Into the fifteenth century, the title of utter barrister was a rank only in the internal structure of the Inns, not a professional qualification or credential. Even so, ‘call to the bar’ (to the status of utter barrister) was traditionally an unofficial qualification to work in the superior common law courts of Westminster, such as the Court of the King’s Bench and the Exchequer.29 Eventually, the rank of barrister (p.31) became an official credential. In the 1530s, parliamentary statute recognized that barristers (i.e. utter barristers) were ‘learned in the law’, and in the early 1590s ‘call to the bar’ of an inn was established as a minimum qualification to plead cases in the central common law courts.30 The serjeantsat-law had their own societies, and had the exclusive right to appear in the central Court of Common Pleas.31 While the Inns exist because of their educational (or credentialing) functions, they were never schools or universities in the way we think of today. In contrast to the nine-month academic schedule of modern universities and law schools, at the early modern Inns, the periods for study, such as they were, were sporadic and lasted for only about six months of the year. The main legal terms, when members would attend court as observers, took up only about sixteen weeks, and junior members were expected to be present for the ‘learning vacations’ of Christmas, Lent, and summer/autumn, with readings taking place during the latter two.32

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court During these periods, some members of course did study the law seriously, often with little help and by sheer force of will. J. H. Baker explains, ‘the Inns of Court were nominally institutions of learning but were clearly not institutions for teaching [. . .]. [T]he accepted method of legal education before the last century was self-help’.33 Christopher Yelverton observed that ‘many gentlemen’ do ‘leave and loath the study and pain of the law’, with its ‘matter base and obscure’.34 The early seventeenth-century lawyer Simonds D’Ewes wrote of his early struggle to learn the law in his diary, complaining that it made him ‘perplexed’ and ‘puzzled’ to where ‘I prostrated myself before my good god’, praying for better ‘apprehension and judgement’.35 Related to the ‘self-help’ nature of legal education at the Inns is the fact that legal study was never compulsory. At the same time, advancement through the internal ranks of the Inns sometimes had less to do with qualifications than time. Rather than participating in learning exercises, junior members could pay fines for lack of attendance and still advance through the Inns’ internal ranks.36 Thus, in ‘Satyre II’, Donne writes of one Coscus ‘whom time [. . .] [h]ath made a (p.32) lawyer’.37 One could also move up by obtaining a distinguished governmental office or with the intervention of a patron.38 This system of fines and patronage was in part a way for the societies to fund themselves since, unlike the universities, the societies had no endowments. These ‘alternative’ mechanisms for advancement are questionable in terms of strictly formal learning. Even so, failure to attend learning vacations did not mean that one learned nothing of the law. A person who missed some learning vacations did not necessarily miss them all.39 More importantly, communal life inculcated common habits of mind and comportment, shared knowledge and a shared outlook, which fostered a corporate identity, and at least some legal learning.

Corporate Culture Legal learning primarily took place during collective activities—moots and readings, note-taking at court, and eating with fellow members at dinners in the hall. By watching and hearing their seniors at these events, junior members internalized received learning, as well as professional habits of dress, decorum, and talk. The practice of communal dining, ‘eating law’, survives today in the requirement that prospective lawyers must eat a certain number of dinners at the Inns to become barristers.40 These routine events (then and now) also created corporate identity, a collective set of styles, habits, and tastes, while helping members to acquire common learning. To apply the terms of Pierre Bourdieu, the communality of the Inns created (and still creates) among inns-ofcourt men a certain habitus, a ‘system of dispositions’ that are ‘acquired through experience’, types of ‘individual and collective behaviour’, as well as ‘schemes of perception, thought and action’ that unconsciously motivate and produce individual and collective practices.41

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court J. H. Baker describes the ‘common learning of the profession’ that ‘was generated and nurtured in the halls of the inns’.42 The learning exercises and communal (p.33) life taught ‘a cast of mind, rather than mere rules’.43 By ‘cast of mind’, Baker means received opinion about procedural learning and legal doctrine,44 as well as habits of thought and tastes, particularly for outlandish ‘what-ifs’. The moots were based on brief, unlikely hypotheticals principally focused on real property and inheritance, such as the following: Land is leased to two single women for a term of years, by deed indented; one of them marries a stranger, while the other enters into religion and is professed. The lessor confirms the husband’s estate for life; a divorce takes place between the husband and his wife; the wife stays in; the lessor ousts her; the husband releases all the right he has. Ceux que droit.45 Baker explains the purpose of putting forth these unlikely scenarios: ‘Some of the questions were clearly designed more to stretch the mind than to establish any principles which might be of practical utility: for instance, how to try bigamy in an appeal brought against a clerk by the bishop and archbishop.’46 In other words, the system did not teach ‘chapter and verse’ as much as ‘common opinion’ and a ‘mind set’.47 Habitual acquaintance with law transmogrifies the novitiate, an idea captured by Sir John Fortescue, where law changes a person ‘as a slip of a pear tree being grafted into the stock of an apple tree […], it so draweth the apple tree into the nature of the pear tree that they both forever after are rightly called a pear tree’.48 In this way, in terms of legal learning, in the more routinely oral and aural culture of the period, it was possible to learn a good deal of law without formally studying it. Thomas Wilson observes: ‘I have known diverse that by familiar talking and mooting together have come to right good learning, without any great book skill, or much beating of their brain by any close study, or secret musing in their chamber.’49 Through both formal and informal means—learning exercises, common-placing, reading, and dining—the Inns produced some learned and influential legal figures, including Thomas More, Nicholas Bacon, William Cecil, Francis Bacon, Edward Coke, and Simonds D’Ewes. But these activities also helped to foster the corporate culture of the Inns.

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court Assisting in this development of a corporate identity of members of the Inns was language. In early modern England, the language of common law was a specialized tongue, a combination of French and English, with some Latin terms, called ‘law-French’.50 The language was unique to the common law, containing some words that existed in none of the source languages. Many lawyers themselves complained of the difficulty of legal discourse. Abraham Fraunce criticized (p.34) ‘that hotchpot French, stuffed up with such variety of borrowed words, wherein our law is written’.51 In reality, law-French seems to have been relatively easy to learn. Many members would have gained the rudiments of this language at the Inns of Chancery, before moving up to an inn of court, and it should have been possible to learn quickly formulaic phrases, such as the ‘Ceux que droit?’ of the moots. By a couple of early seventeenthcentury estimates, one could learn law-French in under two weeks,52 although it must have taken some time to write fluently. No matter how easy to learn, lawFrench was esoteric, creating an impression of difficulty for those outside of the Inns. Thus the Doctor in Christopher St. Germain’s Doctor and Student grumbles that ‘because much part of the law of England is written in the French tongue, therefore, I cannot through my own study attain to the knowledge thereof’.53 Common lawyers could wield their knowledge to intimidate others. Fraunce protests against a ‘multitude of seditious cavillers, who when their fathers have made some lewd bargain in the country, run immediately to the Inns of Court, and having in seven year’s space met with six French words, home they ride like brave magnificos and dash out their poor neighbours’ children quite out of countenance with villen en gros, villen regardant, and tentant per le curtesie’.54 Fraunce’s example emphasizes those who abused their basic, if privileged, knowledge, but at the same time he indicates that those who had this knowledge probably did not spend much time studying to get it, and that even a small amount of learning makes members behave as part of a distinct, even occult group, with special skills and privileges that could, sometimes, be abused. Reinforcing this specialness is socio-economic background. The Inns of Court were expensive to attend, with minimum costs averaging around £40 or £50 per year, although actual costs could vary depending on personal needs and preferences.55 There were no scholarships for poorer students, as there were at Oxford or Cambridge, so in terms of social background, the Inns were more socially homogeneous than the universities. There were differences even in this relatively homogeneous community. Fortescue argued that the Inns were bastions of the nobility,56 but the Inns were not exclusive to the nobility or even the gentry. Sons of yeomen and merchants appear in the admissions records.57 It is notable, however, that whatever his social background, every man admitted to the Inns received the title of ‘gentleman’.58 In this way, the nomenclature of the Inns helped to level any class differences, while giving members an immediate social standing in the society as a whole.

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court (p.35) The habitus of region and parentage could sit uncomfortably with the habitus of the Inns. In 1597, Joseph Hall sneered at a commoner’s son sent to the legal societies: At Inns of Court of the Chancery There to learn law and courtly carriage, To make amends for his mean parentage, Where he unknown and ruffling as he can, Goes current each-where for a gentleman.59

Hall questions whether the mere name of ‘gentleman’ makes up for ‘mean parentage’. Although a gentleman, the subject’s ‘ruffling’ ‘carriage’ suggests that he had not fully internalized the habitus appropriate, in Hall’s view, to an ‘inns man’. Nonetheless, the practice of calling members gentlemen, along with other communal traditions, was one of the many ways through which the habitus of origin could metamorphose into the habitus of the Inns. One mid-sixteenthcentury observer elucidates the process: at the Inns, the men take part in ‘exercises of body and mind’ to learn ‘by speaking, countenance, gesture, and use of apparel the person of a gentleman’.60 The history of religious tolerance at the legal societies illustrates the power of shared culture and dispositions to supersede individual differences. Individual members held different religious opinions, and sometimes these came into conflict. In general, however, members of the Inns adopted a policy of ‘live and let live’ towards religious affiliation.61 For this reason, the Inns were bastions of recusant Catholics in the early part of Elizabeth’s reign and into the seventeenth century. Such religious tolerance is related to the Inns’ corporate life. The legal societies were cohesive social communities, where common experience nurtured acceptance, which tended to lessen political and religious differences that would have been more pronounced outside the Inns.62 Fostering such tolerance were the Inns’ internal hierarchies. At least in the mid-sixteenth century, many of the Benchers—those older, more senior members of the Inns—were still Catholic, or had friends and family who were, and they often prioritized over religion the internal status conferred by the hierarchy of the Inns.63 For this reason, while Benchers officially urged members to conform, they did not often initiate actions to control the religious leanings of their members.64

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court (p.36) A case in point is Edmund Plowden, Middle Templar and Catholic. In 1568 he wrote a treatise supporting the legality of the claim of Mary, Queen of Scots—also a Catholic—to the throne.65 In early 1569, he was summoned to a meeting of his Inn’s Benchers, discovering when he got there that they wanted him to subscribe to the ‘book and statute’ (i.e. the Book of Common Prayer) as a test of loyalty. Plowden refused, saying that he needed to read the fine print, and never subscribed, although he continued to profess his loyalty to Elizabeth. As a consequence, Plowden had to agree to appear before the Privy Council, if summoned, but he was not expelled from the Middle Temple. Indeed, in 1577, he appeared on a list of the Middle Temple double readers with the abbreviation ‘Pa.’ (‘Papist’) next to his name, and also the notation, ‘very learned, of good living’.66 Plowden illustrates the larger point: one’s identity as an inns-of-court man could override other differences.67 The corporate habitus of the Inns was evident also to outside observers, such as Henry Machyn, a clerk in London, who kept a chronicle of events spanning 1550–63. In numerous entries, he refers to men of the Inns collectively in such an offhand way as to suggest that it is possible to identify such men easily— perhaps by context, but also by clothes, comportment, and affectations—as a recognizable group. Machyn was especially fond of recording funerals (he may have rented trappings needed for them), which is where most of his references to the Inns occur:68 ‘A hundred of the Inns of the Court came to the burying’ (24 October 1554); ‘sixty men of gentlemen of the Inns of the Courts and of Oxford brought [the deceased] to the church’ (5 March 1561); ‘two hundred of the Inns of the Court followed’ the funeral procession (25 May 1562); ‘all the Inns of the Court in array’ (15 December 1562); and ‘two hundred of the Inns of the Court to the church’ (30 April 1563).69 At a procession at St. Clement’s without Temple Bar (4 June 1555), ‘all the Inns of the Court’ were following. Even to outsiders, innsmen were a discrete, identifiable set.

Communal Tensions

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court Although one mark of the Inns is their corporate character, this character is not synonymous with men who made their living as barristers, or with practitioners in the common law legal profession as a whole. Barristers were themselves a large and (p.37) diverse group.70 Moreover, there were internal divisions among various groups. Not everyone who came to the societies was a law student, nor were all of the newly admitted interested in the law. As indicated above, the Inns functioned as finishing schools as well as law schools, and by all accounts more men came to the societies for their finishing-school functions than to pursue careers in the common law. By one well-accepted estimate, at most 15 per cent of those admitted to the Inns between 1570 and 1600 were eventually called to the bar.71 Consequently, many contemporaries commented on the lack of serious legal studies at what were supposed to be law schools. Sir John Davies, a member of the Middle Temple, satirizes ‘Publius student at common law’, who ‘[o]ft leaves his books, and for his recreation’ and goes ‘among the dogs and bears’. Francis Lenton comments on an inns-of-court man who, instead of his legal textbooks, ‘better loves Ben Jonson’s book of plays’. This student carries ‘his body as in a curious sort, | As any reveller in the Inns of Court’.72 Thus, in his ‘Grammar Lecture’ to the Inner Temple, Francis Beaumont, a member of the Inner Temple, observes that there were indeed distinct clusters at the societies: those studying law seriously, the ‘plodders’; those who came to the Inns primarily for their ‘finishing school’ function, the ‘revellers’; and those senior members of the societies, the ‘ancients’.73 These differences caused tensions. There was friction between the ‘learners’ and ‘non-learners’ as well as between younger members and the older, more hurried active lawyers.74 In the late 1530s, a description of the Middle Temple complains that ‘[t]here is none there that be compelled to learn, and they that are learners […] are much troubled with the noise of walking and communication of them that be no learners’.75 One senses this friction in Christopher Yelverton’s farewell speech to Gray’s Inn (1589): he laments that ‘some’ younger members of the Inn ‘consume the course of their youthful days in vain and fruitless studies only pleasing the present humour and feeding the daintiness of a wandering fantasy, and this, as it might be tolerated, if it were admitted but for recreation, so is it utterly to be intermitted when it wholly ravisheth by delectation’.76 Moreover, conflicts between revellers, plodders, and ancients at the Inns increased over the period, as barristers gradually developed into a professional group, creating more tensions between those with legal ambitions and those without.77 Prest explains that young gentlemen often adopted affectations and habits that would differentiate them from legal professionals.78

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court While there were inevitably some men who were more ‘plodding’, some who were more ‘revelling’, or some more ‘ancient’ at the Inns, the differences among (p.38) these groups should not be exaggerated. Any community consists of smaller communities: Oxford and Cambridge consist of separate colleges, each with its own character, and each with its own ranks of fellows and students, who in turn have their own official and unofficial hierarchies and cliques. And so it is with the Inns, as is evident in the subtitle to one history of the Inner Temple: ‘a community of communities’.79 Moreover, as with any community, there are some who involve themselves in the community for only a short period of time, and with relative disinterest, and others who do so for longer spans and with more intensity. And among all those associated with the community, there are bound to be tensions between different collections of people, even as they all participate in and make up the whole. When analysing the Inns, it can be difficult to draw clear lines between groups. First of all, many plodders were also revellers.80 The clearest example is perhaps John Davies of the Middle Temple. He was called to the bar of the Inn in 1595 (something a so-called plodder would do), but a year later published Orchestra, a Poem of Dancing (1596), and in 1598 he cudgelled a fellow member, Richard Martin, one evening in the Middle Temple Hall (and was subsequently expelled), the activities of a ‘reveller’. He later became attorney general of Ireland (i.e. an ‘ancient’ in the legal profession). While Davies is an outlier in many ways, most junior members, the outer barristers, even if they did not intend to become inner barristers, sought some grounding in the law, and those who intended a legal career were compelled to take part in various nonlegal pastimes.81 In 1539, the author of an anonymous description of the Middle Temple stated that all junior (or inner) barristers must participate in the Christmas revels (sometimes termed ‘solemn’): They ‘are compelled to exercise all some rooms and offices as they shall be called unto at such time as they keep a solemn Christmas’.82 The blending of youthful revelling and legal study is evident in a 1629 letter from Sir Lawrence Hyde, a Bencher of the Middle Temple, to his brother, Henry, urging him to increase his son’s allowance and to provide his [Henry’s] son with ‘a suit of satin for revelling’ so that he might ‘accompany those diverse sober, fine gentlemen that are students and yet revellers’.83 In 2 Henry IV, Shakespeare captures this blend too in Silence and Shallow’s recollection of the ‘chimes at midnight!’ in their salad days at Clement’s Inn.84

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court (p.39) There is a second, more essential, reason that it is difficult to draw hard lines between revellers and plodders at the Inns. While only 15 per cent may have been called to the bar, a larger percentage must have set out to do so, and even larger numbers still aimed to become a part of the legal magistracy. In England local leaders were simultaneously administrators and legal officials— everyone from justices of the peace (JPs) and circuit judges down to vestrymen and those involved with the poor.85 Most junior members of the Inns had some social and financial ambition to join such gubernative ranks, this legal magistracy, usually as members of Parliament, diplomats, JPs, sheriffs, judges, town recorders, or simply as landed gentlemen managing their own estates and potentially the legal affairs of people living on their land. These were societal roles that demanded some knowledge of law (even if they did not require one to have been called to the bar), and they demanded that one at least view oneself as an officer and magistrate—that is, as a figure of the law. While some individuals may have had little interest in anything the Inns had to offer, many must have come, regardless of whether they were plodders or revellers, to learn the habits and habitus—the dispositions, styles, ways of talking, and listening— of the legal magistracy. For members who resided at the Inns and attended at least some dinners and learning exercises, it is likely that the communal culture of the Inns would have helped to foster a corporate, indeed legal, habitus, even among those who were not destined for careers as barristers. Moreover, it is precisely the tensions, frictions, and debates among individuals and segments of this larger society that helped to foster the hallmark atmosphere of the Inns’ corporate culture, as J. H. Baker evocatively observes: It was here, rather than among the scholarly clergy of Oxford and Cambridge, that future statesmen, members of parliament, sheriffs, magistrates, and administrators of the secular commonwealth were brought together in their formative years. Here, they joined in work and play, learned the names which would matter to them, dined and prayed together, displayed their wealth or their talent—whichever was more conspicuous—talked of law and much else, drank, diced, and misbehaved.86 For many members, these ‘wider advantages’ were ‘doubtless more important than the rudiments of a legal education’.87 Yet this lively social atmosphere fed back into and reinforced in a general way the corporate outlook of members of the Inns, which even as it was founded on the law, was not so much ‘legalistic’ as ‘magisterial’ in character. The Inns were, in Ben Jonson’s words, places of ‘humanity and liberty’—that is, ‘learning and licence’,88 and both aspects are central to the culture of the Inns.

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court Because of the complex relationship between the ostensible, narrow purpose of the Inns and their varied social functions, it is useful to think of the Inns as ‘societies’, (p.40) instead of more narrowly as ‘schools’. It is true that the term ‘society’ runs the risk of falsely connoting ‘salons’, ‘clubs’, or ‘fraternities’. The Inns were neither high-minded salons nor centres of solely intellectual discourse. As in John Davies’s case, members were frequently involved in brawls and other disorders both at the Inns and elsewhere in London. Henry Machyn records a startling episode: ‘The thirteenth day of June [1554] was a great affray between the lord warden’s servants of Kent and the Inns of Court: Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn. And some slain and hurt.’ This event, while unusual enough to warrant a mention in Machyn’s diary, is not the only time innsmen were involved in unrest, collectively or individually.89 Moreover, the records of the Bridewell courts (just west of Blackfriars in Figure 1.1) mention inns-of-court men with some regularity in documents related to prosecutions for female prostitution. This latter history is registered in Shakespeare in Shallow’s reference above to ‘bona-robas’ (those ‘shadowy wantons’),90 as well as in the rhyme above linking Gray’s Inn to ‘the whore’. It also appears in the allusion, in the Gray’s Inn revels of 1594, to one ‘Lucy Negro, Abbess de Clerkenwell’.91 ‘Luce Negro’ (perhaps Lucy Black) was a madam and prostitute who ran a brothel at Clerkenwell, close to Gray’s Inn (northeast of Ely House, about halfway between Portpool Street and Aldersgate in Figure 1.1).92 Despite some of these connotations, society is a useful term, since it gets at the Inns’ common raison d’être—legal enculturation of lawyers and legal magistrates—as well as their exclusiveness and communality, without precluding members’ pursuit of a range of professional and social interests and activities. Society also connotes another important aspect of the Inns: they were unincorporated, self-regulated institutions created and maintained through ‘voluntary and purposeful association’,93 intentional practices of social relationship that served to create community, and to override differences among individuals and among each of the inns, which sustained and perpetuated the societies themselves.94 At the Inns, those communal activities included the educational exercises and hall dining discussed above, as well as (as we shall see) the production, commissioning, and enjoyment of revels and drama. At least some members of the Inns consciously viewed their communal activities as a way of creating and maintaining ‘fellowship’ and ‘society’. In 1640, the Middle Temple Bench claimed that without ‘the holding together in commons [of] the company of this fellowship in their (p.41) public hall […] a company so voluntarily gathered together to live under government could hardly be termed a society’.95

Literary Terrain

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court The distinctive culture of the societies energized the literary activities of members of the Inns, even as those activities reinforced and strengthened a communal culture. Partly because the Inns were home to many men who found the social and literary world of London more enticing and relevant to their future interests than the rigorous study of the law, the Inns of Court were collectively some of the most important centres for intellectual and literary activity in London and even in England as a whole. Many poets and playwrights belonged to an inn—Thomas Sackville, Thomas Lodge, John Donne, John Marston, George Wither, and John Ford, to name only a few.96 Inns-of-court men were also significant producers and consumers of drama. They wrote plays and masques for performance by fellow members at the societies and elsewhere; they hired playwrights to compose masques for them to perform; they commissioned professional productions; and they patronized the public and private theatres. Some became professional dramatists.97 The Inns thus energized and shaped English literary and dramatic culture throughout the period. As much as inns-of-court men participated in the larger social scene of London and England, their institutional culture was distinct from it, as was their literary culture. Through the centuries, poets and novelists have recognized this difference, presenting the Inns as peculiar institutions cloistered away from the hustle and bustle of Fleet Street and the City. In his Prothalamion (1596), Edmund Spenser refers to the Inner and Middle Temples as ‘bricky towers’, the ‘bowers’ of ‘studious lawyers’, where ‘whilom wont the Templar Knights to bide’.98 In the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens, himself a member of the Middle Temple, described the Inns in terms of their ‘clerkly monkish atmosphere’. Herman Melville wrote of the Inns’ ‘dim monastic way[s]’ and ‘quiet cloisters’, calling them a ‘paradise of bachelors’.99 This distinction is raised in some literary texts associated with the Inns, where the societies figure as countries with their own governments, ambassadors, (p.42) and embassies to other ‘lands’ (other Inns or elsewhere in London, such as the court). In 1561, the herald Gerard Legh called the societies a ‘province’ laying a ‘half league from the City’. Elsewhere, members term each inn with names conjuring up exotic regions—‘Purpoole’, ‘Stapulia’, ‘Bernardia’, ‘Templaria’, ‘Lincossos’, and ‘Portpulia’.100 Such monikers characterize the societies as sacred spaces of law, where priestly lawyers devote themselves to the study and preservation of the law with monkish single-mindedness. The depictions call upon a long tradition, going back to Cicero, of representing lawyers as something like priests or prophets of the law. For instance, in 1559, William Bavand, a member of the Middle Temple, wrote that the ‘lawyer’s house […] is as it were the oracle of the whole city’.101 The longevity of the view of lawyers as prophets (and their ‘houses’ as cloisters) indicates its status as quasi-mythology, not as reality.

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court Although set back from the main streets of London, in terms of physical space the Inns of Court were of course not truly cloistered. The societies lacked the walls of Oxford and Cambridge colleges and, as we have seen, they were situated in the bustling area between the City and Westminster and in the midst of taverns and, by the later Elizabethan period, near the public and private theatres (see Figure 1.1). The dynamic social and intellectual conversations fostered in this location extended to members’ literary works, which were in dialogue with broader movements and fashions, even as members spurred and developed contemporary styles in distinctive ways. Writing in 1580, Thomas Churchyard thus praised the intellectual culture of London—‘Here dwells the sages of the world and all the Muses nine’—but he singled out the Inns for special commendation: they are ‘where wit and knowledge flows’.102 The Inns were not ‘countries’ unto themselves, but they constituted literary territories, which—although they shared a real and cultural geography and climate with the rest of London—had a topography and temperature of their own. As we have seen, within the Inns’ territory, members fashioned a distinct social domain, and a distinct literary one too. The most consistent and welldocumented literary tradition in this arena is dramatic and musical performance, most often associated with Christmas entertainments.103 In addition to the Christmas revels, inns-of-court men initiated literary trends—for instance, the fashion for Ovidian (p.43) epyllia in the 1590s, begun by Thomas Lodge of Lincoln’s Inn in Scilla’s Metamorphosis (1589)—which soon extended to include popular and courtly writers, such as Shakespeare in Venus and Adonis (1594).104 Wider literary developments manifested themselves in particular ways or with special force among the inns-of-court ‘set’. The fashion for didactic, neo-Senecan drama in the 1560s, for example, started at the universities but developed in original ways at the Inns, notably in the neo-Senecan tragedy, Gorboduc, written and performed by Inner Templars in 1562.105 Inns-of-court writers, moreover, frequently identified their works with this sphere, dedicating poems, translations, and plays to other members, or sometimes to the societies individually or as a group, or drawing attention to their membership in prefaces and dedications. Lodge, as we have already seen, dedicates Scilla’s Metamorphosis to his ‘good friend, Master Ralph Crane, and the rest of his most entire well-willers, the gentlemen of the Inns of Court and Chancery’.106 This rhetorical move partly functions to confer status, linking authors with what were socially elite institutions, but it also suggests a deeper way that inns-of-court authors associated their literary creations with this particular scene.

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court Although the Inns had a distinct social life and intellectual climate, not everyone associated with the societies was a literary ‘writer’. As the following chapters will illustrate, this book defines the term ‘literature’ very broadly to include traditional literary forms, as well as works that demand linguistic and rhetorical skill, such as translations of classical and Continental poetry and prose, including prose treatises on practical subjects, such as horsemanship. Even with this inclusive definition, it is likely that only a small percentage of the population of the Inns were ‘writers’ in the sense of trying to produce drama, poetry, translations, or historical and other types of ‘literary’ works. Exact numbers, however, are difficult. The total membership of the Inns in the period is a matter of debate. In the late fifteenth century, Fortescue put the number of members at about 200 per house. Prest qualifies these numbers in various ways, showing that between 1500 and 1650, the number of members recorded varied widely, between about 150 and 300. At the same time, since membership was a lifetime condition, there were members who were neither residents nor actively involved in the Inns or with the law.107 That said, if we take our list of over thirty writers at the Inns in the 1560s as a reference point, and we assume that the number of ‘writers’ is likely greater than records indicate, while assuming the total population to be somewhere between 600 and 800, a cautious estimate would be that the number of composers of poetry, plays, translations, or treatises was probably about 5 per cent of the total population, although if we include those who participated in revels and dramatic activities, by acting or even attending, the percentages could go much, much higher. (p.44) Nevertheless, even 5 per cent is a relatively high concentration if we compare the Inns to the royal court, which most early modernists would automatically classify as an important ‘literary environment’. Steven May has identified thirty-two ‘courtier poets’ over the period from 1558 to 1603.108 Although he defines ‘courtier poet’ narrowly and does not include such major figures as Spenser, it is important to recognize that his documented number for a forty-five-year period is almost the same as the number of authors associated with the Inns in the 1560s alone.

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court Moreover, those who were ‘writers’ played an active—even outsized—role in shaping the culture of the Inns as well as the broader perception of them. Writers often presented their work as the product of a broader inns culture, and thus as a kind of representation of the Inns as a whole. For instance, the satirist and soldier, William Goddard (adm MT 1565?), dedicates his 1614 book of satires to several ‘loving friends […] of the Inner Temple’.109 Similarly, the poet Roger Lort (adm MT 1627) writes poems to several members of the Middle Temple, as well as one ‘to the fellows of the Middle and Inner Temple’ (Ad socios medii et interioris templi).110 In addition, as we shall see in Chapter 3 on lyric poetry at the Inns in the 1560s, writers often viewed their work as something active in the world, and in particular as a way to shape the attitudes and values of fellow members, creating and confirming (and sometimes criticizing) the shared habitus of friends and fellow inns-of-court men. Likewise, as we shall see in more detail in Chapters 7 and 8 on drama, inns-of-court revels and plays were, in essence, a form of institutional expression, since the dramas were produced and funded by members of the Inns, and sometimes even written and acted by them. In this sense, the revels provided a forum for members to present themselves to themselves and to others. Literary activities, despite being a minority undertaking, played an important role in shaping the culture of the Inns, as well as in sharing and advertising the image of the Inns for visitors and to a broader public, which could include everyone from the monarch and courtiers to other poets and dramatists, to members of the universities. This context begins to explain the intellectual culture of the Inns, but it also raises the question of how we account for the presence of a substantial number of writers at the Inns. One reason lies in their central location in London and intellectual culture (as we’ve already seen). It is true that this urban and laissezfaire setting promoted conditions that invited and allowed for literary creativity. Yet this cannot be the sole explanation. The Inns’ vibrant intellectual culture and lax educational system existed long before the early modern period. In the midfifteenth century, John Fortescue observes that members often involved themselves in artistic (p.45) and other activities. There, he notes, members learned to sing, dance, and use arms, and practised other ‘noblemen’s pastimes’.111 Dramatic records at the Inns go back to the fifteenth century, and there were always some poets and dramatists associated here and there with the societies.112 Prior to 1558, however, there were never the large clusters of writers that characterize the early modern Inns.

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court Moreover, the ‘environment’ thesis does not explain something else important: the fluctuating intensity of the literary culture over the whole of the period. One of the many striking aspects of the Inns in this period is that the number of writers, and the amount of writing, associated with the Inns increases and decreases over time, with specific networks of writers clustering in particular periods. The first cluster appears in the late 1550s and early 1560s, and is followed by a lull in the 1570s and early 1580s. The second major phase begins in the 1590s, continues through the early years of the seventeenth century, and includes writers such as John Donne, John Marston, John Davies, John Hoskins, Edward Sharpham, Thomas Overbury, John Manningham, John Webster, and John Ford.113 The third cluster emerges in the 1610s and involves the authors William Browne, Christopher Brooke, and George Wither, as well as large groups of members who performed the numerous masques of the decade. A later group emerges in the 1630s and 1640s, surrounding Thomas Stanley, and including James Shirley, John Hall, Edward Sherburne, Alexander Brome, and Richard Lovelace. If the locality and intellectual climate of the Inns did not change dramatically over time, what accounts for these phases in literary activity? What else fostered the development of literary clusters at the Inns at particular moments? The next chapter identifies the educational, political, and legal circumstances relating to the employment opportunities awaiting members on their departure from the Inns. The 1560s, the decade when an extended literary network first developed around the Inns, provides the earliest and best example of this point. Notes:

(1) 2 Henry IV, 3.2.11–21. Clement’s Inn is an inn of Chancery affiliated with the Inner Temple. (2) S. E. Thorne originally proposed that the Inns began as hostels for provincial lawyers in ‘The Early History of the Inns of Court with Special Reference to Gray’s Inn’, Graya, 50 (1959), 79–97. J. H. Baker has since qualified this view, arguing that the Inns were educational houses from their earliest days, in ‘The Inns of Court in 1388’ and ‘Learning Exercises in the Medieval Inns of Court and Chancery’, in The Legal Profession and the Common Law, pp. 1–6; 7–24. See also Paul Brand, ‘Courtroom and Schoolroom: The Education of Lawyers in England Prior to 1400’, Historical Research, 60 (1987), 147–65. (3) On the social background of members of the Inns, see Prest, Inns, pp. 27–32. Prest (Inns, p. 31) points out that only a small percentage of the undergraduate population at Oxford and Cambridge were the sons of peers, knights, or esquires.

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court (4) Prest, Inns, 5–17; also J. H. Gleason, The Justices of the Peace in England, 1558–1640: A Later Eirenarcha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 91– 3. (5) R. M. Fisher, ‘Reform, Repression, and Unrest at the Inns of Court, 1518– 1558’, Historical Journal, 20 (1977), 783–801 and ‘Privy Council Coercion and Religious Conformity at the Inns of Court, 1569–1584’, Recusant History, 15 (1981), 305–24. (6) Christopher Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The ‘Lower Branch’ of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in English Legal History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). (7) Although there appears to have been some sort of legal college in London in the thirteenth century, the Inns appear to have originated in the 1340s or thereabouts, although the earliest known reference to the Inns is 1388. See Readings and Moots at the Inns of Court in the Fifteenth Century, Selden Society, 71 and 105, ed. by S. E. Thorne and J. H. Baker, 2 vols (London: B. Quaritch and the Selden Society, 1954–90), II, p. xv; xxv, xxviii. (8) Baker, Oxford History, p. 461. See, for instance, the ‘Orders made and agreed upon to be observed and kept in all the four houses of court’ (1557), in Records of the Honorable Society of Lincoln’s Inn: The Black Books, ed. by William Pailey Baildon and James Douglas Walker (London: Lincoln’s Inn, 1897), I, pp. 320–1. (9) On the expanding population of the Inns and the related need for a larger physical plant, see Prest, Inns, pp. 5–20. In particular, Prest records that between 1555 and 1560, Gray’s Inn rebuilt its hall, adding a gallery and a new roof with beams. In 1574, the Inner Temple added a carved screen to its hall; in 1565, Lincoln’s Inn added a gallery to its Old Hall; and Middle Temple began to build its Great Hall in 1562, finishing in about 1574. For more on the significance of these building projects, see ‘Literary Play and the Legal Profession’ in the Conclusion. (10) Googe dedicated his Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonnettes (1563) to William Lovelace, a reader of Gray’s Inn, and wrote poems to Laurence Blundeston and Alexander Neville, both members of the Inn (Neville was also Googe’s cousin). For more on these figures, see ‘Barnabe Googe’s Eclogues’ and ‘Creating Community in Googe’s Answer Poetry’ in Chapter 3. (11) Franklin B. Williams records nearly forty dedications to the Inns of Court, the Inns of Court and Chancery, the Inns of Chancery, and students of common law in English books prior to 1641, as well as about thirty-five more to individual inns, or the Temples jointly. See Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books Before 1641 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1962), p. 223. Page 22 of 30

An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court (12) Thomas Lodge, An Alarum against Usurers Containing Tryed Experiences against Worldly Abuses (London: By T. East for Sampson Clarke, 1594), STC 16653, sig. A2r. For other dedications to the Inns, see ‘Literary Terrain’ in this chapter. (13) Even as he identifies with the Inns of Court, Justice Shallow is also fantasizing here, since by the 1590s, the Inns of Court and Inns of Chancery had already begun to specialize in terms of the training they offered, with the Inns of Court educating the ‘upper’ or ‘greater’ branch, the ‘barristers’, and the Inns of Chancery educating the ‘lower’ or ‘lesser’ branch, the attorneys and solicitors. See also ‘Institutional Status’ in Chapter 2. (14) Workes of Benjamin Jonson (London: Will Stansby, 1616), STC 14751, sig. G2r. (15) ‘Multi-dimensional’ is Margaret McGlynn’s term in Royal Prerogative, p. 19. (16) J. H. Baker, Legal Education in London, 1250–1850, Selden Society Lecture (London: Selden Society, 2007), pp. 12–13. (17) Although anachronistic, the phrase is useful and appears frequently in studies of the Inns, for example in the title of J. H. Baker’s ‘The Third University, 1450–1550: Law School or Finishing School?’, in Intellectual, pp. 8–31 (p. 8). (18) Finkelpearl, John Marston, pp. 3–80; Prest, Inns, pp. 21–3; 153–4. (19) Coke, Le Tierce Part Des Reportes (London: Thomas Wight, 1602), STC 5499.2, sig. D4v and Sir George Buck, The Third Universitie of England ([London: [Printed by Thomas Dawson] for Thomas Adams], 1615), STC 23338, p. 968. (20) Pension Book of Gray’s Inn: Records of the Honourable Society, 1569–1669, ed. by Reginald J. Fletcher (London: Chiswick, 1901), p. 213. (21) REED: Inns, I, p. xiv. (22) R. Ross, ‘The Commoning of the Common Law: The Renaissance Debate over Printing English Law, 1520–1640’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 148 (1998), 323–461. (23) Readings and Moots, II, p. liv. (24) Readings and Moots, II, pp. lvi–lviii. See also ‘Corporate Culture’ in this chapter. (25) Prest, Inns, p. 54. (26) Readings and Moots, I, p. ix. Page 23 of 30

An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court (27) McGlynn, Royal Prerogative, p. 17. (28) Readings, for instance, took place for a closed audience of members of the one Inn and special guests, and manuscript copies of readings circulated narrowly, usually among senior members, if at all. See Ian Williams, ‘Common Law Scholarship and the Written Word,’ forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook to English Law and Literature, 1500–1700, ed. by Bradin Cormack and Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). On points of law associated with an inn, see Baker, Oxford History, p. 467n. (29) Readings and Moots, II, p. lvi. (30) On the development of ‘call to the bar’ as a formal qualification, see J. H. Baker, ‘The English Legal Profession, 1450–1550’ and Wilfrid Prest, ‘The English Bar, 1550–1700’, both in Prest, ed. Lawyers, pp. 16–41 (p. 17; 30); and pp. 65–85 (p. 65); Prest, Inns, p. 50; Prest, Rise, p. 5; Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers, p. 27; J. H. Baker, Oxford History, pp. 428–30; and J. H. Baker, ‘Audience in the Courts’, in Collected Papers on English Legal History, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), I, pp. 112–23 (pp. 117–19). (31) The civil lawyers also had their own house in London, the Doctors’ Commons. (32) Three of the four main legal terms were about three weeks each, so that in 1560, Hilary term was 23 January–12 February, Easter term from 1–27 May, and Trinity term from 14 June–3 July. The longest term, Michaelmas, was about seven weeks, for instance from 9 October–28 November in 1560. On the legal and learning calendar at the Inns, see Prest, Inns, pp. 15–16. On the dating of the legal terms, see A Handbook of Dates for Students to British History, Royal Historical Guides and Handbooks, 4, ed. by C. R. Cheney, rev. by Michael Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 96–144. (33) J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (London: Butterworths, 1971), p. 76. (34) ‘The Farewell that I Made at Graies Inne at My Departure From Thence When I Was Elected Serjeant’ (1589), BL MS Add 48109, fols. 11r–15r (fol. 13v). (35) Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (1622–1624), ed. by E. Bourcier (Paris: Didier, 1974), p. 77. (36) Prest, Inns, p. 15, estimates a 30–50 per cent rate of absenteeism among generally admitted members in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court (37) Donne, ‘Satyre II’ in Complete English Poems, lines 41–3. Donne may have been exaggerating. Dugdale observes that ‘time alone makes not a cupboard man’ (i.e. an utter barrister): ‘[T]he Bench, upon just cause of dislike, may pass over any whom they hold not fit for that place.’ William Dugdale, Origines Juridiciales (London: F. and T. Warren, 1666), Wing D2488, p. 203. (38) Prest, Inns, pp. 56–8. (39) Examples of this point exist throughout J. H. Baker’s Men of Court, 1440– 1550: A Prosopography of the Inns of Court and Chancery and the Courts of Law, Selden Society Supplementary Series, 18 (in 2 vols) (London: Selden Society, 2012), which records both records of attendance as well as fines and pardons for non-attendance at learning vacations for ‘men of court’ in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. (40) Peter Goodrich, ‘Eating Law: Commons, Common Land, Common Law’, Journal of Legal History, 12 (1991), 246–67. (41) Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. by Matthew Adamson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 9–10 and The Logic of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), esp. p. 54. For a discussion of legal habitus in the early modern period, see Edward Gieskes, Representing the Professions: Administration, Law, and Theater in Early Modern England (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2006), pp. 125–7; 160. (42) Baker, Oxford History, p. 445, also pp. 467–72 on common learning. (43) Baker, Readings and Moots, II, p. lxxii. (44) Baker, Oxford History, p. 446. (45) Baker, Readings and Moots, II, pp. 6–7. ‘Ceux que droit’ is an abbreviation for the longer question, in law-French, ‘Ceux que droit en ount sont a lour recoverie’, which Baker translates as, ‘The parties with the right wish to be advised how to go about their recovery’ (Readings and Moots, II, p. xlvi). (46) Baker, Readings and Moots, II, p. lxxii. (47) Baker, Readings and Moots, II, pp. lxxii–lxiii. (48) Sir John Fortescue, Learned Commendation of the Politique Lawes of Englande, trans. by Robert Mulcaster (London: Richard Tottel, 1567), STC 11194, fol. 17r. (49) Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London: Richard Grafton, [1553]), STC 25799, sig. F1r. Page 25 of 30

An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court (50) J. H. Baker, ‘The Three Languages of the Common Law’, in Collected Papers, II, pp. 515–36. (51) Abraham Fraunce, Lawiers Logike Exemplifying the Praecepts of Logike by the Practise of the Common Lawe (London: William How for Thomas Gubbin and T. Newman, 1588), STC 11344, sig. ¶3r. (52) Baker, ‘The Three Languages’, in Collected Papers, II, p. 535. (53) Christopher St. German, [Doctor and Student] Here after Foloweth a dialogue in Englisshe, Bytwyxte a Doctour of Dyuynyte, and a Student in the Lawes of Englande (London: Robert Redman, [1531]), STC 21567, sig. A2r. (54) Fraunce, Lawiers Logike, sigs. ¶4r–v. (55) Prest, Inns, pp. 27–8. (56) Fortescue, Learned Commendation, fol. 114r–15r. (57) Prest, Inns, p. 30. (58) Prest, Inns, pp. 21–46; Baker, Oxford History, p. 450. (59) Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum (London: Thomas Creed for Robert Dexter, 1597), STC 12716, sig. B8v. (60) REED: Inns, II, p. 367. (61) Norman Jones, The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 125. (62) Geoffrey C. de Parmiter, Elizabethan Popish Recusancy in the Inns of Court, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research Special Supplement, 11 (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1976), p. 8. (63) Parmiter, Elizabethan Popish Recusancy, p. 16 and Jones, English Reformation, p. 126. (64) Jones, English Reformation, p. 126. See also, Parmiter, Elizabethan Popish Recusancy, p. 54. At the same time, this ‘live and let live’ attitude may also have been fostered by members such as William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon, who had quietly conformed in Mary’s reign, without persecution from Catholics. Their experience under Mary may have made them more sympathetic towards religious conservatives who were now quietly conforming under Elizabeth. I am grateful to Scott Lucas for this point. (65) See Marie Axton, ‘The Influence of Edmund Plowden’s Succession Treatise’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 37 (1974), 209–26. Page 26 of 30

An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court (66) Jones, English Reformation, pp. 127–8. A Calendar of Inner Temple Records, volume 1, 1505–1603, ed. by F. A. Inderwick (London: Stevens and Sons, 1896), p. 471; Parmiter, Popish Recusancy, pp. 46–7. (67) See also Parmiter, Popish Recusancy, p. 54. Membership in an inn did not, however, guarantee freedom from religious persecution. The mid-Tudor chronicler Henry Machyn records the sad case of Bartlet Green, a Protestant and member of the Inner Temple, burned at the stake 1 January 1556. See dated entry in Machyn [13 October 2013]. (68) Machyn (home page) [28 February 2014]. (69) See dated entries in Machyn [13 October 2013]. (70) Prest, Rise, pp. 82–126. (71) Finkelpearl, John Marston, p. 10. (72) For the quotes from Davies and Lenton, see REED: Inns, II, pp. 792–3. (73) See Mark Eccles’s introduction and edition of the ‘Grammar Lecture’ in ‘Francis Beaumont’s Grammar Lecture’, Review of English Studies, 16 (1940), 402–14. The terms appear on p. 406. (74) Prest, Inns, pp. 40–1; Brooks, LPS, p. 18. (75) From the ‘Anonymous Description of the State of the Middle Temple’ (BL Cotton MS Vitellius C.ix), transcribed in R. M. Fisher, ‘Thomas Cromwell, Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the Inns of Court, 1534–1540’, Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law, 14 (1997), 103–17 (pp. 111–17; quotation on p. 114). (76) ‘Farewell’, BL MS Add 48109, fols. 12r–v. (77) Prest, Rise, pp. 1–10. (78) Prest, Inns, p. 41. (79) Rider and Horsler, eds., Inner Temple (2007). (80) Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes cite one John Holles, who commented that his brother charted ‘a mongrel course betwixt a student and a reveller’ at the Inns, in The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 271.

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court (81) Prest, Inns, p. 23; McGlynn, Royal Prerogative, p. 18. Future men of property especially needed this background, given the likelihood of their involvement with the law at some point in their lives. In 1606, men who were gentlemen, esquires, or peers made up about 30 per cent of litigants in the court of common pleas and 20 per cent of those in the King’s Bench. See Christopher Brooks, LLES, p. 14. (82) ‘Anonymous Description of the State of the Middle Temple’, in Fisher, ‘Thomas Cromwell, Dissolution’, p. 113. (83) The request appears in a letter from Sir Lawrence to Henry, transcribed in G. Davies, ‘The Date of Clarendon’s First Marriage’, English Historical Review, 32 (1917), 405–7 (p. 407). (84) 2 Henry IV, 3.2.197. (85) Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000), p. 30. (86) Baker, Oxford History, p. 462. (87) Baker, Oxford History, p. 462. (88) ‘Learning and license’ is Helen Ostovich’s helpful gloss of ‘humanity and liberty’ in Every Man out of His Humour, ed. by Helen Ostovich, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 30. (89) A London Provisioner’s Chronicle, 13 June 1554. On interpersonal violence, see Prest, Inns, esp. pp. 91–109. In 1580, two actors were committed to the Marshalsea for a fray involving members of the Inns. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), II, p. 100. (90) ‘Shadowy Wantons’ is Samuel Johnson’s definition of ‘BonaRobas’ (attributed in OED Online [02/24/14]). (91) REED: Inns, II, p. 388. (92) On the Inns’ connections to prostitution, see Duncan Salkeld, Shakespeare Among the Courtesans: Prostitution, Literature, and Drama, 1500–1650 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 129–32. Salkeld also turns up evidence of inns-ofcourt men in Bridewell and other prosecutions for prostitution (p. 2; 123; 127). (93) On the definition of ‘society’ as ‘voluntary and purposeful association’ see Withington, Society in Early Modern England, p. 13 and, on the application to the Inns specifically, p. 117. (94) Baker, Legal Profession, esp. the chapter on ‘The Inns of Court and Chancery as Voluntary Associations’, pp. 45–74. Page 28 of 30

An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court (95) Minutes of Parliament of the Middle Temple, volume 2: 1603–1649, ed. and trans. by Charles Trice Martin (London: Masters of the [Middle Temple] Bench, 1904), p. 899. See also Prest, Inns, p. 12. (96) For a list of inns-of-court dramatists, see REED: Inns, II, pp. 813–15. (97) For a survey of the involvement of inns-of-court members in drama, see Alan H. Nelson and Jessica Winston, ‘Drama of the Inns of Court’ in A New Companion to Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. by Michael Hattaway, 2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), II, pp. 94–104 (p. 101) and Reed: Inns, I, pp. xvii– xlvii and 2, pp. 757–61; 789–812; 813–15. (98) Edmund Spenser, ‘Prothalamion’, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. by William A. Oram and others (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 761–9 (ll. 132–5). (99) Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, ed. by G. K. Chesterton (1906; repr. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1966), p. 111; Melville, ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’, in Tales, Poems, and Other Writings, ed. by John Bryant (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 147–67 (p. 147). (100) For Legh, see REED: Inns, II, p. 367; 366; 626. The names appear in the accounts of Christmas Revels and masque orations and are references to landmarks and institutions associated with the Inns: the area of London called ‘Portpool’, where Gray’s Inn is situated, plus the Inns of Chancery, Staple Inn and Barnard’s Inn, and the Temple Church. See, for example, REED: Inns, II, p. 380; 395; 420. (101) A reference to Cicero’s De Oratore 1.200 in Bavand, A Woorke of Ioannes Ferrarius Montanus, Touching the Good Ordering of a Common Weale (London: John Kingston for John Wight, 1559), STC 10831, sig. R1v. The idea is repeated nearly verbatim by Christopher Yelverton, a member of Gray’s Inn, in a 1589 speech to the members of that house, upon his creation as serjeant: ‘The lawyers’ houses saith Lucius Crassus be as it were th’ oracles of the whole city’. See ‘Farewell’, BL MS Add 48109, fol. 13r. On the concept of the ‘legal oracle’ in early modern law and literature, see Virginia Lee Strain, ‘The Winter’s Tale and the Oracle of the Law’, English Literary History, 78 (2011), 557–84. (102) Churchyard, A Light Bondell of Lively Discourses Called Churchyards Charge (London: John Kingston, 1580), STC 5240, sig. D4r. (103) A. Wigfall Green, The Inns of Court and Early English Drama (New York: B. Blom, 1965) and REED: Inns.

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An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court (104) On the relationship of Ovidian epyllia to the Inns of Court, see Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship and William Weaver, Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), esp. pp. 158–61. (105) On the connections between the translators of Seneca and the Inns of Court, see Chapter 6. (106) Scillaes Metamorphoses (London: Richard Jones, 1589), STC 16674, sig. *1r. On other dedications to the Inns of Court, see Winston, ‘Literary Associations of the Middle Temple’, p. 153. (107) Prest, Inns, pp. 5–9. (108) May, Elizabethan Courtier Poets: Their Poems and Contexts (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991), pp. 4–5. (109) William Goddard, A Mastif Whelp ([Dordrecht: George Waters], [1616?]), STC 11928, sig. A1v. The admission date is Lesley Whitelaw’s in ‘Men of Letters Associated with the Middle Temple’, History of the Middle Temple, ed. by Havery, pp. 173–203 (p. 184). (110) Roger Lort, Epigrammatum (London: John Wright, 1566), Wing L3076, sig. B4r. (111) Fortescue, Learned Commendation, fol. 114v. (112) The records of music and revels in REED: Inns go back to the early fifteenth century. See also D. S. Bland, ‘Interludes in Fifteenth-Century Revels at Furnival’s Inn’, Review of English Studies, 3 (1952), 263–8. (113) There are numerous studies of this cluster of writers, including Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet, pp. 25–95; Winston, ‘Literary Associations’, in History of the Middle Temple, ed. by Havery, esp. pp. 160–4.

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‘Minerva’s Men’

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

‘Minerva’s Men’ The Inns of Court in the 1560s Jessica Winston

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords This chapter surveys the literary culture of the Inns in the 1560s, exploring several central questions: What prompted the formation of this literary environment in the 1560s? What did it mean to the men who participated in it? Why did it form at the Inns? And what impact did this network have on early modern culture, particularly the arenas of literature, politics, and law? Beginning with a prosopographical analysis of inns-of-court authors in the 1560s, the chapter argues that the literary culture of the Inns in the 1560s resulted from the fortuitous meeting of several trends: first, developments in humanist education; second, the presence of humanist lawyers, such as Nicholas Bacon, in Elizabeth’s government; and third, recent changes in the legal profession, namely the rise in litigation and the undersupply of legally trained men who could meet England’s litigious and administrative needs. Keywords:   Inns of Court, literary culture, 1560s, Preface to Thyestes, commonweal, humanist education, rise in litigation, legal profession, prosopography, Nicholas Bacon

Although the style of his 1560 translation of Seneca’s Thyestes is typical of the time, Jasper Heywood frames his version by comparing himself unfavourably with ‘Minerva’s men’, his term for the literati at the Inns of Court. Their talents, Heywood says, exceed his own. His preface to the play is a dream vision in which Seneca visits him in his rooms at Oxford, asking him to translate the tragedy. Heywood refuses, professing that he is not up to the task. Seneca should look for a translator at one of the Inns of Court: Page 1 of 40

‘Minerva’s Men’                                                                     [G]o where Minerva’s men And finest wits do swarm, whom she hath taught to pass with pen. In Lincoln’s Inn and Temples twain, Gray’s Inn and other mo, Thou shalt them find whose painful pen thy verse shall flourish so, That Melpomen thou wouldst well ween had taught them for to write, And all their works with stately style and goodly grace t’indite. There shalt thou see the selfsame North, whose work his wit displays, And Dial doth of Princes paint, and preach abroad his praise. There Sackville’s sonnets sweetly sauced and featly finèd be; There Norton’s ditties do delight, there Yelverton’s do flee Well pured with pen. Such young men three, as ween thou might’st again, To be begot as Pallas was of mighty Jove his brain. There hear thou shalt a great report of Baldwin’s worthy name, Whose Mirror doth of magistrates proclaim eternal fame. And there the gentle Blundeville is, by name and eke by kind, Of whom we learn by Plutarch’s lore what fruit by foes to find. There Bavand bides that turned his toil a commonwealth to frame, And greater grace in English gives to worthy author’s name. There Googe a grateful gains hath got, report that runneth rife, Who crooked compass doth describe and Zodiac of Life. And yet great number more, whose names if I should now recite, A ten times greater work than thine I should be forced to write.1

If Heywood’s rhapsodizing is to be believed, the Inns teem with the ‘finest’ wits, including Thomas North, the translator of Antonio de Guevara’s Dial of Princes (p.47) (1557) and later the translator of Plutarch’s Lives (1579); Thomas Sackville, the coauthor of Gorboduc (1562) and later the author of the ‘Induction’ and the tragedy of Henry, Duke of Buckingham, in the Mirror for Magistrates (1563 ed.); Thomas Norton, the other author of Gorboduc, as well as the translator of numerous works, including psalms, the Orations of Arsanes (1560), and later Calvin’s Institution of Christian Religion (1561); Christopher Yelverton, here identified—along with Norton—as the author of ‘ditties’, and who later wrote the epilogue to George Gascoigne’s Jocasta (1566); William Baldwin, the compiler of the Mirror for Magistrates (1559); Thomas Blundeville, the translator of several essays by Plutarch, including ‘How to Profit from One’s Enemies’ (the ‘Fruit of Foes’, pub. 1561); William Bavand, the translator of Johannes Ferrarius’s De republica bene instituenda as the Good Ordering of a Commonweal (1559); and Barnabe Googe, the poet and translator of the early sixteenth-century collection of neo-Latin moral philosophy, Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus’s Zodiacus Vitae, or the Zodiac of Life (first ed. 1560).

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‘Minerva’s Men’ Heywood’s reference to a ‘great number’ calls to mind numerous other memberpoets and -translators at the Inns in the 1560s: George Gascoigne and George Turberville—or more obscure figures, such as Alexander Neville, translator of Seneca’s Oedipus (1563); John Studley, translator of four of Seneca’s tragedies, including Medea (1566) and Agamemnon (1566); Goddred Gilby, translator of Cicero’s letter Ad Quintum (1561); John Dolman, translator of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (1561); and Christopher Hatton, one of many contributors to the play Gismond of Salerne (1568). There were others too, such as William Parker, who wrote prefatory verses to others’ works. In the 1560s, over thirty writers were closely affiliated with the societies, and many of them boasted textual accomplishments that might dazzle Seneca’s spectre.2 Considering the style of the ‘Preface’, with its exuberant praise and bobbing rhythm, readers today might conclude that Heywood was right to direct Seneca elsewhere. But Heywood was himself a well-respected poet and translator: as a fellow of All Souls College, he translated three of Seneca’s tragedies—Troas (1559) and Hercules Furens (1561) in addition to Thyestes. What’s more, Heywood joined an inn briefly around this time,3 so his preface does not so much paint him as an outsider to the ranks of ‘Minerva’s men’ as it endows him with special authority: the poet and translator of Seneca’s own choosing.4 Later in the dream vision, at Seneca’s insistence, Heywood agrees to translate Thyestes, and so his paean to the Inns only sets a bar for him to surpass. At the same time, the passage had specific, strategic utility. A devout Catholic, Heywood had several run-ins with the college authorities when he refused to comply with the religious reforms they advocated. Shortly after completing Thyestes, Heywood moved to Gray’s Inn, where he lived (p.48) with his uncle, William Rastell. The Inns in this period were notable for their religious tolerance, in part because they were communal, social, and hierarchical institutions whose governing bodies, the Benchers, included many Catholics.5 Most of the men Heywood lists in the passage were Protestants, and zealous ones at that. His praise of the literary wits at the Inns might have been an attempt to establish precedence for his inclusion. Skirting religious difference, he appeals to the shared literary interests that connect him to the community at the Inns. Whatever the agenda, Heywood paints a telling picture of the Inns-based literary culture, which involved more than two dozen men writing in a range of genres— lyric and didactic poetry, classical and Continental translation, and drama. He also gestures towards the cultural status of the Inns, which in 1560 were recognized as together constituting a major literary hub. Heywood was not alone in this estimation: in the very next year, Gerard Legh described the Inns as the home of the ‘liberal sciences’, where ‘it seemed indeed the Muses had their abiding’. A few years later, Thomas Pound, a member of Lincoln’s Inn, echoed Heywood, referring also to the Inns as the home of ‘Minerva’s men’.6

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‘Minerva’s Men’ It is not surprising that Heywood, Legh, and others were so taken by the Inns. Prior to 1560, a few writers were associated from time to time with the legal societies, but thereafter the societies emerged as the largest, perhaps even the only, literary community in England. Of course, poets, translators, and dramatists wrote in and around the court, the universities, and aristocratic households. One might think of the translator Arthur Golding, or the poets Thomas Howell, Isabella Whitney, and Nicholas Breton. With the possible exception of Golding, even these authors were indirectly connected with the Inns through social and familial networks. Howell modelled his New Sonnets and Pretty Pamphlets (1567–8) and the Arbour of Amity (1568) on the miscellanies of Googe and Turberville; Nicholas Breton’s widowed mother married George Gascoigne in 1559, making him the stepson of the poet.7 As the Introduction mentioned, Isabella Whitney’s Sweet Nosegay (1573) reworks the Lincoln’s Inn member Hugh Plat’s Flowers of Philosophy (1572).8 By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, sizeable literary communities existed in London and elsewhere in England, but at the mid-century, the Inns were in a class by themselves.9 (p.49) If Heywood’s praise for the Inns is unsurprising, their newfound yet secure status remains puzzling: What prompted the formation of this network? What did it mean to the men who participated in it? Why did it form at the Inns? And what impact did this network have on early modern culture, particularly the arenas of literature, politics, and law? As much as the ‘Preface’ raises questions, it also suggests a method that leads to some answers: a prosopographical analysis, or the piecing together of a ‘collective biography’ of Heywood’s ‘Minerva’s men’. Investigating the commonalities within a defined set of personages works especially for well-documented political elites and professional groups, such as doctors or lawyers, the very sorts of men Heywood lists. In its most rigorous form, prosopography concentrates on a specific set of attributes (birth, death, education, occupation, and so forth) across a large circle of individuals.10 Yet even a cursory review of the eight ‘Minerva’s men’ detects key similarities among their most accessible attributes.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ Five of the men make up a generational group: North, Sackville, Norton, Yelverton, and Googe were born in the 1530s, attended university, and entered one of the Inns of Court, or their subsidiary Inns of Chancery, in the 1550s or early 1560s.11 Moreover, these men were committed Protestants, as was Bavand, who was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1557 (his birth date and earlier education are unknown).12 Blundeville was slightly older than some of these others (born 1522?, adm GI c. 1541?), but he too shared characteristics with the other writers—most notably an interest in translation.13 Since their biographies overlap, we might expect connections in their favoured subject matter as well. Several of the works listed by Heywood are of the speculum principis and ‘mirror for magistrates’ tradition—that is, the writings seek to shape the behaviour of rulers, or other high-ranking officers, by providing examples of conduct to follow or avoid, and offering advice on how to care for and manage the state. One might think of North’s Dial of Princes, Baldwin’s Mirror for Magistrates, Blundeville’s ‘Fruit of Foes’, or Bavand’s Good Ordering of a Commonweal. Most of the works (p.50) on Heywood’s list are dedicated to the Queen, members of the Privy Council, or other nobles. With the exception of his Catholicism, Heywood, born in 1535, shared this ‘Minerva’s men’ profile: his three Senecan translations concern the downfall of empires and the role of rulers, contain passages meditating on the rule of the state, and were dedicated to the Queen and to two members of the Privy Council, John Mason and Sir William Herbert. In his first translation—Troas, dedicated to Elizabeth—he even adds mirror language, aligning the play with the speculum principis tradition.14 Prosopographically, Heywood fits this class of literati he presumes to outshine, and his ‘Preface’ indicates that the literary culture of the Inns is a manifestation of another trend: a generational interest among mainly twenty-something, Protestant former university students who sought to enter public life through the Inns of Court. They shared a fascination for the future of the commonweal, particularly the character and practices of the legal magistracy—those members of Parliament, justices of the peace (JPs), judges, officers, town recorders, and lawyers who maintained the orderly administration of the national and local governments. It is this magisterial theme that provides a signal clue to the sudden emergence of the Inns as a literary centre.15

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‘Minerva’s Men’ The literary culture of the Inns in the 1560s results from the fortuitous meeting of two trends: first, long-term developments in humanist education and, second, recent changes in the legal profession, namely the undersupply of legally trained men who could meet England’s litigious and administrative needs. In its barest form, the story goes like this: Men at the Inns in the 1560s were among the first generation fully educated within a humanist framework, one that emphasized classics, rhetoric, and service to the commonweal. This generation came of age in the late 1550s and 1560s, at a time when an expansion in the legal job market created opportunities to use skills acquired in school for the very purposes for which education was ostensibly intended—to assist the prince and the commonweal. This expansion occurred, most importantly and profoundly, because of an unprecedented (p.51) and extremely rapid rise in litigation rates in England in the 1550s. The number of lawyers simply could not keep pace, and the lack of legally trained men impacted the supply in other important positions, such as town recorder or JP, which also required at least some legal background. Overdemand and undersupply created concerns, especially among England’s ruling elite, most especially Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon, about the skill level and ethics of many of the men who served in these roles. In the face of these concerns, a number of members turned to writing a ‘literature of magistracy’, as many of the works listed by Heywood could be termed. This literature sought to train current magistrates and advise them about their responsibilities, to guide the thinking of magistrates-in-training at the Inns, and also to demonstrate the authors’ commitment to and ethical preparation for being legal magistrates themselves.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ As much as this literature of magistracy reflects the attitudes of Bacon and other members of the ruling elite, the writing suggests members’ pride in the legal establishment, as well as their conviction that magistrates were important to the polity. As we shall see, this literature imagines legal professionals as a special group within the commonwealth, one that plays a crucial role in securing the peace and counselling monarchs and other nobles and men of position. For this reason, these ‘literature of magistracy’ writings reflect and foster a growing sense of the prestige and autonomy of the Inns and the legal profession, an autonomy that stems from the foundational function of legal magistrates in the commonweal. Yet this development has far-reaching implications: inns-of-court authors helped to imagine magistrates as a distinctive and autonomous social and political group even as they responded to legal change in the very terms promulgated by the ruling elite. Although this group ideally supported and administered the authority of the monarch and her Privy Council, they had, at least in theory if not in practice, the independence and authority to advise and even to challenge the ruler and her immediate advisors. Indeed, such advice is obvious in Gorboduc, even if the specific point the play makes has been debated.16 Alongside the developing pride and autonomy of the legal magistracy, members of the Inns also represented legal men, and the institutions they occupied, as a semiautonomous political space.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ One final point before moving on: In its discussion of literature and humanism, this chapter offers a corrective to recent criticism on the topic. Early modernists have argued that Renaissance authors often employed the literary skills they learned in school to question or interrogate the usefulness of their education.17 One example is the later sixteenth-century Parnassus plays, which satirize the overproduction (p.52) of university graduates and their unsuccessful attempts to make a living.18 The four courtier-scholars in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost also judge learning to be irrelevant: One learns that ‘which else we should not know’, mainly ‘things hid and barred […] from common sense’.19 Yet, for the most part, those at the Inns in the 1560s did not question the value of learning. It is true that writers there converted the educational capital of their elite classical learning into social and professional capital, at a time when—because of the concerns, ideals, and rhetoric of those highly placed in the government— this elite learning had the highest value.20 However calculated, this conversion appears not to have been routinely cynical or reflexively questioning. In the 1560s, writers affiliated with the Inns, such as Norton, Googe, Bavand, and Turberville, used their linguistic and rhetorical skills to address the duties and decorum of legal magistrates because they generally believed in the importance of the topic, and they believed that poetry, drama, translation, and other literary forms provided a useful way to address these legal issues. In this way, the innsof-court authors are similar to citizen translators and publishers of Utopia in the 1550s, who sought practical applications of humanist learning to social problems.21 The 1560s therefore represent a similar meeting of literature and humanism, with inns-of-court authors in this decade using their learning to assist the commonweal, particularly its magistrates. They had a more positive, even optimistic attitude towards humanism and the uses of learning in the commonweal than did authors of later periods.

Humanism, Commonweal, and the Vita Activa

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‘Minerva’s Men’ Commonweal is one of the most significant keywords of the sixteenth century. It names in a sweeping way numerous ‘projects, policies, and civic activity’ intended for the general welfare.22 Writings associated with the Inns invoke the commonweal especially often. Among Heywood’s ‘Minerva’s men’ alone, the term features in the title to William Bavand’s Good Ordering of a Commonweal, and in the opening sentence of William Baldwin’s dedication to A Mirror for Magistrates: ‘Plato, among many other of his notable sentences concerning the government of a (p.53) commonweal, hath this: Well is that realm governed in which the ambitious desire not to bear office.’23 Sackville and Norton’s Gorboduc concerns the politics of succession specifically as they affect a commonweal, and the word commonweal itself appears four times in the opening debate on this topic (Act I, scene 2).24 Even when they do not use the term, others at the Inns insist that they act for the good of the country and commonweal: Thomas North explains that his Dial of Princes might ‘serve high estates for counsel’, adding that ‘it may profit all and hurt none’;25 Barnabe Googe translates the Zodiac of Life so that ‘the common sort, being ignorant in the Latin, might receive some profit’;26 Thomas Blundeville’s treatise on horsemanship will help young men to become ‘no small ornament unto this realm’, and he translates Plutarch, since he is ‘necessary for all men to read’.27 The emphasis on commonweal reflects the civic ethos cultivated in sixteenthcentury schools. Born between 1535 and 1545, Heywood’s ‘Minerva’s men’, and indeed most of the junior members of the Inns in the late 1550s and early 1560s, came from the first generation fully educated in humanism-influenced English grammar schools and universities. Central to the humanist tenets they internalized was the belief that the study of the classics and classical rhetoric could create dutiful and upstanding men, and that the activities of versification and translation developed rhetorical and linguistic skill. The purpose of this training was to create statesmen, on the model of the Quintilian or Ciceronian orator, who would put their learning and linguistic skills to good use by becoming servants to the state.28 The philosophical basis for this training developed among humanist thinkers of quattrocento Italy: Bruni, to take only one example, believed that a life dedicated to contemplation (otium) was less valuable, and less likely to lead to wisdom, than one dedicated to useful activity (negotium), especially in public affairs.29 In England, these sensibilities translated into the notion that young men educated in a humanist tradition were supposed to study literature, rhetoric, and oratory to learn virtue and wisdom, but those skills, while worthwhile on their own, only truly mattered if they were proved in an active life of service to the state. (p.54) In England in the sixteenth century, this idea that high-mindedness and elite training had to find a purpose for the commonweal appears everywhere in educational and political treatises. For example, Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (c. 1529–32) contains a lengthy argument against the contemplative life, stating: Page 9 of 40

‘Minerva’s Men’ [I]t is not sufficient a man to get knowledge and virtue delighting himself only therewith as the old philosophers did which took such pleasure in private studies that they despised the politic life of man, but chiefly he must study to common his virtues to the profit of other, and this is the end of civil life, or as meseemeth, rather the true administration of the commonweal.30 We also see the case for educating members of the aristocracy and gentry into productive participants in a commonweal, and the methods by which that education should be accomplished are described in such sixteenth-century treatises as Thomas Elyot’s Boke Named the Governour (1531), The Institution of a Gentleman (1555), and Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528; translated by Sir Thomas Hoby, 1561). Elyot’s treatise contains a chapter on ‘[t]he education or form of bringing up of the child of the gentleman, which is to have authority in a public weal’.31 These ideas and ideals suffused the intellectual atmosphere that surrounded nobles, gentry, and others as they matured. That writers at the Inns were exposed to the methods and ethos of humanism is evident in their facility (albeit not flawlessness) in Latin and Latin translation and in their repeated emphasis on commonweal—and their specific educational backgrounds suggest this familiarity, too. Take again Heywood’s ‘Minerva’s men’. While most of their educational paths are obscure, three did attend Cambridge University: Thomas Norton, Christopher Yelverton, and Googe. The others—Norton, Sackville, North, Bavand, Blundeville, and Baldwin—are thought to have attended Oxford or Cambridge. In addition, George Turberville, a friend of Googe and Gascoigne, records that he spent time ‘in school’, among his ‘feres’ (i.e. companions), engaged in a recognizably humanist programme of reading. He studied ‘prose and verse’, including Plato, Cicero, Plutarch, Seneca, and Ovid, authors that were routinely taught in England’s grammar schools.32 He later became a fellow of New College, Cambridge (elected 1561). If many writers at the Inns were fully aware of humanist ideals, how did they meet these ideals in practice?

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‘Minerva’s Men’ While humanist educational methods and aims were described thoroughly by writers such as Elyot, the process by which one fulfilled the ends of this instruction were not, leaving a gap between ideology and practice at the heart of humanist theory. As many early modernists have pointed out, the daily practices of humanist (p.55) education—double translation, philological analysis—are difficult to square with the specific skills needed for a career: the classroom did not necessarily ‘provide the wherewithal for producing fine statesmen’ who must interface with publics and issues broader than creative arts and textual analysis.33 However distant this practical training was from the future needs of students, the daily drills and corporal punishments of grammar school education inculcated a set of behaviours, preferences, and habits of comportment, experienced and re-enacted in the habits of mind, dispositions, and even the bodily carriage of the students themselves. The customs and tastes—the habitus —of the grammar school were engrained at a corporal and psychic level.34 Educational ideology and practice created real pressures on students, many of whom deeply felt the need to find positions that would help them meet the obligations and aims of their education. As one writer would complain in the 1560s, although he and others were supposed to follow in the ‘footsteps’ of their fathers, ‘We the youth of this realm are drawn into divers and sundry doubtful ways and wandering by-paths’ and many ‘know not which way to direct our studies or else want help to go forward’.35 The Inns traditionally were one institution that could facilitate a young man’s transition into employment and service to commonweal by providing the specific training one needed to become a lawyer and magistrate; they were also an arena where one could make connections with potential patrons, which could propel one into the law or into England’s administrative ranks. Robert Googe, Barnabe’s father, for instance, saw the Inns as a route to the advancement into the upper echelon of the law: ‘I will he [Barnabe] be set to the Inns of Court, there to study and apply his learning in the law unto such time as by this said learning he attain and come to be made serjeant of the coif.’36 As Googe’s father recognized, for those young men who needed to find a living and serve their prince and country, the Inns of Court were a superb, well-situated launching point.37

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‘Minerva’s Men’ The Inns became more important as a conduit into London and the court in the latter half of the sixteenth century. In the mid- and late-sixteenth century, many young men came to the Inns, immersing themselves in the social world of early modern London while they furthered their careers.38 Some were there as a matter of breeding and to be prepared for elite society; others were after social mobility and laying the groundwork for political ambitions.39 By the later sixteenth century, (p.56) the Inns had developed a certain socially striving and careerist atmosphere. In the mid-Tudor period, for men of means and ambition, the Inns offered better and greater possibilities for social and financial advancement than other avenues, such as the church. The reasons for this lie in changing litigation rates, in the professionalization of law, and in the administration of the Tudor state.

Lawyers Wanted For many men, law was not an ideal career. Although he eventually became an ambassador and continued to translate practical and religious works, Googe complained that law required ‘studies that no kind of muse delight’.40 Even so, his father’s desire that he become a serjeant, and his sense that law was a lucrative, stable, and meaningful career, was well founded. In the 1560s, the need for lawyers to serve in the legal profession and other positions in the regional and national government rose dramatically: a consequence of the rising litigation rates, which were themselves the result of the growing number of landrelated transfers that followed the dissolution of the monasteries, as well as the increasing commerce- and debt-related transactions of an age of increased mercantile activity and overseas exploration. Consequently, at a time when England’s economy floundered and religious institutions were in major flux, for many men the Inns were the best way—perhaps for some, the only seemingly secure way—to find responsible, civically useful employment. The trend in litigation is consistent with what is called the ‘curvilinear thesis’, explained by Christopher Brooks: ‘periods of rapid social change produce a great deal of litigation as the law is adapted to new economic and social relationships’.41 Beginning in the 1550s, rates of litigation rose dramatically in England, especially in the central courts, peaking around 1640 (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2).42 When factoring in litigation rates relative to the size of the population, this explosion in legal business made the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries among the most litigious in English history.43 Whatever the specific litigation needs, in order to litigate, one needs a lawyer, but even as early as the late 1550s and early 1560s, the number of lawyers could not keep pace.44 By the time Elizabeth came to the throne, at every level lawyers were ‘thin on the ground’,45 with an absence of seasoned barristers to plead cases and fill judicial benches, and a genuine, popular need for more lawyers to do everyday legal work.46 In that (p.57)

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‘Minerva’s Men’ sense, the early years of Elizabeth prove an important exception to the otherwise timeless gripes about lawyers. In 1540, John Hales lamented that more ‘good wits’ did not study the law, an occupation that is a ‘good thing and acceptable to God if it be well 47

used’. By the early 1590s, the sentiment had transformed. In (p.58) 2 Henry VI, one of the rebels wants to eliminate them all: ‘First thing we do is kill all

Figure 2.1. Impressionistic sketch of the volume of central court litigation, c. 1200–1750, from Brooks, LLES, p. 66, used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

the lawyers.’48 Because of the unusual legal times in the 1560s, attending an inn offered a perhaps unprecedented, even unparalleled, opportunity to right-foot oneself for a lifetime of employment, financial security, and even some status. Even Erasmus considered it the best route to affluence, and ‘by the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign the law had virtually replaced the church as the career open to talents, the ladder on which young men

Figure 2.2. Cases in advanced stages in common pleas and King’s Bench, 1490– 1830, from Brooks, LLES, p. 68, used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

could climb to power and riches’.49 A further enticement to legal study was the preparation it provided for civic life—that is, for serving the state in the way that humanist treatises demanded. In the Boke Named the Governour, for instance, Thomas Elyot—himself a member of the Middle Temple—argues that legal professionals should model themselves on Cicero, that Roman paragon of philosophical and lawyerly training and civic duty. For Elyot, men should study philosophy and then combine their oratorical and rhetorical skills with legal learning to serve their country as magistrates, governors, and lawyers:

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‘Minerva’s Men’ I think verily if children were brought up as I have written and continually were retained in the right study of very philosophy until they passed the age of twenty-one years and then set to the laws of this realm […], undoubtedly they should become men of so excellent wisdom that throughout all the world should be founded in no commonweal more noble counsellors.50 Ultimately, he says, such learning results in ‘worshipful lawyers and also a public weal equivalent to the Greeks or Romans’. The treatise The Institution of a Gentleman (1555) further promotes the relationship between legal training and the betterment of the state: gentlemen ‘ought […] to be studious in the laws, which are the maintenance and upholding of every commonwealth’.51 By the middle of the sixteenth century, these ideals seem to have been widely adopted by legal men at the Inns,52 with Gerard Legh observing in 1562 that at the Inns one finds ‘the store of gentlemen of the whole realm, that repair thither to learn rule, and obey by law, to yield their fleece to their prince and commonwealth’.53 One way to serve prince and commonwealth was to be a lawyer, for in the sixteenth century a common idea was that law is central to an orderly polity, and lawyers’ importance coordinated with the centrality of law. Writers of the period often insisted on this fundamental relationship of the law to the commonweal. As Christopher Brooks explains, ‘law had a moral purpose’ and ‘it constituted the (p.59) means by which the kingdom, or political society, and the community became one and the same thing’—a shared value, a common wealth.54 In the 1540s, John Hales expressed that ‘The end of the laws is the preservation of the common wealth’,55 and the legal printer John Rastell (Jasper Heywood’s grandfather) asserted that ‘a good reasonable common law maketh a good common peace and a common wealth among a great commonality of people’.56 In a couple of speeches in 1559, Sir Nicholas Bacon drilled away at the law’s absolute criticality to peace and prosperity, claiming once that men should ‘yield and submit themselves to the law, as to the thing whereby each man enjoyeth his living, liberty, and life’. In almost the same terms, he claimed in another speech to newly promoted serjeants-at-law that ‘by the law (you know) every man enjoyeth the fruits, pleasures, and commodities of his goods, lands, liberty, and life’.57 As an ideal of commonweal gained an ideological foothold, so too did law’s standing improve.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ If law is the mainstay of the polity, then so are its lawyers, a value explicitly and repeatedly articulated in sixteenth-century speeches to lawyers and judges. In one, Bacon claims that ‘service of the law ought of right to be taken for an high and great service in the commonweal’.58 Christopher Yelverton, one of ‘Minerva’s men’, spoke glowingly of law and lawyers later in life, pronouncing to newly elected serjeants in 1589: ‘The law is the perfection of pure and tried reason, the frame of politic and prudent government, the rule of stayed and contented subjection, the sceptre of sweet and happy peace, and the life of the commonwealth’. He urged that ‘we do live to serve the commonwealth’.59 The Institution of a Gentleman mentions ‘a gentleman called to the ministration of the law’, a phrase that, with its ‘ministerial’ language, suggests that the legal profession is a ‘calling’, a virtuous, perhaps glorified way to serve the country and even God.60 Nevertheless, for those men like Googe who did not feel called to be barristersat-law (let alone serjeants), the Inns helped by advancing them to other legally related positions. As state and local governments expanded in the first years of Elizabeth’s reign, opportunities in these areas did, too.61 Consider the example of JPs. The backbone of Elizabethan local government consisted of unsalaried JPs, and their numbers increased greatly under Elizabeth. In the first quarter of the sixteenth century, JPs numbered about twenty-five per county. This number increased to forty or fifty in the middle part of Elizabeth’s reign, and ranged from (p.60) forty to ninety by 1603. Spurring this increase were workloads of local magistrates, who were expected to carry out their official commissions as well as special, ad hoc requests.62 Seats on the bench increasingly became prerequisites for gentlemen who aimed to advance in local and regional affairs.63 According to William Lambarde, the author of a contemporaneous handbook for JPs (pub. 1582), the number of justices ‘increased to the overflowing of each shire at this day’, partly due to ‘the growing number of the statute laws’ and partly due to the ‘ambitious desire of bearing rule in some’.64 Over the period, a growing percentage of JPs had spent time at an inn of court, suggesting their increasingly important role for the ‘ambitious’ who wanted to ‘bear rule’.65 Besides JPs, men with legal backgrounds were increasingly important in numerous other positions. One symptom of this general trend is the welldocumented rise of lawyer ‘men-of-business’ in Parliament, as well as the trend towards common lawyers increasingly taking positions as clerks, manorial stewards, and town recorders.66 The last item on the list is especially relevant to the legal job market: the number of incorporated towns rose over the period, and with them the number of recorders, which jumped from fifteen to fifty over the sixteenth century.67 Recorders were often barristers, or at least had spent some time at an inn, since towns frequently required that recorders be ‘learned in the laws of England’.68 Page 15 of 40

‘Minerva’s Men’ The growth of law underlies a relatively happy story about the legal job market in the 1560s, but it is worth recognizing that this story contrasts markedly with the general labour market in the decade. Norman Jones describes a bleak situation in which ‘making a living required sometimes heroic efforts’ because of the numerous economic disturbances of the decade: religious division, food shortages, increasing population, unemployment, rapid inflation, devaluation, and a decline in exports. In the period from 1540 to 1560, the upward movement of prices was ‘unexpectedly swift and savage, shaking the whole economic framework and proving a shattering experience to all who experienced it’, including those from all classes, especially farmers, merchants, and landowners.69 These trends created (p.61) human issues—how to earn and maintain food, clothing, and shelter? It created political ones, too—how to prevent crime and political unrest and maintain social order? Popular protests broke out, as did a literature of protest, and the situation, in Jones’s words, ‘rais[ed] concerns for all magistrates’. Nevertheless, the situation created a unique job situation for those who wanted to be magistrates. While the majority of English men and women had few prospects of a better life, those men with talent, ambition, and means could look, with well-founded optimism, towards the Inns as the gateway to financially stable as well as socially and politically valued work.70

Leaders for Commonweal Taken together, these generational, educational, and legal trends begin to explain the literary culture of the Inns in the 1560s: Men coming to the Inns were intensely concerned with making themselves useful to the commonweal. Given that the law was one of the few ‘growth industries’ at the time, and legal training was increasingly a requirement for various occupations and positions, inns-of-court men could feel confident and optimistic about their personal futures, and their chances of making a difference for their country. In their writings, members of the Inns reflect this commitment to the commonweal, and more immediately seek to shape the decorum of a rapidly growing class of legal magistrates, most of whom were being trained at the Inns. Members of the Inns, however, had a related incentive to produce their ‘magisterial’ works. This incentive stems from those higher up in the Elizabethan administration, who offered opportunities for position patronage, and whose tastes and interests influenced the modes and opinions of the time.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ In England, those higher up in the early Elizabethan state consisted of an older generational group, a set of educators, thinkers, and noblemen who at Cambridge had surrounded John Cheke: among others, Thomas Smith, Roger Ascham, Thomas Wilson, William Cecil, and especially Nicholas Bacon, all of whom became important figures in Edwardian or Elizabethan education and politics.71 In a now classic book, The Cambridge Connection, Winthrop Hudson traced the numerous scholarly, intellectual, and familial connections formed among these and other men at Cambridge and, later, in London at Gray’s Inn and at Court.72 Sometimes called the ‘Athenian tribe’ because of their interest in Greek pronunciation and in classical studies generally, the men in this network were influenced by Italian civic humanism, chiefly the idea that learning should be used in the vita activa and the (p.62) related conviction that the ‘commonweal’ should take precedence over individual or private interest. To be sure, each of these men had to negotiate and reconcile the conflicting pulls between ‘singular commodity’ and ‘commonweal’, and each of them had a slightly different view of who and what the commonweal was.73 In the Boke Named the Governour, Elyot’s vision was ‘aristocratic’, focusing on an aristocracy of ‘inferior governors’,74 whereas in The Commonwealth of England (1549), Thomas Smith imagined a more inclusive polity, a ‘commonweal’ made up of an ‘entire citizenry that was reformed, civil, industrious, and constantly conscious of the common good’. His ‘commonwealth’ includes monarchs, nobles, and gentry, as well as day labourers, merchants, retailers, and others of what can be called the ‘middling sort’.75 It would be difficult to name an aspect of the commonweal idea that was not up for debate: its beneficiaries, its borders, and the policies that would enrich it.76 Despite this conflict and flux, for the men in this generational group, early English humanism deeply inflected their political ideals and practice.77 Their lives and writings promulgated a ‘commonweal’ vocabulary that permeated political rhetoric and moulded the ideas and ideals of the next generation, most especially those men at the Inns in the 1560s. The ‘Cambridge connection’ was also a ‘Gray’s Inn connection’, and by 1560, many of the men in this group were highly placed in the Elizabethan government, creating an unprecedented concentration of inns-of-court men in Elizabeth’s Privy Council and government.78 This situation clarified and intensified the Inns’ already established role as a stepping stone into the government.79

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‘Minerva’s Men’ For writers at the Inns of Court in the 1560s, an especially important thought leader from this older generation was Bacon. He repeatedly expressed strong views about the role of the legal magistracy within the state and wrote at length about the Inns as a training ground for those seeking to serve in these roles. Amplifying sixteenth-century ideals about lawyers in the polity, Bacon felt strongly that lawyers and magistrates, especially local magistrates such as JPs, were integral to an orderly state, an idea he developed at length in a speech to assembled nobles and justices in the Star Chamber (Trinity Term, 1559). In it, Bacon reminds the assembled of their duties as ministers of justice. He establishes the centrality of law and the legal magistracy in the commonweal, stating that ‘by the conservation of peace and concord, every publique weal hath his (p.63) beginning, increase, and continuance’. Peace through justice, he continues, ‘is a perfect foundation to begin it [i.e. the commonweal], a marvellous good nurse to increase it, a strong pillar to sustain it, and a sure buckler [i.e. a shield] to defend it’. On the other hand, where the laws are not faithfully executed, ‘Division, dissension, and discord cannot but breed and bring decay, yea, and in time destruction and dissipation to every commonweal.’ For him, ‘It is manifest and plain that the good order or disorder of each country consisteth in the well executing or evil executing of you and your followers the justices’ charges of the same country.’80 Yet Bacon, along with Elizabeth’s chief secretary William Cecil, was not satisfied with the quality of the magistracy at the outset of Elizabeth’s reign.81 In 1559, Bacon complained about ‘careless and slothful’ magistrates who did not attend courts or assizes and who chose to be ‘good and quiet’ rather than attending to the commonweal.82 He persistently criticized indolent, even crooked magistrates, lambasting ‘the fearfulness, slothfulness, or corruption of temporal officers’, calling them ‘slothful, drowsy drones’.83 Throughout the 1560s, he returned to similar concerns in speeches to Parliament, often with the same images, for instance the unlit torch. The comparison appears first in 1559 and surfaces again in 1563, when Bacon declares to Parliament that ‘laws without execution to be as a torch unlighted or body without a soul’. In 1567, he described laws without execution ‘as these torches without light’. In 1571, he yet again invokes the torch: ‘Were it not a mere madness for a man to provide fair torches to guide his going by night and when he should use them in the night to carry them unlight?’84 Bacon’s anxieties were not wholly justified. At least in the county of Norfolk, justices were ‘not merely conscientious, but even enthusiastic’ in their attendance of quarter sessions.85 Nevertheless, Bacon felt strongly and acted quickly to propose reforms. In 1563, he recommended that Elizabeth appoint a commission to ensure that local magistrates and, more particularly, JPs be assessed for negligence or corruption:

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‘Minerva’s Men’ [T]he Queen should make choice every second or third year of certain expert and proved persons, to whom commission should be granted to try out and examine by all means and ways the offences of all such as have not seen to the due execution of laws, according to the offices and charges committed to them by the prince, and the offences so found and certified to be sharply punished without remission or redemption.86 (p.64) These commissions were never formed, and in 1571 Bacon repeated the proposal to Parliament almost verbatim.87 Bacon’s interest in the magistracy was not new. Earlier in his career, he focused on training in a report on the Inns of Court. In the 1530s or early 1540s, Bacon was part of a three-member commission, established by Henry VIII, to propose a new college of law. Alongside Bacon, the commission included Thomas Denton (of the Middle Temple) and one Robert Cary (of Strand Inn and then the Middle Temple).88 Their final report described the structure of the current Inns, while spelling out a programme of studies for a new, fifth inn that would combine legal and liberal studies to train diplomats and administrators.89 The report thus aims to help the king ‘be the better served of [his] Grace’s own students of the law as well in foreign countries as within this [his] Grace’s realm’. To accomplish this goal, the authors advocate mooting (in French or Latin) and readings, as well as learning ‘pure’ tongues (as opposed to the ‘corrupted’ pigeon language of legal writings, law-French), and especially works concerned with statecraft. They urge that every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, someone who knows French and Latin well should ‘read some orator or book of rhetoric, or else some other author, which treateth of the government of a commonwealth, openly to all the company’.90 In addition, students should spend time abroad, presumably to learn diplomacy, and to use their literary skills to record historical and military information that could benefit the commonwealth for posterity. Finally, the king should appoint two students to write a chronicle history of England and the students, who should be trained in military skills, such as use of the crossbow, also—when in war—‘set forth in writing all the whole order of the battle, and this to be registered in their House [i.e. their inn] and to remain there forever’.91 Although jointly authored, the report seemingly reflects Bacon’s attitudes: later, he founded a grammar school that incorporated many of the ideas in the report itself.92

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‘Minerva’s Men’ While the Inns never instituted these reforms, at least some members in the 1560s were likely aware of Bacon’s ideals, values, and doubts concerning England’s magistracy. Bacon kept up his legal studies throughout the 1550s, was elected treasurer of Gray’s Inn in 1552, and then became joint treasurer from 1555. Once he became a privy councillor, he served as ‘natural liaison’ between the council and (p.65) the Inns.93 Individual members of Inns had some personal connections to Bacon, too. The most directly linked was Thomas Blundeville, who served as a mathematics tutor in Bacon’s household for some time. George Gascoigne married Bacon’s distant cousin, the widow Elizabeth Boyes (née Bacon), whose will Bacon supervised.94 Sir Henry Goodere (adm GI 1555) had ‘family connections’ with both Nicholas Bacon and William Cecil. Sir Francis Wyndham (called to the bar, LI 1560) married Nicholas Bacon’s daughter, Elizabeth, in 1570.95 In addition to these familial links, other innsmen had direct or distant ties to the ‘Cambridge connection’. Googe was a ward of William Cecil and dedicated the second and third editions of the Zodiac of Life to him; Thomas Blundeville dedicated one of his translations of Plutarch to Roger Ascham.96 More than these individual connections, Bacon’s life must have offered an inspiring model for members to emulate: he was from modest origins, of ‘yeoman extraction’, educated at Cambridge, then Gray’s Inn; he made a successful career as a statesman, acquired land and improved buildings, concerned himself with improving the state by reminding legal officers of their responsibilities, and proposed educational and administrative reforms.97 He lived the classical and legal learning and civic involvement that he advocated. In the architecture of his great hall at Gorhambury, built in the 1570s, Bacon had sayings from Cicero and Seneca carved around the walls. Sententiae are, in a sense, a blend of the classics and the law. At once ancient in origin and legalistic in tone, maxims can be likened to the decrees of public institutions: they are ‘lawyer-orator-judgelike’. The great house sententiae, intended both for Bacon’s contemplation and for visitors, displayed Bacon’s commitment to ‘a humanistic and neostoic political ethic which finds in rationale, humane, and prudent conduct the foundation of political behaviour and asserts the power of law’.98 He was a paragon for young men pursuing academic studies, literary artistry, and politics.99 Whether directly or indirectly, Bacon and the ‘Cambridge connection’ probably influenced the member-authors of the Inns, who actively combined legal and liberal learning, shaping themselves and presenting the societies in terms advocated in the Denton-Bacon-Cary report and exemplified by Bacon himself.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ Legal professionals held Bacon in special esteem. William Staunford, a former member of Gray’s Inn (adm 1536) and a justice in the Court of Common Pleas, (p.66) dedicates his treatise on royal prerogative (1567) to Bacon because ‘I know yourself to have observed the like order in your own study, which in few years hath gotten you above other the great learning you have’, and because ‘I covet your judgement in these matters wherewith you be dayly in ure and exercised’.100 Indeed, beginning in the mid-1550s, Bacon’s influence seems to have been felt across the profession as it ‘fashioned its own self-image largely in terms that would have corresponded nicely to the public rhetoric of Lord Keeper Bacon’.101 At the Inns, writers turned to their quills to demonstrate that they were manifestations of the ideal, ethical magistrates that Bacon described in his speeches and the ideal, humanities-inflected legal minds that Bacon had hoped for in his report on the Inns. They aimed to fashion their fellow inns-of-court men, and already practising magistrates, into the same mould. William Bavand’s Good Ordering of a Commonweal (1559), the first book Heywood mentions in the ‘Minerva’s men’ passage, is a translation of the Lutheran-influenced German author Johannes Ferrarius Montanus’s De republica bene instituenda, first published in Basel in 1556. Infused with the ideas in Cicero, including de officiis (‘on duties’) and de legibus (‘on laws’), Ferrarius’s treatise covers the responsibilities and importance of magistrates, including judges, notaries, and other officers in national and civic governance, as well as practising lawyers. These ‘lower magistrates’ form the backbone of a commonwealth: for Ferrarius, they form a special class of citizens who are distinct from both subjects and princes since they do not suffer from common or monarchic vices.102 Learned legal professionals must serve as magistrates in a Christian, here meaning a religiously reformed and well-governed, commonwealth.103

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‘Minerva’s Men’ Bavand, whose membership in the Middle Temple merits a mention in his preface, has aims that parallel Ferrarius’s. The title page indicates that herein ‘well magistrates, as private persons, be put in remembrance of their duties […] according to the godly institutions and sound doctrine of Christianity’. In translating the treatise, he aims explicitly to promote the public good by providing a work in which ‘vices be sharply rebuked’, ‘virtues highly commended’, and ‘men’s minds moved to embrace godly living’.104 Implicitly, however, he also advocates that he—and others learned in the laws of England— have a central role to play in the order of the state. In the fourth book, dealing with the ideal training for magistrates, Bavand (via Ferrarius) comments that the humanities are crucial to training,105 but (p.67) so is the law: ‘the commonweal can neither be beautified ne governed without the knowledge of the law, which such men shall best practice as be learned therein, and favour godliness and justice.’ Furthermore, ‘the commonweal can neither be appointed, ne yet maintained without the sense of good ordinances, so can it not be governed without assistance of learned lawyers.’106 Later he reiterates: ‘But the law of itself is dumb, of itself without operation, unless there be men that may open it to others.’107 The treatise echoes the ideas of Bacon, who in a 1559 speech assigned to legal men the power to bring the law to life: ‘the law of itself is but a dumb and a dead thing. The servitors and ministers to the law be those that give life thereto and bring forth the whole fruit thereof.’108 In a speech to Parliament in 1571, Bacon made the point also that magistrates are the backbone of the commonweal, stating that ‘laws and law-makers and all magistrates’ are ‘the very foundation of all government’.109 Bacon’s and Bavand’s conviction that men animate the written law enjoyed wide uptake in inns-of-court circles. Thomas North develops these themes in Book Three of his translation of Antonio de Guevara’s Dial of Princes (1557). Although addressed ‘to princes’, the book is more a manual for all magistrates, arguing for upright legal men’s key role in fostering the good order of the state. North, via Guevara, does this by describing at length how unqualified or dishonest ones destroy it:

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‘Minerva’s Men’ O poor and miserable commonwealth, where the governors and judges thereof do not caste their eyes but unto them they ought to chastise; where they do not think in their heart but how they may enrich their coffers; where they do not occupy their hands but to take bribes, and do not pass the time but in banquets. And I said not without cause ‘banquets’: For there are many judges which employ their study more to get friends, to maintain their state proudly, than for to read books, to judge men’s causes uprightly. The judge which never readeth, the judge which never studieth, the judge which never openeth book, the judge which is never in his house, the judge which day and night robbeth, how is it possible that he execute one true justice?110 As Guevara relays it, North aligns dishonesty and lack of learning as faults, suggesting that ‘never reading’ and lining one’s pocket are similar offences. Upright judges must be learned (in the liberal arts and the law) as well as honest, and one senses that North links these virtues as well. Likewise, Thomas Norton’s Institution of (p.68) Christian Religion, his 1561 translation of Calvin, also contains passages, drawn explicitly from Cicero, that advocate the importance of the legal magistracy in terms that parallel those of FerrariusBavand, Guevara-North, and Bacon: ‘the law is a dumb magistrate’, but ‘the magistrate is a living law’, an expression that appears to mean both that law is ‘judge made’ and that legal men are (or should be) exemplars of virtue.111 Bavand, North, and Norton stand at the beginning of a long line of inns-of-court men who subscribe to the ideal of an ethical legal magistracy as the backbone of a stable state. Paul Raffield has shown that between 1560 and 1660, the Inns created a system of customs and visual signs—in their dining customs, revels, and architecture—which represented the legal societies as ‘an ideal commonwealth of responsible citizens’, and which promulgated the idea that the English legal profession was ‘the guardian of common law rights and the arbiter of disputes between magistrate and subject’.112 This fervent ideological commitment to ‘law’ in relation to ‘commonweal’ developed at a particular time and place—in the 1560s at the Inns—in response to specific circumstances, involving the generational and educational backgrounds of men at the Inns, developments in the legal system, and the values and attitudes of an older generation of then highly placed men in the Elizabethan administration about legal magistracy.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ These confident statements about the significance of lawyers and legal men in the polity law stand out against the disposition of the legal establishment under Mary, when the profession demonstrated ‘ultra-conservatism in masters of law’ and ‘ostentatious loyalty to the regime’.113 Such tendencies developed following the death of Edward VI, when some ancients in the profession were involved in the plot to divert the crown away from Mary and Elizabeth to Lady Jane Grey. Perhaps to counter questions of allegiance, the legal profession adopted a pattern of quietism and conservatism under Mary. By the end of her reign, however, the situation had begun to change: the shortage of legal men throughout the realm gave more authority to those who did have credentials. According to one estimate, in Mary’s reign, given the legal background needed and the demands of the work, there were never more than about thirty common lawyers who could serve at the highest offices of royal service.114 The Inns took some years to respond to the increased demand for lawyers, so the supply of excellent legal men with potential for service at the top continued to dwindle in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, and this scarcity gave yet more power to those who did have the right credentials. (p.69) Furthermore, those men with evangelical sympathies, such as Bavand, who had conformed under Mary, may have felt especially eager about the possibility of having a say in Elizabeth’s new government. Finally, under Elizabeth, most occupants of high positions were now legal men, rather than members of the clergy or aristocrats. These circumstances gave lawyers and legal men a new sense of their authority and autonomy as a professional group. Inns men wrote within a set of values circulated from the very upper reaches of the legal magistracy, and their engagement with these values helped to promote this growing authority, all of which returns us to a signal point of the present book: the development of the Inns as a distinct political space, something akin to a public sphere. Bavand, North, and Norton—and even Bacon himself—describe the legal magistracy as a foundational force in the polity, as well as an independent one. The legal magistracy, they suggest, is a distinct social and political group, able to bring peace to citizens, wise counsel to princes. In response to legal change, and in the effort to shape ‘the magistracy’ in the very terms that the ruling elite would have recognized, members developed a literature that asserted the existence of this political force in the polity: unlike the quietism and conformism of the legal establishment under Mary, early in Elizabeth’s reign, legal professionals came to see themselves as a rare, special, autonomous, social as well as political entity. In shoring up the law, the mainstay of the monarch and the commonweal, members of the Inns promoted the magistracy as a new political force.

Institutional Status

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‘Minerva’s Men’ Among Heywood’s ‘Minerva’s men’, the literature of magistracy reflects a growing awareness of the power and possibilities of the legal establishment. Correlated with this awareness is the idea that the Inns were a distinctive, autonomous, and prestigious space. Gerard Legh captures this sense in his account of the Inner Temple Christmas revels in 1561–2, which portrays the Inner Temple as an important, sovereign locale, a separate country, or at least a ‘province’, with its own ruler and heraldic devices. Yet the increasing institutional prestige of the Inns is evident in other places, too, especially in a series of regulations, passed in the 1550s, that distinguish them from their ‘lesser’ Inns of Chancery. A survey of demographic changes at the mid-century Inns testifies to this changed perception. In the 1560s, in demographic terms, the Inns were largely the same as the medieval Inns of Court. Yet, aligned with— and perhaps even caused by—the mid-Tudor transformation in the size and significance of the legal profession, the Inns began to present themselves and to think of themselves in increasingly elite terms. Over the sixteenth century the population of the Inns increased dramatically. Between 1425 and 1550, the number of admissions to the Inns hovered around fifty per year, but then rose rapidly from 1550 to 1575, from just under 100 in 1550 to nearly 150 in 1575, to a peak of about 300 per year in the 1610s.115 The (p.70) physical size of the Inns eventually expanded to meet the need for more lawyers and legally trained men,116 with numerous building projects beginning at the time and continuing through the rest of the century. The 1550s and 1560s saw the construction of private chambers, as well as the rebuilding of Gray’s Inn Hall; the replacement of the Lincoln’s Inn kitchens, an addition of a gallery to that Inn’s hall in 1565, as well as a new chapel there; and the beginning of the Middle Temple Hall in 1562. Yet this physical expansion did more than accommodate increased numbers. The building of halls, in particular, reflects something larger, perhaps a ‘faith of students and practitioners in the legitimacy of the common law’,117 at a time when members could be optimistic that the societies and the common law could serve both them and the public good.118

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‘Minerva’s Men’ The expansion of the Inns of Court is but one example of well-documented changes in higher education in Renaissance England, particularly at the universities.119 Over the sixteenth century, it generally became accepted that, in the words of J. H. Hexter, ‘the noble and gentle must become learned in order to play their part in the government of the commonwealth—as soldiers, ambassadors, councillors, governors, judges, administrators, in whatever office they are called to’. Education, and particularly higher education, was hence ‘held forth as the means whereby men […] should win a place in the service of the princely commonwealth’.120 Members of the aristocracy increasingly entered the universities to get the education that would allow them to become servants to their prince and country. Over time, men from the gentry and merchant families, who wanted to avail themselves of the sorts of opportunities the aristocracy enjoyed, joined the universities as well. In response to the growing demand for education, by the end of the century the universities had expanded in population and demographic makeup. Nevertheless, sixteenth-century trends in education in England affected the universities and the Inns of Court differently. While Oxford and Cambridge began to expand in the 1560s, the greatest expansion at the Inns occurred in the 1570s and 1580s. In addition, the population of the universities altered fairly dramatically, as they accepted large numbers of the aristocracy and the gentry, and then entrants from a variety of classes further down on the social scale: the sons of merchants, tradesmen, and yeomen.121 At the Inns, which were already historically associated with the education of the aristocracy and the gentry, the change solely involved accepting more yeomen and merchants.122 Moreover, despite some definite (p.71) fluctuations, the social background of members did not alter substantially over the entire century. Over 80 per cent of the members between 1550 and 1640 came from the landed gentry or the aristocracy.123 The most noticeable demographic shift in the membership of the Inns in the sixteenth century was in the percentage of new members with a university education, which rose from 13 to 42 per cent between 1561 and 1581, as more and more members of the aristocracy and the gentry—such as the ones mentioned by Heywood—moved from the grammar schools, to the universities, to the Inns of Court.124 This might simply have been the result of the job market: as the market for clergy contracted and the market for lawyers exploded, more men with university educations, who in the past would have found that a university degree was enough, went to the Inns for further training and to connect with the political and social world that would help with their careers.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ In terms of the literary culture, it is notable that the vast majority of writers at the Inns were in the small but increasing percentage of admitted members who had gone to university. Perhaps those who had attended the university had more experience with poetry, translation, and drama, and so were more inclined to continue these traditions at the Inns. It may also be that their training made them even more motivated to cultivate a life of service to the commonweal, and more eager to demonstrate this commitment in writing. Since most of the writers were not aristocratic, they turned to their rarefied knowledge, garnered in grammar schools and the universities, to elevate their social standing, using cultural capital to compensate for a lack of actual capital. The increasingly adamant identification of the Inns of Court as elite institutions for the training of a legal magistracy marked the late 1550s and early 1560s most noticeably. One sees this change in a set of ‘Considerations Delivered to the Parliament, 1559’, contained in the Cecil Papers at Hatfield House, which proposes to keep out anyone who is not descended from a nobleman or gentleman: ‘That none study the laws, temporal or civil, except he be immediately descended from a nobleman or gentleman, for they are the entries to rule and government, and generation [i.e. lineage] is the chiefest foundation of inclination.’125 At the Inns themselves, a series of statutes concerning admissions from the Inns of Chancery evidence a certain air of superiority camouflaged as selectiveness. Up through the sixteenth century, the Inns of Chancery often provided an initial year of legal training to men who then went to an inn of court. But as time went on, the Inns of Chancery became associated with the ‘lower branch’ of the legal profession, with attorneys and solicitors who dealt directly with clients. The Inns, on the other hand, became associated with the ‘upper branch’, the barristers who pleaded cases before the court. While this process took over a century, it began in 1556, when the Benchers of the Inns of Court first passed rules to exclude attorneys from the Inns. For instance, the Inner Temple passed the following on 23 May 1557: ‘At (p.72) this parliament it is ordered that from henceforth there shall be no attorneys, nor other known to be a common solicitor of matters admitted into this House without the assent and agreement of parliament.’126 Here we see the division between the apprentice model for attorneys and the formal educational model dominant at the Inns of Court, where the ‘“scientific” rather than “mechanical” aspects of the law’ were contemplated.127

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‘Minerva’s Men’ The Inns of Chancery felt that this increasing elitism would damage their own student population, as more men would want to enter directly into the more prestigious Inns of Court, rather than the seemingly lesser Inns of Chancery. Indeed, in the 1560s, the Inns of Chancery petitioned the ‘greater’ Inns only to admit men who had first spent some time at an inn of Chancery.128 The Inns of Court reacted positively, creating a special admission fee for those who came from an inn of Chancery. Even so, the regulations of the 1560s augur the beginning of a trend: a decrease in numbers of men moving from a ‘lesser’ house to a ‘greater’ one and the adoption of specialized functions for training in different branches of the law.129 More important, the regulations suggest that the governors and members of the Inns in this decade began to view the institutions as more socially and professionally elite than they had previously. Between 1550 and 1560, little had yet changed in terms of the population of the Inns or its demographic makeup. Yet this single decade—and particularly with the rise in litigation and the advent of the new Elizabethan regime and the attendant need for a large and well-trained legal magistracy—is marked by a change in members’ perception of the Inns and their professional futures. For much of their history, the Inns were associated with the education of England’s administrative leaders. But in the mid-sixteenth century, especially in the face of the increased societal need for lawyers and the optimism fuelled by the opportunities opening up in a new government for legally trained men, the Inns began to be more self-consciously recognized as instruments of social advancement. These changes, coupled with the developing internal sense of the Inns of Court as more prestigious than the ‘junior’ Inns of Chancery, enhanced the sense that the institutions could facilitate a member’s connection with and movement towards significant positions in the Tudor administration, connections that would allow him to find a position to fulfil his personal, social, and financial interests as well as his duty to the commonwealth of England.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ In this sociological, educational, and legal environment of the Inns during the 1560s, literary activities were one set of activities that assisted some inns-ofcourt men in making the transition from educational to professional life, offering a way for members to make contact with potential patrons and to speak to them in the (p.73) ‘commonweal’ language that both authors and benefactors valued. At the same time, such activity allowed men at the Inns to take the skills and texts they had learned about in their school days (their poetry, translations, and drama) and press the production of these works into a form of service to the state. By making their writing useful to the commonwealth, members of the Inns were able to involve themselves in the political and intellectual life of the nation. Even so, in the process of making themselves and their writings useful to the commonweal, authors at the Inns helped to advance the idea that the Inns of Court were an elite space, with the legal magistracy an independently minded and self-authorizing group of citizen-counsellors to the prince. Their literary culture thus begins to seem like a record not only of changes in the legal magistracy but also of an emerging autonomous, and elite, political sphere. But how then do other kinds of literature, poems, and plays work in the context of these institutional and legal changes? The literary culture was built from many individuals who wrote in a variety of forms: treatise, verse, translation, tragedy, and comedy. We know that each of the genres has a different social meaning, and with respect to the Inns, each one functioned within and outwith in distinct ways. So we must examine the literary culture of the Inns, and the ways that specific genres—and the authors and works associated with them— responded to shifts in the legal culture, as well as how these responses undergird a related political shift in political discourse. The main genres of the period are lyric poetry, classical translation, de casibus tragedy, and original drama, with each serving individual authors, their community, and the commonweal in distinct and sometimes surprising ways. We begin in the next chapters with lyric poetry and classical translations, types of writing that served to promote individual and communal self-fashioning. The later chapters focus on drama, an already communal form in which members presented these fashioned selves both to themselves and to other groups and institutions, making more explicit and more public the individual styles and communal behaviours, beliefs, and values—the habitus—that the lyric poetry and translations manifested and helped to form. (p.74) Notes:

(1) ‘Preface’ to Thyestes in Elizabethan Seneca: Three Tragedies, ed. by James Ker and Jessica Winston, MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translation Series, vol 8 (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2012), ll. 83–104. (2) For a complete list of writers associated with the Inns in the 1560s, see Appendix 1.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ (3) On Heywood’s life, see Dennis Flynn, ‘Heywood, Jasper (1535–1598)’, ODNB (09/10/13) and Dennis Flynn, ‘The English Mission of Jasper Heywood, S. J.’, Archivum historicum societati Jesu, 54 (1985), 45–76 (p. 45). On Heywood’s works in the context of his life, see Flynn’s John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 36–53. (4) On Heywood’s reputation, see Elizabethan Seneca, p. 1 (n. 1). (5) On the presence of recusant Catholics at the Inns, see ‘Corporate Culture’ in Chapter 1, and Parmiter, Popish Recusancy, esp. pp. 2–12. Also see several articles by R. M. Fisher, ‘Reform, Repression, and Unrest’; ‘The Reformation of Church and Chapel at the Inns of Court, 1530–1580’, Guildhall Studies in London History, 3 (1979), 223–47; ‘Reformation of the Clergy at the Inns of Court, 1530– 1580’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 12 (1981), 69–91; and ‘Privy Council Coercion’. Also, Norman Jones, English Reformation, pp. 124–30. (6) Accedens of Armory in Inns of Court, in REED: Inns, II, pp. 366–79 (p. 366) and Pound, ‘Sussex Oration’, in REED: Inns, II, pp. 636–50 (p. 638, line 23). For more on this oration, see ‘Two Marriage Orations by Thomas Pound’ in Chapter 8. (7) C. H. Conley argues that Golding was also connected to the Inns through family, since his uncle, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1561, and because Golding was resident in the house of Cecil, which may have connected him to a wider circle of Cecil’s family, wards, and recipients of his patronage, including Barnabe Googe, Thomas Hoby, and John Studley (p. 41; 144). (8) For more on these figures and their connections to the Inns, see Appendix 1. (9) Finkelpearl also makes this point in John Marston, pp. 24–5. (10) Lawrence Stone, ‘Prosopography’, Daedalus, 100.1 (1971), 46–79 (esp. p. 46; 59). (11) The Inns of Chancery trained clerks of chancery and also provided initial training for men wishing to enter into one of the Inns of Court. Later in the period, as the legal profession began to split into two branches, the Inns of Chancery became associated with training of the ‘lower branch’ solicitors. See C. W. Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers, esp. pp. 1–10.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ (12) Bavand’s entry to the Middle Temple is recorded in H. A. C. Sturgess, Register of Admissions to the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, Volume 1, Fifteenth Century to 1781 (London: Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, 1949), p. 23. The admission of a William Baldwin, son of John B. of Byfield, Northamptonshire, appears on the same page. There is some debate about whether this is a reference to the author, William Baldwin. Regardless of his admission, our William Baldwin was significantly older than most of the others whom Heywood mentions, having begun his literary career in the reign of Edward VI. Even so, Heywood clearly establishes his popularity, but not necessarily his presence at the law schools, saying only that there one hears a ‘great report’ of Baldwin’s name. On Baldwin’s life, see W. F. Trench, ‘William Baldwin’, Modern Quarterly of Language and Literature, 2 (1898–9), 259–67 and Eveline I. Feasey, ‘William Baldwin’, Modern Language Review, 20 (1925), 407– 18; John King, ‘William Baldwin’, in ODNB [19 July 2014]. (13) Blundeville (1522?–1606?) was probably admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1541. See Tessa Beverley’s entry in the ODNB (21/07/14) and the entry, under the name ‘Blomvyle’, in Baker, Men of Court, I, p. 325. (14) In a freely composed first chorus, Heywood says that Hecuba, ‘a mirror is to teach you what you are, | Your wavering wealth, O princes, here is seen’. Later, a line casts Priam as ‘a cause of pride, a glass of fear, a mirror for the nones’. See Troas in Ker and Winston, Elizabethan Seneca, 1.Cho.55–6 and 2.2.74. (15) It is telling that in its topics and tone, the literary culture of the Inns, as described by Heywood, differs from the way it is implicitly represented in another literary landmark of the time, Tottel’s Miscellany (1557). Christopher Warner argues that many of the poems in the collection must have come from the inns-of-court men, but the collection does not highlight their involvement. Instead, it downplays the contributions by ‘uncertain authors’ and presents the collection as the product of an earlier era of ‘courtly makers’, from the time of Wyatt and Surrey, thus downplaying any sense of its immediate social or political relevance. In Warner’s persuasive view, Tottel’s Miscellany presents poetry, and perhaps the miscellany itself, as a ‘safe space’ for the ‘joyful social/vocational activity’ of versification. In other words, Tottel’s Miscellany presents poetry as stylistically and aesthetically important, but politically disengaged, deliberately and joyfully so. By 1560, when Heywood was writing, the literary landscape had changed. In Heywood’s telling, the new literary centre is the Inns of Court. Heywood suggests that some writers may still have written light, sweetly sauced ditties (in the vein of earlier courtly makers), but they did not attach their names to such ditties in print. Instead, they wrote and published works on the more sensitive topics of magistracy and rule. See Warner, The Making and Marketing of Tottel’s Miscellany, 1557: Songs and Sonnets in the Summer of Martyrs’ Fires, Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700 Series (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). The quote appears on p. 194. Page 31 of 40

‘Minerva’s Men’ (16) See Chapter 7 for a fuller discussion of this play. (17) For criticism emphasizing the disconnect between humanist pedagogy and legal training, and/or the ways that writers questioned the values of humanist training, see Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) and Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). This disconnect is also a central theme in most of the essays in Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert, eds. Early Modern Academic Drama (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). (18) For a useful overview of this satire, and others in the period that question the value of humanist education see, Sarah Knight, ‘Fantastical Distempers: The Psychopathology of Early Modern Scholars’, in Walker and Streufert, ed. Early Modern Academic Drama, pp. 129–52. (19) Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1.1.56–7. (20) The idea here is based on an important observation by Elizabeth Hanson, who writes that ‘as academic attainments move from school or university to the world beyond [… they] must be converted into other forms (counsel, literature) before these can in turn be exchanged for wealth and honor’. See ‘Playing the Boundaries: Club Law and the Place of Vernacular Academic Drama’, Conference Paper MS, Shakespeare Association of America, 2012. Cited with permission of the author. (21) Jennifer Bishop, ‘Utopia and Civic Politics in Mid-Sixteenth-Century London’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 933–53. (22) Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, p. 5. For other discussions of the popularity and signification of ‘common weal’, see Mark Knights and others, ‘Towards a Social and Cultural History of Keywords and Concepts by the Early Modern Research Group’, History of Political Thought, 31 (2010), 427–48. (23) Mirror for Magistrates: Edited from Original Texts in the Huntington Library, ed. by Lily B. Campbell (1938; reprint: New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960), p. 63. Unless otherwise stated, references to the Mirror will be to pages in this edition. (24) Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, ed. by Irby B. Cauthen (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), l. 48; 136; 242; 255. (25) Thomas North, trans., Dial of Princes (London: Thomas Marsh for John Wayland, 1557), STC 12427, sig. A1r. Page 32 of 40

‘Minerva’s Men’ (26) Barnabe Googe, The Firste Thre Bokes of the Most Christia[n] Poet Marcellus Palingenius, Called the Zodyake of Lyfe (London: John Tisdale for Rafe Newbery), STC 19148, sig. *2v. (27) See respectively Thomas Blundeville, A Newe Booke Containing the Arte of Ryding (London: William Seres, [1561?]), sig. A5v; and Three Morall Treatises (London: William Seres, [1561]), STC 20063.5, title page. For more on appeals to ‘commonweal’ among inns-of-court writers, see ‘Versions of Cicero’ in Chapter 4. (28) The methods and general purpose of this curriculum, and its relationship to poetry, are surveyed by Panofsky, ‘A Descriptive Study of Mid-Tudor Poetry’, pp. 4–39. (29) On the ideals of otium and negotium in quattrocento Italy, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), esp. I, p. 108; 116. (30) Thomas Starkey, Thomas Starkey: A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, Camden Society, 4th ser., 37, ed. by T. F. Mayer (London: Royal Historical Society, 1989), p. 4. On the influence of Italian civic humanism on educational practices, theories, and manuals in the Northern Renaissance, see Skinner, Foundations, p. 213; 241–3. (31) Boke Named the Gouernour (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1531), STC 7635, sigs. B7v–C2r. (32) Turberville, ‘The Louer to Cupid for Mercie’, in Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets (London: Henry Denham, [1567]), STC 24326, sigs. G4r–H6r. Here, Turberville likely refers to Seneca’s prose. (33) Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, p. 3. (34) Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, p. 30. (35) Goddred Gilby, ‘To the Reader’, in [Ad Quintum] An Epistle or Letter of Exhortation Written in Latyne by Marcus Tullius Cicero, To His Brother Quintus The Proconsull or Deputy of Asia, Wherein the Office of a Magistrate is Conningly and Wisely Described (London: Rowland Hall, 1561), STC 5306, sig. A2r. (36) Qtd. in Eccles, ‘Barnabe Googe in England, Spain, and Ireland’, English Literary Renaissance, 15 (1985), 353–70 (p. 356). ‘Set to’ here is used in the sense of placing a person in a certain position or occupation, e.g. ‘to set to school’; see ‘Set, v.1’, definition 26, in OED Online [1 December 2015]. (37) Prest, Inns of Court, p. 21.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ (38) Prest, Inns of Court, pp. 21–2. (39) Michael Graves, Thomas Norton: Parliament Man (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 28. The link between the Inns and Parliament was particularly strong. See M. A. R. Graves, ‘The Management of the Elizabethan House of Commons: The Council’s “Men-of-Business”’, Parliamentary History, 2 (1983), 11–38; Patrick Collinson, ‘Puritans, Men of Business and Elizabethan Parliaments’, Parliamentary History, 7 (1988), 187–211; and M. A. R. Graves, ‘The Common Lawyers and the Privy Council’s Parliamentary Men-of-Business, 1584–1601’, Parliamentary History, 8 (1989), 189–215. (40) Barnabe Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, ed. by Judith M. Kennedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), poem 27. All references to Googe’s poetry will be to numbered entries in this volume. (41) Brooks, LLES, p. 91. (42) Brooks, LLES, p. 68. (43) Brooks, LLES, p. 71. (44) Brooks, LLES, p. 84. (45) Brooks, LPS, p. 61. (46) Lewis Abbott, ‘Public Office and Private Profit: The Legal Establishment in the Reign of Mary Tudor’, in The Mid-Tudor Polity, c. 1540–1560, ed. by Robert Tittler and Jennifer Loach (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), pp. 137– 58 (p. 156). (47) Commendation of the Laws [of England] (c. 1540/2), BL MS Harleian 4990, fol. 20r. Also qtd in Brooks, LPS, p. 61. By the turn of the century, this situation changed as the ‘job market’ became increasingly saturated with lawyers. Thus the theologian William Perkins observed that too many young men became lawyers, instead of clergymen. See Perkins, Of the Calling of the Ministerie Two Treatises (London: I. R[oberts] for William Welby, 1605), STC 19733, sig. B2v. On changing attitudes towards lawyers, see Brooks, LLES, pp. 22–5. (48) 2 Henry VI, 4.2.70. (49) Prest, Inns, p. 22.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ (50) Elyot, Boke, fol. 55r; 59v. See also the discussion of Elyot’s view on the role of lawyers in the commonweal in Brooks, LLES, p. 205. Elyot’s book is, in a sense, one of the first books of ‘managerial’ advice in England, taking the subject of training magistrates as its subject. See Norman Jones, ‘Of Poetry and Politics: The Managerial Culture of Sixteenth-Century England’, in Leadership and Elizabethan Culture, ed. by Peter Iver Kaufman (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2013), pp. 17–36 (esp. pp. 24–7). (51) Humfrey Braham, Institucion of a Gentleman (London: Thomas Marsh, [1555]), STC 14104, sig. D6v. (52) Brooks, LLES, p. 205. (53) REED: Inns, II, p. 367. (54) Brooks, LPS, pp. 25–6. (55) Hales, Commendation, BL MS Harleian 4990, fol. 46v; also qtd in Baker, Oxford History, p. 30. (56) Exposiciones T[er]mino[rum] Legu[m] Anglo[rum] (London: [John Rastell], [c. 1525]), STC 20702, A1r. On the centrality of law in the commonwealth, see Baker’s section on ‘Individualism and the Common Weal’ in the Oxford History, pp. 30–4. (57) ‘Speeches of Sir Nicholas Bacon’, Folger MS V.a.143, fol. 12; 18. (58) Folger MS V.a.143, fol. 19. (59) BL MS Add 48109, fol. 8v and 9r. See also Brooks, LPS, p. 63. (60) Institucion, sig. D7v. ‘Ministration’ has several meanings, including ‘administering law or justice’ as well as ‘ministering in religious matters’ (OED, 5 Sept 2014). The author uses the first sense, connotes the second as well. (61) On the increasing reverence for legal education and its political and social possibilities in the period, see also Heal and Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, pp. 272–3. (62) See A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 87–111. Also Gleason, ‘The Burden of the Commission’, in Justices of the Peace, pp. 96–115. (63) John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 386.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ (64) William Lambarde, Eirenarcha: Or of the Office of the Justices of Peace in Two Books (London: Ralph Newbery and Henry Bynneman, by the ass[istance] of Richard Tottel and Christopher Barker, 1581), STC 15163, cap. 6, pp. 37–8. On the relationship between office and status, see Heal and Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, pp. 168–75. (65) J. H. Gleason charts the increasing percentages of JPs who had attended a university and inn or both; see Justices of the Peace, pp. 81–9. (66) Brooks, LPS, p. 62. (67) On the increasing numbers of incorporated towns, see Robert Tittler, ‘The Incorporation of the Boroughs, 1540–1558’, History, 62.204 (1977), 24–42; Phil Withington, Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England, Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 16–48. (68) On increasing numbers of town recorders in the sixteenth century and their training, see Prest, Rise, p. 240–1, and Robert Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 226–9. (69) Mary Dewar, ed. A Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm attributed to Sir Thomas Smith (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1969), pp. ix– x. (70) Norman Jones, Birth of the Elizabethan Age: England in the 1560s (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 229. (71) At Cambridge, this group also included Thomas Elyot and John Ponet, although they died before Elizabeth succeeded to the throne. (72) See Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1980), esp. pp. 43–60. On connections to Gray’s Inn, see pp. 38–9. (73) On the nationalist project of many of these writers, see Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). (74) Withington, Society in Early Modern England, p. 143. (75) Shrank, Writing the Nation, pp. 154–6; Withington, Society in Early Modern England, pp. 149–50.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ (76) Withingon, Society in Early Modern England, p. 141. Withington here describes the whole of the early modern period, but his point applies well to the writings of early Tudor humanists, whom Withington quotes for examples of the ‘negotiation and conflict’ around the idea of commonweal. (77) See J. M. Anderson, Honorable Burden of Public Office: English Humanists and Tudor Politics in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 2010). (78) Hudson, Cambridge Connection, p. 38. (79) Hudson, Cambridge Connection, p. 39. (80) Folger MS.V.a.143, fol. 20–1. (81) Brooks, LPS, pp. 60–1. (82) Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I: 1558–1581, ed. by T. E. Hartley (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981), p. 50. See also Brooks, LPS, p. 60. (83) Proceedings in the Parliament, p. 83; 193. (84) For the ‘unused torch’ image, see Proceedings in the Parliament, p. 49 (for 1559); p. 112 (for 1563); p. 171 (for 1567); p. 190 (for 1571). Bacon also compares unexecuted laws to unused garden tools (p. 49; 190), to rods without hands to use them (p. 171; 190), and to a ‘body without life, cause without an effect, a countenance of a thing and indeed nothing; pen, ink, and paper serving as much towards good governance of the commonweal as the rudder or helm of a ship serveth to the governance of it without a governor’ (p. 190). (85) Smith, County and Court, pp. 89–90 (quote appears on p. 90). (86) Proceedings in the Parliaments, p. 83. (87) Proceedings in the Parliament, p. 192. (88) Denton (adm MT 1530s) later became an MP as well as a town recorder for Oxford. He also regularly served as a consultant to the borough court of Abingdon. On this last point, see Tittler, ‘Incorporation of the Boroughs’, p. 34. Cary (c. 1515–87; adm Strand Inn c. 1534, adm MT c. 1535) later became a JP, an MP, a sheriff, and town recorder (for Barnstaple). For biographies on these two men, see Baker, Men of Court, I, p. 433; 586; and S. T. Bindoff, The House of Commons, 1509–1558, 3 vols (London: History of Parliament Trust, 1982), I, pp. 583–4; II, pp. 30–1. Denton and Cary do not appear in ODNB. (89) Robert Tittler, Nicholas Bacon: The Making of a Tudor Statesman (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 29–32.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ (90) D. S. Bland, ‘Henry VIII’s Royal Commission on the Inns of Court’, Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law, 10 (1969), 178–94 (p. 190; 192). (91) Bland, ‘Henry VIII’s Royal Commission’, p. 194. (92) The report is consistent with Bacon’s later educational projects; see Robert Tittler, ‘Education and the Gentleman in Tudor England: The Case of Sir Nicholas Bacon’, History of Education, 5.1 (1976), 3–10. (93) Tittler, Nicholas Bacon, p. 47; 48; 85. The number of years he served as joint-treasurer is unknown. (94) G. W. Pigman III, ‘Gascoigne, George’ (1534/5?–77), in ODNB [22 July 2014]. (95) In addition, Thomas Phaer’s 1562 edition of the Aeneid was dedicated to Bacon, as was Leonard Digges’ mathematical treatise, Pantometria (1571). Phaer’s printer, William Wightman, wrote the Aeneid dedication, and Leonard’s son, Thomas, wrote the one in Pantometria. Both were members of Lincoln’s Inn and the dedications also continue the association of the Inns and Bacon. (96) For biographical information and quotations in this paragraph, see relevant entries in the ODNB. The editions of the Zodiac dedicated to Cecil are 1561 (six books) and 1565 (all twelve books). (97) Tittler, Nicholas Bacon, pp. 106–7. (98) Elizabeth McCutcheon, Sir Nicholas Bacon’s Great House Sententiae, English Literary Renaissance Supplements, 3 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), p. 25; 31. (99) McCutcheon, Sir Nicholas Bacon’s Great House, p. 12. (100) William Staunford, An Exposicion of the Kinges Prerogatiue Collected out of the Great Abridgement of Iustice Fizherbert and other Olde Writers of the Lawes of England (London: Richard Tottel, 1567), STC 23213, sigs. A4v–A5r. (101) Brooks, LPS, p. 62. (102) Robert von Friedeburg provides a helpful overview of this treatise in the context of German civic humanism in ‘Civic Humanism and Republican Citizenship in Early Modern Germany’, in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. by Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), I, pp. 127–46 (pp. 138–40). (103) John Witte, Jr ‘An Evangelical Commonwealth: Johannes Eisermann on Law and the Common Good’, in Caritas et Reformation: Essays on Church and Society in Honor of Carter Lindberg, ed. by David M. Whitford (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 2002), pp. 73–88 (esp. pp. 81–5). Page 38 of 40

‘Minerva’s Men’ (104) Bavand, Good Ordering, pref., sig. iiir. (105) Bavand, Good Ordering, book 4, chapter 2, sigs. P1v–P4r. (106) Bavand, Good Ordering, book 4, chapter 4, sigs. Q4r–R3v (sig. Q4r; Q4v). (107) Bavand, Good Ordering, sig. R2r. It is interesting that while Bavand emphasizes magistrates, in the fourth book he recognizes that many other activities and trades are crucial to the commonweal, including weavers, carpenters, smiths, joiners, sailors, merchants, and even (under the right conditions) playmaking and play-going. (108) Folger MS V.a.143, fol. 19. The speech is transcribed in J. H. Baker, Order of Serjeants at Law: A Chronicle of Creations, with Related Texts and a Historical Introduction, Selden Society Supplementary Series, 5 (London: Selden Society, 1984), pp. 302–4. (109) Proceedings in the Parliaments, p. 191. (110) North, Dial of Princes, fol. 157r, with syntax slightly adjusted to accord with Tottel and Marsh’s 1568 reprint (STC 12428). (111) John Calvin, Institution of Christian Religion, trans. by Thomas Norton (London: Reyner Wolfe and Richard Harrison, 1561), STC 4415, fol. 166r. In 1589, Christopher Yelverton would continue to describe the magistrate as a ‘living law’ (‘Farewell’, BL MS Add 48109, fol. 13v). See also Brooks, LPS, pp. 68–9. These comments echo George Ferrers’ sentiments in the ‘Tragedy of Tresilian’ in the Mirror for Magistrates, where judges make the law ‘speak’, but only to twist its words for their own benefit. The law requires not just lawyers, but moral lawyers to make it speak correctly. I am grateful to Scott Lucas for this point. (112) Raffield, Images and Cultures, p. 5. (113) Abbott, ‘Public Office and Private Profit’, p. 139. The details in this paragraph about the legal establishment under Mary are drawn from this article. (114) Abbott, ‘Public Office and Private Profit’, p. 139. (115) Prest, Inns, p. 6. (116) Brooks, LLES, p. 84. (117) Raffield Images and Cultures, p. 43. (118) See also ‘Literary Play and the Legal Profession’ in the Conclusion.

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‘Minerva’s Men’ (119) See Lawrence Stone, ‘The Educational Revolution in England, 1560–1640’, Past and Present, 28 (1964), 41–80; Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); and Rosemary O’Day, Education and Society, 1500–1800: The Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain (London: Longman, 1982). (120) J. H. Hexter, ‘The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance’, in Reappraisals in History (London: Longman, 1961), pp. 45–70. (121) David Cressy provides a useful introduction to the social composition of each of these classes in ‘Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England’, Literature and History, 3 (1976), 29–44. (122) Louis A. Knafla, ‘The Matriculation Revolution and Education at the Inns of Court in Renaissance England’, in Tudor Men and Institutions: Studies in English Law and Government, ed. by Arthur J. Slavin (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), pp. 232–64. (123) Wilfrid Prest, ‘Legal Education of the Gentry at the Inns of Court, 1560– 1640’, Past and Present, 38 (1967), 20–39 (p. 20). (124) Knafla, ‘Matriculation Revolution’, pp. 241–2. (125) Calendar of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House, vol. 1, 1306 –1571, British History Online [19 August 2014], entry year 1559. (126) The exclusion was affirmed by all four houses in June 1557. See Calendar of Inner Temple, p. 190; and for June, p. 192. See also Records […] of Lincoln’s Inn, I, p. 315; 320, and Minutes of Parliament of the Middle Temple Records, I, p. 111. (127) Christopher Brooks, ed., Admissions Record of Barnard’s Inn, 1620–1869 (London: Selden Society, 1995), p. 20. (128) Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers, p. 164. (129) Brooks, Admissions Record, pp. 20–1.

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Lyric Poetry

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

Lyric Poetry Forming a Professional Community Jessica Winston

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the manuscript verse of three significant inns-of-court poets: Barnabe Googe, George Turberville, and George Gascoigne. Their poetry is similar to the verse on set themes that the authors were required to write in school, verses that affirmed the importance of work, friendship, duty, humility, and other social and moral virtues. In the context of the shared educational and professional contexts of the Inns in this period, this poetry confirmed the writers’ shared social and professional aspirations and helped to establish and reinforce their sense of themselves as members of a homogeneous and likeminded group, a society of dutiful, responsible, serious, moral, religious, and civically minded men who were ready to take on careers as magistrates in the commonweal. Keywords:   Inns of Court, 1560s, George Gascoigne, Barnabe Googe, George Turberville, school exercises, lyric poetry, answer poetry, duty, magistrates

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Lyric Poetry In the late 1580s, Ralph Stawell, a gentleman and lawyer of the Middle Temple, compiled a manuscript with notes on moots and legal commonplaces. Surrounding these, Stawell copied twelve sonnets of his own. He uses a careful italic or secretary hand for Latin and legal materials, but he crams the sonnets into the margins, suggesting that the verse is ‘a mere trifle’.1 The manuscript reflects the broad tastes of a lawyer and member of the gentry in the later sixteenth century,2 as well as the way that professional-legal pursuits blended with poetic ones. Stawell’s juxtaposition of law and poetry was hardly unprecedented. It exists in a long tradition of mingling law and literature—of combining ‘an Ovid with a Littleton’3—one that was especially strong a generation earlier at the Inns in the 1560s. In that decade, numerous members of the societies wrote and shared poems in manuscript as a distraction from their studies and as a way of registering and confirming shared literary and social tastes and shaping members’ moral and growing professional culture. This chapter examines the manuscript verse of three significant inns-of-court poets: Googe, Turberville, and Gascoigne, while drawing on the writings of Hugh Plat, Timothy Kendall, and John Grange.4 Their poetry is similar to the verse on set themes that the authors were required to write in school, verses that affirmed the importance of work, friendship, duty, humility, and other social and moral virtues. In the context of the shared educational and professional contexts of the Inns in this period, this poetry confirmed the writers’ shared social and (p.78) professional aspirations and helped to establish and reinforce their sense of themselves as members of a homogeneous and like-minded group, a society of dutiful, responsible, serious, moral, religious, and civically minded men who were ready to take on careers as upright magistrates in the commonweal.

Two Kinds of Poetry

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Lyric Poetry Men at the Inns wrote many kinds of poetry: eclogue, epitaph, epigram, dream vision, song, and sonnet. Some, such as Gascoigne and Grange, composed prose narratives peppered with innovative and traditional verse forms. Most of these genres appeared in schoolroom exercises: poetic composition and adaptation were part of the grammar school and university curriculum and central to education in the arts of rhetoric. In grammar schools and the first years of the university, students often worked with short poetic forms (e.g. epigraphs, sonnets, epigrams), and longer verse assignments often accompanied exercises in prose.5 For instance, at the Durham School, one ordinance required that the schoolmaster read ‘versifying rules’ aloud and that ‘every second day’ students ‘make certain verses upon certain argument[s] which shall be given them’.6 This type of assignment appears in George Gascoigne’s play the Glass of Government (written c. 1565) in which the schoolmaster, Gnomaticus, asks his universitybound students to versify a list of precepts on duty to their king, country, and parents, since ‘arts poetry giveth greatest assistance unto memory’.7 One student creates a set of verse precepts, ‘adding neither dilations, allegories, nor examples’, while another ‘dilate[s] and enlarge[s] every point’. Gnomaticus is pleased with both, praising each for having ‘so well accomplished [his] duties’.8 Later, the two go off to the university and then on to productive and respectable careers in the church and the university. The episode conveys one purpose for poetry. The reading and writing of poetry was part of a larger curriculum that helped to prepare one for a life of service to the state, the principal goal of a humanist education.9 Thus in his Boke Named the (p.79) Governour, Thomas Elyot describes the education of those who are ‘to have authority in a public weal’, arguing for the importance of poetry in a reading program involving the works of Ovid, Martial, and Homer, which provide ‘incomparable wisdoms and instructions for politic governance of people’.10 Likewise, in his Schoolmaster (1570), Roger Ascham presents a programme to prepare youth to ‘serve God and country by virtue and wisdom’, extending Elyot’s views on reading classical poetry to the importance of translating, paraphrasing, and writing it (along with prose).11 Thus poetry was identified with a broader civically orientated educational project. As Richard Helgerson observes, ‘Classroom verse-making aimed at furthering eloquence and strengthening morals, not at producing poets.’12 Such activities helped to develop in students ‘the qualities of temperament and training necessary to magistrates and gentlemen, the “governors” of the realm’.13 At grammar schools and universities, poetry helped to prepare one for the duty of a life in civil affairs.

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Lyric Poetry Yet lyric poetry was not linked solely with morality, duty, ‘God and country’, but with activities and values that were culturally the opposite of these things, with lechery, idleness, and delinquency. The Glass of Government demonstrates these other associations as well in the characters of two other students (elder brothers to the first set) who write poetry too. Unlike the younger men, these two ignore the schoolmaster’s assignment and create love poetry and epic verses, writing ‘loving sonnets’ and ‘verses in praise of martial feats and policies’.14 These activities are the first of many that lead the two to a life of crime. In the Glass of Government, poetry is associated with both duty and delinquency. Each kind of writing—we might call it ‘humanist’ or ‘romance’ poetry—augers the students’ futures, marking them out as men of respectable or prodigal affairs. As Richard Helgerson argues, the two terms existed in a ‘dialectic of opposites’, with humanism ‘represent[ing] paternal expectation, and romance, rebellious desire’.15 Thus Christopher Gaggero observes that Gascoigne shows ‘[i]f young men are to learn their duty, it seems they must renounce the pleasures of poetry, if not—and this is an important distinction—poetry itself’.16 While they did not renounce poetry altogether, students at the Inns renounced some of its ‘pleasures’ (those amorous and heroic topics), using their poetry instead to place themselves on the path of service to God and country. Early Elizabethan inns-of-court poetry has some characteristics that follow from its association with humanist educational practices: a certain impersonal tone and ponderous moralizing, as well as an extensive development of aphorisms and didactic commonplaces, (p.80) heavy metre, and an advisory tone. In addition, the metre and diction of the poems, as G. K. Hunter puts it, has a moral as well as aesthetic quality, creating an effect of ‘weight and solidity’ as well as ‘plainness’.17 Hence, in the words of Panofsky, ‘The distinctive voice of the earlier Elizabethan poet is that of the schoolmaster exhorting or reminding possibly wayward youths.’18 Why did members of the Inns continue to write such poetry once they left the grammar schools and universities? They could have stopped or imitated other models, ranging from the generically multifarious poetry of Chaucer, to the Latinate and popular works of Skelton, to the satires and sonnets of Thomas Wyatt, the elder (c. 1503–42), and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (1516/17–47). Why would they continue essentially schoolroom exercises as part of their extracurricular activities? One might think that Inns of Court authors continued because they remained in an educational environment, but poetry was not a part of the training offered at the Inns.19 Another possibility is that they composed verse to be closer to the world of the court, to imitate and become a part of the social life of this other milieu.20 Yet the poetry at court in the period was primarily written in Latin.21 If students at the Inns had wanted to imitate life at court, they would have (as they could have) written in Latin, as well.

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Lyric Poetry A more likely possibility lies in the opposing social meanings of lyric poetry, those linked with the divergent values of ‘humanism’ and ‘romance’. As men such as Googe, Turberville, and Gascoigne moved into and within the social world of the Inns of Court, the writing of poetry allowed them to associate themselves with ‘humanism’, with those ideals supposedly instilled by their parents or in their schooling—duty, responsibility, public mindedness, and so forth—and to distance themselves from the ‘romance’, those values linked with love poetry and even epic: the rebellious rejection of duty, the prioritization of the beloved over scholarly and professional responsibilities, and dramatic assertions of individual importance.22 (p.81) Through their verse, mid-Tudor poets at the Inns constructed themselves both with and against the social meanings of the form in which they wrote. Like the good students in Gascoigne’s Glass, they marked themselves out—as individuals and as a community—as dutiful rather than profligate men.

Barnabe Googe’s Eclogues: Negating the Erotic Barnabe Googe’s Eclogues illustrate how one member of the Inns defined himself both with and against the social meanings of the form in which he wrote. In these, Googe writes about love, but also against it, using pastoral poetry to warn readers of the dangers of erotic entanglements. Throughout the Eclogues, the author announces his connection with the values of his humanist education, and he does so through a negation of romantic relationships. Born in 1540, Googe was the son of Robert Googe, a landowner in Kent. Like many members of the gentry of his generation, Googe probably received a grammar school education. We know that he attended Christ’s College, Cambridge, as a pensioner between 1555 and 1559. By 1559, he had entered Staple Inn, one of the Inns of Chancery affiliated with Gray’s Inn, where he became ‘a full participant in the burgeoning cultural life of that community’.23 Googe was recognized in his own day as a translator, but he also published a miscellany, titled Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets (1563).24 This collection contains eight eclogues in imitation of Virgil and Mantuan; four epitaphs, including one on the death of the translator of Virgil, Thomas Phaer, and one on the poet Nicholas Grimald; a series of shorter poems (his ‘sonnets’); and a dream vision titled ‘Cupido Conquered’. Googe’s poetry has been recognized primarily for its role in literary history.25 As the first eclogues in English and the first collection of poetry published by a living English author, the volume had some influence on Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579), yet it is also important to consider this collection as inns-of-court poetry. To be sure, not all of the poems were written at the Inns. At least two, ‘Going towards Spain’ and ‘Coming Homeward Out of Spain’ were written during an embassy to that country in 1561, but the collection contains a number of verses written to and by members of the Inns, and Googe himself associated the whole work with this milieu, dedicating it to William Lovelace, a reader at Gray’s Inn.26

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Lyric Poetry The Eclogues show how Googe used poetry to define himself as a dutiful and serious man. The eclogue is a pastoral genre, built on the premise of a distinct contrast between rustic and urban life and often expressing nostalgia for the (p. 82) simplicity of rural life in an ideal natural setting and containing celebrations of virtuous country over decadent city living. The theme may have had some personal significance for Googe, who (although writing in an urban institution) may have seen the pastoral world as an idealized retreat from the vices of the urban environment. Also importantly, pastoral poetry often takes up the subject of love, featuring shepherds who idly pass their time discussing the triumphs and pains of romance.27 In his Eclogues, Googe conforms to these conventions and defies them, altering the bucolic genre into severely moralizing, admonitory, and didactic poetry. The alteration is evident in the first eclogue. A young shepherd, Daphnes, asks an older one, Amintas, to tell him a tale to pass the time. Amintas agrees, offering a story about love. But the tale is not a happy, or even melancholy, musing about love. Instead, it is a lengthy lecture on the debilitating physical and psychological effects of erotic desire, followed by a sermon on the necessity of avoiding love altogether. After introducing his subject, ‘the cause of lover’s pain’, Amintas describes the effects of love. The lover falls into a ‘fervent humour’, suffering from a ‘frenzy’ while ‘poison’ ‘infects the blood about and boils in every part’. Ultimately, the lover falls into ‘bondage’, captured by affection in a ‘slavish, servile yoke’.28 The description repeats Petrarchan conventions in which lovers describe themselves as slaves to the tyrant love. But while the Petrarchan lover is often a masochist who enjoys such enslavement, Amintas is horrified, using his tale about love as a warning. The lecture is the sort that Daphnes wants. When Amintas is done, the younger shepherd thanks him, handing Amintas a whistle that once belonged to his father. With this gesture, Daphnes makes Amintas into something of a father figure and signals the way that Googe has turned the eclogue into didactic, parental admonition. A similar alteration takes place in the fourth eclogue, which develops the story of Dametas, who, in an earlier sequence, kills himself for love, and now appears as a ghostly fury, clothed in black, before the shepherd Melibeus to warn him: O Melibei, take heed of love of me example take, That slew myself, and live in hell for Deiopeia’s sake I thought that death should me release from pains and doleful woe, But now, alas, the troth is tried I find it nothing so, For look what pain and grief I felt when I lived here afore, With those I now tormented am, and with ten thousand more.29

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Lyric Poetry Ghostly visitors appear in other pastoral works, for instance in Boccaccio and Mantuan, but Googe alters the genre, introducing a ‘tormented’ ghost more akin to those in Seneca’s tragedies (translated by men affiliated with the Inns) or the Mirror for Magistrates (1559), which circulated there.30 In the Mirror, the ghosts of (p.83) former English rulers warn kings and magistrates about appropriate behaviour. In a similar way, Dametas admonishes Melibeus to avoid romantic love. Googe brings tragedy to the pastoral, pressing the genre into Senecan form and incorporating a tirade on the dangers of erotic attraction. Other eclogues likewise warn against romance. The fifth describes the shepherdess Claudia, who like Dametas kills herself in a fit of passion. The sixth presents the shepherd Felix who counsels his companion Faustus to let reason rule him in matters of love. The seventh contains yet another tale of unrequited love, and the eighth and final eclogue warns lovers to avoid Cupid (‘Cupido’s camp’) and to focus on God. The eclogues end with the shepherd Cornix, who turns away from the subject of love altogether and speaks in language approaching that of devotional prayer, concluding that one should ‘love and fear the mighty God that rules and reigns on high’.31 In this final turn, Cornix (and by extension Googe) seems to suggest that religious piety is important for pastoral tranquillity.32 Critics concur that Googe altered the pastoral: he ‘wrote the Eclogues as a sort of refutation of the pastoral tradition’; he put ‘the pastoral to work to solve the problem of literary love’; and he ‘harnessed the eclogue for his own didactic agenda, using the form to expound moral, political, religious, and sexual dogma’.33 Yet Googe’s treatment of pastoral is not unique. The mode was used for social, political, and religious commentary, and Googe adapts the Italian writer Mantuan (Baptista Spagnolo Mantuanus, 1448–1516), whose ten neoLatin eclogues were a common text in European schools in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and translated by Googe’s friend and fellow inns-of-court man George Turberville in 1567.34 Moreover, Mantuan’s ‘moralistic tone’ influences Googe’s.35 For instance, in Mantuan’s first eclogue, the shepherd Fortunatus asks Faustus to tell a tale. Faustus responds with a story about his affair with Galla, who ensnares him in love, concluding that romance is best avoided: Love, Faustus, blinds the senses sore; it guiles the gazing eyes; It reaves [i.e. robs] the freedom from the mind of man in monstrouswise. It doth bewitch our weakened sprites. I verily suppose Some hellish imp doth force this fire and foully overthrows, And out of book doth heave our hearts: Love is not as they say A heavenly God, but bitter gall and error from the way.36

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Lyric Poetry Here, Fortunatus observes that love incapacitates the lover, blinding the senses, beguiling the eyes, enslaving the mind, and bewitching the spirit. It is an ‘error (p.84) from the way’, by which Fortunatus means the way of work, duty, and responsibility. Later eclogues repeat and elaborate on this theme as shepherds argue that Lucifer is the source of love and that love brings destruction to the commonwealth. As Fortunatus states of love, ‘By means thereof are cities sacked and bulwarks beat to ground, | Moreover laws and sacred books in iron chains ybound’. He thus hopes, ‘Forbid and give us charge to flee in any case this love’.37 In this work, it is best to avoid women altogether. Even with the precedent of Mantuan, one still wonders why Googe wrote eclogues that removed any pleasure from the pastoral world and created stern and moralistic scenes. One suggestion is that Googe was a poet and that eclogues, the genre of Virgil’s earliest literary endeavours, represented an appropriate way to begin a poetic career.38 But Googe did not have ambitions to be a national poet (as Virgil did). Instead, from the Inns he went on to earn regular employment as a subambassador to Spain, to hold a seat in Parliament (1571), and to serve two stints as a civil servant in Ireland (1582–3 and 1584–5). In his literary endeavours, however, he did not follow Virgil’s example and move to epic. Instead he wrote only occasional poetry: his dream vision (‘Cupido Conquered’), a Christian allegorical poem, The Ship of Safeguard (1569), and translations of several moral and religious works. A more probable interpretation is that Googe wrote pastoral poetry because it was associated with romance and idleness. By turning the genre to moral, didactic ends, Googe defined himself as a man who was not a lover or even a poet, but rather someone interested in duty, responsibility, morality, and religion. In his revision of the pastoral, Googe portrays himself as a man concerned with religious and moral reform, not as a man of amours. At the same time, it is possible that Googe wrote the Eclogues because he could make it fulfil the admonitory role that the literature of his schooling performed: the improvement of youth and the creation of better servants of the state. In the Eclogues, Googe takes a community of shepherds and turns them into severe, moralizing men. As we shall see, by circulating such works among his colleagues at the Inns, he aimed to shape the values of the community there as well.39

Creating Community in Googe’s Answer Poetry In his Eclogues Googe defined himself with and against the meanings of the form in which he wrote. Yet Googe and other poets at the Inns also shared their verses (p.85) with each other to display their ideas and values, and to shape those of their fellow students. As in Googe’s pastoral poetry, wherein a community of shepherds communicates its ideas through poetry, poetic composition at the law schools was a kind of conversation, one in which inns-ofcourt men shared their attitudes about romance, duty, discipline, friendship, fidelity, pride, and the like to mould the values of the community as a whole.

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Lyric Poetry Such poetry originally circulated in manuscript, none of which exists today, so it is necessary to reconstruct circulation from printed sources. Googe’s collection and those of other inns-of-court writers, such as Turberville, Gascoigne, Kendall, and Grange, call attention to their origins in manuscript, and there are close affinities between manuscript poetry and printed miscellanies. As Mary Hobbs observes, ‘the first printed [i.e. early Elizabethan] anthologies evidently derive from manuscript anthologies’.40 For example, George Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) contains a series of poems written at the request of members of Gray’s Inn in the early to mid-1560s. Since the poems were written nearly ten years before the volume appeared in print, it is likely they were circulated in manuscript. In addition, in the preface to Barnabe Googe’s Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, Laurence Blundeston explains that he published Googe’s ‘paper bunch’ when the poet was out of town.41 Blundeston’s phrase indicates that the poems were initially in manuscript compilation, although the story may or may not be true. In a discussion of a similar preface in Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F. J. (1573), Arthur Marotti observes that such prefaces often replicate ‘the circumstances of the production, transmission, and preservation or collection of social verse, calling attention to the social and biographical circumstances in which lyrics were typically written’.42 One popular genre, the answer poem, circulated in manuscript, shows how such poetry helped to define the community at the Inns. Answer poetry is verse that explicitly responds to poetry written by someone else, usually well known to the author. E. F. Hart observes that answer poetry falls into four separate categories: ‘The answer proper, in which the theme or arguments of a poem are criticized as a whole, or (more usually) refuted one by one’, ‘imitations’, ‘extension poems [that] develop or amplify some idea, image, or characteristic rhythm or style of the original poems’, and ‘mock-songs’.43 Describing the social function of this kind of poetry, Marotti contends that it reminds readers of the occasional origins of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse. Answer poetry ‘foregrounds the social […] character of poetic composition, marking poetic discourse […] as continuous with other forms of communication’.44

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Lyric Poetry (p.86) Examples of answer poetry and related genres, such as verse epistles, appear in several poetry collections from the period. Googe’s collection, which he calls in his dedication ‘the numbered heaps of sundry friendships’,45 contains verse written to and received from friends Alexander Neville and Laurence Blundeston, as well as a number of verse epistles, such as ‘To George Holmedon of a Running Head’.46 George Turberville’s Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets contains poems addressed to Barnabe Googe, including ‘Master Googe His Sonnet on the Pains of Love’ and ‘Turberville’s Answer and Distich to the Same’, as well as ‘Master Googe His Sonnet’ (‘Accuse Not God If Fancy Fond’) and ‘Turberville’s Answer’.47 Timothy Kendall’s Trifles, printed at the end of his Flowers of Epigrams (1577), has many poems addressed to men at universities and the Inns of Court, such as ‘A Letter Written to T. W. Gent, When He Was a Scholar in Oxford’, ‘Precepts Written to His Friend Richard Woodward’s Prayerbook, Sometime His Companion in Oxford’, and ‘To His Dear Brother John Sheppard Gent. of Gray’s Inn’.48 As these titles suggest, members of the Inns wrote answer poetry to a range of people, including their peers at the Inns of Court and universities. All such poetry helped to create and continue connections between the poets and others, but a significant number of the poems helped students at the Inns to connect and negotiate their relationships with members of the legal societies. The importance of such poetry is evident if we look at some of the shorter poems in Googe’s Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, considering how he uses the answer poem to converse with other members of the Inns about their attitudes and ideas. Take, for instance, an exchange between Googe and Alexander Neville, his cousin and fellow member of the Inns.49 In ‘To Alexander Neville’, Googe advises his relative to avoid idleness: If thou canst banish idleness, Cupido’s bow is broke, And well thou mayst despise his brands clean void of flame and smoke. What moved the King Aegisthus once to love with vile excess? The cause at hand doth straight appear: he lived in idleness.50

Googe repeats the move from the Eclogues, writing about love to warn against it, counselling Neville to ‘banish idleness’, since doing so will help him to avoid romantic entanglements. He illustrates his point using an extreme example of (p.87) King Aegisthus, who, left in charge of Argos when Agamemnon went to the Trojan War, fell in love with Clytemnestra, the war-bound king’s wife, and with her murdered Agamemnon upon his return. The poem is short, but conveys ideas consistent with Googe’s Eclogues while attempting to shape those of Neville through admonitory advice. Neville replies to Googe in ‘The Answer of A. Neville to the Same’, also published in the Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets:

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Lyric Poetry The lack of labour maims the mind, And wit and reason quite exiles, And reason fled, flames fancy blind, And fancy she forthwith beguiles The senseless wight, that swiftly sails Through deepest floods of vile excess. Thus vice abounds, thus virtue quails, By means of drowsy idleness.51

Neville observes the dangers of idleness, describing the way that ‘lack of labour’ makes a ‘senseless wight’. He departs from the form of Googe’s verse, responding to the fourteeners with tetrameter and in a rhyme scheme that also differs from the original. Also departing from Googe’s end-stopped lines, Neville uses enjambment in lines four to six to emphasize the unstoppable effects of fancy. Yet even with such changes, Neville’s reply is in accord with Googe. Using an equally elevated diction, Neville agrees that idleness should be avoided, writing a physiological and psychological explanation of Aegisthus’s actions, showing that ‘lack of labour’ leads to the vicious acts that Aegisthus committed. In the end, Neville agrees with Googe’s sentiment: because of ‘drowsy idleness’, ‘vice abounds’ and ‘virtue quails’. Another example of poetry confirming social values appears in an exchange between Googe and Laurence Blundeston, a member of Gray’s Inn.52 Googe’s collection contains a prefatory poem by Blundeston, as well as two pairs of answer poems. In one, Googe praises his friend for his ability to ‘rule affections right’, and Blundeston replies in kind. Googe writes: Some men be counted wise that well can talk, And some because they can each man beguile, Some for because they know well cheese from chalk, And can be sure, weep whoso list, to smile. But Blund’ston, him I call the wisest wight, Whom God gives grace to rule affections right.53

(p.88) Blundeston replies: Affections seeks high honour’s frail estate, Affections doth the golden mean reprove, Affections turns the friendly heart to hate, Affections breed without discretion love; Both wise and happy he, Googe, he may be hight, Whom God gives grace to rule affections right.54

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Lyric Poetry Like the previous exchange, this one is a form of social converse and confirmation. Blundeston repeats the form, moral content, and tone of Googe. Both poems are written in iambic pentameter and contain four general statements followed by two lines of praise. Both have the same rhyme scheme (ab ab cc). Moreover, Blundeston repeats the rhyme at the end of the verse, using ‘hight’ to respond to ‘wight’, and reiterates Googe’s praise, likewise congratulating his friend for his ability to ‘rule affections right’. Overall, the exchange is a playful and genial confirmation of their mutual esteem and comparable values. In Googe’s answer poetry, community is created through the explicit confirmation of likeness. In this way, his answer poetry differs in tone from the poems in this genre described by E. F. Hart and Arthur Marotti. Hart writes that answer poems have much in common with ‘forms of parody’ and that the genre was popular with the ‘gentlemanly amateur in an age when lyric and song were fashionable’. Moreover, he explains that the most common kinds of answer poems are ‘critical’ of the recipient, and while most of these verses never go beyond ‘friendly chaff’, some ‘amount to gentle satire’.55 Marotti, describing the spirit of ‘competitive versifying’ that characterizes answer poetry, suggests that some poems go much further. In particular, the poetry of the Sidney circle probably originated as a ‘coterie game’, and poetic exchanges among the members of this group were often ‘quite hostile’.56 Both critics suggest that satire, hostility, and competition between men is the norm in the answer poetry circulated in male literary communities, and such an assessment makes sense, given the way that competition of various sorts (particularly over women) is central to communities of men, helping to create and sustain, while also threatening, homosocial bonds.57 Wendy Wall finds that Renaissance sonnets—typically written to women but exchanged among men— represent poetic exchange as a form of courtship, and more sharply show an understanding of poetic composition as a competition among men, played out in the field of verse writing for women.58 But it is noticeable in this regard that Googe’s answer poetry (and most of his other writing) is not competitive or erotic but appears instead as a form of amiable, if morally stringent, conversation. (p.89) Googe and his friends do not cement a literary community through the medium of love poetry. They negate the presence of women and avoid competition. Cathy Shrank observes of Googe’s collection that ‘woman’ is ‘decentred’ further than we might expect from reading Wall: ‘The poems either avoid the subject of love entirely or counsel against it, celebrating instead the rational life of studiousness and male fellowship’.59 Googe’s poetry suggests that he primarily wants to establish similarities with his fellow authors, to affirm his like-minded attitudes and ideas, and more broadly to attempt to bring about the homogeneity of the community as a whole.

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Lyric Poetry In an important survey of the literary culture of the early Elizabethan Inns, Laurie Shannon argues that the writings of Googe, along with Turberville and Gascoigne, represent ‘a kind of textual traffic among “friends”’. These collaborative practices of friendship help to constitute an alternative to capitalist greed and court corruption, and establish a horizontal social and political network at the Inns, which represents a kind of alternative polity to the political nation. The writings of inns-of-court men help to create a distinct political group. Yet Shannon emphasizes that the literary culture of the Inns involved a ‘circle of learned and friendly readers’, who write to each other and respond to each other’s work. It should be recognized that the poems also register the strained negotiation and even coercion in creating homogeneity in this community.60 Instead of being competitive or collaborative, Googe’s poems are subtly coercive: the implied expectation that his interlocutor respond in kind cuts off the possibility of genuine dialogue. In her analysis of Googe’s Eclogues, Jennifer Richards shows that the conversations between shepherds leave little room for disagreement or dissent. In most, an older man advises his younger companion to control his desires. In so doing, the poems present ‘a cycle of exchange— represented by the “thanks” owed to a senior shepherd by a junior for advice given—which entails an expression of satisfaction with the status quo’. There is no expectation that the junior shepherd will disagree, and there is, therefore, no chance for free-flowing ideas in critical conversation.61 Like the Eclogues, Googe’s answer poetry neither invites nor represents dissent. For him, ‘habitus’ is most definitely singular and non-negotiable. Googe and his respondents insist on their similarity in a way that closes off difference, affirming likeness and, by extension, promoting the homogeneity of their community.62

(p.90) Turberville’s Poetry: Negotiating Friendships

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Lyric Poetry While never hostile, critical, or competitive, the answer poetry by members of the early Elizabethan Inns does not always achieve such easy (even if compulsory) conviviality, as we can see in the poetry of Googe’s fellow poet and inns-of-court man George Turberville, and in the exchanges between them. Like Googe, Turberville published a collection of poetry, the Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets, a miscellaneous collection of poems in a variety of forms and genres. Unlike Googe, Turberville’s poems appear within a loose narrative, concerning the relationship between two lovers, Tymetes and Pyndara. This story is set up in the preface, but the organization of the volume does not develop a chronological account of the relationship. Rather, the circumstances of each poem jump back and forth among what appear to be various stages in the affair: infatuation and vows of faithfulness, separation, and accusations of infidelity. In addition, interspersed among these poems is a variety of other verses: moralizing epigrams, such as ‘Of Drunkenness’ and ‘Of the Picture of Vain Rhetoric’; epitaphs by Turberville and others, such as one by Thomas Twyne (the translator of Virgil’s Aeneid ) on the death of Richard Edwards; and odd, esoteric verses, such as ‘Of the Cruel Hatred of Stepmothers’. Because the love story is so disordered, at least one critic has posited that there was an earlier edition of the book, now lost, that was organized more consistently according to the genres announced in the title.63 Whatever the reason, the organization breaks up the amorous love narrative, turning individual poems in the ‘Tymetes and Pyndara’ series into examples of the very situations warned against in the moralizing epigrams. Hence, one epigram warns against lust, and another, showing Tymetes pining over the loss of Pyndara, illustrates why it should be avoided. In a sense, Turberville repeats what Googe did in his pastorals, presenting an erotic narrative in such a way as to warn against it. Moreover, several poems in the volume actually are exchanges between Turberville and Googe, or responses by Turberville to verses only printed in Googe’s collection, such as ‘Out of Sight Out of Mind’ and ‘Of Money’.64 Turberville’s answer to ‘Of Money’ shows two inns-of-court men speaking about another value, friendship, and creating and confirming their own friendship through this process. Yet the reply registers some of Turberville’s anxiety. In ‘Of Money’, Googe writes, Give money me, take friendship whoso list, For friends are gone come once adversity, When money yet remaineth safe in chest, That quickly can thee bring from misery, For face shows friends, when riches do abound, Come time of proof, farewell, they must away; Believe me well, they are not to be found, (p.91) If God but send thee once a louring day. Gold never starts aside, but in distress Finds ways enough to ease thine heaviness.

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Lyric Poetry William Sheidley remarks that much of Googe’s wit comes from his creative combination of two commonplaces: the first that friendship is worth more than money and the second that false friends are unfaithful in times of need.65 Googe brings the logic of the two together, concluding that money is worth more than friendship, since it never ‘starts aside’ in distress and ‘finds ways enough to ease heaviness’. Critics have seen ‘Of Money’ as an expression of personal sentiment. Donald L. Peterson praises the ‘personal conviction that comes through in its unrelieved severity of statement’. For Sheidley, ‘the poet seems to have come from a friend who has just let him down’. And one contemporary poet repeats this collapse of poet and fictional persona in his distich ‘Googe | Is Scrooge’.66 It is more helpful to see the poem as an extension of the educational exercise of refutatio—writing against a claim, or thesis—writing to support or refute a position.67 For Googe seems less to offer a personal opinion than a presentation of his rhetorical and intellectual abilities in refutatio. He piles up statements that, as a result of the numerous end-stopped lines, read like definitive moral truisms. Nevertheless, together they refute the two commonplaces about friendship and money and add up to a proof of the unexpected thesis that money is worth more than friendship. Googe’s poem is a skilfully told joke. Turberville may have replied because he got the joke, or because he missed it. In his response, he follows Googe’s lead: treating the first poem as the thesis and refuting ‘Of Money’s’ position by showing that accusations of faithlessness are more fittingly applied to money: Friend Googe, give me the faithful friend to trust, And take the fickle coin for mo that lust. For friends in time of trouble and distress With help and sound advice will soon redress Each growing grief that grips the pensive breast, When money lies locked up in covert chest. Thy coin will cause a thousand cares to grow, Which if thou hadst no coin thou couldst not know. Thy friend no care but comfort will procure, Of him thou mayst at need thyself assure. Thy Money makes the thief in wait to lie, Whose fraud thy friend and falsehood will decry. Thou canst not keep unlocked thy careful coin, But some from thee thy money will purloin: Thy faithful friend will never start aside, But take his share of all that shall betide. (p.92) When thou art dead thy money is bereft But after life thy trusty friend is left: Thy money serves another master then, Thy faithful friend links with no other man. So that, Friend Googe, I deem it better I, To choose the Friend and let the money lie.68 Page 15 of 30

Lyric Poetry Turberville echoes Googe in form and diction, writing in end-stopped aphorisms and incorporating phrases from Googe’s poem, such as ‘locked up in covert chest’ and ‘start aside’. But he departs in tone, writing something more serious than ‘Of Money’. In combination with the end-stopped lines, the couplets make the statements about friendship and money seem even more absolute than those of the first poem. In addition, while the apostrophe to ‘friend Googe’ addresses the Scrooge-like Googe ironically and humorously with the name of ‘friend’, the twice-repeated phrase feels insistent as well, as much an assertion that Googe is a friend as a recognition of him as such. Indeed, the length of Tuberville’s reply (more than twice as long as the original) suggests something of his seriousness, making it seem as though he could not stop writing without first making sure that he had made his point. In the end, Turberville comes across as anxious about friendship, writing to connect with ‘friend Googe’ and to ensure that they value friendship in the same way. The poem corrects Googe and attempts to assert a connection with him. Turberville’s response reflects an anxiety about friendship that appears throughout his poetry in his ambiguous use of the word friend, a word that appears regularly in verses such as: ‘To a Late Acquainted Friend’; ‘To His Friend to Be Constant after Choice Is Made’; ‘To His Friend: P. of Courting, Traveling, Dicing, and Tennis’; ‘To His Friend Riding to Londonward’; ‘To his Friend Francis Th: Leading His Life in the Country at His   Desire’; and ‘Of an Open Foe and a Fained Friend’.

Some of these are part of the romantic narrative in the volume, which deals with Tymetes and his ‘friend’ and lover Pyndara. Others, like ‘To His Friend Francis Th’, are verses written by Turberville to his own friends or about friendship. Yet because of the confused arrangement of the volume, it is ambiguous whether a particular poem about a ‘friend’ is a part of the love narrative or an epigram or answer poem, and many of the verses in the ‘Tymetes and Pyndara’ series read simultaneously like anxious expressions about the loss of friendship and romance.69

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Lyric Poetry The confusion a modern reader feels with Turberville’s collection of poetry mimics the confusion that may have existed for any reader who received his verse in (p.93) manuscript. Especially with loose papers, it would have been difficult for readers to tell in the first few lines, or after reading the entire poem, whether a particular verse was about romance or male friendship. For instance, in Turberville’s collection, there is a somewhat anxious lamentation titled ‘To His Friend Riding to Londonward’.70 The title suggests the departure of a male friend; the poem, however, compares the friend’s departure towards London to Cressida’s departure from Troy, suggesting it is about a female friend. We cannot be sure. What initially seems to be a poem about the loss of male friendship quickly becomes a verse on the loss of romance, or one that codes a discussion of friendship in romantic language.

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Lyric Poetry The ambiguous presentation of friendship and romance points to the aspect of mid-Tudor inns-of-court poetry we saw in Googe: the extent to which friendship and romance are mutually dependent but opposing terms. Men at the Inns reinforced their sense of communal identity and belonging in sometimes romantic terms, at the same time warning against women and, more specifically, against the threat that women might distract from friendship and even a public career. Cathy Shrank writes, ‘In the case of Googe’s and Turberville’s sonnets, that is, amorous experience is analysed in order to learn a lesson which is then passed on to other men. It is consequently the absence or rejection, rather than the presence, of the woman that forms the trope by which male sociability is consolidated.’71 Thus women are often the focus of anxiety and harsh judgements. In one poem, Googe calls a ‘Mistress A.’ a Gorgon, accusing her of having been raised by wolves and possessing a tiger’s heart.72 To be sure, given the proximity of the Inns to brothels, and the social reality of liaisons between inns-of-court men and local women, we can assume that some of the men were involved with women, and such involvement is partly what Googe aimed to prevent.73 Despite such derisive words, it is important to recognize that women per se were not the problem. Rather, in the poetry, a cluster of terms and topics —women, love, romance, desire, lust—represent experiences and feelings that distract from community. As Richards writes of Googe’s Eclogues, the shepherds criticize love, since ‘sexual desire, heterosexual and homosexual, is equated equally in the Eclogues with other types of desire (including social aspiration and the lust for power), all of which entail an assertion of will that is dangerous to the commonwealth’.74 Like the shepherds, Googe and Turberville express anxiety about romantic relationships with women, cautioning their friends to avoid personal distractions and admonishing them to focus on the end goal, public duty and service to the commonweal, as opposed to individual gain and private joys. Of course, that such warnings occur frequently suggests the struggle of preventing those kinds of desires and ambitions that threatened the coherence of the group. Thus, in his poetry, Turberville links anxiety about friendship with romantic troubles. In so doing, he conveys a level of anxiety about the fragility of (p.94) his connections with other men. Poetry is a way to make and continue friendships while expressing concern about sustaining such bonds.

Gascoigne’s Poetry: Imitation and Parody

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Lyric Poetry Whatever ideas answer poetry helped to circulate, whatever anxieties it helped to negotiate, members of the Inns were self-consciously aware that their writing helped to establish social connections, something that is evident in the poetry of George Gascoigne. Gascoigne was born in 1534 and was, like Googe and Turberville, a member of the gentry. He attended Cambridge (which college is unknown), was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1555, and returned to the societies sometime in the early to mid-1560s. Gascoigne’s professional life was not the success he might have wanted. As Gascoigne himself points out in his poem ‘Gascoigne’s Woodmanship’, he shot ‘oft awry’ at everything, for instance squandering his fortune, involving himself in many lawsuits, and failing to obtain royal patronage.75 Gascoigne wrote in a broad range of literary forms, including translations, estates satire, epigram, epitaph, sonnet, and prose narrative, and much of his work was published in the miscellany A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) and later reprinted in The Posies (1575). Describing the work performed by all of Gascoigne’s poetry, Pigman has observed that ‘Gascoigne published his writings primarily as a means of seeking preferment’, and the inns-of-court answer poems in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres were part of this larger goal.76 These are five ‘sundry themes’, which Gascoigne composed for members of Gray’s Inn in the mid-1560s, when (after an unsuccessful attempt at farming) he returned to the societies to pursue a career in law.77 G. T., the presumably fictional editor and compiler of the Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, introduces the ‘Sundry themes’ (as he does all of the poems in the volume), describing the occasion for their composition:78 I have heard master Gascoigne’s memory commended by these verses following, the which were written upon this occasion. He had (in the middest of his youth) determined to abandon all vain delights and to return unto Gray’s Inn, there to undertake again the study of the common laws. And being required by five sundry gentlemen to write in verse somewhat worthy to be remembered, before he entered into their fellowship, he compiled these five sundry sorts of metre upon five sundry themes which they delivered unto him.79

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Lyric Poetry (p.95) G. T. states that Gascoigne was ‘required’ by ‘sundry gentlemen’ at Gray’s Inn to write poems on set themes in order to return there. The G. T. material is usually described as a fictional frame, which sets Gascoigne’s poetry within occasional contexts that may or may not have existed. The frame may be fictional, but G. T.’s comments have some relation to real situations, since—as we have already seen—members of the Inns wrote poems to each other on themes related to personal behaviour and comportment (such as Googe’s poems to Neville and Blundeston on idleness and lust). Moreover, it is likely that the events G. T. describes really occurred, since this is one of the few points in the Hundreth Sundrie Flowres when he uses the names of real men: the themes are assigned by and written to Francis Kinwelmersh, Anthony Kinwelmersh, John Vaughn, Alexander Neville, and Richard Courtop.80 The request to write on set themes ‘somewhat worthy to be remembered’ recalls the assignment that the schoolmaster Gnomaticus gave to his students in the Glass of Government, asking them to write verses on various precepts or themes, since ‘Arts poetry giveth greatest assistance unto memory’, and underscores that poetry at the Inns in the 1560s was an extension of the sorts of versification assignments given to students in grammar schools.81 At the same time, G. T.’s statement that Gascoigne was ‘required by five sundry gentlemen to write in verse […] before he entered into their fellowship’ reinforces the idea that this sort of composition was a common practice at the Inns and a way of establishing (or, in this case, reconfirming) social connections. Initially, the ‘sundry themes’ reveal more about Gascoigne’s reluctance to rejoin this community than about his desire to connect himself to it. Gascoigne’s poetry, in the words of Fred Inglis, is marked by his characteristic ‘scornful, truculent resignation’.82 Such scorn and truculence come across strongly, since the content and tone of the ‘sundry themes’ create the sense that Gascoigne is resistant to the demands of the assignments given to him. The first of them is a sonnet on the theme audaces fortuna iuvat (‘fortune helps the brave’). According to G. T., Francis Kinwelmersh, a member of Gray’s Inn, ‘delivered’ this theme to Gascoigne. The verse provides one example of the author’s ‘truculent resignation’: If yielding fear, or cankered villainy, In Caesar’s haughty heart had ta’en the charge, The walls of Rome had not been reared so high, (p.96) Nor yet the mighty empire left so large. If Menelaus could have ruled his will With foul reproach to lose his faire delight, Then had the stately towers of Troy stood still, And Greeks with grudge had drunk their own despite. If dread of drenching waves or fear of fire, Had stayed the wandering Prince amid his race, Ascanius then, the fruit of his desire In Lavine land had not possessed his place, Page 20 of 30

Lyric Poetry But true it is, where lots doe light by chance, There Fortune helps the boldest to advance.83

Gascoigne describes the fates of Caesar, Menelaus, and Aeneas. Yet it is curious that the theme ‘fortune helps the brave’ applies to only one of his examples. Caesar’s might results from his ability to control his ‘haughty heart’. Menelaus brings down Troy because he is unable to ‘rule his will’. Only Aeneas, as a figure who overcomes ‘dread’ and ‘fear’ to conquer Rome (‘Lavine land’), stands as an example of bravery. Yet the phrase ‘but true it is, where lots doe light by chance’ in the penultimate line calls attention to the fact that none of Gascoigne’s examples prove the theme well, since in each case it is resolution (or the lack thereof) that affects the outcome.84 Gascoigne writes on the maxim given to him, but in a way that seems to challenge, rather than address, the assignment. Gascoigne’s resistance is evident as well in his fourth theme on the topic ‘no haste but good’, which (again according to G. T.) was ‘delivered’ to him by Alexander Neville (whom we saw exchanging poetry with Barnabe Googe). In response to the maxim, which he interprets to mean ‘haste makes waste’, Gascoigne writes seven sonnets concerning Gascoigne’s—the narrator’s—rise and fall from favour at court. G. T.’s introduction to the poem notes that all of the sonnets themselves were written very, very quickly: Alexander Neville delivered him this theme, Sat cito, si sat bene, whereupon he [Gascoigne] compiled these seven sonnets in sequence, therein bewraying his own Nimis cito: and therewith his Vix bene.85 G. T. tells us that Gascoigne wrote nimis cito, ‘too fast’, and therefore vix bene, ‘hardly well’.86 Of course, the quality of the sonnets is open to the reader’s judgement, and we do not know how quickly Gascoigne wrote, but G. T.’s comment implies that Gascoigne’s composition proves the theme on which he writes, showing that haste, ‘too fast’, indeed makes waste, ‘hardly well’. At the same time, G. T. suggests Gascoigne’s refusal to live by the precepts he has been assigned to versify, pointing to his calculated unwillingness to act in accordance with the very lesson he has been asked to explain.

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Lyric Poetry (p.97) Looked at in another way, Gascoigne’s disregard is less a sign of his indifference and unwillingness to connect than an indication of the similarity of his personality and attitudes to those for whom he writes. The ‘sundry themes’, as I suggested above, have the feel of a grammar school academic assignment, such as the requirement from the Durham School that students ‘make certain verses upon certain argument which shall be given them’. In response, Gascoigne shows his understanding of the task ‘delivered’ to him, dutifully completing ‘themes’ while affecting the ‘truculent resignation’ of a schoolboy. Together, the men at the Inns and Gascoigne seem to engage in a knowing imitation and mild parody of academic assignments. As Laurie Shannon explains, this ‘winking contract’ between Gascoigne and his friends ‘draws its life from the pedagogical contexts of the all-male Tudor schoolroom’. Here ‘One figure hails another into poetry by “delivery” of a theme; the other hauls himself into a space of being by “delivering” poetry in response.’87 Gascoigne’s affected disregard indicates that he understands the academic form of the request and displays his shared understanding in the form of a joke. Gascoigne connects to the members of the Inns by demonstrating his willingness to obediently complete the task while expressing his sense of humour.

Communal Poetry Gascoigne’s ‘sundry themes’ return us to the question of why the men at the Inns continued the poetic practices of the grammar school and university. Writing poetry and attending the Inns played an analogous role in the lives of the men themselves. In the grammar schools, poetic composition was supposed to help one to acquire the skills and attitudes that would allow one to become an active participant in public life. At the same time, men came to the Inns to effect this transition, to become officers, secretaries, parliamentarians, and ambassadors in service to the state. Both activities were central to the creation of oneself as an active member of the realm. By continuing to write on set themes and commonplaces at the Inns, the men there continued to practise and memorize the ideas and attitudes they associated with professional responsibility. At the same time, by doing such work on their own, they selfconsciously and knowingly took on the qualities of men who considered questions about duty, service, and appropriate public behaviour. Thus, as we have seen in the poems discussed in this chapter, they wrote about ‘idleness’, ‘lust’, ‘friendship’, and ‘courage’, as well as ‘hasty’ work. If versification helped to turn precepts into memory, then the continuation of this activity helped to turn memory into personality. Writing poetry allowed the authors to take on, and promote, the personas of dutiful servants to the state that they learned and wrote about in their schooling—and to mould the attitudes and ethos of those around them.

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Lyric Poetry (p.98) It was not enough for members of the Inns to write verses on duty, responsibility, thriftiness, and the like and, therefore, to put themselves on the path to respectable careers. They also had to write amorous poetry and turn the amorous path into the dutiful one. Indeed, they displayed both their poetic abilities and moral steadfastness by writing both kinds of verse, and turning both to the same end. More importantly, members of the Inns were writing not just for themselves but also for their peers, in an effort to shape an inns-of-court habitus, to promote the homogeneity of a community of like-minded men. For them, the way to do this was to counsel each other about appropriate behaviour by both describing and affirming the values they wanted to uphold, and by illustrating the dangers of other ways of being. By writing and circulating lyric poetry, they defined themselves as individuals and as a community. Hence, lyric poetry at the Inns served a social as well as psychological function, allowing men to enter into, connect with, and shape the social world and outlook of members of the Inns of Court. And once they were established at the Inns, the community then furnished them with the incentive, authorization, and credentials to make contacts in the professional and political world of the Elizabethan government, and it fostered the production of other forms of writing—translation and drama —that they could use to make these contacts. Notes:

(1) Guillaume Coatalen, ‘Unpublished Elizabethan Sonnets in a Legal Manuscript from the Cambridge University Library’, Review of English Studies, 54 (2003), 553–65 (p. 564). (2) Coatalen, ‘Unpublished Elizabethan Sonnets’, p. 565. (3) The phrase is Thomas Randolph’s in a poem that satirizes this tradition: Besides, each day, I’ll write an elegy, And in as lamentable poetry As any inns-of-court man that hath gone To buy an Ovid with a Littleton.

See Poems (London: Printed for F. Bowman for Tho. Bowman, 1664), Wing R244, sig. C6v. (4) The collections by Googe, Turberville, and Gascoigne are discussed below. Hugh Plat’s collection is Flouers of Philosophie (London: Henry Bynneman and Francis Coldock, 1572), Timothy Kendall’s is Flowers of Epigrammes (London: John Shepperd, 1577), and John Grange’s is The Golden Aphroditis (London: Henry Bynneman, 1577). Kendall is a generation later than Turberville, but is clearly influenced by him, since he copied or closely paraphrased passages directly from him; see Hyder E. Rollins, ‘New Facts about George Turberville’, Modern Philology, 15 (1918), 513–38 (pp. 514–16).

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Lyric Poetry (5) Panofsky, ‘Mid-Tudor Short Poetry’, p. 5. (6) Quoted in Richard Foster Watson, who cites numerous grammar school statutes on versemaking in the curriculum, The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908). For further discussion of literary composition and grammar school curricula, see also Peter Mack, ‘Rhetoric in the Grammar School’, in Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 11–47; Lynn Enterline, ‘Rhetoric, Discipline, and the Theatricality of Everyday Life in Elizabethan Grammar Schools’, in From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, ed. by Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 173–90. (7) The Glasse of Governement, in The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. John W. Cunliffe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), II, pp. 1–90 (p. 47). Further references to the Glasse are to page numbers in this edition. (8) Glasse of Governement, pp. 55–6; 58. (9) Kenneth Charlton discusses the emphasis on civic duty and service to the state in Renaissance educational theory in Education in Renaissance England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), esp. pp. 41–85. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine show that there was a disconnect between theory and practice, the idea that ‘successful drilling in copia and methodus will guarantee a classroom product of moral uprightness and good characters’: see From Humanism to the Humanities, p. 149. (10) Elyot, Boke, sig. B7v; D7v. (11) Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. by Lawrence V. Ryan (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1967), p. 35. (12) Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 32. (13) Panofsky, ‘Mid-Tudor Short Poetry’, p. 6. (14) Gascoigne, Glasse of Governement, p. 60. (15) Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals, p. 41. (16) Gaggero, ‘Pleasure Unreconciled to Virtue: George Gascoigne and Didactic Drama’, in Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare, ed. by Kermode, Scott-Warren, and van Elk (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 167–94 (p. 170).

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Lyric Poetry (17) Hunter, ‘Drab and Golden Lyrics of the Renaissance’, in Forms of Lyric: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. by Reuben A. Brower (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 1–18 (p. 10). (18) Panofsky, ‘Mid-Tudor Short Poetry’, p. 7. (19) Kenneth Charlton surveys this training in ‘Education and the Inns of Court in the Sixteenth Century’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 9 (1960), 25– 38. (20) J. W. Saunders asserts that ‘professional poets’ (he implies, those not associated with court) in the sixteenth century tried ‘as best they could to imitate the Courtier’s habits’ in ‘From Manuscript to Print: A Note on the Circulation of Poetic MSS in the Sixteenth Century’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical Society, 6 (1951), 507–28 (p. 509) and ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’, Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951), 139–64. In the 1590s, inns-of-court men did imitate poetic forms popular at court (see Marotti, John Donne, pp. 25–95). (21) Stephen May, Elizabethan Courtier Poets, pp. 43–5. (22) That duty, responsibility, care for the state, the active life, etc. were indeed educational values is evident in many Renaissance educational and political treatises. J. H. Hexter shows that ‘questions of responsibility’ are of the utmost importance to such treatises, which describe the ‘responsibility through education’ for young men, particularly aristocrats, to prepare themselves for office, and emphasize ‘their responsibility to turn the education they get to the service of the public weal’ in Reappraisals in History (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961), p. 67. Referring specifically to Elyot’s Boke, Charlton points out that ‘duty, responsibility, obligation’ are the ‘key concepts’ (Education in Renaissance England, p. 83). More specifically, through the speaker Lupset, Thomas Starkey suggests that educated men must use their learning in service to the state, or they ‘regardeth not [their] office and duty’ in A Dialogue Between Pole and Lupset, p. 2. (23) Barnabe Googe, The Shippe of Safegarde (1569), ed. by Simon McKeown and William E. Sheidley (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001), p. xviii. (24) Biographical information from Mark Eccles, ‘Barnabe Googe’, 353–70; Judith M. Kennedy’s introduction to Barnabe Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, pp. 1–31.

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Lyric Poetry (25) Simon McKeown is an exception to this trend, discussing how Barnabe Googe reworks and reflects his own and contemporary religious and political beliefs: ‘Barnabe Googe: Poetry and Society in the 1560s’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Queen’s University, Belfast, 1993). (26) The two poems are in Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, ed. by Kennedy, poem 43; 45. (27) On the characteristics of pastoral, see Frank Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry: From the Beginnings to Marvell (London: George G. Harrap, 1952), pp. 11–44. (28) Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, 5.60; 65–94. (29) Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, 8.53–64. (30) On the Mirror at the Inns and Senecan tragedy, see ‘The Mirror among the Men at the Inns’ in Chapters 5 and 6. (31) Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, 12.239–40. (32) J. D. Alsop suggests that for Googe ‘quiet country refuge’ is necessary ‘until God restore[s] the true order’: ‘The Sixth Eclogue of Baptista Mantuan and the Elizabethan Poet Barnabe Googe’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 25 (1984), 1–8. (33) Paul Parnell, ‘Barnabe Googe: A Puritan in Arcadia’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 60 (1961), 273–81 (p. 281); Sheidley, Barnabe Googe (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1981), p. 74; McKeown, ‘Barnabe Googe’, p. 96. (34) Helen Cooper, ‘Mantuan’, in Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. by Hamilton, pp. 452–3 (p. 452). (35) Kennedy, introduction to Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, p. 21. (36) George Turberville, Eglogs of the Poet B. Mantuan Carmelitan Turned into English Verse (London: Henry Bynneman, 1567), STC 22990, sigs. B3r–v. (37) Turberville, Eglogs, sig. C7v. (38) Virgil began his career with his pastoral Eclogues, moved on to the Georgics, and then wrote the epic Aeneid. His movement, from pastoral to epic, became in the words of Lawrence Lipking the ‘pattern of a career to so many later poets’, the so-called rota Virgilii or cursus Virgilii. See Lipking, Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. xi, and Edward Kennedy, ‘Virgil’, in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. by Hamilton, pp. 717–19 (p. 717).

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Lyric Poetry (39) Stephen Hamrick argues that Googe’s aims extend beyond the Inns and that in his Eclogues especially, he criticizes Elizabeth I’s failure to fulfil her maternal role, the Queen’s invocation of Catholic aesthetic practices to promote herself, and her courtier Robert Dudley’s maneuverings for marriage in The Catholic Imaginary, pp. 35–70. (40) Hobbs, Early Seventeenth Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992), p. 21. (41) Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, 4.41. (42) Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 222. (43) Hart, ‘The Answer-Poem in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Review of English Studies, n.s., 7 (1956), 19–29. (44) Marotti, Manuscript, pp. 159–60. (45) Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, 2.35–6. (46) Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, poem 29. ‘Running’ means ‘flighty’ or ‘giddy’ (p. 171). Holmedon appears to be a fellow student and friend of Googe’s, since he is addressed as ‘my Holmedon’ (26.8) and told that a ‘running head’ is ‘the vilest plague that students can sustain’ (26.6). (47) George Turberville, Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, sig. B7v; sig. C2r. (48) Kendall, Flowers, sig. P4v; D6r; S4v. (49) Born in 1544, Neville matriculated at St. John’s College, Cambridge in 1559. His name does not appear on the rolls at the Inns, but it is assumed that he attended because, as we shall see further in the section on ‘Gascoigne’s Poetry: Imitation and Parody’, he is one of the five men for whom Gascoigne had to write ‘sundry themes’ on his return to Gray’s Inn in the early to mid-1560s. (50) Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, 29. (51) Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, 29a. (52) Franklin B. Williams, Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses, p. 19. It is possible that Blundeston was a fellow student with Googe at Christ’s College, Cambridge. See Kennedy’s note to ‘L. Blundeston to the Reader’ in her edition of Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, p. 139.

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Lyric Poetry (53) Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, poem 21. The phrase ‘cheese from chalk’ describes things that are dissimilar, as in the expression, ‘No more alike than cheese and chalk’. Frank Percy Wilson, Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 113. (54) Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, poem 21a. (55) Hart, ‘Answer-Poem in the Early Seventeenth Century’, p. 19. (56) Marotti, Manuscript, p. 162. (57) See, for instance, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 1–27. (58) Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 38–50. (59) Cathy Shrank, ‘“Matters of Love as of Discourse”: The English Sonnet, 1560– 1580’, Studies in Philology, 105 (2008), 30–49 (p. 36). (60) Shannon, ‘“Minerva’s Men”’, esp. p. 440; 444. (61) Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness, pp. 154–5. (62) Such insistence on homogeneity points to a difference between the poetry at the Inns in the 1560s and the 1590s, when much of the poetry, usually satirical, expressed hostility towards other inns-of-court men and other authors and often, in Lawrence Manley’s view, conveyed the poet’s isolation from others. See Manley, ‘Essential Difference: The Projects of Satire’, in Literature and Culture, pp. 372–430. Such differences in the tone of 1560s and 1590s poetry reinforce the need to examine different periods of literary production at the Inns in their immediate institutional and communal contexts. (63) William E. Sheidley, ‘George Turbervile and the Problem of Passion’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 69 (1970), 631–49 (p. 634). (64) Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, 35; 42. (65) Sheidley, Barnabe Googe, p. 53. (66) Donald L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A History of Plain and Eloquent Styles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 137; Sheidley, Barnabe Googe, p. 53; and John Peck, quoted in Sheidley, Barnabe Googe, p. 53. (67) Panofsky, ‘Mid-Tudor Short Poetry’, p. 127.

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Lyric Poetry (68) Turberville, Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs, and Sonets, sigs. Q2r–v. (69) Turberville’s unsettled treatment of friendship may grow out of the similarly unsettled treatment of masculinity, evident in his treatment of the hunter in his poems where ‘[T]he manliness of the hunter figure that is gestured at and appealed to in these poems is undermined, reversed, or put in doubt’: Catherine Bates, ‘George Turberville and the Painful Art of Falconry’, English Literary Renaissance, 41 (2011), 403–28 (p. 409). (70) Turberville, Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs, and Sonets, sigs. K6r–K6v. (71) Shrank, ‘Matters of Love as of Discourse’, p. 37. (72) Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, 25.11–25. (73) See ‘Communal Tensions’ in Chapter 1. (74) Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness, p. 155. (75) Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 72.2 and p. xxiv. References to poems are to numbered entries in this edition. (76) Pigman, ‘Biographical Introduction’, p. xxiii. (77) For more on these poems and their role as ‘an initiation into a literary clique’ see Gillian Austen, ‘Gascoigne’s Memories (1565)’, in George Gascoigne (Cambridge: Brewer, 2008), pp. 36–48. (78) Most commentators, including most recently Austen, George Gascoigne (p. 36), assume that G. T. is fictional; there is a slight possibility that the initials stand for George Turberville, or another actual person associated with the Inns. On connections between Gascoigne and Turberville, see Bates, ‘George Turberville and the Painful Art of Falconry’, p. 403; 407. (79) Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 58.0.01–0.11. (80) Not much is known about these men: Francis Kinwelmersh was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1557. He collaborated with Gascoigne on Jocasta (1566) and may also have been the brother of Anthony Kinwelmersh, who was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1561. John Vaughn was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1562–3. No record of Alexander Neville’s (1544–1614) admission to the Inns exists. He translated Seneca’s Oedipus (1563) and, as we have seen, wrote some of the poetry published in Googe’s Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets (1563). Richard Courtop was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1559. For biographical information, see Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, pp. 636–41.

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Lyric Poetry (81) For more on poetic assignments in the schools, see Watson, English Grammar Schools, esp. chapter 29 (‘Verse-Making with a Note on the Flores Poetarum’), pp. 468–82; also T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 2, pp. 380– 416, and on ‘amplification’, the underlying principle in the ‘sundry themes’, II, pp. 228–31. (82) Fred Inglis, The Elizabe`than Poets: The Making of English Poetry from Wyatt to Ben Jonson (London: Evans Brothers, Ltd, 1969), p. 159. (83) Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 58.1–14. (84) Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, p. 637. (85) Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 61. (86) Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, p. 640. (87) Laurie Shannon, ‘Poetic Companies: Musters of Agency in George Gascoigne’s “Friendly Verse” ’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 10 (2004), 453–83 (p. 467).

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England Jessica Winston

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords In the first half of Elizabeth’s reign, spanning from 1558 to 1581, over sixty Latin and Greek texts were translated into and printed in English. Surveying these translations, the chapter argues that translations assisted members of the Inns in the move from educational to professional life, allowing them to make the skills and materials of their earlier educational experiences useful to this transition. Looking at translations of Cicero, the chapter argues that translators viewed their activity as a service to the commonweal, specifically as a way of transferring the former political and intellectual dominance of Greece and Rome to England. By importing the cultural power and learning of ancient empires, translation could catalyse men looking for positions in the state into contributing members of the commonweal. The chapter concludes with a discussion of literacy rates and readership, and the influence of early Elizabethan translations in the later Elizabethan period. Keywords:   early Elizabethan, Inns of Court, classical translations, survey, education, professional career, commonweal, translations of Cicero, literacy rates, readership

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England In his translation of Ovid’s Heroides (1567), George Turberville asserts that ‘[i]t is a work of praise to cause | A Roman born to speak with English jaws’.1 Turberville implies that translation is a straightforward, if extreme, act. Take a Roman author, transplant an English mandible, and he will speak English. Yet the transformation is hardly straightforward or smooth. ‘Cause’, here, means ‘to make’, but it also implies ‘to force’.2 Roman authors are elegant, with ‘wellcouched words and featly forged phrase’,3 but English authors fail to forge so featly: they ‘jaw’ in their native tongue. The view that English was inferior to Latin, and even Continental languages, was pervasive in the sixteenth century. As Roger Ascham once asserted, And as for the Latin or Greek tongue, everything is so excellently done in them that none can do better. In the English tongue, contrary, everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and the handling, that not many can do worse.4 Yet in the 1560s and 1570s, Turberville and other authors overcame such reservations to participate in what retrospectively looks like a project to co-opt classical culture by ‘causing’ a record number of ancient Roman as well as Greek authors to speak—however coarsely or elegantly—in English. In the first half of Elizabeth’s reign, spanning from 1558 to 1581, over sixty Latin and Greek texts on a wide range of topics were translated and printed in English.5 The numbers include literature like Virgil’s Aeneid (1558, 1562, 1573), Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1565, 1567), Homer’s Iliad (1581), the satires of Horace, and all of Seneca’s tragedies. There is also moral philosophy: Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (1561) and the Manual of Epictetus (1567); natural histories, such as (p.100) Pliny’s Summary of Natural History (1566); exemplary lives and histories, such as Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus (books 1–6, 1552; books 7 and 8, 1567), Plutarch’s Lives (1579), and Caesar’s Gallic Wars (1564); and even mathematics: Euclid’s Geometry (1570). More classical translations were printed in this period than at any other time in the sixteenth century. Only fifty or so were published in the eighty-two years from 1476 to 1558, from the advent of printing in England to Elizabeth’s succession to the English throne, and only forty or so in the twenty-two years after 1581, the remaining years of Elizabeth’s reign.6

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England Why was classical translation so popular at this time? The majority of early Elizabethan translations were of serious works by Roman authors, and the majority of the translators were part of a generation of men affiliated with the universities and, especially, the Inns of Court. This phenomenon extends beyond the generational, political, and legal trends already charted. We have seen that members of the Inns in this period were part of a generational group that aimed to make themselves into ideal magistrates who could serve the new Elizabethan regime. And lyric poetry allowed some members to move along this professional path: drawing on the poetic skills they learned in the grammar schools and the universities, they circulated poetry to connect with each other and to shape the tastes and values of the community itself. Like lyric poetry, translations assisted members of the Inns in the move from educational to professional life, allowing them to make the skills and materials of their earlier educational experiences useful to this transition. Translation itself could be a form of national service. Many translators in the period in fact viewed their activity as a way of transferring the former political and intellectual dominance of Greece and Rome to England. By importing the cultural power and learning of ancient empires, translation began to catalyse men looking for positions in the state into contributing members of the commonweal. In a sense, the activity helped to effect a double translation: the transformation of the translators themselves and of the political and intellectual state of England.

Reading Translations In the early Elizabethan period, the decision to produce a work through translation—a distinct kind of textual and rhetorical production—was at least as important as its literary type or content. In a sense, translations are a genre in their own right, regardless of the rhetorical structure of any individual work— prose or poetry, polemic or pastoral. In early modern studies, this idea that translations are a special form of writing, let alone a genre, diverges from trends in translation in the latter half of the twentieth century. This chapter, therefore, also describes trends in early modern translation studies, and explains the rationale for viewing translations (p.101) collectively: the ensuing discussion groups together a range of works as diverse as Virgil’s Aeneid and Euclid’s Geometry.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England For just over half a century, from the 1950s to about 2010, early modernists paid little attention to translations produced in the period.7 This critical neglect stems, in part, from the dominant methods of literary inquiry. Especially with the rise of New Historicism in the last quarter of the twentieth century, criticism explored how textual productions reveal and shape particular discourses in the cultures in which they are produced: for example, ideas about the monarchy, the court, women, and inhabitants of the new world. Usually, these studies analyse a wide range of texts—from poetry to legal statutes and from epics to popular pamphlets—to demonstrate the prevalence, assumptions, and cultural function of these discourses. It is understandable that critics seeking to examine instantiations of specific early modern cultural vocabularies would not make a distinction between translated and more original works, since both reflect the early modern present, the concerns of the now, even if they derive directly from earlier cultural products.8 (p.102) How then should we read translations? Warren Boutcher suggests considering them ‘original’ works. Although faithfulness to original texts is of some value to modern critics and readers, translators in the sixteenth century were less likely to prioritize the form and content of their sources: The conditions for translation practice [throughout the Renaissance] were radically different from modern ones. Renaissance translators read and anatomized texts from the point of view of their training in rhetoric, a form of literary sensitivity very different in emphasis from that of twentiethcentury translators, if only because it is less mindful of the hard-and-fast distinction between original and translated texts. In this way, translations are ‘“original” works by authors who happen to be translating’.9 At a time when imitation and elaboration were common rhetorical modes, authors often created works by repeating, translating, expanding, compressing, and combining others’ work. Early Elizabethan translations were— like all other literary forms of the period—products of literary imitation, adaptation, and adoption, rather than close reproductions of particular sources. This way of thinking about translations makes some sense. Translators frequently altered their sources to suit their aims and readers. For instance, many adapted their sources so that their plots and characters might be better understood by readers, often ‘inferior’ or ‘unlearned’ ones who did not know Latin. In his translation of the Aeneid, Thomas Phaer explains that he conveys not every aspect of Virgil but only those features that can be rendered into English:

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England [T]here be many mystical secrets in this writer, which uttered in English would show little pleasure, and in mine opinion are better to be untouched than to diminish the grace of the rest with tediousness or darkness. I have therefore followed the counsel of Horace, teaching the duty of a good interpreter, Qui quae desperate nitescere posse, relinquit,10 by which occasion somewhat I have in places omitted, somewhat have altered, and something I have expounded, and all to ease of inferior readers.11 In particular, Phaer alters Virgil’s opening, freely composing several lines on ‘other books made by Virgil before this great work’ before arriving at the first line of Virgil, which he splits over two half lines: ‘Lo now of Mars and dreadful wars I sing | Of arms, and of the man of Troy’.12 Phaer conveys background about Virgil’s poetic career and, eventually, the story, but not Virgil’s rhetorical development. He never evokes or mimics the ancient’s ‘mystical secrets’; that is, perhaps, his poetic style.13 (p.103) Like Phaer, John Studley takes some liberties with Seneca’s Medea (1566), explaining in a preface that he does not see the use of the first choral ode. Observing that he aims to make Seneca’s drama available to readers without Latin, Studley explains: And because that all thing might be to the better understanding and commodity of the unlearned, as in some places I do expound at large the dark sense of the poet, so have I changed the first Chorus, because in it I saw nothing but an heap of profane stories, and names of profane fools: therefore I have altered the whole matter of it.14 Phaer and Studley adjust their works for ‘unlearned’ readers, but creative licence was taken for politico-religious ends, too. A vivid, if extreme, example is the translation of Horace’s fifth satire in The Medicinable Moral (1566), a volume by Thomas Drant that joins together a translation of Horace’s satires with an English version of The Wailings of the Prophet Jeremiah. In the fifth satire, Drant detours from his source, replacing the classical author’s poem with his own invective against vice. Addressing his source, Drant confesses the inventiveness of his pen: Friend Horace, though you may me use as to translate your verse, Yet your exploit I do refuse at this time to rehearse. Not every trick nor every toy that floweth from your brain Are incident into my pen, nor worthy of my pain.15

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England Drant wrote his poem to address a contemporaneous religious debate, the vestiarian controversy, which concerned preaching ministers’ continued practice of wearing the cope and surplice, vestments that for many radical Protestants smacked of popery. Drant’s verse supported Archbishop Grindal’s compromising, conformist attitude towards the practice, while criticizing the nonconformist, radical Protestant view, advocated by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, as a divisive, even insidiously Catholic, plot to undermine the English Church. In replacing Horace’s poem with his own polemic, Drant signals an important aspect of his translation practice in the entire collection: he replaces the multivalent, worldly, humorous voices in Horace with a singleminded, judgemental, moralistic speaker.16 He radically adapted, redacted, and expanded his source to suit his circumstances and aims, creating an arguably new, freestanding work in the process. Despite the clear tendency to alter and even radically change sources, the idea that translations are ‘original works’ can be taken too far. Translation, in the words of Neil Rhodes, is also ‘a distinct category of composition’, and it is partly for this reason that early modern printers and authors themselves frequently used the words translated and translation on title pages.17 Over the past decade, critics have (p.104) developed a new appreciation for translated texts, reading them less as writings that ‘happen to be translated’, to return to Boutcher’s phrasing, than as original works written in the ‘mode’ of translation. John Frow defines ‘mode’ as an extension of a genre that modifies or refines our expectations of the conventions in which the work is written, as in the gothic thriller, the lyrical drama, the comic novel, and the satirical sitcom.18 In early modern studies, critics such as Rhodes and Fred Shurink have shown that reading texts as ‘translated works’ modifies and refines how we understand their cultural significance and function in the period.19 Translation is at ‘the heart of our understanding of sixteenth-century literature and history’, yet to get at this understanding translations must be considered continuous with other forms of ‘original’ writing, but nevertheless a special kind of writing.20 A translation’s meaning and significance is shaped by authorial and contemporary attitudes towards the source text and source author, as well as by its original and target languages. In this way, more than with imitation, adaptation, or allusion, understanding translation demands investigation into the author’s micro- and macro-level reworking of the source from one language into another.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England When we treat translation as its own category of literary and rhetorical production, the various ends that motivated the early Elizabethan translation boom become more apparent. To do this, and following the lead of the early Elizabethan translators themselves, this chapter reverses this recent classification of translation as a mode and treats it not only as a mode—a secondary designation21—but as a genre, which is the primary literary category. For example, at least for the early Elizabethan period, the Aeneid was as much an epic (in translation) as it was a translation (of an epic).22 This may seem like a chicken-and-egg point, but it is useful since it can help us to understand that, in the early Elizabethan period, translation had a social meaning and significance that cut across typical literary genres, regardless of the particular author or type of work being translated. Early Elizabethan translators, such as Googe and Turberville, themselves traversed different types of writings; the act of translating and the production of translations were themselves important, at least equal to specific literary or rhetorical kind. (p.105) Indeed, this tendency to translate multiple kinds of writing distinguishes the early Elizabethans from translators of the early seventeenth century, such as Thomas Lodge, Philemon Holland, George Chapman, and John Florio, who tended to stick with particular authors, source languages, and types of writing like prose or poetry. Thus, despite their diversity, the early Elizabethan classical translations—of history, mathematics, medical treatise, poetry, and so forth—compose a singular archive, unified in their method of composition (translation), as well as defined in relation to a shared purpose, which is the importation of ancient, classical knowledge to England. To make this point through a discussion of this archive as a whole, with translation constituting a genre and not simply a mode, it is necessary to zoom out, away from micro-issues in translation. We must examine patterns across the field, extending the type of prosopographical analysis discussed in Chapter 2 to look at patterns in the biographies of the translators, their subject matter, and in the ways they present and describe their projects in the prefaces to their works.23 Expanding the chronological scope from the 1560s to include all of the translators and translations produced between 1558 and 1581 works towards this holistic view of translations. As we shall see, members of the Inns were the main actors in the larger, longer-term phenomenon described here, but this phenomenon also involved men, and sometimes women, outside of the Inns as well. Looking at the entire trend over the course of the early Elizabethan period, we can address why members of the Inns played such a large part in the translation boom.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England Classical translations make up only a small subset of translations produced in the early and later Elizabethan period.24 The majority of translators put Continental works into English, ranging from neo-Latin poetry to vernacular treatises on horsemanship. Classical translations are, however, an important subcategory of Elizabethan translations generally since Elizabethan translators tended to engage with classical sources and Continental ones differently, dealing more freely with the former than with other kinds of works, and often turning their ‘original authors’ into ‘mirrors of themselves’.25 Stuart Gillespie suggests that one reason for the difference in treatment is historical distance: unlike contemporaneous European texts, the classics could ‘only be “made English” through a process of cultural negotiation, for their world is much more remote’.26 (p.106) As Turberville envisages, translating Greek and Latin texts was motivated in part by an especially pronounced, almost visceral need to force classical authors, in particular, to speak to the English and in English, even as an act of quasi-nationalistic conquest and subjugation.27 Many authors viewed translation as part of a process of translatio studii, one that went hand in hand with a kind of translatio imperii—that is, an attempt to translate the cultural and military authority of the ancients to England. In this process, the cultures of France, Spain, and especially Italy were important, but the civilizations of ancient Greece and the empire of Rome were the prime models that English authors aimed to emulate, to equal, and even to better. In other words, classical translations had a different cultural weight and significance than Continental ones, even if similar desires for cultural adaptation and co-optation motivated the translators’ work with European authors, too.28

Versions of Cicero

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England The early Elizabethan classical translations are coherent as a set of works. Most of the classical translations are of works by Roman authors such as Seneca, Ovid, Cicero, Virgil, and Horace, or are works about Rome, such as Eutropius’s Chronicle (1564), Polybius’s History of the Roman Empire (1568), or Appian’s Roman History (separate translations 1578; 1580). At the same time, a significant number of the classical sources were viewed in the period as serious works, ones that took up publicly important questions about morality, politics, and culture. The translations teach rulers and citizens how to act morally; they chart the rise and decline of empires; they categorize the nature and geography of the world; and they contain an ancient storehouse of historical, mythological, and literary learning. Absent from this body of works are what might be considered randy or at least less explicitly serious works—for instance, Ovid’s Art of Love or Catullus’s lyrics. Even texts that might now seem pastoral, amorous, or romantic, such as Virgil’s Eclogues (1575) or Ovid’s Metamorphoses (various translations, 1560–72), are presented to the reader as important books that provide moral admonition and training.29 Thus the translator of Ovid’s tale of Narcissus (1560) adds a poem, the ‘moralization of the tale’, that is nearly five times as long as the tale itself.30 The early Elizabethan translations are full of gravitas and address themselves squarely towards critical, publicly important issues of morality, propriety and politics. (p.107) The majority of early Elizabethan classical translators (as well as the majority of the translators of medieval and contemporary Latin works at this time) belonged to a social network involving the universities and the Inns of Court, so the translation community is fairly interconnected. Several translators sign their works from one of the universities, the Inns, or their affiliated Inns of Chancery. Jasper Heywood signs his three versions of Seneca from All Souls College, Oxford; John Studley signs from his rooms at Cambridge; John Dolman signs his preface to the Tusculan Disputations from the Inner Temple; Nicolas Haward writes a preface to Eutropius’s Chronicle from the Inn of Chancery, Thavies Inn; Thomas Peend signs a dedication to Ovid’s fable of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1565) from the Inn of Chancery, Serjeant’s Inn; Thomas North signs his version of Antonio de Guevara’s Dial of Princes (1557) from Lincoln’s Inn; and William Bavand signs his edition of the Good Ordering of a Commonweal (1559) from the Middle Temple. In his ‘Preface’ to Seneca’s Thyestes (1560), Heywood of course praises the Inns as places where ‘Minerva’s men and finest wits do swarm’.31 A striking feature of his list of ‘wits’ is its emphasis on the Inns’ association with translation. The passage itself appears in a preface to a translation, and three of the listed works—North’s The Dial of Princes, Blundeville’s ‘Fruit of Foes’, and Googe’s The Zodiac of Life—are English versions of classical, medieval, or contemporary Latin works. Other writers in his list—Baldwin, Norton, Sackville, and Yelverton—produced or are closely affiliated with translated texts.32

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England Half of the classical translators in the early Elizabethan period were official members of the Inns of Court, and others had professional and personal relationships that connected them with the Inns in other ways. For example, the dedicatees and patrons of Christopher Watson (the translator of Polybius in 1568) and Thomas Twyne (the translator of Dionysius Periegetes’ Survey of the World in 1572 as well as portions of the Aeneid in 1573) were important members of the Inns, although some, by the time of the dedication, had moved beyond daily associations with the societies.33 The father of the prolific translator, Arthur Golding, was a member of the Middle Temple, while his half nephew, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, entered Gray’s Inn in 1561.34 The Inns were central to the development of a culture of translation at this time. (p.108) Nevertheless, all these translations were created against the backdrop of the print trade taking off in England in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Booksellers needed wares, and they often found these in already existing texts. Indeed, many translations were themselves produced by printers such as Edward Aggas, who translated many Calvinist treatises from French in the 1570s.35 Unlike Continental European countries, which had publishing centres in multiple cities, England had only one, London, and the book trade centred on the area around St Paul’s Churchyard, which itself was relatively near the Inns of Court (see Figure 1.1). Since printers could not produce all of their own stock by themselves, they needed an external supply. Those educated men at the Inns provided many of the works that the booksellers came to sell, but why were inns-of-court men interested in creating translations for print anyway?

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England This trend is, first and foremost, a generational phenomenon. As we saw in Chapter 2, born mainly in the 1530s, men at the Inns in the 1560s were members of the first generation of men wholly educated within a humanist educational framework—an educational model that stressed reading and translating the classics and then putting that knowledge to good use through future service to country and commonweal. As members of this cohort sought to make the transition from educational to professional life, the Inns were an especially important institution in that membership helped them to make connections with the social world of London and with patrons at court, such as Nicholas Bacon and Sir William Cecil, who themselves had been members of the Inns. Indeed, the translators frequently dedicated their translations to the Queen, Cecil, Bacon, and other members of the Privy Council as a way of bringing themselves to the attention of these important men.36 For many translators, the act of translating itself provided a way to link educational skills to civic service. As we have seen, criticism on early modern educational pedagogy often emphasizes disjunction between humanist theory and actual practice, demonstrating the disconnect between the everyday exercises and discipline of the classroom and the often idealistic rhetoric about the relevance of this work to a life of civic duty.37 Translation offers a way of overcoming that disconnect.38 Next to Seneca, Cicero was the most frequently translated author of the time: he was, in many ways, held up as the model citizen and philosopher statesman that members of the Inns were taught to emulate.39 His Tusculan Disputations, Ad Quintum (1561), Paradoxa Stoicorum, Somnium Scipionis, De Senectute (all 1569), and De Amicitia (1577) all appeared in English for the first time or in new translations (p.109) between 1561 and 1577.40 Cicero was himself a lawyer, and his content often concerns not just nomocracy but also another highly valued inn practice: oratory. Indeed, Cicero was an ‘iconic symbol for the legal profession’.41 Members of the generation of Googe, Turberville, Gascoigne, Norton, and Sackville translated Cicero to serve the state and—although it’s important not to push the metaphor too far—to translate themselves into the sphere that Cicero himself occupied. John Dolman does exactly this in his translation of the Tusculan Disputations (1561). The son of a clothier, Dolman joined the Inner Temple in 1560 to study law and to make his way in a profession that could improve the status of his family.42 While at the Inns, he participated in at least two literary endeavours, first translating the Tusculan Disputations and then writing the ‘Tragedy of Hastings’ for the 1563 edition of the Mirror for Magistrates. In the preface to his translation, Dolman spends some time describing the circumstances that prompted his book:

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England Whenas, partly by the counsel of them that might command me, and partly by mine own consent, I left the university and began to apply myself to the study of the common laws of this realm, I felt myself chiefly hindered therein with the intermeddling of those studies the which, not without great delight, I had afore time used. The which, because I was loathe to continue to the defrauding of the expectation of those with whom to trifle had been impiety, I minded to take my farewell of some such part of philosophy as both might be profitable to the quiet leading of my life, to whatsoever trade I should give myself, and also should be so pleasant that it might even cloy me with delight.43 Before coming to the Inner Temple, Dolman could well have studied a good deal of Cicero in his ‘intermeddling’ studies—that is, disciplines that have no business together.44 In the first two decades of the sixteenth century, Cicero’s works were part of a broader curriculum of Latin training, and by the end of the sixteenth century, Cicero was a central part of the school curriculum because he provided a model for Latin grammar and rhetoric.45 Dolman takes up Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations to say farewell to philosophy and to this earlier education; however, he quickly presses this work into a kind of service, suggesting that philosophy may be ‘profitable to the quiet leading of my life’ and ‘to whatsoever trade I should give myself’. Dolman does more, however, than find a pastime that will be delightful and personally profitable; it will also be useful to his country: [W]hiles I read, I must needs confess that I was never more delighted with any work, except it were the sacred volume of the Holy Scriptures; wherefore, when I had (p.110) perused it over and found such profit and pleasure therein, as it were not possible to find the like in any ethnic [i.e. pagan] writer, I wished all men the like delight as the reading of it brought unto me. And because I could not misdoubt, but the learned had already tried unto the intent, that the unlearned also might have some fruition thereof, and that our country might at length flow with the works of philosophy, I endeavoured myself, although not eloquently, yet plainly, to translate the same into our English tongue.46 Dolman aims at a kind of translation of erudition, disseminating Cicero’s learning to the ‘learned’ and the ‘unlearned’ to transfer the philosophy of ancient Rome to England. With respect to Dolman’s life trajectory, his translation occurred during a professional transition: he fashioned the materials of his education into something that could serve self, career, and country.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England A more explicit example of this pattern—career alchemy via translation—occurs in Goddred Gilby’s (fl. 1561) translation of Cicero’s letter Ad Quintum (1561) in which Cicero describes the duties of a magistrate to his brother Quintus, posted in Asia. We know little of Gilby. He was the son of the Leicestershire-native, evangelical religious writer and Church of England clergyman Anthony Gilby (c. 1510–85), who fled England upon the accession of Mary. He returned to Leicestershire when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne, finding a patron in the Earl of Huntingdon. As for Gilby, he was born prior to 1554 and taken into exile with his parents. Upon his family’s return to England, he published the translation of Cicero and, a short while later, Calvin’s Admonition against Astrology (1561). Neither Gilby’s education nor his age when he translated these works is known.47 In the epistle ‘To the Reader’ in Calvin, he describes himself as a ‘child’.48 Nevertheless, in the Cicero translation’s ‘To the Reader’, he raises numerous points that place him as a member of a generation of ‘youth’ (as he terms himself in the epistle itself) at a transitional point in their lives who aim for careers in the law, church, and government, a transition that is directly connected to his reason for translating Cicero. The epistle begins with an invective against the corruption of men who hold important offices because such behaviour makes it difficult for the youth of his generation to know how to ‘direct [their] studies’,49 to the point that he is forced to translate Cicero because it is the only way he thinks that he can use his learning productively. He dedicates two pages to criticizing the dishonesty of magistrates, lawyers, and other officers: The laws are good to right the wrongs, but lawyers do not their duties. Justice is good, but the justices care not for poor men’s causes. Officers are enough and well provided for in all places but these officers understand not their office and duty or if they do understand it, they will not do it, and which is the worst of all, when they do it not, they may not be told of it, especially by a man that is learned in God’s word.50 (p.111) With so little guidance, and with concerns about magistrates that would equal Nicholas Bacon’s, Gilby writes: Therefore not seeing whereunto in this my youth I could direct my studies yet neither wherein I could be better occupied both for mine own learning, and for the instruction of such politic men as will vouchsafe to read heathen writers, though they regard not scriptures, I have translated, as I could, into our native language the notable epistle of that famous, wise, and politic man M. Tullius Cicero unto his brother Quintus, wherein justice and the right use of an office is so well and politicly described that the politic heads may learn thereby to put good things into practice.51

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England Gilby suggests that the achievement of an office would be the appropriate use of his learning, providing a way for him to ‘direct [his] studies’. Yet, in the face of intense corruption among office holders, he continues; he is forced to look for another way to use his learning, so that he can ‘instruct politic men’ and be ‘occupied’, a word that suggests both his desire to avoid idleness and his interest in having an occupation. Gilby later concludes that translation also keeps him from getting in trouble with his father because it is a form of labour, and ‘My father commanded me to follow labour and to suffer others to seek for honours.’52 Gilby thus registers a distinctive combination of petulance and bitterness, while still exemplifying a more general trend. Like Dolman, he turned translation into a form of personal, professional, and national service. It kept him busy and assisted the nation insofar as his work offered advice to rulers and magistrates. At the same time, translating Cicero was professionally beneficial, allowing Gilby to showcase his linguistic skill to potential patrons (although the translation is unusual in that it is not dedicated to anyone) and to display his awareness of the role of the magistrate in the country as whole. The practice translates Cicero, reforms office holders, and imparts some of Cicero’s essence and prominence to Gilby. Translators like Dolman and Gilby described their practice as a civic duty and civil service, depicting their work as an activity for the improvement of the commonwealth. In his translation of Pliny’s Natural History, one John Alday explains that he works ‘to profit my country with that small talent that God hath lent me’.53 This is a reference to the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25.14–30), and John Studley invokes the same allusion when he writes that he decided to translate and publish Seneca’s Agamemnon because he was urged by his friends ‘not to hide and keep to myself that small talent which god hath lent unto me to serve my country withal’.54 Using that rhetoric of service (minus the biblical reference), James Sandford says that he translates the Manual of Epictetus as ‘a pledge of my bounden (p.112) duty towards your highness and affection towards my country’;55 Arthur Golding explains that he translates Justinus’s History of Trogus Pompeius ‘for the zeal I bear to this my native country’;56 Christopher Watson indicates in his version of Polybius’s History of the Roman Empire that he is moved to write by ‘a fervent zeal which I bear towards my native country’.57 Early Elizabethan authors, and in particular a generational group at the universities and the Inns, saw the art of translation as a mechanism for carrying out the service that their education (and those who commanded them) demanded they perform.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England It may seem strange to consider translation as a form of national service, but the content of many of the translations directly appeals to and illustrates this association. Like Gilby’s Ad Quintum, a number of works provide information relevant to the governance of the state—several translations in particular contain advice for princes. In his dedication to Queen Elizabeth in Three Moral Treatises by Plutarch, Blundeville asserts that Plutarch ‘shows wherein a prince ought most t’ excel’.58 Likewise, Alexander Neville presents Seneca’s Oedipus as a mirror for princes. Following Act III, the Chorus describes the story as an example from which rulers can learn, stating, ‘Let Oedipus example be of this unto you all, | A mirror meet, a pattern plain of princes’ careful thrall’.59 Similarly, William Barker translates Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus as an example of a perfect prince: Xenophon ‘treateth of a prince that in his time exceeded all other, and in him he showeth a plat [i.e. scheme or pattern] of perfect and princely education’.60 These authors are, in many ways, assuming the role of magistrates laid out by William Bavand, and advanced also by Bacon. As Chapter 2 showed, Bavand, Bacon, and others promulgated the view that magistrates are the backbone of a well-governed nation. Here, by advising the prince on the princely duties, these authors demonstrate their own care for the commonweal, and cast themselves in the role of magisterial advisors. In terms of guiding magistrates at all levels, the translations even counselled the very generation of men who were trying to obtain civic position. While Gilby’s Ad Quintum guides readers on the duties of magistrates, it also provides useful instruction for those seeking advancement and public office. Nicolas Haward asserts that his translation of Eutropius’s History of the Roman Commonwealth can help readers to be better governors by teaching them the nature of government: (p.113) [A] man shall […] understand the usage and fashions of sundry realms and countries, as well in peace as in time of war, the ordinances and laws of sundry nations, the ways and means by which they have enlarged their kingdoms, and the causes of the decay of the same, and how those ruinous empires have been again restored, and have recovered their former estates.61 In a more explicit way, Thomas Wilson speaks to this generation, presenting his translation of several orations by Demosthenes (1570) as a guidebook for those who would like to learn how best to serve their country: ‘He that desires to serve his country abroad, let him read Demosthenes day and night, for this is he that is able to make him fit to do any service for his country’s welfare’.62

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England If members of the Inns used the transmission of lyric poetry in manuscript to make connections with each other, they used the circulation of translations in print to provide information both to each other and to those magistrates who already held offices, translating works to make themselves (and their fellow office seekers) ‘fit to do any service’. But not all of the translations functioned in this way. The Tusculan Disputations, for instance, with its focus on the question of what makes a person happiest, is not immediately relevant to rule. Similarly, Virgil’s Aeneid, while it raises questions about the rights and obligations of rulers, is not as clearly a book of advice to magistrates as Cicero’s Ad Quintum is. And Ovid’s works, while presented in Golding as a kind of moral training ground for readers (and hence, implicitly, as works that could contribute to the moral training of princes and magistrates, among others), were not immediately relevant to the rule of the nation. But these other translations also served the state by helping to bring the cultural authority of Rome and other ancient empires to England.

Translatio Imperii and Translatio Studii In his study of Renaissance translation, F. O. Matthiessen memorably wrote, ‘A study of Elizabethan translations is a study of the means by which the Renaissance came to England’.63 As cultural work, early Elizabethan classical translations helped to transfer the learning of the ancient world to England. The translators were interested in what translations could do for them and for their country, and what made translation a service was in part the effect the activity could have on the culture itself. Many translators saw their work as a form of translatio imperii and translatio studii, as a way of bringing the cultural authority of Greece and Rome to England. In translation, they might bring to England the conditions for the production of a cultural centre of their own. (p.114) Medieval and Renaissance Europe developed the concepts of translatio imperii and translatio studii as a way of understanding the relationship between empires of their present and those of their past. Following the model of the four worldly empires in the Book of Daniel, translatio imperii refers to a shift in centres of military and political power from Greece to Rome and then to countries in medieval and early modern Europe. The idea allowed empires to see themselves as ‘the transferal of the Roman imperium to another people’.64 Translatio imperii studiique describes a metaphysical movement of imperial and cultural authority from one place to another, but the process also involves the physical movement of people, such as the travel of Aeneas from Troy to Rome. As Édouard Jeauneau has observed, translatio studii often involves the physical transfer of books:

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England The transmission of learning from one place to another implies the translation of texts from one language to another. In a world where books are the necessary vehicle of learning, it is obvious that learning cannot travel unless conveyed by books […]. Hence the absolute necessity for translations.65 Classical statements on translatio studii highlight the material exchange involved in the translation of culture from one place to another. For example, in his Epistulae, Horace observes that soon after Rome had conquered Greece with weapons, Greece conquered Rome with learning.66 The comment suggests a material exchange between Greece and Rome, the physical transfer of weapons and arts. In the opening pages of the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero refers to this sort of physical transfer to urge readers to bring philosophy from Greece to Rome. As he says in Dolman’s translation, I desire all such as are able to do it, that they would help to take this praise [in philosophy] also from Greece, that is already fainted, and bring it into this our city, as our ancestors have already done by all the rest [of Greek studies], that were worth any pain or travail.67 Like the classical author whom he translated, Dolman sought to transfer this ancient philosophical text to England, and thus to spur philosophical writing in his own country.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England Underlying and motivating the early Elizabethan translation of learning is a persistent and even peculiarly English concern that England lagged culturally behind Continental Europe.68 Evidence of this anxiety appears in both classical and Continental translations, but perhaps the most developed and well-known (p.115) statement on the perceived inferiority of English culture and the related need for translations comes from Thomas Hoby’s ‘Preface’ to his translation of the Italian Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1561), where Hoby complains, in reference to learning, that ‘Englishmen are much inferior to well most all other Nations’.69 This kind of anxiety was neither localized to the Inns of Court nor new. In the medieval period, Englishmen thought of themselves, as the Virgilian phrase goes, as wholly divided from the world. And this worry caused Spenser, near the end of the sixteenth century, to lament not having a kingdom of his own language.70 The anxiety of cultural belatedness persisted but the circumstances prompting it to emerge changed with time. In the middle part of the sixteenth century the sense that ‘Englishmen [were] much inferior’ was fostered by a growing distress that other countries, especially Italy, had more material available in their native languages, and consequently had richer vernacular cultures than did England.71 This distress was perhaps fuelled by the increasing availability of Continental books in English as well as by the return of Marian Catholic exiles, who upon returning to England in Elizabeth’s reign likely brought Continental works with them, as well as perhaps the rise in translation itself. The idea is that writers translated Continental works, an act that reinforced this sense of belatedness even as the translators were attempting to overcome it. In his lengthy defence of translation in the preface to the Courtier, Hoby argues that translation will enrich English vernacular culture as well. Complaining that ‘learned men’ in England did not see the study of translated texts as a form of learning, Hoby asserts that ‘it is learning itself’. Moreover, In Italy, where the most translation of authors is not only for philosophy, logic, humanit[ies] and all liberal sciences both in Greek and Latin, [several Italian authors] are presently very singular and renowned throughout all Christendom: but also for the same in the vulgar tongue with little or no sight at all in the Latin, Aretino, Gelli (a tailor in Florence) [and five Italian ladies], infinite other men and women are most famous throughout Italy, whose divine works and excellent style both in rhyme and prose give a sufficient testimony not only of their profound knowledge and noble wit, but also that knowledge may be obtained in studying only a man’s own native tongue.72

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England For Hoby, translation had elsewhere produced cultures of learning wherein a variety of learned citizens as diverse as ‘a tailor in Florence’ and many of the noble ladies created great works of ‘excellent style’. A similar translatio studii in England would enrich the culture of the English nation, producing a learned (and, he adds, a civil and moral) culture in England. Referring back to Cicero’s comments on translation in the Tusculan Disputations, Hoby continues: (p.116) Therefore the translation of Latin or Greek authors doth not only not hinder learning, but it furthereth it, yea it is learning itself, and a great stay to youth, and the noble end to the which they ought to apply their wits that with diligence and study have attained a perfect understanding to open a gap for others to follow their steps and a virtuous exercise for the unlatined to come by learning and to fill their mind with the moral virtues, and their body with civil conditions, that they may both talk freely in all company, live uprightly though there were no laws, and be in a readiness against all kind of worldly chances that happen, which is the profit that commeth of philosophy.73 Hoby’s high hopes for translation were not unique. Thomas Wilson in his Art of Logic (1551) worries that his fellow Englishmen are ‘inferior’ to those in other nations, protesting that ‘the capacity of my countrymen in the English nation is so pregnant and quick to achieve any kind or art of knowledge, whereunto wit may attain that they are not inferior to any other’. He also believed that translations were central to demonstrating and ensuring this cultural equality. For he says that he would follow the example of ‘diverse learned men of other countries’ who had ‘not suffered any of the sciences liberal to be hidden in the Greek or Latin tongue’. Like those men who ‘have with most earnest travail made every of them familiar to their vulgar people’, Wilson vowed to work to foster and secure the intellectual eminence of England by making one kind of knowledge—logic, or the science of reasoning—available in English.74 Translators of Continental works express these ideas most explicitly. The translators chose works because they seemed important enough to put into English, yet the fact of learned Continental authors perhaps also enhanced for the translators their own sense of cultural belatedness. Thus the sense of England’s cultural deficit is evident in New Jewel of Health (1576), where the translator Conrad Gessner complains that the Italians and the French have learning in their languages that is not available in English, and then he offers the following defence of translation: For what kind of science or knowledge ever was invented by man, which is not now in the Italian or French? And what more prerogative have they than we Englishmen […]? For our English is as meet and necessary for us, as is the Greek for the Grecians.75

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England Translation was thought to be necessary for gaining the knowledge (and implicitly the culture) already available to others. In 1603, John Florio made clear what was at stake in overcoming this deficit: the movement of the centre of international learning to England. In the preface to his translation of Montaigne’s Essays, Florio asks, ‘[S]hall I apologize translation?’ He then describes the translation of learning from one place to another over time, explaining that (p.117) Philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, logic, Arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, and all the mathematics yet hold their name of the Greeks: and the Greeks drew their baptizing water from the conduit pipes of the Egyptians, and they from the well-springs of the Hebrews or Chaldees [i.e. Chaldeans].76 Tracing the origins of philosophy, rhetoric, geometry, and similar subjects back to the earliest cultures, Florio argues that translation brought these fields of study to the Greeks. He suggests that England then became a part of this line of reception and that the English were therefore poised to become as culturally important as those earlier empires. While the translation of learning required the translation of both ancient and modern works, in the early Elizabethan period there was special interest in translation of the classics, since these were thought to be the ‘well-spring’ of culture. At least two of the classical translators specifically describe themselves as undertaking such projects precisely to improve the state of English cultural affairs. In the preface to his translation of Vegetius’s Martial Policy, John Sadler explains that his patron, Edmonde Brudenelle, deliberately sought to bring the work out in English: [H]e thought it better to cause the said work to be openly set forth and published, although in a very base and homely style, then that this worthy author, whom not only the Italians, Almains [i.e. residents of what is now Germany], and Frenchmen but also many other Nations have most diligently translated into their own peculiar languages, should any longer be hid and kept from all his native countrymen.77

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England For Brudenelle and Sadler, translation is a way to overcome what were clearly seen as England’s cultural limitations, seeking to make learning already available to the Italians, Germans, and French obtainable for English readers. Similarly, Henry Billingsley translates Euclid’s Geometry, ‘By means whereof, our English tongue shall no less be enriched with good authors than are other strange tongues: as the Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish’.78 For a generation of men trained in the careful reading of classical texts, and themselves looking to serve the state, translation provided an established way for them to, in the words of Goddred Gilby’s preface to Ad Quintum, ‘direct their studies’ and fulfil their duty by bringing the learning and, one hoped, the cultural status of ancient Greece and Rome to England.

Translations for the Common Reader The English translators of the mid-sixteenth century sought to renovate their country’s culture, and in part their project was to make the content of classical (p.118) works available to the ‘unlearned’ reader. Who was this reader precisely? What relationship did this reader have to members of the Inns of Court? In many ways, this reader was the foundation of the project of cultural vitalization described by the translators themselves. Who read translations? There is no way to determine for certain, but prefaces, layout, and book design offer insight into imagined and implied audience. When looking over the prefaces, it becomes clear that the works were intended for two kinds of audiences: first, particular nobles, especially those in the upper echelons of the Elizabethan administration. The majority of the translations are dedicated to the Queen and members of the Privy Council, such as William Cecil, as well as other important members of the court, such as Robert Dudley and Christopher Hatton. Second, translators aimed their works at a variety of readers, variously described as ‘unlearned’, ‘vulgar’, ‘common’, and ‘mean’, and imagined generally as readers who did not know Latin. Some of these readers were members of the nobility who were untutored in Latin. In his translation of the first seven books of Virgil’s Aeneid, Thomas Phaer explains that he writes for the ‘honest recreation of you the nobility, gentlemen and ladies that study not Latin’.79 Elsewhere, the social status of readers is not clear. In his translation of Justinus’s Abridgement of the Histories of Trogus Pompeius, Arthur Golding translates, as we saw above, ‘for the zeal I bear to this my native country’, continuing that he also is ‘desirous to gratify, yea, and to profit such as have not understanding in the Latin tongue’.80 Thomas Wilson insists that he translates Demosthenes for the benefit of everyone, ‘of young and old, of learned and unlearned, of wise and unwise’.81 In several translations, the ‘unlearned’ reader is certainly not aristocratic. In Tusculan Disputations, Dolman argues against a position that philosophy should not be shared with common readers:

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England I think that sufficiently satisfied, if they consider that besides the rascal multitude and the learned sages, there is a mean sort of men, which although they be not learned, yet by the quickness of their wits can conceive all such points of arte as nature could give. To those, I say, there is nothing in this book too dark.82 In his dedication to Queen Elizabeth in his translation of Plutarch’s Lives, Thomas North strikes a likewise optimistic—perhaps even in some measure democratic—tone, hoping that ‘the common sort of your subjects shall not only profit themselves hereby, but also be animated to the better service of your Majesty’.83 James Sandford considers the Manual of Epictetus ‘worthy to be published abroad for a common use and commodity, and meet that of all estates he be usually read’,84 and in his translation of Cicero’s Paradoxa, Thomas Newton wants to put his book (p.119) ‘into the hands of many’.85 In their emphasis on ‘the people’, these aims of the translators also align with other movements in the period that aimed to put learning and interpretation into the hands of the people—the Reformation and vernacular translations of the Bible, humanism, and the rise of grammar schools. Nevertheless, despite a growing interest in educating larger and larger groups of the population, these projects were necessarily hampered by actual literacy rates and the affordability of books and education. ‘[T]he common sort of the Queen’s subjects’ and a ‘mean sort of men’ could not have been a large group. While most of the translations of the period were published in affordable octavos, these could still be rather pricey.86 Few readers would have been able to afford a thick quarto or folio, such as Plutarch’s Lives, and although functional literacy rates may have been as high as 90 per cent, what proportion of this group would have been literate and interested enough to read the book, should they have got their hands on it? Regardless of specific literacy rates, it is undeniable that levels of literacy increased over the sixteenth century, and the translators must have felt that they were capitalizing on what they knew to be a trend, even if they (and we) do not know precisely how far down the social scale an interest in and ability to read extended, or how people differently read varying types of works, such as public, authoritative texts like the Bible, or books for private consumption, such as chapbooks and romances.87 In O. L. Hatcher’s words: ‘the instinct of the translator for imparting instruction was at times more highly developed than that in the general public for receiving it’.88 Nevertheless, the prefaces suggest the translators’ interest in gaining an audience that was significantly broader than members of the Privy Council, the ‘unlatined’ nobility, or other inns-of-court men. Moreover, as Neil Rhodes points out, ‘the mission of vernacularisation of the classics was precisely to extend [the] reach’ of translations down the social scale.89

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England (p.120) The appeal to the common reader was more than a convention trotted out on title pages to justify entrance into the marketplace of print. Many classical translations were designed to make works approachable and educational. Prefaces provide details to help readers situate the works in historical or biographical context. Thomas Underdown begins his translation of Ovid’s Invective against Ibis (1569) with a description of the circumstances surrounding the composition of the satire, the poet’s exile from Rome. Thomas Churchyard includes a passage on ‘The Occasion of This Book’ in his translation of Ovid’s De Tristibus (1572), a series of verse letters that Ovid wrote while in exile to his family, friends, and the emperor in Rome. Thomas Wilson’s translation of Demosthenes includes prefatory material to set the Olynthiacs within the context of the life and work of the Roman orator. And in his version of Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Arthur Golding includes a letter to the reader explaining the history of Gaul leading up to and following the time period covered in Caesar’s account. Furthering the translations’ accessibility, marginal notes and glossaries help readers to identify obscure phrases, places, and historical figures. In his translation of the fable of Hemaphroditus and Salmacis from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Thomas Peend appends a glossary with ‘histories and names not familiar to our English phrase’, including entries on even relatively basic mythological figures such as Venus and Mercury.90 Thomas Underdown breaks up Ovid’s Invective against Ibis with prose glosses, explaining the poem’s historical and mythological references. Arthur Fleming, translator of Virgil’s Eclogues, bundles an entire dictionary with his work, offering readers a cut-rate deal on an otherwise expensive, additional book to help them understand the text. In a letter to ‘the indifferent reader’, in other words the average or general one, Fleming states his aim for a ‘mitigation of expense’ and ‘a saving of money’ by including in the margins ‘an abridgment of a commentary or dictionary, which being bought alone […] doth exceed the price of this libel [i.e. little book] by pence, groats, and shillings’.91 Prefatory and intertextual material encourages the reader to take moral guidance from the works. Thomas Norton begins his translation of the Orations of Arsanes against Philip (1560) with a lengthy preface on how to read historical works, explaining that history should not be read ‘with an idle vain lust to hear news, or to tell tales, or as it were to spend out time’. Rather, it should be approached following the ‘right rule of wisdom’ to gather ‘profit of every lawful pleasure’.92 Golding instructs readers of Justinus’s Abridgement to pay attention to ‘the variety and multitude of examples’, which he observes ‘tend all to one end, that is, th’ advancement of virtue, and the defacing of vice’.93 And Goddred Gilby helps (p.121) readers learn from Ad Quintum by including marginal glosses to reinforce Cicero’s maxims.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England The interest in the ‘common reader’ has been explained as an investment on the part of Elizabethan translators in educating a burgeoning English middle class,94 and this must have been important to some translators. Yet this preoccupation can be better understood within the context of translatio studii and the larger, comparative European context in which translators took up their work. Many translators were trying to bring works into English to make their own culture as vibrant as that of France, Germany, Italy, or Spain. The way to do this was to educate the common reader for, as Hoby asserts, what made these cultures great was the widespread availability of learning in the vernacular, and the possibility that such learning gave to those people who did not know Latin, even a tailor in Florence or the noble ladies of Italy, a chance to read the ancients and then to produce their own works, as Hoby says, of ‘profound knowledge and noble wit’. To the translators of early Elizabethan England, the commitment to educating the ‘mean’ or ‘vulgar’ reader was not an end in itself but an instrument for fostering an intellectual and artistic culture that would rival those they imagined existed on the Continent, to create the conditions for ‘profound’ and ‘noble’ cultural productions of their own.

Translation and Elizabethan Literature Classical translations did have an impact on Elizabethan culture, helping to create the cultural platform on which the towering achievements of the following generations could take place. The later ‘golden age’ of vernacular literature was in part built on a literary and intellectual foundation built by those seemingly ‘drab’ authors of a generation earlier. In essence, Elizabethan classical reception was a two-part process, first involving the translation, sometimes even the rewriting, of the classics to create a vernacular English literary culture modelled on Greek and Roman texts. In the second (later Elizabethan) phase, writers extended and transformed this trend by creating more novel, less directly source-based, literary works and forms in English.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England Two moments encapsulate these phases in classical reception. We heard the early Elizabethan author George Turberville state at the beginning of the chapter, ‘It is a work of praise to cause | A Roman born to speak with English jaws’. In Turberville’s phrasing, the creation of vernacular literature involves outfitting a Roman body with English parts, an idea in line with other contemporary images of translation as a way of re-‘dressing’ others. Another, ideologically fraught version of this idea comes from Thomas Drant, who says of his translation of Horace: ‘I have shaved off his hair and paired off his nails— that is, I have wiped away all his vanity and superfluity of matter’.95 Drant takes his image from Deuteronomy 21, which states (p.122) that one can marry a captive woman so long as she is purified, with her head and eyebrows shaved and her nails pared. The image was used by St Jerome, and later Erasmus, to justify appropriating the writings of the pagan past for Christian purposes, by turning the property of the ancients to good use.96 This is precisely Drant’s aim as he strips away the ‘vanity’ and ‘superfluity’ of Horace for political and religious purposes.97 Both Turberville and Drant, however, imply that translation is the transmission of an excellent mind in a new, and perhaps more modestly outfitted, body. The second moment, from the end of the sixteenth century, reverses Turberville’s implied relationship between classical and vernacular. In Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595), the character Bottom is a weaver—that is, someone who makes cloth from that staple material of the English economy, wool. He is ‘translated’ into an ass, a word that initially seems simply to mean ‘changed in form or appearance’. Because the play is ‘intimately engaged with classical antecedents’ and set in part in ancient Athens, however, the word ‘translated’ calls to mind that other meaning also in circulation in the period, ‘turned from one language to another’.98 Yet while Bottom is changed in form, he is decidedly not a linguistic or cultural translation: his ass’s head has no specific source, although it may be a vaguely classical allusion to Apuleius’s Golden Ass or to the punishment of King Midas in book 11 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Rather than repeat or rework a specific Roman work, Bottom, in Lynn Enterline’s words, ‘undergoes a physical, classically derived metamorphosis that his peers understand in terms of translation’.99 In this way, the moment refracts later sixteenth-century literary and dramatic approaches to the classics, implicitly inverting the early Elizabethan idea of a Roman body with English jaws. This new vernacular literary moment recreates the classics in an imaginative ‘translation’ in which an English body is outfitted with vaguely classical chops.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England It has long been recognized that Arthur Golding’s Metamorphoses and Thomas North’s Plutarch’s Lives were sources for later Elizabethan authors, especially Shakespeare. In addition to the local influence that such works had on individual authors and plays, we should recognize that Golding and North—together with an entire generation of translators—helped create the conditions in which the writings of a later generation could take place. In essence, the early Elizabethan classical translators helped to populate a print environment that then surrounded and influenced later authors, including Shakespeare, the son of a glove-maker, with a little Latin and less Greek, who—to use Hoby’s words about the ‘unlatined’ writers of Italy—then produced works of ‘profound knowledge’ and ‘noble wit’ in English.

(p.123) Translations and Political Society at the Inns Even as the translators of the 1560s and 1570s promoted later Elizabethan literary culture, they shaped the political society and culture of the early Elizabethan Inns of Court. As we saw in Chapter 2, members of the Inns responded to dramatic changes in the size of the legal profession, and authors there sought to shape themselves and others into ideal magistrates. As part of this process, they translated classical as well as Continental works that would foster and reinforce the honesty and propriety of magistrates and the magistracy. In works like Cicero’s Ad Quintum, Plutarch’s Lives, Montanus’s Good Ordering of a Commonweal, and Federico Ceriol’s Of Councils and Counsellors, members of the Inns advised those in office, while presenting themselves as ready to take on roles as officers in the commonwealth. This concern for the commonwealth grew out of the educational background and future ambitions of the authors. Yet these interests had the reciprocal effect of facilitating the development of a type of alternative polity at the Inns,100 an ideal society of friends and colleagues, where members could speak to each other and to those in power about care and governance of the state. While ostensibly furthering the development of a reading public, works such as the Good Ordering of a Commonweal or Of Councils and Counsellors allowed men such as Bavand and Blundeville to speak to each other, the monarch, the Privy Council, Parliament, and other magistrates about issues relevant to the political nation: the responsibilities of kings, the duties of counsellors, and the role of subjects in the life of the state; the relationship between the king and the law; and the role of rebellion in maintaining and disturbing the commonwealth. Altogether, the translations fostered a political culture at the Inns, one that expressed and developed members’ interest in and care for the rule of the state, even as it implied that the Inns were an alternative political unit, a province, with an angular relationship to the political nation, both separate from and dependent upon the political hierarchy.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England In a period traditionally associated with the increasing consolidation of authority in the monarchy, it is intriguing to find a group forming—in loosely Habermasian terms—a protopublic sphere, an arena in which men could routinely critically consider, even question, the roles and responsibilities of magistrates and the monarch herself. The emergence of the Inns in the 1560s as something like a proto-‘public sphere’ or alternative polity raises a variety of questions about their status vis-à-vis the Elizabethan political nation, and more especially the monarchy: Was such a community new or had it existed before? To what degree did it support those in power, and to what degree did it threaten the legitimacy or authority of the central institutions of the political nation—monarch, Privy Council, and Parliament? What made possible the development of this polity? Writings produced by members of this community had subversive potential. Markku Peltonen has shown that the classical and Continental translations of the 1570s promulgated a tradition of classical humanism in England, one that would help to justify (p.124) republican activities in the mid-seventeenth century.101 Phil Withington has documented how texts published and relating to the English Civil War in the later 1640s and 1650s saw the revitalization of the ‘commonweal’ vocabulary that first became prominent in English printed texts in the 1560s and 1570s. Such texts created ‘an important framework for political actions and their justification—or condemnation—by the time the king and Commons fell out in 1640’.102 The early Elizabethan classical translations, then, are part of a long trajectory in the coalescence of seventeenth-century pro- and anti-monarchic arguments. But what was the social and cultural status of these ‘commonweal’ sentiments at the moment they were written? To begin to address this question, it is necessary to look back to the mid-1550s and to examine several literary-political precedents that directly informed the intellectual culture of the Inns in the 1560s: A Mirror for Magistrates and Senecan tragedy. Notes:

(1) George Turberville, ‘The Translator to the Captious Sort of Sycophants’, in The Heroycall Epistles of the Learned Poet Publius Ouidius Naso, in English Verse (London: Henry Denham, 1567), STC 18940, sigs. X2r–X3r (sig. X2v). (2) ‘Cause, v.1’, definitions 1a and 2 in OED Online [22 September 2013]. (3) The word ‘featly’ here means ‘properly, neatly, elegantly’; see ‘featly, adj. and adv’, OED Online [22 September 2013]. (4) Roger Ascham, Toxophilus (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1545), STC 837, sig. A4v.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England (5) The end date 1581 is significant for a number of reasons. It is the halfway point of Elizabeth’s reign, and right around this date several landmark publications appeared that would transform later Elizabethan literary culture: Thomas Newton’s Tenne Tragedies (1581), a compilation of translations of Seneca’s tragedies, most of which were translated in the 1560s; also Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579), dedicated to Sidney, and Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (c. 1579) and Astrophil and Stella (c. 1581). Arthur Hall’s translation of Homer’s Iliad also appeared in 1581. (6) For a list of first editions of classical translations from 1558 to 1581, see Appendix 2, and H. B. Lathrop’s ‘Chronological List of Translations’, in Translations of the Classics into English from Caxton to Chapman, 1477–1620 (1933; reprint: New York: Octagon Books, 1967), pp. 311–18.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England (7) Warren Boutcher, ‘The Renaissance’, in Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. by Peter France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 45– 55 (p. 45). An example of this neglect is the Cambridge Companion to Literature in English, 1500–1600, ed. by Arthur F. Kinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The volume surveys major themes and genres in the sixteenth century and contains chapters on specific forms of writing, including drama, lyric poetry, romance, epic, and satire, as well as chapters on ‘religious writing’ and ‘chronicles of private life’. Brief discussions of Ovid, Horace, Seneca, Virgil, and various continental authors appear throughout this collection. Yet the volume has no chapter, indeed not even an index entry, on translation. An exception to this trend is studies of religious translations and studies of translations by women, as exemplified by the work of Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Margaret P. Hannay, Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985). Translation was a topic of criticism in the early to mid-twentieth century. Important studies include: John Garret Underhill, Spanish Literature in the England of the Tudors (New York: Columbia University Press, 1899); Henrietta R. Palmer, List of English Editions and Translations of Greek and Latin Classics Printed Before 1641 (1911; repr. Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1970); O. L. Hatcher, ‘Aims and Methods of Elizabethan Translators’, Englische Studien, 44 (1912), 174–92; Mary Augusta Scott, Elizabethan Translations from the Italian (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1916); C. H. Conley, First English Translators of the Classics; F. O. Matthiesson, Translation: An Elizabethan Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931); Lathrop, Translations of the Classics (1933); Louis B. Wright, ‘Translations for the Elizabethan Middle Class’, The Library, 4th ser., 13 (1933), 312–33; Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of English: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1953); Julia G. Ebel, ‘A Numerical Survey of Elizabethan Translations’, The Library, 5th ser., 22 (1967), 104–27 and ‘Translation and Cultural Nationalism in the Reign of Elizabeth’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 30 (1969), 593–602; James Ruoff’s entry on ‘Translation’, in Crowell’s Handbook of Elizabethan and Stuart Literature (New York: Crowell, 1975), pp. 428–33; Gordon Braden, The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978); and Warren Boutcher, ‘Vernacular Humanism in the Sixteenth Century’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. by Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 189–202.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England (8) See, for example, surveys of the technique and style of particular translations in Matthiesson, Translation: An Elizabethan Art and Gordon, Classics and English Renaissance Poetry, as well as Evelyn M. Spearing, The Elizabethan Translations of Seneca’s Tragedies (1912; repr. Folcroft, PA: The Folcroft Press, 1969); Spearing, ‘Alexander Nevile’s Translation of Seneca’s “Oedipus”’, Modern Language Review, 15 (1920), 359–63; T. S. Eliot, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932), 51–88; and Lee T. Pearcy, The Mediated Muse: English Translations of Ovid, 1560–1700 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984). (9) Boutcher, ‘The Renaissance’, p. 46. (10) The line from the Art of Poetry (lines 149–50) reads ‘et quae desperate tractate nitescere posse, reliquit’ (‘and what he fears he cannot make attractive with his touch he abandons’); see Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936). (11) Thomas Phaer, The Seuen First Bookes of the Eneidos of Virgill (London: John Kingston for Richard Jugge, 1558), STC 24799, sigs. X2r–X3v. (12) Phaer, Seven First Books, sig. A1r. (13) In another example of this phenomenon, Alexander Neville writes that his translation is not ‘precise in following the author word for word, but sometimes by addition, sometimes by subtraction, to use the aptest phrase in giving the sense that I could invent’. The Lamentable Tragedie of Oedipus the Sonne of Laius Kyng of Thebes out of Seneca (London: Thomas Colwell, 1563), STC 22225, sig. a3v–a4r. (14) John Studley, Seuenth Tragedie of Seneca, Entituled Medea (London: Thomas Colwell, 1566), STC 22224, sigs. A3r–A3v. (15) Thomas Drant, A Medicinable Morall (London: Thomas Marsh, 1566), STC 13805, sig. C3v. (16) The points in this paragraph are drawn directly from Neel Mukherjee, ‘Thomas Drant’s Rewriting of Horace’, SEL, 40 (2000), 1–20. (17) English Renaissance Translation Theory, ed. by Neil Rhodes with Gordon Kendal and Louise Wilson, MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations Series, vol. 9 (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2013), p. 1; 2. (18) Frow, Genre, p. 65.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England (19) Fred Schurink, ed. Tudor Translation (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Other examples of the new work in translation studies include: Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, volume 2: 1550–1660, ed. by Gordon Braden, Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Stuart Gillespie, English Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary History, Classical Receptions Series (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Fred Schurink, ed. Tudor Translation, and the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations Series, ed. by Neil Rhodes and Andrew Hadfield (London: Modern Humanities Research Association), 2011–present. (20) Schurink, ‘Introduction’, Tudor Translation, p. 1. (21) An example is the Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, ed. by Braden, Cummings, and Gillespie, which surveys translations by genre, ‘nondramatic verse’, ‘drama’, and ‘prose fiction’, divisions that highlight that literary and rhetorical genre are of prime importance in thinking about early modern translations. I suggest that the prioritization should be reversed for the period 1558–81. (22) In his dedication, Thomas Phaer, for instance, dwells less on the book he chose to translate than on the translation as an illustration of his industriousness: The translation gives ‘the accompts of my pastime in all my vacations, in which vacations I made the said work’ (Seuen First Bookes, sig. a2r). The production of the translation is emphasized more than the specific work chosen. (23) On prosopography, see the opening of Chapter 2. This chapter builds on research compiled by C. H. Conley in First English Translators of the Classics (1927). Conley’s data is significant, but the conclusions drawn from it here differ significantly. Conley argues that the important patrons urged inns-of-court men and others to translate classics into English, since the dissemination of these translations could help the process of religious reformation by freeing the English people from Catholic superstitions. Among other things, the argument overstates the role of patrons in initiating literary works, while also simplifying the complex blend of motives that prompted individuals, friends, and contemporaries to produce similar sorts of works. For other objections, see Pauline Aiken’s review of the book in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 28 (1929), 288–90. (24) On the popularity of translations of all sorts in the sixteenth century, see H. S. Bennett’s three-volume survey of English Books and Readers, especially volume one, English Books and Readers, 1475–1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 153. (25) Ruoff, Crowell’s Handbook, p. 429. See also Gillespie, English Translation, p. 31. Page 31 of 37

Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England (26) Gillespie, English Translation, p. 21. (27) English Renaissance Translation Theory, p. 51. (28) It is interesting to note that in the early Elizabethan period, the process of building a vernacular literary culture relies almost exclusively on translation and importation, and not on indigenous folkloric traditions, such as the ‘fairy lore’ that would figure in Elizabethan writings of the 1590s, e.g. Spenser’s Faerie Queene or Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. See ‘Translation and Elizabethan Literature’ in this chapter. (29) It is interesting to note that the attempt to put Virgil’s Eclogues to didactic and pedagogical uses follows a precedent set in the eclogues of Googe, who, as we saw in Chapter 3, sought to make pastoral poetry into a form of parental and religious admonition. (30) [T. H.] [Thomas Hackett or Howell?], The Fable of Ouid Treting of Narcissus (London: Thomas Hackett, 1560), STC 18970, sigs. B1r–E1v. (31) See the opening of Chapter 2. (32) William Baldwin wrote A Treatise of Morall Phylosophie Contaynyng the Sayinges of the Wyse (1547) and The Canticles or Balades of Salomon, Phraselyke Declared in Englysh Metres (1549). Thomas Norton translated some Justin in Orations of Arsanes (two speeches) (1560) as well as John Calvin’s Institution of Christian Religion (1561). Thomas Sackville wrote a commendatory poem in Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s Courtier (1561). Christopher Yelverton wrote the epilogue to George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh’s translated play, Jocasta. (33) Watson’s dedicatee was Thomas Gawdy, esquire (d. 1588), called to the bar of IT in 1550, Lenten Reader (1560), and IT Treasurer (1562). He was nominated for Serjeant-at-Law 1567. See David Ibbetson, ‘Gawdy, Thomas’ in ODNB [5 August 2013]. Twyne’s dedicatee was Sir Nicholas Bacon. (34) Unless otherwise specified, biographical information on the early Elizabethan translators is from Conley, First English Translators of the Classics, pp. 23–7; 129–54. Golding himself earned an honourable admission to the Inner Temple in 1574 (John Considine, ‘Golding, Arthur,’ ODNB [15 August 2013]. (35) Brenda M. Hosington discusses other printers who were translators in ‘Commerce, Printing, and Patronage’, in Oxford History of Literary Translation Into English, volume 2: 1550–1660, ed. by Braden, Cummings, and Gillespie, pp. 47–58 (p. 51). (36) For more on dedicatees, see ‘Translations for the Common Reader’ in this chapter. Page 32 of 37

Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England (37) See also the opening of Chapter 2. (38) In this way, the early Elizabethan translators were following in the footsteps of earlier humanists, especially Elyot, who ‘defined the role of translator as that of public servant’ (Rhodes, English Renaissance Translation Theory, p. 35). (39) On Cicero’s status in Tudor England, see Howard Jones, Master Tully: Cicero in Tudor England (Nieuwkoop: De Graff Publishers, 1998), esp. p. 77. (40) In addition, other works, such as De Officiis, first published in an English translation by Nicholas Grimald in 1556, were continually reprinted throughout this period. (41) Brooks, LPS, pp. 28–9. (42) Lily B. Campbell, ‘John Dolman’, English Literary History, 4 (1937), 192–200. (43) John Dolman, [Tusculan Disputations] Those Fyue Qvestions Which Marke Tullye Cicero, Disputed in His Manor of Tusculanum: Written Afterwardes By Him, In as Manye Bookes, To His Frende, and Familiar, Brutus, in the Latine Tounge (London: Thomas Marsh, 1561), STC 5317, sigs. 2r–2v. (44) ‘Intermeddle, v.’ OED Online [24 September 2013]. (45) Watson, English Grammar Schools to 1660, p. 228; Charlton, Education in Renaissance England, p. 56; 110; 121. See also Brooks, LPS, p. 29. (46) Dolman, Tusculan Disputations, sig. 2v. (47) Claire Cross, ‘Anthony Gilby’ in ODNB [7 August 2013]. (48) Goddred Gilby, An Admonicion Against Astrology Judiciall and Other Curiosities, that Raigne Now in the World (London: Rouland Hall, 1561), STC 4372, sig. A1v. (49) Goddred Gilby, Ad Quintum, sig. A2r. (50) Gilby, Ad Quintum, sig. A3r. (51) Gilby, Ad Quintum, sigs. A3r–A3v. (52) Gilby, Ad Quintum, sig. A4v. (53) I[ohn] A[lday], A Summarie of the Antiquities, and Wonders of the Worlde, Abstracted out of the Sixteene First Bookes of the Excellente Historiographer Plinie (London: Henry Denham for Thomas Hackett, 1566), STC 20031, sig. A2r.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England (54) John Studley, The Eyght Tragedie of Seneca. Entituled Agamemnon (London: Thomas Colwell, 1566), STC 22222, sig. A4r. The parable also appears in works by Thomas Phaer and Thomas Gale (Rhodes, English Renaissance Translation Theory, p. 35). (55) James Sandford, The Manuell of Epictetus (London: H. Bynneman for Leonard Maylard, 1567), STC 10423, sig. A3v. (56) Arthur Golding, Thabridgment of the Histories of Trogus Pompeius, Collected and Wrytten in the Laten Tongue By The Famous Historiographer Iustine ([London]: Thomas Marsh, [1564]), STC 24290, sig. *6r. (57) Christopher Watson, The Hystories of the Most Famous and Worthy Cronographer Polybius: Discoursing of the Warres Betwixt the Romanes & Carthaginenses, a Rich and Goodly Worke, Conteining Holsome Counsels & Wonderfull Deuises Against the Incombrances of Fickle Fortune (London: Henry Bynneman for Thomas Hackett, [1568]), STC 20097, sig. A5r. (58) Thomas Blundeville, Three Morall Treatises, A2r. (59) Alexander Neville, Lamentable Tragedie of Oedipus, sig. D2v. (60) William Barker, Preface to the Earl of Surrey in The XIII Bookes of Xenophon, Containinge the Institution, Schole, and Education of Cyrus, the Noble Kynge of Persye ([London: Reginald (Reyner) Wolfe, 1567]), STC 26067, sigs. A2r–A4r (sig. A3r). (61) Nicolas Haward, A Briefe Chronicle, Wherein Are Described Shortlye the Originall, and Successiue Estate of the Romaine Weale Publique ([London: Thomas Marsh, [1564]), STC 10579, sigs. A6r–v. (62) Thomas Wilson, The Three Orations of Demosthenes Chiefe Orator Among the Grecians (London: Henry Denham, [1570]), STC 6578, sig. **1r. (63) Matthiessen, Translation, p. 3. (64) Ernst Robert Curtius is writing specifically about Charlemagne; the point can be generalized to any empire. See European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. by Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), p. 29. (65) édouard Jeauneau, Translatio Studii: The Transmission of Learning: A Gilsonian Theme (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1994), pp. 8–9.

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Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England (66) ‘Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes | intulit agresti Latio’ (‘Greece, the captive, made her savage victor captive, and brought the arts into rustic Latium’). See Epistle 2.1.156–7 in Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica, trans. by Fairclough. (67) Dolman, Tusculan Disputations, sig. J3v. (68) Ebel, ‘Numerical Survey’, pp. 123–5. (69) Thomas Hoby, The Covrtyer of Covnt Baldessar Castilio Diuided into Foure Bookes (London: William Seres, 1561), STC 4778, sig. A4r. (70) Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Erwin Greenlaw et al, 11 vols (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57), X, p. 16. (71) In his article on ‘The Renaissance’, Boutcher points out that the context for understanding this growing awareness of European vernacular cultures is the increasing popularity of polyglot literary training. (72) Hoby, The Covrtyer, sig. A4v. (73) Hoby, The Covrtyer, sigs. A4v–B1r. (74) Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason, Conteining the Arte of Logique ([London: Richard Grafton], [1551]), STC 25809, sigs. A3r–A3v. (75) Conrad Gesner, The New Iewell of Health, Wherein Is Contayned The Most Excellent Secretes of Phisicke and Philosophie, Deuided Into Fower Bookes (London: Henry Denham, 1576), STC 11798, sig. *3r. (76) John Florio, The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne (London: Valentine Simmes for Edward Blount, 1603), STC 18041, sig. A5r. (77) John Sadler, The Foure Boookes of Flauius Vegetius Renatus, Briefely Contayninge a Plaine Forme, and Perfect Knowledge of Martiall Policyce, Feates of Chiualrie, and Whatsoeuer Pertayneth to Warre (London: Thomas Marsh, [1572]), STC 24631, sig. 2v. (78) Henry Billingsley, The Elements of Geometrie of the Most Auncient Philosopher Euclide of Megara (London: John Day, 1570), STC 10560, sig. 3r. (79) Phaer, Seuen First Bookes, sig. X2r. (80) Golding, Thabridgment of the Histories of Trogus Pompeius, sig. *6r. (81) Wilson, Three Orations of Demosthenes, sig. **ir. (82) Dolman, Tusculan Disputations, sigs. 5r–5v. Page 35 of 37

Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England (83) Thomas North, The Liues of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, Compared Together by that Graue Learned Philosopher and Historiographer, Plutarke of Chaeronea (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1579), STC 20065, sig. *2r. (84) Sandford, Manuell of Epictetus, sig. A2r. (85) Thomas Newton, The Booke of Marcus Tullius Cicero Entituled Paradoxa Stoicorum (London: Thomas Marsh, [1569]), STC 5314, sig. a3r. (86) Costs varied depending on the total length of the book and the number of sheets of paper needed to print it. Throughout the period, costs hovered around a half-penny per sheet, with one sheet equaling eight leaves or sixteen pages in octavo; four leaves or eight pages in quarto; and two leaves or four pages in folio. (Bookbinding costs were additional.) For instance, Thomas Blundeville’s quarto translation of Plutarch in Three Morall Treatises contains about eighteen leaves, and so would have cost about nine pence, although Roger Ascham, in a prefatory poem, notes that it is worth far more. Ascham states that the advice it contains is so helpful that ‘if I lacked I would not let, | To buy this book for forty pence’. See ‘The Fruytes of Foes’, in Three Morall Treatises, sig. A2r. On book prices, see H. S. Bennett, ‘Notes on English Retail Book Prices, 1480–1560’, The Library, 5th ser., 3 (1950), 172–8; Francis R. Johnson, ‘Notes on English Retail Book Prices, 1550–1640’, The Library, 5th ser., 5 (1950), 83–112; David McKitterick, ‘“Ovid with a Littleton”: The Cost of English Books in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 11 (1997), 184–237. (87) On literacy in England, see especially David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1981); Jonathan Barry, ‘Literacy and Literature in Popular Culture: Reading and Writing in Historical Perspective’, in Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850, ed. by Tim Harris (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), pp. 69–94. (88) Hatcher, ‘Aims and Methods of Elizabethan Translators’, p. 176. (89) Rhodes, English Renaissance Translation Theory, p. 37. (90) Thomas Peend, Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (London: [Thomas Colwell], 1565), STC 18971, sig. B7r. (91) Abraham Fleming, The Bucolikes of Publius Virgilius Maro (London: John Charlewood for Thomas Woodcock, 1575), STC 24816, sig. A4r. (92) Thomas Norton, Orations of Arsanes Agaynst Philip The Trecherous Kyng of Macedone (London: John Day, [1560]), STC 785, sig. 2r –v. Page 36 of 37

Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England (93) Golding, Thabridgment of the Histories of Trogus Pompeius, sig 2v. (94) See Wright’s ‘Translations for the Elizabethan Middle Class’. (95) Drant, Medicinable Moral, sig. A3v. (96) On the use of this image to articulate the relationship of pagan literature and Christian learning, see Kathy Eden, ‘Friends Hold All Things in Common’: Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the Adages of Erasmus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 8–32. (97) Mukherjee, ‘Thomas Drant’s Rewriting of Horace’. (98) Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, p. 2. (99) Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, p. 2. (100) Laurie Shannon’s term; see ‘The Inns in the 1560s’ in the Introduction. (101) Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 18–53. (102) Withington, Society in Early Modern England, pp. 152–60; the quotation is from p. 156.

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The Mirror for Magistrates

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

The Mirror for Magistrates Political Discourse and the Legal Magistracy Jessica Winston

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines one of the most popular literary works of the later sixteenth century, the Mirror for Magistrates (1559–63). The chapter argues that the Mirror, which was written in the 1550s, presents a literary community as the foundation for a political one, and the type of literary-cum-political culture imagined in the Mirror was realized at the Inns in the 1560s. The Mirror is the seminal, and arguably the most important, work in the literature of magistracy that appeared in the late 1550s and early 1560s. Why was the Mirror written at this time? Why was it so popular and influential? An important key to these questions lies in the literary and political community represented in its pages, and the related role it imagines for magistrates in the polity. Magistrates are an enlightened political group who have the authority to advise monarchs, and even to resist them. Keywords:   The Mirror for Magistrates, The Mirror for Magistrates: prose frame, literary community, political community, representation of magistrates, political counsel, Inns of Court

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The Mirror for Magistrates In 1561, John Dolman, a new inner barrister of the Inner Temple, regretted his legal training since it entailed abandoning those liberal studies that ‘not without great delight [he] had aforetime used’.1 As we saw in Chapter 4, Dolman translated Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations as a valediction to philosophy and the other liberal arts, but it turns out that this was not his final venture beyond the law. Two years later, Dolman wrote and published the poem ‘The Tragedy of Hastings’ in the most recent edition of the Mirror for Magistrates (1563). As he did in the Tusculan Disputations, Dolman legitimated this extra-legal endeavour, turning it into a publicly beneficial end. In the Disputations, Dolman sought to foster the intellectual and artistic culture of England, ‘so that our country might at length flow with the works of philosophy’. Likewise, the ‘Tragedy of Hastings’, along with the other poems in the Mirror, aimed to inculcate virtue in rulers and magistrates by providing examples of vice that these readers should avoid. Dolman exemplifies the coincidence of legal and poetic interests of sixteenthcentury law students, and more specifically their interest in linking the liberal arts with the vita activa. More immediately for this chapter, his life and writings illustrate one point of connection between the Inns of Court and the Mirror for Magistrates, one of the most important and influential texts produced in Marian England. There are other points of connection, too. One of the earliest authors of the Mirror, George Ferrers, was a member of Lincoln’s Inn (adm 1534). Thomas Sackville contributed to the 1563 Mirror, and his earlier play Gorboduc alludes directly to the volume: Gorboduc ‘[a] Mirror shall become to Princes all | To learn to shun the cause of such a fall’.2 In his list of ‘Minerva’s Men’, Jasper Heywood linked the Mirror to the Inns of Court, where one will hear ‘a great report of Baldwin’s worthy name’.3 As Chapters 6 and 7 will show in a more general way, the Mirror served as an inspiration for specific poems, translations, and plays produced by members of the Inns. Yet the influence of the Mirror was even more general and profound. This chapter argues that the Mirror presents a literary community as the foundation for a political one; and the type of literary-cum-political culture imagined in the Mirror was realized at the Inns in the 1560s. The Mirror is a seminal, and arguably the most important, work in the literature of magistracy that (p.128) appeared in the late 1550s and early 1560s. Why was the Mirror written at this time? Why was it so popular and influential? An important key to the topics and popularity of the Mirror lies in the literary and political community represented in its pages, and the related role it imagines for magistrates in the polity. Magistrates are an enlightened political community who have the authority to advise monarchs, and even to resist them.

The Project of the Mirror

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The Mirror for Magistrates Collaboratively composed by William Baldwin and a group of seven other writers in the early 1550s, the Mirror for Magistrates (pub. 1559; rev. 1563) is a collection of didactic poetry about the downfall of English kings, lords, and pretenders to power between the reigns of Richard II and Edward IV.4 The purpose of the volume is to teach the monarch and other nobles wisdom and virtue by showing them the results of a variety of vices, including tyranny, ambition, and pride. As Baldwin writes in his prefatory letter to the nobility, the Mirror provides a series of tragic stories in which noble readers might see themselves. ‘For here’, he explains, ‘as in a looking glass, you shall see (if any vice be in you) how the like hath been punished in other heretofore, whereby admonished, I trust it will be a good occasion to move you to the sooner amendment’. Such admonition to virtue ‘is the chiefest end why it is set forth’, which he hopes ‘God grant it may attain’.5 The ‘chiefest end’ of the Mirror is to advise magistrates to act virtuously, but it is not clear how all of the parts of the work contribute to this goal. The individual ‘tragedies’ are introduced and framed by a prose narrative that documents the activities of the authors as they create the volume itself. In a conversation about the composition of the book in the opening section of the prose narrative, George Ferrers makes Baldwin the secretary for the group, telling him that ‘it shall be your charge to note and pen orderly the whole process’, and near the end of the work, Baldwin tells us that he ‘recorded and noted all such matters as they had willed me’.6 Why should the ‘whole process’ of the authors’ work—not just the final outcome of it—be ‘recorded and noted’ in the collection alongside the tragedies themselves?

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The Mirror for Magistrates The Mirror is based on John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (c. 1431–9), itself a translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (c. 1358) by way of Laurent de Premierfait’s French prose version, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes (c. 1409). Nothing like the prose frame exists in these earlier works. Nevertheless, a look at the Mirror in the context of these generic predecessors helps to make sense of the formal device. Each of the earlier works is designed, as Lydgate puts it, to serve as (p.129) a ‘clear lantern’ in which the tragic examples of ancient rulers can ‘teach another what he shall eschew’.7 Even so, Laurent and Lydgate dramatically altered the form and content of Boccaccio’s De casibus to make it suit the specific contexts in which they wrote. The authors of the Mirror followed in this tradition, writing to advise princes, while altering the substance and shape of their work to suit their goals. With the addition of the prose frame, they shifted the emphasis of the De casibus genre from the ‘clear lantern’ of admonitory history to their own conversations about the creation of the volume, transforming the social and political function of the genre itself. This chapter examines the Mirror in the context of its generic precursors to discuss how and why Baldwin and his fellow authors altered the De casibus. In the Mirror for Magistrates, the authors turned a kind of writing designed to speak to power into one that depicted and fostered a conversation about power, about the obligations and responsibilities of those who rule the commonwealth.8 In the end, they shaped a work that not only changed the genre in which they wrote but also transformed the culture in which they lived. The Mirror helped to promote political discourse about governance in Elizabethan England, and it reinforced the integral role of the legal magistracy in governing the nation.9

(p.130) Adaptations of De Casibus The Mirror for Magistrates is one in a series of adaptations of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium. The initial recreations of this work by Laurent and Lydgate, however, only barely anticipate the generic and political innovations of the Mirror. Moreover, despite their numerous changes, these versions of the De casibus tragedy are similar in that they aim primarily to speak to power, to those nobles and princes who rule the realm. In contrast, Baldwin and his fellow authors altered precisely the audience of the genre in the Mirror, as they aimed at a wider range of readers, especially ‘magistrates’, but not necessarily princely or even noble ones. A survey of the adaptations of the De casibus that led up to the Mirror illustrates this shift and highlights the significance of this new orientation.10

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The Mirror for Magistrates In Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium, a series of fallen characters from world history and mythology, beginning with Adam and Eve and continuing through the reign of King John of France in the mid-fourteenth century, appear in a dream vision before the writer, who then records their stories. The stories themselves are fairly similar to one another, providing moral exempla and admonition to readers. Boccaccio, however, varies his material, presenting some tales in the first person, interjecting his own disputations with characters, including digressions (such as chapters on the cunning nature of women or complaints about the luxury of princes), and consolidating some stories together into group chapters on similar historical figures (‘Conventus Infoelicium’ or ‘Pauci Flentes’). His text is designed to illustrate that ‘where virtue is lodged, fortune has no place’.11 Primarily, Boccaccio addresses those nobles and princes who might benefit from his moral advice; however, he addresses this group neither solely nor uncritically. As Walter Schirmer points out, he designed the De casibus to appeal to a broad range of readers, including scholars, who would be attracted to the book’s blend of sacred and classical history, as well as other learned, nonnoble readers, such as Mainardo dei Cavalcanti, the educated, middle-class friend to whom Boccaccio dedicated the 1363 version.12 At the same time, Boccaccio’s text has an antagonistic relationship to its most powerful readers. As Schirmer shows, Boccaccio ‘regarded his princes with hostility and bitter scorn’. Although he wants to teach those in power, ‘he nevertheless seems convinced that they have forfeited all sense of decency by their arrogance, extravagance, and vindictiveness’.13 The dedication to Cavalcanti shows (p.131) his conviction: Boccaccio explains that he did not dedicate the work to a prince, emperor, or nobleman because he could not find one worthy of it. Boccaccio’s De casibus was relatively popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, circulating in numerous manuscripts and being translated into multiple languages, including Spanish, English, Italian, and German. In the early fifteenth century, at the behest of the Duke of Berry, Laurent de Premierfait translated it into a French prose version, 1400’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes. This was a fairly literal prose translation. In 1409, Laurent came out with a much longer version, an extensive expansion of Boccaccio’s text that nearly doubled the size of the original book, developing the biographies of the protagonists, adding geographical detail, expanding the moral interpretations, and breaking many of the group chapters into separate segments on individual characters.14

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The Mirror for Magistrates Critics have argued that Laurent’s 1409 Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes fails as a translation. Schirmer asserts that Laurent’s version of Boccaccio lost some of its ‘dramatic conciseness’; Patricia May Gathercole says that his ‘admiration for rhetoric […] may have led him astray to some extent’; Derek Pearsall observes that he destroys ‘Boccaccio’s carefully designed perspective’; and A. S. G. Edwards describes the translation as a ‘formless amalgam of the encyclopaedia and the chronicle’.15 I suggest that Laurent amplifies some features of Boccaccio and obscures others to make the book suit a new purpose. He created his translation at the request of the Duke of Berry and altered his source to keep and maintain his patron’s favour. Such an agenda is evident in Laurent’s flattering dedication to the duke, where he calls his patron his ‘puissant noble et excellent prince’ and his ‘tres redouté seigneur et beinfacteur’ and himself the duke’s ‘moins digne secretaire’ and ‘serf de bonne foi’.16 To make the De casibus suit his own and his patron’s needs, and to turn a book that was critical of power into one that could support it, Laurent obscured the more challenging aspects of Boccaccio’s text with historical and scholarly detail, while at the same time reinforcing his own and his patron’s status by displaying their learning.17 Laurent’s recalibration of the relationship between the genre and the nobility seems to have worked. In 1431, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, commissioned John Lydgate to produce a translation of Laurent’s book for him. As Derek Pearsall has pointed out, Gloucester’s goal in commissioning the book was, at least in part, to promote his own learning and authority: the book was intended ‘to advance the (p.132) duke’s reputation as a European patron of letters and as the English representative of the new Italian humanist learning’.18

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The Mirror for Magistrates Lydgate, however, also adapted his book to suit this new context. Using Laurent as the basis for his own translation, Lydgate continued the amplification begun by his predecessor, adding even more historical detail and further diminishing Boccaccio’s group chapters to focus on individuals. Additionally, at the behest of Gloucester, he added a series of ‘envoys’ in which he comments on and reinforces the moral of each tragedy, and he shifted Laurent’s prose back into poetry.19 Lydgate’s changes effectively recoup some of the edgy criticism present in Boccaccio. The increasingly narrow focus on individual action intensifies Boccaccio’s description of individual vice. At the same time, the ‘envoys’ direct attention away from the capriciousness of fortune recorded in the poems and to the particular moral the reader is supposed to learn. Lydgate’s poems are not scornful, but they do restore the critical edge needed if the work is to function as a piece of counsel. As Lydgate himself notes, the book seeks to allow princes ‘by others falling themselves to correct’.20 Thus, in the words of Lois Ebin, ‘the main emphasis of the Fall of Princes is on the conduct of the ruler and his ability to profit from the examples he witnesses’. Lydgate’s adaptations, she concludes, ‘make his version more effective as a manual for princes’.21 This more focused orientation was not a rhetorical fiction: at the point when he began the Fall, Gloucester was the Lord Protector of England; Lydgate did advise the prince.

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The Mirror for Magistrates The translations of Boccaccio by Laurent and Lydgate adapted the De casibus genre to the specific circumstances of each writer, significantly changing Boccaccio’s original work in the process. Although writers such as Laurent and Lydgate went far astray from the original, they nonetheless chose to work from Boccaccio as a source. Each one, of course, made this choice based on his patron’s request. But the decision to remain with Boccaccio also allowed them to create and participate in a transhistorical conversation among poetical advisors on the subject of how to speak to power, for one aspect of the De casibus did not change: the primary audience of the monarch and nobility of the realm. Although Boccaccio’s work appealed to a broad range of readers, it was written for and primarily meant as a message to those in positions of authority. Accordingly, Laurent’s translation addressed and was meant for the nobility of the realm, in particular the Duke of Berry. And Lydgate wrote to advise princes, specifically Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the Lord Protector. Indeed, as it was translated and adapted, the audience of the book increasingly narrowed its explicit focus to address exclusively the nobility. This shift is most evident in the changing of the title of the work from one concerning ‘illustrious men’ to one detailing the ‘fall of princes’. It is also evident in the narrowing of the stated audience from a broad range of readers, to a duke, to a (p.133) representative of the king himself. To be sure, each writer sought to speak to power in a different way. Boccaccio scorned authority, Laurent flattered power, and Lydgate advised the prince. Nonetheless, all took as their primary audience those powerful nobles who governed the commonwealth.22 When the authors of the Mirror took up the De casibus, they aimed at a much, much broader audience.

A Collaborative Conversation In the early 1550s, the London printer John Wayland commissioned William Baldwin to create a continuation of Lydgate, which was subsequently published as the Mirror for Magistrates.23 As Baldwin explains early in the prose narrative, the printer wanted ‘to have the story continued from where as Bochas [Boccaccio] left unto this present time, chiefly such as Fortune had dallied with here in this land’.24 The poetry in the Mirror follows the model of the tragedies in the Fall and consists of nineteen tragedies in which a king, noble, or other famous figure from English history (such as Jack Cade, who has his sights set on kingship) recounts the story of his demise to illustrate a lesson that contemporary English magistrates must learn. Yet in the Mirror, the authors further transformed the De casibus, turning all of the verses into first-person monologues addressed to Baldwin, and presenting these as staged performances for the entire group, without the ‘envoys’ but with the prose frame.

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The Mirror for Magistrates The formal changes are emphasized strikingly in the physical layout of the book. In the first eight editions of the Mirror, the prose frame is printed in a larger type than the poems themselves. (For two examples, see Figures 5.1 and 5.2.) Such typographic distinction between prose and poetry is not unusual in Renaissance texts.25 Yet within the context of the project of the Mirror, it is strange. Wayland commissioned the Mirror as a continuation of Lydgate, and planned to bind it together with his new edition of the Fall. One would imagine that a book conceived, (p.134) commissioned, and printed as a continuation would reproduce the form of the work on which it is based, or at the very least would not draw attention to its considerable changes by printing them in a larger-size type than the tragedies themselves. The typography of the work is significant. As D. F. McKenzie has observed with regard to a later work, it is impossible ‘to divorce the substance of the text on the one hand from the physical form of its presentation on the other’.26 In the Mirror, physical form shifts the reader’s attention from the tragedies to the prose frame and indicates a political and ideological shift from admonitory history to conversations among the writers themselves. The tragedy of Richard II provides a concrete illustration of the interweaving of the performed verses and the new prose frame.27 In the introduction, one of the authors (introduced as ‘one of the company’, but who we know was Thomas Chaloner) offers to tell the story of the deposed king.28 Referring to other nobles about whom the group could write, the author says: But seeing no man is ready to say ought in their behalf, I will give who so listeth leisure to think thereupon, and in the meantime to further your enterprise, I will in the king’s behalf recount such part of his story as I think most necessary. And therefore imagine, Baldwin, that you see him all to be mangled with blue wounds, lying pale and wan all naked upon the cold stones in Paul’s church, the people standing round about him, and making his moan in this sort.29 This introduction is followed by the author’s ‘performance’ of the tragedy, in which Richard II describes his lawless and wilful reign, as well as his susceptibility to flattering counsellors, arguing that his personal rule led to his deposition and murder. He concludes with a lesson for the reader, telling Baldwin, Thus lawless life to lawless death ay draws. Wherefore bid kings be ruled and rule by right, Who worketh his will and shunneth wisdom’s saws In flattery’s claws and shame’s foul paws shall light.30

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The Mirror for Magistrates Here, in a final metaphor that helps to explain his ‘mangled’ body and ‘blue wounds’, Richard II urges Baldwin to warn princes to avoid the ‘claws’ of flattery. The tragedy is followed by another prose section, in which Baldwin records the group’s response to the tale, writing: ‘When he had ended this so woeful a tragedy, and to all princes a right worthy instruction, we paused: having passed through a (p.135) (p.136)

Figure 5.1 Recto of the remaining leaf of A Memorial of All Suche Princes, the suppressed edition of the Mirror (c. 1554– 5). © British Library Board, shelfmark c. 40.m.9.25.

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The Mirror for Magistrates (p.137) miserable time full of piteous tragedies’.31 The prose narrative then records the conversation of the writers as they discuss the next verses that they will perform. ‘Richard II’ is characteristic of the Mirror. The other eighteen tragedies are similarly introduced, and contain comparable messages, directing Baldwin to warn magistrates to avoid lawlessness, flattery, and other vices. For example, in the tragedy of the Earl of Northumberland, the earl describes his ill-fated revolt against Henry IV, and urges near the end: Wherefore good Baldwin will the peers take heed, Of slander, malice, and conspiracy, Of covetise, whence al

Figure 5.2 A page from A Mirror for Magistrates (1559), sig. E4v, RB 60324, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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the rest proceed.

Likewise, in the tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, the duke tells the story of his unfortunate revolt against Henry VI, and concludes, Wherefore warn princes not to wade in war For any cause, except the realm’s defence: Their troublous titles are unworthy far, The blood, the life, the spoil of innocence.33

Thus each verse is introduced to, performed for, and addressed to Baldwin, and each charges him to take a moral lesson to princes and peers.

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The Mirror for Magistrates The performances, the imperative address to Baldwin, and the prose narrative together have the effect of keeping Baldwin and the other performers constantly before us, continually emphasizing the collaborative nature of the Mirror’s production. This is evident in ‘Richard II’, where the creation of the tragedy itself is depicted as a shared process of discussion, compromise, and collaboration. Yet the collective composition of the work is featured from the opening pages of the prose narrative, where Baldwin details the discussions and negotiations that prompted the creation of the work. He opens the prose narrative saying: When the printer had purposed with himself to print Lydgate’s book, the Fall of Princes, and had made privy thereto many both honourable and worshipful, he was counselled by diverse of them to procure to have the story continued from where as Bochas left unto this present time chiefly such as Fortune had dallied with here in this ylande.34 Baldwin observes that the book results from a dialogue between ‘the printer’ and several powerful people, ‘many both honourable and worshipful’, whose names are not mentioned. Even so, the description draws attention to the book’s origin as a collaboration between the printer and those in power. As the prose narrative continues, Baldwin again calls attention to the collaborative nature of the book, showing that it is also the product of the printer’s discussions and negotiations with him. Noting that the printer ‘required [him] to take pains’ to produce the book, Baldwin writes: (p.138) But because it was a matter passing my wit and skill, and more thankless than gainful to meddle in, I refused utterly to undertake it, except I might have the help of such as in wit were apt, in learning allowed, and in judgement and estimation able to wield and furnish so weighty an enterprise, thinking even so to shift my hands. But he earnest and diligent in his affairs procured Atlas to set under his shoulder: for shortly after, diverse learned men whose many gifts need few praises consented to take upon them part of the travail.35

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The Mirror for Magistrates The history that Baldwin tells of his attitude towards the ‘thankless’ task of producing the Mirror is amusing in its own right; however, it also extends the narrative about the collaborative history of the book that he began in the opening lines, detailing the increasing number of people involved in the creation of the work, and highlighting from the very beginning that the Mirror is the product of many different people: the printer, many ‘honourable and worshipful’, and ‘diverse learned men’. At the same time, the story points to Baldwin’s (and his fellow writers’) participation in the conversation in which Lydgate and Laurent were involved, a larger collaborative project about how to speak to and advise the magistrates. Such emphasis on collaboration is reinforced through the rest of the narrative, which ‘records and notes’ the ‘whole process’ of the Mirror’s production. The collaborative aspect of the Mirror raises a question about whether the authors are a homogeneous collective. Critics have different positions on this issue. On the one hand, Scott Lucas argues that the volume is the work of a ‘group of like-minded evangelical authors’ who wrote the tragedies to cope with the failure of Edward Seymour’s religious and political reforms in the reign of Edward and to admonish England’s magistrates under Mary and Elizabeth to follow the law and to accept the advice of independent counsellors, especially politically engaged poets.36 While Lucas emphasizes the similarity of the authors of the Mirror, others stress that Baldwin is distinct from the group. Meredith Skura sees Baldwin’s opening letter to the reader (and, by extension, the whole prose frame) as an early example of autobiography, and thus as primarily Baldwin’s own story. Mike Pincombe argues that in this letter Baldwin seeks to separate himself from the group by writing something that highlights and distinguishes his personality, for instance in his opening refusal to undertake the project of the Mirror and his later indication that the others required him to record the ‘whole process’ of its composition.37 Pincombe is right that Baldwin has a different status from his fellow writers. He is the one who signs his name to the dedication, who writes the prose frame, and to whom the performances are addressed. Yet, as Lucas shows, he is also an integral member of the group, participating in the general discussion in the prose frame and writing some of the tragedies himself. I argue that his role as ‘first among equals’, while troubling any argument for the equality of the authors, nonetheless reinforces the collaborative aspect of the volume, demonstrating that the (p.139) book involves negotiation and compromise among writers of varying degrees of importance and status.

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The Mirror for Magistrates While the prose frame adds one layer of complexity to the Mirror, the presentation of the poems as performances do as well. On the one hand, the performances strengthen the moral of each verse. Unlike the dream visions in the earlier works, where ghosts appear before the writer, who then records their stories, the performances lend a sense of immediacy to the tragedies, demonstrating the commitment of each author to the story he tells and the warning he offers. The performances indicate each author’s willingness wholly to take on and embody the persona of the historical figure who delivers the warning itself. On the other hand, such presentations alter the meaning of the advice in each tragedy, turning the individually definitive and committed pieces of counsel into a series of strategically adopted positions—taken on, performed, and then cast off by the authors—over the course of the Mirror. The individual tragedies, in other words, become parts of the larger conversation that takes place over the entire work. The status of the tragedies as positions rather than as definitive pieces of advice is evident in the way that verses contradict each other. Several tragedies, for instance, make explicit statements about fortune and divine will, offering statements on the influence of Fortune. Robert Tresilian, chief justice to Richard II, says in his tragedy that his own downfall occurred because ‘unfriendly Fortune did train [him] unto a trap’, and Roger Mortimer observes that he fell because ‘Fortune lulled me in her lap’.38 Such tragedies suggest that one cannot control one’s fate, since the future is subject to the whims of fortune. Yet other tragedies suggest that lives are governed by divine providence. For example, in the tragedy of James I, the king attributes his fall to God’s will, telling Baldwin, Warn, warn all princes, all like sins to loathe, And chiefly such as in my realm be born, For God hates highly such as are forsworn.39

Still others suggest that the outcome of one’s life is determined by one’s own virtuous (or vicious) action. Describing the outcome of his life, Lord Mowbray says, I blame not Fortune though she did her part, And true it is she can do little harm, She guideth goods, she hampereth not the hart, A virtuous mind is safe from every charm.40

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The Mirror for Magistrates Throughout the tragedies, the writers take positions on questions dealing with princely virtue and vice, individual action, and the extent to which one can control one’s destiny. Such questions are never resolved, but rather surface over and over again. Critics have attempted to resolve some of the contradictions in the depiction of fortune and providence in the Mirror, arguing for the compatibility of the two ideas or suggesting that the contradiction reveals that the Mirror was written (p.140) in a period of transition from the dominance of one idea to the other.41 In the context of the entire work, however, the contrasting opinions on fortune and providence voiced by the individual characters feel less like contradictions than like differing positions in a larger discussion about the amount of control that princes and rulers have over their fates. Indeed, the authors themselves take up such issues in the prose sections. For example, following the story of William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, Baldwin says that the poets were happy to see the man punished, ‘For though Fortune in many points be injurious to Princes, yet in this and such like she is most righteous: And only deserveth the name of a goddess, when she provideth means to punish and destroy tyrants.’42 Other issues are raised as well. Several tragedies raise questions about the justifiability of rebellion. Some suggest that rebellion is sometimes appropriate. For instance, in the first tragedy, Robert Tresilian describes his life as a flattering counsellor to Richard II and details his rightful deposition as chief justice, which occurs when a series of peers and commoners rise up and overthrow him. The story suggests that such uprisings may sometimes be justified. Yet later tragedies, such as the Earl of York’s, generally speak out against rebellion, concluding, as Northumberland does, that princes should not ‘wade in war, | For any cause, except the realm’s defence’.43 This issue clearly interests the authors themselves, who in the prose frame take up the question of whether rebellion can be a form of national defence. After the tragedy of Jack Cade, they have a lengthy conversation about the purpose and function of rebellion, first suggesting that ‘whosoever rebelleth against any ruler either good or bad, rebelleth against God, and shall be sure of a wretched end’, but later suggesting that rebellions are justifiable when they are used to depose tyrannical rulers. As one of the writers (who remains unidentified) says, Yet this I note by the way concerning rebels and rebellions. Although the devil raise them, yet God always useth them to his glory as a part of his justice. For when kings and chief rulers suffer their under-officers to misuse their subjects and will not hear nor remedy their people’s wrongs when they complain, then suffreth God the rebel to rage and to execute that part of his justice, which the partial [i.e. apt or inclined] prince would not.44

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The Mirror for Magistrates The authors argue that rebellion is sometimes the justifiable and inevitable result of poor leadership.45 Indeed, here rebellions are an instrument of God’s justice, and a way to protect the subjects of the realm. Scott Lucas has persuasively demonstrated that the Mirror served as a repository for important strands of resistance (p.141) theory.46 Nonetheless, as with the question of fortune, it is important to recognize that the issue of rebellion and justified resistance is never resolved, and in this way the politics of resistance is in tension with ideas about obedience. Throughout the Mirror, the authors use the tragedies to make points about the importance of virtue, the dangers of flattery, the appropriateness of revolt, and the role of fate in the life of a prince. Yet none of them ever adopts a definitive stance. As a result, the Mirror takes what could be set pieces of advice and puts them in dialogue with each other, making them a part of a larger conversation about the appropriate behaviour of governors (and subjects) of the realm. The alterations to the form of the Mirror significantly changed the social function of the genre in which the authors were working. For as much as the Mirror is a book of counsel to princes, the changes deemphasize this aspect of the work and instead draw attention to dialogue and exchange. It is worth mentioning in this regard that the prose frame is clearly a fiction: the poetry of the Mirror could not have been composed, as the narrative suggests, in a single day of spontaneous performances. Yet the obviously fictional nature of the frame highlights the significance of its presence: it makes the Mirror appear as the record of a collaborative conversation about the governance of the commonwealth, a discussion in which the authors take different positions on the role of providence, fortune, rebellion, obedience, and individual and collective action in creating a stable state.47 A Mirror for Political Reflection

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The Mirror for Magistrates The dramatic transformation of De casibus raises one obvious issue for us: why should the authors of the Mirror have altered the genre in this way? One promising answer lies in the works of William Baldwin, since the Mirror is typical of the pieces he produced. Baldwin wrote or translated five books in addition to the Mirror: A Treatise of Moral Philosophy (1547), The Canticles or Ballads of Solomon (1549), Wonderful News of the Death of Paul III (c. 1552), Beware the Cat (c. 1553), and The Funerals of King Edward the Sixt (1560).48 In all of these, he uses the material layout of his work—its form, organization, and genre—to prompt (p.142) readers to engage with the moral and philosophical questions each book raises. Baldwin’s awareness and use of form is evident in A Treatise of Moral Philosophy, his first work, which is arranged into four parts, moving from examples of virtuous lives in Book 1, ‘Of Lives and Answers’, to Book 2 on ‘Precepts and Counsels’, to the third on ‘Proverbs or Witty Sayings’, and to the last on ‘Parables and Semblables’.49 As one looks at the work, it is evident that, as Stephen Gresham has explained, Baldwin has organized the chapters into ‘modes of increasing difficulty, from the easiest to discern […] to the most difficult’.50 The book is thus designed to prepare the reader for the parables that come at the end of the volume. In the prologue, Baldwin acknowledges that the layout of the Treatise is important for learning its content. After describing the layout, he concludes, saying, ‘now the order and intent of the book being known, there is no danger but that with judgement, the process may both be read, learned, and followed’.51 Baldwin shows a similar interest in using the ‘order’ of a book to facilitate the reader’s engagement with its content in his translation of the Canticles. Describing how his reader might best learn from the poems in his ‘dialogue between Christ and his church’, Baldwin says: But this I tell thee good reader, thou must read them [the poems] well (for it is not once reading nor twice that can make thee understand them), and in reading note the sentence more than the rhyme, with the arguments which go before and after the songs, and read them orderly, so shall the process of the matter help thee much.52

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The Mirror for Magistrates The form of his work—the ‘arguments which go before and after the songs’, as well as its overall ‘orderly’ design—helps the reader to understand and participate in the dialogue that takes place in the poems themselves. Baldwin is less explicit about his use of form in his other works. Yet critics have recognized a similar pattern in Beware the Cat.53 According to Nancy Guttierrez, Beware the Cat is made of multiple literary (p.143) kinds that give form to a ‘strategy by which the reader comes to read, interpret, and finally act in an ethical manner’.54 Baldwin’s preoccupations make sense. He worked at the press of Edward Whitchurch in the late 1540s and early 1550s and was as a result most likely familiar with the importance of the physical layout, organization, and genre of a book.55 In the Mirror, Baldwin continues this interest, emphasizing the process by which the book came into existence, while creating a work whose form raises questions about princely action and the forces that control such action. The purpose of this form is to illustrate for noble readers that there are no concrete guidelines for behaviour, and to urge them to consider their own conduct in the context of their own situations and, if necessary, to amend their rule. For virtuous conduct is, as Baldwin says, the ‘chiefest end’ of the book. Still, there is something in the Mirror’s emphasis on collaboration that such a reading does not entirely explain. If the ‘chiefest end’ of the Mirror is to prompt nobles to improve, the book also seeks to do something that is only barely foreshadowed in Baldwin’s other works: it presents and fosters a public conversation about governance, one that includes any reader of the text, and not solely princely or even noble ones. This goal is evident in the way that the prose frame and performed tragedies together create several layers of audience. The first layer is Baldwin, to whom each verse is directly addressed; the second is the assembled group of writers who watch the performers and comment on the stories; the third is ‘The reader’ to whom Baldwin addresses the prose narrative; and the fourth is the nobility, who receive the work and the counsel contained in it after it has passed through a network of individuals and groups. Such layering self-consciously depicts the reception of the tragedies and draws ‘the reader’ into the authors’ conversation about governance. If Boccaccio, Laurent, and Lydgate increasingly narrowed the stated audience of the De casibus genre, moving from ‘illustrious men’ to princes, the authors of the Mirror widened it again, and dramatically so, to address ‘magistrates’ and any reader of the work. Such a goal is stated explicitly in the opening part of the prose narrative, where Baldwin declares that one aim of the work was to create ‘a mirror for all men as well noble as others’.56 But in demonstrating their own conversation, Baldwin and his fellow writers did not merely address such others, or simply create a guide to behaviour that could be applicable to any reader’s life. Rather, they sought to involve their readers in the collaborative discussion of governance depicted within the pages of the book itself. While the Mirror is indeed a glass of governance, it is also a representation of a conversation about politics.

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The Mirror for Magistrates (p.144) Notably, the Mirror for Magistrates was written at a time of increasing governmental control over political discourse, particularly in print.57 Indeed, the Mirror was itself a victim of censorship, having been suppressed by the Lord Chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, and the Privy Council, when it was initially printed (c. 1554);58 however, as Scott Lucas and Sherri Geller have argued, the Mirror was also a response to increasing governmental attempts to control political expression.59 As the former employee of Edward Whitchurch, one of the many Protestant printers who fled the country when Mary came to the throne, and as someone in the book trade who had written at least one work prior to the Mirror that he had difficulty getting published, William Baldwin must have been well aware of Tudor attempts to control the press.60 The Mirror for Magistrates pushes against this trend, and is an attempt to use the medium of print to promote a political discourse about governance in the face of an increasing number of proclamations and statutes that attempted to restrict this sort of conversation. In a study of the collaborative writing of history in Holinshed’s Chronicles, Annabel Patterson has argued for the existence of a popular discourse about English history and governance in the sixteenth century.61 The Mirror also contributed to such conversations, both presenting and fostering discussions about the leadership of the state. In the first fifty years of its history, the Mirror drew more and more people into its conversation about rule of the realm. In 1554–5, in a move that suggests some concern about what it meant for the public to read and respond to the political ideas of the text, the Privy Council suppressed the volume. In 1559, it was printed successfully on its own and in a slim quarto format that made it fairly affordable and available to a range of readers, perhaps the same range of readers who were imagined as the audience of the classical translations.62 In 1563, new (p.145) authors joined the political conversation going on in the volume, writing several additional tragedies and prose links, including tragedies about ‘Shore’s Wife’, the poet ‘Collingbourne’, and a blacksmith that together widened the scope of subjects and citizens who were capable of serving as mirrors for magistrates. Participation in this conversation continued to expand. In 1574, John Higgins wrote a prequel to the Mirror, containing a series of tragedies covering all of English history from the time of Brutus. In 1578, Thomas Blenerhasset edited a continuation of Higgins’s volume, covering English history from the time of the Roman conquest until William the Conqueror. In 1610, Richard Niccols added some missing parts, and included narratives about King Arthur as well as a poem in praise of Elizabeth titled ‘England’s Eliza’. By the turn of the century, the Mirror was one of the most popular printed works in England. It formed the nexus of an expansive conversation about the leadership of the nation, one that involved a cast of historical, mythological, and contemporary figures, some of the well-known writers and printers of the day, and a growing body of readers from among the urban citizenry.63 Page 19 of 31

The Mirror for Magistrates Paul Budra has observed that each edition of the Mirror fundamentally altered the work, transforming a ‘politically corrective exemplar of the poetry/history combination’ into a ‘mundane and sentimental book of moral platitudes’, and altering ‘an admonitory reading of history’ into ‘a piece of Tudor propaganda’.64 As the Mirror changed, Budra shows, so did its audience, appealing increasingly to a citizen class of urban readers, instead of to political authorities. We should, however, read the evolving shape and audience of the Mirror differently, as an indication that it gradually realized the very project that Baldwin and his fellow authors began. As it was reprinted, the Mirror found an audience in an increasingly large number and broad range of readers, which included the nobility, members of the universities and Inns of Court, and women and merchants.65 Such popular interest in a work covering all rulers throughout British history shows the growing reading public’s involvement with questions about the history of the governance of the nation. In its growing appeal, the Mirror drew more and more people into the conversation it depicted, helping to foster, through the sixteenth century and beyond, public participation in a discourse about the rule of the state. Although it remains widely accepted in the field of early modern studies that political discourse in the sixteenth century was fairly circumscribed, this survey shows that public interest in and engagement with issues of governance did exist, at the very least in the desire to create, expand, and own the Mirror for Magistrates. The ‘chiefest end’ (p.146) of the Mirror was not explicitly to facilitate public political discourse, but whether through the vicissitudes of popular taste or by the grace of God, this was an end it attained.

The Mirror Among the Men at the Inns In addition to the development of a dynamic conversation, the Mirror also had a more immediate aim, which was to guide magistrates in appropriate behaviour, and to advance the sense that magistrates are an autonomous force in the political sphere, one whose autonomy and authority derives from a source other than the monarch, and who can serve as a force to counter and criticize the monarch. These aims, evident throughout the Mirror, are especially clear in the opening pages of the 1559 edition in Baldwin’s letter ‘To the Nobility’ and the initial tragedy concerning Chief Justice Robert Tresilian.

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The Mirror for Magistrates Baldwin begins by emphasizing office holders, ‘the nobility and all other in office’, a phrase that indicates that ‘office holders’ are not always nobles. Referring to Plato, one of two classical figures mentioned by name in the Mirror, Baldwin argues that a realm is governed well when its officers are not ambitious and where the offices are ‘duly executed’. He continues, ‘there is nothing more necessary in a commonweal than that officers be diligent and trusty in their charges’. Thus he concludes, with some repetition for emphasis, ‘And therefore, where the ambitious seek no office, there is no doubt, offices are duly ministered, and where offices are duly ministered, it cannot be chosen, but the people are good, whereof must needs follow a good commonweal.’ More importantly, magistrates and office holders derive their authority directly from God, ‘the ordainer of offices’. Those who use their office for personal gain ‘dishonour him’: ‘For it is God’s own office, yea his chief office, which they bear and abuse.’ He continues, kings and office holders are, in their own way gods: ‘Ye be all gods, as many as have in your charge any ministration of justice.’66 Without the historical background of Chapter 2, Baldwin’s preface can sound like little more than a collection of platitudinous commonplaces, yet those have an important resonance in light of mid-Tudor legal change. Baldwin, perhaps responding to the contemporary situation in the magistracy, seeks to advise the magistracy on appropriate behaviour. Moreover, as Scott Lucas observes, ‘In this dedication, Baldwin urges English officers to see themselves first and foremost as servants not of the Crown but of God, and he insists that each of them holds a divinely appointed duty to make the well-being of the people his override concern.’ Baldwin’s letter, in other words, makes magistrates parallel to kings, arguing that both must make the people their foremost concern and that, if necessary, magistrates must resist the misdeeds of their monarchs.67 (p.147) The first tragedy on Robert Tresilian, chief justice for Richard II, continues to develop these points. Written by George Ferrers, himself a former magistrate, the tragedy describes how Tresilian and other magistrates deliberately interpreted the law to the benefit of the king and to provide authorization for some of his unjust activities. In this way, Tresilian explains, he helped Richard to become a tyrant and to promote the insecurity of the people: So working law like wax, the subject was not sure Of life, land, nor goods, but at the prince’s will, Which caused his kingdom the shorter time to dure, For claiming power absolute both to save and spill, The prince thereby presumed his people for to pull, And set his lusts for law, and will had reason’s place, No more but hang and draw there was no better grace.68

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The Mirror for Magistrates The result of Tresilian’s actions is an uprising by the English barony as well as subjects, one that appears to be sanctioned in the poem itself, thus making the poem an important example of resistance theory in the Mirror and in early Elizabethan England.69 It also suggests, however, that Tresilian’s role initially should have been to resist Richard II, thus constituting Tresilian and other office holders as part of a category of political actors who have the power to resist the king. The Mirror’s argument for the political authority of magistrates helps to explain another curious way that at least the 1559 edition deviates from the work’s generic influences. Unlike the earlier De casibus volumes, there appear to be no women in the 1559 edition of the Mirror. The tragedy of one woman, ‘Shore’s Wife’, appears in 1563, and the tragedy of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester’s wife, Eleanor Cobham, appears in 1578, although her tragedy may have been written for the original publication of the Mirror in the 1550s. The narratives of two other women are implied in the narratives of several of the male characters, most notably Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Woodville. The absence of women might point to ‘some anxiety about powerful women’ in the Mirror.70 Be that as it may, this absence points back to the social function of the Mirror, which is to speak to a specific category of men—that is, magistrates and office holders—and to urge them to follow their divinely appointed duties to ensure the welfare and security of the people, even against tyrants, even against female monarchs. In the context of its generic forebears, the Mirror appears as a noticeable departure from the De casibus tradition. More importantly, from our modern perspective, it appears as a fictional rendering of an imagined political community, something that looks like a proto-, if micro-, version of a Habermasian (p.148) public sphere. The Mirror imagines a space—perhaps John Wayland’s shop—where a group of men can gather together to discuss literary, intellectual, and political ideas, and to challenge each other on these issues and questions. Moreover, the book imagines that there is a class of men deriving their authority from beyond the monarch, from God, and from their own commitment to justice whose role it is to provide critical feedback to the monarch and others in positions of authority. In the Mirror, the community of authors is separate from the community of magistrates whom they address. (The Mirror authors write ‘for magistrates’.) Yet the book also collapses these two groups—first in authorship, since some of the authors, like Ferrers, had been magistrates. (Ferrers was a justice of the peace during Edward’s reign.71) Second, this collapse occurs in the structure of the poem. In their poetry, Baldwin, Ferrers, and their fellow authors express a commitment to justice and right dealing that the protagonists in the poems, for the most part, lack. They thus come to represent the sorts of men who ought to be office holders in the commonweal. In a sense, the Mirror is an imagined community of magistrates, a group of men who demonstrate their fitness as officers through literary means.

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The Mirror for Magistrates While the Mirror only imagined this community, shortly after its publication in 1559, the members of the Inns appear to have drawn on its example (among others) to realize what the Mirror imagined—a real space where men could pursue literary and intellectual activities to demonstrate that they were ideal office holders for the commonweal. This point will be developed in Chapters 7 and 8, in the discussion of drama. To advance this point, however, it is necessary first to turn to another literary-political precedent for members of the Inns: the drama of the ancient playwright Seneca, whose works provided an example of how to take the Mirror and turn it into a collaborative, social, and dramatic form. Notes:

(1) Dolman, Tusculan Disputations, sigs. 2r. (2) Sackville and Norton, Gorboduc, 1.2.393–4. (3) See also the opening of Chapter 2. (4) At least some poems of the Mirror were initially printed as A Memorial of all Such Princes, c. 1554. See ‘A Collaborative Conversation’ in this chapter. The names of the men who contributed to the volume are somewhat obscure. William Baldwin notes in the opening pages of the work that he wrote it with seven others, but critics have only been able to identify the names of three main contributors, William Baldwin, George Ferrers, and Thomas Chaloner. Critics also suggest that Thomas Phaer contributed. See Mirror for Magistrates, 3–60. Unless otherwise stated, references to the Mirror will be to pages in this edition. (5) Mirror, pp. 65–6. (6) Mirror, p. 71; 240. (7) John Lydgate, The Tragedies, Gathered by Ihon Bochas, of All Such Princes As Fell from Theyr Estates (London: John Wayland, [1554?]), STC 3178, sig. G5r. Referred to hereafter as The Fall of Princes. (8) Paul Budra has discussed the Mirror in the context of the De casibus tradition. While he describes the Mirror’s link to its generic precursors, I focus on its formal and ideological departure from this tradition. See A Mirror for Magistrates and the ‘De Casibus’ Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). The argument is thus in line with those critics who have argued for the politically controversial and challenging nature of the poems, especially Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 81–107.

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The Mirror for Magistrates (9) The prose frame in the Mirror has received little scholarly attention. The two monographs on the book do not address the prose frame at any length. See Budra, A Mirror for Magistrates and Scott Lucas, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ and the Politics of the English Reformation, Massachusetts Studies in Early Modern Culture Series (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). When it has been discussed, the prose frame has been seen as ancillary to or as a diversion from the political and moral objectives of the volume. E. M. W. Tillyard observes that the prose narrative has little to do with the tragedies, suggesting that the commentary offers ‘the spectacle of a group of men feeling their way towards the right literary procedure’. See ‘A Mirror for Magistrates Revisited’, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to Frank Percy Wilson, ed. by Herbert Davis and Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 1–17 (p. 15). Sherri Geller proposes that the prose narrative is designed to ‘deprivilege the complaints’ to mitigate the potential danger and political topicality of the poems themselves. See ‘What History Really Teaches: Historical Pyrrhonism in William Baldwin’s A Mirror for Magistrates’, in Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies, ed. by Peter C. Herman (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999), pp. 150–84 (p. 151). Mike Pincombe goes further, arguing that the prose frame aims to ‘depoliticize’ the poems in the Mirror. ‘William Baldwin and A Mirror for Magistrates’, Renaissance Studies, 27 (2013), 183–98 (p. 184). Moving away from politics, Meredith Skura argues that the dedications and prose frame should be seen within the developing tradition of English autobiography, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates and the Beginnings of English Autobiography’, English Literary Renaissance, 36 (2006), 26–56. Donald Jellerson argues that the prose links invite readers to participate in a conversation about the meaning of history: ‘The Spectral Poetics of the Mirror for Magistrates’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 2:1 (2010), 54–71. In another essay, Geller further demonstrates that the editorial history of the Mirror has worked to diminish the significance of the prose frame. Sherri Geller, ‘Editing Under the Influence of the Standard Textual Hierarchy: Misrepresenting A Mirror for Magistrates in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Editions’, Textual Cultures, 2:1 (2007), 43–77. Here, I argue that the device is an integral part of the larger project of the Mirror, signalling the generically innovative and politically progressive nature of the work. (10) De casibus tragedy was not the only source for the Mirror. The stories themselves were adapted from Edward Hall’s Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (London: Richard Grafton, 1550), usually known as Hall’s Chronicle. Scott Lucas points out that Hall provided more than story lines, but in his literariness and attempt to establish causal relationships between historical events, Hall also influenced the idea of writing historical, causally driven narratives in a literary form in the Mirror. See ‘Hall’s Chronicle and the Mirror for Magistrates: History and the Tragic Pattern’, in Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, ed. by Shrank and Pincombe, pp. 356–71. Page 24 of 31

The Mirror for Magistrates (11) Giovanni Boccaccio, De Casibus Illustrium Virorum (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1962), p. xlix; quoted and translated in Louis Brewer Hall’s introduction to this volume, pp. v–xi (p. x). (12) Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. by Ann E. Keep (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1961), p. 208. (13) Schirmer, John Lydgate, p. 209. (14) For a complete discussion of Laurent’s additions, see Patricia May Gathercole, introduction, Laurent de Premierfait’s Des Cas Des Nobles Hommes et Femmes, Book 1, Translated from Boccaccio (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 18–22. (15) Schirmer, John Lydgate, p. 209; Gathercole, introduction, Des Cas Des Nobles Hommes et Femmes, p. 17; Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 232; A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Influence of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes c. 1440–1559: A Survey’, Mediaeval Studies, 39 (1977), 424–39 (p. 425). (16) Laurent, Des Cas Des Nobles Hommes et Femmes, p. 75. (17) On the use of esoteric humanist learning to reinforce social status, see Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to Humanities, pp. xi–xvi. (18) Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-bibliography (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1997), p. 33. (19) For a complete discussion of Lydgate’s alterations to Laurent, see Gathercole, introduction, Des Cas Des Nobles Hommes et Femmes, pp. 33–5. (20) Lydgate, The Fall of Princes, sig. G5v. (21) Lois A. Ebin, John Lydgate (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1985), pp. 65–6.

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The Mirror for Magistrates (22) In reality, in late medieval England the audience of the De casibus genre and counsel literature more generally extended beyond the nobility. Judith Ferster, for instance, offers a suggestive account of the range of readers of counsel literature in the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries in Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986). Still, it is unclear just how broad or interested this audience was. Chaucer’s Monk, for instance, offers a series of De casibus tragedies to the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales. But after nineteen of his planned 100 tragedies, the pilgrims interrupt the Monk and, following the Host, who complains that the tales make him ‘fallen doun for sleep’, ask for another kind of tale. Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Monk’s Prologue and Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), pp. 240–52 (line 3594). Whatever the actual audience of the genre was, Boccaccio, Laurent, and Lydgate explicitly addressed their works to members of the nobility. (23) The work was originally commissioned and written under the title A Memorial of All Suche Princes, as Since The Tyme of King Richard the Seconde, Have Been Unfortunate in the Realme of England. The title was changed in 1559 to A Mirror for Magistrates. (24) Mirror, p. 68. (25) For instance, Baldwin’s translation of The Canticles or Balades of Salomon (1549), George Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F.J. (1573), and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) all contain prose-framing devices that are typographically different from the poems they surround. In Baldwin’s Canticles, moreover, the prose sections are printed in a larger type than the poems themselves. (26) D. F. McKenzie, ‘Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve’, in The Book and the Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. by Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian (Hamburg: Ernst Hauswedell, 1981), pp. 81–126 (p. 82). (27) I turn to this tragedy in particular since many are familiar with Shakespeare’s version of the story in Richard II. For two discussions of the Mirror as a source for Shakespeare, see Donna B. Hamilton, ‘The State of Law in Richard II’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983), 5–17 and Budra, A Mirror for Magistrates and the De Casibus Tradition, esp. chapter 6 on drama.

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The Mirror for Magistrates (28) The Mirror for Magistrates, p. 110. Chaloner is identified as the author in the surviving leaf of the suppressed edition of the Mirror (see Figure 5.1). Although it is unclear why, his name was removed from the 1559 and subsequent editions. Whatever the reason, the change is consistent with the general emphasis on collaborative rather than individual authorship throughout the Mirror. (29) Mirror, p. 111. (30) Mirror, p. 118. (31) Mirror, p. 119. (32) Mirror, p. 137. ‘Covetise’ here means ‘inordinate desire’ and ‘covetousness’ (see ‘† covetise, n.’, OED Online [13 February 2014]. (33) Mirror, p. 190. (34) Mirror, p. 68. (35) Mirror, pp. 68–9. (36) Lucas, A Mirror for Magistrates, esp. pp. 3–4; 36–49. (37) Skura, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates and the Beginnings of English Autobiography’, esp. pp. 40–6. Pincombe, ‘William Baldwin and A Mirror for Magistrates’, pp. 189–90. (38) Mirror, p. 73; 87. (39) Mirror, p. 160. (40) Mirror, p. 102. (41) Frederick Kiefer, ‘Fortune and Providence in the Mirror for Magistrates’, Studies in Philology, 74 (1977), 146–64; Paul Budra, ‘The Mirror for Magistrates and the Shape of De Casibus Tragedy’, English Studies, 69 (1988), 303–12; Allyna E. Ward, ‘ “Fortune Laughs and Proudly Hovers”: Fortune and Providence in the Tudor Tradition’, Yearbook in English Studies, 39 (2009), 39–57. (42) Mirror, p. 170. (43) Mirror, p. 190. (44) Mirror, p. 178.

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The Mirror for Magistrates (45) For a further discussion of attitudes towards rebellion in both the Fall of Princes and the Mirror, see Mervyn James, ‘Obedience and Dissent in Henrician England: The Lincolnshire Rebellion, 1536’, in Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 188–269. (46) Scott Lucas, ‘“Let None Such Office Take, Save He that Can for Right His Prince Forsake”: A Mirror for Magistrates, Resistance Theory, and the Elizabethan Monarchical Republic’, in The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson, ed. by John F. McDiarmid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 97–107. (47) Viewing the Mirror as a conversation about the obligations and responsibilities of magistrates and subjects also helps to explain the presence of conflicting depictions of ambition in the work. Jim Ellis argues that such conflicts indicate a larger cultural trauma about the effects of ambition and social mobility in early modern England. In my reading, Baldwin and his fellow authors consciously raise such ideas within the text, making them part of a larger conversation about the possibility for social mobility within the state. See ‘Embodying Dislocation: A Mirror for Magistrates and Property Relations’, Renaissance Quarterly, 53 (2000), 1032–52. For another discussion of the Mirror as a contradictory and transitional text, see Lawrence D. Green, ‘Modes of Perception in the Mirror for Magistrates’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 44 (1981), 117–33. (48) The turn here to Baldwin’s other works presumes that Baldwin is a major force behind the content and form of the Mirror, but here there are differences of opinion. Most critics assume that Baldwin is the primary author of the book. Scott Lucas, for instance, describes Baldwin as a ‘well-known poet, translator, editor, and covert evangelical controversialist’, whose writings advanced the religious programmes of Edward Seymour’s protectorate in the reign of Edward (Lucas, A Mirror for Magistrates, p. 36; 36–41). Mike Pincombe, however, suggests that Baldwin is a menial printer’s assistant and once radical Protestant chastened by the ascension of Mary, who reluctantly serves as dogsbody to George Ferrers and Thomas Chaloner on the project (‘William Baldwin and A Mirror’, pp. 190–3). The problem with this argument is that while Baldwin obfuscates his authorship on other texts (Pincombe, p. 192), he openly proclaims his affiliation with The Mirror, for instance putting his full name on the dedication and letter to the reader in the 1559 edition; he appears to have censored the names of some of the other authors, a move that emphasizes, even elevates, his connection with the work, and suggests something other than reluctance. (49) The word ‘similitude’ is abstract, but means something like an allegory or similar. See ‘similitude, n.’ (3.c) OED Online (15/09/13). Page 28 of 31

The Mirror for Magistrates (50) Stephen Gresham, ‘William Baldwin: Literary Voice of the Reign of Edward VI’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 44 (1981), 101–16 (p. 105). (51) William Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Phylosophie (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1547), STC 1253, Book 1, sig. A8v. (52) Baldwin, The Canticles or Balades of Salomon (London: William Baldwin with Edward Whitchurch, 1549), STC 2768, sig. A1v. (53) See Nancy A. Guttierrez, ‘Beware the Cat: Mimesis in a Skin of Oratory’, Style, 23 (1989), 49–69; Terence N. Bowers, ‘The Production and Communication of Knowledge in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat: Toward a Typographic Culture’, Criticism, 33 (1991), 1–29; and Edward T. Bonahue, Jr, ‘“I Know the Place and The Persons”: The Play of Textual Frames in Baldwin’s Beware the Cat’, Studies in Philology, 91 (1994), 283–300. (54) Guttierrez, ‘Beware the Cat: Mimesis in a Skin of Oratory’, p. 51. (55) On the last page of The Canticles or Balades of Salomon, Baldwin describes himself as a ‘servant with Edward Whitchurch’ (sig. N4v). Information on Baldwin’s life is from Trench, ‘William Baldwin’; Feasey, ‘William Baldwin’; Paul Gaudet, ‘William Baldwin and the “Silence” of His Last Years’, Notes and Queries, 25 (1978), 417–20; David Scott Kastan, ‘The Death of William Baldwin’, Notes and Queries, 226 (1981), 516–17; John King, English Reformation Literature: Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 358–406; and William A. Ringler, Jr. and Michael Flachmann, introduction, Beware the Cat by William Baldwin: The First English Novel (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1988), pp. xiii–xxviii. (56) Mirror, p. 68. (57) D. M. Loades, ‘The Press Under the Early Tudors: A Study in Censorship and Sedition’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 4 (1964–8), 29–50 and ‘The Theory and Practice of Censorship in Sixteenth-Century England’, in Politics, Censorship, and the English Reformation (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991), pp. 96–108; Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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The Mirror for Magistrates (58) The reasons for the suppression are unknown today. Critics tend to agree that it was the result of some objectionable content, but disagree about what this content was. See Eveline Iris Feasey, ‘The Licensing of the Mirror for Magistrates’, The Library, 4th ser., 3 (1922), 177–93; W. A. Jackson, ‘Wayland’s Edition of The Mirror for Magistrates’, The Library, 4th ser., 13 (1933), 155–7; Lily B. Campbell, ‘Humphrey Duke of Gloucester and Elianor Cobham His Wife in the Mirror for Magistrates’, Huntington Library Bulletin, 5 (1934), 119–56 and ‘The Suppressed Edition of A Mirror for Magistrates’, Huntington Library Bulletin, 6 (1934), 1–16; John N. King, English Reformation Literature, pp. 415– 18; and Scott Campbell Lucas, ‘The Suppressed Edition and the Creation of the “Orthodox” Mirror for Magistrates’, Renaissance Papers (1994), 31–54. (59) Geller, ‘What History Really Teaches’ and Scott Lucas’s discussion of ‘“Collingbourne” and the Public Role of the Political Poet’, in ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ and the Politics of the English Reformation, pp. 210–30. (60) In the letter ‘To the Reader’ in The Funeralles of King Edward The Sixt, Baldwin states that the poem was ‘penned before his [Edward VI’s] corpse was buried, and endeavored since by many means to have had been printed, but such was the time, that it could not be brought to pass’. See The Funeralles of King Edward The Sixt (London: Thomas Marsh, 1560), STC 1243, sig. Aiv. (61) Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). (62) See ‘Translations for the Common Reader’ in Chapter 4. (63) On the growing readership of the Mirror, see Paul Budra, ‘The Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of Readership’, SEL, 32 (1992), 1–13. (64) Budra, ‘The Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of Readership’, pp. 2–3. (65) Jasper Heywood in the preface to his translation of Seneca’s Thyestes (1560) mentions the popularity of the Mirror at the Inns; see the opening of Chapter 2. Paul Budra describes the urban citizenry who read the Mirror in ‘The Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of Readership’. Stephen Orgel has illustrated how one woman, Lady Anne Clifford, read the Mirror in ‘Marginal Maternity: Reading Lady Anne Clifford’s Mirror for Magistrates’, in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. by Douglas A. Brooks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 267– 89; repr. in Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson, ed. by Mihoko Suzuki (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 139–61. (66) Mirror, pp. 63–5. (67) Lucas, ‘Hall’s Chronicle and the Mirror’, in Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, ed. by Pincombe and Shrank, p. 366. Lucas develops this point in ‘Let None Such Office Take’, p. 96. Page 30 of 31

The Mirror for Magistrates (68) Mirror, p. 77. In the fifth line down, the original spelling is ‘pyll’, but here it means ‘to pull’ as in ‘to strip (a person) of possessions and money; to despoil, rob, swindle’. See ‘pull, v.’, definition 1b in OED Online [13 February 2014]. (69) Lucas, ‘Let None Such Office Take’, pp. 102–4. (70) On Anjou and Woodville, as well as the absence of women in the Mirror, see Kavita Mundan Finn, ‘Queens in the Margins: Allegorizing Anxiety in A Mirror for Magistrates’, in The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography, 1440–1627 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 105–24 (p. 112). (71) Charles Beem reminds us that Ferrers began work on the Mirror only after he no longer had an office: ‘From Lydgate to Shakespeare: George Ferrers and the Historian as Moral Compass’, Latch: A Journal for the Study of the Literary Artifact in Theory, Culture, or History, 2 (2009), 101–14. The connection suggests that Ferrers may have viewed the Mirror as an alternative venue for magistracy.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

Gorboduc in the Political Nation Jessica Winston

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords This chapter is the first of two that examines the complex social function of the institutional drama at the mid-Tudor Inns. Surveying a number of documents concerning the occasion, production, and reception of Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc (1562), this chapter argues that the play began as an entertainment to fit a specific occasion, the Christmas revels of 1561–2, and developed into a play on the succession. Following critics who have argued that the play is more deliberative than didactic, the chapter shows that Gorboduc addresses the nature and makeup of the English political nation, broadly defined as those individuals and institutions that could legitimately contribute to discussions of matters of state. Keywords:   institutional drama, Thomas Sackville, Thomas Norton, Gorboduc, Inner Temple, Christmas revels, succession question, didactic drama, political nation, political discourse

Sometime in the later sixteenth century, the classical scholar and poet Gabriel Harvey acquired The Posies (1575), George Gascoigne’s collection of poetry, prose, and drama. As he did with most of the books in his library, Harvey annotated this one with marginalia. In a note on the title page to George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh’s play Jocasta, Harvey linked the drama to two other period works. The title page reads: JOCASTA: A tragedy written in Greek by Euripides, translated and digested into act by George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh of Gray’s Inn, and there by them presented, 1566.1 Above this, Harvey wrote the following: Page 1 of 28

Gorboduc in the Political Nation The Mirror of Magistrates. The Tragedy of King Gorboduc, penned by M. Thomas Sackville, now Lord Buckhurst, and M. Thomas Norton: as the same was showed before the Queen’s Majesty at Whitehall, 1561, by the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple.2 Harvey is perhaps confused here, running together the titles of the Mirror for Magistrates and Gorboduc in a way that suggests they are the same work, but his note refers, of course, to two texts: first, the influential and popular book of De casibus poetry (discussed in Chapter 5), and the other, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc, a play referred to throughout this book, which is now the focus of this chapter. Harvey does not himself explain the link between the Mirror/Gorboduc and Jocasta, but it is not difficult to understand the connection. Each is associated with the Inns of Court. There, as Chapter 5 showed, members of the law schools (such as John Dolman and Sackville himself) read and expanded the Mirror in the early 1560s, and there both Gorboduc and Jocasta were written and initially performed. Harvey seems to have made this connection, carefully noting that Gorboduc is ‘by the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple’, a comment that resembles the title of Jocasta by Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh ‘of Gray’s Inn’. Harvey perhaps also recognized another similarity: the works are alike in plot, each recounting tragedies from periods of civil war. The Mirror describes the downfall of princes and nobles in an era of English civil strife between the reigns of Richard II and Edward IV. Gorboduc replays an episode of ancient English history in which the king divides the realm between his two sons, sparking a disastrous (p.174) civil war; and Jocasta, dramatizing the Oedipus myth, likewise details the civil war between Eteocles and Pollynices for control of the Theban throne.3 There are yet other similarities: all three aimed at a broad audience of viewers, which included both noble and nonnoble members of the Elizabethan polity.4 They are alike in form, drawing on classical and medieval models and tone, admonishing their audiences about the dangers of tyranny, ambition, and pride. And they are similar in elements of their production: each was created through a process of collaborative writing and performance.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation The Mirror, Gorboduc, and Jocasta make up a family of writings. But more than that, the two dramas are the generic and political offspring of the earlier work. The opening chorus of Gorboduc asserts: the king ‘[a] mirror shall become to princes all | To learn to shun the cause of such a fall’.5 In Jocasta, the final chorus urges princes to take the king as a mirror, commanding that ‘kings and princes in prosperity’ should ‘example here, lo, take by Oedipus’.6 Both plays, in other words, are mirrors for magistrates. Chapter 5 showed that the Mirror depicted and promoted a public political discourse in early Elizabethan England. Chapter 6 demonstrated the Mirror’s immediate influence on dramatic writing in England, especially the translation of Senecan drama. Gorboduc and Jocasta illustrate the continuation and transformation of this trend in the development of a native tradition of Senecan-style De casibus drama at the Inns that could foster the political thinking of members about the governance of the realm. Members of the Inns used the Mirror as a model to create and facilitate their own conversations about the falls of princes and the rule and misrule of the commonwealth, and to articulate the importance of including members of the Inns of Court in the English polity, even as different plays articulated this importance with greater clarity and directness than others.7 It makes sense that the Inns combined drama and politics. The societies’ tradition of dramatic production goes back to the fifteenth century. The record for the 1560s is especially rich, with numerous full texts and accounts of a host of dramatic shows surviving, including Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc (1562), Thomas Pound’s two marriage masques for members of Lincoln’s Inn (both 1566), Gascoigne’s Supposes, Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta (Gray’s Inn Christmas Revels, 1565–6 or 1566–7), and the multiauthored Gismond of Salerne (Inner Temple at Greenwich, February 1566?).8 In a classic survey of inns-of-court drama in this decade, Marie Axton observes that such works intervened in (p.175) one of the most pressing political debates of the day, the succession question. Members used drama to participate in this political conversation, urging Elizabeth to marry, bear an heir, and resolve the line to the throne.9 Axton pinpoints a crucial context for these plays, but her discussion flattens out a dynamic and multivalent realm of cultural production into a uniform and monologic area of political expression. Members of the Inns were not homogeneous in their positions on the succession, and drama was never produced or viewed as such a consistent or narrowly focused form.10 Almost everywhere in England in the early part of the sixteenth century, plays were collaborative and occasional activities, and at the Inns they were occasions in which members presented themselves to themselves and often to those in power —the monarch, the Privy Council, and members of the nobility. Even individual plays served multiple purposes and were the combined expression of a series of overlapping interests and needs.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation This chapter begins the work of examining the complex social function of the institutional drama of the decade by looking at the first and best-known play produced at the Inns in this period, Gorboduc. In recent years, a central critical question has emerged around this play: is the play didactic or deliberative?11 The development of this question is something of a surprise, given the early critical history of the play, where critics routinely recognized the play as a didactic intervention in the succession debates. In the early 1990s, the discovery of what has been called an ‘eyewitness account’ of the first performance helped to solidify a relatively narrow reading of this intervention: the play comments on the marriage negotiations of Lord Robert Dudley and King Eric XIV of Sweden.12 Since then critics have revised this reading, describing the interpretive problems raised (p.176) by the ‘eyewitness’ account,13 while others analyse issues beyond succession and counsel that are addressed in the play.14 For the most part, later studies focus on the play as a ‘thought experiment’, on par with the elaborate hypotheticals of the readings and moots, considering questions of counsel, land transfer, and property rights, without necessarily seeking to offer specific advice on any of these issues. This chapter participates in this latter trend. The ‘eyewitness’ account is only one of a number of documents concerning the occasion, production, and reception of the play, and together these provide a rich basis from which to examine the work’s social context and political significance. This chapter argues that Gorboduc began as an entertainment to fit a specific social occasion, the Christmas revels of 1561–2, and developed into a play on the succession. The content, staging, and reception of the play suggest that the political statement it makes is less specific and more challenging than the ‘eyewitness’ suggests. Gorboduc addresses the nature and makeup of the English political nation, broadly defined as those individuals and institutions that could legitimately contribute to discussions of matters of state. As they performed the play at the Inner Temple, members of the inn claimed for themselves the authority to counsel the Privy Council and made themselves a significant part of the political nation itself, even if only for the duration of the play.

The Occasional Politics of Gorboduc Gorboduc was first performed as part of the annual Christmas revels at the Inner Temple in 1561–2, so viewing the play in this institutional and festive context shows its collaborative and occasional nature. Traditionally, in the revels, members of the Inns imitated and parodied the court. Some unusual events in 1561–2 involved prominent figures from court in the celebrations, including Lord Robert Dudley and members of the Privy Council. As a result, the festivities opened up a (p.177) fairly novel opportunity to create a play on the succession, or more broadly speaking, to use the imitative court of the revels to create a mirror for the magistrates from the court. In this context, Gorboduc looks less like a specific, topical political commentary than a variegated response to the multifaceted circumstances in which it was initially performed. Page 4 of 28

Gorboduc in the Political Nation The history of Gorboduc then best begins with the tradition of inns-of-court Christmas revels. While their specific origins are unknown, the tradition goes back to at least the fifteenth century.15 By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the law schools had established a set of complex conventions around their Christmas celebrations, which involved electing a prince or lord of misrule as well as a retinue of attendants and officers—for instance, a lord chancellor, chief baron of the exchequer, and chief butler—to preside over their realms or provinces during the festival period. The revels typically consisted of a set of events surrounding the prince himself: banqueting, the reception of ambassadors from so-called foreign lands (members of the other inns), the creation of members as knights of the prince, visits to the court, progresses along the Thames, and the production of a play.16 Combining elements of a carnival and a high school mock congress, the revels allowed members of the Inns to take on positions of prestige that they often would not otherwise hold. The revels offered an opportunity for self-fashioning, but their mock courts must have become traditional for other reasons as well. They contributed to the festive character of the Christmas celebrations, since the exaggerated parody of the national court lent an air of outlandish humour to the events. In addition, as Chapter 1 discussed, many men came to the Inns searching for social and political advancement, aiming in particular for positions in the Elizabethan court and government. The revels allowed such men to train themselves in the comportment and bearing they would need to obtain posts in the court and state. According to one sixteenth-century observer, attendants and officers at the revels were to be the same as those ‘in the King’s Highness’s house, and other noblemen, and this is done only to the intent that they should in time come to know how to use themselves’.17 Drama especially helped inns-of-court men to ‘know how to use themselves’, since such performances allowed them to practise the rhetorical skills they would need to possess as courtiers and civil servants.18

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation The Inner Temple revels of 1561–2 parodied the court and prepared participants for courtly life. One contemporary account of those revels tells us that the Inn blasted various ‘double cannons in so great a number and so terrible that it darkened the whole air’ and that these served as a ‘warning shot to the officers of the (p.178) Constable Marshall of the Inner Temple to prepare dinner’.19 Queen Elizabeth evidently found humour in this militarism. One observer writes of these revels that she would ‘often say’ ‘when the Chamber piece at mealtimes were discharged, the trumpets sounded, and drums roaring, with other compliments of warlike discipline, now the court calls her retinue to diet’.20 Revellers imitated and caricatured the court, firing off their cannons—weapons usually reserved for events of national significance—to add hyperbolic importance to their own activity, the preparation of the evening meal.21 The account also indicates that the revels fulfilled their other traditional function: training future members of the court and servants of the state. Men came to this special revels court to learn ‘to yield their fleece to their prince and commonwealth’. In part, they did this by participating in the court’s ‘exercises of body and mind’, which help them to master ‘speaking, countenance, gesture, and use of apparel’.22 The revels of 1561–2 were characteristic festivities, but they were unique as well, being far more elaborate than most revels. A later sixteenth-century account of the event remarks on this exceptionalism: for music, masking, revelling, singing, and dancing daily during the time aforesaid, and other sports, pastimes, oratory speeches and heroical inventions performed there, […] the like there before nor sithence hath been here of, resembling rather an emperor’s court than a college of students.23 One reason for this difference lies in the timing and purpose of the event, celebrating the end of a conflict between the Inner and Middle Temples. In 1561, the governors of the Middle Temple had only one subsidiary Inn of Chancery under their control. They approached their counterparts at the Inner Temple, who then had three Inns of Chancery, with a proposal to transfer jurisdiction of one of these, Lyons Inn. To aid them in their plan, the Middle Temple enlisted the assistance of the powerful lord keeper, Nicholas Bacon. The Inner Temple opposed the move and asked Lord Robert Dudley, master of the queen’s (p.179) horse (and later earl of Leicester), to help them to prevent the transfer. Dudley successfully petitioned Queen Elizabeth, who then spoke to Bacon, telling him ‘to cease and no further to proceed or meddle in the same matter’, which promptly brought the dispute to a close.24

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation The end of the conflict occasioned an unusually lavish celebration, for which the inn named Dudley its lord of misrule. An entry in the diary of the merchant Henry Machyn shows the magnificence of the festivities. Relating the progress of Dudley’s lord of misrule through London, Machyn writes: The twenty-seventh day of December came riding through London a lord of misrule in clean, complete harness gilt, with a hundred great horses and gentlemen riding gorgeously, with chains of gold, and their horse goodly trapped, unto the temple. For there was great cheer all Christmas till and great revels as ever was for the gentlemen of the temple every day, for many of the council was there.25 Machyn describes the splendid procession, which with its prince and 100 men on horses arrayed in gold rivals the opulent extravagance of royal progresses. He indicates, as well, the importance and exceptional nature of the revels, which involved ‘many of the [Privy] Council’ and were ‘great revels as ever was’. For the finale to such great revels, members of the Inner Temple needed a suitable play, and this was Sackville and Norton’s Gorboduc, a dramatization of the ancient civil war between the sons of King Gorboduc for control of the English throne. Sackville and Norton likely adapted this history expressly for the occasion. The story responds in a variety of ways to the particular circumstances of the festivities. First, the tale about the division of the empire reflects the events that led up to the revels, the dispute between the Middle and Inner Temples over the property of Lyons Inn.26 Second, it encapsulates the psychic and rhetorical logic of the revels, turning a local place and event into a kingdom and incident on a national and dynastic scale. Finally, it provides an opportunity for rhetorical training. The authors filled out their source, enhancing a brief narrative from the chronicles with numerous scenes of counsel that served as exercises in ‘speaking, countenance, gesture and use of apparel’.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation Sackville and Norton may have composed the play to respond to domestic events, but they deliberately adapted the plot to comment on a national political issue as well. The tale of Gorboduc goes back as far as Geoffrey of Monmouth, appearing with changes in detail in chronicles up through the sixteenth century. In a brief version, in The Chronicles of England (1528), King Gorbodian reigns for fifteen years and then dies. His two sons, becoming ‘stout and proud’, then ‘ever warred together for the land’. The younger son kills his brother, and the act prompts his mother to murder him in revenge. The sons die without heirs, with ‘neither son ne daughter ne none other of the kindred it might inherit the land’, (p.180) and the kingdom plunges into fifty years of civil war.27 While the source used by Sackville and Norton is not clear, it is likely that they picked particular details and adapted a variety of sources in particular ways.28 They shaped the beginning to present a king who abdicates while he is still alive, and they made this the act that causes civil war. They also enhanced the extent of the civil turmoil, introducing a rebellion among the commoners; added a foreign invader, Fergus, who threatens to take the crown by force; and fleshed out the ending, concluding the play with Gorboduc’s former counsellors debating the future of the kingdom and with that future still undecided. The alterations, especially the opening and closing debates about the appropriate heir, shift the emphasis of the story from fraternal strife to the succession. The inheritance of the throne was one of the most politically charged and complex issues of the day, touching a range of other matters like debates about primogeniture, the will of Henry VIII, the legitimacy of female rule, the national religion, and the relative power of the monarch, Privy Council, and Parliament. The issue is complicated, but in the early 1560s the succession crisis centred on two main debates. One concerned the rightful heir to the throne, an issue that divided supporters of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, from the supporters of the Protestant Catherine Grey. The second concerned Queen Elizabeth’s marriage policy. Elizabeth was frequently urged to resolve the succession by marrying and having a child of her own. Yet there were disputes about an appropriate husband. At the time of Gorboduc, at least two men actively sought Elizabeth’s hand: King Eric of Sweden and the Inner Temple’s patron and lord of misrule, Lord Robert Dudley himself.29 Indeed, Sackville and Norton probably chose to address the succession in their play since the issue appealed to nearly every segment of the audience: Dudley, who wanted to marry Elizabeth; members of the Privy Council, who sought to have the question resolved; and members of the Inns, who were likely drawn to the thorny common-law legal issues at the heart of the succession crisis, as well as the issues of legal inheritance and land law highlighted in the plot itself.30

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation It must have been a fairly natural step to turn the imitative revels court into a mirror for the real court and shape historical fiction to comment on the realities of the political world. As it did with the revels, Gorboduc responded to the succession question in a variety of ways, offering, as critics have shown, numerous statements on the issue. In the case of the foreign invader, Fergus, Gorboduc warns against a match with a foreigner, such as the king of Sweden, and signals the unsuitability of Mary, Queen of Scots. In one of the final speeches of the play, in which a (p.181) counsellor argues that someone nativeborn should rule, it urges that a native heir such as Lady Catherine Grey should be named as the successor. Finally, in performance with another revel’s entertainment, it presents Dudley himself as a worthy royal husband.31 The topical references all tend towards the same advice: the succession needs to be resolved—and better through a native heir than a foreign one. Moreover, the differences in the specific topical recommendations most likely reflect the diversity of attitudes that must have existed among the members of the audience of Gorboduc. Overall, the range of comments on the succession reminds us of the play’s complex social function. Gorboduc came about as a variegated response to the traditional needs of the revels, as well as the particular circumstances of the conflict with the Middle Temple, and the audience’s interests in the succession question. The play served many purposes, encapsulating and expressing an array of communal, institutional, and national concerns.

Collaborative Counsel Gorboduc is a broadly topical response to a particular social occasion and political question. In their production of the play, members of the Inner Temple also capitalized on the occasion to offer a less topical and more general comment on the nature and makeup of the early Elizabethan political nation, those groups and institutions that had the authority to contribute to discussions of matters of state. There are drawbacks to reading Gorboduc narrowly, as a topical commentary on the succession: to the extent that the play comments on particular solutions to the succession question, it does so only obliquely and vaguely. The foreign invader Fergus might represent Mary, Queen of Scots, or the king of Sweden. The native heir might refer to Catherine Grey or the offspring of a marriage with Lord Robert Dudley. In both cases, the intended references are difficult to determine. In contrast to these shadowed allusions, Gorboduc advances one line of argument quite directly: the succession must be decided through conversation and consultation among the three main institutions of the political nation, monarch, council, and Parliament. Hence, even as Gorboduc gestures at different answers to the succession question, it presents an argument for how such answers should be determined. The play advises collaboration and counsel as a way to settle the most significant debate of the day.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation This line of argument is evident in Gorboduc’s structure. The play is built around a series of scenes depicting different models of governance, each of which fails to (p.182) maintain the stability of the state. In the opening act, King Gorboduc discusses the proposal to divide the realm with his counsellors. The first, Arostus, whose name means ‘flabby and weak’, agrees with the proposal. The second, Philander, whose name means ‘friend of mankind’, urges delay. The third, Eubulus, the king’s secretary, whose name means ‘wise counsellor’, opposes the plan.32 At the end of the scene, Gorboduc concurs with Arostus and divides the realm, a decision that plunges the country into civil war. In Act I, the government consists of the king-in-council, but this model fails to secure the wise decision of the king, in other words his agreement with Eubulus, the wise counsellor. Act II repeats the scene. At first, Ferrex succumbs to the counsel of Hermon, who disastrously urges the prince to build up his army in case of an attack, a piece of advice described by another advisor as ‘traitorous counsel’.33 In the next scene, Porrex follows the counsel of Tyndar, who argues that the prince should protect himself from Ferrex’s growing army, advice that leads Porrex to murder his brother. In Act II, the monarch-in-council again fails to prevent a ruinous turn of events, and as a model of governance, does not guarantee the stability of the state. More than that, governance by the king-incouncil hastens the disintegration of the political order. Acts III and IV then illustrate the consequences of such failures, describing the murder of Ferrex by Porrex, the vengeful murder of Porrex by Queen Videna, and the murder of Videna and Gorboduc in an uprising by the commoners. Marie Axton argues that the main protagonist in Gorboduc is the monarch-incouncil.34 The monarch-in-council, however, disappears by Act V, and in its place appear several models of governance.35 First, we find a number of lords who, as Eubulus puts it, ‘consent in one’ to put down the rebellion among the commoners.36 For a moment, a small coalition of the nobility appears as a possible model of governance. The peers soon lose their strength when faced with the threat of Fergus, the foreign invader. At the end of the play, the king’s former counsellors debate the future of the realm. The council of counsellors then emerges vaguely as another model, but the advisors quickly focus our attention on two other forms of rule. The first is rule by Parliament. In an effort to bring the civil war to an end, Arostus suggests that the nobles convene Parliament to choose a new ruler. In the penultimate speech of the play, he urges the nobles to lay down their arms: (p.183) Till first by common counsel of you all In parliament the regal diadem Be set in certain place of governance; In which your parliament, and in your choice, Prefer the right, my lords, without respect Page 10 of 28

Gorboduc in the Political Nation Of strength or friends, or whatsoever cause That may set forward any other’s part. For right will last, and wrong cannot endure.37

Arostus argues that the ‘common counsel’ of Parliament will bring peace. As his name, ‘flabby and weak’, signals, however, there is a problem with this plan. Eubulus, the wise counsellor, observes there is little likelihood that Parliament will reach consent: Alas, in Parliament what hope can be, When is of Parliament no hope at all, Which, though it be assembled by consent, Yet is not likely with consent to end; While each one for himself, or for his friend, Against his foe shall travail what he may; While now the state, left open to the man That shall with greatest force invade the same, Shall fill ambitious minds with gaping hope; When will they once with yielding hearts agree? Or in the while, how shall the realm be used?38

In the eyes of Eubulus, Parliament alone fails to provide an adequate model of governance. Parliaments create factions, men acting ‘each one for himself, or for his friend, | Against his foe’. While Eubulus suggests that Parliament might work in times of peace, he points out that it cannot work in times of crisis, with the state ‘left open’. At such moments, it is unlikely that ‘ambitious minds with gaping hope’ will ‘with yielding hearts agree’. The monarch-in-council, the coalition of nobility, rule by council, and rule by Parliament all fail as models of governance. Eubulus concludes his speech and the play, however, with a suggestion for yet another model, one created by a union of the king and Parliament. In reference to the debated succession, he asserts: No, no; then Parliament should have been holden, And certain heirs appointed to the crown, To stay the title of established right And in the people plant obedience While yet the prince did live whose name and power By lawful summons and authority Might make a parliament to be of force And might have set the state in quiet stay.39

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation (p.184) Arguing that the king and Parliament should work together to ‘stay the title of established right’ and ‘set the state in quiet stay’, Eubulus turns a debate about the succession into a policy recommendation on how to avoid the very question the counsellors discuss, delineating a form of government that is different from any we have seen earlier. The way to prevent turmoil is to resolve the problem through the collaborative government of the monarch and Parliament. From the syntax of Eubulus’s speech, it is not entirely clear who appoints heirs to the crown, Parliament or the king. One thing is nonetheless certain: the mutual action of the two institutions can ‘set the state in quiet stay’. Moreover, since Eubulus himself makes the recommendation, he suggests that the king’s council has a crucial role to play in bringing such stability to the commonwealth as well.40 Eubulus recommends that the government exist in essence as a mixed polity, as a combination of a variety of institutions of the state. In a contemporary succession treatise, John Aylmer nicely summarizes a broad version of the concept: ‘The regiment of England is not a mere monarchy, as some for lack of consideration thinker, nor a mere Oligarchy nor Democracy, but a rule mixed of all these, wherein each one of these have or should have like authority’.41 Of course, as Aylmer’s ‘have or should have’ indicates, one issue in the succession debates concerns whether the monarch, Parliament, and council ‘had or should have had’ similar authority. At the heart of the conflict was uncertainty over who exactly had the authority to speak on and decide the issue. In his recent study of the early Elizabethan polity, Stephen Alford shows that Gorboduc is significant in this context since it investigates precisely this problem, ‘explor[ing] the relationship between monarch, councillors, and counsel, and plac[ing] it in the context of the British succession’. The play does not so much offer advice on the succession as it counsels against the power of the monarch and the king-incouncil, arguing instead for a form of government in which different institutions of the political nation play equally authoritative and mutually reinforcing roles. In the 1560s, as Alford puts it, ‘the settlement rested on counsel and firm action by the three elements of the mixed polity: monarch, Council, and Parliament’.42

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation The narrative of the play reinforces and extends this argument. It begins with a private conversation between Queen Videna and Ferrex about the succession, then moves to the discussion between Gorboduc and his council. In both scenes, private passions mix with political theory, allowing decisions about the inheritance of the throne to appear as private whims justified by abstract argument.43 The play ends (p.185) somewhere near the field of battle, where the counsellors, joined by the lords Clotyn, Mandud, and Gwenard, discuss the future of the state. Hence, in the course of the play, the space of political deliberation shifts from the royal household to a rarefied but more open political sphere involving the king’s council and the peers.44 Over the whole of Gorboduc, Sackville and Norton thus offer a variety of topical comments on the succession. These references open up a broader point, that the issue must be decided through dialogue, consultation, and agreement among the monarch, the Privy Council, and Parliament. At a time of crisis, with the state ‘left open’, any single institution of the political nation by itself will fail to maintain the stability of the state.

The Place of the Play What did it mean for members of the Inner Temple to offer this advice? In general, the suggestion was not radical for the time, fitting well with the climate of political cooperation that existed among the Council and Parliament in the early 1560s. As Alford puts it, both groups were ‘collegial, focused, and galvanized into action by Elizabeth’s refusal to marry or settle the kingdom’s succession’.45 Even so, the location and staging of the play helped to make a subtle and challenging point: that members of the Inner Temple could participate in the conversation about the succession as well. Gorboduc was above all the product of its institutional environment, the Inns of Court. Critics have traditionally grouped the play with courtly productions as a work created at the centre of national power.46 The Inns, however, existed in a geographically and socially separate sphere from the court and were an institution with no official relationship to the government.47 It is true that members of the Inns came from the landed gentry and aristocracy, and many went into Parliament and served at court, but these were unofficial, informal, and traditional arrangements.48 Moreover, the Inns had their own literary and political culture, (p.186) one that often, as in this case, responded critically to the crown.49 The Inns were connected to but separate from the centre of political power. Viewed from this perspective, the performance of Gorboduc at the Inner Temple has some striking implications. The play shifted the debate away from the core of the polity. At the same time, it turned members of the Inn into counsellors to the Privy Council. As a result, the play pressed to expand the dialogue about the succession beyond the central government, implicitly making a claim that members of the Inn were part of the political nation, too: that they too could legitimately contribute to discussions of matters of state.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation A brief look at the audience and layout of the performance illustrates how the play turned the performers into counsellors. We know that the audience included members of the Inner Temple, Gray’s Inn, and the Privy Council, as well as courtiers and potentially ladies from the court.50 The staging of the performance is less certain, but we can reconstruct its likely outlines. During many plays at the Inns, visitors and high-ranking members sat at the high table. The performances themselves then took place in front of these figures on a purposebuilt raised platform, perhaps set between the high table and the large, central fireplace or along the sides, or more likely at the lower end of the hall.51 Scaffolding was erected along the sides of the halls to provide additional seating for the audience.52 One of these layouts was probably used for Gorboduc, since the Inner Temple would have had to accommodate important visitors, such as Dudley and the councillors, as well as a number of other guests for their festivities.53 Regardless of the particular staging, in the performance, members of the Inner Temple would have been in an elevated position relative to members of the court, delivering counsel to the political establishment, and becoming counsellors to members of the Privy Council themselves. The performance of Gorboduc, in other words, took the succession debates out of the royal household, away from court, past Parliament, and to a space that existed separately from the core of the polity. In that space, members of the Inn argued for the necessity of political dialogue in resolving the succession crisis. They (p.187) also broadened participation in that dialogue, making themselves figuratively and perhaps even literally, in terms of the performance space, central to conversations on the issue. The move is subtle but significant. Gorboduc takes place against the backdrop of the coalescence of a conciliar class. As Kevin Dunn observes, ‘Gorboduc shows the conciliar class instantiating itself as the representative of the state, the entity that persists through changes of monarch and government.’54 Dunn incisively pinpoints the social shift underlying the play, but he merges the Privy Council and Inns together into a single group and consequently pushes the point too far. For him, such counsellors are the political nation. Gorboduc, though, does not offer a particular resolution to the succession crisis, nor does it show that counsellors should provide the answer. Rather, the play urges a form of collaborative counsel. Its political import lies in the way it transforms members of the Inn into counsellors and hence into contributors to a major debate about the future of the state. Gorboduc asserts that the Inns can and should play a crucial (but not definitive) role in the political nation, too.

Authorizing Counsel

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation The move to participate explicitly in contemporary political debates was hardly unproblematic. At the time, drama was restricted as a form of political expression. On 16 May 1559, Queen Elizabeth issued a proclamation limiting plays on ‘matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the commonweal’. These topics were ‘no meet matters to be written or treated upon but by men of authority, learning, and wisdom’, nor were they ‘to be handled before any audience but of grave and discreet persons’.55 The edict appears to prohibit all political drama, but some details suggest why no one censored the Inn for the production. The performers were ‘men of authority, learning, and wisdom’ playing before ‘grave and discreet persons’. Still, Sackville and Norton could not have known how the play would be received. Earlier in the century, John Roo of Gray’s Inn was arrested and held in the Tower of London for a play that Wolsey considered too political.56 Gorboduc was moreover an unprecedented combination of innovative drama and political advice. It remains the first recorded play in blank verse, the first recorded play to use dumb shows, one of the earliest English tragedies, one of the earliest adaptations of Senecan drama, the first adaptation of the material used by authors of the Mirror for Magistrates (1559) in dramatic form, and the first play in a series of plays sparked by succession questions in the period.57 (p.188) Sackville and Norton likely took a risk creating the drama for a number of reasons. In part, as they turned their play into a comment on the succession, they may have found it difficult despite the proclamation to hold back their political advice. In addition, they may have felt that the revels context and the patronage of men such as Lord Robert Dudley in some sense licensed the production. Finally, they may have concluded that it was worth the risk, since drama gave them a means to participate in the succession debates. This final suggestion makes particular sense in light of the interests and social aspirations of members of the Inns themselves. As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, some of them aimed to be common-law lawyers, and many additionally hoped for positions in the Elizabethan court and government. Naturally, men with such goals and training would have found the legal and political issues of the succession captivating. Still, it was not clear that they had the authority to speak openly on the issue. Later in the decade, Elizabeth plainly stated that the matter should rest solely in herself, saying: ‘As for handling the succession, not one of them [her subjects] should do it; she would reserve that for herself.’58 No such firm prohibition existed in 1561–2. Even so, for men seeking preferment into the government, it was risky to offer an opinion in the debate. Drama allowed them to enter the deliberations on the succession in a protected way, under the cover of fiction and, by virtue of Elizabeth’s proclamation, with the rules of engagement in some sense laid out. Gorboduc offered members of the Inn a legitimate but guarded means to enter the charged debate and to offer their ideas, however general and conciliatory, on the issue.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation That said, Sackville and Norton took no chances and built into the play some authorization for the counsel they offered. In the content of the drama, they allowed the players to show their ‘learning and wisdom’ through a number of references to events and myths concerning rule of the self and commonweal. These include the English legends of Morgan and Cunedag, who tragically divided the realm between them; Brutus, who also disastrously divided Britain among his three sons; the Trojan legend of Priam and Hecuba, which links the fall of Gorboduc and Videna with the fall of Troy; and the Greek myths of Phaeton and Tantalus, who like Ferrex and Porrex both rose above their traditionally appropriate positions in social and cosmic order and suffered as a result.59 They also authorized their counsel through their innovative genre. They modelled their work on the Mirror for Magistrates (1559) and Senecan drama. As Chapters 5 and 6 showed, these kinds of tragedy describe the downfall of historical and mythological magistrates in part to warn leaders against the dangers of tyranny, ambition, and pride. Thus, for instance, as discussed in the opening of Chapter 5, in the preface to the Mirror, William Baldwin explains to noble readers: (p.189) For here as in a looking glass, you shall see (if any vice be in you) how the like hath been punished in other heretofore, whereby admonished, I trust it will be a good occasion to move you to the sooner amendment.60 In a similar vein, at the end of a contemporary translation of Seneca’s Oedipus (1563), the chorus tells the audience that Oedipus is ‘[a] Mirror meet, a pattern plain | of princes’ careful thrall’.61 Sackville and Norton obviously picked up on the Mirror and Seneca. At the end of Act I, we learn that the king, ‘A mirror shall become to princes all | To learn to shun the cause of such a fall’.62 By working within these traditions, the authors created a political drama suitable for ‘grave and discreet persons’. The play is, in the words of Sir Philip Sidney, ‘full of stately speeches, and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca’s style, and as full of notable morality’.63 More importantly, by turning to such sources, the authors signalled that there was a precedent for the combination of drama and counsel offered in the play itself.

The Reception of Gorboduc

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation Gorboduc is a response to a specific occasion as well as a comment on the nature and makeup of the political nation. To those familiar with criticism of the play, such a view may still seem too broad. An account of the first performance states that the drama explicitly supports the royal marriage bid of Lord Robert Dudley. How can one allow that Gorboduc has such broad significance when a contemporary observer read it so narrowly? It is important to bear in mind that in assessing its political significance, the location and occasion of the play are as important as its content. At the same time, as Mike Pincombe has persuasively shown, the account itself is hardly as straightforward as it initially appears, indicating the lawyers’ resistance to rather than support of Dudley’s marriage plans.64 Readers should neither lean too heavily on nor sideline this account. In light of the argument here, it provides crucial and telling insight into the reception of the play: that it was received as political advice. In Gorboduc, members of the Inner Temple sought to contribute to a national conversation, and they did so neither too allusively nor ambiguously to be heard. If they aimed to turn their play into a form of political participation, they succeeded—and admirably so. Even a brief look at the eyewitness account indicates both its evidentiary problems and promise. The account appears in the British Library in a manuscript collection of working notes from the early years of Elizabeth’s reign. The papers are anonymous, but in a discussion of the collection Norman Jones and Paul Whitfield White observe that the author was a ‘well-educated minor courtier who had extensive (p.190) contacts with such diplomats as Roger Ascham […], access to diplomatic correspondence, and a place at Court’.65 More recently, Simon Adams, Ian Archer, and G. W. Bernard suggest that the author was John Hales, an antagonist of the Dudley family. The papers in which the account appears once belonged to Thomas Norton. He was not the author, but the provenance suggests the author’s connections with the Inns.66 The papers offer the following description:

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation There was a tragedy played in the Inner Temple of the two brethren Porrex and Ferrex, Kings of Britain, between whom the father had divided the realm, the one slew the other and the mother slew the man-killer. It was thus used. First, wild men came in and would have broken a whole fagot, but could not, the sticks they brake being severed. Then came in a king to whom was given a clear glass, and a golden cup of gold covered, full of poison. The glass he cast under his foot and break it, the poison he drank of. After came in mourners. The shadows were declared by the Chorus: first to signify unity, the two [i.e. second] how that men refused the certain and took the uncertain, whereby was meant that it was better for the queen to marry with the Lord Robert, known, than with the king of Sweden. The third to declare it civil dissension breadeth mourning. Many things were handled of marriage, and that the matter was to be debated in Parliament, because it was much banding but it hit ought to be determined by the Council. There was also declared how a strange duke seeing the realm at division would have taken upon him the crown, but the people would none of it. And many things were said for the succession to put things in certainty.67 The writer describes the first three of the play’s dumb shows, an interpretation of each, and the conclusion to the last act, observing that ‘many things were said for the succession to put things in certainty’. The account is interesting for a number of reasons; for instance, the focus on the dumb shows. Analyses of this account focus on the second dumb show, which indicates ‘how that men refused the certain and took the uncertain, whereby was meant that it was better for the queen to marry with the Lord Robert, known, than with the king of Sweden’. The courtier explicitly refers to Lord Robert Dudley’s marriage negotiations with Elizabeth and the ill-fated efforts of the king of Sweden. Critics have argued that the comment shows the play dealt mainly with the Dudley marriage efforts.68 Should we trust this account entirely? Printed editions of the play contain no references resembling the courtier’s remark on Dudley, and since we do not have a corroborating description there is no way to tell whether the comment was the courtier’s interpretation or part of the performance.69 Moreover, in general, the account seems more personal than objective since it offers, as one historian puts it, (p.191) ‘an extremely selective reaction to the performance’.70 As we have seen, the entire play is made up of far more than a series of dumb shows and a final act, responding to a range of institutional and national concerns, and commenting on the important role of the monarch, Parliament, and council in resolving the crisis.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation The report is still significant, since it provides crucial information about the reception of the play. At least one viewer saw it as a comment on the succession and Queen Elizabeth’s marriage policy. In other words, Gorboduc did not just offer but was heard as a piece of counsel. Members of the Inner Temple not only performed as but became counsellors to the council itself. The account is also important for its matter-of-fact tone. We might expect the eyewitness to register some anxiety about the play’s political advice. Instead, he boldly and briskly interprets the contemporary relevance of the drama. The tone suggests that during the performance, performers became legitimate contributors to a discussion about matters of state, demonstrating that they had, in the language of Elizabeth’s proclamation, the ‘authority, learning, and wisdom’ to comment on ‘matters of the governance of the estate of the commonweal’. Less than two weeks later, Elizabeth herself heard what the men of the Inner Temple had to say. On 18 January 1562, they performed Gorboduc for her at Whitehall. The significance of this move is difficult to interpret. On the one hand, it helped to complete the transition that many members of the Inns sought to make. When they went to the queen, they became counsellors in their own right. At the Inner Temple, they counselled the council; at Whitehall, the queen herself. On the other hand, the shift neutralizes some of the play’s political power, bringing its discussion of politics back within the firmly established institutional, spatial, and political centre of England, Whitehall, and turns the play into a piece of counsel drama of the sort that was common in Tudor aristocratic households.71 Still, in its initial performance at the Inner Temple, at an institution that was relatively speaking on the periphery of national power, Gorboduc made a claim for the authority of members of the Inner Temple to speak on the succession and pushed at the boundaries of the political nation itself.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation As Chapter 8 will show, throughout the 1560s, Gorboduc provided a reference point for the plays produced by members of the Inns. In that decade, members mounted a series of dramatic shows touching on contemporary political issues, usually succession, but also the quality of magistrates: Thomas Pound’s two marriage masques for members of Lincoln’s Inn, Supposes, Jocasta, and the multiauthored Gismond of Salerne. Nevertheless, their political expression was limited to drama. Attempts to participate in the succession debates in other ways did not go well. In the middle of the decade, Edmund Plowden, a member of the Middle Temple, wrote a treatise on the succession but kept it in closely guarded manuscript, since ‘in dealing in titles of kingdoms there is much danger, and specially to the subjects, and in these cases […] the surest way is to be silent’.72 In the same year, (p.192) members of Lincoln’s Inn found this out when they performed a moot concluding that Mary, Queen of Scots, should not inherit the throne. Cecil intervened to put an end to the criticism of the Queen and the affair ended with one of the governors of the Inn in prison.73 Participation by means other than drama could be dangerous. Nonetheless, in a climate in which there was ‘much danger’ in political speech, Gorboduc was important. With it, members of the Inns tested and explored drama as a means to enter the debates about the succession and found a restricted, but still effective, way to participate in a national debate concerning the governance of the commonwealth. Notes:

(1) George Gascoigne, The Posies (London: Richard Smith, 1575), STC 11637, p. 69. (2) Qtd. in G.W. Pigman’s commentary to Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, p. 516. (3) ‘Pollynices’ reflects the spelling of this name in Gascoigne’s play. (4) The Mirror addresses the ‘nobility’ and a general ‘reader’ (see Chapter 5). Gorboduc, at least in its initial performance, aimed at members of the Inner Temple, members of court, and Privy Councillors. See ‘The Occasional Politics of Gorboduc’ in this chapter. (5) Sackville and Norton, Gorboduc, 1.2.392–3. (6) Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh, Jocasta in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, pp. 59– 140, 5.Cho.1–2. (7) I also discuss connections between these three texts in ‘National History to Foreign Calamity: A Mirror for Magistrates and Early English Tragedy’, in Shakespeare’s Histories and Counter-Histories, ed. Dermot Cavanagh, Stuart Hampton-Reeves, and Steve Longstaffe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 152–65.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation (8) On the dating of Jocasta and Supposes, see Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, p. 512. On the dating of Gismond, see REED: Inns, II, p. 733. (9) Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, pp. 38–60. (10) In 1567, the Middle Templar Edmund Plowden produced a legal treatise explicitly supporting Mary Stuart’s claim to the throne. In the same year, members of Lincoln’s Inn held a moot (a mock debate) arguing against Mary Stuart’s claim. On Plowden, see Axton, ‘Influence of Edmund Plowden’s Succession Treatise’, and Geoffrey de C. Parmiter, Edmund Plowden: An Elizabethan Recusant Lawyer (London: Catholic Record Society, 1987), 84–95. On the Lincoln’s Inn moot see Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots 1547–1603, vol 2: 1563–1569, ed. by Joseph Bain (Edinburgh: H.M. Register House, 1900), p. 304; Collection of State Papers […] Left by W. Cecill Lord Burghley, ed. by Samuel Haynes and William Murdin, 2 vols (London: W. Bower, 1740–59), II, p. 762; and J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1559–1581 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953), p. 133. (11) For an articulation of this debate, see Scott Lucas’s review of Dermot Cavanagh’s Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play, in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 19 (2006), 304–10. (12) On Gorboduc and succession, see Ernest William Talbert, ‘The Political Import and the First Two Audiences of Gorboduc’, in Studies in Honor of DeWitt T. Starnes, ed. by Thomas P. Harrison, Archibald A. Hill, Ernest C. Mossner, and James Sledd (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1967), pp. 89–115; David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 141–7; Marie Axton, ‘Robert Dudley and the Inner Temple Revels’, Historical Journal, 13 (1970), 365– 78; Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, pp. 39–47; and Susan Doran, ‘Juno versus Diana: The Treatment of Elizabeth I’s Marriage in Plays and Entertainments, 1561– 1581’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 257–74. On the eyewitness account, see Henry James and Greg Walker, ‘The Politics of Gorboduc’, English Historical Review, 110 (1995), 109–21; and Norman Jones and Paul Whitfield White, ‘Gorboduc and Royal Marriage Politics: An Elizabethan Playgoer’s Report of the Premiere Performance’, English Literary Renaissance, 26 (1996), 3–16.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation (13) Mike Pincombe illustrates problems with interpreting this manuscript source in ‘Robert Dudley, Gorboduc, and “The Masque of Beauty and Desire”: A Reconsideration of the Evidence for Political Intervention’, Parergon, 20 (2003), 19–44. Kevin Dunn and Dermot Cavanagh show that the play contributes to debates about the function and purpose of counsel. See Dunn, ‘Representing Counsel: Gorboduc and the Elizabethan Privy Council’, English Literary Renaissance, 33 (2003), 279–308. Cavanagh’s essay, the best recent work on the play, appears as a chapter on ‘The Language of Counsel in Gorboduc’, in Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 36–57. Peter C. Herman provides a precedent for these essays, arguing that the play highlights problems of interpretation and certainty: ‘“He Said What?!?”: Misdeeming Gorboduc, or Problematizing Form, Service, and Certainty’, Exemplaria, 13 (2001), 287–321. (14) For example, Terry Reilly and Karen Cunningham argue that the play addresses issues of land law and inheritance, reflecting concerns that also appear in readings and moots at the Inns. Reilly, ‘This is the Case’ and Cunningham, ‘So Many Books, So Many Rolls of Ancient Time’. Cathy Shrank emphasizes the active role of the audience in ‘weighing up different advice and advice givers’ in ‘Community’, in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. by Brian Cummings and James Simpson, Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 441–58 (p. 456). For Tom McFaul, the play explores ‘how a father may influence his sons’ in Problem Fathers in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 22. (15) Bland, ‘Interludes in Fifteenth-Century Revels at Furnivall’s Inn’. (16) On the Christmas revels, see Green, The Inns of Court and Early English Drama, 56–96; Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston, 32–44; and D. S. Bland, introduction, Gesta Grayorum: Or the History of the High and Mighty Prince Henry, Prince of Purpoole, Anno Domini 1594 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1968), pp. xvi–xxiv. (17) Bland, ‘Henry VIII’s Royal Commission’, p. 188. (18) On drama as rhetorical training, see D. S. Bland, ‘Rhetoric and the Law Student in Sixteenth-Century England’, Studies in Philology, 54 (1957), 498–508.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation (19) REED: Inns, II, pp. 366–7. The source for this account is Gerard Legh’s treatise on heraldry, The Accedens of Armory (London: Richard Tottell, 1562), STC 15388. The description of the revels appears as part of a description of the importance of the heraldic device, the Pegasus, which is the symbol of the Inner Temple. Legh offers some flattering and exaggerated description of the inn, for instance as a place ‘ancient in true nobility’ (REED: Inns, II, p. 367). Despite the exaggeration, the account does indicate something of the nature of the revels, and many of the events, such as the creation of knights of the prince or the firing of cannons, appear as well in accounts of other revels later in the period. On the creation of knights, see REED: Inns, II, pp. 401–5. For a discussion of some of the difficulties of using this account to interpret Gorboduc as an argument in support of Dudley’s marriage plans, see Pincombe, ‘Robert Dudley, Gorboduc’, pp. 23–31. (20) Inner Temple MS, misc. 32, fol. 9r. (21) Evidently, this was not an isolated incident. In 1621–2, Gray’s Inn put the city into a commotion when, as part of its Christmas festivities, it fired off cannons in the middle of the night, prompting a sleeping King James to start from his bed yelling, ‘Treason, treason!’ The revels were (and plainly created) burlesque of the court and courtly world. The full account is in The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, ed. by John Nichols, 4 vols (London: J.B. Nichols, 1828), IV, pp. 751–2. (22) REED: Inns, II, p. 367. (23) Inner Temple MS, misc. 32, fols. 9r–10v. (24) Calendar of Inner Temple Records, I, p. 217. (25) Entry date 12-27-1561 in Machyn [22 November 2013]. (26) Calendar of Inner Temple Records, I, p. 217. (27) The Cronycles of Englonde with The Dedes of Popes and Emperours, and also The Descripcyon of Englonde (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1528), STC 10002, sigs. 16r–16v. (28) On the sources for the Gorboduc story, see Sackville and Norton, Gorboduc, pp. xiv–xvi. (29) On the major issues in the succession, see Mortimer Levine, The Early Elizabethan Succession Question, 1558–1568 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966). On the marriage negotiations of Robert Dudley and Eric XIV of Sweden, see James and Walker, ‘The Politics of Gorboduc’, pp. 110–12 and Jones and White, ‘Gorboduc and Royal Marriage Politics’, pp. 7–10.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation (30) On the legal issues involved in the succession, see Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, pp. 11–37. On inheritance and land in the play, see Reilly, ‘This is the Case’ and Cunningham, ‘So Many Books, So Many Rolls of Ancient Time’. (31) On Gorboduc as support for Lady Catherine Grey, see Levine, Elizabethan Succession Question, pp. 39–44. On Gorboduc as support for Dudley, see Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, p. 46 and ‘Robert Dudley and the Inner Temple Revels’, esp. pp. 374–5; Doran, ‘Juno versus Diana’, pp. 260–3; James and Walker, ‘The Politics of Gorboduc’ and Jones and White, ‘Gorboduc and Royal Marriage Politics’. Mike Pincombe counters this criticism, showing in ‘Robert Dudley, Gorboduc’ that the play and its accompanying masque were not intended, as has been suggested by Marie Axton and others, to make an argument for Robert Dudley as a royal husband. (32) On the names of the counsellors, see Gorboduc, p. xviii. There is some ambiguity surrounding the status of the three speakers. Arostus and Philander are both referred to in the play’s opening list of speakers as ‘counsellors’, while Eubulus is a ‘secretary’. The designation implies that Eubulus is a figure like William Cecil, who as one ‘entrusted with private or secret matters’ (OED [3 February 2014]) has a privileged relationship with the king, and makes Gorboduc’s decision not to listen to Eubulus all the more striking. (33) Gorboduc, 2.1.207. (34) Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, p. 46. (35) Dunn also observes that the monarch-in-council disappears by Act V (‘Representing Council’, p. 297). While he asserts that the Council itself remains the protagonist in the play, I argue that Act 5 introduces several other forms of rule. (36) Gorboduc, 5.1.30. (37) Gorboduc, 5.2.157–64. (38) Gorboduc, 5.2.253–63. (39) Gorboduc, 5.2.264–71. (40) Cavanagh argues that Eubulus’s advice is compromised in part because he fails to address the complex and changing nature of the present situation (Language and Politics, p. 54). Despite the inadequacy of his counsel for the situation at the end of the play, Eubulus nevertheless offers good advice on what ‘should have’ been done by Gorboduc in the first instance before events got out of hand.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation (41) John Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithful and Trewe Subiectes, agaynst the Late Blowne Blaste, Concerninge the Government of Wemen (London: John Day, 1559), STC 1005, sigs. H2v–H3r. (42) Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 100; 102. (43) This observation reinforces Franco Moretti’s argument that the principal tension in the play lies in the conflict between will and reason. See Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. by Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1988), esp. pp. 43–50. (44) James Emmanuel Berg examines this shift from the perspective of contemporary concerns about feudal householding: ‘Gorboduc as a Tragic Discovery of “Feudalism”’, SEL, 40 (2000), 199–226. (45) Alford, Early Elizabethan Polity, p. 98. (46) The best example of this tendency appears in the work of Greg Walker, who examines Gorboduc as an example of the traditional genre of Tudor courtly and aristocratic counsel drama. See The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 196–221. Although Axton sets up her discussion of Gorboduc with a lengthy discussion of revels at the Inns, she views Gorboduc as a courtly drama with Elizabeth as the primary audience. See ‘The Choice of a Goddess: Entertainments of the 1560s at Court and the Inns of Court’, in Queen’s Two Bodies, pp. 38–60. Doran follows Axton, recognizing that Gorboduc was ‘part of the whole revels’, but still argues that it was ‘designed to send out a clear message to Elizabeth’ (‘Juno versus Diana’, p. 261). (47) Dunn observes that critics overly emphasize the play’s connection to Elizabeth, noting the ‘critical literature’ is marked by ‘a preoccupation with the succession question and with Elizabeth as the play’s audience. This preoccupation has included an unfortunate tendency to ignore the play’s original audience and exaggerate its status as a piece of counsel to Elizabeth I’ (‘Representing Counsel’, p. 296). As I argue further in this chapter, the significance of political debate in Gorboduc is precisely that it takes place outside of the purview of the Queen. (48) On the social backgrounds of members of the Inns, see Prest, ‘Legal Education of the Gentry’; Prest, Inns, pp. 27–32; and Knafla, ‘Matriculation Revolution’. On the link between the Inns of Court and parliament, see ‘Humanism, Commonweal, and the Vita Activa’ in Chapter 2.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation (49) For a further discussion of the relationship between the Inns of Court and the court that focuses on a later period, see Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘Shepheards Nation’, esp. pp. 17–18. (50) On the presence of privy councillors, see Machyn (entry date 12-27-1561) [14 January 2014]. On the presence of at least one courtier, see Jones and White, ‘Gorboduc and Royal Marriage Politics’, pp. 4–5. On the likely presence of members of Gray’s Inn, see Bland, Gesta Grayorum, p. 30; 90 n.30.24. There is no direct evidence that women were present at the 1561–2 revels, but it is likely since we know they attended revels later in the century. See Bland, Gesta Grayorum, p. 29 and Dugdale, Origines Juridiciales, p. 157. (51) On the placement of a staged platform in front of the high table, see Margaret Knapp and Michal Kobialka, ‘Shakespeare and the Prince of Purpoole: The 1594 Production of The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn Hall’, Theatre History Studies, 4 (1984), 70–81; and Robert E. Burkhart, ‘The Surviving Shakespearean Playhouses: The Halls of the Inns of Court and the Excavation of the Rose’, Theatre History Studies, 12 (1992), 192–3. For concrete evidence of seventeenth-century performances at the lower end of the halls of the Inns and in royal venues, see REED: Inns, I, p. xliii. (52) Knapp and Kobialka, ‘Shakespeare and the Prince of Purpoole’, p. 75. Dugdale, Origines Juridiciales, p. 157. (53) This staging also makes sense of the direction in the dumb show preceding Act 4, where three furies come ‘forth from under the stage’, since they could emerge from under a raised platform but not from under the solid dais. (54) Dunn, ‘Representing Counsel’, p. 304. (55) Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. by Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 3 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), III, pp. 115–16. (56) Edward Hall, Chronicle, ed. by Henry Ellis (London: J. Johnson, 1809), p. 719; Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, ed. by Henry Ellis, 6 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1807–8), III, p. 714; and The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, 3rd ed. rev. by Josiah Pratt, 8 vols (London: George Seeley, 1870), IV, p. 657.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation (57) On the innovative form of Gorboduc, see Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 37–49; Dieter Mehl, The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 30–41; Irby B. Cauthen, introduction, Gorboduc, pp. xvi–xix; and Eric Rasmussen, ‘The Implications of Past Tense Verbs in Early Elizabethan Dumb Shows’, English Studies, 67 (1986), 417–19. Alan T. Bradford qualifies the extent of the innovations of the play, showing that Sackville and Norton combine and blend native and classical traditions: ‘Drama and Architecture under Elizabeth I: The “Regular” Phase’, English Literary Renaissance, 14 (1984), 3–28. (58) Qtd in Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, p. 11. (59) For a discussion of these references, see Gorboduc, pp. xxii–xxiii. (60) A Mirror for Magistrates, p. 65. (61) Neville, Lamentable Tragedie of Oedipus, sig. D2v. (62) Gorboduc, 1.2.392–3. (63) Sir Philip Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poesy’, Renaissance Literature: An Anthology, ed. by Michael Payne and John Hunter (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 501–27 (p. 523). (64) Pincombe, ‘Robert Dudley, Gorboduc’, p. 19. (65) Jones and White, ‘Gorboduc and Royal Marriage Politics’, p. 4. (66) A ‘Journal’ of Matters of State as Happened from Time to Time […], ed. by Simon Adams, Ian Archer, and G. W. Bernard, in Religion, Politics, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England, ed. by Ian W. Archer et al, Camden Society, 5th ser., 22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2003), pp. 35–136 (pp. 45–51 on Hales’ possible authorship; pp. 38–9 on provenance). (67) BL Add 48023, fol. 359v. A transcription appears in Appendix 3. (68) Jones and White, ‘Gorboduc and Royal Marriage Politics’; James and Walker, ‘The Politics of Gorboduc’; and Walker, The Politics of Performance, pp. 196–221. (69) For a discussion of this point, see James and Walker, ‘The Politics of Gorboduc’, pp. 114–15. (70) Alford, Early Elizabethan Polity, p. 100. (71) See Walker, The Politics of Performance, esp. pp. 51–75.

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Gorboduc in the Political Nation (72) Qtd in Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, p. 20. (73) On the Lincoln’s Inn moot, see the opening of Chapter 7 and the conclusion of ‘Two Marriage Orations by Thomas Pound’ in Chapter 8.

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Marriage Plays at the Inns

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

Marriage Plays at the Inns Negotiating Professional Jurisdiction Jessica Winston

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.003.0009

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines plays produced after Gorboduc at the Inns of Court in the 1560s. Critics have suggested that these plays comment on the succession, but I argue that the post-Gorboduc plays share an unusual plot feature: they are set up to comment on political topics, but by the end, they swerve away from or undercut this narrative potential, dwelling instead on the psychology and social positions of the characters themselves. In this way, the plays suggest that members use dramatic performance to announce the prerogatives of their members and the Inns themselves in the political nation, but in turning away from these topics, the plays negotiate jurisdiction, indicating that political advice is a prerogative that members will not engage. The plays discussed include Thomas Pound’s two marriage masques (1566), Jocasta and Supposes, and Gismond of Salerne. Keywords:   institutional drama, 1560s, Inns of Court, political commentary, Jocasta, Supposes, Thomas Pound, Gismond of Salerne, jurisdiction in literature, marriage plays

Ambition catalyses the succession crisis in Gorboduc. At the end of Act IV, the chorus explains: When greedy lust in royal seat to reign Hath reft all care of gods and eke of men, And cruel heart, wrath, treason and disdain Within the ambitious breast are lodgèd then Behold how Mischief wide herself displays Page 1 of 27

Marriage Plays at the Inns And with the brother’s hand the brother slays.1

Here, ‘lust’ for royal power replaces familial, social, and religious piety with ‘wrath, treason, and distain’. Individual failings facilitate large-scale domestic and civil strife: ‘And with the brother’s hand the brother slays’. The chorus is referring to the play’s younger brother, Porrex, who murdered his elder brother and who, from the first scene, is accused of having ‘ambitious pride’ to rule. Widening the resonance of the chorus’s commentary, the final scene features the wise counsellor Eubulus arguing that ambition is a problem of political organization: the right political institutions in right relation to each other will limit the dangerous potential of ambition. Commenting on Parliament, Eubulus states that the institution alone is not a reliable arbiter of policy since, without a monarch, the ‘state left open’ will ‘fill ambitious minds with gaping hope’ and make it difficult for the collective body to reach a consensus. A ‘mixed polity’, according to Eubulus, keeps personal ambition in check, counter-balancing it with a system of mutually limiting individuals and groups: monarch, Parliament, councillors, and even the Inns themselves. Gorboduc itself was a politically ambitious production: its commentary on the succession, timely. It is striking that the play’s comment on ambition does not appear to include members of the Inns themselves. The vice is associated with lone actors in the royal line and, perhaps, with individual members of Parliament, although only in periods when there is no reigning monarch. It is not an issue in a normal Parliament, or for legal men and ambitious, career-minded gentry such as those men at the Inns. (p.194) Contrast, then, Gorboduc’s depiction of ambition with that appearing in an inns-of-court play of a few years later: Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta, performed during the Christmas to Lent season, 1565–6 or 1566–7. Like the earlier Gorboduc, on which Jocasta is patterned, it melds a classical model (Seneca in the one, Euripides in the other) with a native tradition, with dumb shows between the acts. Both plays deal with fraternal strife over a contested succession (Ferrex and Porrex; Eteocles and Pollynices), and like Gorboduc, Jocasta highlights the problem of ambition among royalty or aristocracy, although it does so with more regularity than does its predecessor. In the opening dumb show, Jocasta presents Sesostres, King of Egypt, who ‘represent[s] unto us ambition’, since he was ‘in his time and reign a mighty conqueror, yet not content to have subdued many princes […] did in like manner cause those kings whom he had so overcome to draw in his Chariot like beasts and oxen’.2 Maxims against ambition appear throughout the play. Consider Jocasta’s advice to Eteocles in Act II: Oh, cast aside that vain ambition That corrosive, that cruel pestilence, That most infects the minds of mortal men: In princely palace and in stately towns Page 2 of 27

Marriage Plays at the Inns It creepeth oft, and close with it conveys To leave behind it damage and decays.3

Still, unlike Gorboduc, Jocasta directly links this theme of ambition to the personal and political aspirations of inns-of-court men. The epilogue, written by Christopher Yelverton, himself an aspiring lawyer, warns: ‘See, ruin grows when most we reach to rise.’4 The statement seems universal, but in the context of a piece written by members of Gray’s Inn for internal production, this ‘we’ refers most immediately to Yelverton and the other members of the Inn performing and watching the show. In a departure from Gorboduc, here in Jocasta the ambition of the men of the Inn is itself an issue. The difference between the plays touches on the larger question of describing the relationship between Gorboduc itself and the inns-of-court plays of the 1560s: the masque ‘Diana/Pallas’ (Gray’s Inn at Whitehall, March 1565), two marriage orations by Thomas Pound (Lincoln’s Inn at two weddings, both 1566), Jocasta and Gascoigne’s single-authored play Supposes (both Gray’s Inn, Christmas revels, 1565–6 or 1566–7), and Gismond of Salerne (Inner Temple at Greenwich, February 1566?). As a group, the plays are generally read as reflecting Gorboduc and the continuing succession crisis. For some, Gorboduc’s political commentary is unique: it is the ‘last’—that is, the only—play of its type,5 but more commonly, the later plays are thought to address the succession with similar degrees of intensity and in (p.195) similar terms: developing the theme that marriage is preferable to chastity, and forming part of a ‘continuous tradition of political criticism in drama’.6 Yet this common line is not the final word, and this chapter reopens this issue: Are the later plays about the succession or not?

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Marriage Plays at the Inns In response to this question, the following discussion extends the line of argument already underway: like Gorboduc, the plays are less about succession itself than about positioning members of the Inns and the legal profession within the political nation, although in distinctive and increasingly tentative ways. We have seen that, in Gorboduc, members of the societies commented on the succession, but they took the opportunity to make a claim for their inclusion in politics, broadly defined as the individuals and groups who could legitimately contribute to discussions of matters of state. The task now is to chart the ways in which, after Gorboduc, members of the Inns used drama in much the same way: dramatic performance allowed them to negotiate the limits of the Inns’, their members’, and the profession’s political jurisdiction and authority. Jocasta’s comments on personal and institutional ambition—that is, rising or reaching beyond one’s immediate and socially acceptable station—in part serve this function. The theme reflects collective concerns about the scope and legitimacy of their personal, institutional, and professional political influence—a point developed below, specifically in connection with Jocasta. Yet the social function of the drama of this decade is primarily less evident in any specific theme than in a persistent plot pattern. Many post-Gorboduc plays are set up to offer commentary on political topics, but by the end, they swerve away from or undercut this narrative potential, dwelling instead on the psychology and social positions of the characters and performers themselves.

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Marriage Plays at the Inns At least in part, this repeated plot pattern reflects the increasing uncertainty about whether and when members of the Inns might participate in the debates surrounding the succession, or indeed politics at all. The succession remained an issue through the decade. At the time of Gorboduc, a prime issue seems to have been the relative claims of specific claimants for Elizabeth’s hand, as well as the potential claims of Lady Catherine Grey to the throne.7 Into the middle of the decade, these and other issues remained; we might list just a few benchmarks. In October 1562, Elizabeth contracted small pox, creating intense anxiety about the future of the crown. In early 1563, Parliament petitioned the Queen to resolve the succession, and towards the end of that year, the MP John Hales circulated a pamphlet arguing in favour of Catherine Grey’s claim to the throne and against Mary Stuart’s, while also rebuking the Queen for her unmarried, single status, a position for which he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower.8 In July 1565, Mary, Queen of Scots, married Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, strengthening her own claim to the throne. Then from September 1566 to January 1567, the Queen and Parliament (p.196) disagreed repeatedly over the succession. On 5 November 1566, Elizabeth rebuked Parliament for its involvement in the settlement of the succession. Members of the Inns directly involved themselves in these debates. In October 1566, students at Lincoln’s Inn held a moot on the succession, finding that Mary could not succeed to the crown. Despite the argument in Elizabeth’s favour, Cecil was forced to intervene and put an end to the criticism of Mary Stuart; William Thornton, a member of the governing body of Lincoln’s Inn, ended up in prison for the moot.9 In January 1567, Edmund Plowden wrote a treatise in support of Mary’s claim to the throne, which he circulated in manuscript but did not publish, perhaps suggesting some caution about how widely his thoughts should be disseminated.10 As the succession became an increasingly pressing issue and Elizabeth became less and less willing to take advice, it seems likely that members of the Inns were ever more unsure of the extent to which they could participate in contemporary conversations about governance, whether in the form of a treatise or even in the fictionalized form of drama.

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Marriage Plays at the Inns Nonetheless, in this climate, it is important to recognize that members did not avoid writing plays that might have contemporary political relevance. Every dramatic work written and produced by members of the Inns in this decade takes marriage or legal authority, or their combination, as a topic. Several deliberately play with stories and mythological figures, such as Diana and Juno, that figured in contemporary literature concerning succession or legal power. At the same time, the plays are different from Gorboduc in the extent to which they maintain an extended focus on politics. From beginning to end, Gorboduc prompts its audience to ponder these issues. The play opens with Queen Videna and Ferrex’s conversation about succession, and Eubulus, in one of the final lines, still dwells on it: ‘Yet must God in fine restore | This noble crown unto the lawful heir’.11 The later plays, instead, have plots that first position members to assert their political and legal authority but then retreat from doing so. In this way, the plays suggest that members of the Inns use dramatic performance to announce the prerogatives of their members and the Inns themselves in the political nation, but in turning away from these topics by the end of the drama, the plays also indicate that this is a prerogative they will not engage. It must be understood that drama is a form of institutional expression, and in this sense it reflects the collective habitus—the attitudes, values, ideals, and concerns—of members of the Inns collectively.12 It is true that the plays were written and performed by individuals, and they were often clearly shaped by the interests of individual authors. Even so, the plays were also communal productions, usually written collaboratively for performance by members of the Inns at the Inns themselves or elsewhere. Members of the societies funded the productions. The dramas were thus, to repeat an idea from Chapter 7, events where members presented themselves to themselves and to those in power. The plays develop and (p.197) reinforce an internal sense of institutional interests, values, and tastes, and they help to advertise these dispositions to others.

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Marriage Plays at the Inns In developing these points, this chapter builds on Bradin Cormack’s work on jurisdiction and early modern literature, especially an article that links jurisdiction specifically to inns-of-court entertainments. Focusing on the Gray’s Inn revels of 1594, Cormack argues that such events at the Inns ‘are themselves imaginable […] as a jurisdictional exercise, a cultural practice for articulating the nature of the Inns’ authority as self-regulating professional associations’.13 For Cormack, these later Elizabethan revels were ‘less a direct rehearsal of the political authority a young lawyer might aspire to than an oblique performance of the twinned and twinning jurisdictional order subtending legal authority generally’.14 By ‘twinned and twinning’, Cormack refers to the twins of the Comedy of Errors, which was performed in the 1594 revels at Gray’s Inn, but his point is that ‘jurisdiction’, here meaning authority generally, always implies an excluded other that defines and challenges the limit and nature of that authority. Cormack rightly views the 1594 exercises as a ‘jurisdictional exercise’; however, three decades earlier, performances such as Gorboduc, Jocasta, and Gismond of Salerne were also ‘direct rehearsals’ of the nature and extent of the Inns’ and the legal profession’s jurisdiction, a practice or trial carried out by inns-of-court men on stage and against the backdrop of the Elizabethan succession question. The following develops these points through a survey of individual plays produced and performed by members of the Inns after Gorboduc in the 1560s, demonstrating how each one engages with issues of succession, announcing the authority of members of the Inns to comment on them and preserving this authority by not using it. The precise dating of most of these plays is not known and so, while a chronological overview might make intuitive sense, the movement of the chapter follows a different logic. I begin with the play that comments most directly on the succession, ‘Diana/Pallas’. I next move to Thomas Pound’s two marriage orations, two performances that—like ‘Diana/Pallas’— invoke the mythology of Diana in the context of an argument about marriage. These orations vividly establish the plot pattern present in the other works discussed. Then let us analyse with an associative logic, linking texts based on tone, author, and then genre, while emphasizing each work’s engagement with, and then retreat from, political engagement.

‘Diana/Pallas’ After Gorboduc, the next recorded dramatic performance by members of the Inns happened some four years later. In March 1565, Gray’s Inn put on a masque, ‘Diana/Pallas’, for the Queen at Whitehall. The masque presented a debate between Juno and Diana about the merits of marriage and chastity, which is decided by (p.198) Jupiter in favour of Juno, who represents marriage. The text has not survived, but the Spanish Ambassador De Silva describes it in a letter to the king of Spain:

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Marriage Plays at the Inns All was prepared for the representation of a comedy in English, of which I understood just as much as the Queen told me. The plot was founded on the question of marriage, discussed between Juno and Diana, Juno advocating marriage and Diana chastity. Jupiter gave the verdict in favour of matrimony after many things had passed on both sides in defence of the respective arguments. The Queen turned to me and said, ‘This is all against me.’15 Caution must be taken here not to read too much into the masque. De Silva himself observes that he only understood ‘just as much as the Queen told me’. Nevertheless, members of the Inns seem to follow Gorboduc, offering a masque that speaks directly to the Queen about marriage: the Queen appears in this account to be willing to listen to this advice, even remarking (one imagines with some matter-of-fact amusement from De Silva’s description) that the play was ‘all against her’. Whatever Elizabeth’s general attitude towards political drama, she seemed open to allowing it in her own home. Moreover, the play was acceptable enough to have lavish costumes and sets supplied by the Queen’s Office of the Revels, including ‘towns and chariots for the goddesses, and diverse devices as the heavens and clouds’.16 Gorboduc, however, pushed the boundaries of the political nation when, at the Inns, both it and ‘Diana/Pallas’ were tolerable, if not welcomed, when performed within the established forms of aristocratic household drama and inside the boundaries of the political nation itself.17 From the minimal records of this performance, it also seems that members of the Inns felt that they still had the authority, at least in drama, to comment on succession. Within the year, however, this possibility seems to have dimmed.

Two Marriage Orations by Thomas Pound

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Marriage Plays at the Inns In 1566, members of Lincoln’s Inn performed in two orations by Thomas Pound. In February of that year, they performed at the wedding of the Earl of Southampton to the daughter of Lord Montague. Later that year, they performed again at the wedding of Frances Radcliffe and Thomas Mildmay. Each oration consisted of a lengthy speech presenting the men of Lincoln’s Inn to the wedding party, explaining their presence, and offering gifts. Both argue that marriage is better than chastity and explicitly invoke Diana and Juno, the goddesses of chastity and marriage, also alluded to in the 1565 masque. As Elizabeth’s comment suggests, these mythological figures were already associated with the succession issue, and so invoking them (p.199) in these orations implicitly raised it again. Setting the two orations in the context of the succession crisis, Susan Doran argues that with Elizabeth’s lack of husband such a constant topic of concern, the two Lincoln’s Inn marriage orations could not but touch on politics.18 Both masques, however, while raising the possibility of commentary, instead turn members of Lincoln’s Inn into objects of humour, depicting them as chaste men who themselves need to get married. While marriage arises in both cases, the masques bring it up only to turn away from royal politics by focusing on and making comedic the unmarried status of the actors themselves. The ‘Montague Oration’ begins by situating the performers vis-à-vis their institutional affiliation: And what we are and whence we come if so I shall begin then let it please you t’understand we are of Lincoln’s Inn.19

The orator then characterizes the men, explaining that they are single and spend their time dressed in white and worshipping the goddess of chastity, Diana: And in our country this is true, we gentlemen do use, Almost for religious point, which no man may refuse, That while we lead this single life, Diana we adore As goddess of our chastities to worship her therefore. So make we her our patroness, each man to be her knight, And therefore thus we clad ourselves like virgins all in white.20

Reversing the usual association of Diana with women’s chastity, the orator plays up the men’s seemingly religious devotion to Diana. At the same time, the lines subtly suggest that the men—dressing themselves ‘like virgins all in white’—may not be as chaste as they seem. As the orator continues, he explains that the men do hope to take wives. Addressing Southampton himself, he qualifies: Your honours thus must understand that though as I did say, We serve Diana all our youths, until our wedding day, Yet do we not so dedicate ourselves to single life, But that each man doth hope at last to speed of some good wife.21 Page 9 of 27

Marriage Plays at the Inns Having established that each man hopes to marry, Pound can further assert that the men also make daily prayers to the god of marriage: And therefore daily thus we use for fortune good that way unto the god of marriage some orisons to say.22

(p.200) Through the rest of the masque, the audience learns how the men came to hear of the wedding and offers gifts to the couple. At the conclusion, the orator describes the men who in honour of this day visit such a virgin’s feast in virgin-like array.23

The masque relies on a whimsical, exaggerated reversal of the association between Diana and female chastity, humorously depicting the men who worship daily at Hymen’s altar in hopes of getting married, and who, in a phrase that again implies that Diana’s servants are not as chaste as they seem, take care to visit ‘a virgin’s feast in virgin-like array’. It is true that the subject of the oration —chastity and marriage—had contemporary political relevance, as did the mythological figures invoked in the production. Instead of exploiting this political potential, however, the performance neutralizes it through the humour of its extended conceit. The second of the two orations by Pound was presented by the men of Lincoln’s Inn at the Radcliffe-Mildmay wedding later that year. Queen Elizabeth was present. The ‘Sussex Oration’ also neutralizes its potential political application by turning the author and orator, Pound himself, into an object of ridicule. As in the ‘Montague Oration’, Pound begins the ‘Sussex Oration’ by locating the performers institutionally: Listen ye lords and ladies all, for now, lo, I begin, But know ye first from whence we come, most part from Lincoln’s Inn, Where unto me the[re] chanced of late a thing most strange to hear, And to your Honours what it was in few it shall appear.24

The remainder of the oration involves a dream vision in which Pound is visited by four goddesses—Pallas, Diana, Venus, and Juno—and ordered to take gifts to the wedding. Pallas makes it clear that she and the other goddesses chose Pound for one reason: he makes a good messenger. Probably expressly recalling Heywood’s ‘Preface’ to Thyestes, that dream vision describing the Inns as a place swarming with ‘Minerva’s men’, here Pallas observes that Pound is ‘the worst of all Minerva’s men’ but nevertheless will serve to deliver the gifts of the goddesses to the wedding feast: Page 10 of 27

Marriage Plays at the Inns ‘You, you’, quoth she, ‘why blush you so, faith servant none but you Must have this credit at our hands, you shall have help enough, Although you be one of ye worst of all Minerva’s men, And find yourself sometime to seek in practice of the pen, Yet we may now enable you with gifts of better grace, When you shall be our Mercury to go in such a place, If Pallas can instruct thy muse, our message well to do.25

(p.201) Pound accepts his charge, and each goddess steps forward to give him a message to bear to the wedding. When Venus gives Pound her message, she offers him first a smile, described as a ‘secret favour’ that she reserves for ‘bachelors sometime’.26 The smile, which Pound says has ‘force enough | to conquer mighty men’, prompts a blazon of the beauty of Venus spanning nearly 100 lines.27 When Venus then gives Pound an apple, her own prize for beauty, she tells him to give the apple to the bride, Radcliffe. Pound then turns outward to the audience, admitting that there might be a fairer lady in the hall: the Queen. Addressing Radcliffe directly, he acknowledges that while Elizabeth may be lovely as well, he must act as though she were not present: Me thinks a golden present should mislike you nere a whit. Mislike you? No it cannot sure, except for it be this: That you do think I flatter you for that I do amiss: To it you while all men see a fairer now in place, But as for that, I will appeal, for pardon to her grace. I must suppose she is not here, as thoughts, we say, be free, And then I do her Grace no wrong, no fault there is in me. I do but my commission, which I may not transgress.28

Having acknowledged the potential awkwardness of Venus’s gift, Pound returns to his self-deprecating humour, depicting himself as dogsbody to the gods. And essentially he is indeed subject to them—not just their command and whims but also their values and tone. In the next part of the story, Juno—the goddess of marriage, also characterized by anger—speaks to Pound, who hides his face from her angry gaze. Addressing him pejoratively as ‘you bachelor’, Juno demands that he look at her, and takes this opportunity to chastise him mildly for being single and to give him marital advice: ‘Fie, fie,’ saith she, ‘you bachelor, lift up your quicker eye. The goddesses be all your friends, you honour us, pardie!’ ‘And how long linger you,’ quoth she, ‘in this same single life?’ ‘A time there is when to be free, and time to take a wife. Sell not thy liberty for nought, yet if good fortune fall, A faithful fere above all friends is sweetest to live withal.’29

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Marriage Plays at the Inns After advising Pound about his ‘single life’, Juno offers some praise for wedlock before the oration moves to a close. Pound presents more gifts to the bride and groom and finally, as though remembering that he is not alone, he presents the men from Lincoln’s Inn, whom he describes as ‘Pallas’s knights’.30 Like the earlier marriage oration, this one argues that marriage is preferable to chastity. And, like the other one, it neutralizes the political resonance of the argument (p.202) by focusing on Pound’s status as a mediocre writer and a single man, presenting him as a somewhat excitable and anxious bachelor reprimanded and directed by a series of powerful women. It is telling that when Pound does acknowledge the most powerful woman in the room, the Queen, it is in reference to the potential offence that she might take at not being recognized as the most beautiful woman present and the recipient of the apple from Venus. He does not connect her with arguments about chastity and marriage. Indeed, Pound appears to be the only person in the room whose single life is a problem. Using the same set of mythological references made in the ‘Diana/Pallas’ masque of the previous year, Pound’s oration ends in a very different place. Why did members of Lincoln’s Inn back away from the opportunity to engage in the debate about the succession and the Queen’s marriage? One possibility is decorum—the orations were written for weddings, not for an internal celebration at the Inns or at Court, and it may well have seemed inappropriate to turn a marriage into a political affair. There might, however, have been external factors, including the fact that throughout the year 1566, Elizabeth became increasingly resistant to advice on the matter. Moreover, as mentioned above, 1566 was the year that Lincoln’s Inn held a moot on the subject of the succession, in which members of the Inn decided against Mary Stuart’s claim to the throne. The debate created some problems for the Inn, and Cecil had to intervene to put an end to the criticism of Mary Stuart. In addition, William Thornton, a member of the governing body of the Inn, ended up in prison for the moot.31 It is possible that members of the Inn avoided the subject of the succession because they feared that any intervention at this point would create difficulties that it was best to avoid. It nonetheless remains intriguing that they chose a subject that would resonate with the marriage debates. That choice implies a sort of defiance, suggesting that not addressing the succession is a freely made choice, one that preserves independence and freedom even as it carefully creates a situation where this freedom is not tested.

Gascoigne’s Supposes

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Marriage Plays at the Inns Translated by George Gascoigne from Ariosto’s I Suppositi, Supposes was performed at Gray’s Inn, during the Christmas to Lent revels of either 1565–6 or 1566–7. Like the ‘Bianca’ subplot of Taming of the Shrew, which it influenced, Supposes tells the story of a student, Erostrato, and his servant, Dulypo, who exchange identities so that Erostrato can infiltrate the house of Damon and be near his beloved, Polynesta, the master’s daughter. The basic plot device of Supposes also influences A Comedy of Errors, since (as in Comedy) various characters suppose others to be what they actually are not. Gascoigne explains his prologue to the play, ‘for you shall see the master supposed for the servant, the servant for the master: the freeman for a slave, and the bond slave for a freeman: the stranger for a well-known (p.203) friend, and the familiar for a stranger’.32 The seemingly apolitical plot of this comedy seems initially to have little in common with the more obvious political investments of Gorboduc and ‘Diana/Pallas’, or even with the deliberate obfuscation of politics in Pound’s orations. Yet the play’s rewriting of classical comedy (via an Italian example) may have been inspired by the recent publication of Sackville and Norton’s Gorboduc in September 1565. Whether written before or after Pound’s orations, the play also brushes up against a contemporary political and legal issue—the quality and legal integrity of the magistracy. However, it abandons this plot to become an appealing fantasy about youthful delinquency in the face of the growing expectation for academic and adult responsibility. First, the play appears, like Pound’s orations, to raise and then leave aside a more potent political and legal topic—in this case, the quality of the English magistracy. In Gillian Austen’s words, the play ‘satirizes law, lawyers and the legal profession’.33 This theme has been highlighted in Lorna Hutson’s work on Supposes in the context of neoclassical comedy at the early Elizabethan Inns of Court.34 Hutson argues that Roman comedic plots, on which Supposes is based, strategically deploy legal-forensic methods of inquiry, especially the sifting of material evidence and testimony to determine what has happened. In Hutson’s view, the plots of Roman New Comedy depict ‘near-crimes and legal scams as triumphantly successful, thus seeming to endorse a view of judicial procedure as purely strategic, without moral authority or divine sanction’.35 Built into the decision to adapt Roman comedy is thus an implicit interest in the process of forensic inquiry. Yet among the legal men of the period there was ‘profound ambivalence’ towards the ‘perceived subversions of civic order inherent in the imitation of Italian models of Roman New Comedy’.36

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Marriage Plays at the Inns Gascoigne’s play Supposes, in particular, queries whether magistrates are reliable arbiters of civic order. Thus, Hutson observes, when Philogano, the father of Erostrato, enters Ferrara, he discovers that his identity has been usurped by a stranger and that the servant Dulypo is impersonating his son, whom he imagines to be murdered. He desperately seeks justice, asking, ‘Oh, eternal god, is there no judge, no officer, no higher powers whom I may complain unto for redress of these wrongs?’ In response, one Farrarese claims Ferrara as a civic ideal: ‘Yes sir, we have potestates, we have judges, and above all, we have a most just prince, doubt you not, but you shall have justice if your cause be just’. Yet another character points out that it is doubtful that Philogano will be able to resolve his case, given that his cause will need more than justice: ‘Sir, he that will go to the law must be sure of four things: first, a right and a just cause; then a righteous advocate to plead; next, favour coram iudice, and above all, a good purse to procure it.’37 The forensic plot, in combination with this dialogue, thus announces the play’s concern with judicial (p.204) procedure. The concern is present as well in the only figure of law, Cleander, a doctor of law called ‘Mumpsimus’ (i.e. an obstinate traditionalist) and ‘doctor dotipole’ (i.e. a blockhead), whose worldly success comes from ‘reading, counselling, and pleading’.38 As Hutson tells it, in its treatment of law, Supposes taps into a larger concern in the period about the quality of the English magistracy. As we also saw in Chapter 2, in this period there was some worry about the training and calibre of magistrates, justices of the peace, and other legal men, especially from Lord Keeper Bacon. In their writings, therefore, members of the Inns, such as William Bavand in works such as the Good Ordering of a Commonweal, played up and responded to this concern while also establishing their own seriousness, decorum, and skill. In part these manoeuvres would seem to underscore their ability to do the work of magistrates in the way that men such as Bacon desired.39 By contrast, here in Supposes, instead of making a claim for the quality of the magistracy, the play adopts Bacon’s point of view as we see in the comment about the need for money to bribe justices, and in the character of Cleander, made rich through his blockheaded engagement with the law.

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Marriage Plays at the Inns In advancing this argument, Hutson connects Supposes to other comedies written by members of the Inns in the 1560s and 1570s. What happens if we instead align the play with other inns-of-court productions of the decade? This shift helps to make visible the characteristic plot trajectory this play shares with the others, a similarity that cuts across author, Inn, and even dramatic genre. Like Pound’s two orations, Supposes does not follow through on or respond to the political and social issue it raises. As much as the play questions the integrity of legal procedures and persons, it does not offer a model for a resolution, for instance by demonstrating the authority, infallibility, or uprightness in the law, perhaps by showing a magistrate failing to perform or dutifully performing his duty. The play also does not demonstrate the law’s immorality and fallibility—by having a corrupt magistrate decide the situation for the worse, for example. Instead, as Hutson points out, after Philogano’s lament, Supposes quickly comes to a close through a different, nonlegal mechanism: a series of recognitions that do not involve legal procedures or legal men. Once again, the play queries a contemporary legal issue but abandons that line of enquiry instead of pursuing it to the end. As the play leaves behind questions of legal procedure and magistracy, it raises a theme more directly relevant to the social positions of individual members of the Inns themselves: concerns, discussed in Chapter 3, about the relationship between professional obligations and romance. Here, as in the lyric poetry and Gascoigne’s later play, the Glass of Government, the pursuit of one seems to require the rejection of the other, and following love necessitates some sort of punishment. Like the bad boys of Gascoigne’s Glass, Erostrato is reprimanded for his delinquency: he is thrown into prison for having an illicit affair with Polynesta. Yet unlike the punishments in Gascoigne’s Glass, Erostrato’s penalty does not last long. By the end of (p.205) the play, Erostrato is forgiven and officially engaged to his beloved. In the end, while the play flirts with an existential crisis in law and in legal identity, no one is hurt and no one really punished. The play offers a fantasy of professional, scholarly, perhaps even legalmagisterial delinquency, one in which a young man could reject his duty, embrace romance, and—while suffering only minor discipline—remain respectable in the end. Here again, as in Pound’s orations, the play develops in relation to a contemporary political issue but then turns its attention to a more immediate and personal concern of the performers and audience—a certain desire for delinquency in the midst of a communal and legal-professional expectation for growing academic seriousness and adult responsibility.

Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta

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Marriage Plays at the Inns During the same Christmas revels at which Supposes was performed, the men of Gray’s Inn likely also put on Jocasta. Although it is neither oration nor Roman New Comedy, it has a plot pattern similar to these other works. Jocasta is based on the Oedipus myth and translated by Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh from Lodovico Dolce’s Giocasta, itself an expansive translation of Euripides’ Phoenissae (‘Phoenician Women’). Criticism on Jocasta tends to focus on issues in genre, translation, and later influence.40 Yet the play also refracts issues in contemporary politics, if in an angular way. As we have seen, Jocasta has much in common with Sackville and Norton’s Gorboduc, which was published shortly before Jocasta appeared. Building on Seneca’s Oedipus, Jocasta uses a story about the fall of princes to offer moral commentary on fortune, tyranny, and ambition. Yet unlike Gorboduc and Oedipus, the play emphasizes a different sort of character, the queen figure, who with potent political authority attempts to manage a succession crisis. In this way, as Allyna Ward has shown, Jocasta implies there is a positive role for women in managing the political nation, an argument with obvious relevance to Elizabeth.41 By the end of the play, however, the plot swerves away from the queen character and even from succession as an issue, shifting to focus on the psychological turmoil of the former king, Oedipus himself.42 (p.206) Early parts of the play focus on Queen Jocasta as the one figure capable of dealing with the Theban succession crisis. Indeed, as Ward shows, Jocasta’s capacity for political discussion exceeds that of her sons, Eteocles and Pollynices; that she is a queen and not the absolute ruler may make possible her remarkable understanding of ‘resistance and rebellion and tyranny’.43 As the play begins, Jocasta describes the perilous situation in Thebes, the basic outlines of Oedipus’s life and curse, and the current threat: a power struggle between her sons, who could take annual turns on the throne but instead each want sole rule. In Act II, Jocasta attempts to resolve the crisis, urging Pollynices to return to Thebes to live, while Eteocles continues to rule. Pollynices, however, refuses to relent, and chooses instead to attack the city with the force of a foreign ally. The men in the play show no ability to compromise, whereas the women emerge the more natural rulers, satisfying even ‘theoretical rules for governing’.44 In the midst of a succession crisis, the women, the ‘consort’ queen and Antigone, represent the voices of political moderation and wisdom. Ward argues that this emphasis reflects a change in gender and political discourse at the time, showing the increased acceptability of the idea that women have a place in political debate; the dramatic writers of the time recognized the intelligence women could bring to rule. In this reading, Jocasta is a symbol for Queen Elizabeth herself, and in paying attention to Jocasta’s role, this reading also privileges the voice of the Queen, suggesting that Queen Elizabeth is herself the best arbiter of policy in politically conflicted times. Jocasta, in this view, offers flattering political commentary on a female monarch’s role in resolving contemporary political issues, including the succession. Page 16 of 27

Marriage Plays at the Inns Ward’s argument is compelling; nevertheless, the play’s emphasis on the Queen does not last. As with the works already discussed, this play is set up in a way to suggest it will offer topical political commentary, and flattering commentary at that, but it does not follow through on this initial potential. Instead, it shifts the focus of the end of the play away from the women to the former king, Oedipus, and his struggle to maintain a personal identity once his political role has been stripped from him. By the end of the play, we have witnessed the outbreak of civil war between Eteocles and Pollynices, the death of Jocasta, and the banishment of Oedipus. The final exit of Oedipus is indicative of the neglect of politics. In the most recent Elizabethan version of the Oedipus story, Alexander Neville’s translation of Seneca’s Oedipus (discussed in Chapter 6), one’s attention remains focused on the state throughout. In the final lines of that play, Oedipus himself hopes that his exile will end the plague on Thebes and restore health to the state: ‘A better state | of air shall straight ensue’.45 Jocasta shifts attention to the king’s sense of self. At first, Oedipus asserts his selfhood, saying that banishment will not affect him: Let fortune take from me these worldly gifts, She cannot conquer this courageous heart, (p.207) That never yet could well be overcome, To force me yield for fear to villainy: Do what thou canst I will be Oedipus.46

Regardless of fortune, Oedipus insists that he will remain himself. Only moments later, he acknowledges that he is a shadow of his former self, empty of substance: O careful caitiff, how am I now changed From that I was? I am that Oedipus, That whilom had triumphant victory, And was both dread and honoured eke in Thebes: But now (so pleaseth you my froward stars) Down headlong hurled in depth of misery, So that remains of Oedipus no more As now in me, but even the naked name, And lo, this image, that resembles more Shadows of death than shape of Oedipus.47

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Marriage Plays at the Inns In a single speech, the king shifts from the contention that ‘I am […] Oedipus’ to the comment that he is the mere ‘shape of Oedipus’. The play ends with Oedipus resigned to ‘[t]he fate that heavens have erst to him assigned’.48 In its conclusion, Jocasta shifts the narrative away from the disputed succession and women’s rule to the more personal tragedy of Oedipus. Like the orations by Thomas Pound and Supposes, which raise the possibility of political relevance only to abandon it, Jocasta also turns away from the potential it has early in the play to address succession in order to end in another place. As the play closes, it again parallels the pattern of the Pound orations and Supposes, turning to consider the actions and social positions of the authors and performers themselves. In the concluding chorus and epilogue, Oedipus becomes an example of the dangers of involving oneself in the political life of the state. At first, the final chorus recoups some of the potential political relevance of the play, explicitly stating that the tale is a mirror for magistrates. The chorus orders: ‘Example here, lo, take by Oedipus, | You kings and princes in prosperity’.49 Yet the chorus quickly pushes this moral outward to suggest that the tale is relevant beyond ‘kings and princes’ to anyone who wishes to be involved in the political life of the state. The chorus continues, ‘And everyone that is desirous | To sway the seat of worldly dignity’ should take the king as a mirror as well.50 This mirror warns against involvement in politics, showing that political life makes one lose a sense of self. Christopher Yelverton, an aspiring lawyer and another member of Gray’s Inn, returns to and reinforces this moral in his epilogue. The existence of the epilogue itself is significant, since it may be the first extant example in English of one not (p.208) penned by a work’s author.51 Referring back to the play, Yelverton highlights the dangers of ambition: Lo here the fruit of aspiring mind, Who weens to mount above the moving skies: Lo here the trap that titles proud do find, See, ruin grows when most we reach to rise.52

Concluding that a humble life is more desirable, the epilogue advises the audience: Cease to aspire then, cease to soar so high, And shun the plague that pierceth noble breast: To glittering courts what fondness is to flee, When better state in baser towers rests?53

The closing speech thus continues to move the narrative away from the disputed throne of Thebes, or from Jocasta and her diplomatic powers, offering instead some cautionary advice about the dangers of political life and the consequences of ambition for members of the Inns themselves. Page 18 of 27

Marriage Plays at the Inns In the end, Jocasta reverses the trajectory of Gorboduc, which capitalized on the occasion of the Christmas revels to offer a tale relevant to the political life of the state. Jocasta seems to use the disputed succession, a politically inflected form, and the general interest of the members of the Inns in the political nation as only a starting point. It then retreats from this topic over the course of the narrative, moving towards a tale that is more generally about the nature of rule and finally to a conclusion about the way that involvement in governance affects one’s sense of self. Where Gorboduc turns a local event into a national one, Jocasta collapses a national crisis into a personal one. In many ways, the end of the play speaks more to the potential ambition of members of Gray’s Inn than to kings and magistrates, offering a space for those members to work through their own ambitious interests in political life as well as their use of their prerogative to comment on politics. Jocasta reflects concerns about the significant personal dangers involved in becoming part of the political nation.

Gismond of Salerne Compiled by Christopher Hatton, Robert Wilmot, Henry Noel, and at least two other members of the Inner Temple, Gismond of Salerne was performed for the Queen by members of the Inner Temple during a Christmas celebration, most likely in 1566. Like Gorboduc and Jocasta, the play is influenced by Senecan tragedy, although the story itself derives from Boccaccio’s Decameron. Even more than (p.209) Jocasta, Gismond of Salerne moves away from its potential to offer topical commentary on the succession. The bizarre plot concerns King Tancred and his widowed daughter, Gismond. The king, motivated by an incestuous desire for his daughter, prohibits her from getting remarried to an earl, Guishard, who is otherwise worthy of her hand. She has an affair with Guishard, which the king discovers when, having hidden himself in Gismond’s bedroom, he witnesses the two together. At the end of the play, Tancred orders the murder of the earl. Gismond commits suicide, asking with her dying breath to be buried with her lover. The king agrees, and then plans to kill himself within the tomb of the lovers so that he might lie with Gismond forever.54 Marie Axton has argued that the play deals with the events surrounding Lady Catherine Grey, sister of Lady Jane Grey and another claimant to the throne. Without Elizabeth’s knowledge, Lady Catherine married Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, and bore him two children. The pregnancy made the liaison difficult to hide from Elizabeth, who had the couple imprisoned and their marriage declared invalid. In this reading, Gismond is a figure for Lady Catherine, who died in January 1568, while Elizabeth is a Tancred-figure, attempting unreasonably to control the sexuality of a marriageable young woman.55 Some of the prefatory material that appeared with the play when it was printed in 1591/92 reminds the reader of this original political context, in particular an epistle from William Webb, written from Pyrgo, the estate where Catherine was held in 1563–4.56

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Marriage Plays at the Inns As Curtis Perry has argued persuasively, the play may be less about the specific, topical politics of succession than the broader constitutional questions raised by Elizabeth’s absolutist tendencies.57 The play offers a criticism of autocracy in the figure of Tancred, a king who—in his unruly passions for his daughter— becomes a type of effeminate tyrant (effeminate, that is, because in the early modern world uncontrolled emotion was associated with women). The play’s criticism of tyranny is enhanced by stylistic and other allusions to Senecan drama. In particular, at the beginning of Act IV, the play invokes the fury Megaera, who aims to hurl a ‘stinging snake’ into Tancred’s heart. Megaera also appears at the beginning of Seneca’s Thyestes, forcing Tantalus to bring down his grandchildren, Atreus and Thyestes himself. As Perry further observes, the interior space where Tancred has Guishard murdered is a ‘strong turret, compact of stone and rock | hugie without, but horrible within’,58 recalling the secret grove in Act IV of Seneca’s Thyestes where Atreus murders his nephews, preparing to serve them at a banquet for Thyestes. In this way, Perry continues, Seneca serves as ‘an invaluable literary model for the representation of political imbalance and social degeneration’. The play invokes a (p.210) Senecan precursor to criticize Elizabeth’s absolutist tendencies and her increasing insistence on her prerogative to manage the succession crisis. Here again, however, it is important to note that as much as the plot of the play offers up a criticism of the uncontrolled power, it swerves away or undercuts specific, topical criticism. One striking aspect of the play, especially again in comparison to Gorboduc, is its isolation of castle from commonweal. Unlike Gorboduc, which begins in the private chamber of Queen Videna and moves to the open field of battle, this play begins outside of the court, where Cupid describes his plan to destroy Gismond. The action then moves inside the court itself, and to its increasingly intimate, secret, and isolated interiors. There is little sense for most of Gismond that the actions of the characters are linked to the nation in any way. Whereas in Gorboduc characters consistently appeal to a notion of what is good for the state (even if only to justify private whims), the characters of Gismond rarely appeal to the commonwealth or the state to justify their actions, acting instead from personal preferences and desires: Tancred argues that Gismond should not remarry because he enjoys her presence; Gismond and Guishard have an affair because they love each other, and not—as one relevant, contemporary argument might go—because it would be useful to produce an heir to the crown; Tancred murders Guishard because he is jealous, and not—as another relevant, contemporary argument might go—because a union between Gismond and Guishard would be detrimental to the state.

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Marriage Plays at the Inns Moreover, Gismond indicates only minimally that such self-involvement has any impact on the state itself, or the people in it. In Gorboduc, the actions of the royal family cause the commons to rise up and to murder the royal family. In contrast, in Gismond, there is only one moment when one gets a sense of outside censure. A messenger, having just participated in the murder of the earl, and bearing the earl’s heart in a cup, indicts the king:                                                      Is this Salerne I see? What? Doth King Tancred govern here, and guide? Is this the place where civil people be? Or do the savage Scythians here abide?59

Because the messenger asks these questions directly of the audience, Marie Axton observes, this moment ‘presses beyond the world of the play asking the audience to examine their state, pushing the audience towards the conclusion that “the king’s to blame”’.60 Yet Gismond does not dwell on the monarch’s lapse in responsibility for long. Even at the end of the drama, with Guishard and Gismond dead and the king about to kill himself, nothing emerges about the problems that such deaths might bring to the realm. Instead, the play emphasizes the king’s desires. Referring to Gismond’s request to be buried with the earl, the king vows to kill himself by burying himself alive in the tomb: And when these eyes some aged tears have shed, The tomb myself then will I creep into, (p.211) And with my blood all bain [i.e. wash] their bodies dead. This heart there will I pierce, and rive this breast The irksome life, and wreak my wrathful ire Upon myself. She shall have her request: And I by death will purchase my desire.61

Stressing the king’s desires carries us away from the commonwealth, away from the court, and into a strange triple tomb. Gismond of Salerne thus parallels the move of Jocasta, shifting away from the tragedy of state to the psychological turmoil of the king. With the exception of very few speeches, one of which is pinpointed by Axton, the play leaves little room for the trenchant political criticism of Gorboduc, or even for the commentary on the estate of kings and queens in Oedipus and the earlier parts of Jocasta. Tellingly, there is not a single moment in the play when the audience is asked to see any of the characters as a mirror. When the authors do hang commentary onto the plot, the moral lessons concern chastity and virtuous romance, rather than—as we saw in the Mirror for Magistrates, the Senecan translations, and Gorboduc—the relationship between monarchs, magistrates, and the state. Thus we learn from the chorus that ‘the end of wicked love is blood’, and that Guishard should have served Gismond chastely, as Petrarch did Laura.62 Page 21 of 27

Marriage Plays at the Inns Once again, members of the Inns of Court create a plot with possible political resonance but retreat from playing up this opportunity, however ripe. Indeed, at the end of Gismond, they make the work into a celebration of the virtue of the women in the English court. In the epilogue, they turn out to the audience, stating that ladies there should not fear such terrible events in England, since the fates have not and would not wreak such havoc on a land where the women are so virtuous: ‘Therefore ye may | be free from fear’.63 Rather than urge reform, this play lauds the virtue of the ladies of the English court. Though it is capable of offering criticism or admonition, Gismond celebrates its audience in moral, but not political, terms.64 As Gismond and the other dramatic texts surveyed in this chapter indicate, the most significant characteristic of the post-Gorboduc inns-of-court dramas is their withdrawal from sustained political engagement. In play after play, members of the Inns either neglect or undercut plots that could lead to explicit political commentary. As much as individual members of the Inns appear to have wanted to be a part of the political life of the state, and to participate in discussions about the governance of the realm, the drama that the members collectively produced points to some concern about the possibility for (and potential repercussions of) such political (p.212) engagement. While members of the Inner Temple sought to authorize political commentary in Gorboduc, the societies pulled away from such commentary elsewhere, and even seem to have warned each other against the dangers of such involvement in plays like Jocasta. At least initially, this sort of retreat may seem surprising if we think of the Inns in this period as filled with a generation of men who, as individuals and as a group, were moving to join the political nation and to obtain offices that would allow them to serve the state. One would expect that they might take the opportunities offered by dramatic production to advise those in power and, hence, to illustrate the concern for the commonwealth that would be a prerequisite for any position.

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Marriage Plays at the Inns Their reticence makes more sense if we consider the relationship between such individual desires and their institutional effects. While members of the Inns were personally interested in the governance of the realm, the coalescence of a network with such collective interests helped to form a group whose political consciousness and awareness had the power to threaten the authority of the very institutions of the political nation that its individual members sought to join. Perhaps as members of the Inns began to sense the possibilities of their community, they responded in different ways. At least once, in Gorboduc, they capitalized on the credentials provided by their legal training, using their institutional background and relevant literary forms to authorize their political advice. Later, they turned away from an appeal to their political and legal backgrounds and avoided commentary on matters of state. Each time members of the Inns came together and acted as a collective, both for themselves and before those in power, they were forced to consider their relationship to the political nation they sought to join and to work through the prerogatives, boundaries, limits, and significance of the political community that they and their literary play had, perhaps only half-knowingly, helped to form. Notes:

(1) Gorboduc, 4.2.267–72. (2) Jocasta, ‘The Order of the Dumb Shows’, ll. 10–15. (3) Jocasta, 2.1.401–2; 405–6. (4) Jocasta, Epilogue, l. 5. (5) David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics, p. 143; Norman Sanders, Richard Southern, T. W. Craik, and Lois Potter, Revels History of Drama in English, 1500– 1576 (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 22. (6) Susan Doran, ‘Juno versus Diana’, p. 257; 264. The quote is from Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, p. 1. (7) See ‘The Occasional Politics of Gorboduc’ in Chapter 7. (8) On John Hales, see Ben Lowe, ‘John Hales (1516?–72)’, ODNB [27 January 2014] and Victoria De La Torre, ‘“We Few of an Infinite Multitude”: John Hales, Parliament, and the Gendered Politics of the Early Elizabethan Succession’, Albion, 33 (2001), 557–82. (9) See the opening of Chapter 7 (n. 10). (10) Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, pp. 18–19. (11) Gorboduc, 5.2.276–77.

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Marriage Plays at the Inns (12) On ‘habitus’, see ‘Corporate Culture’ in Chapter 1. (13) Cormack, A Power to do Justice, and especially his ‘Locating The Comedy of Errors: Revels Jurisdiction at the Inns of Court’, in Intellectual, pp. 264–85 (p. 265). (14) Cormack, ‘Locating Comedy of Errors’, in Intellectual, p. 281. (15) Calendar of State Papers Spanish, 1558–1567, ed. by Martin A. S. Hume (1892; repr. Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1971), p. 404. (16) Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, ed. by Albert Feuillerat (1908; repr. Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1963), p. 117 and REED: Inns, II, p. 715. (17) On the tradition of counsel in aristocratic household drama, see Walker, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). (18) Doran, ‘Juno versus Diana’, p. 205. (19) REED: Inns, II, p. 626, ll. 4–7. In this edition, the line numbers begin anew on each page, so the references for the ‘Montague’ and ‘Sussex’ orations are presented with both page and line numbers. (20) REED: Inns, II, p. 626, ll. 28–42. (21) REED: Inns, II, p. 627, ll. 5–12. (22) REED: Inns, II, p. 627, ll. 20–3. (23) REED: Inns, II, p. 635, ll. 22–3. (24) REED: Inns, II, p. 636, ll. 1–8. (25) REED: Inns, II, p. 638, ll. 17–31. (26) REED: Inns, II, p. 640, l. 19; 17. (27) REED: Inns, II, p. 640, ll. 27–8. The blazon appears on p. 640, ll. 29–p. 642, l. 18. (28) REED: Inns, II, p. 643, l. 28–p. 644, l. 4. (29) REED: Inns, II, p. 645, ll. 5–16. (30) REED: Inns, II, p. 650, l. 10.

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Marriage Plays at the Inns (31) For a discussion of the Lincoln’s Inn moot, see Calendar of State Papers (Scottish), II, p. 304; Collection of State Papers, II, p. 762; and Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1559–1581, I, p. 133. (32) Gascoigne, Supposes in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, pp. 5–58 (p. 5). (33) Austen, George Gascoigne, p. 50. (34) See esp. Hutson, Invention of Suspicion, pp. 185–202; and ‘The Evidential Plot: Shakespeare and Gascoigne at Gray’s Inn’, in Intellectual, pp. 244–63. (35) Hutson, Invention of Suspicion, p. 158. (36) Hutson, Invention of Suspicion, p. 8. (37) Supposes, 5.1.31–4; 35–7; 41–4. (38) Supposes, 1.3.82; 1.1.107; 1.2.47. (39) See ‘Leaders for Commonweal’ in Chapter 2. (40) See Sarah Dewar-Watson, ‘Jocasta: A Tragedie Written in Greeke’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 17 (2010), 22–32; Dominique Goy-Blanquet, ‘Translating Europe into your England’, in Shakespeare and European Politics, ed. by Dirk Delabastita, Jozef de Vos, and Paul Franssen (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 286–303; Robert Miola, ‘Euripides at Gray’s Inn: Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta’, in The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama, ed. by Naomi Conn Liebler (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 33–50. (41) This is Allyna Ward’s argument, summarized further in this chapter, in Women and Tudor Tragedy, pp. 62–71. (42) Critics have associated Elizabeth with different figures in this play: with Jocasta, with Oedipus, and with Fortune, who appears in the dumb shows. While all of these figures are royal rulers, and may well comment on contemporary rule in different ways, in my view, Ward’s argument is most persuasive, since Jocasta is most similar to Elizabeth—both are queens managing a succession crisis. On ‘blind’ Oedipus and Elizabeth, see Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, p. 54; On Fortune as Queen Elizabeth, see David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 153–6; Austen, George Gascoigne, pp. 61–2. (43) Ward, Women and Tudor Tragedy, p. 68. (44) Ward, Women and Tudor Tragedy, p. 64. (45) Neville, Oedipus, sig. F2r. Page 25 of 27

Marriage Plays at the Inns (46) Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh, Jocasta, 5.5.49–53. (47) Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh, Jocasta, 5.5.200–9. (48) Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh, Jocasta, 5.5.249. (49) Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh, Jocasta, 5.Cho.1–2. (50) Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh, Jocasta, 5.Cho.3–4. The emphasis is mine. (51) Brian W. Schneider, The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama: ‘Whining’ Prologues and ‘Armed’ Epilogues, Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 167. (52) Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh, Jocasta, Epilogue.1–4. (53) Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh, Jocasta, Epilogue.37–40. (54) Gismond of Salerne by the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple in Early English Classical Tragedies, ed. John W. Cunliffe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), pp. 161–216. (55) Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, pp. 56–8. (56) Curtis Perry draws attention to Axton’s argument and the prefaces to the printed edition in ‘Gismond of Salerne and the Elizabethan Politics of Senecan Drama’, in Gender Matters: Discourses of Violence in Early Modern Literature and the Arts, ed. by Mara R. Wade (Amsterdam: Rudopi, 2014), pp. 279–93. (57) This paragraph summarizes Perry’s argument in ‘Gismond of Salerne’. (58) Gismond of Salerne, 5.1.61–2. (59) Gismond of Salerne, V.i.21–4. (60) Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, pp. 57–8. (61) Gismond of Salerne, 5.4.26–32. (62) Gismond of Salerne, 4.Cho.12; 45. (63) Gismond of Salerne, epilogue, ll. 23–4.

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Marriage Plays at the Inns (64) A sixteenth-century manuscript contains excerpts of Gismond, including most of V.3, the epilogue, sonnets to the Queen’s maids, the argument, and character lists, along with various poems by one Robert Davy (Folger MS V.a. 198). By excerpting these sections from the play, the manuscript decontextualizes them, continuing the trajectory of the play itself, which seems to engage in one context, only to suggest that the play should be read in another context altogether. My attention was drawn to this manuscript by Tamara Atkin in her presentation at the Folger Library in July 2014.

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Conclusion

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

Conclusion Lawyers at Play Redux Jessica Winston

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.003.0010

Abstract and Keywords The conclusion examines a portrait of William Naylor (1532–71) to summarize some of the major arguments of the book. Turning to theories of play, it examines why literary play was so important to members of the Inns in this period of legal-professional change. The conclusion also addresses the significance of the book to studies of law and literature, exploring why inns-ofcourt literature in the 1560s seems to have more to do with virtue than law, arguing that virtue signals readiness for law. Finally, the conclusion explores the influence of the mid-Tudor political culture of the Inns. Looking at John Stubbe’s Discovery of a Gaping Gulf (1579), I suggest that although this political culture dissipated, it contributed to the expansion of political discourse on a national scale. The culture of the mid-Tudor Inns helped to condition the rhetorical world of later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England for public, political debate. Keywords:   Inns of Court, political culture, law and literature, William Naylor, theories of play, Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, John Stubbe, Discovery of a Gaping Gulf, virtue in literature

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Conclusion An early 1560s portrait commemorates a junior member of Lincoln’s Inn as a well-to-do, pious Englishman (see Figure C.1).1 In the painting, the sitter wears a black gown, lined with black fur and trimmed at the collar and wrists with white ruff edged in blackwork. These sumptuous, subdued garments set off three gold chains and several gemstone rings. In his right hand, he holds a plaque reminding viewers that while life is fleeting, fame and salvation are eternal: ‘Since you […] and life sore pass away, and death at hand to end thy days, so live that men may justly say thy life led here deserved praise. 1562’. Then a motto: ‘Vive, ut viva’ (‘Live so that you may live’).2 A coat of arms appears in the upper corner. The portrait would most likely have been displayed in a domestic context, where it would have edified viewers.3 In the manner of a preacher or a judge, it prompts an audience—which could have included the sitter himself, members of his family, and visitors—to reflect carefully on the consequences of their actions. The painting’s subject is William Naylor (1532–71). He earned a B.A. at Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1553, and in 1556 was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn. He was called to the bar in 1565. Eventually he became one of the six clerks of Chancery.4 In 1562, the year of the portrait, he was still in the midst of his legal training and did not even have the coat of arms, which was granted in 1564 and may have been included in the portrait in anticipation of this grant or painted in later.5 Read in relation to Naylor’s biography, the portrait seems less a celebration of success than a fantasy, a representation of the inner barrister as an affluent legal (p.214)

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Conclusion man of exemplary virtue. The portrait must also be read in the context of the broader shift this book is contextualizing: the growing interest of innsmen in combining the arts with professional self-fashioning. Like Naylor, a small but influential minority of men at the Inns in the 1560s deliberately leveraged the arts to (p.215) effect personal, institutional, and professional cultivation. As the chapters on lyric poetry, translation, and drama have demonstrated, members looked to literature to foster a virtuous public image of themselves and the organizations to which they belonged. They aimed to present themselves as possessing a social and professional decorum that matched their image of the ideal magistrate and wise counsellor, and to shape the ethos and actions of those already in magisterial positions.

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Figure C.1 Portrait of William Naylor. Unknown Anglo-Netherlandish artist, 1562. Oil on panel, dimensions unknown, location unknown. Photograph in National Portrait Gallery, London, reference Z7939, photograph. © A C Cooper (Colour) Ltd.

Conclusion This literary culture promulgated a vision of inns-of-court men, and magistrates generally, as informed, authorized, and crucial participants in governance. Naylor’s portrait captures this idea too. His golden chains and gemstone rings at first connote wealth. Yet in the period, the chains would have indicated piety, since they were associated with spiritual salvation.6 Given Naylor’s profession, the chains were surely also meant to evoke the domain of law. The linked jewellery, a more modest form of the official chains worn by high-ranking legal men, conjures the idea of a ‘chain of office’. Chains are associated with law in other ways. Plato describes law as a ‘leading-string, golden and holy’,7 and this idea was alive in early modern England. In John Day’s play Law-Tricks (1608), a character describes law as ‘divine’ and compares it to ‘a golden chain | That links the body of a commonwealth’.8 In the masque The Triumph of Peace (1634), law ‘chain[s] security with peace’.9 A related idea pulls from the etymology of law as tie or binding. In Doctor and Student, St. German states that ‘the law is named of ligare, that is to say to bind’.10 Fortescue, in his Commendation of the Laws of England, similarly states (here in a mid-Tudor translation): [T]he law, under the which a multitude of men is made a people, representeth the semblance of sinews in the body natural. Because that like as by sinews, the joining of the body is made sound, so by the law which taketh the name à ligando—that is to wit, of binding such a mystical body is knit and preserved together.11 (p.216) Thus, Christopher Yelverton describes law as a ‘strong sinew of a commonwealth’ and the ‘sure and assured band of man’s society’.12 In this context, Naylor represents a judge, a law-giver, and idea reinforced by the plaque. As with the chains, the plaque clearly points to salvation; however, sententiae are similar to legal decrees: they are ‘lawyer-orator-judgelike’, calling upon viewers to apply a ‘universal truth’ to a particular present.13 The directive on the plaque, ‘so live that men may justly say thy life led here deserved praise’, seemingly spoken in Naylor’s own voice, comes in a judicial tone. Naylor commands himself and others to monitor their actions. Even as the portrait directs viewers towards salvation, it evokes this world, the lasting fame of the sitter and Naylor’s position—the one he holds and the one to which he aspires. In the confident voice of one of God’s elect, and in the tone of a judge authorized by a golden chain of law, Naylor fosters the orderly decorum of those around him.

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Conclusion In a similar way, in the 1560s, many authors at the Inns turned to the literary arts to promote an orderly society. In works like the Good Ordering of a Commonweal, the Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes, and Gorboduc, men like Bavand, Googe, Sackville, and Norton promoted an image of the wise counsellor while encouraging the dignity of those around them, and advancing the idea that all magistrates are appropriate and necessary to the health and welfare of the nation. In developing this line, members of the Inns aligned their rhetoric with the public statements of Lord Keeper Bacon among others, responding to what was, at least in Bacon’s eyes, a crisis in the quality of England’s magistracy, one resulting from the undersupply of legal men at a time when litigation rates were expanding rapidly and the legal profession was evolving in both form and function. Yet at the heart of this rapid change was a tension. As much as authors at the Inns, such as Bavand and Norton, modelled their writing on ideals disseminated from the very top of Elizabeth’s government, the works they created suggested that lawyers and legal men were a distinct, self-creating, and self-authorizing group. Moreover, because the authors were affiliated with the Inns, their works imply that the societies themselves existed as distinct jurisdictional spaces, outside of governmental purview. For instance, drama produced at the Inns reinforced this idea of the societies as a separate political sphere. These plays sought to expand or preserve the jurisdiction of inns-of-court men to comment on legal and political affairs. In supporting leaders like Bacon, in other words, writers and dramatists imagined the Inns as a political domain that was at least potentially separate from the political nation. To return to the terms of Gerard Legh, they were their own jurisdiction, a ‘province’ unto themselves.14 Like Naylor in his portrait, members of the Inns conceived writing as a force in the world: they turned to literary arts to fashion a magisterial persona, to influence the values and behaviour of their extended community, to define and elevate the status of magistrates, and to construct the Inns as a politically distinct space. But (p.217) why look to the literary arts to effect such transformation? (Why not more portraits, or more moots?) The very fact that writing and performance could be disseminated so widely, to so many different social circles, and could thus accomplish so many aims probably alone explains why literature was so popular. What other activity could have had the potential to achieve so much both within and outwith the Inns? Yet another fundamental factor may have powered the turn to writing—the essential, reciprocal association of play and cultural change.

Homo Ludens

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Conclusion In the early modern period, play is integral to cultural shifts; culture grows out of play.15 This vital relationship obtains even though play is leisure and essentially separate from business and civil affairs. Play is characterized by its separation from the workaday world: it is voluntary, distinct from ordinary life, limited in space and time, orderly (there are rules), and often also exclusive (not everyone can play).16 This definition of play applies especially well to communal forms, almost any shared, nonwork activity—feasting, jousting, religious rituals. Such communal activities are distinct from civil affairs, business, and work, even though they can be solemn or serious. Yet despite its separation from quotidian and workaday affairs, communal play has an impact on those realms, stabilizing them and assisting with the process of cultural change. Civilization, Johan Huizinga evocatively writes, exists in a ‘twin union’ with play.17 It ‘does not come from play like a babe detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it’.18 How does civilization, or culture, or society ‘arise’ from play?19 They do so because culture and play exist in a ‘reciprocal relationship’. A society’s tastes and habits of thought influence types and forms of play; at the same time play nudges players to hold the very tastes and habits of the society where the play occurs. In Roger Caillois’s words, ‘[A] game that is esteemed by a people may at the same time be utilized to define the society’s moral or intellectual character, provide proof of its precise meaning, and contribute to its popular acceptance by accentuating the relevant qualities’.20 To rewrite Caillois in the terms of Bourdieu: (p.218) Society shapes habitus, which in turn shapes play, but then play both reflects—and remakes—habitus and, by extension, society. Play ‘expresses and drives social life’.21

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Conclusion The early modern period offers multifarious examples of the reciprocal relationship between play and change.22 Indeed, it is notable that foundational play theorist Johan Huizinga was a historian of preindustrial Europe, and his writings develop out of and suit preindustrial sensibilities, particularly the notion that play is otium, existing in opposition to negotium, as well as the idea that play ranges in tone from amusing to grave, and spans games and rituals. A sixteenth-century ‘Treatise on Play’, for instance, argues that play is ‘a spending of the time either in speech or action whose only end is a delight of the mind or the spirit’, although play ranges from solemn devotion to games and ‘unseemly pleasures’.23 Especially with the advent of New Historicism, over four decades ago, critics have documented countless ways that literary play, particularly drama, responded to the profound cultural shifts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—religious reformation, increased social mobility, the advent of print, the expansion of a reading public, and the rise of Republicanism.24 More than respond, this critical work shows that literary play helped authors and audiences to navigate, even to further these transitions. Indeed, the period witnessed the invention in England of an entirely new form of play—dramatic performance in purpose-built, public playhouses—which enabled large groups of people to escape from, think through, accommodate themselves to, or resist transitions of the time.25

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Conclusion On a more local scale, at the Inns of Court in the 1560s, members likewise turned to literary play to work through, respond to, and affect the political and legal shifts of the time. As with play generally, here literary play was distinct from negotium, limited to particular spaces and times, orderly (involving institutional rules, or at least rules of genre), and exclusive to members or social affiliates. At the Inns, what Huizinga would call ‘the sphere of play’ overlaps with the social grouping that was resident members. The societies were not ‘play communities’, but they were communities defined in and through play, both individual and communal, especially the ritual- and leisure-time activity of eating and feasting together and the solemn play of Christmas revels. At the Inns, literary play ‘expresses and drives social life’, as well as legal and political thought. Furthermore, such play intensified in decisive periods of political and legal change. Although at the Inns literary play is, like play generally, set off from law and politics and exists in a separate sphere, these (p.219) forms nevertheless helped individual members and the societies as a whole to traverse and manage legal and political transition. With the dissolution of the monasteries, the advent of overseas expansion, the creation of new types of international trading companies such as the Muscovy Company, the rise of a credit economy, and the expansion of national and local bureaucracy, lawyers and legal men performed increasingly crucial functions in society. Forms of literary play—lyric poetry, translation, and drama—fostered explicit models for how magistrates should act and helped to promote their significance for the commonweal. Just as the authors of the Mirror for Magistrates imagined and taught magisterial roles in and through performance, so writers associated with the Inns in the 1560s promulgated an idea of the model magistrate in and through their own forms of literary play.

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Conclusion As much as play shapes social life and drives change, the point must be qualified. First, while this reciprocal relationship is present always, this relationship intensifies at some times and weakens at others. Second, play is not monolithic and certain kinds of play rise to a special level of importance at particular times: they provide an especially useful sphere wherein members of a society can demonstrate, contest, and work out shared values. For instance, amid the major upheavals of the 1590s and early seventeenth century, the public theatre emerged as a major space in and through which audiences could contest and negotiate societal transitions, but the bear baiting ring did not. The early modern Inns further illustrate these points. Legal men pursued literary pastimes with a special intensity in years leading to those ‘thresholds’ of professional transformation—those times when the societal role and functions of inns-of-court men and the legal magistracy permanently changed.26 At other times, when such issues as societal status and professional roles were more settled, individual legal men pursued literary pastimes for the ‘delight of the mind or the spirit’, but innsmen did not pursue literary pastimes with collective vigour. In other words, as legal men established themselves as a professional group, they no longer needed to play, or at least not as a group and in literary ways.

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Conclusion The later literary history of the early modern Inns illustrates this pattern of waxing and waning. By the middle of the 1570s, the literary culture of the Inns had declined. While members must have continued to write and circulate poems in manuscript, the volumes of published verse and the performance of drama subsided, and this ebbing trend continued through the 1580s. For, by the 1570s, the issues of magistracy at mid-century had lessened in importance, although these were to be replaced by others. By the third quarter of the sixteenth century, the Inns had expanded in population, and eventually the supply of lawyers began to rise, even though supply never fully equalled demand. Indeed, as time went on, the undersupply and underqualification of the magistracy was less of a concern. By the 1590s, the major issue stemmed from the sudden visibility and size of the legal profession, and attendant concerns about the ethics of lawyers, a concern that dominates writings of inns-of-court men in the period, as well as others, such as Shakespeare. In 2 Henry VI, Dick the Butcher’s call to ‘kill all the lawyers’ may tap into an anti-lawyer rhetoric that goes back to the Romans, but it also refers to a (p.220) new reality in late sixteenth-century England: the sudden visibility of a newly large, urban class of legal men.27 As this new legal-professional issue developed, literary play revived, but the popular genres and forms differed from the 1560s. Members of the public, like Shakespeare, and innsmen, like John Marston, turned to new genres—such as satirical epigram and Ovidian epyllia—to represent the preoccupations of legal apprentices and to chastise legal ethics and behaviour. There are similar periods later, with high points in the 1610s and 1630s. At the legal societies, literary play took shape in and drove politico-legal transitions, and innsmen turned to literary play because these forms were most suited to their needs and their times.

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Conclusion The literary culture of the Inns, then, looks something like an uneven sine wave, whereby play increases in some generations in response to periods of legal change, a process that takes about a decade, and then declines in following decades once members adapt to legal change or the rate of transformation itself slows. It is intriguing that this wave-like historical pattern of literary play correlates with two other historical models mentioned earlier in the book, literary generations and litigation. As we saw in the Introduction, literary history is a ‘succession of synchronies’, characterized by generational waves of writers. At the same time, as Chapter 2 discussed, legal history also has a curvilinear shape: litigation increases in response to periods of rapid social change so that the law can alter to fit new social and economic circumstances. In early modernity, the histories of early modern institutions and social formations follow the form of an uneven sine wave, as various kinds of activity (literary, legal, political, religious) pick up at crux moments and later subside. At least at the Inns, these historical sine waves appear in a staggered pattern: the rise in litigation precedes by a few years the uptick in literary play, which in turn leads by another few years institutional and professional change. Societal transformation intensifies play, which in turn helps society to adjust to the new conditions these transformations necessitate.

Literary Play and the Legal Profession This point returns us to a central aim of this book—to explore relationships of literature and law at the early modern Inns. How, precisely, did this ‘twin union’ of play and law work? How did one affect the other? Literary play participated in and advanced larger-scale developments in the legal profession, particularly the growing confidence of the Inns and the rise of the barristers. Literary forms did not have a significant, sustained relationship to specific legal forms and procedures; instead, they helped to manifest and amplify the confidence of the legal profession. But if literature is so bound up with law, why doesn’t law feature more explicitly or prominently in it?

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Conclusion (p.221) A return to the Naylor portrait—that audacious, thickly symbolic painting—helps to illustrate why. Naylor’s chains and plaque present him as a bearer of law, yet it is striking that legal authority is secured by virtue, rather than the legal learning he was acquiring at the Inns. The portrait connects piety and salvation with worldly success: prosperity is ‘deserved praise’ for virtuous living, which itself justifies, perhaps even renders inevitable, financial and professional accomplishment, manifested in sumptuous clothes and jewels. For Naylor, it would seem, virtue, not formal or legal education, makes the man. The writers at the Inns in the 1560s likewise draw attention to their own their moral and civic virtue, their care for the commonwealth. In works such as answer poetry or plays like Gorboduc, they imply that a set of personal and group attributes will reform the English magistracy, and will set up the inns-of-court men as worthy participants in the magistracy. Although inns-of-court authors of the 1560s often call attention to the provenance of their writing by mentioning their affiliation in dedications and other prefaces, they rarely mention legal training per se. Magistrates are made by virtue and disposition, not necessarily the laborious study of law. This intense focus on virtue makes sense, since in the words of Norman Jones, mid-Tudor politics was about ‘individual morality, not political values’. Magistrates and leaders in the period ‘judged good and bad actions in the context of an individual’s virtue’, since ‘for them, governing was a series of individual acts that ought to be guided and judged by the virtue of the actors’.28 Thus, Francis Bacon recalled that when Queen Elizabeth sought to make a ‘great officer’, she would ‘inquire after the piety, integrity, learning of the man. And when she was satisfied in these qualifications, she would consider of his personage. And upon such an occasion she pleased once to say to me, “Bacon, how can the magistrate main his authority when the man is despised?”’29 Likewise, Thomas Norton praised the new Lord Mayor of London, James Hawes, for not being ‘apt to corruption or contempt’ and for having an ‘upright mind to serve God and the queen sincerely’.30

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Conclusion How, then, do literary kinds of play that are seemingly indifferent to legal forms, procedures, or learning relate to the law—or do they? An answer to this question lies in the principal contention of this book: the literary culture of the Inns intensifies at important moments of transformation in the legal profession, especially those that directly affected the career prospects of members of the Inns as trainee-lawyers, and generally as trainees for a broader class of civic leaders, the legal magistracy. Literature provided one mechanism for members of the Inns to respond to and cope with legal-professional change. For instance, as Chapter 2 showed, beginning in the 1550s, the legal profession became a ‘growth industry’, and there (p.222) was great concern among leaders such as Lord Keeper Bacon about the quality of England’s legal men, especially justices of the peace (JPs) and other magistrates, in terms of their legal training but also in terms of their prioritization of personal or civic interests.31 The presence or absence of moral virtue and civic mindedness, rather than legal learning, was the prime concern about magistrates and officers, even those who, like JPs, dealt directly in the law. For this reason, it makes sense that men such as Naylor and writers at the Inns, such as Googe or Norton, sought primarily to demonstrate their moral qualities and civic orientation, instead of their legal learning. Since legal learning was in part a set of shared dispositions and a ‘habitus’, and not simply a body of knowledge, it may well be that demonstrating virtue, decorum, and an interest in counsel and counselling signalled a cluster of related and shared characteristics which included knowledge of the law. The tone of writings by members of the Inns in this period—the serious sententiousness and moral stringency—may have signified readiness for legal and political work. As Jones contends, what we understand as ‘habitus’ in the early Elizabethan period had another name, ‘virtue’.32

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Conclusion In the 1560s, literature and the legal profession at the Inns were linked in other ways too. The intense literary culture contributed directly to several long-term trends at the Inns and in the legal profession. Over the early modern period, the Inns of Court transformed from what Wilfrid Prest has called ‘small, inwardlooking professional fraternities’ to ‘large, complex, quasi-public institutions’.33 The early Elizabethan Inns are part of this larger development: writers there bolstered the institutional self-confidence of the Inns and the legal profession. This increased confidence is evident in other aspects of the institutional life of the societies, for instance in building schemes that culminated or began at the societies around this decade. In 1556, Gray’s Inn began rebuilding its communal hall; the work was completed in 1560. In 1562, the Middle Temple began the process of building a new hall, an ‘imposing and confident structure’, which took some ten years to finish.34 In 1565, Lincoln’s Inn added a gallery to its Old Hall. In 1574, the Inner Temple added a new, imposing, carved screen to its hall, and the Middle Temple began raising money for its screen in 1575.35 The projects suggest members’ sense of the authority and grandeur of their profession.36 In the words of Prest, the Middle Temple Hall in particular ‘stands as a monument to the material well-being and social aspirations of the Elizabethan Inns of Court’.37 This sense of well-being and aspiration is especially clear in a massive narrative painting, probably commissioned for the newly built Middle Temple Hall: The Judgement of Solomon (c. 1580–1600) (see Figure C.2).38 The well-known story (p.223)

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Conclusion comes from Kings 3:16–28, in Figure C.2 The Judgement of Solomon. which the sovereign Solomon Unknown Anglo-Netherlandish artist, c. resolves a grim dispute between 1570. Oil on panel, approximately 1270 x two new mothers, one of whom 1270 mm. Middle Temple Hall, London. claims the living babe when her Photograph by Todd White. own child dies. In the painting, © Middle Temple and published by kind the dead infant lies at the foot permission of the Masters of the Bench of of Solomon, who must have the Honourable Society of the Middle already declared that the living Temple. child must be split in two, since a servant with a rapier in the lower portion of the painting threatens to do just this. The woman on the left pleads with the king to give the baby to the other woman to save him, while the one on the right remains unmoved, her lack of attachment to the child (p.224) quite clear. The story often stands as an example of judicial wisdom, and it is ‘emblematic of the idea that wise governance is the foundation for a stable state’.39 A Latin inscription with the painting reinforces this meaning: ‘And now whoever holds the reins of justice let him learn this mighty lesson of just decision, and at a distance let him adore the footsteps of the king fully taught of God.’40 Yet in the context of its display at the Middle Temple, the painting may have had further significance. Although the Latin motto asks members of the Inns to see Solomon as a king and ‘adore the footsteps of the king fully taught of God’, the painting also alludes to legal and judicial adjudication, with Solomon perhaps representing a magistrate (not a monarch); he is a mirror for ‘whoever holds the reins of justice’. As Lorna Hutson points out, in the 1550s, Archbishop Cranmer had associated Solomon with magistrates in a discussion of judicial presumption, and the need for judges to give confident sentences, even if it requires bold, presumptuous action, where more concrete proofs do not exist.41 The assurance of members of the societies, or the Middle Temple at least, in their ability to be Solomons themselves—wise, just, upright magistrates holding the ‘reins of justice’—was growing. At the Middle Temple, members were less part of a ‘fraternity’ than wise carers and protectors in a nursery of law and justice, and by extension nurturers of the common good.

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Conclusion Connected with this growth and change in the early modern Inns is the ‘rise of the barristers’, a phrase that captures their numerical expansion as a professional group between 1550 and 1640 and their solidification as the upper echelon of a two-tiered legal system. In publicizing their affiliation with the Inns in classically inflected, learned publication and performance, members of the societies in the 1560s began a process of associating law and the legal societies with the elite cultural capital of classical and artistic production. At the same time, as in The Judgement of Solomon, members understood themselves, the Inns, and hence the barristers trained there as a special, distinct force whose training, virtue, abilities, and habits of mind helped to keep the nation going. For this reason, even though many inns-of-court authors had no plans to become barristers or judges, as a group they did see themselves as members of a broader class of legal magistrates. Through this general legal affiliation, their lives and writings helped to raise the status of the common law and barristers, too. Indeed, a sense of specialness and importance is reflected and defended in that prologue to The Misfortunes of Arthur, discussed in the Introduction, where the men of Gray’s Inn remind Queen Elizabeth that ‘our industry maintaineth unimpeached | Prerogative of prince, respect to peers’. There is a counterpoint to this argument about law and literature at the early modern Inns. Literature did not directly or continuously influence the content or forms of law (legal writs, statutes, cases, moots). Although incidental connections exist between legal study and specific literary works, particularly drama, legal (p.225) documentation was not in an extensive or sustained way integral to the forms of literature at the Inns.42 Instead, the biggest influence on the forms and content of members’ writing was their own previous training and experiences with verse, translation, and drama at the grammar schools and universities.43 Yet again, to say that there is not a sustained, formal similarity between literature and law at the Inns is not to say there is no connection. Rather, literary activity intensified at crux moments in the transformation of the legal profession.

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Conclusion The full story of law and literature at the early modern Inns of Court remains to be told. This book identified what must be that story’s persistent theme. Within a generally lively, intellectual milieu, the literary culture of the Inns was energized at important moments of legal, professional change, and this holds true even though specific writers, specific genres, and specific literary networks responded to this change in manifestly disparate and changing ways, and with evolving forms of writing and drama. At the early modern legal societies, members produced literary works—verse, translations, and drama—to respond to periods of major transitions in the legal field. Members turned to literature to publicize their own learning and dispositions, as well as to demonstrate and shape the habits and habitus of innsmen. Literary activities served to announce the intertwined importance of the societies, legal men, and the legal magistracy in the commonwealth, to emphasize and maintain the authority and autonomy of the legal societies, and to raise the prestige of members of the Inns and the legal profession. To return to the terms of The Misfortunes of Arthur, law might well deride the poet’s law. Yet at the Inns of Court literary play was the unacknowledged but ever-present associate to the common law in the history of early modern legal professionalization.

Literary Play and Political Culture The story of the ‘twin union’ of law and literature at the Inns, their correlated, yet staggered sine-wave patterns, leads us finally to the other major theme of the book—the political culture of the early Elizabethan Inns. How did the members’ literary play affect English political culture? I have shown that in the 1560s, the Inns were an important centre for political discourse, particularly discourses about magistracy and counsel. For various reasons—monarchic autocracy, professional ambitions, age and maturity, alterations in the legal profession—this situation did not continue at the Inns in the 1570s. Nevertheless the literary culture of the Inns continued to inspire both elite and popular political expression in later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England.

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Conclusion In imagining the Inns as a separate political space, members participated in a trend that characterizes the sixteenth century: the expansion of the political (p. 226) nation. Over this time, the significance of the ‘great private households’ of the fifteenth century slowly receded in prominence and influence, replaced by a more decentralized, if still literate, web of professionals, the political nation, established through a network of official and personal connections.44 This expansion involved the growth of the legal magistracy, as well as an altered understanding of the sorts of people and institutions that could legitimately contribute to conversations about governance. At the beginning of the century, one could argue that the political nation consisted of a (male) monarch, the Privy Council, Parliament, and peers. By the end of the century, it included a now female monarch, as well as a variety of members of the aristocracy and gentry, noble and gentlewomen, merchants, tradesmen, yeomen, and even poets and playwrights, such as Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson. There was struggle involved in this expansion, and it would take centuries for all but the most rarefied and elite groups to have a securely legitimate and effective voice in matters of state. The Inns of Court in the 1560s participated in this process. Those who composed verse, translated classical and other works, and wrote and performed drama implicitly established the Inns as a distinct political space, and pushed to extend legitimate political discourse beyond the centre of national power. The literary culture of the Inns in the 1560s stands as a leavener of the political nation’s contested expansion in the sixteenth century. For a sense of just how the Inns cultured political expression, and just how contested such expression remained, we can turn to the well-known events surrounding the publication of John Stubbe’s Discovery of a Gaping Gulf (1579), a treatise against the proposed marriage between Queen Elizabeth and the Catholic François, duc d’Anjou. Born in 1541 to a well-to-do, landed family in Norfolk, John Stubbe entered Trinity College in 1555, earning his B.A. in 1561. He then was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1562 and called to the bar in 1572. Stubbe probably remained in residence at the Inn through the 1570s. He was a fervent Puritan, and during his time at Lincoln’s he translated Theodore de Beza’s Life and Death of Mr John Calvin (1564) and the Life of the LXXth Archbishop of Canterbury (1574). Likely also written at Lincoln’s Inn, the Gaping Gulf is a virulent anti-Catholic denunciation of the Anjou match, one that also questioned Elizabeth’s Protestantism.45 The book incensed Elizabeth, who issued a royal proclamation prohibiting its circulation. She also ordered Stubbe, along with his printer and one other man, arrested, and the three were convicted of conspiring to excite sedition and sentenced to have their right hands cut off. Upon the scaffold, Stubbe delivered a moving colloquy on the injustice of his punishment:

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Conclusion I am sorry for the loss of my hand, and more sorry to lose it by judgement […]. I pray god it may be an example to you all that it being so dangerous to offend the laws without an evil meaning as breadeth the loss of a hand, you may use your hands holily, and pray to God for the long preservation of her majesty over you.46 (p.227) It took three blows to hew Stubbe’s hand. Before a silent, horrified crowd, he cried, ‘God save the Queen’ before fainting and being carried back to prison. In Gorboduc, members of the Inns implicitly and explicitly made the case that literary skill, legal training, and civic concern authorized political counsel. Clearly for Stubbe this was not the case, although it is understandable that he thought he could counsel Elizabeth. Having entered Lincoln’s Inn in 1562, only six months or so after the production of Gorboduc, Stubbe’s time at the societies spanned the very decade when members of the Inns had used writing to argue for the special role of the magistracy in the commonweal. As we have seen, members once capitalized on this role in Gorboduc, counselling Elizabeth on marriage and the succession. The Queen not only seems to have appreciated this play, but viewed it in a second, command performance at Whitehall. Stubbe wrote the treatise in the same intellectual tradition as that play. Like the speakers in it, Stubbe makes deliberate use of the arts of oratory and classical persuasion, and he makes nearly the same case for the monarch-in-council that appears in that play, arguing that the Queen must ‘abide the advice and consent of all her estates, not to conclude her marriage before she parle in parliament with her subjects’.47 Of course, Stubbe’s counsel was different too: He wrote as an individual, rather than as part of a collective; he authored a treatise, instead of historical fiction; he disseminated in print, instead of performance. His work also threatened to foment unrest, since the Anjou match was not popularly supported, and the publication had international ramifications, threatening to upset Elizabeth’s delicate, international diplomacy. Finally, Stubbe wrote later in Elizabeth’s reign, when her style of rule was altering from the collaborative model that dominated the first half of her reign to the more authoritarian style of the latter half.48 Elizabeth’s anger in the late 1570s at Stubbe highlights her permissive attitude in the early 1560s towards the Inns as hotspots of political debate so long as they did not exceed certain bounds of propriety and, indeed, remained somewhat insulated from the public.49 Stubbe was the wrong person counselling Elizabeth in the wrong way at the wrong time.50

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Conclusion However specific the circumstances surrounding the suppression of the Gaping Gulf, these events point also to changing patterns in political discourse at the Inns and in England generally. While Stubbe may have expected his association with the Inns to have authorized counsel, it did not. Public, political commentary was neither legitimated nor guaranteed by his training or affiliation with the Inns. Indeed, rather than continue to develop in the 1570s, by the end of that decade, (p.228) the literary-political culture of the Inns lessened in intensity. And this appears to be the case, even though there is ample evidence in the 1570s and 1580s for the development of political discourse in other locations and forms—in conversation, letters, parliamentary debates, and sermons. As Natalie Mears reminds us, ‘the Elizabethan public sphere has to be defined in terms of multiple spheres’.51 The Inns of Court were a ‘situated’ public sphere, where political discourse occurred in a relatively confined physical location. (Public spheres can also be ‘unsituated’ and ‘communicative’, constructed across space through letters, travel, and other means.) For Mears, a ‘situated’ public sphere is constructed and maintained through conversation, face-to-face interactions. This point suggests also that in Elizabethan England, a public sphere (or something like it), whether situated or unsituated, could be both present and remarkably tenuous. If a public sphere is constructed through networks of association, established by face-to-face interactions, what happens when the faces change? At least at the Inns, it would be appear that the political culture diminishes, even dissipates altogether.

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Conclusion Ideas take shape in associational contexts,52 and the decline of political discourse at the Inns in the 1570s results from very generational forces that brought this literary-political culture into being in the first place. In the 1560s, a generation of men at the Inns aimed to join and shape England’s legal magistracy, and for the most part, they did, or they went into related bureaucratic positions: Googe became an ambassador to Spain and Ireland. Turberville joined an embassy to Russia. Sackville, who entered the Inner Temple in 1554, was elected to the House of Commons in 1558 and again in 1559 and 1561. He served as a JP from 1559, and in 1561, the crown appointed him feodary (a type of legal office) for the duchy of Lancaster lands in Sussex. Norton was elected to Parliament in 1558 and again in 1563. From 1563 on, he served as counsel to the newly incorporated Stationers’ Company, and he went on to serve as a ‘man-of-business’ in Parliament. Yelverton was first elected to Parliament in 1563. He was the recorder of Northampton from 1568–99, and a JP for the area from about 1573. He was created serjeant-at-law in 1589. In 1568, Blundeville inherited the family estate at Newton Flotman and returned there. Thomas North never met with the magisterial success of the others, often living with his more successful brother, Roger, although he did go on to publish the influential translation of Plutarch’s Lives (1579). In other words, writers at the Inns moved onward and away from the Inns, gradually involving themselves in new issues and concerns, and in new social circles. As they grew older, these men no longer had the pressure to prove themselves, to find positions, or to ensure the ethos and decorum of those around them who would determine how they were perceived by others. The men at the Inns in the 1560s grew on to another life stage, leaving their junior roles at the Inns and often the Inns themselves behind. Most of them also stopped publishing. By the later 1570s and early 1580s, the literary and political culture of the Inns seems to have faded away.

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Conclusion (p.229) The 1560s inns culture nevertheless helped promote the proliferation of political discourse in England, and the Gaping Gulf shows how. Like his contemporaries at the Inns, Stubbe drew upon his classical rhetorical training and civic commitments, initially learned at grammar school, and he used these to try to serve queen and commonweal, declaring that he did ‘love my country and queen, though it should cost me my life’.53 Stubbe thus attempted to move political counsel beyond the Inns and into the public, printed domain. Markku Peltonen has persuasively shown that deliberative rhetoric, the kind learned at grammar school, shaped popular politics in pre-Civil War England.54 Although Peltonen does not make this point, it is clear that the mid-Tudor Inns were crucial to this process, shaping both the personalities of public servants, such as Nicholas Bacon or Thomas Norton, and the genres and forms that they and others employed to make their education relevant to political life. In this way, the Inns in the 1560s were proving ground and crucible, where classical rhetorical forms were channelled into eloquence in service of commonweal, especially through the medium of print. Even as individual members of the midTudor Inns moved on, then, they nevertheless created a culture in which the relationship between grammar school education and civic-minded engagement with politics was direct and real. To put this another way, the dissipation of the political culture of the mid-Tudor Inns is contemporaneous with, perhaps even a cause of, the expansion of political discourse on a national scale—in situated and unsituated political communities, and through multiple modes and genres: special prayers and parliamentary speeches, libels and pamphlets, news and tracts.55 As much as the grammar schools, the literary-political culture of the mid-Tudor Inns conditioned the rhetorical world of later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England for public, political debate.56 At the same time, this last point throws us back on the historical challenge initially raised in the Introduction: How do we precisely connect the particular to the longue durée? In terms of the rise of the barristers, the connections are fairly direct. After all, the Inns are the only places where barristers were trained. Yet the history of the bar is still not a steady, linear process, and the role of the Inns in it changes over time. With political discourse, even more so, the Inns participate in a broader historical trend, even as it is difficult to connect the dots of their legacy in a precise way. In the areas of law and politics, the Inns are both directly connected to longer developments in legal and political history and isolated from them. Ultimately, the early Elizabethan Inns stand as an emblem for a central puzzle of early modernity—its relationship to the modern. At the Inns in the 1560s, an influential group of writers fostered a set of peculiarly, presciently modern professional and political formations that were yet not moored to modernity. (p.230) Notes:

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Conclusion (1) Tarnya Cooper discusses this portrait and identifies the sitter in ‘Predestined Lives? Portraiture and Religious Belief in England and Wales, 1560–1620’, in Art Reformed: Re-Assessing the Impact of the Reformation on the Visual Arts, ed. by Tara Hamling and Richard Williams (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), pp. 49–63 (p. 54). Cooper also discusses this portrait in ‘Professional Pride and Personal Agendas: Portraits of Judges, Lawyers, and Members of the Inns of Court, 1560–1630’, in Intellectual, pp. 157–78 (pp. 169–71) and in Citizen Portrait: Portrait Paining and the Urban Elite of Tudor and Jacobean England and Wales (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2012), p. 135. (2) The transcription follows Cooper, ‘Predestined Lives’, p. 54 and ‘Professional Pride’, in Intellectual, p. 171. Cooper does not transcribe the ‘s’ on the end of ‘vivas’.The phrase would normally appear as ‘vivas’, but it is difficult to tell whether there is an ‘s’ on the end here. (3) Cooper, ‘Predestined Lives’, p. 54. (4) Cooper identifies the subject of the painting and provides biographical details in ‘Predestined Lives’, p. 54. (5) Cooper, ‘Predestined Lives’, p. 59 (note 18). (6) An example is the title of William Perkins’ treatise A Golden Chaine, or the Description of Theologie Containing the Order of the Causes of Saluation and Damnation, according to Gods Woord, trans. by Robert Hill (London: Edward Allde, 1591), STC 19657. The connection of the golden chain to salvation appears in numerous other works too; for instance, Herman Renecher, Golden Chayne of Salvation, trans. by Peter Allibond (London: printed by Valentine Simmes for Thomas Man, 1604), STC 20889. (7) This discussion of law as a chain builds on Paul Raffield’s observations in Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution: Late Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2010), p. 64; p. 32n. For Plato, Laws, trans. by R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library Series, 2 vols (London: William Heinemann, 1926), I, 645a. (8) John Day, Law-Trickes, or Who Would Have Thought It (London: Richard More, 1608), STC 6416, sig. B1r. The play goes on to satirize this ‘divine’ view of the law, but the statement nonetheless captures the idea of law as a golden chain. (9) James Shirley, Triumph of Peace, in Inigo Jones: Theatre of the Stuart Court, ed. by Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, 2 vols (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1973), II, pp. 536–66 (line 550). The character representing peace is Irene, while law is Eunomia. Page 23 of 27

Conclusion (10) St. German, Doctor and Student, fourth chapter, ‘Of the Law of Man’, fol. 7r. (11) Sir John Fortescue, Learned Commendation of the Politique Lawes of Englande, fol. 31r–v. The concept appears later in the period, for instance in a treatise from 1622: ‘as the Law is derived à ligare, to bind, so is the whole state of the commonwealth bound to the head, and may be made easier in practice.’ See Gerard Malynes, Consuetudo, vel lex mercatoria, or The Ancient Lawmerchant Diuided into Three Parts: According to the Essentiall Parts of Trafficke (London: Adam Islip, 1622), STC 17222, p. 473. (12) ‘Farewell’, BL MS 48109, fol. 12v; 13r. (13) McCutcheon, Sir Nicholas Bacon’s Great House Sententiae, p. 25. (14) See also ‘Literary Terrain’ in Chapter 1. (15) Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 46. Play operates in different ways in other periods, such as the Victorian era, where play seems to have induced anxiety about cultural change. See Matthew Kaiser, World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012) and his article by the same title, ‘World in Play: A Portrait of a Victorian Concept’, New Literary History, 40 (2009), 105–29, which shows that for the Victorians, ‘play triggers […] existential and metahistorical anxiety: endless unsettling reflections upon the condition of modern life’, bringing on the sense that their world is separated from the past: play ‘put modernity in play’ (p. 124). (16) Huizinga, Homo Ludens, esp. pp. 1–27. (17) Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 46. (18) Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 173. (19) Huizinga does not fully explain why this might be. My terminology, ‘civilization’, ‘culture’, ‘society’, here is shifting deliberately to get at the general question of whether play can influence the actions and ideas of social groups on any scale. (20) Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. by Meyer Barash (New York: Schocken Books, 1979), pp. 82–3. (21) Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 94. (22) Thomas Hendricks complains that Huizinga is too quick to generalize and offers no counter-examples in Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 23. Page 24 of 27

Conclusion (23) Sir John Harington, ‘A Treatise on Playe’, in Nugae Antiquae, 2 vols (London: J. Wright for Vernor and Hood, Poultry, Cuthell and Martin, 1804), I, pp. 186–232 (p. 188). (24) This is true, even though Huizinga’s book itself is rarely cited in early modern studies. (25) See, for just one example, Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). His brief discussion of Huizinga and Harington (p. 41) influences this paragraph. (26) On the term ‘threshold’, see ‘The Inns in the 1560s’ in the Introduction. (27) 2 Henry VI, 4.2.70. On the urbanization and centralization of the common law, see Gieskes, Representing the Professions, pp. 138–9. (28) Norman Jones, Governing by Virtue: Lord Burghley and the Management of Elizabethan England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 15. The examples in this paragraph borrow from Jones, where he develops this point further (pp. 15–16). I am grateful to Professor Jones for sharing the book with me, while it was still in proofs. (29) Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1859), VII, p. 175. (30) Norton’s letter of advice to the lord mayor is transcribed in Leonard R. N. Ashley, Elizabethan Popular Culture (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), pp. 13–14 (quote from p. 13). (31) See ‘Leaders for Commonweal’ in Chapter 2. (32) Jones, Governing by Virtue, p. 27; 43. (33) Prest, Inns, p. 4. (34) Raffield, Images and Cultures, p. 43. (35) See Prest, Inns, p. 18; Mark Girouard, ‘The Halls of the Elizabethan and Early Stuart Inns of Court’, in Intellectual, pp. 138–56 (p. 147). (36) Hutson, Invention of Suspicion, p. 196. (37) Prest, Inns, p. 19. (38) On the dating of this painting, see Cooper, ‘Professional Pride’, in Intellectual, p. 160 and Cooper, Citizen Portrait, p. 62; 210, note 101. Page 25 of 27

Conclusion (39) Cooper, ‘Professional Pride’, in Intellectual, p. 160. (40) Translation qtd. in Cooper, ‘Professional Pride’, in Intellectual, p. 161. (41) Hutson, Invention of Suspicion, p. 198. (42) For criticism that has connected legal forms with literary forms at the Inns, see ‘Law and Literature’ in the Introduction. (43) On the influence of grammar school training, see ‘Humanism, Commonweal, and the Vita Activa’ in Chapter 2 and ‘Two Kinds of Poetry’ in Chapter 3. (44) David Loades, Power in Tudor England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), p. 4. (45) Natalie Mears, ‘Stubbe [Stubbs], John (c. 1541–90)’, in ODNB (25 September 2014). (46) ‘Mr. John Stubbes, His Wordes upon the Scaffolde’, in Nugae Antiquae, I, pp. 154–8 (pp. 154–5). (47) John Stubbe[s], The Discouerie of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is Like to be Swallowed by Another French Marriage […] ([London: H. Singleton for W. Page], 1579), STC 23400, sig. E1r. On Stubbe’s use of deliberative rhetoric, see Markku Peltonen’s chapter on the treatise in Rhetoric, Politics and Popularity (pp. 116–27). (48) See Guy, ‘The Elizabethan Establishment’. (49) Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse, p. 125. See also Natalie Mears, ‘Counsel, Public Debate, and Queenship: The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf, 1579’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 629–50. (50) Clegg in Press Censorship (pp. 123–37) describes the unusual set of circumstances that led to the suppression of the Gaping Gulf. Even so, I argue that the difference between Elizabeth’s reaction to Gorboduc and the Gaping Gulf also suggests a difference in the political culture of the 1560s to the late 1570s. (51) Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse, p. 184. On ‘situated’ and ‘unsituated’ public spheres, see the chapter on ‘The Elizabethan Public Sphere’, pp. 186–216. (52) See Withington, Society in Early Modern England. (53) Stubbe[s], Discoverie, sig. F3v. (54) Peltonen, Rhetoric, Politics and Popularity, esp. part 1, pp. 11–97. Page 26 of 27

Conclusion (55) See ‘The Public Sphere in Early Modernity’ in the Introduction and Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, eds., The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Natalie Mears, ‘Public Worship and Political Participation in Elizabethan England’, Journal of British Studies, 51 (2012), 4–25. (56) For the argument about grammar school and oratory, see Peltonen, Rhetoric, Politics and Popularity.

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Appendix 1 Literary Men of the Inns of Court, 1558–72

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

(p.231) Appendix 1 Literary Men of the Inns of Court, 1558–72 Jessica Winston

Arranged in roughly chronological order from the beginning of the decade to the end, taking into account birth date, date of admission to an inn of court, and date of publication.

Author

Works and/or Involvement, 1558–72

Thomas Churchyard (1520?–1604; IT 1577)

Poems in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557)

‘Shore’s Wife’ in Mirror for Magistrates (1563) De Tristibus, trans. of Ovid (1572) William Barker (fl. 1572; Education of Cyrus (expansion of 1552 trans.) MT 1554; GI 1560) (1567) George Gascoigne (1523?–77; GI 1555)

‘Sundry Themes’ in Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (c. 1565; pub. 1573) Supposes, trans. from Ariosto (1566) Jocasta, trans. acts 2, 3, 5 from Dolce (1566)

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George Puttenham (1529–90/91; MT 1556)

Arte of English Poesie (pub. 1589)

Richard Courtop (dates?; GI 1559)

Requests one of Gascoigne’s ‘memories’

Appendix 1 Literary Men of the Inns of Court, 1558–72

Author

Works and/or Involvement, 1558–72

Anthony Kinwelmersh (dates?; GI 1561)

Requests one of Gascoigne’s ‘memories’

Francis Kinwelmersh (d. Jocasta, trans. acts 1 and 4 from Dolce (1566) 1580; GI 1557) Requests one of Gascoigne’s ‘memories’ Christopher Yelverton (1535?–1612; GI 1552)

Epilogue to Jocasta (perf. 1566)

Thomas Norton (1532– 84; IT 1555)

Poem in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557)

Orations of Arsanes, trans. of Trogus Pompeius (1560?) Gorboduc, acts 1–3 (performed 1562; pub. 1565 and 1570) Institution of Christian Religion, trans. of Calvin (1561) Thomas North (1535– 1601?; LI 1555)

Dial of Princes, trans. of Guevara (1557)

Philosophy of Doni, fr. Italian (1570) [Lives, trans. of Plutarch from French (1579)] Jasper Heywood (1535– 97/98; GI 1561)

Troas, trans. of Seneca’s Troades (1559)

Thyestes, trans. of Seneca’s Thyestes (1560) Hercules Furens, trans. of Seneca Hercules Furens (1561) (p.232) Thomas Prefatory verse in Hoby’s Courtier (1561) Sackville (1536–1608; IT 1555) Gorboduc, acts 4 and 5 (1562) ‘Tragedy of Buckingham’ and ‘Induction’ in Mirror for Magistrates (1563) Arthur Hall (1539–1605; [Translation of Homer’s Iliad (1581)] GI 1556) Thomas Blundeville (1522–1606? GI 1541?)

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Three Moral Treatises, trans. of Plutarch (1561)

Appendix 1 Literary Men of the Inns of Court, 1558–72

Author

Works and/or Involvement, 1558–72 Art of Riding, trans. and abridgement of F. Grisone, Ordini di cavalcare (1561) Of Councils and Counsellors, trans. of Federico Ceriol, ‘El concejo i consejeros del principe’ via Alfonso d’Ulloa’s Italian ‘Il concilio et consiglieri del principe’ (1570)

William Bavand (dates?; Good Ordering of a Commonweal, trans. of MT 1557) Johannes Ferrarius Montanus (1559) Barnabe Googe (1540– 94; SI c. 1560)

Zodiac of Life, 1–3, trans. of Palingenius Zodiacus Vitae (1560); Zodiac of Life, 1–6 (1561) Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes (1563) Zodiac of Life, 1–12 (1565) Ship of Safeguard (1569) Popish Kingdom or Reign of Antichrist, trans. of Naogeorgus, Regnum papisticum; includes ‘Spiritual Husbandry’, trans. of Agriculturae sacrae (book 5) (1570)

Christopher Hatton (1540–91; IT 1560)

Participant in Inner Temple Revels of 1561

John Dolman (fl. 1561; IT 1560)

Tusculan Disputations, trans. of Cicero (1561)

‘Tragedy of Hastings’ in Mirror for Magistrates (1563) Thomas Pound (1539– 1615; LI 1560)

Two marriage masques (1560)

Goddred Gilby (fl. 1561; Letter to Quintus, trans. of Cicero (1561) inn?) Arthur Broke (d. 1563; IT 1561/62)

Romeus and Juliet, trans. of Bandello via French (1562)

George Turberville

Epitaphes, Epigrammes, Songes, and Sonets

(1540?–1610?; inn?)

(1567) Heroical Epistles, trans. of Ovid (1567) Eclogues, trans. of Virgil (1567) Eglogs, trans. of Mantuan (1567)

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Appendix 1 Literary Men of the Inns of Court, 1558–72

Author

Works and/or Involvement, 1558–72 Plain Path to Perfect Virtue (1568)

John Stubbe (c. 1541– 90; adm LI 1562)

Life and Death of Mr. John Calvin, trans. of Theodore de Beza (1564) Life of the LXXth Archbishop of Canterburty, trans. from Latin (1574) Discovery of a Gaping Gulf (1579)

(p.233) Thomas Newton (1542?–1607; BI?, then GI 1576)

Various translations of Cicero (1569) [Also completed and compiled Seneca’s Tenne Tragedies, 1581]

Alexander Neville (1544–1614; GI 1562)

Oedipus, trans. of Seneca (trans. 1560; pub. 1563)

Answer poetry, exchanged with Barnabe Googe (1563) Requests one of Gascoigne’s ‘memories’ John Vaughn (dates?; GI Requests one of Gascoigne’s ‘memories’ 1562/63) Richard Edwards (1523– Damon and Pythias (written c. 1564, pub. 1571) 66; spec. LI 1564) Paradise of Dainty Devises (comp. circa 1566) Nicholas Haward (fl. 1569; TI?)

Chronicle, trans. of Eutropius (1564)

Thomas Peend (fl. 1564– ‘Hermaphroditus and Salamacis’, Metamorphoses 6; MT 1564) (1565) Lord John Mandosse, trans. of Bandello (1565) Verses in Agamemnon, trans. by John Studley (1566) Peter Beverley (dates?; SI by 1566)

Ariodanto and Ieneura, loose trans. and paraphrase of Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (book 5) (1565; pub. 1575) Verses in Geoffrey Fenton’s Tragical Discourses (1567)

John Studley (c. 1547–

Agamemnon, trans. of Seneca (1566)

90; BI 1566) Medea, trans. of Seneca (1566) Page 4 of 6

Appendix 1 Literary Men of the Inns of Court, 1558–72

Author

Works and/or Involvement, 1558–72 Hercules Oetaeus, trans. of Seneca (1566?; pub. 1581) Hippolytus, trans. of Seneca (1567, pub. 1581)

William Fulwood (fl. 1562; inn?)

Castle of Memory, trans. of Guglielmo Gratarolo, De memoria reparanda (1562) Philosopher’s Game, by Ralph Lever, augmented by W. F. (1563?) Enemy of Idleness, trans. of Le stile et maniere de composer, dicter, & escrire toutes sortes d’epistres (1568)

Edward Hake (fl. 1567– 88; GI 1567)

Imitation of Christ, trans. of [Thomas Kempis?] (1567)

William Parker (fl. 1566; Verses in Studley’s Agamemnon and Medea LI 1566) John Sadler (d. 1595?; MT 1566)

Martial Policy, trans. of Vegetius (1572)

Humphrey Gifford (dates?; MT 1568)

[A Posie of Gilloflowers (pub. 1580)]

William Hubbard (dates?; CI?, then MT 1571)

‘Ceyx and Alcyone’, trans. from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1569)

Hugh Plat (1552–1608; LI 1572?)

Flowers of Philosophy (1572)

(p.234) Note on non-inns-of-court authors of the 1560s In conversations with other early modernists, I am sometimes asked whether there were writers in the 1560s who were not affiliated with the Inns. The answer is yes, but in terms of major figures, not many. Unlike the 1590s, when there were overlapping clusters of writers at court, the Inns, the universities, and the public theatres, as well as elsewhere in England, in the 1560s the Inns of Court were the dominant, arguably the only, English literary scene. There were a handful of other important and prolific individuals (listed below) who were not directly connected with the Inns, but even they had some tangential familial or professional links with this milieu.

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Appendix 1 Literary Men of the Inns of Court, 1558–72 Arthur Golding (1536–1606) was the most prolific translator at the time. His father was a member of the Inns, but Golding himself does not seem to have interacted with this literary scene, and in his ‘Preface’ to Thyestes (1560), Jasper Heywood leaves him out of his list of inns-of-court authors. The poet Thomas Howell (fl. 1568) seems to have been connected more to a noble household (biographies suggest the Earl of Shrewsbury) than the Inns, although his poetic miscellanies, New Sonnets and Pretty Pamphlets (1567–8) and the Arbor of Amity (1568), seem to be modelled on the miscellanies of Googe and Turberville, and many of his poems seem similar in style to what was produced at the Inns. Another interesting figure is Isabella Whitney (b. 1540s, fl. 1567–78). She modelled her Sweet Nosegay (1573) on the writings of Hugh Plat, a member of Lincoln’s Inn (see Appendix 1). She also alludes to the literary and intellectual culture of the Inns in her verse ‘Will’ to London, where she bequeaths to members of the Inns of Court copies of her work, leaving them ‘a store of books […] at each bookbinder’s stall’. The prolific writer Nicholas Breton (1545–1626) also had tangential connections to the Inns. His stepfather was the poet George Gascoigne (Breton’s widowed mother married him in 1559), but Breton himself, whose first poems appear in the mid-1570s, was not a member and he seems to have been more linked with the court of the late 1570s and 1580s than with the Inns.

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Appendix 2 First Editions of Classical Translations, 1558–81

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

(p.235) Appendix 2 First Editions of Classical Translations, 1558–81 Jessica Winston

Organized from most to least translated classical author, with lives and histories, and other one-off translations grouped at the end. Seneca, Troas, Lat., Tr. Jasper Heywood (1559) Seneca, Thyestes, Lat., Tr. Jasper Heywood (1560) Seneca, Hercules Furens, Lat., Tr. Jasper Heywood (1561) Seneca, Oedipus, Lat., Tr. Alexander Neville (1563) Seneca, Agamemnon, Lat., Tr. John Studley (1566) Seneca, Medea, Lat., Tr. John Studley (1566) Seneca (attrib.), Hercules Oetaeus, Lat., Tr. John Studley (1566?) Seneca, Hippolytus, Lat., Tr. John Studley (1567) Seneca (attrib.), Octavia, Lat., Tr. Thomas Nuce (1566) Seneca, Thebais in Tenne Tragedies, Lat., Tr. Thomas Newton (1581) Seneca, De Beneficiis, Books 1–3 as Line of Liberalitie, Lat., Tr. N. Haward (1569) Seneca, prose excerpts on death as Certain Collections, Lat. via Fr., Tr. E. Aggas (1576) Seneca, De Beneficiis, Lat., Tr. Arthur Golding (1578) Ovid, fable of Narcissus fr. Metamorphoses III, Lat., Tr. T. Howell or T. Hackett (?) (1560) Ovid, Metamorphoses I–IV, Lat., Tr. Arthur Golding (1565) Ovid, ‘Hermaphroditus and Salmacis’ fr. Metamorphoses IV, Lat., Tr. T. Peend (1565) Ovid, Metamorphoses, Lat., Tr. Arthur Golding (1567)

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Appendix 2 First Editions of Classical Translations, 1558–81 Ovid, Heroides as ‘Heroycall Epistles’, Lat., Tr. George Turberville (1567) Ovid, Invective against Ibis, Lat., Tr. T. Underdowne (1569) Ovid, Tristia, Lat., Tr. Thomas Churchyard (1572) Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Lat., Tr. John Dolman (1561) Cicero, Ad Quintum, Lat., Tr. G. Gilby (1561) Cicero, De Senectute as Worthy Book of Old Age, Lat., Tr. Thomas Newton (1569) Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum, Lat., Tr. Thomas Newton (1569) Cicero, Somnium Scipionis, Lat., Tr. Thomas Newton (1569) Cicero, selections from Epistolae as ‘Principia Latine loquendi’, Lat., Tr. T. W. (1575) Cicero, De Amicitia with repr. of Paradoxa Stoicorum, Somnium Scipionis, De Senectute, Lat., Tr. Thomas Newton (1577) See also Other Literary . . . Virgil, Aeneid, I–VII, Lat., Tr. Thomas Phaer (1558) Virgil, Aeneid, repr. I–VII, with VIII and IX, Lat., Tr. Thomas Phaer (1562) Virgil, Aeneid, Lat., Tr. Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne (1573) Virgil, Eclogues, Lat., Tr. Abraham Fleming (1575) Plutarch, Moralia as Three Moral Treatises, Gk., Tr. Thomas Blundeville (1561) Plutarch, ‘Amorous and Tragical Tales […] Sayings of the Greek Philosophers’, Gk. via Fr. Tr. James Sandford (1567); see also Heliodorus (p.236) Plutarch, De Educatione Puerorum as ‘A President for Parentes’, Gk., Tr. E. Grant (1571). See also Lives and Histories Horace, Satires I, 1 and 2, Lat., Tr. Lewis Evans (1565) Horace, Satires, Lat., Tr. Thomas Drant (1566) Horace, Ars Poetica, Satires, and Epistles, Lat., Tr. Thomas Drant (1567) Galen, Certain Works of Galen, Gk., Tr. Thomas Gale (1567) Galen, ‘The Curing of Wounds’, Gk., Tr. G. Baker (1574) Galen, Elements, Gk. via Lat., Tr. John Jones (1574) Justin, Orations of Arsanes (two speeches), Lat., Tr. T. Norton (1560) Justin, Abridgement of the Histories of Trogus Pompeius, Lat., Tr. Arthur Golding (1564; rev. 1570) Heliodorus, Aethiopica as Theagenes and Chariclea (Book IV), Gk. via Fr., Tr. James Sandford (1567) Heliodorus, Aethiopica as An Aethiopian Historie, Gk. via Lat., Tr. Thomas Underdowne (1569; rev. 1577)

Other Literary, Rhetorical, and Philosophical Works Apuleius, The Golden Ass, Lat., Tr. William Adlington (1566) Page 2 of 4

Appendix 2 First Editions of Classical Translations, 1558–81 Euripides, Phoenissae as Jocasta, Gk. via Ital., Tr. George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmershe (1566) Epictetus, Manual of Epictetus, Gk. via Fr. and Lat., Tr. James Sandford (1567) Various authors (Aesop, Pliny (elder), Erasmus) as School of Wise Conceits (Aesop, Pliny, Erasmus), Gk. and Lat., Tr. Thomas Blague (1569) Various authors (Xenophon, M. Aurelius, Cicero, etc.) as Closet of Counsels, Gk. and Lat., Tr. E. Elviden (1569) Demosthenes, Olynthiacs and Philippics (selected speeches), Gk., Tr. Thomas Wilson (1570) Various authors (Cicero, Pliny (younger), Seneca, Erasmus) as A Panoply of Epistles, Gk. and Lat., Tr. Abraham Fleming (1576) Cato, Distichs of Cato as Cato Construed, Lat. via Fr., Tr. Anon. (A. Maunselle?) (1577) Isocrates, three orations as A Perfect Looking Glass, Gk. via Lat., Tr. Thomas Forrest (1580) Homer, Iliad, I–X, Gk. via Fr., Tr. Arthur Hall (1581)

Lives and Histories Eutropius, Breviarium ab urbe Condita as A Brief Chronicle, Lat., Tr. N. Haward (1564) Caesar, Gallic Wars, Lat., Tr. Arthur Golding (1565) Xenophon, Education of Cyrus, Gk. via Lat., Tr. William Barker (books 1–6, 1552; 7 and 8, 1567) Polybius, History of the Roman Empire, Gk. via Lat., Tr. Christopher Watson (1568) Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, 18–20 as Successors of Alexander the Great, Lat. via Fr., Tr. T. Stocker (1569) (p.237) Vegetius, De Re Militari as Martial Policy, Lat., Tr. John Sadler (1572) Aelian, Varia Historia as Register of Histories, Gk., Tr. Abraham Fleming (1576) Appian, Roman History, Gk., Tr. William Barker (1578) Appian, Roman History, as A View of Valyaunce, Gk., Tr. T. Newton (1580) Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers, Gk. via Lat., Tr. H. I. H. (1579) Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Gk. via Fr., Tr. Sir Thomas North (1579)

Other Works Pliny (elder), Summary of Natural History, Lat. via Fr., Tr. J. A[lday] (1566) Artemidorus (?), Oneirocritica (Interpretation of Dreams), Gk. via?, Tr. Thomas Hill (1571) Page 3 of 4

Appendix 2 First Editions of Classical Translations, 1558–81 Euclid, Elements of Geometry, Gk., Tr. Henry Billingsley (1570) Dionysius Periegetes, Survey of the World, Gk., Tr. Thomas Twyne (1572) Synesius, ‘Of Baldness’ as ‘Baldness Better than Bushy Hair’, Lat., Tr. Abraham Fleming (1579)

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Appendix 3 Description of Gorboduc at the Inner Temple

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

(p.238) Appendix 3 Description of Gorboduc at the Inner Temple Transcription of British Library Add 48023, fol. 359v: Ther was a Tragedie played in the Inner Temple of the two Brethren Porrex and Ferrex, K[ings] of Brytayne Betwene whome the father had devyded the Realme, the one slewe the other and the mother slewe the manquil[e]r [ie the man-killer] [.] It was thus used. Firste wilde men cam[e] in and woulde have broken a whole fagott, but coulde not, the stickes they brake being severed. Then cam[e] in a king to whome was geven a clere glasse, and a golden cupp of Golde covered, full of poison. The glasse he caste under his fote and brake hyt, the poyson he dranck of, After cam[e] in mo[u]rners [.] The shadowes were declared by the Chore[us]. first to signyfie unytie, the 2. [ie second] howe that men refused the certen and tooke the uncerten, wherby was ment that yt was better for the Quene to marye with the L[ord] R[obert] knowen then with the K[ing] of Sweden. The thryde to declare yt cyvill discension bredeth mo[u]rning. Many thinges were handled of mariage, and that the matter was to be debated in P[ar]liament, because yt was much banding but yt hit ought to be determined by the councell. There was also declared howe a straunge duke seying the Realme at dyvysion, would have taken upon him the Crowne, but the people would none of hytt. And many thinges were saied for the Succession to putt thinges in certenty.

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Bibliography

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

(p.239) Bibliography Bibliography references: The following bibliography is divided into three parts: manuscripts, pre-1700 print sources, and post-1700 print sources. For the pre-1700 sources, unless otherwise indicated, the place of publication is London. I also include STC and Wing numbers. Manuscript Sources

British Library Harleian 4990 British Library Add 48023 British Library Add 48109 Folger MS V.a.143 Folger MS.v.198 Inner Temple MS, misc 32 Pre-1700 Print Sources

A[lday], I[ohn], A Summarie of the Antiquities, and Wonders of the Worlde, Abstracted out of the Sixteene First Bookes of the Excellente Historiographer Plinie (Henry Denham for Thomas Hacket, 1566), STC 20031 Ascham, Roger, Toxophilus (Edward Whitchurch, 1545), STC 837 Aylmer, John, An Harborowe for Faithful and Trewe Subiectes, agaynst the Late Blowne Blaste, Concerninge the Government of Wemen (John Day, 1559), STC 1005

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Bibliography Williams, Ian, ‘Common Law Scholarship and the Written Word,’ forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook to English Law and Literature, 1500–1700, ed. by Bradin Cormack and Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Wilson, Frank Percy, Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) Wilson, Luke, Theatres of Intention: Drama and the Law in Early Modern England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000) Winston, Jessica, ‘National History to Foreign Calamity: A Mirror for Magistrates and Early English Tragedy’, in Shakespeare’s Histories and Counter-Histories, ed. by Dermot Cavanagh, Stuart Hampton-Reeves, and Steve Longstaffe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 152–65 Winston, Jessica, ‘Literary Associations of the Middle Temple’, in Middle Temple History, ed. by Richard Havery (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2011), pp. 147–71 Winston, Jessica and James Ker, ‘A Note on Jasper Heywood’s “Free Compositions” in Troas (1559)’, Modern Philology, 110 (2013), 564–75 Withington, Phil, Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England, Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Withington, Phil, ‘Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England’, American Historical Review, 112 (2007), 1016–38 Withington, Phil, Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010) Witte, John Jr., ‘An Evangelical Commonwealth: Johannes Eisermann on Law and the Common Good’, in Caritas et Reformation: Essays on Church and Society in Honor of Carter Lindberg, ed. by David M. Whitford (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 2002), pp. 73–88 Woodbridge, Linda, English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Erwin Greenlaw et al, 11 vols (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57) Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. by Ronald B. Mckerrow; rev. by F. P. Wilson, 5 vols (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966) (p.261) Wright, Louis B., ‘Translations for the Elizabethan Middle Class’, The Library, 4th ser., 13 (1933), 312–33

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Bibliography Zaret, David, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) Zim, Rivkah, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Zurcher, Andrew, Spenser’s Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Brewer, 2007) (p.262)

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Index

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 Jessica Winston

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780198769422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769422.001.0001

(p.263) Index Figures and footnotes are indicated by an italic f and n following the page number. Abridgement of the Histories of Trogus Pompeius (Justinus) 118, 120 adaptations 2, 7, 78, 83, 203 of De Casibus 130–3 of Seneca 149–55, 162, 165–6, 169, 179–80, 187see also translations Ad Quintum (Cicero) 47, 108, 110, 112, 117, 121, 235 Adlington, William 236 Aelian 237 Aeneid (Virgil) 65n. 95, 99, 102, 104, 113, 118, 235, 236 Aethiopica (Heliodorus) 236 Agamemnon (Seneca) 47, 111, 152, 153, 157, 169, 233, 235 Aggas, Edward 108, 235 Alarum against Usurers (Lodge) 26 A[lday], [I]ohn 111, 237 Alford, Stephen 184, 185 ambition 15, 141n. 47 political 8, 193–5, 208 professional 37, 39, 55–6, 60–1, 146, 225 answer poetry 84–90, 152, 221, 233 and friendship 90–4 ‘sundry themes’ (Gascoigne) 94–7 Appian 106, 237 Apuleius 236 Arbor of Amity (Howell) 234 Ariodanto and Ieneura (Beverley) 233 Ars Poetica (Horace) 236 Artemidorus 237 Arte of English Poesie (Puttenham) 231 Art of Logic (Wilson) 116 Page 1 of 15

Index Art of Riding (Blundeville) 232 Ascham, Roger 65, 79, 99, 119n. 86, 190 audience advice to 113, 167–8, 174, 196, 208, 210–11 of A Mirror for Magistrates 130, 132–3, 143, 144–8 of readings 30 staging for 186 of translations 117–21, 160, 174, 180 Austen, Gillian 94n. 77, 203 autocracy, critique on 209–11 Axton, Mary 174–5, 182, 185n. 46, 209, 210, 211 Aylmer, John 184 Bacon, Lord Keeper Nicholas 7, 35n. 64, 178–9 on education at the Inns of Court 64 on the magistracy 51, 59, 61, 62–7, 69, 112, 204, 216, 221 Baker, J. H. 24n. 2, 25, 31, 32–3, 39 ‘Baldness Better than Bushy Hair’ (Synesius) 237 Baldwin, William 46, 49n. 12, 127, 141–2 see also Mirror for Magistrates, A Barker, William 112, 231, 236 barristers 5nn. 16, 17, 12, 36–7, 60, 71, 224, 229 education of 25, 26n. 13, 30–1, 224 Bavand, William 42, 46, 49, 68, 69 Good Ordering of a Commonweal 8, 47, 52, 66, 67nn. 106, 107, 107, 232 Benchers 30, 35–6, 58, 71 Beverley, Peter 233 Beware the Cat (Baldwin) 142–3 Billingsley, Henry 117, 237 Bishop, J. David 157 Blague, Thomas 236 Blundeston, Laurence 85, 87–8 Blundeville, Thomas 46, 47, 49, 53, 65, 112, 119n. 86, 152n. 11, 228, 232, 236 Boccaccio, Giovanni (De casibus virorum illustrium) 128–33, 143, 173 Boke Named the Governour (Elyot) 54, 58, 62, 78–9 Book of the Courtier (Castiglione) 115 book trade 108 Bourdieu, Pierre 32, 217see also habitus Boutcher, Warren 102, 104, 115n. 71 Braden, Gordon 151n. 7, 169 Breton, Nicholas 48, 234 Broke, Arthur 232 Brooks, Christopher 9n. 30, 56, 58–9 Buck, George 27 Budra, Paul 145 Caesar (Gallic Wars) 120, 236 Caillois, Roger 217 Calder, William 157 Calvin, John 47, 68, 107n. 32, 108, 110, 231 Cambridge Connection, The (Hudson) 61 case-study approach 19 Page 2 of 15

Index Castle of Memory (Gratarolo) 233 Cato 236 Cecil, William (Lord Burghley) 7, 33, 35n. 64, 48n. 7, 61, 63, 108, 192 on admissions to Inns of Court 71 as dedicatee 65, 118 as secretary 182n. 32 censorship 144, 187, 226 (p.264) Certain Works of Galen (Galen) 236 Charlton, S. B. 169–70 Christmas revels 38, 42, 69, 174, 208 Gorboduc’s performance 176–81 Chronicles of England, The 179–80 Churchyard, Thomas 42, 120, 231, 235 Cicero 58, 65, 66, 68 translations of 47, 99, 106–19, 121, 154, 232, 233, 235 civic duty 7, 56, 58, 203, 221–2 and humanism 53, 78–81 and translations 108–13see also commonweal civil lawyers 31n. 31 Clement’s Inn 23, 26 Closet of Counsels (trans. by Elviden) 236 Coke, Edward 27 Colie, Rosalie 13n. 41, 14 Comedy of Errors 197, 202 commonweal 2, 7, 8, 50, 52–5, 72–3, 187, 229 and law 58–9, 67, 68, 146, 148 leaders of 61–9 and translations 100, 108, 124 Commonwealth of England, The (Smith) 62 community and answer poetry 84–90 and corporate culture 7, 23–4, 32–6, 93 and friendship 90–3 literary-political 127–8, 147–8, 196, 218–19 socialization through poetry 97–8 tensions 36–40 Conley, C. H. 48n. 7, 105n. 23 contract law cases 5 Cormack, Bradin 9n. 29, 10n. 31, 30n. 28, 197 courtier poets 44 Courtop, Richard 231 ‘Curing of Wounds, The’ (Galen) 236 Damon and Pythias (Edwards) 233 Davies, Sir John 37, 38 Day, John (Law-Tricks) 215 De Amicitia (Cicero) 235 De Beneficiis (Seneca) 235 De casibus virorum illustrium (Boccaccio) 128–33, 143, 173 De Educatione Puerorum (Plutarch) 236 Page 3 of 15

Index De republica bene instituenda (Ferrarius) 47, 66 De Senectute (Cicero) 235 De Tristibus (Ovid) 120, 231 dedications 26, 43, 44, 65, 66, 118, 130–1, 163, 165, 169 Demosthenes 113, 118, 120, 236 Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes (Laurent) 128 D’Ewes, Simonds 31 Dial of Princes (de Guevara) 46, 49, 53, 67, 107, 231 Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (Starkey) 54, 80n. 22 ‘Diana/Pallas’ 194, 197–8, 202 Dickens, Charles 41 didacticism 43, 79, 82–4, 106n. 29, 128 168, 175 Dimock, Wai Chee 14 Diodorus, Siculus 236 Dionysius, Periegetes 237 Discouerie of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is Like to be Swallowed by Another French Marriage, The (Stubbe) 226–7, 229, 232 Distichs of Cato (trans. by Anon) 236 Doctor and Student (St. Germain) 34, 215 Dolman, John 47, 107, 109–10, 114, 118, 127, 159, 232, 235 Donne, John (‘Satyre II’) 10, 31–2 Doran, Susan 185n. 46, 199 drama 6, 9, 41, 43 adaptation of 149–55, 165–6, 169, 179–80, 187 deliberately apolitical 210–12 didactic function 4, 15, 43 and politics 1–2, 4, 8, 14–15, 154–60, 163–4, 168–70, 173–6, 195–6, 216 Drant, Thomas 95, 103, 121–2, 236 Dunn, Kevin 182n. 35, 185n. 47, 187 Durham School 78, 97 early modernity 18–19, 229 Eclogues (Virgil) 106n. 29, 120, 232 Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets (Googe) 81–9, 232 answer poems 90–3 education and career advancement 30–2, 55–6 humanist 50, 53–5, 78–80 recommended reforms 64 through translations 119, 121 trends at Inns 70–1 value of 51–2see also Inns of Court Education of Cyrus (Xenophon) 112, 231, 236 Edwards, A. S. G. 131 Edwards, Richard 233 Elements (Galen) 236 Elements of Geometry (Euclid) 100, 117, 237 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 1 censorship of plays 187, 226 counsel to 4, 63, 179–81, 188, 196, 201–2, 227 Page 4 of 15

Index dedicated works 118, 163 on virtue 221 Ellis, Jim 5, 141n. 47 Elviden, E. 236 Elyot, Thomas (Boke Named the Governour) 54, 58, 62, 78–9 employment, demand for 56–61 Enemy of Idleness (trans. by Fulwood) 233 Enterline, Lynn 122 Epictetus 236 (p.265) Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets (Tuberville) 86, 90–4, 232 Essays (Montaigne) 116–17 Euclid (Elements of Geometry) 100, 117, 237 Eunapius 237 Euripides Phoenissae as Jocasta 15, 47, 170, 173–4, 191, 205, 236 The Trojan Women 160 Eutropius 106, 107, 112–13, 233, 236 Evans, Lewis 236 Every Man Out of His Humour (Jonson) 26, 39 eyewitness accounts 175–6, 189, 191 Fall of Princes (Lydgate) 128–9, 131–2, 137, 159 Ferrarius, Johannes 47, 66, 232 Ferrers, George 68n. 111, 127, 128, 147, 148 Fleming, Abraham 91, 236, 237 Fleming, Arthur 120 Florio, John 116–17 Flowers of Philosophy (Plat) 7, 48, 233 Forrest, Thomas 236 Fortescue, Sir John 33, 34, 43, 44–5, 215 Fraunce, Abraham 33–4 Frow, John 13n. 43, 104 Fuchs, Barbara 13 Fulwood, William 233 Gaggero, Christopher 79 Galen 236 Gale, Thomas 111n. 54, 236 Gallic Wars (Caesar) 120, 237 Gascoigne, George 6, 15, 48, 65, 85, 152, 234 Glass of Government 78, 79, 95, 204 Jocasta 47, 173–4, 205–8, 231, 236 ‘sundry themes’ 94–7, 231 Supposes 202–5, 231 Gathercole, Patricia May 131 Geller, Sherri 129n. 9, 144 Genre 5, 220 alterations of 129–33, 141 as analytical category 13–16 and generic system 14–15 and legal profession 11–12 Page 5 of 15

Index and literary culture 5, 13–15, 41–3, 48, 73 pastoral 81–4 and political discourse 129, 143–6, 229 as school exercises 78–80see also drama; poetry; translations Gessner, Conrad (New Jewel of Health) 116 Gifford, Humphrey 233 Gilby, Goddred 47, 110–11, 112, 117, 120–1, 232, 235 Gillespie, Stuart 104n. 19, 105 Gismond of Salerne (Hatton, Wilmot, Noel, et al.) 151, 197, 208–12 Glass of Government (Gascoigne) 78, 79, 95, 204 Goddard, William 44 Golden Ass, The (Apuleius) 236 Golding, Arthur 7, 48, 107n. 34, 234 translations by 112, 113, 118, 120, 122, 235, 236 Good Ordering of a Commonweal (Bavand) 8, 47, 52, 66, 67nn. 106, 107, 107, 232 Googe, Barnabe 18, 26, 47, 53, 56, 65, 106n. 29, 228, 232 answer poetry 90–3 Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets 81–9 Zodiac of Life 47, 53, 65, 232 Googe, Robert 55 Gorboduc (Norton and Sackville) 2, 11, 43, 51, 53, 127, 151, 170, 173–6, 196, 231, 232 and counselling 181–5, 187–9, 191–2 political commentary in 179–81, 193–5, 198, 212 reception of 189–92 staging of 185–7, 238 Gray’s Inn 1–2, 4, 12, 40, 70, 222, 224 education at 27, 30, 37 location 24–5 poems for members 85, 94–5 revels at 178n. 21, 197 Gresham, Stephen 142 Guevara, Antonio de 46, 49, 53, 67, 107, 231 Guttierrez, Nancy 142–3 Habermas, Jürgen 16, 17n. 60, 123see also public sphere habitus 32 and education 55 at the Inns 35–6, 39, 196 and literary works 98, 218, 225 and virtue 222see also Bourdieu, Pierre Hake, Edward 233 Hall, Arthur 99n. 5, 232, 236 Hall, Joseph 35 Hampton, Timothy 14 Hart, E. F. 85, 88 Harvey, Gabriel 173 Hatcher, O. L. 119 Hatton, Christopher 47, 208, 232 Haward, Nicholas 107, 112–13, 154n. 18, 233, 235, 236 Hawes, James 221 Page 6 of 15

Index Helgerson, Richard 4, 14n. 51, 15n. 55, 79 Heliodorus 236 Henry IV, Part 2 (Shakespeare) 23, 26, 38 Henry VI, Part 2 (Shakespeare) 58, 219–20 Hercules Furens (Seneca) 47, 157, 164, 231, 235 Hercules Oetaeus (attrib. Seneca) 150, 159n. 46, 233, 235 Herington, C. J. 155 Heroides (Ovid) 99, 232, 235 Hexter, J. H. 70, 80n. 22 (p.266) Heywood, Jasper 47, 50, 53, 66, 107, 127, 168, 234 ‘Minerva’s men’ 46, 48–9, 53, 54, 69 translations by 107, 150, 152, 153, 154, 159–65, 200, 231, 235 Hill, Thomas 237 Hippolytus (Seneca) 150n. 4, 159n. 46, 233, 235 History of the Roman Commonwealth (Eutropius) 112–13 History of the Roman Empire (Polybius) 106, 112, 236 History of Trogus Pompeius (Justinus) 112 Hobbs, Mary 85 Hoby, Thomas 54, 115–16, 121, 122, 232 Homer (Iliad) 99n. 5, 232, 236 Horace 99, 103, 114, 121–2, 236 Howard, Jean 13, 170 Howell, Thomas 48, 106n. 30, 234 Hubbard, William 233 Hudson, Winthrop 61 Hughes, Thomas 17 Huizinga, Johan 217–18 humanist education 14, 50 and civic values 7, 52–5, 66n. 102, 78–81, 108, 123–4, 131n. 17 and politics 61–2, 65 Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (Gascoigne) 85, 94–7, 231 Hunter, G. K. 80, 149n. 2 Hutson, Lorna 9n. 29, 10, 203–4, 224 identity, communal 7, 11–12, 19, 24, 32–3, 93, 97–8 and language 33–4 and religious tolerance 35–6, 48 Iliad (Homer) 99n. 5, 232, 236 Imitation of Christ (trans. by Hake) 233 Inglis, Fred 95 Inner Temple 38, 41, 69, 222 conflict with the Middle Temple 178–9 education at 71–2 location 24–5 plays at 2, 176–7, 185–7, 189–91, 208–12 Inns of Chancery 2, 178, 213 education at 25–6, 34, 35, 49n. 11, 71–2 Inns of Court communal culture 26–7, 32–41, 90–4, 97–8 communal tensions 36–40 Page 7 of 15

Index cost 34 dedications to 26, 44 and ‘eating law’ 32 education at 25, 30–2, 71–3 expansion of 69–71 friendship at 90–3 institutional ambition 222–4 literary culture 5–8, 9–12, 24, 41–5 location 24–5, 28–9f, 42 poetry about 25 political discourse at 143–8, 173–6, 225–9 and the public sphere 17–20 religious tolerance 35–6, 48 as a society 39–41 Institution of Christian Religion (Calvin) 47, 68, 107n. 32, 231 Institution of a Gentleman, The 54, 58, 59 Invective against Ibis (Ovid) 120, 235 Isocrates 236 Jeauneau, édouard 114 Jocasta (Euripides’ Phoenissae) 15, 47, 170, 173–4, 205–8, 231, 236 Jones, John 236 Jones, Norman 60–1, 189–90, 221, 222 Jonson, Ben 26, 37, 39 Judgement of Solomon (painting) 222–4 justices of the peace (JPs) 39, 59–60, 63, 222, 228 Justinus 118, 120, 236 Kiefer, Frederick 149n. 2, 162–3, 166 Kinwelmersh, Anthony 95, 231 Kinwelmersh, Francis 15, 95, 173–4, 205–8, 231, 236 Kyle, Chris 19 Lambarde, William 60 language English vs. classical 99 generational 4–5 law-French 33–4, 64 and rhetoric of commonweal 8 law as chain 215–16 law-French 33–4, 64 Law-Tricks (Day) 215 legal magistracy 39, 50–1, 62, 68–9, 221, 225, 226 as legal elite 71–3, 228 role in governance 129, 219 legal profession career opportunities 56–8 changes in 3–4, 8, 24, 50, 69, 220 and commonweal 58–9, 61–9 influence of literature 9–12, 72–3, 220–5 tiers of 25, 26n. 9, 49n. 11, 71–2, 224 training 25, 36–7, 49n. 11 Page 8 of 15

Index and virtue 220–1 Legh, Gerard 42, 48, 58, 69, 178n. 19, 216 Life and Death of Mr. John Calvin (de Beza) 226, 232 Life of the LXXth Archbishop of Canterbury (trans. by Stubbe) 226, 232 Lincoln’s Inn 70, 222 location 24–5 moots on the succession 175n. 10, 192, 196, 198–202 literary culture 3, 5–8, 23, 41–5, 48, 50, 71, 220–5 decline of 219 (p.267) dedications 26, 43, 44, 65, 66, 118, 130–1, 163, 165, 169 and friendship 90–3 genres 5, 13–15, 73 influence on legal profession 3–4, 9–12, 73 non-Inn writers 234 and politics 17–18, 225–9 literary careers 15, 84, 102, 155 literary generations 4–6, 15 Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Manley) 15 litigation rates, rise of 7, 9n. 30, 51, 56–7, 72, 216, 220 Lives of the Philosophers (Eunapius) 237 Lives (Plutarch) 47, 100, 118, 122, 228, 231, 236, 237 Lodge, Thomas 26, 43 Lort, Roger 44 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare) 52 Lucas, Scott 130n. 10, 138, 140–1, 144, 146 Lydgate, John (Fall of Princes) 128–9, 131–3, 137, 143, 159 lyric poetry 14 answer poetry 84–90 characteristics of 15, 79–80 and friendship 90–3 and humanism 77–80, 97–8 and parody 94–7 pastoral 81–4 Machyn, Henry 36, 40, 179 magistracy advice to 15, 51, 112–13, 128, 137, 146–8 criticism of 110–11 legal integrity of 203–5 and virtue 221–2see also legal magistracy; Mirror for Magistrates, A Manley, Lawrence 13, 15, 89n. 62 Mantuan, Baptista Spagnolo 81, 83, 232 Manual of Epictetus (Epictetus) 111–12, 118, 236 manuscript verse 77–8, 160n. 47, 219 answer poetry 84–90, 92–3 as school exercises 78–80see also printing Marotti, Arthur 5, 85, 88 marriage politics ‘Diana/Pallas’ 197–8 Pound’s orations on 198–202see also succession issue Page 9 of 15

Index Martial Policy (Vegetius) 117, 233, 237 Mary, Queen of Scots (succession issue) 36, 180, 192, 195–6, 202 masques 5, 41, 215 on marriage 174, 191, 194, 197–202 Matthiessen, F. O. 113 May, Steven 44 McKenzie, D. F. 134 Mears, Natalie 16n. 58, 226n. 45, 227n. 49, 228, 229n. 55 Medea (Seneca) 103, 157, 233, 235 Medicinable Moral, The (Drant) 103, 121 Melville, Herman 41 members of the Inns and communal tensions 36–40 corporate culture 32–6 demographic growth 69–70 education of 25, 27, 30–2 friendship between 90–3 garments 213–15 and prostitutes 40 and riots 40 Memorial of all Suche Princes 128n. 4, 133n. 23, 135f see alsoMirror for Magistrates, A Metamorphoses (Ovid) 120, 122, 233, 235 Middle Temple 24, 36, 41, 70, 222, 224 communal culture 37–8, 40 conflict with the Inner Temple 178–9 Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare) 122 Mirror for Magistrates, A (Baldwin) 47, 52–3, 82–3, 127–8, 136f adaptations of De Casibus 130–3 conversational feature 133–41 counselling function 146–8 influence on translations of Seneca 158–9 and political discourse 143–6, 173–4, 188–9 purpose of 128–9, 146 Misfortunes of Arthur, The 8, 17 prologue 1–2, 4, 12, 224 monarchy dedicated works 118, 163 political counsel to 4, 63, 179–81, 188, 196, 201–2, 227 succession debates 170, 175–7, 179–88, 191–7, 202, 205–10 Montaigne, Michel de (Essays) 116–17 moots 11, 30, 33 on the succession issue 192, 196, 202 moralization and law 58 through poetry 79, 82, 83–4, 88, 90 through translations 106, 112, 113, 120, 164–8 Mukherji, Subha 9n. 29, 10 mythological references 120, 188, 197–202 Page 10 of 15

Index Nashe, Thomas 149, 170 Natural History (Pliny) 111, 237 Naylor, William 213–16, 221 Neville, Alexander 86–7, 96, 102n. 13 classical translations by 112, 150, 152, 153, 158, 159–60, 164–9, 206, 233, 235 New Historicism 13, 101, 218 New Jewel of Health (Gessner) 116 New Sonnets and Pretty Pamphlets (Howell) 48, 234 Newton, Thomas 118–19, 150, 233, 235, 237 North, Thomas 46–7, 228 translations by 53, 107, 118, 122, 231, 237 (p.268) Norton, Thomas 18, 67–8, 120, 190, 216, 221, 228, 231see also Gorboduc Nuce, Thomas 150, 152, 153, 157–8, 169, 235 Octavia (attrib. Seneca) 150, 152, 157–8, 169, 235 Oedipus (Seneca), translation of 112, 153, 158, 233, 235 as moral and political counsel 164–9, 189 Of Councils and Counsellors (Blundeville) 123, 232 ‘Of Money’ (Googe) 90–1 Oneirocritica (Artemidorus) 237 orations on marriage 198–203 translations of 113, 120 Orations of Arsanes Agaynst Philip the Trecherous Kyng of Macedone (Justinus) 47, 107n. 32, 120, 231, 236 Orchestra, a Poem of Dancing (Davies) 38 Ovid, translation of 106, 113, 120, 122, 154, 232, 233, 235 Ovidian epyllia 5, 42–3 Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama 6 Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature 6 paintings 213, 214f, 221–4 Palingenius, Marcellus 47, 232 Panofsky, Richard J. 80 Panoply of Epistles (trans. by Fleming) Paradise of Dainty Devises (Edwards) 233 Paradoxa Stoicorum (Cicero) 118–19, 235 Parnassus plays 51–2 Parker, William 233 pastoral poetry 81–4 patrons 32, 55, 61, 105n. 23, 117 committing works 131–2 Patterson, Annabel 144, 163 Pearsall, Derek 131 Peend, Thomas 107, 120, 233, 235 Peltonen, Markku 17n. 60, 123, 227n. 47, 229 Perfect Looking Glass, A (trans. by Forrest) Perry, Curtis 209 Peterson, Donald L. 91 Phaedra (Seneca) 162 Phaer, Thomas 65n. 95, 102, 104, 118, 235, 236 Page 11 of 15

Index Philosopher’s Game (Lever) 233 Philosophy of Doni 231 Pincombe, Mike 7, 138, 142n. 48, 181n. 31, 189 Plain Path to Perfect Virtue (trans. by Turberville) 232 Plat, Hugh 7, 48, 233, 234 Plato 52, 146, 215 play  definition of 217, 218 poetry as 1–2 relationship to cultural change 217–20 relationship to legal and literary trends 220 relationship to work 217 Pliny (Natural History) 111, 237 Plowden, Edmund 36, 175n. 10, 191, 196 Plutarch, translations of 47, 53, 100, 112, 118, 119n. 86, 122, 228, 231, 232, 235, 236, 237 poetry as advice 132 as communication 14, 84–90 dedication of 26, 43, 44, 81 functions of 2, 12 on the Inns’ architecture 25 see also lyric poetry politics and ambition 193–5, 208 avoidance of 205–8, 211–12 and criticism of autocracy 209–11 and the integrity of magistracy 203–5 and law 5 and literary plays 225–9 neutralized through humour 198–202 political culture 1–2, 4–5, 7–8, 12, 17–19 political discourse 129, 143–6, 173–6, 179–85, 187–9, 191–2, 225–9 and Senecan tragedies 154–60, 163–4, 168–70 and translations 123–4 Polybius 106, 107, 112, 237 Popish Kingdom or Reign of Antichrist (Googe) 232 Posie of Gilloflowers, A (Gifford) 233 Pound, Thomas 48 orations on marriage 174, 191, 198–202, 232 prefaces 85, 142 to The Misfortunes of Arthur 1–2, 4, 12, 224 to translations 46, 50, 107, 115–17, 119–20, 152, 153, 158, 159, 234 Prest, Wilfrid 3, 10, 12, 26n. 9, 37, 43, 222 printing 85, 100, 108, 113see also manuscript verse professional careers and commonweal rhetoric 58–9 and education 30–1, 32 as translators 100, 107–8, 110, 169 prose frame (in A Mirror for Magistrates) 128–9, 133–4, 138–9, 141, 143 Page 12 of 15

Index prosopography 49–50, 105 Prothalamion (Spenser) 41 public sphere 16–20, 228 Puttenham, George 231 Raffield, Paul 12–13n. 40, 68 Randolph, Thomas 77n. 3 readings 30 calendar of 31 as educational exercises 32, 64 influence on Gorboduc 11n. 38, 176 recorders 60 (p.269) Register of Histories (Aelian) 237 religion 25, 66, 83 debates on 103 tolerance 35–6, 48 revelling 38–9, 44 Christmas revels 42, 69, 174, 176–81 Rhodes, Neil 103, 119 Richards, Jennifer 89, 93 romance, criticism of 81–4, 86, 93 Roman History (Appian) 106, 237 Romeus and Juliet (Broke’s translation) 232 Roo, John 187 Sackville, Thomas 107n. 32, 109, 151, 188–9, 228, 232 see also Gorboduc Sadler, John 117, 233, 237 Sandford, James 111–12, 118, 235, 236 Satires (Horace) 236 ‘Satyre II’ (Donne) 10, 31–2 Schirmer, Walter 130, 131 School of Wise Conceits (trans. by Blague) Schoolmaster (Ascham) 79 Senecan tragedy 2, 17, 43 and the pastoral genre 82–3 and politics 154–60, 169–70, 209–10 translations of 46–7, 50, 103, 107, 111, 112, 149–54, 157–60, 160–3, 164–9, 231, 233, 235 serjeants-at-law 30, 31, 59, 228 Seymour, Edward 138, 142n. 48, 209 Shakespeare, William 170 Henry IV, Part 2 23, 26, 38 Henry VI, Part 2 58, 219–20 Love’s Labour’s Lost 52 Midsummer Night’s Dream 122 Shallow, Robert 23, 26, 38, 40 Shannon, Laurie 8, 89, 97, 123n. 100 Sheidley, William 91 Ship of Safeguard (Googe) 84, 232 ‘Shore’s Wife’ (Churchyard) 147, 231 Shrank, Cathy 7, 89, 93, 176n. 14 Page 13 of 15

Index Sidney, Sir Philip 88, 189 Skura, Meredith 129n. 9, 138 Slack, Paul 8 Slade v. Morley (1596–1602) 5 Smith, Bruce 166, 167 Smith, Thomas (The Commonwealth of England ) 62 society definition of 40 as term for Inns of Court 39–41 Somnium Scipionis (Cicero) 235 Spenser, Edmund 41, 81, 115 Staple Inn 26 Starkey, Thomas (Dialogue between Pole and Lupset) 54, 80n. 22 Staunford, William 65–6 Stawell, Ralph 77 St. Germain, Christopher (Doctor and Student) 34, 215 Stubbe[s], John 226–7, 229, 232 Studley, John 18, 47, 107, 160 translations by 103, 111, 150, 152, 153, 169, 233, 235 succession issue 170, 175–7, 179–88, 191–2, 202, 205–10 and institutional ambition 193–7 Successors of Alexander the Great (Diodorus) 236 Sullivan, J. P. 155, 157 Supposes (Gascoigne) 202–5 Survey of the World (Dionysius) 237 Sweet Nosegay (Whitney) 7, 48, 234 Synesius 237 Tenne Tragedies (Newton) 150, 233, 235 tensions, communal at Inns of Court 36–40 Thebais (Seneca) 235 Three Moral Treatises (Plutarch) 112, 232, 235 Thyestes (Seneca) 231, 235 political issues in 155–7, 164, 209–10 preface to 46, 50, 107, 152, 153, 159, 234 Tottel’s Miscellany 50n. 15, 231 ‘Tragedy of Hastings’ (Dolman) 109, 127, 232 training see education translations 46–7, 49–50, 53–4, 66–7, 73, 99–100 as a civic duty 108–13 and Elizabethan literature 121–2 as a genre 100–6 import of cultural authority 113–17 and politics 123–4, 169–70 readership 117–21 of Seneca 46–7, 50, 103, 107, 111, 112, 149–53, 157–60see also adaptations Treatise of Moral Philosophy, A (Baldwin) 142 Treatise on Play (Harington) 218 Tristia (Ovid) 235 Triumph of Peace, The 215 Page 14 of 15

Index Troas (Seneca) 50, 150, 153, 159, 160–3, 164, 166, 168, 231, 235 Trogus, Pompeius 231 Trojan Women, The (Euripides) 160 Trotte, Nicholas 11 Turberville, George 18, 47, 54, 228 Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets 86, 90–4, 232 and translations 83–4, 99, 106, 121–2, 235 Tusculan Disputations (Cicero) 47, 99, 107, 109–10, 113, 114, 115–16, 118, 127, 232, 235 Twyne, Thomas 90, 107, 236, 237 Underdown[e], Thomas 120, 235, 236 utter barristers see barristers (p.270) Vaughn, John (233) Vegetius (Martial Policy) 117, 233, 237 Virgil 81, 84 Aeneid 102, 104, 113, 118, 235–6 Eclogues 106n. 29, 120, 236 virtue, praise of 54, 66, 87, 120, 127, 128, 130, 141, 211, 221–2 Wall, Wendy 88–9 Ward, Allyna 205–6 Watson, Christopher 107, 112, 236 Whitehall, performances at 173, 191, 197–8, 227 Whitney, Isabella (Sweet Nosegay) 7, 48, 234 Wilson, Thomas 33, 113, 116, 118, 120, 236 Withington, Phil 8n. 25, 17n. 61, 18–19, 40n. 93, 124, 228n. 52 women absence of 89, 93, 147 praise of 205–6, 211 writers 7, 48, 234 Xenophon (Education of Cyrus) 112, 236 Yelverton, Christopher 31, 37, 42n. 101, 47, 59, 216, 228, 231 on ambition 15, 194, 207–8 Zodiac of Life (Googe) 47, 53, 65, 232

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