Research Topic: Homosociality and Marital Anxiety in Renaissance Literature

We have discussed, briefly, the homosocial relationship between Arden and Franklin in Arden of Faversham. It interests me greatly that, though he suspects that Alice is cheating on him, Arden nonetheless seems content to spend his time with Franklin and leave Alice to her own devices. Further on this point, though Arden initially expresses outrage at Mosby for pursuing Alice behind his back (or at least, this is what he suspects), Arden nevertheless believes Mosby when he tells Arden that he is not (even though he is). Further, Arden mentions that he once saw Mosby with Arden's own wedding ring, though he does not act on this knowledge.

For my research, I would like to explore how homosocial relationships interact with heterosexual marriages in early modern English drama. While the focus of my paper will of course be Arden of Faversham, I think that it would also be prudent to pull in Shakespeare's Othello as well, since both plays are closely related: the titular characters of both plays show that they are pressured by societal concerns (social status in Arden's case, racism [and thus also social status] in Othello's); both characters demonstrate a close, homosocial bond within the play (Arden with Franklin, Othello with Cassio); and both plays end in tragedy/domestic violence. While the circumstances are different between the two plays, close homosocial bonds and innate trust in this bond facilitates a show of domestic violence. Also, while Arden of Faversham is based on historical events and is thus somewhat difficult to critique, Franklin is an addition by the anonymous author. This addition of Franklin seems to call for the need to analyze his function within the text.

Some primary sources on the topic include:

Bacon, Francis. "Of Friendship." The Essays of Francis Bacon. Forgotten Books, 2008. Google Books. Web. 20 Oct. 2011.

Brathwait, Richard. The English Gentleman.

Montaigne, Michel de. "Of Friendship." Montaigne’s Essays, in Three Books. Trans. Charles Cotton. London: n.p., 1743. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Web. 30 Apr. 2011.

**All three of these sources discuss, to some extent or another, homosociality/male friendship within the context of the early modern time period. As this is a central aspect of my topic, I think these would make great primary sources from which to draw in writing my paper.

Some related secondary sources include:

Bach, Rebecca A. Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature Before Heterosexuality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.

Boose, Lynda. “Othello’s Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love.’” Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Othello. Ed. Anthony Gerard Barthelemy. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. 55-67. Print.

Danson, Lawrence. “‘The Catastrophe is a Nuptial’: The Space of Masculine Desire in Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production. Ed. Stanley Wells. Vol. 46.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 69-80. Print.

Fletcher, Anthony. Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England 1500-1800. London: Yale UP, 1995. Print.

MacFaul, Tom. Male Friendship in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

Masten, Jeffrey. Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.

Matz, Robert. “Slander, Renaissance Discourses of Sodomy, and Othello.” ELH 66.2 (1999): 261-276. Print.

Österberg, Eva. Friendship and Love, Ethics and Politics: Studies in Mediaeval and Early Modern History. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010. Print.

Walker, Garthine. Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print.

**I realize that the most noticeable gap in my scholarship is that I have nothing dealing with Arden of Faversham specifically. I am finding it difficult to find sources treating this topic in this text, though the play certainly lends itself to such analysis. As I am aware that such scholarship would be greatly beneficial to my paper, I will continue to search for sources to fill this gap.

**Boose, Danson, and Matz all treat the subject of marital anxiety, male friendship, and domestic violence in Othello. Fletcher and Walker treat the subject of domestic violence in early modern England. Bach, MacFaul, Masten all treat the subject of male friendship in Renaissance literature and drama, which is no doubt be essential to my research. While I have yet to read Österberg's work, it seems that this would be a decent supplement to the works of Bach, MacFaul, and Masten.

Witch of Edmonton | On "Gender Instability" and Connections to Other Renaissance Texts

This weekend, I attended the 6th Annual Meeting in the Middle Medieval (and Renaissance) Conference at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia. And yes, I did think, "There's not really a place called Farmville," when I first saw the town in which the university was located. But there is; true fact. Anyhow, while I was there, I was able to hear a wonderful presentation by Caden John Campbell, an undergraduate at Sweet Briar College, who presented on the idea of "gender instability," particularly in The Witch of Edmonton.

Gender instability, which was (or perhaps is, I do not know how Campbell would discuss the modern world in response to this terming) the result of a conflict of gender between how one appears and how one acts, leads to the idea of monstrosity. That is, in essence, if a women appears like a woman, yet acts like a man, or if a woman has both masculine and feminine characteristics, yet looks mostly like a man and acts mostly like a woman, she is considered monstrous. In the presentation, Campbell discussed how the witch of Edmonton, Elizabeth Sawyer, appears, at first, like a woman, particularly through her dress. Campbell provided this depiction of Sawyer, noting how she wears a dress and hat typically worn by women during the time:

Yet, Campbell argued, since the heat of a man was thought to turn blood into semen, and since the devil was said to suck blood from Sawyer, Sawyer is thus acting in a masculine fashion. Also, Sawyer was described as having a teat (see bottom of p.6, The Wonderfull Discouerie of Elizabeth Sawyer), from which milk is typically drawn and thus a feminine feature. Yet the feature is also somewhat phallic by nature, and, again, was how the devil was said to suck Sawyer's blood. Thus, Campbell argued, Sawyer was both male and female, and this duality composes her gender instability and thus made her monstrous.

Now, the point of this post is not to restate Campbell's presentation. Instead, I would like to go back and explore the pieces previously mentioned in this blog to examine where we might find cases of such gender instability. The last play mentioned was Arden of Faversham. Certainly, in this play we find a woman (Alice) acting with agency. But is she acting like a man? I would argue that she transforms into a man at the end of her play, and thus transforms into Campbell's idea of the monstrous. Poison was typically a woman's weapon in cases of domestic violence during the early modern period. And this, tellingly enough, is Alice's weapon of choice for killing Arden in the beginning of the play. Yet when the poison is unsuccessful, Alice must take more drastic measures. In the end, both Black Will and Mosby stab Arden (a more masculine action), though they do not kill him. Alice then demands the knife (a phallic image in its own right) and kills Arden with it. Alice, then, while still appearing and acting as a wife (albeit an unhappy one) also acts as a man, and thus she is both man and woman at one time. And thus she becomes monstrous.

In The Duchess of Malfi we again see gender instability. The Duchess clearly looks like a woman, yet she, within the first several scenes of the play, already displays masculine behavior, as she asks Antonio to marry her, which is typically a role which is performed by men. Already then, she enters into the realm of the monstrous. But here I must admit that I am unsure if the Duchess is truly monstrous, for after this display of masculine behavior, she slips into the role of mother, bearing three children throughout the course of the play. Perhaps, then, the Duchess only lapses briefly into an instance of gender instability that is not permanent nor enough to define her as a monstrous figure, as I certainly did not consider her to be so when I read the play.

Campbell, in this presentation, noted that it was generally more acceptable for a man to act like a woman than vice versa, and thus gender instability is a term which is difficult to apply to men, if it may be done so at all. Thus I shall not comment upon Doctor Faustus, a play wherein women are suspiciously absent. I was going to say that The Faerie Queene also lacks instances of gender instability, as I cannot think of any good instances within the work off the top of my head, but it seems to me that something may be made of Duessa, though perhaps not. I will have to consider this further (when I have more time to do so).

As a final note, I would like to reiterate that Campbell's presentation was absolutely brilliant and that any mention of gender instability that I have made in this post owes much credit to Campbell for explaining the terminology and demonstrating where it might be seen within The Witch of Edmonton.

Witch of Edmonton | On Social and Domestic Affairs

It strikes me that, in several of the plays covered thus far (The Duchess of Malfi and Arden of Faversham most notably), social affairs and domestic affairs seem to play into each other quite extensively. For instance, in The Duchess of Malfi, the Duchess's brothers (though specifically Ferdinand) do not want the Duchess to remarry, since Ferdinand would benefit from her death if she had died a widow but not if she had died a married woman (since Antonio would benefit instead). Further, the Duchess seems to marry Antonio at least partly out of spite of her brothers, but regardless, she is forced to maintain secrecy about the marriage since society seems to play a major role in shaping her reputation. And in Arden of Faversham, not only does the affair between Alice and Mosby (and thus also the cuckolding of Arden) spread outside the domestic sphere and into the societal gaze, but so does the resulting series of events that eventually leads to Arden's death.

We see this intermingling of societal and domestic spheres in The Witch of Edmonton, too. Frank marries Winnifried before the opening of the play, yet Sir Arthur Clarington immediately pries into the matter, noting that Frank has "wronged thy master's house basely and lewdly" (1.1.77) by getting Winnifried pregnant. Frank's father (Old Thorney) wants Frank to marry the daughter of a wealthy yeoman, not because that's what Frank wants to do, but because that's what Old Thorney would benefit the most from. Further, when Old Thorney catches news that Frank may have married a fellow servant, he immediately berates Frank for his actions (again, because Old Thorney wanted Frank to marry Susan). And Speaking of Susan, Old Carter doesn't want Susan (his daughter) to marry Warbeck, presumably because Warbeck lacks a social status that Old Carter may benefit from, whereas Old Carter may benefit from Susan's marriage to Frank.

Though I have yet to get very far in the text, this is one thing that was immediately obvious to me. And since this is something which appears in several of the previously noted plays, I figured that it was worth mentioning. I imagine that this will continue throughout the rest of the play, too, so I hope to comment more within the next week or two.

Arden of Faversham | On Late Posts and Domestic Violence

First, two things. 1) I had this crazy notion in my head that I was not supposed to make a post the week I present in class, even though there was nothing to make me think that was the case. Not one of my better moments, that. 2) Here's a post for last week anyway, for your reading enjoyment.

So, the Arden of Feversham. I'm going to relate this to my presentation on domestic violence in early modern England, but I ask that you forgive me for not citing my sources. The books I used are all sitting in the library's stack of returns, and all I have to go off of is my presentation notes. Again, one of my less brilliant moments. Anyhow. It strikes me that I fail to see Arden as an instigator of violence in the play, while Alice obviously is. Unless, of course, you see Alice's marriage to Arden while she truly loves Mosby a justifiable reason to commit murder. Much of the domestic violence which occurred in early modern England was provoked by a woman's behavior in the household (a husband could beat his wife if she did anything that was not to his liking, and the severity of the abuse often reflected how great of an error the man thought the woman had made. And Arden certainly knows that Alice is cheating on him. He suspects it in the very beginning, and it remains, at the very least, a suspicion throughout the play. Yet Arden doesn't seem to think violence towards her. In fact, he dismisses his wife's adulterous behavior in the play's opening; when Franklin states, "It is not strange / That women will be false and wavering" (1.20-21), Arden responds, "Ay, but to dote on one as he / Is monstrous, Franklin, and intolerable" (1.22-23).

Instead, the focus of Arden's ire is Mosby. He loathes Mosby. Or rather, he loathes that his wife is cheating on him with Mosby. Yet the violence which Arden wishes upon Mosby remains contained to the domestic landscape:

And that injurious ribald that attempts

To violate my dear wife's chastity--

For dear I hold her love, as dear as heaven--

Shall on the bed which he thinks to defile

See his dissevered joints and sinews torn,

Whilst on the planchers pants his weary body.

Smeared in the channels of his lustful blood" (1.37-43)

The play is almost neat and tidy in this way. In the beginning, the potential murders are confined to the house. Arden wants to kill Mosby in the bedroom. Mosby wants to kill Arden with a poisoned painting in the house. Alice tries to kill Arden with a poisoned meal (why does Franklin carry an antidote around with him?). However, the more the murder plot spreads, the messier it gets. Greene is convinced to murder Arden, and Black Will and Shakebag are hired by Greene. And then Michael gets in on the murder schemes. And each time it spreads farther from the house and to someone new, the attempts become less neat, less precise, and in the end, everyone is caught.

Does this play condone household violence while condemning violence which spreads outside the domestic landscape? Perhaps. Certainly, Franklin seems to think, by his offhand comment about women, that a husband should exercise the right to keep his wife in line. His methods prove to be roundabout, but I cannot shake the notion that he seems to think that Arden's dismissal of his wife's guilt is a mistake. Yet as soon as the violence spreads out of the house, everything goes awry, and it enters a realm where the violence is not permitted to any extent. Hm.

Also, a side note. Alice is traditionally, in literature, a name given to adulterous, or at least openly sexually active women, no? I am thinking in particular of Chaucer's The Miller's Tale and The Wife of Bath's Prologue. There is great significance in the naming of Alice in this play, then, yes?