Alright, on to our next resource. Or rather, two resources that go hand-in-hand with one another. Today I would like to turn to the homosocial bond aspect of my research topic. And for that, I would recommend looking at two primary sources, from the early modern English period: Michel de Montaigne's essay "Of Friendship" and Francis Bacon's essay "Of Friendship" (their titling is quite original, no?). Michel de Montaigne was a French essayist writing during the middle-late 1500s, and Francis Bacon was a... well, hm... he did many things, one of which was write essays, which he did during the late 1500s and early 1600s. Their respective "Of Friendship" essays both consider the male bond of friendship (and it is important to note that they were, in fact, talking exclusively about male-male friendship) and its fullness or pureness as opposed to other bonds, particularly that of marriage. While there are many points made in each essay, there is one passage from each of these essays that I have found to be of particular importance.
First, from Bacon:
"A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce. We know diseases of stoppings, and suffocations, are the most dangerous in the body; and it is not much otherwise in the mind; you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flowers of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart, but a true friend; to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession."
Bacon here describes friendship in a very medical sense. Diseases plague the body, but the mind may also become diseased if a man does not have someone to whom he may open his heart and share all his feelings. And this person, as Bacon asserts, is a male friend. This casts the male friendship in a very important, almost necessary, light, a notion which is reinforced with Bacon's closing lines: "I have given the rule, where a man cannot fitly play his own part; if he have not a friend, he may quit the stage."
Second, from Montaigne:
"Concerning marriage, besides that it is a covenant which hath nothing free but the entrance, the continuance being forced and constrained, depending else-where than from our will, and a match ordinarily concluded to other ends: A thousand strange knots are therein commonly to be unknit, able to break the web, and trouble the whole course of a lively affection; whereas in friendship there is no commerce or busines depending on the same, but it selfe. Seeing (to speake truly) that the ordinary sufficiency of women cannot answer this conference and communication, the nurse of this sacred bond: nor seeme their mindes strong enough to endure the pulling of a knot so hard, so fast, and durable. And truly, if without that, such a genuine and voluntarie acquaintance might be contracted, where not only mindes had this entire jovissance, but also bodies, a share of the alliance, and where a man might wholly be engaged: It is certaine, that friendship would thereby be more compleat and full: But this sex could never yet by any example attaine unto it, and is by ancient schooles rejected thence."
My interest in Montaigne is that he compares the bond of friendship with the bond of marriage. Not only is friendship a pure bond which does not require work to maintain and which is difficult to destroy, but it is also a greater bond than marriage, which is a much weaker bond, requiring work and which may come undone with ordinary stresses. If we were to turn back to Bacon and look at his essay "Of Marriage and Single Life," we could determine a similar devaluing of marriage.
Male friendship was an important aspect of early modern English society, and these two essays, as far as I have seen, tend to be two of the most essential in discussing this topic. As such, if you are at all interested in this aspect, I would recommend that you definitely read these two essays in their entirety to get a better sense of what male friendship at the time was about and how it was viewed.
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