ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: REPRESENTATIONS OF BOOKS AND READERS IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA Brandi Kristine Adams, Doctor of Philosophy, 2018 Dissertation directed by Professor Kent Cartwright Department of English This study presents a novel approach to the history of books and reading by encouraging scholars to look beyond the archives to include the study of English Renaissance Drama to understand how early modern readers interacted with and used their books. In this dissertation, I suggest that by employing an archeology of feeling— which involves deliberate consideration of how English Renaissance dramatists represented books and reading in the theater and in print—it is possible to cultivate a deeper understanding of readers living in London during the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth centuries. My project focuses on dramatists (and other writers) with significant connections to either the universities or Inns of Court; I suggest that their theatrical representations of books and reading onstage indicate their growing anxiety over the diminishing roles and opportunities for scholars and public intellectuals. I also argue that they use the theater to advocate for themselves and their colleagues using their books and erudition through nostalgia, satiric complaint, or counsel. This anxiety about the significance of books and reading may also be the result of changing discourses in education which were moving from a humanist-centered to a more empiricist-centered framework, perhaps encouraging dramatists to question the limits and worth of their studies. Through an examination of plays that features bookish and erudite characters including those from Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594), Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (1604), The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus (1606), and John Fletcher’s The Elder Brother (1633), I articulate ways in which scholarly readers use books to confront their concerns over government, social and political changes that do not necessarily prioritize the learned. In the first chapter, I propose that characters engage in specific acts of reading to anticipate the changing course of humanism and future paths of reading; in the second chapter, I consider physical sites of reading, including the Renaissance study, in which scholars use their reading and books to define the space and themselves alongside the tumult, noise, and capitalism inherent in city life that begins to encroach upon their space of reading and writing. Finally, in the third chapter, I examine the consequences of reading in which bright, learned individuals are left without provision or preferment after a university education. Their shared reading experiences and history of attending university and then living in London create a powerful group of readers who, through books, satire, and complaint signify their potential danger to the city, the country and the monarch due to their shifting political, social, and economic views. Throughout these plays, readers vacillate between questioning and affirming the worth of their reading and books even as they continually champion the value of their literacy. REPRESENTATIONS OF BOOKS AND READERS IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA by Brandi Kristine Adams Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2018 Advisory Committee: Professor Kent Cartwright, Chair Professor Theresa Coletti Associate Professor Kimberly Coles Assistant Professor Scott Trudell Professor Franklin J. Hildy (Dean’s Representative) ©Copyright by Brandi Kristine Adams 2018 ii For my grandmother, Charlotte M. Adams, the most well-read person I will ever know. iii To beggers of Bookes My friend, you presse me very hard, my bookes of me you craue; I haue none, but in Pauls Church-yard, for mony you may haue. But why should I my coyne bestow such toyes as these to buy? I am not such a foole I trow: forsooth no more am I. Sir John Harrington from The Most Elegant and Witty Epigrams, 1618 iv Acknowledgements This project marks a return to academia—an opposite journey from many of the characters I studied in this dissertation. Unlike them, who felt alone and discontented on their paths, I have had the benefit of nothing but support, comfort, and kindness. I and this project have been the recipients of the brilliance of so many professors, mentors, and friends, both during my coursework as a graduate student and during the writing process. My acknowledgements here only show a small fraction of my gratitude for everyone’s cleverness and goodwill as well as their continued faith in my project and in me. Kent Cartwright has been my lodestar—a Polaris of insight, carefulness, sharpness, and constancy. The best parts of this work could not have existed without his wide-ranging knowledge of humanism and English Renaissance drama as well as his thoughtful attention to detail. My only hope is that one day I have the same effect on another person’s work. Theresa Coletti’s wit and her ability to instill in me a desire to become a better writer and thinker every day have been an unceasing gift. Kimberly Coles’s discerning questions about the project and her razor-sharp understanding of the politics and intellectual history of the English Renaissance will undoubtedly shape any future work I embark upon. Scott Trudell’s questions on gender and shifting masculinity in the period have been invaluable; his selflessness in agreeing to participate on the committee late in the process was nothing short of wonderful. Because of Frank Hildy’s teaching about performance and the physical structures of theaters I understand more about theater history. My first course as a graduate student was with Donna B. Hamilton; her electrifying presence and facility for making the English Renaissance come alive solidified my commitment to this field of study. Without her advice, I do not know that I would have decided to return to graduate school after so long a hiatus. Heidi Brayman- Hackel taught me about the physical structures and multiple lives of books; her undergraduate courses introduced me to this field and for that, I will always be grateful. Theodore Leinwand, David Norbrook, Sharon Achinstein, and William H. Sherman modeled excellent and compelling scholarship for me. Friends and mentors Karen Nelson and Anita Sherman have both left an indelible mark on this dissertation because of their wisdom, generosity, and sharp ideas. The comradeship of Helen Hull, Erin Sadlack, C. Bryan Love, Gillian Knoll, Meg Pearson, Emily Dagger, Megan Monserez, Jonathan Weyer, Kiki Schneider, Nicole Stevens, Malcolm Bracken, Julie Edmonds, Patrick Jenkins, Katrina LaCurts, John Dickerson, Dave Levin, Matt Lentz, Vasilios Lekakis, Bobby Bhattacharjee, Neil Spring, Tom Goldstein, Brenda K. Chick, Adelaide Findlay, and Tiffani Perry provided me with smart conversations and moments of levity that helped me to hone my arguments and enjoy the writing process. Jennifer Dix ensured that editing was neither lonely nor frustrating, and her careful reading and excellent friendship kept me focused on completing the project. Finally, I cannot thank my parents Jerry and Deborah enough for instilling in me a love of reading and curiosity about so many things in the world. They sacrificed so much of themselves to provide me with a world-class education and they have cheered me on in every endeavor. I thank them and my brother Jared for their unending support. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ............................................................................................................................................. ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................ iv List of Figures ..................................................................................................................................... vi Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 1 Beyond the Archives Chapter 1 .............................................................................................................................................27 A case for scholarly advice: Thaumaturgical acts of reading, magic books, and the university in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus Chapter 2 .............................................................................................................................................83 Physical Spaces of Reading: The English Renaissance Study in Everard Guilpin’s “Satyra Quinta” and Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix Chapter 3 ........................................................................................................................................... 141 The Consequences of Reading: Exile, Discontentment, and Disruption in The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus and John Fletcher’s The Elder Brother Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 201 “My Library was dukedom large enough”: In Search of Books and their Readers Primary Sources ............................................................................................................................... 210 from Early English Books Online Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................... 214 vi List of Figures Figure 1: Santi di Tito (1536-1603) Portrait of Niccolo Machiavelli Second half of the 16th century Polo Museale Fiorentino, Inventario 1890: Database https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli_by_ Santi_di_Tito.jpg Figure 2: Antonella da Messina Saint Jerome in His Study, about 1475 The National Gallery https://research.ng-london.org.uk/projects/exhibitions/building-the-picture/images/N- 1418-00-000029/1/0.5/0.5/0/1/ Figure 3: Joos van Cleve, Flemish, ca. 1485-1540/41 Saint Jerome in HIs Study, 1528 Princeton University Art Museum http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/32773 Figure 4: Pieter Coeke van Aelst, the elder (Flemish, 1501-1550_ Saint Jerome in His Study, ca. 1530 The Waters Art Museum, Baltimore http://art.thewalters.org/detail/35964/saint-jerome-in-his-study-2/ Figure 5: Albrecht Durer (German, Nuremberg 1471-1528) Saint Jerome in His Study, 1514 The Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/336229 Figure 6: Caravaggio St. Jerome Writing, 1606 Galleria Borghese Collection https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Saint_Jerome_in_his_study_by_Caravagg io_(Rome) vii Figure 7: Albrecht Durer (German Nuremberg 1471-1528) Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1526 Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/19.73.120/ Figure 8: Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems Silencium EEBO Figure 9: Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems Usus libri, non lectio prudentes facit (The use not the reading of a book makes people wise) EEBO Figure 10: Agostino Ramelli Book-wheel in Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine (Paris, 1588) EEBO 1 Introduction: Beyond the Archives Your bookes are Adamants and you the Iron That cleaues to them till you confound your selfe (Histrio-mastix, B4r)1 In John Marston’s play Histrio-mastix (1610), Philarchus comments upon Chrisoganus’s devotion to his studies by comparing his books to adamants—objects so attractive to him that he cannot separate from them.2 The iron in this metaphor, Chrisoganus (who may have been a satirical representation of Ben Jonson), cleaves to his books to the point of befuddlement.3 Chrisoganus entrenches himself in his study near Inns of Court and unsettles his friends who were initially interested in his studiousness but who now find his intense connection to his books increasingly peculiar. Goddesses Peace and Plenty 1 John Marston, Histrio-mastix, Or the Player Whipped (London, 1610), Early English Books Online (EEBO), Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. All citations of Histriomastix come from this edition. The play was performed in 1599 possibly at Inns of Court. (All stable URLs for copies of books obtained from Early English Books Online (identified from this point forward as EEBO) will be listed in the bibliography section. For all early books obtained through EEBO, I will identify the library holding the edition.) 2 “adamant, n. and adj.,” OED Online, accessed April 2017, Oxford University Press. At 2b, the figurative use of adamant is identified: “A person or thing which attracts people’s affections or attention;=loadstone.” Histrio-mastix is cited as an example of the use of the term to describe “a devotion to a thing.” Dr. Gillian Knoll provided a fruitful discussion on the properties of adamants by allowing me to read her unpublished essay manuscript. 3 See Roslyn L. Knutson, “Histrio-Mastix: Not by John Marston,” Studies in Philology 98, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 359-377; Philip Finkelpearl, “John Marston’s Histrio-Mastix as an Inns of Court Play: A Hypothesis,” Huntington Library Quarterly 29, no. 3 (May 1966): 223-34; Charles Cathcart, “Guilpin and the Godly Satyre,” The Review of English Studies 62, no. 253 (February 2011): 64-79. Using internal evidence and a “trendiness index,” Knutson suggests that Marston did not write the play, making the connection between Jonson and Chrisoganus unclear. Philip Finklepearl and Charles Cathcart disagree and are convinced of Marston’s authorship based partially on his familial relationship and friendship with Everard Guilpin who also wrote about Chrisoganus in an epigram in Skialeithia (1598). 2 reign, encouraging young lawyers to take advantage of the relaxed times to see popular plays and ignore their law cases. Chrisoganus instead continues to study, propelled by a desire to understand astronomy and finer points of mathematics including arithmetic, geometry, and magnitude as a part of his search for epistemic certainty: If wee haue this wee call Scientia, We must haue truth of mere necessity, For Acriueia doth not signifie, Onley a Certainty in that wee know, But certainty with all perfection. (A4v)4 Scientia, which translates to either knowledge or science, is a mathematical function of truth for Chrisoganus and is as certain for him as the air that he breathes. He is transfixed by his books of mathematics, causing his friends to dismiss him and his studies as pretentious and officious. In the end, however, as Warre and Pouerty reign, his steadfastness to his scholarly reading proves useful, and his friends acknowledge the necessity of his devotion to his work. The roles of readers such as Chrisoganus, their magnetic attraction to their books, the innumerable hours they spend in their studies, and their continued professed interest in reading and learning may not be ever-present matter in English Renaissance plays; however, several dramatists of the time including Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, John Marston, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Fletcher chose to explore these subjects, including the ways that readers understand, 4 “Aerinus,” ΛΟΓΕΙΟΝ, Perseus at University of Chicago, accessed June 7, 2018, http://logeion.uchicago.edu/index.html#aerinus. “Acriuea” could be a typesetting error for the name Aerinea/aerinus, which may be a personification of air, taken from Medieval Latin. 3 interact with, and use the books that they read. In their plays, these and other English Renaissance dramatists have unobtrusively recorded the habits, experiences, and “place(s) of reading” of early modern individuals through their engagement with classical, humanist, scientific, or magic books.5 Together, these dramatists help elucidate the roles of a “great variety of readers” from “the most able, to him that can but spell.”6 In this dissertation, I argue that readers in English Renaissance Drama— principally those with clear associations to a university or Inns of Court—adhere to their books and employ their reading in response to anxieties about the role and purpose of a humanist education in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. I examine acts of reading, including the ways scholars use books to question the ‘ends’—both the reasons for and the limits—of humanism; sites of reading, comprising physical environments in which scholars contemplate their books in relation to outside communities; and consequences of reading, featuring conditions in which shared reading experiences define social groups of readers to signify political, social, and economic shifts in behavior. In plays including Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594), Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (1604), The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus (1606), and John Fletcher’s The Elder Brother (1633), scholarly readers confront the necessity of their roles and activities in political, educational, and social 5 William Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). For Sherman, “the place of reading” includes not only the traces left behind by readers, but also “the physical place in which reading was carried out, and the cultural place of readers within the social and professional matrix” (29). 6 “To the Great Variety of Readers,” First Folio of Shakespeare’s Works, ed. John Heminge and Henry Condell (London, 1623), A3r, EEBO, Folger Shakespeare Library. 4 settings. At the same time, they vacillate between questioning and affirming the value of their reading and the books they have read. They express concern and nostalgia about their positions as public intellectuals and speculate whether they will be fully-employed, contributing members of English society. Simultaneously, scholarly readers map out the beginnings of a complex transition in the universities from a mostly humanist to an increasingly empiricist/scientific worldview. As they spend discrete moments with their books, or extended time reading and carrying them, readers in English Renaissance drama exist quietly in comparison to noticeable comedic actions, romances, spectacles, and other well-known historical moments in the same play. In Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of D. Faustus (1604), the title character of which is conceivably the most famous reader in English Renaissance drama, the chorus acknowledges the relative quiet of the play’s subject: CHORUS. Not marching now in fields of Thrasimene, Where Mars did mate the Carthaginians, Nor sporting in the dalliance of love, In courts of kings where state is overturned, Nor in the pomp of proud audacious deeds, Intends our Muse to vaunt his heavenly verse: Only this (Gentlemen) we must perform, The form of Faustus’ fortunes good or bad. (prologue, 1-8)7 While Dr. Faustus contains spectacle in its tragedy, it has neither the frenetic pacing of Tamburlaine, nor the visceral longing of Dido, Queen of Carthage, in which she 7 Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, ed. Roma Gill (New York: WW Norton, 2000). Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes taken from this edition, based on the 1604 A-text. 5 abandons all books to focus upon Aeneas: “Instead of music I will hear him speak, His looks shall be my only library” (3.1.88-89).8 In a sense, this dissertation examines the “form” of readers to understand how English Renaissance dramatists conceived of them. At times, when readers appear in plays, their activity is seemingly limited as they peruse books for the sake of a distraction—as Ophelia does in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet— or to conjure on stage to summon the devil—as Alexander does in Barnabe Barnes’ The Devil’s Charter. They interpret books and attempt to draw meaning from them, even when they do not know how to read, or they express nostalgia, confusion, and boredom through their books. Readers also interact with books in studies, libraries, and cells— physical sites of reading—and they are able to imagine and articulate the significance of that space. Perhaps most importantly, readers reflect upon the consequences of their reading and convey the impact of their books not only for themselves, but for others. Many of these moments, which could guide contemporary historians of reading, may be disregarded because they are fictive, never mentioned in historical documents. Sarah Wall-Randell has written a groundbreaking study on “immaterial” books in Renaissance literature, which challenges the need for physical material for the study of book history. She closely examines books that appear in works by Shakespeare, Wroth, Sidney, and Cervantes within the genre of Romance. She determines that these ‘books within books’ are “always dematerializing, losing the wholeness and heft, the certainty and understandability—the graspability in both the physical and cognitive senses—that seem to be the unspoken corollaries of “materiality.”9 In partial response to Wall- 8 Christopher Marlowe, Dido Queen of Carthage, in Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, ed. Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey (New York: Penguin Books, 2003). 9 Sarah Wall-Randell, The Immaterial Book: Reading and Romance in Early Modern England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 1-17, on 2. 6 Randell’s work, this study conceives of immaterial readers, ones that are both absent and present, who, ultimately, I argue, become a significant and nearly material historical resource. They are absent as they are not featured as supplements to historical work being done on their real peers, whose thoughts, marginalia, and actions have become important parts of the archives. These readers are present as they hold books on stage, or grapple with what it means to read a book. They rematerialize thanks to the very real books— many of which are still extant—that they engage with and interpret in various ways. Readers in English Renaissance drama not only handle the amorphous, capacious volumes that Wall-Randell examines, but also the real, named, humanist, scientific, poetic, and grimoire texts that were available in bookshops and libraries in the period. In Ben Jonson’s play Every Man in his Humor (1601), Matthew (a gull) and Bobadill (a city gallant) discuss purchasing and reading Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedy, which had been published in quarto for the second time in 1599:10 BOBADILL. I confess. I love a cleanly and quiet privacy, above all the tumult, and roar of fortune. What new book ha’ you there? What, ‘Go by, Hieronymo!’ MATTHEW. Ay, did you ever see it acted? Is’t not well penned? BOBADILL. Well penned? I would fain see all the poets, of these times pen such another play as that was! They’ll prate and swagger, and keep a stir 10 Ben Jonson, Every Man in his Humor, in The Roaring Girl and Other City Comedies, ed. James Knowles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Unless otherwise noted, all quotes come from this edition of the play. In 1616, the scene still worked remarkably well as The Spanish Tragedy was in its fourth edition (Q4) as Jonson’s folio was published; see also Ben Jonson, Every Man in his Humor (London, 1601), EEBO, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery; Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (London, 1599), EEBO, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. 7 of art and devices, when, as I am a gentleman, read’em, they are the most shallow, pitiful, barren fellows that live upon the face of the earth again. MATTHEW. Indeed, here are a number of fine speeches in this book. ‘O, eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears!’—There’s conceit! Fountains fraught with tears. ‘O life, no life, but lively form of death!’— Another! ‘O, world, no world, but masse of public wrongs!’—A third! ‘Confused and filled with murder, and misdeeds!—A fourth! O, the Muses! Is’t not excellent, is’t not simply the best that ever you heard, Captain? Ha? How do you like it? BOBADILL. ‘Tis good. (1.4.40-57) Through this exchange, there is evidence of readers who purchased a playbook from William White on Cow Lane in 1599, or from Paul’s Churchyard in 1615. Both Matthew and Bobadill call The Spanish Tragedy—referred to by a well-known line in the play—a book, a real material object connected to a theatrical experience in Renaissance England. Instead of dwelling on performance, the readers—however ridiculously Jonson paints them—spend time discussing its “penning,” and speeches reifying it in terms of its intrinsic worth and cultural staying power. They may not be Jonson’s idea of perfect urbane readers, but Matthew’s weighing of conceits and Bobadill’s nostalgia suggestively counter ways that Thomas Bodley “repeatedly dismisse[d] playbooks as ‘idle,’ ‘riffe raffe,’ baggage books, [invoking] a set of social anxieties…and contemporary concerns about playhouses onto playbooks,” outside of the city at Oxford University11 This 11 Heidi Brayman-Hackel, “‘Rowme’ of its own: Printed Drama in Early Libraries,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 113-130, on 117. 8 discussion between two young men in London, however fictive and humorous nevertheless challenges anxieties of older, socially conservative men living in London and Oxford, who determined the inventory of university libraries that would shape generations of readers. This small moment in Jonson’s play defies that social order and indicates a shift in the habits and reading pastimes of young men in London. While Jonson’s tone can certainly be regarded as patronizing and critical, the scene nevertheless evokes joy, revels in nostalgia, and ultimately celebrates the book- collecting habits of young men who valued a theatrical production and its printed play. This scene also works as an advertisement to purchase the play—provided it was still available in shops—in anticipation of the next theatrical production of The Spanish Tragedy.12 Whether mockingly or not, Jonson archives a specific reading experience that strongly suggests that playbooks were part of conversations about popular culture including books and the theater. This scene provides social evidence and supports historical work on the printing and publication of English Renaissance drama by Zachary Lesser, Lukas Erne, and Alan B. Farmer, among others.13 With these scenes of reading, 12 Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, “The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 56, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 1-32; Farmer and Lesser present data about the publication of printed playbooks in order to question the idea of “popularity” that Peter Blayney defined in 1997. For Blaney’s full argument about playbooks see Peter W.M. Blaney, “The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 33-50; Peter W.M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” in A New History of Early English Drama, 383- 422. Blaney compares the sales of various books including religious treatises and other books to printed drama. He concludes that as much as scholars studying drama would like for it to have been popular, printed drama did not appeal to many book purchasers. 13 Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Lukas Earne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Alan B. Farmer, “What Is Print Popularity? A Map of the Elizabethan Book Trade,” in The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England, ed. Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 19–54. Lesser and Farmer examine the statistics of playbook publication and argue that specific audiences enjoyed purchasing and reading printed plays, despite Peter W.M. Blayney’s conventional wisdom on the subject. 9 literary historians should consider exploring an archeology of feeling that may be found in playbooks alongside data concerning inventories of bookshops and print runs of “Newly corrected, amended, and enlarged…additions,” or the drama of the Stationers’ Register. Through readers in plays, historians may unearth and rediscover the excitement, frustrations, and pleasure that English Renaissance readers could derive from reading and book ownership. Combining these approaches with book history may allow for a broader understanding of readers, no matter how narrow the demographic. Many of the authors who address acts, sites, and consequences of reading in their plays were educated at Oxford and Cambridge Universities or Inns of Court and reflect various experiences of literate members of English society, such as Matthew and Bobadill in Jonson’s play.14 The dramatic settings in which many readers appear most comfortable include universities, libraries, studies, and the city of London. Renaissance dramatists understood the changing landscape and population of London while also capturing the anxieties surrounding education. Their characters then perform the frustrations encountered by university graduates in the 1590s-1610s due to a gap between their education and the labor opportunities made available to them. In order to fully articulate the growing alienation and financial insecurity that these young men experienced, dramatists used the language of humanism, new poetry compilations, and the theater to tell their stories.15 Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe and 14 George Saintsbury coined the anachronistic phrase “university wits,” which ultimately privileges playwrights based on education and creates unnecessary restrictive and artificial categories; George Saintsbury, A History of Elizabethan Literature (New York: Henry McMillan Company, 1910). 15 Laurie Ellinghausen, “University of Vice: Drink Gentility, and Masculinity in Oxford, Cambridge, and London,” in Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550-1650, ed. Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 45-65; Mark H. Curtis, 10 the anonymous author of the Parnassus Plays examine scenarios in which scholarly readers are left without suitable occupations or long-term employment. Their plays acknowledge the penury of scholars as a continual trope of reality, but they also introduce the potential for scholars to use their books and reading individually or collectively to disrupt (or at least destabilize) the political and social structures that maintain their state of underemployment. By encountering these plays, even in fantastical settings, Renaissance audiences learned that educated readers could be dangerous or subversive, assert new, unfamiliar scientific knowledge and authority, upend traditional social and religious structures, and challenge longstanding political dynasties. Through books in their plays, Renaissance dramatists also confront the social realities of being professional writers in a competitive field in London. Within their plays, and at times other genres of writing, dramatists communicated with one another, through teasing and jibes, using the language of humanist books mixed with the new pamphlets, romances, and poetry. They reinforced a mostly like-minded community of men who were influencing burgeoning popular culture and reifying a young, hip, growing intellectual and literary community in London. This crowd of intellectual urbanites created a hybrid literary language of the university and the city as they tested the limits of social acceptability in satire, epigrams, and invective. They incited small disagreements, large social feuds, and mass censorship. In the Parnassus plays, readers still in university use the same affected language of books and reading and satire to highlight their urbanity, and those same readers revert back to milder classical forms of satire to Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558-1642: An Essay on Changing Relations Between the English Universities and English Society (Oxford: Clarendon,1959); Mark H. Curtis “The Alienated Intellectuals of Early Stuart England,” Past & Present 23, no. 1 (November 1962): 25- 43. 11 question long-standing, problematic, social hierarchies that continue to exist for them despite their educations. II. In the introduction to his volume on Meaning and Representation in History, Jörn Rüssen outlines the complicated relationship between historical meaning and the way events or objects are represented in history or any historical enterprise. Nevertheless, for Rüsen, “[the relationship] is already there in the cultural preconditions of historical thinking, but it is only impending as a potential, a condition and a need for orientation.”16 Historians and literary historians are already predisposed to think about history in a multifaceted way that includes physical objects, documents and other artifactual traces left behind by individuals and groups living in the past. However, the practice of history should regard representations (whether of objects or experiences) as significantly as physical objects themselves. Component elements of the history of reading can be found in intimate details of objects and actions connected to reading that English Renaissance playwrights describe. The plays preserve moments that serve as an archive for feelings about books and the experience of reading. Materials of the archive are not always available, and they are also rarely complete. Archives, however expansive, do not contain the experiences of all people and do not fully capture zeitgeist and pockets of contemporary culture. Feminist theorists have examined these realities of the archives 16 Jörn Rüssen, “Introduction,” Meaning and Representation ed. Jörn Rüssen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 4. 12 extensively. Danielle Cooper explains how the archives (and unarchived materials) have been approached in their work: By invoking archives metaphorically within their work, queer and postcolonial feminist theorists challenge traditional archives’ limitations and construct new methodologies for legitimizing their work. These theorists are not only acknowledging archives’ inherently incomplete nature but also deliberately challenging archives’ authority as a site of knowledge retention and production. 17 There is a great need for the recognition and understanding that archival research cannot fully guide all literary historical projects pertaining to the history of reading and the history of books. Challenging the supremacy of the archives and questioning the values guiding their use in literary research opens possibilities for researchers interested non- data driven approaches to the reading lives of individuals in the period. Opening the walls of the archive expands the base of material literary historians can explore and investigate.18 Rüsen claims that history is simultaneously “incorporated into cultural life, it is a real element in human life, but at the same time, it is a task, an objective, an aim of 17 Danielle Cooper, “Imagining Something Else Entirely: Metaphorical Archives in Feminist Theory,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 45, no. 5-8 (2016): 444-56, on 445. 18 See William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Sherman incorporates literary examples in his sweeping examination of marginalia but admits that adjustments in methodology may be necessary to broaden our understanding of groups of reader; see William M. Hamlin, Montaigne’s English Journey: Reading the Essays in Shakespeare’s Day (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Hamlin writes that collating and examining groups of markings and manicules of disparate readers in search of commonality did not give him added insight to Montaigne’s readers. 13 mental activities. It is a product, a result of creative processes of the human mind.”19 He briefly considers the role of fiction and poetry within the context of the philosophy of history and concludes that these forms of human expression should be bound tightly to the work of history, which “is the course of time in the real world and, at the same time, a meaningful interpretation of this course.”20 Too often, those working in the philosophy of history have not only separated, but also harshly juxtaposed fact from fiction; this decouples terms and experiences that are often closely linked. However this dichotomy between historical fact and representational truth started, Rüsen nevertheless argues that this prevailing paradigm should not continue to be accepted. The philosophy and study of history can only become fully dimensional when both facts and fiction(s) are examined in conjunction with one another. Examining the moments in plays when characters interact with books or are constructed into scenes of reading can only deepen historical understanding from a book history or social historical perspective. The study of marginalia, notes, commonplace books and other materials often results in fascinating stories, but at the same time offers opportunities for unchecked conjecture. One could argue that literary historians bring their own fictions to the archives, hoping to find stories that may not be able to be told—or more importantly, have already been told in another, equally valid way. Rüsen’s inclusion of representational forms encourages the possibility of an inclusive, multidimensional history—one that begins to validate the stories of readers and books that these dramatists tell. Whether with intention or not, playwrights during this time continually grappled with the social structures of the world in which they were living, and readers and books help to construct that story. 19 Rüsen, “Introduction,” 2. 20 Rüsen, 3. 14 In addition, this exploration of represented forms also heeds the suggestion of James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor as they argue for the use of representation in what is considered more pragmatic historical work: More immediate evidence of the ways in which certain kinds of text were read can sometimes be gleaned from visual representations of the reading of manuscript and print. Often these were offered within the texts themselves as elaborately decorated letters and factotums, or through simple woodcuts and engraved illustrations. Influential literary portrayals of the act of reading in England first appear during the late fourteenth century. For example, Chaucer’s innovatory representations of himself as a reader, and some of the figures who appear reading in his poems, were directly imitated by several of his fifteenth-century followers, and the resonances of such reading scenes have echoed in English writing ever since. More broadly, pictorial representations range from paintings on the walls of churches to family miniatures. Implicitly, and often explicitly, readers were told by such visual and literary illustrations how to read and what to expect from their reading—but often the representation of reading was being mocked or castigated rather than idealized.21 A form that clearly embodies both the visual and literal because of its very hybrid nature, English Renaissance drama resounds with the “echoes” of reading and books. Unlike its fifteenth-century prose forerunners, it performs reading with many of its possible 21 James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor, introduction to The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13. 15 accouterments and interruptions all the while demonstrating the singular and powerful relationships that readers could have with books. Readers and books in printed drama present multiple ‘book cultures’—what it means to possess, read, and use books in larger community settings. Unlike the rigid notions of reading that Raven, Small, and Tadmor find in Chaucer, English Renaissance drama refuses to answer questions about the best way to read a book. In their collection of essays entitled Books and Readers in Early Modern England, Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer ask a straightforward, but fairly difficult question: “How do we identify and locate early modern English readers?”22 The essays in that collection purposefully limit their answers to material objects and marginalia left behind by readers and the “historicist implications of an analytical reading of these books in the particular social matrixes of early modern England where they occur.”23 The search for these readers has remained a material-historical enterprise and has now even extended into the digital realm, which includes such ambitious projects as the Archeology of Reading (AoR).24 This website offers historians of readers and books a wealth of digitally reproduced historical texts to study and showcases books with marginalia, print anomalies, or other notable markings. The AoR emulates a Renaissance book wheel— recently (but somewhat inaccurately) described as a “modern day Amazon Kindle”—that Augostino Ramelli imagined in 1587 in his opus of invention, The Various and Ingenious 22 Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, “Introduction,” Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 10. 23 Anderson and Sauer, “Introduction,” 2. 24 Earle Havens, Anthony Grafton, and Lisa Jardine, “The Archaeology of Reading,” Archaeology of Reading, Johns Hopkins University, last modified September 2016, http://archaeologyofreading.org/. 16 Machines of Augostino Ramelli.25 There is more than enough material available through the AoR and its digital bookwheel for years of intellectual inquiry. English Renaissance Drama may be regarded as a repository as valuable as the AoR—but as one that tells a story that is equally important to, yet fundamentally different from, traditional histories of reading and the book. The continued study of historical English Renaissance readers contributes to a much more comprehensive understanding of the place of reading in Renaissance culture. However, current prevailing methodology focuses on the book as a medium which, according to Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, encourages the study of “traits of communities of readers, reading traditions, and ways of reading” by focusing solely upon marginalia, physical spaces occupied by books, and the places where people chose to read and study.26 While constructing a reading tradition of the West, they have also argued that, “any history of the practice of reading is thus necessarily a history of both written objects and the testimonies left by their readers.”27 They make this argument forcefully without considering or addressing the role of representation in this type of history. Testimonies are not simply physical; the imprints of reading are manifest in art, including plays that highlight readers and their books. The actions and behaviors of readers and the types of books in English Renaissance drama are as varied as humans and archival material that historians have gone to such great lengths to understand and describe. Readers in plays range from those 25 Megan Garber, “Behold the Kindle of the 16th Century,” The Atlantic, February 27, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/behold-the-kindle-of-the-16th- century/273577/. 26 Gugliermo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, A History of Reading in the West (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 2. 27 Cavallo and Chartier, A History of Reading, 2. 17 who are university educated to those barely able to read; they are men and women; they are characters who use their own reading or others’ abilities to take social or political advantage of a host of situations. There are readers who resemble humanist scholars such as Gabriel Harvey as he is described by Lisa Jardine, Anthony Grafton, and William Sherman.28 There are also readers who experience difficult social transitions, mimicking those that took place in England during the Renaissance. Their education and an affinity for books allowed playwrights including William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson to transition from merchant classes to a burgeoning literary class of men with the ability to grapple with social transitions in the theater. Their literate audience members who had an affinity for printed poetry and theatrical performances were able to experience dramatists’ work twice—as a performance and as a printed book—solidifying the intertwined histories of the theater and books. The place at which the histories of the book and theater converge during the English Renaissance has been the subject of several notable studies, including those by Julie Stone Peters, Lukas Erne, and Patrick Cheney.29 More often than not, scholarly conversations about Renaissance theater, readers, and books remain restricted to the production of printed playbooks or to Shakespeare and other playwrights’ (or someone else’s) intent to publish their work to interested readers. This supposition about Shakespeare’s intent to publicize his work to a reading public provides a launching point for scholars including Patrick Cheney to declare that the metaphorical language of the 28 Anthon Grafton and Lisa Jardine, “‘Studied For Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past & Present 129, no. 1 (1990): 30-78. 29 Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book: 1480-1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Lukas Earne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 18 printing house and the material construction of books can be located in the same ways that the language of the theater can be applied to Shakespeare’s works: From early in his career till late, across the genres of comedy, history, tragedy, and romance, he rehearses a discourse of the book and a discourse of the theatre, and more importantly he combines the two discourses together, letting the terms book and theatre jostle in historically telling ways.30 By focusing upon the metaphors of the press, Cheney uncovers specific moments that bind theater and print culture and articulate the nuances of both. For him, Shakespeare’s use of hendiadys brings together such terms as “index and obscure prologue” in Othello to yoke together parts of Shakespeare that act in conjunction with and counter to one another.31 While the rhetorical device helps to situate the placement of the stage and the page for Shakespeare’s work, it does not necessarily hold if applied to the rest of drama produced in the period. Furthermore, Shakespeare should not have the sole responsibility of cementing the theater, reading, and books together. Other playwrights including Marlowe, Jonson, and Greene spent more time writing about material books, metaphoric books, and communities of readers. The terminology of books and reading resounds in Renaissance plays and emphasizes a history of books and readers even beyond the publishers and printers of St. Paul’s Churchyard (even as the printer John Danter, who was well-known for printing 30 Patrick Cheney, “‘An index and obscure prologue’: Books and Theatre in Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship,” in Shakespeare’s Book: Essays in Reading, Writing, and Reception, ed. Richard Meek, Jane Rickard, and Richard Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 29-58, on 31. 31 Cheney, “An index and obscure prologue,” 49. 19 plays and poems, appears as a character in the Parnassus cycle). English Renaissance playwrights provide needed insight into readers on the margins (predominantly women and occasionally people of color) and lesser known books of their time. They also examine the dynamic of reading spaces, from the very small—a study or a closet—to the very large—whether Plato’s Academy or a university—and explain how readers negotiate meaning in what Henri Lefebvre might identify as a “space of gratification.”32 Playgoers and play readers continually encountered fully-realized, complicated books and readers through metaphor and actions, alongside metaphors of the stage and the page. Often, but not always paired with readers, books in plays are centers of necromancy, metaphors for the body, and at times, characters’ closest companions. They are more than the props that were never listed in Philip Henslowe’s diaries. In Renaissance plays, books ground readers including Faustus and Hamlet to social and political landscapes not necessarily depicted onstage. In the context of the material book, Stephen Orgel has suggested, “If readers construct books, books also construct readers.”33 While Orgel uses the physical properties of a book and the markings left behind by readers to delineate that relationship, it is possible to extend his argument to include readers and books in Renaissance drama. Readers and books construct one another in plays, define each other, and at times help construct the culture that is fashioned within the play itself. Readers invoke books (and learnedness) as a marker of literacy, mastery, certainty, history, and teleology. Books define scenes and are used to describe characters 32 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991). 33 Stephen Orgel, “Afterword: Records of Culture,” in Andersen and Sauer, Books and Readers, 282-90, on 283. 20 as they arrive onstage or stand in front of an audience. Perhaps most powerfully, books permeate and affect a scene with cultural significance. In contrast, the work of most historians of books and readers begins with physical objects left behind for historians to examine and reexamine in the hopes of discovering new ways of understanding why readers collected specific reading materials, how they wrote notes to highlight what they had learned, or how authors hoped to communicate with those who chose to buy (or borrow) their books. However, in Renaissance drama, the book has many lives and purposes and exists as object and metaphor, complicating the matter. Books often appear in English Renaissance drama as a marker of the classical knowledge of a playwright or as an object to distinguish a character as a schoolboy, or a merchant, or a scholar. Very often the ‘booke’ is a bible, or a metaphor embodying religion, knowledge, or love. The transformative nature of books tells us far more than traces left behind in them; for Sarah Wall-Randell, this transformation also gives scholars a way to understand books of the period. She also notes critical disagreements among literary and social historians about the relative rates of literacy and the ability of people to access books. While these answers about the culture at large remain unresolved, there are other questions at stake: Yet, as evidence for the history of readers’ thoughts about themselves in relation to books, more important than a merely quantitative answer, I would argue, is a sense of the dynamism of the culture’s experience of reading—the pervasiveness of people’s awareness of reading as happening, as spreading, as current. If increased reading were commonly 21 understood by a society as an ongoing trend, individual members of the society would be prompted to consider their own relationships to it. 34 For Wall-Randell, romance most encapsulates this self-reflection, in part because of the transformative quality of books in the genre, which include Shakespeare’s plays Cymbeline and The Tempest. She points out that the “interaction between the individual reader and the text has multiple imaginative and affective qualities,” and that these qualities are missed with such adherence to the materiality of books when considering their role in the Renaissance.35 This orthodoxy of material culture at times prevents the very work of the literary historian—the reading of literature. Wall-Randell examines the book and all of its transformations as a function of genre and how the represented book is seemingly immaterial, but still very necessary to understanding books in a larger culture that was continually shaped by and shaping the book itself. In its various transformations and iterations, the book does seem to be an immaterial object in drama, but it is based on a very real object. One of the most consequential relationships in her work is the intimate, complicated dynamic between an individual and a book, because the book functions as a mirror of the reader. She highlights the historical relationship between privacy and reading as mapped out by Roger Chartier and the “imaginary spatial aesthetics of the book in early modern England” that could develop between a reader and a book.36 While the transformative natures of books resound in Renaissance drama, and their metaphoric qualities are in abundance in Shakespeare, this dissertation focuses on additional playwrights and their conceptions of books and readers. 34 Sarah Wall-Randell, The Immaterial Book: Reading and Romance in Early Modern England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 15. 35 Wall-Randell, The Immaterial Book, 3. 36 Wall-Randell, 4. 22 Where Wall-Randell explores the book as both a mirror of the self in the genre of romance, Charlotte Scott traces the use and idea of the book throughout Shakespeare’s plays as a “dynamic challenge of thinking and seeing.”37 For Scott, the book in Shakespeare is more metaphor than a material object, and references a range of materials that push the definition far beyond two boards that bind quires of paper together. Books can be sites of contention in many Shakespeare plays. Just as reading sparks an uncomfortable conversation between Hamlet and Polonius in Act 2.2, books in English Renaissance drama can be containers of “words, words, words,” but they are also the center of conversation asking us to “engage with the vicariousness of thought in conjunction with the vicissitudes of seeing.” 38 Robert Knapp also addresses the importance of the book in its metaphoric form in Shakespeare while also examining some of its more material uses in and appearances on stage (e.g. Tamburlaine’s destruction of the Koran, and Faustus’ use of books), and he imagines the book as metaphor for the body, mortality, fate, and industry.39 Much like Scott, Knapp examines the fluidity of the book and how it appears less as an object and more as a metaphor (“book of life”) in the library of books in Shakespeare’s plays. While these examinations of metaphor reveal much about Shakespeare’s conception of the book, they elide the diverse work of other playwrights of the English Renaissance theater, especially those who may have considered reading and books in slightly more concrete and profane ways. 37 Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 187. 38 Scott, Shakespeare and the Idea, 187. 39 Robert Knapp, Shakespeare, the Theater and the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 23 In Shakespeare, the book transmogrifies from matter to metaphor, from object to catalyst, and from mirror to a source. While books can be all of those things inside of Shakespeare’s plays, they can be more in other plays. In plays that contain universities and studies, a book’s function and definition expand and are further complicated by the playwrights who use and understand them in other ways. In fact, it is in plays beyond Shakespeare’s that some of the most provocative conversations about books take place. For Scott, the English Renaissance “book” was “adapting and moving through its cultural production and this journey was neither passive nor accidental.” 40 Rather than limit the history of the book to a mythical, omnipresent object, books in the English Renaissance theater have multiple, parallel lives and a variety of functions beyond metaphor and idea. III. In the first chapter, “A Case for Scholarly Advice: Magic Books in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus,” I argue that Robert Greene advocates for scholars, their books, and their reading as ideal political and social counselors for the health of England, its monarchy, and its universities. In order for Bacon to fulfill that role, Green transforms scholarly reading beyond the rational limits of humanism to what I call thaumaturgical, which combines humanism, magic, and science. Bacon uses his abilities not only to engage in novel scientific/magical practice, including the construction of the Brazen head, but also to establish the intellectual supremacy of England and ensure both Henry III’s and Elizabeth 40 Scott, 187. 24 I’s political legacy. Through the use of nostalgia, Greene highlights the connections Elizabeth I made with scholars in her 1564 and 1566 visits to Oxford and Cambridge University, and he demonstrates the ways that despite their imperfect natures, universities are the sites of intellectual development and change, and of scholarly work that is able to either support or destabilize a country. I then compare Greene’s play with Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus to illustrate the results of a highly literate scholar’s disconnection from his university community as well as most of his country in a search for scholarship that lies beyond the reaches of humanism. In the second chapter, “Physical Spaces of Reading: The English Renaissance Study in Everard Guilpin’s “Satyra Quinta” and Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix,” I examine representations of reading spaces—namely the study—using Everard Guilpin’s conception of the space in his satirical poem as he attempts to position this private, humanist space devoted to reading and study in the lively cityscape of 1590s London. I note that “Satrya Quinta” also tells a history of the study and its origins in Renaissance Italy that is depicted in paintings of early humanists including St. Jerome and Erasmus and was eventually built for scholars (and in miniature for students) at Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Using the work of Anne M. Myers and Henri Lefebvre, I present how Guilpin and Thomas Dekker express the capacity and limitations the study while also recording a changing history of the space. Guilpin and Dekker note that the study, while still maintaining some of its private, humanist characteristics, becomes an emergent capitalist and transactive space as poets, including Horace in Satiromastix, use the space for marketing his writing to patrons. 25 In the third chapter, “The Consequences of Reading: Exile, Discontentment, and Disruption in The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus and John Fletcher’s The Elder Brother,” I examine the ways in which a bookish subculture of university-educated young men use popular and classical books to collectively define themselves in response to a lack of social or economic opportunities available to them at the end of Elizabeth I’s reign. I argue that The Second Part of the Return recommends Juvenalian formal verse satire as an effective mode of complaint and form of counsel for young unemployed graduates. In doing so, the play itself turns into a sophisticated Juvenalian satire that is imitative of and implicitly supports books which were a part the Bishop’s Ban of 1599. In addition, in its censuring of popular books and authors and the reading habits of bookish young men, the play also obliquely responds to Thomas Nashe’s preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589, 1599) entitled “To the Gentlemen of Both Universities.” This preface, like the play, reminds audiences of the potential disruptive nature of educated, well-read “masterless” men with the potential to use their books and reading to upend political structures. The play’s treatment of books and reading as forms of counsel and complaint serves as a point of entry to John Fletcher’s mostly unexamined play, The Elder Brother (1633), in which a bookish graduate student, Charles, confronts upended primogeniture from his father and younger brother Eustace. In lieu of friends and associates gathered at universities, Charles relies on his books to establish a world unlike the Tempest, in which a scholar abandons his inheritance for a library. There are far more readers and books in English Renaissance plays than the ones that I have included in this dissertation. There are more playbook readers like Jonson’s characters in Every Man in his Humor, there are dismembered readers in Shakespeare’s 26 Titus Andronicus, and urban gallant readers in plays by Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, and John Webster. This group of plays that I have studied, however, enjoys a commonality of scholarly readers who are continually trying to negotiate a place for themselves in institutions and spaces, including the university and city, which are evolving, and may not have a place for them. These same readers document educational, social, and political changes and use books and their reading in order to define themselves in terms of each other, the spaces that they occupy, and the common languages and experiences that they share. Although I focus the role of books and readers in English Renaissance drama, I do so with the full knowledge that they are not a ubiquitous part of it. Inside of the plays themselves, books can easily and often do go unnoticed as seemingly unimportant objects that characters carry on or off the stage, place on a desk, or read for distraction. Acts and scenes of reading are muted in the face of larger spectacle, and the words, deeds, and predictions of readers often go unheeded. However, upon closer examination, it is possible to focus on the presence and authority of books along with the awareness and actions of their readers in plays. Playwrights of tragedies, but especially city and university comedies, chose to present readers and books to us much like palimpsests of vellum. The faint impressions of the reading and writing that exist are evidence of readers and their books, and it is our duty to work to unearth and recover them. 27 Chapter 1 A Case for Scholarly Advice: Thaumaturgical Acts of Reading, Magic Books, and the University in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus Therfore, because the scie[n]ce of Magike, is as a good knowledge (as it is presupposed) and is somewhat euyll in beholding ofcauses, and natural thinges, as I haue considered, & perceaued in auncient aucthors: yes and I myself, Alberte haue fou[n]d the trouth in many thinges, & I suppose the truth to be in some parte of the boke of Chirander, & of the boke of Alchorat. Albertus Magnus (13th century), The boke of secretes, printed 1560 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke, “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination,” 1962 Time Is At the start of Robert Greene’s play The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594), Rafe, the king’s fool, proposes a visit to Oxford University as the surest way to “la[y] the plot,” for Edward, Prince of Wales, to pursue Margaret, the Fair Maid of Fressingfield (1.91).1 A few lines earlier, however, Rafe appeals to a different sort of learned authority as he and other courtiers question how the prince “fell into his passions” 1 Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, in Drama of the English Renaissance I: The Tudor Period, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New York: Macmillan, 1976). All quotes are taken from this edition. See also Robert Greene, The honorable historie of frier Bacon, and frier Bongay (London, 1594), EEBO, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. 28 and has become fixated on Margaret’s physical beauty (1.19). Doubting not only Edward’s motives, but also his aesthetics, Rafe asks the prince to consider the expertise of an abbot to ensure the proper selection of the prince’s consort. According to Rafe, an abbot “hath read many books,” “hath more learning,” and has a knowledge founded in grammar, which gives him a type of authority over the prince (1.47-48).2 But after losing his argument in the face of a determinedly smitten monarch, Rafe pivots and instead praises Friar Bacon’s scholarly abilities in order to persuade the prince to enlist the Oxford academic in his cause to woo Margaret. Rafe calls Bacon a “brave scholar” and a “brave nigromancer” in order to convince Edward not only to witness but also to benefit from the friar’s knowledge and “charms of art that must enchain her love” (1.96; 1.97; 1.125). “Bacon shall by his magic do this deed,” the prince declares as he seems to accept the possible role that the scholar could have in his pursuit (1.129). However, not wishing to hang his future solely on the friar’s work, Edward both “haste[s] to Oxford,” and also orders courtier Lacy to surveil Margaret and ply her with “secret gifts” while speaking well of the prince (1.168-69). In this uncomfortable attempt to “have the maid,” Edward employs university scholars and his courtiers to achieve his romantic ends (1.104). Through his eventual partnership with the Oxford friar and scholar (who preternaturally knows that Lacy has decided to win Margaret for himself), the prince learns about the university and the desires of scholars, including Bacon, to solve a whole host of problems well beyond the prince’s worrisome pursuit of Margaret (5.108-09). Furthermore, Edward also sees that 2 Rafe’s comments about the Abbot of Warwickshire may perhaps be a historical joke about Coombe Abbey (or another group of monks), or the relative celibacy of monks, but there is still an acknowledgement of his learning, however facetious. 29 while the results of the work being done at Oxford—in this case much of it scientific and magical—are not always perfect, the scholars working there are diligent and perhaps more steadfast and partial to a prince’s causes (and by extension a king’s and nation’s causes) than some of his own royal courtiers. It is perhaps easy enough to see Rafe’s endorsement of an abbot or Friar Bacon as well as the prince’s travel to Oxford University as little more than a contrived plot device to forward what David Bevington has called “cheerful romantic nonsense,” or the traditionally comedic elements of the play.3 However, Rafe’s sustained appeal to an educated authority resolutely pushes the romance/marriage plot, along with all other aspects of the play, into the intellectual, but complicated and chaotic, political landscape of the early English university.4 The Oxford that Edward visits in the play is replete with all of the trappings associated with universities: those include bureaucracy, architectural space, academics and their students, as well as the materials and performances associated with scholarship. During the play, Oxford also becomes the center of an official royal visit, where the expectations and demands of the monarchy put additional pressure on the university community to show themselves as learned, competent readers. Not solely the 3 Quoted from David M. Bergeron, “‘Bogus History’ and Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,” Early Theater 17, no.1 (2014): 93–112, on 93. Bergeron uses Bevington’s statement concerning bogus history and romantic nonsense to begin his article in a joking challenge. Edward’s desire for Margaret and description of himself as Tarquinesque is far less cheerful than Bevington suggests (and Bergeron permits), but this subject is beyond the scope of this chapter. 4 Sarah Knight, “The Niniversity at the Bankside: Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,” The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 355-70. Knight suggests is balanced between the country and Oxford, but it remains significant that the conversations occurring in the play are mostly located at the university, or contain the social markings of a university education. The juxtaposition of the country and Oxford do certainly have an effect on the play, but there is an emphasis upon the happenings in the university as well as the authority of it. 30 domain of scholars, Greene’s version of the university exists in an interstitial space at the intersection of the private sphere(s) of scholars, their reading, and their discoveries, as well as of the public performative sphere of kings, emperors, and nations.5 It is also a space in which the philosophical, intellectual, and physical power of England is demonstrated through acts of research, discovery, and reading. Greene uses all elements of the play, but especially Friar Bacon’s books and his reading, to outline the ways that a university community profoundly affects the world outside of itself, all while operating in its own particularly insular way. By having the play be contained or viewed from Oxford, he makes both a historical and a contemporary case for the university and its scholars as the most logical place for monarchs and the larger public to receive advice from well-read intellectuals on phenomena as diverse as romance, news, civic pride, doubt, aphorisms, philosophy, marriage, magic, prognostication, and the future prosperity of England. Viewed through the quasi- historical lens that David Bergeron has argued for the play, Greene does more than cite actual historical events—including Edward’s eventual marriage to Elinor of Castille—he outlines significant, lived histories that often go unrecorded. Frank Ardolino also points to Greene’s use of historical and material figures from Oxford University that turn the play into a truly topical one that 5 On the public sphere, see Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011). While the focus of Habermas’s work is on the later part of the seventeenth century, he traces the beginnings of the public sphere from the Oikos of the Ancient Greeks to Rome and outlines how this concept of the public sphere greatly affected the development and formation of news, education, government service, the traffic of commodities, and the lives of the middle class in late Medieval and Renaissance Europe and England. 31 includes allusions to Queen Elizabeth; Anglo-Spanish relations after the defeat of the Armada; medieval and Renaissance historical people and places, and objects connected with Oxford, including the Bocardos, the prison at Oxford, Roger Bacon’s cell, and the emblematic brass door knocker of Brasenose College.6 To Ardolino’s list of objects and Bergeron’s provocative statement about unrecorded histories, I suggest that Friar Bacon’s books—magic and otherwise—be included as central parts of Greene’s intentional, yet whimsical, history of a scholar’s and university’s role in international political issues including a prince’s sexual pursuit and the performance of an intellectual ethos for a country. In this chapter, I suggest that in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Robert Greene advocates for university-trained scholars to continually perform public and private acts of reading—including public disputations and magic/scientific experiments—in service of England through the mostly judicious, but occasionally radical use of their books. By combining history and performances of reading with nostalgia, he establishes the long- standing efficacy of humanist training and the continual work of its scholars, but also promotes pressing beyond implied academic limits of humanism and its books towards a new type of reading. I call this approach to books and learning thaumaturgical reading; it combines humanism, magic, and science transhistorically to discover new meaning through the use of magic books, disputation, and the natural world. While very cognizant of the significance of humanism, thaumaturgical reading crosses multiple boundaries— 6 Frank Ardolino, “Greene’s Use of the History of Oxford in The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal Of Short Articles, Notes, And Reviews 18, no. 2 (2005): 22-26, on 22; ANQ is American Notes and Queries. . 32 including past educational practices of scholasticism—to reveal new “aphorisms” and novel technologies. For Renaissance readers in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Dr. Faustus particularly, thaumaturgical reading encourages both individual efficacy and the freedom associated with elevated rank or a change in social station. Its practice gives readers hope, but no guarantee, of achieving something that is a “bow beyond [their] reach” (Friar Bacon, 2.76). Thaumaturgical reading is inspired by Katherine Eggert’s examination of disknowledge, in which she determines that readers and thinkers in the late Renaissance in England were holding fast to unverifiable academic areas of inquiry, especially alchemy, to address the persistent hegemony of humanism in education as well as longstanding epistemological crises surrounding what one can or cannot possibly know. For Eggert, disknowledge “describes the conscious and deliberate setting aside of one compelling mode of understanding the world—one discipline, one theory—in favor of another. The state of knowing that results from disknowledge is not pure ignorance, but rather something more like what Peter Sloterdijk calls ‘enlightened false consciousness.’”7 In Eggert’s estimation, by the end of the sixteenth century, humanism had experienced a break in which scholars were acknowledging that it was no longer the most efficacious mode of learning available. As the next epistemological leap had yet to take place, disknowledge—or a willful adherence to faulty modes of knowledge, including alchemy—became the norm. However, rather than advocating for the rejection of one particular type of knowledge and understanding for yet another to rationalize 7 See Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 3. Sloterdijk is quoted in Eggert. 33 unquestioned answers in the world about the origins and nature of the universe, Thaumaturgical reading recognizes the preeminence of humanism as it continually moves forward in pursuit of new knowledge and paradigms. It is an act of reading that is based in optimism and that also decentralizes (rather than erases) religion in favor of empirical, scientific-like approaches to understanding the world and its universe. Throughout Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Greene shows scholars supplementing their university learning and humanist training with magic/scientific books of empiricism, new science, technology, and occultism.8 Through the shrewd combination of these books, which poor scholar Miles notes for their consanguinity: “Ecce quam bonum et quam jocundum, habitares libros in unum” (Look how nice and happy it is when books live together in one place), which is itself a rereading of Psalm 133.1-2, scholars and readers become highly valuable but also potentially dangerous as they move beyond humanist books to magic ones in an attempt to order the universe (2.4).9 Scholars and readers in the play have both selfish and altruistic reasons for thaumaturgical reading: (1) the singular pursuit of knowledge and personal fame and (2) the desire to make thoughtful contributions to the health and stability of the university community and of England itself, even in the face of catastrophic failure.10 In Friar 8 I realize that this argument may draw comparison to Frances Yates’s totalizing portrait of the magus in the Renaissance, but I would argue that books, magic, science, and humanism are used on a continuum; see, Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; orig. pub. 1964); see also, William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). 9 In the Vulgate, the Psalm is 132; in later versions the verse seems to be in 133: “Ecce quam bonum et quam jucundum, habitare fratres in unum!” (How wonderful it is to see brothers live together as one). 10 Kent Cartwright, Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 224-25. Cartwright presents academic knowledge depicted in 34 Bacon and Friar Bungay, fantastical and magic/scientific books assist “disruptive” boundary-crossing readers including Bacon, Bungay, and even Miles, making them integral, if not central, parts of the university and the country. Christopher Marlowe’s contemporaneous play Dr. Faustus serves as a counter to Greene’s relatively enthusiastic—yet still occasionally critical—support of scholars, magic books, and thaumaturgical reading as necessary parts of monarchical, nationalistic causes.11 Unlike Friar Bacon, Faustus draws a sharp distinction between his experimental, magic books, and the humanist ones he lists and seemingly disregards at the start of Marlowe’s play. Faustus upends the optimism of the “jolly friar’s” romance, mischief, and experimentation with magic books and presents a far darker side to the acquisition and reading of books in his own relentless pursuit of scholarship. The precarious nature of employment for certain university graduates in the 1580s and 1590s as well as the contentious and uneven history of his own labors (as evidenced through his Groatsworth of Wit) may have encouraged Greene to promote bookish counselors, however imperfect they may be. After mapping out the decreasing opportunities for university-trained humanists, including Greene, I connect this shift to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay’s expressed nostalgia for eras and pageantry in which scholars used their reading and books—however fantastic and magical—to both function Friar Bacon and Friar Bacon as one that has academic limits within the confines of the “humanist dream of learning,” and argues that the “troubled relationship between experience and knowledge that pulses through sixteenth-century drama achieves poignant culmination” (222). Magic/scientific books push the outer bounds of this relationship and encourage a shift to using these books for the purposes of experimentation. 11 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Dr. Faustus are often paired together because of their close theatrical and publication dates and charismatic scholars as well as their shared influences. Their views of magic books as viable alternatives to humanist books are remarkably similar, even though they engage with the possibilities in very distinct way. 35 and perform as wise counselors and protectors of the state. The play harkens back to important royal visits to universities, including Elizabeth I’s presence at Cambridge (1564) and Oxford (1566). As in Greene’s play, representatives from the universities displayed their learning through intellectual materials and performances including disputations, sermons, and plays to support and advise the Queen. I further argue that the magic books mentioned throughout that play are a necessary part of a transhistorical performance of thaumaturgical reading in academia in which Greene commends the experimental, dangerous, but mostly useful nature of Bacon’s scholarship even in the face of death and disaster. Greene advocates for thaumaturgical readers, acts of reading, and books that, however precariously, continually empower the English monarchy, the country, university, and scholars themselves. Marlowe questions the entire enterprise of learning for the sake of benefiting the community; in Dr. Faustus, thaumaturgical reading is a mostly selfish enterprise. Kent Cartwright discusses the relationship between governing bodies and learning in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay as well as the play’s “combination of theatrical conventions and techniques of humanist allusion to create a spectatorially engaging theatrical ‘world.’”12 This theatrical world is based on an institution that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London audiences may have recognized but that some were never able to experience. Yet, among the books, scholars, reading, science, magic and spectacle, Greene presents a version of what Paulina Kewes has identified as the “politics of counsel,” the complicated position of the university and its scholars as they attempt to 12 Cartwright, Theater and Humanism, 224-25. 36 forge “closer links between the country’s political, clerical, and intellectual elites.”13 Greene also pairs this ambitious spectacle of learning with the pastoral, prophesy-driven, nearly Spenserian political romance in the same play.14 He dramatizes both the politics and changes occurring in early English universities through Bacon’s reading, his experiments, and his books, while also demonstrating the shifting intellectual approaches to humanism, science, religion, and magic that Keith Thomas, Katherine Eggert, Anthony Grafton, and Lisa Jardine have addressed.15 Necromantic books in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay also further complicate acts of reading and acts of magic, particularly in light of work on grimoires by Owen Davies, Barbara Mowat, Stephen Orgel, and others.16 In addition, Greene’s spectacle of the brazen head encapsulates difficulties that scientific inventors, scholars, and readers encountered in Renaissance England as their new work, 13 Paulina Kewes, “‘Plesures in lernyng’ and the Politics of Counsel in Early Elizabethan England: Royal Visits to Cambridge and Oxford,” English Literary Renaissance 46, no. 3 (Autumn 2016): 333-75. 14 Brian Walsh, “‘Deep Prescience’: Succession and the Politics of Prophecy in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 23 (2010): 63-85. Walsh notices the similarities in prophecy between Greene’s play and in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, both of which were concerned over the aging of Elizabeth I, and the uncertainty surrounding succession; Walsh suggests that the play uses prophecy to draw attention to the precarious nature of the country to encourage audiences to produce a desirable future; by juxtaposing and then bringing the monarch and his heir into the university setting and by allowing Friar Bacon the gift of prognostication, Greene is providing an answer to this dilemma. 15 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Penguin, 2003), Kindle edition; Eggert, Disknowledge; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 16 See Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Barbara A. Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 1- 33; Stephen Orgel, “Secret Arts and Public Spectacles: The Parameters of Elizabethan Magic,” Shakespeare Quarterly 68, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 80-91. The study of actual magic books and the power of conjuring on the stage are certainly present in this play and others, including Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter (1607). Thanks to Darryl Chalk for introducing me to grimoire studies at the Renaissance Society of American Conference, 2018. 37 even that which was far-fetched and illusory, challenged universally accepted paradigms espoused by religious or academic leaders. While also partially centered in a university, Dr. Faustus has neither the sustained, expressed fondness for the monarchy nor a particular reverence (however winking) for the academic community. Faustus does not actively oppose either institution, but he also does not use his learning or books to benefit his community or country, despite his claims that he will have his spirits …wall all Germany with brass, And make swift Rhine circle fair Wittenberg; I’ll have them fill the public schools with silk, Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad. (1.1.88)17 Although the play tacitly challenges sumptuary laws and rules of dress for university students it does not focus on the community at Wittenberg until Faustus’s death.18 Until then, he leaves fellow scholars to question his absence: “I wonder what’s become of Faustus, that was wont to make our schools ring with sic probo” as he acquires and then employs his magic, necromantic books in oppositional ways to Wittenberg and other authority figures in Germany and Rome (2.1-2). Faustus is ultimately a directionless, yet still peerless reader; his search for satisfactory answers to questions about knowledge and construction of the universe beyond the books that remain in his study is remarkably similar to Friar Bacon’s desire to read his magic books to animate the brazen head. 17 Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, ed. Roma Gill (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989). All quotes are taken from this edition, which is based on the A-text. 18 Kirk Melnikoff, “The Extremities of Sumptuary Law in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 19 (2006): 227-34. While Melnikoff writes about Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, his observations demonstrate the non-issue of challenging sumptuary laws in a play such as this. 38 However, instead of focusing his acts of thaumaturgical reading and learning on embracing and strengthening the larger academic and political community, Faustus instead embarks on an independent and meaningful search to comprehend the universe. Unlike Friar Bacon, Faustus does not have a community to return home to when his experiments with necromantic books collapse. Time Was: Opportunity and Nostalgia for Robert Greene The reasons why Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay supports a case for scholars and their books may have been both personal and political for Robert Greene. His advocating for the involvement of highly trained readers in affairs of state, romance, and even the governance of the university itself, was likely steeped in the real-life consequences of decreasing opportunities for graduates of the two English universities in the 1580s and 1590s.19 These decreased opportunities sharply contrasted to the widespread availability of positions in Tudor government starting with Henry VIII, which came as a result of an increased need for educated clerks and other administrators: The sudden expansion of government, creating new offices and opportunities for royal service, generated on the one side a sense of 19 Curtis, “The Alienated Intellectuals of Early Stuart England,” 25-43. Curtis is cited by current scholars working in this field including Laurie Ellinghausen, “University of Vice: Drink Gentility, and Masculinity in Oxford, Cambridge, and London,” in Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550-1650, ed. Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 45-65; Sarah Knight, “Fantastical Distempers: The Psychopathology of Early Modern Scholars,” in Early Modern Academic Drama, ed. Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 129-52. The lack of opportunities for scholars may have been real or only possibly perceived, but concern about employment for scholars appears in a number of plays between 1590-1620. The anxiety surrounding joblessness fosters a greater dependency on books or at least the perception of their importance. 39 urgency about the scarcity of trained talent and on the other steady pressure to acquire the skills that were in demand. The growing popularity at court and in the universities of a body of political and educational ideas which stressed service to the prince and commonwealth as a calling especially worthy of high-minded men with great ability combined with a secularizing process which began to make a distinction between civil and ecclesiastical offices. The combination steadily weakened prejudices about bookish, clerkly learning.20 Monarchs including Henry VIII and Edward VI employed university scholars in matters of religion and law. During Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, the King spent a great deal of time consulting with members of the university community about the religious and legal ramifications of his original marriage and the tactics to initiate his separation.21 Mark H. Curtis notes that increased interest in the universities by the Tudor government came as the result of the Roman Catholic Church’s dwindling financial and educational control of those institutions once the religious houses and orders were initially dissolved.22 By the late fifteenth century, certain colleges at Oxford and Cambridge Universities had also already begun welcoming members of the gentry to study, thanks to 20 Mark H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558-1642: An Essay on Changing Relations between the English Universities and English Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 75. 21 Dale Hoak, “Edward VI (1537–53), king of England and Ireland,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb- 9780198614128-e-8522, accessed March 1 2018. 22Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 76. 40 Erasmus, Thomas Starkey, Polydore Vergil, and other champions of humanism in England.23 However, by the middle of the sixteenth century, colleges were experiencing increased expenses and other rising costs; as a result, many leaders of colleges decided to counter established statutes and invite more young men from a variety of backgrounds, including commoners, to attend university as paying students. Fortunately, the increase in the type and diversity of positions in the government—not just in Protestant churches, but in policy and diplomacy—could provide jobs to accommodate the greater numbers of gentlemen studying for bachelor’s degrees.24 Encouraged by such books, including Sir Thomas Elyot’s Book of the Governor (1531) and Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570), English parents decided to send young men to pursue education at the universities in the hopes that their sons would secure excellent employment, either as members of the clergy, or as clerks or other administrators in the expanding Tudor government.25 In fact, many Tudor officials were patrons of humanist scholars and firmly believed in the necessity of educated men serving in office. The desire to use the precepts of humanism was so ingrained in the government that William Cecil Lord Burghley “would always carry Tully’s Offices about him, either in his bosom or his pocket.”26 Unfortunately, the 23 See Craig W. D’Alton, “The Trojan War of 1518: Melodrama, Politics, and the Rise of Humanism,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 28, no. 3 (Autumn 1997), 727-38. It should be noted, however, that humanism had a contentious beginning in English Universities, and practicing humanists initially clashed with other more conservative scholars who were uninterested in the study of Greek and who expressed anxiety at the marginalization of scholastic logic and theology. For anti-humanists, the study of Greek was dangerous to the university community. 24 Curtis, “Oxford and Cambridge in Transition,” 76. 25 Curtis, 73. 26 John Guy, Tudor England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 414. 41 number of positions in either the church or the government did not keep pace with the numbers of young men who matriculated to university in the coming years.27 At the same time, again starting with Henry VIII, the crown began to view universities as places where styles of reading, or modes of interpretation, and ideas were being consistently developed and manufactured without the direct influence of the monarchy. As a result, the crown and government experienced discomfort at the prospect of university-trained individuals working on controversial subject matter independent of the crown and its interests. Scholars also began to move easily between the university, the court, and society at large, providing both firm and light touches on new and developing policies and political ideologies espoused by Elizabeth I and her councilors.28 The Queen then decided that the best way to exercise some control of ideas being perpetuated at Oxford and Cambridge was to develop a closer relationship with the 27 Morgan, History of Cambridge, 130; Elizabeth Russell, “The Influx of Commoners in the University of Oxford before 1581: An Optical Illusion?,” The English Historical Review 92, no. 365 (October 1977): 721-45. Russell argues that these numbers are far more illusory than what Curtis (and even Morgan) present. She states that Oxford had convoluted arrangements with halls and Colleges and that the ways that the university kept records of students and tutors changed during the mid-sixteenth century, which could affect how historians understand the population of students at Oxford. She also explains that Marian involvement in Oxford rendered its organization far different from that of Cambridge and that it is not beneficial to compare the two. However, she does concede that secularization in education increased and that teaching at Oxford was restructured. 28 Two other plays that were performed and printed within a similar to that of Friar Bacon, John Lyly’s Sappho and Phao, and Campaspe, also briefly address the role of well-read scholars in academies and universities and their important relationships to rulers. See John Lyly, and Sappho and Phao, in Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, ed. G.K. Hunter and David Bevington (New York: Manchester University Press, 1991). Through the character of Diogenes, the play Campaspe in particular encourages scholars to openly question a ruling monarch’s intentions as he decides to reshape his court into one imbued with scholarship: “Aristotle and the rest, sithence my coming from Thebes to Athens, from a place of conquest to a palace of quiet, I have resolved with myself in my court to have as many philosophers as I had in my camp soldiers. My court shall be a school where I will have used as great doctrine in peace as I did in war discipline” (1.3.67-71). 42 universities and to scrutinize scholars as well as the amount and type of knowledge they produced.29 The late Tudor monarchy depended upon the two universities to produce excellent scholars and readers—with a willingness to work for the government. However, not everyone who graduated from university was able to find a position, perhaps leaving some graduates with a crisis of “vocational identity,” which, Laurie Ellinghausen writes, pushed them, however ambivalently, to “new possibilities as well as losses for non- aristocratic authors who turned to the market for print.”30 As a university graduate who turned to the print market, Greene never specifically addressed his time at St. John’s College Cambridge, but his Groatsworth of Wit alludes to the necessity of his becoming a playwright as a result of scholarly penury or lack of opportunity.31 Perhaps Greene’s exit from university resembled that of Miles, who, after his failure, is condemned to “perish as a vagabond on earth”; he declares: “I’ll take but a book in my hand, a wide-sleeve gown on my back, and a crowned cap on my head, and see if I can want promotion” (Friar Bacon, 11.123-32). In Groatsworth, Greene tells the story of “Roberto,” a young man who becomes famous because of his learnedness, but 29 Victor Morgan, A History of the University of Cambridge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 129-30. 30 Laurie Ellinghausen, “The Uses of Resentment, Nashe, Parnassus, and the Poet’s Mystery,” in Thomas Nashe, ed. Georgia Brown (New York: Routledge, 2017), 96-111, on 107. 31 Robert Greene, Greenes, groats-vvorth of witte, bought with a million of repentance Describing the follie of youth, the falshoode of makeshifte flatterers, the miserie of the negligent, and mischiefes of deceiuing courtezans. Written before his death, and published at his dyeing request (London, 1592). There is argument over whether or not Greene actually wrote the text of this book—it has been attributed to both Henry Chettle and to Robert Greene. There have been convincing arguments for both sides; for this chapter, I assume that Chettle acted as editor for Greene as he wrote the book on his deathbed. See Brian Vickers, “‘Upstart Crow’? The Myth of Shakespeare’s Plagiarism,” The Review of English Studies 68, no. 284 (1 April 2017): 244–67; Hanspeter Born, “Why Greene Was Angry at Shakespeare,” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 25 (2012): 133-73. 43 ends up ethically compromised and eventually bankrupt as he involves himself with actors and other company Greene finds less than reputable: His companie were lightly the lewdest persons in the land, apt for pilferie, periurie, forgerie, or any villainy. Of these hee knew the casts to cog at cards, coossen at Dice; by these he learnd the legerdemaines of nips, foystes, connycatchers, crosbyters, lifts, high Lawyers, and all the rabble of that vncleane generation of vipers: and pithily could he paint out their whole courses of craft: So cunning he was in all craftes, as nothing rested in him almost but craftiness. (C2r) For scholars and university graduates such as Roberto, or Robert Greene, by the 1580s and 1590s, life after the university could be extremely stressful—particularly for those who depended upon employment rather than the largesse of their families. A few of these educated men, including several playwrights and other professional writers, turned to the magic of the theater and the “craftes” of “craftiness.” After the boom of opportunities to work for the government slowed, competition for positions in court, important households, and the church became fraught as more students graduated and entered society.32 Johnstone Parr traced the growth of Cambridge University from 1558 to1583 (the years marking Greene’s birth to his completion of the M.A.) and notes that it went from granting twenty-eight to 278 baccalaureate degrees. The total enrollment of the university had ballooned to 1,862 students; the university could barely provide food and shelter for its matriculants, and yet it did not limit their growth. St. John’s College, where Greene’s fellow writer Thomas Nashe as well as William Cecil Lord Burghley 32 Morgan, History of Cambridge, 99-110. 44 also matriculated, went from housing thirty-one students to nearly 200 in less than a thirty-year period.33 Along with Mark H. Curtis, Victor Morgan notes that by the 1580s, undergraduates at universities hailed from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds and had to compete with each other for few openings throughout government or the church.34 In some cases, individuals held on to positions for much longer than expected, or clergy were combining appointments to increase their personal incomes, which also limited opportunities for younger men. Because Robert Greene was not among those fortunate enough to secure a coveted position, his unsecured state made for a potentially uncomfortable life. This also left him politically and socially vulnerable with no connection to a powerful member of the gentry, the church, or other state institution. Fortunately, he could continue to associate himself with the universities—which he often did in his work, in print. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay proved to be a very popular play, performed at the Rose by several different companies (including the Queen’s Men before 1592), and its printed playbook was accompanied with the phrase “made by Robert Greene, Maister of Arts,” clearly identifying him with educational institutions and giving him an aegis of sorts. 35 33 Johnstone Parr, “Robert Greene and His Classmates at Cambridge,” PMLA 77, no. 5 (December 1962): 536-43. This essay is reprinted in Kirk Melnikoff, ed. Robert Greene (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2011), 1-35; Guy Tudor England. Guy disputes these assumptions (not Parr’s numbers specifically) based on poor record keeping at the universities and ways in which scholars could choose to attend as they wanted without formal matriculation; Greene’s nostalgia and his own version of events, however fictive and self-serving, paint a compelling picture of life for scholars who are not able to secure employment but who are still attached to the mission of the universities. 34 Morgan, History of Cambridge, 99-132. 35 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage: 1574-1642, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 236. Gurr gives the dates of the first performance of Faustus in 1588. In the first 45 Perhaps it was the stark reality of education without guarantee, but also fond remembrances of his experiences, that encouraged Greene to present nostalgic retrospective moments about university life in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Greene harkens back to a time when scholars were asked to read or perform their reading though disputations for the sake of the English monarchy and nation. He presents Bacon’s thaumaturgical reading as both wistful and prescient—it contains the history of scholasticism as well as the gravitas of humanism, while it also anticipates proto-science and empiricism that were developing in the universities. His pleasant look backward centers on thirteenth-century Oxford at the time of Roger Bacon, whose works were still being printed in Latin and English in the 1580s.36 While presenting the university’s political inner-workings, and its scholarly labor practices, Greene evokes an earlier time in which individual scholars garnered fame and held strong connections to the monarchy, as he draws attention to famous historical scholar/magicians as well as those who were working in his own time. In addition to Roger Bacon, Greene’s Friar Bacon exhibits similarities to John Dee, Tycho Brahe, Simon Forman and other astrologer-astronomers, alchemists, mathematicians, and scientists working in sixteenth-century universities.37 Greene places a great premium on universities and their scholars, as well as the humanist, scientific, or quarto of Friar Bacon, Greene is clearly identified as its author and his education is made quite prominent. Other authors with similar degrees, including Christopher Marlowe, do not have their academic qualifications listed after their names. 36 For other early mentions of Roger Bacon in the 1580s see Raphael Holinshed, The firste [laste] volume of the chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (London, 1577), EEBO, Folger Shakespeare Library; see also John Stow’s Chronicles of England (cited below), and curiously, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, A defensatiue against the poyson of supposed prophesies (London[?], 1583), EEBO, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. 37 Cartwright, 224. 46 magical books and materials that they read and use. The books in the play are less objects or talismans, as one could argue that Prospero’s books become in Shakespeare’s later play, The Tempest (1611). Rather, Bacon’s books are very modern and usable sources—tools of learning and inquiry instead of a sole, catholic site of knowledge and learning itself. In addition, if modeled after the scientific books of the time, Bacon’s books—particularly the magic and scientific ones—were often crafted with royal (or at least wealthy) audiences in mind. Although not printed in England until 1632, Tycho Brahe’s “detailed horoscopes” of the 1585 comet, Learned: Tico Brahae his astronomicall coniectur of the new and much admired [star] which appered in the year 1572, would have required a great deal of fiscal support from patrons because of the expense—both for printing and purchase.38 Late in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, as Bacon lectures Miles about the learning he acquired to construct the brazen head, he alludes to astronomy books as he lists his “journey into hell” to understand the “rafters of the earth rent from the poles”—or the disruption of geographic poles (11.8; 11.12). The detailed scientific charts and graphs were particularly difficult and expensive to print; as a result, this type of book was far more expensive than other books, even academic ones. Bacon’s open use of magic books seems to have the implicit support of the community despite their ability to cause disruption and even death. In the end, however, Bacon’s books are still not Faustus’s secret codices of unrest, radical magic, wholly unchecked science, or unintentional farce. 38 Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 278-79; Learned: Tico Brahae his astronomicall coniectur of the new and much admired [star] which appered in the year 1572 (London, 1632), EEBO, Peterborough Cathedral. 47 In the play, Bacon’s reading, much like that of other scientists’ (including Nicholas Copernicus and Giordorno Bruno), straddles the divide between magic and empirical science including scholars, and emphasizes both the fluidity of the subject matter and the role that books have in the acquisition and production of knowledge.39 The books that he refers to are still imbued with an authority and power that grant Bacon—and by extension the university community—the ability to participate, however comically, in diplomacy and other efforts to support the monarchy and the country. An exploration of this connection occurs early in the play as Rafe suggests that Edward go to Oxford to meet with Friar Bacon. This occurs more significantly, as the viceroys announce the “King’s repair,” or visit. Henry III is . . . trooped with all the western kings That lie alongst the Dansig seas by east, North by the clime of frosty Germany, The Almain monarch, and the Saxon duke, Castile, and the lovely Eleanor with him, Have in their jests resolved for Oxford town. (7.3-8) This moment also recalls the early part of Elizabeth I’s reign, which includes her royal visits to both Cambridge University in 1564 and Oxford University in 1566, when Greene was a young boy who had not yet matriculated to Cambridge as a sizar (an undergraduate with institutional financial support) in 1579/1580.40 During each visit, the Queen observed plays, sermons, and disputations that were supposed to demonstrate learning 39 Stanley J. Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 17-25. 40 Parr, “Robert Greene and His Classmates at Cambridge,” 536-43. 48 and continuing religious conformity, as scholars provided Elizabeth I with subtle advice on issues, including her style of governance and matters of succession. While these visits were mostly tightly controlled affairs, there were moments during each visit that presented the Queen with a view into internecine disagreements and contentious relationships between university scholars and officials. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay presents audiences with a public theatrical version of a royal visit to a university as well as the anxieties and controls that accompany the types of public reading and academic performances that take place during such a display. Paulina Kewes enumerates how the 1564 and 1566 visits “exemplify a nexus of competing interests, pressures, and anxieties that had as much to do with religion and affairs of state, as with struggles for power within the Court and the universities, and individual bids for promotion and patronage. They illuminate the inner workings and the public image of the early Elizabethan regime.”41 In his reconstruction of the 1566 Oxford visit, Gerard Kilroy reveals the ways that the Earl of Leister (who had been named Chancellor that year) and William Cecil Lord Burghley attempted to control and silence Marian recusant Catholics—who hoped that the royal visit would soften Elizabeth I to their cause—by purposely disallowing their participation in disputations and other public performances of knowledge.42 Despite myriad public and private political and religious disagreements occurring during these visits, some scholars were nevertheless able to use the opportunity to at least attempt to influence national issues through their 41 Kewes, “Plesures in lernying,” 333; Elisabeth Goldring and Jayne Elizabeth Archer, “Shows and Pageants,” The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles, ed. Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer, and Felicity Heal (Oxford.: Oxford University Press, 2013), 322. 42 Gerard Kilroy, “The Queen’s Visit to Oxford in 1566: A Fresh Look at Neglected Manuscript Sources,” Recusant History 31, no. 3 (2013): 331–73. 49 participation in plays, sermons, and disputations in what were ultimately very bookish, readerly affairs. Elizabeth’s Progress to the Universities of Cambridge (1564) and Oxford (1566) In his letter to the Vice Chancellor before the Queen’s visit to Cambridge, William Cecil expressed both “anxiety for the well doing of things there” and “desire [that] two things may speciallye appeare in that Universitye: order and lerninge. And for order I mean bothe for Religion and civill behaviour.”43 While order is Cecil’s foremost concern, “lerninge” in all of its permutations remained particularly important. He continually made extensive contingency plans with university officials in which he discussed “thorder of disputacions/ the questions for the same / the sermon ad Clerum / thorder of commodies and tragedies” and attempted to exact as much control over the contents and program of the event as possible.44 The importance of the royal visit was not lost on contemporary historians, as both John Stow and Raphael Holinshed recorded the event. The Cambridge visit was thus summarized in Stow’s The Chronicle of England (1580): …The days of her abode were passed in Scholasticall exercises of Philosophie, Phisike and Diuinitie, the nightes in Comedies and Tragedies, 43 John Nichols, John Nichols's the Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A new edition of the early modern sources, ed. Elizabeth Goldring, Faith Eales, Elizabeth Clarke, and Jayne Elisabeth Archer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 381-87. 44 Kewes,“Plesures in lernyng,”340. Kewes quotes John Nichols’ The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, Progresses I, 382; Cecil met personally with several university representatives starting on July 18th 1564 for the August visit to Cambridge. 50 sette forthe partlye by the whole Universitie, and partly by the Students of the Kyngs Colledge.45 The “Schollastical exercises of Philosophie, Physike and Diuinitie,” or disputations, were first and foremost performances of reading and knowledge, both for Elizabeth and other members of the university. In the 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles, the Queen’s Latin speech was printed with the statement: “England may reioice that it hath so learned a prince, and the vniversity may triumph that they haue so noble a patronesse.”46 The performance of learning was two-fold; both the scholars and Elizabeth I prepared and read for one another. Scholars made their arguments and plied their books in order to gain recognition for their work and possibly earn patronage from the Queen herself (or at least an opportunity to kiss her hand).47 Joshua Rodda succinctly describes disputations that Elizabeth I was likely to have seen as a “manifestation of scholarship and scholarly interaction. It stood on a foundation of logical testing, and on the implied consequent of an intellectual community whose members had the mental equipment to understand one another.”48 Disputations were a live performance of marginalia and animadversions. As scholars rehearsed their knowledge—garnered through their hard earned reading—they 45 Kewes, 379; see John Stow, The chronicles of England from Brute vnto this present yeare of Christ. 1580. Collected by Iohn Stow citizen of London (London, 1580), 1122-23; this visit is also recorded in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577). 46 Holinshed, quoted in Linda Shenk, “Turning Learned Authority into Royal Supremacy: Elizabeth I’s Learned Persona and Her University Orations,” in Elizabeth I, Always Her Own Free Woman, ed. Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barett Graves (New York: Routledge, 2016), 80. 47 When Elizabeth I seemed especially pleased at a disputation, she invited a scholar to kiss her hand. Mr. William Master gave a speech during the 1564 visit that pleased Elizabeth immensely; she requested his name from Burghley. See Nichols, The Progress and Processions, 161. 48Joshua Rodda. Public Religious Disputation in England, 1558–1626, St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (London: Farnham Ashgate, 2014), 7. 51 essentially commented on material that they had read, by dissecting others’ arguments, and were speaking and performing the notes on the page. As the Queen questioned or praised the disputants, she acted as another reader to their performed text. These exercises, or disputations, were theatrical affairs, likely modeled after disputatio quodlibets, that Jodie Enders describes as a “spectacular tournament of words,” begun at the University of Paris at the time the historic Friar Bacon began his tenure at Brasenose College.49 Enders explains that scholars involved in medieval disputations acted similarly to Seneca’s “students qua gladiators” through verbal “shadow boxing” in order to demonstrate their connection to and understanding of the material they read. Victor H. Morgan has characterized this pugilistic display of learning as a “form of academic bloodsport or the equivalent of the vitriolic review of a later time.” 50 The drama of disputations included audiences of students “standing upon stalles, knockinge, hissinge and displaying other inconsiderate behavior,” although it was likely that during Elizabeth I’s visits to the English universities, disputations were much more subdued affairs.51 This type reading and argumentation demanded an arrogance and assuredness that likely promoted unsubtle, vituperative interpretations of a variety of texts. The sharp, critical, performance of masculine reading may have contributed to the cutting, angry style of writing and reading perpetuated by Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Nashe, and Robert Greene. In lieu of an army that could physically fight her battles, the performances of reading indicated to Elizabeth that she had colleges of men who were able to protect her and her legacy through their understanding of written material. 49 Jody Enders, “The Theater of Scholastic Erudition,” Comparative Drama 27, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 341-63, on 345. 50 Morgan, History of Cambridge, 130. 51 Morgan, 130. 52 As members of Cambridge university attempted to impress or advise her, the Queen had her own opportunity to gather information about scholars and in turn, impress upon them the extent of her political power as well as her specific role in their studies and futures. After she listened and watched scholars dispute while visiting King’s College, the Queen was asked to give a speech in Latin; she may have spoken extemporaneously as she beseeched students to ply their books and continue their studies: Quod ad propagationem spectat, vnum vllud apud Demothenem memini: superiorum verba apud Inferiores librorum locum habent, et Principum dicta legum autoritatem apud subditos retinent. Hoc itaque vnum vos omnes in memoria retinere velim quod semita nella rectior, nulla apitor erit, siue ad bona fortunae accquirenda, siue ad Principis vestrae beneuolentiam conciliandam, quom vt grauiert studiij vestris incumbatis, vt coepistis: quod vt faciatis vos oro osectroque. (As to the increase of good letters, I remember that passage in Demosthenes “The words of superiors have the weight of books with their inferiors; & the saying of Princes retain the authority of laws with their subject.” This one thing then I would have you all remember, that there will be no director [sic], no fitter course either to make your fortunes, or to procure the favor of your Prince, than as you have begun, to ply your studies diligently. Which that you would do, I beg & beseech you all.)52 52 Nichols, Goldring et al, Progress and Processions, “The translation is a Latin Speech to the University at the Conclusion of her Entertainment in St. Mary’s Church. This Latin translation taken from Nichols’ book, is by Mr. Francis Peck, an eighteenth-century antiquarian” (430). 53 Elizabeth I appeals to scholars by encouraging them to read and study to gain her favor by equating her princely power and spoken words to the weight of the books that they read—which were presumably many and varied. She employs the literal language of scholarship and alludes to the physical mass of their books as well as to the veracity and heavy truths that these volumes contain. She then deftly moves to invoke Demosthenes, whom Plutarch calls the “prince of orators,” known for his rhetorical abilities, if not necessarily for the words she attributes to him.53 Whether or not he actually spoke those words, Elizabeth carefully employs the authority and power of this classical historical figure to “transform the common territory of learned authority into her exclusively royal supremacy.”54 She creates a rhetorical bond between herself and Cambridge scholars by aligning them and their books exclusively to her political agenda. This connection ensures that the disputations that scholars prepared, the plays that they performed, and the verses that they posted all over the walls and doors of their colleges, were all ultimately in service to her as a monarch. In the seemingly extemporaneous Latin speech, Elizabeth I impresses upon the scholars present the inevitability of her authority and influence in their lives, as she gives their scholarly work her imprimatur mixed with royal imperative to read and study in her service. Linda Shenk writes that in the 1564 speech she “displayed her erudition, emphasized alliances with her current learned counselors and articulated the relationship she expected from her university scholars who were, at least in theory, the next 53 Thomas North, The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes [Plutarch’s Lives] ( London, 1579), 215. 54 Linda Shenk, “Turning Learned Authority into Royal Supremacy: Elizabeth I’s Learned Persona and Her University Orations,” in Elizabeth I, ed. Levin, Carney, and Graves, 78-97, on 80. 54 generation of state servants.”55 The scholars are charged, much like commissioned officers or soldiers commencing a battle, to read continually to gain her favor, ultimately in support of the state. Elizabeth implies that their diligent reading could also provide them with a direct path to financial security and preferment, a concern for many undergraduates. For younger scholars, her connection between scholarly reading of books resulting personal fortune, intimately joining newer students to the state and the Queen herself. Siobhan Keenan explains that as a result of the Queen’s visit, more young men matriculated to Cambridge in the coming years after her 1564 visit.56 This unspoken, close relationship between scholars and their monarch permeates the nostalgia of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Robert Greene constructs an ideal scholarly word of seamless interplay among scholars in the university with their monarch. Henry III boasts of this exact relationship where scholars actively engage in study and reading for him as he extols Bacon’s abilities: We’ll progress straight to Oxford with our trains, And see what men our academy brings. And, wonder Vandermast, welcome to me; In Oxford shalt thou find a jolly friar Called Friar Bacon, England’s only flower. Set him but nonplus in his magic spells, 55 Shenk, “Turning,” 79. Shenk also notes that Elizabeth I’s rhetoric about university education changes drastically in 1592 during her last visit to Oxford University (the year Greene died), in which she repositioned humanists from wise counselors to obedient servants. 56 Siobhan Keenan, “Spectator and Spectacle: Royal Entertainments at the Universities in the 1560s,” in The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 86-103. 55 And make him yield in mathematic rules, And for thy glory I will bind thy brows Not with a poet’s garland made of bays, But with a coronet of choicest gold. Whilst then we fit to Oxford with our troops, Let’s in and banquet in our English court. (4.56-67) Calling Bacon “England’s only flower,” Henry III is so confident in the friar’s ability in “mathematic rules” that he offers Vandermast a prize of a coronet of gold, rather than a garland, if he bests the friar. Despite Friar Bacon’s immediate wishes, the king and university compel him to galvanize his thaumaturgical reading, along with the power of his books, to best a German scholar on the nation’s and university’s behalf and to establish the intellectual supremacy of England and all of Europe. In the end, Henry III reminds scholars that their work is at his command for whatever purpose necessary. Linda Shenk observes that the two visits in the 1560s profoundly affected how Elizabeth interacted with and perceived the universities. While the disputations may have been highlights during her visit, as the monarch aged, her requests to the university changed profoundly. Instead of calling upon them for performances of knowledge, Elizabeth I only ordered dramatic performances from the university. This caused great consternation among academic leaders. In 1592, Elizabeth went so far as to request an English play from scholars, which for Cambridge Vice Chancellor John Sill, went beyond the pale.57 About the role of such a play, Shenk asks: “how might this relationship imply 57 Linda Shenk, “Gown Before Crown: Scholarly Abjection and Academic Entertainment Under Queen Elizabeth I,” in Early Modern Academic Drama, ed. Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 19-44. 56 that the Elizabethan regime had created its own version of the humanist idea that the scholar should serve the state as a wise counselor?”58 She answers her question by demonstrating that Elizabeth favored her own absolutism over intellectual exchange with scholars and forgot the circumstances of the 1564 and 1566 visits in favor of her own vision of the role of the university. Shenk ultimately argues that through the queen’s requests for entertainment, scholars were allowed the opportunity to present political arguments to her. Shenk suggests that by being fully inculcated into the university system, dramatists such as Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe may have understood this relationship and attempted to benefit from it.59 Other dramatists, including John Lyly, may have done something similar, but for a time, Lyly also benefited from royal connections that Greene did not necessarily have. In the case of Greene and Marlowe, they may have used their plays to function similarly to disputations and other scholarly performances that the Queen witnessed during her visits to Cambridge and Oxford. Both men produced plays that supported the cause of scholars and their reading, but with very different outcomes for scholarly readers—each of which may have been of interest to Elizabeth (had she been aware of them) for different, and equally compelling reasons. John Lyly, another casualty of the wait for preferment, petitioned for years for a position in Elizabeth I’s government that never materialized. He was eventually employed for a time as personal secretary to Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, mostly because Lyly had a close relationship with William Cecil Lord Burghley (a great supporter of humanism and letters), and the Earl was Burghley’s son-in-law. Such a symbiotic (although, at times, difficult) relationship between monarch and scholar 58 Shenk,“Gown Before Crown,” 20. 59 Shenk, 21-22. 57 emanates from Greene’s play as he examines scholarly disputations and explores the reading of books that are more dangerous and more experimental than the ones Elizabeth I encouraged her charges to read in the 1560s.60 Perhaps in an attempt to revive the Queen’s interest in scholars as well as to introduce the general playgoing public to the importance of the scholarly disputation through the spectacle of learning, Greene ensures that Bacon’s thaumaturgical reading is still very much in service to a monarch. He also implies that for the sake of the monarchy, a controlled use of magic books, although potentially dangerous, may be efficacious—particularly in order to ensure both the safety and stability of the nation, but also for its forward momentum. When Bacon initiates the protocols for the brazen head and rehearses all that he has learned from books in order to accomplish this feat, Greene suggests that in dangerous books, there is the potential for scientific progress, no matter how transitory. While Friar Bacon assists Edward with his pursuit of Margaret, the university viceroys prepare for a visit from Henry III and the German emperor and emissaries. Bacon, his books, and learning eventually become the central focus of the royal visit. This part of the play is strikingly similar to Elizabeth I’s visit to Cambridge in 1564, as a German envoy was present with her. It also conflates elements of her progress to Oxford in 1566, in which Diego Guzman de Silva, a Spanish ambassador, accompanied the Queen to plays and other events.61 Much like Cecil and the vice chancellor, the scholars Burden, Clement, and Masters rehearse plans for Henry III’s visit in order to “lay plots of stately tragedies / Strange comic shows, such as proud Roscius / Vaunted before the 60 See Derek B. Alwes, “‘I would faine serve’: John Lyly’s Career at Court,” Comparative Drama 34, no. 4 (Winter 2000-2001): 399-421. 61 Kewes, “Pleasures in lernying,” 334, 370. The Queen also visited Oxford a second time in 1592, during the same month that Robert Greene died. 58 Roman emperors / To welcome all the western potentates” (7.9-12). This talk of performances recalls the drama prepared for the Queen, including Latin plays Aulularia by Plautus, Dido by Edward Halliwell, and Ajax Flagellifer, an anonymous play based on Sophocles’ works for the 1564 visit to Cambridge. The university also prepared Ezechias, an English play by Nicolas Udall.62 For the Oxford visit in 1566, Richard Edwards, who was on leave from his position as Master of the Chapel Royal, managed all performances and wrote the principal play, Palimon and Arcite, scheduled to be performed before the Queen and the Spanish ambassador Although, during her Cambridge visit, it was said that Elizabeth I enjoyed the evening plays, she seems to have focused her time on the more academic day-time events. Much like the Queen’s visit, it is the disputations—the public, theatrical demonstrations of learning and reading—that are marked as the most important scholarly events to happen during Henry III’s visit in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Clement reveals that the King has written to the university viceroys in order to announce the arrival of “Don Jacques Vandermast / Skillful in magic and those secret arts,” who will challenge the scholars in a large theatrical disputation at Oxford (7.16-17). The viceroys realize that they must “all make suit unto the friar, / To Friar Bacon, that he vouch this task, / And undertake to countervail in skill / The German; else there’s none in Oxford can / Match and dispute with learned Vandermast” (7.18-22). However, before the viceroys learn of the King’s arrival and determine a need for Bacon’s assistance in this disputation, they address his reading and growing renown. It is in this first meeting that 62 Kewes, 346. 59 Bacon maps out his thaumaturgical reading and differentiates himself for the other Oxford scholars. Reading and the Brazen Head The first time that the viceroys of Oxford enter his cell, Friar Bacon acknowledges them for their adherence to “liberal arts” and their “depth of learned skill” (2.8-9).63 They, in turn, identify him as a reader unlike them or any other residing in Oxford. Bacon is immediately marked as atypical, a gifted scholar who invests in complicated books and scholarly materials more successfully than his peers. They offer conditional, skeptical praise, but nevertheless guarantee his eternal fame, provided that unorthodox scholarly practices and “cunning work” prove Bacon to be the “wonder of the world” that Clement supposes he could be (2.39, 38). The display of his wit and reading becomes integral as Burden, in particular, positions himself antithetically to Bacon’s (and Miles’s) work, yet still attempts to connect Bacon to classical figures and humanist forms of learning by aligning him with Apollo, the god of poetry, song, and prophecy: 64 63 Daniel Kinney, “More’s Letter to Dorp: Remapping the Trivium,” Renaissance Quarterly 34, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 179-210. The trivium —grammar, rhetoric, and logic—included the three parts of liberal arts curriculum and the essential components of humanist education in medieval and Renaissance universities. 64 Fritz Graf, “Apollo,” Oxford Classical Dictionary, accessed, 20 April 2018; “Apollo (Ἀπόλλων, Dor. also Ἀπέλλων), Greek god, son of Zeus and Leto, brother of Artemis, for many ‘the most Greek of Greek gods’ (W. F. Otto). Among his numerous and diverse functions healing and purification, prophecy, care for young citizens, for poetry, and music are prominent (see Plat. Cra. 404d–405e),” http://classics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.001.0001/acrefore- 9780199381135-e-592. 60 Bacon, we hear that long we have suspect, That thou art read in magic’s mystery; In pyromancy to divine by flames; To tell by hydromantic ebbs and tides; By aeromancy to discover doubts, To plain out questions, as Apollo did. (2.13-18; emphasis mine) Bacon’s reading “discovers” doubts and reveals uncommon, potentially dangerous knowledge through nature, but his abilities are not airy thoughts; they are rooted in the books that Miles carries for him. His divination, pyromancy, and aeromancy are the products of new forms of reading that the viceroys have only heard rumors of from other members of the university community and the King himself. To be read in “magic’s mystery” involves more than the parsing of texts; there is a practical element to reading that allows Bacon to commune not only with a book, but with nature itself. Bacon’s new forms of reading are thaumaturgic—he embraces the evolution of scholarship to include magic, science, and physical elements of the earth. The books that Friar Bacon has joined together in his cell closely link humanism to the history of magic, as well as scientific practice and the future of technology, including the brazen head.65 Friar Bacon’s reading is performative and quite spectacular throughout the play, as Greene establishes the centrality of his role as a reader of the past as well as a historic protector of the present, in which Elizabeth I has led England to safety from the Spanish Armada and has ensured the prosperity of the universities (if not necessarily its students). 65 Kevin LaGrandeur, “The talking brass head as a symbol of dangerous knowledge in Friar Bacon and in Alphonsus, King of Aragon,” Journal of English Studies 80, no. 5 (1999): 408-22. LaGrandeur presents the ‘Brass head’ and its animation as an emblem of suspicion and of Greene’s lampooning of scientists and developing science. 61 For Keith Thomas, this form of Renaissance intellectual magic is tightly interwoven with religion, and the current moment—as historical figures including Elizabeth I herself indulged in the use of charms, astrology, and numerology. Yet it also filled the divide left between the unknown and empirical and technical knowledge that had yet to be discovered, but was nonetheless coming.66 Friar Bacon and his reading serve to bridge the divide between the medieval past, the humanist present, and the proto-empirical scientific work of the immediate future. In other words, Bacon is both a new and historical reader, who uses innovative techniques to alter the ways that humans—and even automata—use books and knowledge. Friar Bacon’s language is that of an inventor rather than an explorer. Instead of uncovering or recovering what is already known, he reads or “plain[s] out,” clarifying questions by using his books or other magical objects. Just as priests of Apollo used and interpreted the verses of the Pythia, Bacon is a reader of physical and non-material mysteries beyond the comprehension of most men, even the scholars standing before him. Bacon’s thaumaturgical reading ultimately produces the brazen head, a creation that is wholly original, and the direct result of his humanist, magical and scientific training. His interdisciplinarity produces new, technological phenomena that matches the linguistic shift surrounding the concept of ‘discovery’ that David Wooton locates in 1558. No longer the domain of explorers such as Walter Raleigh and Henry Hudson, the concept of discovery began to include astronomers, physicists, and other proto-scientists as they began to create or “uncover something that has never previously existed.” 67 While 66 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Kindle loc., 942 of 24551. 67 David Wooton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper Collins, 2016), Kindle edition, section 1.3 “Inventing Discovery,” location 1660/18294. 62 differentiating new science and technology from classical learning and reading in 1605, Francis Bacon declares the inherent newness and distinctiveness of this type of reading and work, calling it the “art itself of Invention and Discovery,” in Of the Proficiency and Advancement of Learning.68 Katherine Eggert suggests that Francis Bacon sought to efface the humanist educational agenda in full support of a burgeoning wave of scientific empiricism.69 Greene transforms a continuing humanist agenda with the invention of the brazen head through Friar Bacon’s thaumaturgical reading. He creates a more inclusive space for a combination of magic/technology, science and reading to explain the vicissitudes of the world, from the seemingly mundane, including Edward’s pursuit of and eventual loss of Margaret, to the philosophical, including doubts, miracles and failures of “nigromancy.”70 Bacon’s unfamiliar reading encourages confusion and skepticism in his fellow scholar Burden, who questions his most recognized work: I tell thee, Bacon, Oxford makes report, Nay, England, and the court of Henry says Th’art making of a brazen head by art Which shall unfold strange doubts and aphorisms And read a lecture in philosophy, And by the help of devils and ghastly fiends, Thou mean’st ere many years or days be past, 68 Wooton, The Invention of Science, loc. 1660 of 18294. 69 Eggert, Disknowledge, 1-14. 70 Thomas, Religion and The Decline of Magic; Thomas explains that the turn to both religion and magic was an attempt to impose some kind of order and hope in a world that was largely unpredictable in terms of illness, fire, and other disasters, Kindle edition, location 12073 of 24551. 63 To compass England with a wall of brass. (2.23-30) The brazen head, whether or not it is the descendent of Ancient Greek automata or closely related to the severed head of the Green Knight, transforms knowledge and reinterprets humanist ideology and reading practices. With the help of Belcephon, who “hammers out the stuff” of brass (2.56), Bacon’s creation stretches beyond a simple replica of tenth-century Arabic oracular heads or talking statues that fascinated scholars such as Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, or the historical Roger Bacon.71 It becomes more than a pneumatic machine programmed to perform a finite task; it has the ability to learn and read, construct scientific truths (“aphorisms”), and then share knowledge with its hearers, much like Bacon or the other professional scholars who question the possibility of its creation.72 Kevin LaGrandeur calls the brazen head “an emblem for ‘intellectual magic,’” that encourages “popular suspicion toward the practitioners of innovative science.” 73 Todd Andrew Borlik writes that it “serves as metonymy for the hubris of Renaissance intellectuals and artists” and is the result of “glamorizing the study of ancient, esoteric knowledge [that] humanist scholars inspired a vogue for[:] Egyptian Hermeticism that gripped Cambridge in the 1580s.”74 While these warnings surrounding scholarship and hubris are continually present in the play, the brazen head is a glance, however briefly, into a scientific and technological future. The artificially intelligent automaton that “shall unfold strange doubts and aphorisms” is not only the result of the 71 LaGrandeur, “The Talking Brass Head,” 410. 72 LaGrandeur, 410. Scholars including Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon were interested in the construction of automata and pneumatic devices in the hope of emulating the work of the Ancient Greeks but with modern adaptations. 73 LaGrandeur, 416. 74 Todd Andrew Borlik, ‘More than Art”: Clockwork Automata, the Extemporizing Actor, and the Brazen head in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,” The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature, ed. Wendy Beth Hyman (New York: Routledge, 2011), 129-44, on 130 and 131. 64 power of scholarly thaumaturgical reading and learning; it becomes modern-day magic, a predictive, machine-learning robot of our collective dreams (or nightmares). This conglomeration of “unseen forces and beings” that nearly becomes a sentient machine is the product of Bacon’s reading and his books. He explains to his fellow Oxford dons that books propel his scholarship: Resolve you, doctors: Bacon can by books Make storming Boreas thunder from his cave And dim fair Luna to a dark eclipse. The great arch-ruler, potentate of hell, Trembles, when Bacon bids him or his fiends Bow to the force of his pentageron. What art can work, the frolic friar knows; And therefore will I turn my magic books And strain out nigromancy to the deep. (2.46-54; emphasis mine) In the end, the books that Bacon extols may not even necessarily be magical. According to Bacon’s fellow scholar Mason, magic may simply be the application of “mathematic rules,” which can “find conclusions that avail to work / Wonders that pass the common sense of men” (2.73-75). Magic and the brazen head may be new theories of astronomy and mathematics that simply change our understanding of travel, communication, university, and the world. Nevertheless for Bacon, it is his books, but specifically his necromantic ones (“libros meos de necromantia”) (2.3), that imbue him with an ability that is otherworldly, encyclopedic, and magical. It is these same books that eventually buttress his informal disputation with Burden and then his formal one 65 against Vandermast. His thaumaturgical reading is an examination of what knowledge exists beyond the conventional study of humanism, and it offers a small window into the future of scholarly endeavors that could pose a threat to the community stability. In the end, however, Greene ensures that Bacon’s “strain[ing] out” of books in his acts of thaumaturgical reading—whether they result in a victorious disputation or the creation of a automaton—positively impact the university and the country. For Bacon’s fellow scholar Burden, the creation of this bodiless reading head is a total anathema that should be out of the realm of possibility: “Bacon roves a bow beyond his reach, / And tells of more than magic can perform / Thinking to get a fame by fooleries” (2.76-78). In his search to comprehend Bacon’s extraordinary abilities in comparison to his own, Burden questions the adequacy of his own reading as he asks: “Have I not passed as far in state of schools, / And read of many secrets” (2.79-80)? He assures himself of the impossibility of Bacon’s thaumaturgical reading abilities by simply discounting the existence of any magical or technological entity, relegating it to the stuff of fairy tales, “[y]et to think / That heads of brass can utter any voice, / Or more, to tell of deep philosophy – / This is the fable Aesop had forgot” (2.80-83). Both the limits of his personal humanism and his inability to confront the realms of scientific, empirical, and magical possibilities are manifest in Burden’s limited questions and ideas as he “doubts of Bacon’s cabalism” (2.107). Nevertheless, he must lay aside these concerns, including his later embarrassment when Bacon reveals that Burden’s studies and books are simply the “Hostess at Henley, mistress of the Bell” (2.127). The viceroys and the university need Bacon and his thaumaturgical reading to support the monarchy through disputation. Burden’s skepticism is a casualty to Henry III’s immediate needs. 66 While university disputations in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay were likely born of the disputatio quodlibet and bred in Elizabeth I’s early visits to the universities, they emerge as a battle for political dominance and intellectual supremacy between Bacon and Vandermast as they represent the interests of their respective countries and monarchs through thaumaturgical reading. The two also point to the differing educational agendas of England and Germany as the representative ‘ideal’ scholar from each nation. Parts of this academic confrontation at times mirror the “active reading” that Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton have identified in certain humanist readers, including Robert Greene’s academic and personal nemesis Gabriel Harvey. Harvey was employed as scholar and secretary and used his humanist training to interpret texts to reinforce political and social objectives of his employers. Harvey’s work as a ‘facilitator-reader,’ in which he poured through classical works to buttress the political arguments of his employers are, in abstract, similar to the scholars who sought to follow Elizabeth I’s Latin speech at Oxford, or Friar Bacon and Vandermast in their intellectual battle for the glory of their respective nations. Although Bacon and Vandermast perform their learning in a less directed way than did Harvey, they are demonstrating the raw intellectual powers of their respective universities and reading communities. Bacon, Bungay, and Vandermast model Harvey’s approach to reading as described by Grafton and Jardine. Harvey’s reading was “conducted under conditions of strenuous attentiveness; it employed job-related equipment (both machinery and techniques) designed for efficient absorption and processing of the matter read; it was normally carried out in the company of a colleague or student, and was a public performance, rather than a private meditation, in its aims and character (emphasis 67 mine).”75 Harvey’s reading—which produced government or military action—was the result of working in tandem with another reader in an effort to execute humanist reading practices in politically efficacious ways.76 Such directed reading anticipated a specific result. Harvey and his reading partners understood the texts they read so well that they could produce support from them for whatever arguments they needed based on the information at hand. This type of reading and style of argumentation could have positive political and social consequences in the appeals to the queen by members of the gentry who engaged such scholars,, especially if their arguments were used effectively. Several dignitaries in Elizabeth I’s court, including Philip Sidney, employed university-educated men to serve as resident humanist scholars who specialized in the reading and interpretation of various classical texts to make their requests and petitions more learned and infused with the language of the highly educated. Harvey, for his part, was employed to read and reread authors including Livy and Aristotle to shape the philosophers’ writings to influence political discourse and decisions that supported his patron. While Harvey’s reading was not as public as a disputation, it was nearly as performative. It involved the representation of a text for political advantage and positive effect, in less playful but analogous ways to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay’s thaumatological reading- based disputation with Vandermast. Perhaps to Greene’s dismay, his nemesis Gabriel Harvey was not only named a fellow to the university but was also employed in the very 75 Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past & Present 129, no. 1 (November 1990): 30-78. 76 Grafton and Jardine, 32. 68 way that Greene envisions for thaumaturgical scholars in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.77 Vandermast and Friar Bungay become proxies and facilitator readers for King Henry III and the German Emperor who wager on the abilities of their readers/representatives in the first set of disputations. Likewise, Greene taps into the analogous anxieties and intellectual energy surrounding disputations and other public performances of reading that Cecil and the scholars of Cambridge University experienced before and during the 1564 royal visit. The intellectual duelers theatrically enact Elizabeth I’s subtle command to perform all intellectual endeavors with utmost loyalty to the state. Before he begins his disputation with Vandermast, Bungay vaunts the abilities of all Oxford scholars: I tell thee, German, Hapsburg holds none such None read so deep as Oxenford contains There are within our academic state Men that may lecture it in Germany To all the doctors of your Belgic schools. (9.13-16; emphasis mine) The German Emperor also notices that scholars at Oxford are both well-read and dressed “seemly in their grave attire, / Learned in searching principles of art” (9.6-7). However, after “giving nonplus,” and leaving Bungay bereft and confused in his inability to control a fiend that resembles the classical figure Hercules, Vandermast declares himself victor 77 See Gabriel Harvey, Foure letters, and certaine sonnets especially touching Robert Greene, and other parties, by him abused: but incidently of diuers excellent persons, and some matters of note. To all courteous mindes, that will voutchsafe the reading (London : Imprinted by Iohn Wolfe, 1592), EEBO, British Library. 69 over all of the European universities, including Louvain, Florence, Bologna, and Rotterdam, while demanding “And now must Henry if he do me right, / Crown me with laurel, as they all have done” (9.114-15). Friar Bacon arrives to ridicule Bungay and draw attention to the theatricality of the disputation asking, “What, hath the German acted more than thou?” (9.119; emphasis mine). Before Bungay can answer the question, Vandermast notes the learning and erudition imprinted on Bacon’s body: “Lordly thou lookest, as if that thou wert learned; / Thy countenance, as if science held her seat / Between the circled arches of thy brows” (9.122-25; emphasis mine). What should have been an impressive disputation between Vandermast and Bacon turns into a rout; in the moment, there seems to be no end to Bacon’s abilities, as his thaumaturgical reading and studies have been internalized and now radiate forth. Bacon disrupts Vandermast’s scholarship by surpassing all limits as a humanist reader, magician, and scientist. With little ceremony, Bacon simply returns Vandermast back to the confines of his study in Germany and wins accolades from the king: “thou has honored England with thy skill, / And made fair Oxford famous by thine art; / I will be English Henry to thyself “ (9.165-67). At this point in the play, Bacon’s transhistorical polymathic ways seem boundless, and it would seem inevitable that the brazen head would function based on his books and his extensive reading. His ability to construct a sentient, reading automaton only collapses through thoroughly human failure. Bacon leaves his student, whom he calls a “gross dunce” for not knowing much Latin, with the brazen head he has spent seven years creating through reading, magic, and scholarship (5.40). Before he departs from Miles, Bacon again underscores the power of his books: 70 When Bacon read upon his magic book. With seven years tossing nigromantic charms, Poring upon dark Hecate’s principles, I have framed out a monstrous head of brass, That by th’ enchanting forces of the devil, Shall tell out strange and uncouth aphorisms, And girt fair England with a wall of brass. (11.15-20) After emphasizing the importance of watching for the brazen head’s sentience, Bacon talks until the stage directions read Here he falleth asleep (SD 11.39). Bacon’s failure to properly instruct Miles results in the destruction of the brazen head by an otherworldly power. Mark Dahlquist associates the end of the automaton with iconoclastic movements in the sixteenth century as well as Greene’s attempt to encourage audiences to “consider the idolatrous and atheistic potential human knowledge,” as he ties this event to the breakdown of romantic and other social relationships in the play.78 The failure of the brazen head is also pedagogical and communal; Bacon’s disruptive and boundless scholarship could only be understood by a few people. The friction surrounding his work and its eventual destruction are less a function of hubris than the absence of a community of scholars working with him on this seven-year project. After the demise of the brazen head, Bacon ceases to mention books and breaks his glass (after the death of men who looked to it for answers). He turns back to embrace Bungay and his scholarly community and continues to serve Henry III to use the skills that he has forsworn in order to predict the rise of Elizabeth I, who by leading the country to safety 78 Mark Dahlquist, “Love and Technological Iconoclasm in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,” ELH 78, no. 1 (2011): 51-77. 71 after the Spanish Armada accomplished what Bacon could not and metaphorically surrounded England with a wall of brass. Greene’s play complies with Elizabeth I’s early statements about scholars and coincidentally positions scholars and readers exactly as she wants them: harmless, brilliant, and in service of the state. In the end, Robert Greene may be adhering to Linda Shenk’s assertion that men of the university were so used to performing for the monarch that even authors for the public theater were tied “closely (and abjectly) to the crown’s authority.”79 As a result, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay remains mostly supportive of political hierarchy, the monarch (either Henry III or Elizabeth I), and succession. One could argue that Greene holds this conservative view as a proud graduate of the universities, all the while being critical of the enterprise as Katherine Eggert explains in the context of humanism in the sixteenth century universities: “[i]t is possible to be skeptical about a system while still functioning wholly within it.”80 Alternatively, however, Greene hints at the potential danger and chaos that could exist if these expert readers and practitioners of magic books are left to their own devices. Time’s Past: Dr. Faustus’s End of Every Art If Friar Bacon finds some solace in the university community after his foray into the disruptive nature and limitlessness of thaumaturgical reading and science, Faustus shrinks away from the academic community at Wittenberg to the recesses of his study in search of what lies beyond the “ends” or bounds of humanism. His interest in this sort of 79 Linda Shenk, Gown vs. Crown, 22. 80 Eggert, Disknowledge, 17. 72 learning transports him from the celebrated center of the university community to its outer margins in the company of occultists Valdes and Cornelius who eventually encourage him to conjure with books including “Bacon’s and Albanus’ workes, / The Hebrew Psalter, and New Testament; / And whatsoever else is requisite” (1.154-56). In time, Faustus eventually becomes a thaumaturgical reader, but only after dissecting numerous books in areas of his academic expertise—a restless attempt to discover a subject to study that will hold his interest and desires. At the opening of the play, he reflects upon Aristotle’s Analytics, claiming that it alone has “ravished” him. He will Yet level at the end of every art, And live and die in Aristotle’s works. Sweet Analytics, ‘tis thou has ravished me: Bene disserere est finis logices. Is, to dispute well, logic’s chiefest end? Affords this art no greater miracle? Then read no more, thou has attained the end; A greater subject fitteth Faustus’ wit. (1.4-10) For the brief moment that he reads and takes pleasure from it, the book Faustus holds profoundly affects him. It ravishes him in many senses of the word; it drives him to a state of fraught and convoluted ecstasy, a variable unsteadiness that seemingly parallels the evolving definition of ‘ravish’ in the 1580s and 1590s.81 While the initial ravishment fit a description of forcible assault or of religious ecstasy, the initial ravishment Faustus 81 “ravish, v.,” OED Online, accessed March 2018, Oxford University Press. The verb ravish seems to encompass many actions—from forcible assault, to joy, to corruption, to simply removing someone from something. 73 experiences is a peculiar fusion of these two concepts. He is both overcome and taken away by his reading and he wishes both to live and die in the aesthetic moment he experiences; in this instant, he identifies a very modern human condition.82 This act of reading philosophy summons in Faustus a loss of control and incites in him an utter joy, the intensity of which muddies his desire to consider reading Aristotle beyond the basic functions of logic and disputation. On the seductive nature of aesthetic ravishment, Francisco Unger writes that it might offer more than discrete pleasure—might help us stave off forms of nihilism and despondency that always menace the undeceived among us in a world that is structurally amoral, characterized by irrepressible agonistic strife, and lacking any transcendental escape from the conditions of finitude and contingency—a world in which the deck is stacked in favor of Jeremiah.83 Rather than using the moment fully to experience the sublime, Faustus decides, quite gluttonously, that this feeling is repeatable. Rebecca Lemon has likened this ravishment to addiction, both in the contemporary and sociological senses, but also in an early modern sense of “service, debt, [and] dedication” or in the Roman sense of “bind[ing] 82 Cf. John Marston, Histriomastix, or the Player Whipped, in The Plays of John Marston in Three Volumes, ed. H. Harvey Wood (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1939). Coming several years after Dr. Faustus was first performed and then published in 1604, John Marston’s Histriomastix (1610) also addresses ravishment in study. When asked to describe the difference between the study of philosophy and mathematics, Chrisoganus explains that philosophy is for the sensible but in mathematics and astrology/astronomy one may find the transcendent: “Those Regions fil’d with sundry sorts of starres: / They (likewise) christned with peculiar names / To see a dayly vse wrought out of them / With demonstrations so infallible / The pleasure cannot bee, but rauishing” (B2r) (emphasis mine). 83 Francisco Unger, “The Ends of Aesthetic Ravishment,” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 36, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 48-59, on 50-51. 74 someone to service, or to bind or attach oneself to a person, party or cause.”84 Faustus has attached himself to a life of study, and the rhetoric of addiction is fused to his continual desire for books, answers, and the beauty that accompanies the study of necromancy. Addiction, in this sense, was not viewed pejoratively during the Renaissance. At times it was viewed as ameliorative, a “crucial component of scholarship: only with clarity and dedication can the philosopher find his calling.”85 Whether positively or negatively, in this dramatic moment that ricochets from ravishment to profound need, it is Faustus’ addiction to reading, rather than his dissatisfaction, that propels him to “a greater subject [that] fitteth Faustus’ wit” (1.11) Faustus’s relationship with The Analytics leads him to a syllogism that halts his reading of all Aristotle. Because he has been both overwhelmed and sated by this particular work, he claims to have “attained the end,” or the limit, of an essential part of traditional, sixteenth-century humanism using the logic he has carefully studied. He then eschews works by Galen and Justinian as well as Jerome’s translation of the Bible, and condemns the reading of a “mercenary drudge / Who aims at nothing but external trash,” which has now become the purview of scholars and lawyers who, seemingly without freedom, read in the service of others such as professional scholars Gabriel Harvey. Faustus’s denunciation of these books pushes his reading and desires well beyond the 84 Rebecca Lemon, “Scholarly Addiction: Doctor Faustus and the Drama of Devotion,” Renaissance Quarterly 69, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 865-98, on 866; see also Deborah Willis, “Dr. Faustus and the Early Modern Language of Addiction,” Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe: Fresh Cultural Contexts, ed. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan (New York: Routledge, 2008), 135-48. 85 Lemon, “Scholarly Addiction,” 866. 75 scope of humanism (1.34-35).86 Rather than reversing the course of knowledge into the comfortable but shaky empiricism of alchemy that Katherine Eggert identifies in the plays of Jonson and Shakespeare, Marlowe instead pushes the margins of Faustus’s experimentation into “metaphysics.” His books become a catalyst for his study of “lines, circles, schemes, letters and characters,” which signify not only the indefinable domain of the occult, but also the burgeoning field of experimental science—the very edge of discovery and reality (1.1.51). This new work and the new books that accompany it allow Faustus to become ravished again. The necromantic books that he decides to study promise him what his other studies do not—profit, fame, honor, and omnipotence: These metaphysics of magicians, And necromantic books are heavenly! Lines, circles, schemes, letters and characters! Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires. O what a world of profit and delight, Of power, of honor, of omnipotence Is promised to the studious Artisan! All things that move between the quiet poles Shall be at my command: emperors and kings Are but obeyed in their several provinces: Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds; But his dominion that exceeds in this, 86 Eggert, Disknowledge, “Introduction”; I am taking my cue from Katherine Eggert’s purposefully contained view of humanism in order to create restrictive boundaries of humanism. I understand that humanism was far more nuanced, multifaceted ,and complex than I am able to elaborate here. 76 Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man: A sound magician is a mighty god. Here Faustus try thy brains to gain a deity. (1.49-63) Instead of “intellectual ennui,” it is intellectual curiosity and a desire to move beyond the walls of the study and the perceived “ends” of learning that push Faustus from one set of books to another.87 The seeming limitlessness of his imagination— however finite it is in actuality—suggests that he could learn about astronomy and the birth of the universe—what is seemingly impossible. He supposes that necromantic books will produce spirits, much like Bacon’s brazen head, who will bring him certainty and “read [him] strange philosophy” that is presumably unlike The Analytics he earlier rejects. Kristin Poole identifies Faustus’s variable interests and desires as a necessary part of his being a “Renaissance Man,” who functions as an antiquarian searching through pieces of history to understand the present. He is also very modern in the sense that, like Friar Bacon, his addiction and understanding of his books are asynchronous; his reading is a transhistoric gathering of new and old material that encourages him to move forward into the study of the unknown. During his early encounters with Mephastophilis, Faustus learns that this unknown subject should be mathematics and astronomy, but he learns that only after he is denied the possibility of a wife. Mephastophilis reengages Faustus’s intellectual curiosity—after their initial conversation about contracts and the 87 Kristin Poole, “Dr. Faustus and Reformation Theology,” in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Garrett Sullivan, Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 96-107. Poole calls Faustus a Renaissance man, juxtaposing him with the medieval Everyman; for Poole, Faustus is a “highly individualized and complex character” who must strangely interact with relics from another time. Very much like Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Marlowe’s play seamlessly draws together elements of Medieval and Renaissance cultures.. 77 state of being damned and living out of heaven. Mephastophilis hands Faustus a book and outlines its physical beauty of lines and circles while touting its worth. Consequently he resurrects the addiction that drew Faustus to study necromancy in the first place. After offering him courtesans who are chaste, wise, or as “bright as Lucifer before his fall,” the devil offers Faustus a book (5.155): Hold, take this book, peruse it thoroughly, The iterating of these lines brings gold; The framing of this circle on the ground Brings whirlwinds, tempests, thunder and lightning, Pronounce this thrice devoutly to thy self, And men in armour shall appear to thee, Ready to execute what thou desirest. (5.156-62) From there Faustus asks for three more books that contain all “spells and incantations,” the “characters and planets of the heavens” and “all plants, herbs and trees that grow upon the earth” (5.164, 167-68, 172-73). The audience watching the play in the sixteenth century may have recognized the books Faustus demands from the devil as grimoires, which were growing in popularity for general readers. The more erudite members of the audience may have recalled the medieval Book of Secrets, which was falsely attributed to Albertus Magnus, or the book Magia naturalis (1558) by Giambattista Della Porta, which addresses subjects such as optics, and “has been characterized by one historian as reading ‘like a manifesto for new scientific methodology: that of science as a venation, a hunt for ‘new secrets of nature.’”88 With 88 Davies, Grimoires, 156; see William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Natures: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 78 these books, Faustus engages Mephastophilis in a disputation about astronomy, mathematics, and planetary alignment, fueling questions about the universe that had recently become a part of sixteenth-century scientific areas of inquiry. Gabrielle Sugar attributes to Faustus “unconventional astronomical thought” because of a Copernican understanding of the universe, based either on De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), or on a work supporting these ideas proposed by Kepler.89 Either way, Faustus challenges the standard scientific understanding of the firmament. Sugar argues that Faustus presents Mephastophilis with the problem of retrograde motion, “the astronomical phenomenon in which a planet appears to change direction in its orbit and travel backwards. This phenomenon was difficult to explain in the Ptolemaic universe, which incorporated Aristotle’s belief that “all celestial bodies must have an orbit of the perfect shape, the circle,” and to this challenge, Mephastophilis “is unable to give a satisfactory answer within traditional cosmology and unwilling to reveal the other possible explanation.”90 Sugar further explains that Faustus recognizes the insincerity of the answer, while Mephastophilis refuses to respond with “anything that is against the devil’s kingdom.”91 Faustus heavily implies that the Copernican universe is new science that extends beyond Lucifer’s conception but perhaps not that of the university that he has abandoned. His disputation with Mephastophilis is academic in nature, capturing Faustus’s thaumaturgical reading and his interest in the boundless possibilities of knowledge. In his anger at not getting a proper answer to his question about the universe, 89 Gabrielle Sugar, “Falling to a diuelish exercise: The Coperincan Universe in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” Early Theatre 12, no. 1 (September 2009): 141-49. 90 Sugar, “Falling to a diuelish exercise,” 144-45. 91 Sugar, 144-45. 79 Faustus asks, “Villain, have I not bound thee to tell me anything?” (5.245). In this exchange, he learns that there is, in fact, knowledge, reading and study without limit, but these may reside with God. As dramatic characters, Bacon and Faustus represent two distinct approaches to thaumaturgical reading as they both look for answers about the universe and learning beyond the scope of humanism. Bacon maintains a close proximity to his academic and social community and continually reinforces the necessity of his magic books and reading as commodities valuable to the university and nation. His desire to animate the brazen head, as well as his desire to understand the universe by philosophy changes the notions of what it means to be a reader in the face of evolving magic and science. Bacon’s reading is both experimental and applied science and as a result, his reading is systematic, practical, and grounded in the physical entity of an automaton. Faustus’s reading is individualistic, mostly driven by a selfish desire to comprehend fully the construction of the universe through devotion to theoretical material, or the “the lines, circles, schemes, letters and characters” (1.1.51) in his books. He remains mostly self-guided and independent of his community—particularly once he outperforms his friends in magic. Faustus ‘addiction’ to material books and learning drives his intense discussions with Mephastophilis concerning the nature and origin of the universe—a theoretical and astronomy-based approach to knowledge and experience that move beyond humanism. Bacon and Faustus both use thaumaturgic reading to acknowledge the importance of humanism and the history of learning in the university and then use this academic nostalgia to push forward into empiricism in slightly different, but equally disruptive ways. 80 In The groundes of the longitude with an admonition to all those that are incredulous and beleeue not the trueth of the same (1591), Simon Forman makes a theological and scientific case for the existence of longitude, which in the end proved to be very false.92 He was correct, however, that, despite being a staple of cartography, longitude was not always a trusted or verifiable mode of calculation. Forman lists scholars who never understood the theory of longitude, including “Ptolomeus, Pithargoras, Plato, Beed, Aristotle…Frier Bacon and an infitine numer moe of grat and learned clearkes which haue written as well of Astronomie as Cosmographie, it was not for want of wisedome or learning in them, or great diligence to search the secreete misterie of things: neither was it for that there should be borne into the world a greater clarke then they to finde it” (A4r). Whether or not Forman was actually able to calculate longitude on land, he understood that boundaries of knowledge were always being pressed upon and broken by learned individuals. For Forman, discovering and calculating longitude, while seemingly magical at first, became a process about understanding the formulae of time, and according to him, being in the right place and willing to study novel things. Combined with Mason’s pithy and reasonable assessment of the wonder and spectacle of discovering new mathematical information in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Forman’s statement is, I believe, a hearty endorsement of the work and scholarship that Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe understood to be the gifts of scholars and universities—the ability to gather disparate reading material and push 92 Simon Forman, The groundes of the longitude with an admonition to all those that are incredulous and beleeue not the trueth of the same (London, 1591), EEBO, Bodliean Library. see Barbara Howard Traister, The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 81 boundaries of assumed knowledge. For historians of the book and of readers, Greene and Marlowe sharpen our understanding of the ways that English Renaissance readers could conceive of books as instruments that were pivotal to education, politics, and burgeoning scientific theory in the face of an evolving conception and definition of humanism. At the same time, they demonstrate the possibility that these same books could be dangerous and disruptive to the larger community. In these plays, books are tools of knowledge for very specialized purposes, but they are also a part of a wider cultural phenomenon that both Greene and Marlowe were keen to acknowledge. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Dr. Faustus provide a view into an emerging language of erudite literary individuals who had begun to communicate with one another using metaphors related to books—both their physical makeup and the texts they contain. Historians of the book and readers are able to reinforce the notion that books could be more than one thing to a reader: practical and yet still magical. With the help of Bacon’s and Faustus’s magic books, their longstanding humanist books, and the empirical books that came after, English Renaissance readers could follow the Latin motto that starts Forman’s treatise in anticipation of a scientific revolution: Veritas filia temporis, or truth (and perhaps science and magic) are the daughters of time. 82 Chapter 2 Physical Spaces of Reading: The English Renaissance Study in Everard Guilpin’s “Satyra Quinta” and Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix “Studio, a studie, or place to studie in, a cabinet, closet, a university, a colledge. Also a deske, a standing deske in a school for great books to stand upon, but properlie an earnest bending of the minde to a thing, great affection that one hath to do good or euill, studie, exercise, seate, trade, endevour, will, care, carke, diligence, industrie, appetite, fansie, desire, labour, affection, delight, pleasure, opinion to a thing.” —A vvorlde of wordes, or Most copious, and exact dictionarie in Italian and English, collected by Iohn Florio, 1598 In “Satyra Quinta,” of Skialethia, or a Shadow of Truth (1598), Everard Guilpin spends a substantial part of his poem claiming that he wants nothing more than to remain undisturbed with his books within the confines of his study: Let me alone I prethee in thys Cell, Entice me not into the Citties hell; Tempt me not forth this Eden of content, To tast of that which I shall soon repent: Prethy excuse me, I am not alone Accompanied with meditation, 83 And calme content, whose tast more pleaseth me Then all the Citties lushious vanity. I had rather be encoffin’d in this chest Amongst these bookes and papers I protest, Then free-booting abroad purchase offence, And scandale my calme thoughts with discontents. (D4r-v)1 Guilpin may have written his poem as a response to or companion piece for his friend John Donne’s early manuscript poem “Satyre I,” in which Donne also supposedly wishes to remain alone, away from the public, in a “standing wooden chest” with his books (line 2).2 Guilpin likely wrote his anonymously published satire from his rooms in London at Inns of Court. In 1591, after leaving Emmanuel College, Cambridge without a degree, he had begun his legal education at Gray’s Inn and was afterwards employed as an attorney, during which period he may have met Donne, who was then affiliated with Lincoln’s Inn.3 D. Allen Carroll writes that Guilpin was among “that extraordinary set of young 1 Everard (Edward) Guilpin, Skialetheia. Or, A shadowe of truth, in certaine epigrams and satyres (London, 1598), EEBO, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. All quotes are taken from this edition. 2 “Satyre I,” The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 90; see Charles Cathcart, “Guilpin and the Godly Satyre,” The Review of English Studies 63, no. 253 (April 2010): 64-79; M. Thomas Hester, “‘All are players’: Guilpin and ‘Prester Iohn’ Donne,” South Atlantic Review 49, no. 1 (January 1984): 3-17; R.E. Bennett, “John Donne and Everard Guilpin,” The Review of English Studies 15, no. 58 (January 1939): 66-72; The existence of Donne’s friendship with Guilpin is based upon his verse letter “To Mr. E.G.” in which Donne refers to Guilpin as a poet and friend. Coincidentally, Donne uses the phrase “slimy rimes,” which only appears in one other place during the time period: The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus (which was performed after Christmas 1601 and printed in 1606). 3 D. Allen Carroll, “Everard Guilpin (circa 1572-after 1608?),” in Sixteenth-Century British Nondramatic Writers: Second Series, ed. David A. Richardson, Dictionary of Literary Biography vol. 136 (Detroit: Gale, 1994), 168-70. Guilpin matriculated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1588 and left without a degree in 1591. 84 men who came from the universities in the 1590s to the Inns of Court to study law, and to find preferment at court.”4 Like Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and his future cousin by marriage, John Marston, Guilpin added to the set of young men searching unsuccessfully for a coveted position in the Tudor (and then Stuart) government. He was decidedly less fortunate than Donne, who secured a position as a diplomat and eventually received an appointment as a fellow in the Church of England. Although it is not known if Guilpin was called to the bar, it can only be assumed that he had to rely upon his work as an attorney to sustain him financially in the 1590s and early 1600s.5 Numerous scholars have already drawn comparisons between “Satyra Quinta” and Donne’s poem “Satire I,” speculating about the nature of the Guilpin-Donne friendship suggested by Donne’s verse letter “To Mr. E.G.”6 More often than not, however, More often than not, however, “Satire I” has been the focus of most examinations involving the two poems. “Satire I” has been praised for its carefulness and for its being “concerned with the role of the satirist in a providential world.”7 Joshua Scodel writes that Donne’s work “evokes—without quite endorsing—a traditional association of philosophical retirement with freedom from worldly 4 Carroll, “Everard Guilpin,” 16. 5 Bennett, “John Donne and Everard Guilpin,” 68; see London County Council survey of London, ed. Sir George Gater and Walter H. Godfrey, vol. 27, The Village of Highgate (London, 1936), 39-42. After publishing one additional satire in which he defends himself and John Marston, entitled The whipper of the satyre his pennance in a white sheete, or the beadles confutation (London, 1601), Guilpin was listed as a resident of Highgate in Suffolk by 1608. Bennett makes fascinating conjectures that Guilpin and Donne may have suffered a rupture to their friendship as the result of Donne’s travel to Cadiz with Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex. 6 Hester, “All are players,” 4. 7 Hester, 6. 85 perturbations” in search of “the Stoic conception of ‘inner freedom.”8 Scholarship often labels Guilpin’s poem as derivative—a reproduction of Donne’s work but with less purpose and creativity—and lacking the gravitas or complexity of his friend’s verse. As a result, both Guilpin and his poetry have been relegated to the margins. Charles Cathcart identifies him as “something of a satellite in the priorities of the academic world: a Rosencrantz or a Guildenstern who holds a walk-on part in the literary affairs of greater men.”9 However, as Guilpin expands upon the twelve lines that “Satyre I” devotes to solitude and books, he does far more in “Satyra Quinta” than write imitative verse; he dissects and complicates an early modern paradigm that persisted in contrasting the space of the study with the outside world. English Renaissance drama had begun examining this juxtaposition as well; however, Guilpin’s exploration of the space through a combination of Horatian and Juvenalian satire provide him with the means to find commonalities and stark differences between his private enclave and the cityscape. He employs his humanist training to articulate the architectural and cultural depth of the room—it is more than a launching point for a walk through the city in order to criticize it and its purposelessness (while reluctantly acknowledging that the space of the city continually provides material and people to satirize).10 Along with biting satire aimed at various groups of people in London, Guilpin constructs a novel history and an encomium to the English Renaissance study. Throughout the satire, as he requests to stay either content, or happy, in Eden, or 8 Joshua Scodel, “‘None’s Slave’: Some Versions of Liberty in Donne’s Satires 1 and 4,” ELH 72, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 363-85, on 367-68. 9 Cathcart, “Guilpin and the Godly Satyre,” 66. 10 Tara S. Welch, “Est locus uni cuique suus: City and Status in Horace’s Satires 1.8 and 1.9, ”Classical Antiquity 20, no. 1 (April 2001):165-92, on 167. 86 perhaps pleased with the Edenic contents of his reading, he details the study’s origins from its beginnings as a monastic “cell”—an offshoot of the scriptorium—to the humanist studiolo of the Italian Renaissance, to the hybrid literary and transactional space that appears in English Renaissance drama of the 1590s and 1600s. As it maps the evolution of the study, “Satyra Quinta” details possible architectural and literary functions for it in an early modern urban landscape. Guilpin records how changing language and cultural references—including that of the theater and Inns of Court—inform new uses and meanings for the space, even as the history of the study continually associates it with privacy and seclusion. In “Satyra Quinta,” Guilpin grapples with the notion that the study must remain synonymous with isolation and solitude. Even as he claims comfort in his aloneness, the world outside seeps in and informs and alters his solitary perceptions of the city. His observations are significant for English Renaissance drama as he clearly articulates the tensions that exist at the nexus of reading, books, and the physical space of the study, particularly as new, urbane readers and writers embrace a nascent capitalism produced by non-humanist books circulating in St. Paul’s Churchyard, the theater, and through activities associated with writing professionally in London. By drawing attention to the study and the action within it, Guilpin emphasizes the dynamic nature of reading, the physical life of books, and the ways in which the space of the study transforms humans and ideas—notions that English Renaissance dramatists were exploring around the same time that “Satrya Quinta” was published. Guilpin’s observations about reading, space, and the city guide this chapter as “Satyra Quinta” is briefly paired with Christopher Marlowe’s play Dr. Faustus, before the poem traces a history of the study. This chapter culminates in a 87 reading of the space in its most transactional and emotional form—Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix, in which a writer, Horace (a lampooning of Ben Jonson), is “untrussed” for his use of this private space to publish the secrets of his fellow poets initially, at least, with impunity. Guilpin constructs nearly post-modern architectural meaning for the study by “conferring value on it,” through his poetic rendering of the space, as he discovers the habits of a new type of early modern urban reader and thinker (educated, young, sophisticated, invested in popular culture) using the space.11 Ann M. Myers notes that beyond examining the writings of early modern architects and surveyors such as Henry Wotton, John Stowe, and Ralph Treswell, studying Renaissance literature can “expand our knowledge of early modern architecture in another way, contributing not so much to our knowledge of its design or construction, as to our sense of how it was valued and understood.”12 Sixteenth- and seventeenth- century literature reconstructs the built environment by providing a history of space. Because there are few statements of architectural aesthetics or detailed descriptions of architectural space in Renaissance English buildings before the 1610s, literary descriptions fill a gap, capturing the historical function, purpose, and general feeling about particular spaces. Because architecture and constructed space inspired so much historical and literary writing, Myers notes that the “built environment likewise affected the way writers were prepared to approach, in writing, the representation of historical 11 Rafael De Clercq, “Modern Architecture and the Concept of Harmony,” British Journal of Aesthetics 51, no. 1 (January 2011): 69-79. Guilpin applies contemporary architectural theory in his conception of the space of the study in his poem. 12 Ann M. Meyers, Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2013), 4; see Lucy Gent, “Elizabethan Architecture: A View from Rhetoric,” Architectural History 57 (2104), 73-108, for more views on the relationships between literature, language, and architecture. 88 places and literary settings.”13 She also explains that English Renaissance writers use buildings (and perhaps interior space) “as a way to tell human stories, to reflect on history, to discover it or make it up.”14 She also explains that English Renaissance writers use buildings (and perhaps interior space) “as a way to tell human stories, to reflect on history, to discover it or make it up.”15 This chapter also attempts to articulate the hybridity of the urban study as Henry Lefebvre rationalizes the complication of space in general: “Activity in space is restricted by that space; space ‘decides’ what activity may occur, but even this ‘decision’ has limits placed upon it.”16 It is possible to conceive that the built environment had an effect on the way that writers, including Guilpin, imagined and then constructed spaces for reading and books in their poetry and drama. Poets and dramatists in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London shape the study into a space that highlights the tensions surrounding the notions of privacy, reading and writing. Collectively, they recognize the changing nature of reading space, both inside the study and around the city. The culmination of this change occurs in satirical city comedies of which Guilpin could have been an audience member. In order to understand the physical construction of the study, it is also helpful to recall the history of the space through non-literary texts. Early humanist paintings of St. Jerome and Erasmus envision the ideal space for reading, thinking, and writing, which is then incorporated into the building of studies for scholars and students at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Many early humanists determined educational and aesthetic 13 Meyers, “Literature and Architecture,” 5. 14 Meyers, 5. 15 Meyers, 5. 16 Henry LeFebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 147. 89 choices that influenced later generations of scholars, several of whom ended up as professional writers in England. The paintings of scholars in their studies have a theatrical quality similar to that of Guilpin’s satire; both maintain a keen awareness of the performative nature of the study as it straddles the private and public divide. Two examples in Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems show the inherent theatrical qualities of the study, resembling the theater and evoking Guilpin’s interest in the space and its purpose. Whitney grapples with purpose of the study—as he determines whether it is a space of communication or absolute silence. Guilpin shares that confusion, as he confronts the noise and disruption from the outside world and enters into his study. After explaining that he would rather be nearly inhumed with this books, Guilpin eschews the noise and temptations that surround him in the city and instead prefers to be “accompanied with meditation, / and calm content” of philosophers (D4r): Heere I conuerse with those diuiner spirits Whose knowledge and admire the world inherits: Heere doth the famous profound Stagarite, With Natures mistick harmony delight My rauish’d contemplation: I heere see The now-old worlds youth in an history: Heere may I be graue Platos auditor; And learning of that morrall Lecturer To temper mine affections, gallantly Get of my selfe a glorious victory. (D4v) 90 Like Faustus before him, Guilpin sits in an enclosed space “rauish’d” by Aristotle (the Stagarite) and then lists the additional books within his reach. His encounter with philosophy leaves Guilpin outwardly settled and comfortable or “deepe,” as Francis Bacon obverses in his experience in reading the subject matter (B2r).17 Conversely, his expression may also be one similar to Marisilio Ficino’s “vacatio,” which Maria Ruvolt describes as a “form of ecstasy in which the soul separates from the body to commune with the divine intelligence.”18 If he is as enraptured as the famous scholar “that in his study sits,” Guilpin nevertheless refuses to chase Aristotle’s syllogisms to the ends of humanism into necromancy and science.19 He may, however, have been familiar with Marlowe’s tragedy as it had played in repertory at the Rose (which he mentions along with the Curtain at a later point in the poem) when Guilpin was a student and young lawyer at Gray’s Inn.20 Unlike Faustus, Guilpin does not seem to read his books or remain in the space of his study to encounter the limits of his own knowledge; rather, he employs his reading and the space initially to compare the “hell” of the city with his monkish cell. The architectural space allows Guilpin to perform his understanding of humanism and history with Aristotle’s “natures mistick harmony” far away from the “lushious vanity of the city” (D4v). His satire initially adopts a language and style in his satire that is reminiscent of much earlier humanist scholars of the Italian Renaissance 17 Francis Bacon, “Of Studies,” The Essaies (London, 1597), EEBO, The Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. 18 Maria Ruvoldt, “Sacred to Secular, East to West: The Renaissance Study and the Strategies of Display,” Renaissance Studies 20, no. 5 (November 2006): 640-57 on 642. 19 Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus, ed. Roma Gill (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989). See chapter one of this dissertation. 20 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage: 1574-1642, 3rd ed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 236. 91 who used their studies to shape a humanist identity through their pursuit of non-religious study.21 Guilpin’s books come alive in his study, embodying the very scholars he wishes to learn from in conversation—similar to an undergraduate and his tutor. Learning about the history of the world from some of its most famous philosophers is enough to keep him from the devilish temptations outside of the study; unlike Faustus, Guilpin, at least initially, tempers his desires to learn more and know more outside of the books inside of the space with him. His language echoes that of early scholars including Juan Luis Vives, who purposely conflated the secular and the divine in scholarly pursuits—to ensure that humanism and the pursuit of knowledge did not efface religion and the presence of the sacred. He encouraged students to model themselves after Thomas Acquinas and pray for inspiration and maintain a closeness with God while pursuing new (and potentially dangerous) knowledge.22 Guilpin’s study does not outwardly indicate religiosity, but he nevertheless maintains a connection with god-like figures including Aristotle and Plato as he separates the noise and space of the city from his study in his communion with them. In John Fletcher’s play, The Elder Brother, Charles, a bookish student, also communes with classical figures of learning in which he dines, walks and mediates on the starts with Erra Pater—a book that functions as a stand in for an astrologer and healer, who ensures that Charles’ body remained strong. For Charles, the study, and the meetings taking place in are divinely inspired. His manservant Andrew describes his days: Few Princes fare like him; He breakes his fast With Aristotle, dines with Tully, takes His watering with the Muses, suppes with Livie, 21 Ruvoldt, “Sacred to secular,” 641. 22 Ruvoldt, 642. 92 Then walkes a turne or two in via lactea, And (after sixe houres conference with the starres) Sleepes with old Erra Pater. (B3r)23 ‘The antique courts of ancients’: The Early Renaissance Study Initially, Guilpin’s study mimics a traditional Italian Renaissance studiolo, a reading space that Leah R. Clark explains was “humanistic and attached to ideas, reading and intellect,”24and that which gradually evolved to include visitors interested in conversations about books or in the objects, paintings, and collections housed there.25 Stephen J. Campbell defines the study as “the spatial expression of the notion of the private individual” who may have used the space to curate a persona for him or herself— either alone or with the help from an expert—through a narrative suggested by books or other collections present in the space.26 Both Campbell and Clark note that the Italian Renaissance study had competing purposes: it was a space that supported private, individual acts of reading but could also be a performative space of knowledge, books, reading, and art. Throughout the poem, Guilpin emphasizes the calm of the space in his attempt to draw contrasts and underline the boorishness of the city. His study is a 23 John Fletcher, The Elder Brother A Comedie (1637) (New York: Da Capo Press Theatrum Orbis Terrarus, LTD, 1970). 24 Leah R. Clark, “Collecting, Exchange, and Sociability in the Renaissance Studiolo,” Journal of the History of Collection 25, no. 2 (July 2013), 171-84, on 171; see Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 25 Clark, “Collecting, exchange and sociability,”175. 26 Stephen J. Campbell, “Giorgione’s ‘Tempest,’ ‘Studiolo’ Culture, and the Renaissance Lucretius,” Renaissance Quarterly 56, no. 2 (Summer 2003), 299-332, on 302. 93 humanist one—it values the conversation—or conceivably a veneration—between a reader and his (and occasionally her) book, especially when the author is one “[w]hose knowledge and admire the world inherits” (D4v). Guilpin’s sentiments are near to those of Niccolo Machiavelli—who coincidentally appears briefly in “Satyra Prima” in which Guilpin rails against hypocrisy in a manner reminiscent of Juvenal’s “Satire 1”: 27 Signior Machiauell Taught him this mumming trick, with curtesie T’entrench himselfe in popularitie, And for a writhen face, and bodies moue, Be Barricadode in the peoples loue. (C3v) In his own description of his space dedicated to reading, Machiavelli writes to his friend, Francescso Vettori, to describe the quiet opulence of his study and the conversations that take place there: When evening comes I return to my home, and I go into my study [et entro nel mio scrittoio]; and on the threshold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered with mud and mire, and I put on regal and curial robes; and dress in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient court of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I am not 27 Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. Susana Morton Brand (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Guilpin begins Satyra Prima with the lines: “Shall I still mych in silence and giue ayme, / To other wits which make court to bright fame?” which seems to be a loose translation of the first few lines of Juvenal’s “Satyre I”: “Semper ego auditor tantum? numquamne reponam / vexatus totiens rauci Theseide Cordi? / inpune ergo mihi recitaverit ille togatas, / hic elegos?” (Shall I always be stuck in the audience? Never retaliate for being tortured so often by hoarse Cordus’ Song of Theseus? Let them get away with it, then?); coincidentally, lines from this Juvenalian satire begin The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus. See Chapter three of this dissertation. 94 ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions, and they in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom, I dismiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death: I become completely part of them.28 Machiavelli sets the tone for the space sartorially, by wearing expensive, “regal” clothes to counter the mundane labor he endures during the day. His clothes also set the tone for the communion that is about to take place. Leah R. Clark writes that conversations with authors were crucial—particularly in studioli—as a “way to reunite the owner with the great minds of the past.”29 Machiavelli dons luxurious clothes, seemingly akin to a priest’s holy day vestments, in order to speak with the spirits of great men. The study is a transcendent place for him—it exists just beyond space or time as he holds his daily erudite “conversations” and learns from ancient authors. His reading enables him to merge with the ancients, much like a religious divine, in a daily immersive ceremony that pushes his everyday concerns—boredom, or even death—beyond the wall of the study. At first, Guilpin imitates Machiavelli’s calm reading through conversations with philosophers , historians, painters, and poets until he allows the cityscape to passively enter into the sanctum of his study later in the poem. Perhaps imagining a moment just before he went into his study, Santi di Tito painted a well-known portrait of Machiavelli in the second half of the sixteenth century, years after Machiavelli’s death in 1527 (figure 1). In the portrait, Machiavelli wears red and black expensive-looking robes as he stands 28 Anthony Grafton, “The Humanist as Reader,” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 179- 212, on 180 ; see also N. Machiavelli, Opere, vol. 3: Lettere, ed. F. Gaeta (Turin: UTET, 1984), 425-26; The Portable Machiavelli, ed. P. Bandanella and M. Musa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 68-69. 29 Clarke, “Collecting,” 176. 95 leaning on a book that is clasped shut with his right hand; he holds a glove in his left hand. His robes appear to be made of a velvet material and seem expensive. The voluminous fabric, with an air-filled, expansive quality is not only the central focus of the painting, but also typifies di Santi’s “emphasis on light simplicity of composition” and resembles the cardinal red St. Jerome wears in many portraits in which he is located in his study.30 Jerome’s singular devotion to his books and his humanist endeavors along with his duties as a priest influenced generations of early Renaissance scholars; his association with the space of the study ties it closely to humanism and the intellectual, private work of the study. Christopher Marlowe obliquely addresses St. Jerome’s work in the opening scene of Dr. Faustus in which Faustus dismisses the Latin Vulgate—Jerome’s translation of the bible—yet the specter of the scholar and his study persists, and Faustus ruminates on what subject will next hold his interest. The figure of Jerome in his study is easily conflated with those of many Renaissance scholars in their studies as he was a favorite scholar of religious European humanists, many of whom (mena and women) chose him as their patron saint.31 Petrarch himself venerated Jerome, second only to his favorite early Christian scholar, Augustine.32 Bernhard Ridderbos observes that the proliferation of relief sculptures and of portraits of Jerome in his study is tied closely to the rise of the humanist moment in early Renaissance Italy. Andrew Cain and Josef Lössl write that 30 Julian Brooks, “Santi di Tito’s Studio: The Contents of his House and Workshop in 1603,” The Burlington Magazine 144, no. 1 (May 2002): 279-88. 31 Andrew Cain and Josef Lössl, Jerome of Stridon: His Life, Writings, and Legacy (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009), 240. 32 Bernhard Ridderbos, Saint and Symbol: Images of Saint Jerome in early Italian Art (Gronigen: Bouma's Boekhuis, 1984), 15-62. 96 humanists admired him because they “saw in him the ancient Christian who…did not deny his classical education in favour of his Biblical learning and, at any rate, stood for literary, as opposed to scholastic, erudition.”33 Jerome is often painted in an elaborate study—evocative of the Italian studiolo—in which he is surrounded by books, memento mori, and occasionally, scientific instruments such as flasks and astrolabes. In addition to standard iconography that surrounds him, such as his lion, Jerome sits producing the vulgate or reading religious texts. He sits alone, but as in Guilpin’s description of his own study, Jerome does not appear to be isolated, mostly because of the wealth of books and objects that surround him. St. Jerome in His Study was the subject of several works by European Renaissance artists, including Antonello da Messina (figure 2), Joos Van Cleve (figure 3), and Pieter Coecke van Aelst (figure 4). In these paintings, Jerome wears the signature red robes of the Cardinal; his books and other instruments of study surround him in his “monastic cell.”34 Painted in 1475, da Messina’s Jerome sits as though he is the focal point of a proscenium theatre as the cavernous scene develops around him. Da Messina gives viewers a full perspective of Jerome’s study, which is raised from the floor. It is bathed in light and placed directly beneath arched, vaulted ceilings. Jerome sits and concentrates on a book that rests on his ornate wooden desk, and the tools of his scholarship surround him on the shelves above. Joos Van Cleve’s St. Jerome in His Study (1528) also has the scholar sitting at a desk in his red robe. For this painting, his book rests on a stand as Jerome contemplates the fragility and brevity of life. The placard 33 Cain and Lössl, Jerome of Stridon, 240. 34 John Oliver Hand, “Saint Jerome in His Study by Joos van Cleve,” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 49, no. 2 (1990): 2-10, on 2. 97 “Homo bulla” (Man is a bubble) rests above him, sounding “the theme of the vanity and ephemerality of human life.”35 His left index finger rests on a human skull as his right hand is affixed on his temple and holds up his head, skull and head thus connected. He stares forward, perhaps in the throes of vacatio, or distracted ecstacy, as his unclasped book’s pages fall forward. Pieter Ceocke van Aelst’s painting, ca.1530, appears to focus on Jerome’s thoughts of death as he, like the Jerome in Van Cleve’s painting, holds up his head with his right hand. Jerome’s left index finger rests on a human skull that sits upon his desk. The sign behind him, which says “Cogita Mori” (Think on death) hangs over the scene of the painting. Among the other objects on the desk are ornate books with clasps, an hourglass, cracked spectacles, a quill and a penknife, and a candle that has nearly burned down to its end. On one side of the table, his book rests on a page that celebrates the assumption of the Virgin Mary or a saint, and on the other side rests Jerome’s copy of the New Testament in Greek. In contrast, Antonello da Messina’s portrait of the study, however, is reminiscent of the performative, conversational space that Guilpin seems to describe as he writes about learning from Plato and Aristotle before he turns to read his other books. Nevertheless, in many of the paintings there is a very earthly quality in which Jerome is invested in quiet of his study. Unlike Guilpin, who eventually becomes distracted by the vanities of the city, Jerome remains resilient in his work. Jerome also remains fully aware of his humanity and the finiteness of his existence. Guilpin and even Donne do the same as they compare the feeling of being surrounded by their books to enclosure in a coffin. 35 Hand, “Saint Jerome and His Study,” 6. 98 Rather than keeping death at bay as it does for Machiavelli, to study—and to commune with scholars from the distant past—is to be constantly made aware of death. Cogito mori—think on death—may discourage Jerome from focusing less on the sacred and more on the profane. Perhaps the best-known depictions of St. Jerome in His Study is Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of the scholar from 1514 (figure 5). In the engraving, Jerome is a recessed figured sitting at a mostly empty desk with his book open upon a stand. His body folded over his book, he stares into the text and does not regard the other objects in the room— the human skull on the windowsill, the hourglass, his cardinal’s hat, nor the multiple vials that sit on shelves behind him. He is engrossed in his work that encapsulates him as a “scholar, linguist, and man of letters” who “studied both Christian and pagan literature and was especially fond of Cicero.”36 Jerome’s reading and erudition remained a popular subject for paintings well into the seventeenth century, for example, Caravaggio’s painting of Saint Jerome Writing 1606), a late Renaissance painting (figure 6) in which Jerome leans over a large book and reads while writing notes . The standard iconography of Jerome is present; he wears red Cardinal robes while a human skull rests on the desk next to him. Jerome’s study, like Guilpin’s, contains sacred and humanist texts and shows the monastic and scholarly history of the space, which becomes conflated with poets and philosophers who are also seeking divine inspiration. This sanctity of the study translates on to the Renaissance stage as scholars are “discovered” with their reading materials, much like Jerome is depicted involved in scholarly endeavors. 36 Hand, 4. 99 Jerome’s translations were the subject of humanist scholarship by Erasmus, Luther, Tyndale, and Tremellius, scholars who revised Jerome’s work into “more accurate Latin, polyglot and vernacular Bibles throughout the sixteenth century.”37 Erasmus in particular fashioned himself after this scholar and perhaps brought his interest in well-designed study spaces to the students he encountered during his time at universities in England.38 Just as Jerome had been, Erasmus was also the subject of a 1526 engraving by Albrecht Dürer (Figure 7). Styled very much like Jerome, Erasmus sits alone, wrapped in a heavy robe as he writes on a piece of paper placed on a book on a bookstand. He is surrounded by clasped and open books, two letters, and an amphora filled with cuttings of plants. Next to Erasmus is a framed description of the engraving— in Latin and Greek—in which Dürer explains that the portrait is a still-life engraving of Erasmus and that his writings provide a better portrait than life. Hans Holbein and Quentin Massys also painted portraits of Erasmus in which he appears with books or is writing in an enclosed space that resembles a study. Erasmus spent time both in London and at the University of Oxford with his friend, fellow scholar and humanist, Thomas More. Erasmus also lived, studied, and worked at the University of Cambridge as he prepared his edition of Jerome’s manuscripts. While there, he served from 1514-16 as a Professor of Divinity.39 Erasmus influenced the education of many students in Renaissance England, and perhaps quietly had an effect on the way that Cambridge 37 Michael Davies, “Reading the Bible on the Early Modern Stage,” in Early Modern Drama and The Bible: Contexts and Readings, 1570-1625, ed. Adrian Street (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 27-47, on 33. 38 D.F.S. Thomason, Erasmus and Cambridge: The Cambridge Letters of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 4-103. 39 Thomason, Erasmus and Cambridge, 4-103. 100 university conceived of study spaces for students including Guilpin, who matriculated to Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1581.40 Erasmus was partially responsible for changing the ways that English students learned about classical works. He advocated for serious study of ancient languages and a return to the text in order to learn as much as possible. The space needed for this kind of endeavor was close, private, and nearly monastic.41 In addition to other representations of scholars in studies, visual depictions printed in books gave clear, almost pedagogical directions for the space. Like the paintings of Jerome, they provide telling examples of cultural expectations about studies. Several emblems dedicated to scholarship and learning in Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems allow readers and spectators to view the labor that takes place in a scholar’s study or library. In the emblem Silencium, Whitney emphasizes a Pythagorean directive, which demands that “silence [scholars] should keepe,” as a lone scholar sits inside of his study, surrounded by books and writing implements, the tools of his trade (figure 8). Other emblems that address scholarship are more directly related to the actual labor of scholars. Dedicated to Andrew Perne,42 an eminent scholar of sixteenth century Cambridge, the emblem entitled Usus libri, non lectio prudentes facit, encourages scholars not only to labor by “reade[ing] and marke[ing],” their books, but by using what 40 Carroll, “Everard Guilpin,” 168. 41 Thomason, 4-103. 42 Patrick Collinson, David McKitterick, and E. S Leedham-Green, Andrew Perne: Quatercentenary Studies, Monograph Cambridge Bibliographical Society, No. 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1991). Interestingly, the inventory of Andrew Perne’s study completed by E.S. Leedham-Green contains nearly all of the books mentioned by Dr. Faustus at the beginning of the play. Furthermore, Perne owned several magical/necromatic books as well. 101 they have read (figure 9).43 The author employs the metaphors of farming to emphasize the connection between scholarly and agrarian work, extolling the virtues of “reap[ing] and toil[ing]” in order that “good shall growe.”44 As they read, the scholars are also perpetuating memory and staving off “Lethe[‘s] flood” of forgetfulness.45 The study becomes both a performative space in which scholars emphatically learn to profit from their reading and work—a precursor to the later study in which the space becomes a transactional—yet still humanist—space in which the commodity being produced is reading and writing. Although it may have never actually been constructed, representation of a labor- intensive study is demonstrated in the illustration of Agostino Ramelli’s book-wheel. Printed in Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine (Paris, 1588), Ramelli includes a picture of his book-wheel, an invention that allows a scholar to read several books simultaneously by turning a wheel of shelves as it sits in front of him (or her) (figure 10).46 The bookwheel sits near a window that allows light into the room. Ramelli’s bookwheel is housed inside of a study with a door containing several locks. The book-wheel, along with several shelves lined with books, heightens the seriousness of the space. While the scholar may be engaged in an activity that he enjoys, he has installed complicated technical equipment to aid in his work. There is a luxury implied by the availability of the space that accompanies the book-wheel. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine assert that machines such as that book-wheel indicate “something of the dramatic quality that 43 Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblems (Leyden, 1586), 171, EEBO, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. 44 Whitney, A Choice of Emblems, 171. 45 Whitney, 171. 46 Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study, 62. 102 writing now possesses,” and suggests that humanists collected devices like the book- wheel, maps, globes and other materials to “impart glamour to [their] occupation.”47 Later visual representations continue to show the diligence and work ethic associated with the study in later representations of the space. In the late seventeenth century, Johann Amos Comenius used emblems depicting scholarship and the space of the study to teach students Latin. Orbis Sensualium Pictus (translated into English by Charles Hoole in 1685) defines and stages the space of the study for its young readers. Comenius provides an emblem of the study and demonstrates a scholar at work with all of the material necessary for labor. He also labels all of the material in Latin and English so that students will learn all of the vocabulary associated with the study. Like Geoffrey Whitney’s emblems, “The Study” emphasizes the work of the scholar. Books line the wall of the shelves as a scholar reads and writes notes in books that lie on a large wooden desk. The scholar is fully dressed and seated in a wooden chair, and he is hunched over the desk as he works, it is implied, both during the day and at night: The Study is a place where a Student apart from men, sitteth alone addicted to his Studies, whilst he readeth Books which being within his reach he layeth open upon a Desk and picketh all the best things out of them into his own Manual or marketh them with a dash or a little star in the Margent. Being to sit up late, he setteth a Candle on a Candle-stick which is snuffed with Snuffers; before the Candle he placeth a Screen with which is green that it may not hurt his eyesight, richer persons use a Taper for a Tallow-Candle stinketh and smoaketh. A Letter is wrapped up, writ 47 Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past & Present 129, no. 1 (November 1990): 30-78, on 46. 103 upon and sealed. Going abroad by night, he maketh use of a Lanthorn or a Torch.48 The study does not receive a description other than its practical use. Beyond the suggestion that students working in a study spend time alone, the description does not insist upon the solitude of the space. As in theatrical space, the objects in the room define this pictorial representation of the study; readers are invited closely to examine the contents of the room. For Comenius’ younger readers, a model space is set up—they are able to see and understand how students are supposed to act inside of the space. At the same time, there is no language that indicates that the space is one associated with pleasure or glamour. Rather, the study provides a place for intellectual labor that is within but distinct from academic, familial or social communities. The study is not only constitutive of labor, but of a desire to reify the type of intellectual labor that goes on inside of it. The paintings and emblems of scholars in their studies show both the active and contemplative parts of the space, where readers must construct scholarly identities for themselves, which are often defined by the objects and activities occurring in the space. The performative nature of the space may result from its relationship to the medieval scriptorium, where work was a performance for God and fellow scholars who sought to preserve and forward the religious and humanist scholarship. In Dr. Faustus, Marlowe has his famous scholar emulate the carriage of Jerome as he engages in solitary pursuit of a subject on which to focus his energies. He emulates Comenius’s overworked scholar and embodies the history of humanists, including Erasmus and even St. Jerome himself; 48 Johann Amos Comenius, Orbis Sesualium Pictus, trans. Charles Hoole (London, 1658), 200. 104 however, his need to to encounter necromancy and stave off death undermines the place of the study in a university setting. “Pinned with a few boards”: The University study In John Lyly’s play Sappho and Phao (1584), Trachinus tries to persuade Pandion to leave the university to join the court. Reversing Guilpin’s initial rejection of the space outside of the study, Trachinus laments Pandion’s decision to live the life of a scholar. Trachinus denigrates the study and books—the very objects that Guilpin praises—and scorns the life of the university for the action of the court. He relegates the study and the work taking place in the past, an artificial space of stories and fabrication. The study is a place of conjecture and process, but not one of action or “truth”: In universities virtues and vices are but shadowed in colours white and black, in courts, showed to life good and bad. There, times past are read of in old books, times present set down by new devices, times to come conjectured at by aim, by prophecy or chance; here are times in perfection, not by device, as fables, but in execution, as truths…What hath a scholar found out by study that a courtier hath not found out by practice? Simple are you that think to see more at the candle-snuff than the sunbeams. (1.2.20-25)49 49 John Lyly, Sappho and Phao, in Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, ed. G.K. Hunter and David Bevington (New York: Manchester University Press, 1991). All quotations are taken from this edition. 105 The court is a natural, primary place for Trachinus—and is the place of the sun—in which the practical can occur. The study fosters life through secondary means; the light of the candle cannot compare to the light of day. The work of the study remains theoretical, rather than purposeful. The court, at least in Trachinus’ eyes, is without history; the study is the place of the past, whereas the court is the space of “times in perfection.” Pandion accepts the portrait of the university painted by his companion and remains content to refuse the “embossed roofs” of Sappho’s palace (1.2.30-31). He ignores Trachinus’ suggestion that he “[c]ease then to lead thy life in a study, pinned with a few boards” and rejects richer architecture and action for the quiet of the study and space in favor of the smaller place of his books (1.2.30-31). While Trachinus’ conjectures about what goes on in the study are overly simplistic, his physical description of the study at English universities is fairly accurate. While earning his MA, Lyly may have spent some time in or had at least seen the smallest, most enclosed, versions of a university study.50 As early as 1340, in Queen’s College Oxford, all students were provided with a study and a room: “Scholares etiam omnes habeant camerae et studia, juxta assignation Praepositi”51 (Students shall all now have rooms and studies according to the 50 G. K. Hunter, “Lyly, John (1554–1606),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/17251. Lyly earned a B.A. from Magdalen College, Oxford in 27 April 1573 and MA degrees from Oxford and Cambridge respectively. 51 Robert Willis, The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge and of the Colleges of Cambridge and Eton, vol 3., ed. John Willis Clark (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1886), 311. Much of this information would have been lost without Robert Willis’s and John Willis Clark’s extensive and detailed architectural history of Cambridge and Eton in the 1880s. It would not be possible to understand how many of the studies in the oldest colleges of Cambridge were constructed, especially now that all of the Elizabethan-era studies have been destroyed. 106 assignments of the Masters). However, as more students matriculated to Oxford and Cambridge Universities, students, fellows, and even masters would have to share rooms, and sometimes beds, depending on the statutes of individual colleges and their founders.52 However, there seemed to be a great premium placed on individual studies and study space—perhaps to give students time to “converse” with classical authors as the Italian humanists had done before them. For scholars at Cambridge University in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, individual colleges arranged for the upkeep of their students, fellows, and masters. Colleges arranged placement of chamber fellows (or chums) and also had specific statutes to dictate where scholars must sleep, work, and eat. They assigned two to four students (who were not of the nobility) to live in dormitory-like chambers. These chambers could be large and somewhat oblong (e.g., a room that is 40 feet long but only 20 feet wide), with windows on the outside wall.53 Two sets of windows could be used to light the large area that contained beds, and there were small partitioned studies built against the other windows in the chamber. Because this light was particularly important, studies were built adjacently with thin wood paneling so that two students would have equal access to light and the opportunity to use their studies as they saw fit. The appointed studies were rather small (6ft long by 4ft wide) and still had room for a door.54 If, for example, there were space for four beds in a chamber, there would also be four studies for occupants to use for their work. Having individual bedrooms was less 52 Willis, Architectural History, 304-07; Victor Morgan, A History of the University of Cambridge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 53 Willis, 306. 54 Willis, 307. 107 important for students than having particular space to read their books and to write.55 In addition, if they had the means, students could diversify their own space and create distance between where they slept and where they chose to study; in theory, studies could be put up and taken down at a student’s or scholar’s convenience. In some cases, students and fellows could rent studies from others in the college, giving them larger, more comfortable space.56 The privileging of individual space for reading and writing is a given in Guilpin’s poem, or Donne’s. Young, well-educated men were provided with this space even if they were sizars or economically disadvantaged students. This expectation of a room of one’s own guides Guilpin’s clear separation from people whom he mocks as they participate in less intellectual activity outside of the walls of his study. There seems to have been a privileging of space for the sake of learning material on one’s own, a respect for the time that individuals could read and perhaps commune with their books, or spend time writing in response to their reading, or even preparing verses for a monarch’s visit. Locks and doors provided for these spaces imply that parts of the reading and learning experience are entirely singular. Outside of the disputations, lectures, meeting with tutors, and sleeping in communal rooms, the space of intense learning was something that required a room of one’s own—which allowed one to enter the metaphorical space of the study—in the mind as a part of the act of study—which includes ingesting books like meals. Francis Bacon encourages his audience to consider carefully the books that they read, targeting their consumption of specific books: 55 Damian Riehl Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge, volume 1: The University to 1546 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 236. 56 Willis, 313. 108 Some books are to bee tasted, others swallowed, and some few to be chewed and disgested: That is some books are to be read only in partes; others to be read but cursorily, and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention. Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. (B1r)57 According to architectural and contract plans for construction of the Perse and Legge buildings of Caius College in 1618-19, for every room, two studies were to be constructed. This means that two master’s students or undergraduates would share a room, but each man would have his own study. The spaces were to be constructed in the same way: Every studdye window to have an iron casement of two foote long, and every chamber two casements besides the studies of the same length, for thorow light and ayer; and all the same lifts to be well and sufficiently glassed with good Burgundie glasse in small quarries well leaded…All the partitions shalbe made with good and sufficient Oke tymber and the same and all the studies to be lathed with hart lathes…and also to make a good and sufficient dore for every study to be fitted to the dorestead and hanged on sufficient hooks and hinges.58 In some cases, small chamber rooms and studies were built into garret window space of the roof of a college building. This created a nearly self-contained study without much need for construction with slightly larger space. Garret windows also provided additional 57 Bacon, Essaies, EEBO. 58 Willis, 305. 109 light—which was certainly a precious commodity for study owners; more often than not, students of lesser means had rooms and studies in these smaller spaces. Just as they did for undergraduates, university statutes dictated the ways that higher-ranking scholars were assigned to rooms as well. They were most often joined together specifically by their association with the college. Fellows and doctors were given space for their studies accordingly—certain practitioners of academic fields were given space that better suited experiments for science and medicine.59 In most cases, studies could not be built within the chambers in which scholars or fellows slept, so they were built elsewhere in the college. In the 1580s at Caius College, the library contained ten studies, which could be rented at a student’s convenience.60 These studies were more expensive and often made of wainscoting and lined with tapestries. Less expensive studies were made with panels including dornix and perpetuana.61 In many cases, studies were also given locks so that students could keep secure their books and other materials, including pens, ink, and paper, which could be expensive. While complete privacy does not seem to have been possible, the studies at least gave an illusion of constructed individual space. Senior-most scholars could be given more than one study to hold what could amount to be hundreds of books along with maps, pictures, bottles, spectacles and other materials. If a scholar died while still affiliated with the University, his college inventoried his books and other property and kept it for future use.62 It is reasonable to 59 Willis, 310. Later records give incredibly detailed accounts of study space and requirements for scholars. 60 Willis, 143. In a visit to Caius College in 2004, I met with the librarian in order to see the marking where the studies had existed. They had been removed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for convenience’s sake. 61 Willis, 323. 62 Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge, 265. 110 surmise that less important materials garnered from a former scholar’s study could end up as stage properties for college theatrical productions. St. John’s College, Cambridge in particular, was well-recognized, by the public for its plays.63 “Who dost molest my contemplation?”: The Study in the Theater Renaissance England As colleges set up or modified their complicated statutes regarding scholars and studies, the theatrical community constructed and staged them in parallel. Although the study is mentioned as both a space and a stage property, many literary and theater historians have not really given a full description of the use of the study, particularly when compared to other, small handheld stage properties.64 Perhaps the study has been overlooked because like the books that would have been sitting within in it, it cannot be traced with the ease that clothing, rapiers, beards, or even a brazen head can, as those appear in Philip Henslowe’s or other theatrical inventories. Alan Dessen and Leslie Thompson regard the space as a significant part of stage directions, and Bernard Beckerman embarks on pioneering work on the study specifically in relation to the theatrical space in Barnabe Barnes’ The Devil’s Charter. However, the study (or ‘studie’) in stage directions may not have had the same immediate, spectacular impact as other large complicated theatrical structures.65 Although the study shares some similarities to 63 Johnstone Parr, “Robert Greene and His Classmates at Cambridge,” PMLA 77, no. 5 (December 1962): 536-43. 64 Douglas Bruster, “The Dramatic Life of Objects,” Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Harris and Natasha Korda (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 67-96. 65 “study,” Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thompson, A Dictionary of Renaissance Stage Directions: 1580-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 220-21; Bernard 111 smaller properties, it has not been associated with social relationships or as a source of human interest in commodities and the “fluidity [that may exist] between a person and thing on the early modern stage.”66 Whether constructed inside of the enclosure on the stage or a result of the culling together of a table, a chair and some books, the study appears in several sets of stage directions in Renaissance plays, just as frequently as some smaller properties. More often than not, the dramatic study is used as way to ‘discover’ an individual at work, presenting him in medias res, in a still life of thought. It has its more mundane uses as well, allowing an individual to ‘exit’ from his scene or work in order to enter the stage once again reading a book or a letter. It functions as a portal between the public and private worlds of characters—the world inside a play and away from it. In their work on stage properties, Alan Dessen and Leslie Thompson reduce the theatrical use of studies to perfunctory stagecraft. For them, a study is “ (1) usually a male preserve associated with reading and writing where a figure enters or is discovered in/as in or comes out of his study, or (2) less commonly a verb meaning ‘think, consider.’” 67 Dessen and Thompson also suggest that, “some signals call for a figure to be discovered in his study by the parting of a curtain.”68 As dynamic as handkerchiefs, rings, and swords, the study can also be read as an important space for intellectual labor and its implications for developing social and political relationships. These same spaces were being set up in Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe 1599-1609 (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 82-85. Beckerman writes about Barnabe Barnes’s’ play The Devil’s Charter, and the placement of the study. 66 Bruster, “The Dramatic Life of Objects,” 75. 67 Dessen and Thompson, “Study,” 220” 68 Dessen and Thompson, 221. 112 smaller houses in London at this time and certainly had an impact on how people understood themselves and their work. Architectural and cultural historians connect the emergence of rooms like the study in England to new architectural innovations, including the separation of formal areas like the hall or the gallery from private areas such as bedchambers and parlors. These developments in organizing space affect the ways that personal interaction must have taken place, particularly with the construction of a room like a study. In the early seventeenth century, Ralph Trewsell noted this diversification of space in extensive surveys that he made of Christ’s Church hospital, where he recorded divisions of space in small, urban households in London. Treswell pays close attention to the study, detailing its placement within individual apartments.69 He noted several studies in multiple dwellings; it is likely that young men, including Everard Guilpin, lived in a space like this one. While the details of the exact use of the space cannot be excavated entirely, theories about personal interaction and household spaces enumerated by Frank Brown should certainly be taken into consideration: The way in which spaces are used and the meaning assigned to different parts of the home are plainly not a simple function of plan arrangement; they stem from a complex amalgam or social and cultural influences. But if it is true that space is not determinative of human activity, it is equally true that patterns of activity and behaviour are not entirely independent of their spatial locus. Some sort of relation exists between society and space, albeit an elusive one, and it seems reasonable to assume that the house, as 69 John Schofield, The London Surveys of Ralph Treswell (London: London Topographical Society, 1987). 113 social artefact, in some measure reflects and reinforces aspects of household life. If this is so, the internal configuration of the house should be a matter of more than formal interest: systematically analysed, it should yield information, which can enrich our understanding of society, and perhaps of social process too.70 Once spaces like the study are translated onto the Renaissance stage, the ways that individuals interact with one another and spectators are affected by the rhetoric and discourse used to define the space and the individuals laboring within it. Alan Stewart has demonstrated that actions that take place within the study or closet leak out into larger social and cultural practices; in certain cases of the Renaissance stage, the study becomes a central space from which relationships are negotiated. These relationships can be magical, ephemeral, or transactional, and they occur in several plays during the English Renaissance plays, e.g. Dr. Faustus, The Devil’s Charter, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, The Two Merry Milkmaids, and Every Man in his Humour.71 In William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, the study becomes more than a space of contemplation and censure, as it is in Guilpin’s poem; it becomes the site of reading, writing, and revenge. In the play, Titus Andronicus reconciles himself to the death and mutilation of his children as he sits inside of his study, the place where Tamora claims that “he keeps / to 70 Frank E. Brown, “Continuity and Change in the Urban House: Developments in Domestic Space Organisation in Seventeenth Century London,” Comparative Studies of Society and History 28, no. 4 (October 1986): 558-90, on 558. 71 Alan Stewart, “The Early Modern Closet Discovered,” Representations, 76-100. 114 ruminate strange plots of dire revenge” (5.2.6).72 According to the stage directions, Tamora’s sons, Chiron and Demetrius “knock, and Titus opens his study door (SD 5.2.8)” Titus’s study may not have been displayed to the audience; however, he explains the nature of his work within it: TITUS. Who dost molest my contemplation? Is it your trick to ope the door, That so my sad decrees may fly away, And all my study be to no effect? You are deceived, for what I mean to do, See here in bloody lines I have set down, And what is written shall be executed. (5.2.9-15) Tamora and her sons beckon Titus out of the study, and they draw attention to the space in which he is laboring to record his exact revenge. Titus’ “rumination [of] strange plots of dire revenge” is an embracing of the “discontents” that Guilpin works to keep outside of his study; however, the contagion of danger, vanity, and death has already entered into Titus’ household and life. Just as Guilpin claims he will contain his thoughts and conversations inside of the study, Titus desires to do the same until he is set to enact his revenge exactly. Although they are not mentioned, Titus seems to have books along with papers filled with blood—or the intention to carry out “bloody” deeds. His hand has been removed, yet Titus is still trying to function as the manus (“right hand”) or the head of the household inside of his very male space of privacy, reading, contemplation, and writing. 72 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Russ McDonald, in The Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000). 115 He maintains that position theatrically, as it appears that he is standing above Tamora and her sons as she asks him “come down and welcome me” (5.2.33). The placement of his study dissociates him and his labor of revenge from other, treacherous, work taking place in the household. Titus’ study becomes a space of intention in which he draws out the lines of revenge that he intends to act upon; he draws strength from that contemplation, and uses that power, as he does with the words that he has “set down” which pour forth from his study. Titus’ time in his study transforms him from a state of lamentation to revenge. The materials of his study push him from a state of vacatio, or thoughtful distracted ecstasy, to fury. Within his study, he communes with the spirit of revenge which he can dismiss as nothing more than a costume on Tamora, who has inserted herself into Titus’ household. Her presence incites him to move to the protective space of the study. Because Tamora has colonized his household by disabling his power and his ability to control his landscape or remaining family, the study remains Titus’ last refuge away from her. She attempts to take over the very male space of reading and writing as she impersonates and embodies the figure of revenge. Instead, Titus asks her to examine his work: TITUS. I am not mad; I know thee well enough Witness these trenches made by grief and care, Witness the tiring day and heavy night, Witness all sorrow, that I know thee well For our proud empress, mighty Tamora. Is not thy coming for my other hand? (5.2.21-27) 116 Titus focuses upon his written lines of revenge against Tamora. He uses language of manual labor to show the pressure on the paper that emphasizes both his grief and the work that he is completing to carry out the revenge. From his study, he asks Tamora (disguised as Revenge) to assist him by “stab[bing her sons] or tear[ing] them down on [her] chariot wheels,” and he offers his own labor in exchange (5.2.48). As she will not heed his desires, Titus, like Faustus, must exit his study and depend on the action of the written word that he has read (and has written) inside of it. Once he exits the study, he fulfills his written contract for revenge, and he has exchanged his grief for deed. “For this my study is indeed m’Exchange:” Urban Studies in Renaissance Drama In “Satyra Quinta,” the narrative of the satire turns away from the idyllic space of the study to incorporate elements of the city. Guilpin searches for a “change” in his reading as he turns from philosophy to law books and printed plays. Before this transition, however, Guilpin parenthetically exclaims that his study is “m’Exchange,” a term which evokes the grand architecture and daily commerce of The Royal Exchange as well as Thomas Dekker’s statement a few years later in The Gulls Hornbook (1609): The Theater is your Poets Royal-Exchange, vpon which, their Muses (ye are now turnd to Merchants) meeting, barter away that light commodity of words for a lighter ware then words. Plaudities and the Breath of the great 117 Beast, which (like the threatnings of two Cowards) vanish all into aire.73 (emphasis mine) Kathleen E. McLuskie finds truth in Dekker’s statement which for her marks a shift in poets’ and actors’ roles in both elite and popular culture. However cloaked in humor, Dekker’s statement pinpoints moments in which, by the early seventeenth century, the theater and the market have become one: poets provide the commodity which is dealt in by the players and purchased by the audience: patronage has become a matter of commerce and the only patrons the paying audience.74 In her work on the Royal Exchange in William Haughton’s 1598 play Englishmen for My Money, Crystal Bartolovich notes that the exchange is “chaotic, with its bustle, large cast, and constant interruptions, but it is also enacts a space of a generalized market.”75 She further explains that as a result of the exchange, London became more permeable and part of a much larger world with significant social and economic interactions.76 As Guilpin conflates his study with the Royal Exchange and urban space, he transforms it into a social and transactional space where the theaters and the courtroom begin to lead Guilpin out of his study to the streets of London. While he does not interact with people directly, he comments upon the changes and differences in London’s cityscape and its people. The Royal Exchange marks London’s economic development and greater 73 Thomas Dekker, The guls horne-booke (London, 1609), 28, EEBO, The British Library; see Kathleen E. McLuskie, “The Poets Royal Exchange: Patronage and Commerce in Early Modern Drama,” The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 53-62. 74 McLuskie, “The Poets Royal Exchange,” 53. 75 Crystal Bartolovich, “London’s the Thing: Alienation, the Market and Englishmen for My Money,” Huntington Library Quarterly 71, no. 1 (March 2008): 137-56, on 147. 76 Bartolovich, 147. 118 openness, while also heralding the decline of formal patronage in favor of professional writers. At the same time, by calling his study an exchange, Guilpin acknowledges that he and his reading space must recognize if not adjust to London’s changing populations, particularly as more educated young men move into the city. There is also a possibility that Guilpin and Dekker shared this metaphor purposefully. Charles Cathcart suggests that Guilpin and Dekker may have been acquaintances or friends because of their mutual connection to John Marston. Guilpin’s second book of satires “The Whipper of the Satyre” could be an English translation and play on the title of Dekker’s Satiromastix. Furthermore, E.G. (the same styling of initials used for John Donne’s verse letter) wrote a prefatory verse for Dekker’s book Lanthone and Candle-light; or, the bell-mans second Nights walke (London, 1608). E.G. writes “To my industrious friend,” in which he praises Dekker for his labors of “Reading Euil” and teaching goodness and endeavoring to force a “breach” on “abuse.” This affinity may connect their comments and sentiments on the burgeoning and uncomfortably transactional nature of work, activity, and poems that might otherwise be private (A4v). 77 The labor, financial transactions, and work that take place in the study are especially relevant to its use in Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix (1602). The title of the play itself indicates its author’s displeasure at the changing nature of the profession of writing, in which associates are able to profit from each other as they open up their studies and disrupt a literary community. Dekker focuses his vitriol on Horace, a poet (likely based on Ben Jonson), who has opened up his study to sell poems for occasions including epithalamia, and yet presents the space of his study as a private intellectual 77 Cathcart, “Guilpin and The Godly Satyre,” 78-79; Thomas Dekker, Lanthorne and candle- light; or The bell-mans second Nights walke (London, 1608), EEBO, British Library. 119 enclave. However, the study—like the theater Dekker also commented upon—has become an exchange, where poets will provide whatever they can for their patrons. As the mercantile and contractual relationships between Horace and several different men are established, Dekker takes aim at poets who overemphasize the sanctity of the study— in a false gesture towards scholars and the inviolability of their work—and inflate the importance of their writing. The stage directions to Dekker’s play introduce Horace as he composes an Epithalamium and he sit[s] in study behinde a Curtaine, a candle by him burning, bookes lying confusedly: to himselfe (SD 1.2).78 His space is far from orderly, but he has the comforts and space of a scholar. In his search for end rhymes and perfect rhythms, Horace is interrupted by Asinius Bubo,who instantly draws attention his work and the metaphor of birth as he calls, “Horace, Horace, my sweet ningle, is alwayes in labour when I come, the nine Muses be his midwiues I pray Jupiter: Ningle” (1.2.21). Asinius continually points out the process of invention by asking Horace specific questions about his writing. [more repetitive diction here} Horace invites his friend to sit in his study and discuss the verses that he creates, claiming that his “brains have giuen assault to [the poem] but this morning” (1.2.39). He attacks the poem with reason and effort; metaphors of physical labor continue as the two men discuss the merits of Horace’s workas well as the beauty of the paper on which it is written: 78 Thomas Dekker, Satiromastix, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, vol I., ed. Fredson Bowers (London: Cambridge University Press, 1953). 120 ASINIUS. Heer’s the best leafe in England, but on, on, Ile but tune this Pipe. HORACE. Marke, to thee whose fore-head swels with Roses. ASINIUS. O sweet, but will there be no exceptions taken, because fore-head and swelling comes together? HORACE. Push, away, away, away, its proper, besides tis an elegancy to say the fore head swels. ASINIUS. Nay an’t be proper, let it stand for Gods loue. (1.2.43-50) Asinius notes that Horace’s work should be a good as the paper on which it appears, and Horace seeks validation for his unusual metaphor about a forehead swelling with Roses. Ever aware of the marketplace, Asinius checks with Horace to ensure that his patrons will not take offence at the bawdy sounding image, and in a market where anything could be misinterpreted, he suggests that the metaphor be connected to God, where paying readers can find no offence. Horace establishes that his livelihood as a poet depends on the work completed in his study. He pressures Asinius to “deal plainly” with him and give a proper judgment of the work, explaining that by following the wedding poem with “rich and labour’d conceipts, [that] oh, the end shall be admirable!” (1.2.84-85). The ends of the work are not the pleasures of the study; rather, they are the financial and social gains won by laboring and toiling in the space. Carrying out the metaphor of giving birth, Asinius claims, that “is the best stufe that euer dropt from thee” (1.2.88-89). After further indulging Horace in a discussion of his odes, copies of which have found themselves in the ordinary, Asinius asks to uncover the secrets of his study. Open 121 again to both spectators and his friend, Horace explains that in his study “lyes intoomb’d the loues of Knights and Earles” in the form of letters and payment for his words: heer tis, heer tis, Sir Walter Terils letter to me, and my answere to him: I no sooner opened his letter, but there appeared to me three glorious angels, whome I ador’d, as subiects doe their Soueraignes: the honest knight Angles for my acquaintance, with such golden baites. (1.2.107-111) Horace openly admits his financial dependence upon his patrons and their ability to provide him with economic security. The scene draws attention to the economic exchange of cash for the epithalamion, and the ways in which he finds patrons to support his life as a poet. His study is a work place, but one that is also filled with the pleasure of company and gossip about other poets; in this case, the gossip revolves around Crispinus and Demetrius Fannius, men that Horace has often offended in verse. As Asinius and Horace discuss Horace’s complicated relationship with the two other poets, Demetrius and Fannius gain entrance into Horace’s study, asking that he stop his more bilious poetic labors: Chrisoganus. Say that you haue not sworne vnto your Paper, To blot her white cheeks with the dregs and bottome Of your friends priuate vices: say you sweare Your loue and your aleageance to bright vertue Makes you descend so low, as to put on The Office of an Executioner, Onely to strike off the swolne head of sinne, Where ere you finde it standing; say you sweaare, 122 And make damnation parcell of your oath, That when your lashing iestes make all men bleed Yet you whip none. (1.2. 225-235) Horace’s study turns into a bloody torture chamber where he decides the fate of his friends and foes, eviscerating them with his poetry. Demetrius and Fannius liken the study to a sickroom where they must act as his “Phisitision to purge / [His] sick and daugerous mind of her disease” (1.2.247-48). Horace, before giving Demetrius and Fannius an opportunity to confront him for the nature of his verse, invokes the language of a surgical theater by informing them that is their misreading of his work issuing from a “pen” dipped in “distilled” Roses (1.2.265). Horace claims that readers “[l]ooke through and through [him], carving his poore labours / Like an Anatomy:” and that it is their eyes that misread his work, for it is “as straight as euen Paralels” (1.2.195-200). Horace’s study is placed in a liminal position between his aspirations of being a well-known and revered poet and the hindrances to their fulfillment, as evidenced by the way he continually offends fellow poets along the way. Demetrius and Fannius chastise and then forgive Horace for his painful verse; however, Captain Tucca, a fellow recipient of Horace’s derision, forces entrance into his study, demanding that a ‘deuise’ be finished. He is also insulted by Horaces “iestes,” and demands justice for the words written against him. Yet, after learning of Horace’s reconciliation with the other two poets, Tucca declares that his revenge will be to force Horace to author a play with Demetrius and Fannius and take the blame for the scandal that it will create: 123 yet tis no matter neither, I’le haue thee in league first with these two rowly powlies: they shal be thy Damons and thou their Pithyasse; Crispinus shall giue thee an olde case Sattin suite, and demetrius shall write thee a Scene or two, in one of the strong garlick Comedies; and thou shalt take the guild of conscience for’t and sware tis thine owne olde lad, tis thine owne. (1.2.330-337) In his anger and frustration at Horace’s slow work, Tucca draws comparisons between the poet and a bird in labor asking, “what will he be fifteen weekes about this Cockatrices egge too? has hee not cackeld yet? not laide yet?” ( 1.2.362-364). Tucca changes the space of the study from a workshop into a whorehouse; he throws money at Horace, demanding that his work be finished immediately: TUCCA. His wittes are somewhat hard bound: the Puncke his Muse has sore laboure ere the whoore be deliuered: the poore saffron-cheeke Sun- burnt Gipsie wants phisicke; give the hungrie-face pudding-pye-eater ten Pilles: ten shillings my faire Angelica they’l make his Muse as yare as a tumbler. (2.1.366-70) The study has simultaneously become a bawdy-house and delivery room in which Tucca demands that Horace produce work for pay in the same paradigm as a prostitute. Tucca mocks Horace for the connecting his muse to cost. The transactions of the study are infantilized and brutalized—it is equated with “women’s work.” The divine nature of the study found in Machiavelli’s descriptions or Jerome’s paintings has disappeared into a purely capitalist paradigm. The other poets lament Horace’ descent into this transactional and cruel place and can only mock him for his privileging the what his writing could be 124 worth, as opposed to that of his fellow poets, who claim not to sell their muse to the highest bidder. Tucca continues in his taunting, claiming that Horace will only call Tucca his Maecenas; although the connotation is much more insidious in nature. Tucca also claims that he will force Horace to wear an old satin suit that once belonged to a playing company, ensuring that Horace suffers the consequences of breaking sumptuary laws. The study shifts from a sacred place of muses working as midwives to help Horace with his labors to a space in which his words and works are equated to sexual favors. The study turns from a space of male reading, writing, and exchange into a space contaminated by the prostituted female body. The desire to keep out the female, as indicated by Alan Stewart, is one of the main purposes of the study; the study gives men one area in the household over which they may wield power.79 Horace expresses his disgust at Tucca’s treatment of him and his chamber, claiming that he shall “spit again” in Tucca’s face. Later in the play, Horace iterates his desire to clean the study and his work of Tucca’s debasing actions: HORACE. The Muses birdes (the Bees) were hiu’d and fed Vs in our cradle, thereby prophecying; that we to learned eares should sweetly sing, But to the vulger and adulterate braine, Should loath to prostitute our Virgin strain. No, our sharpe pen shall keep the world in awe, Horace thy Poesie wormwood wreathes shall weare, 79 Alan Stewart, “The Early Modern Closet Discovered,” 80-85. 125 We hunt not for mens loues but for their feare. (2.2.55-62) Reclaiming the virility of the study and his work, Horace emphasizes the force of his words through the sharpness of his pen and the words that he will write with them. However, because audiences and readers are not supposed to sympathize with Horace, he continues to write satirical lines against his so-called friends and eventually does not have the space of the study to protect him. In the end, he is forced to swear that he will not steal jests from the Temple Revels, will not terrorize the actors and audiences in his play, and must remain humble. Dekker (and possibly Guilpin) noted the changing nature of the intellectual work conducted in the study, although Dekker was much more invested in the changing nature of writing for public consumption—if looking at his literary output is any indicator. Kathleen E. McLuskie notes that Dekker’s attack on Jonson (Horace) in Satiromastix came to represent two very different views of the role of elite patrons in theater going, reading, book buying, the function of taste and aesthetics: The early modern dramatists, the players and the booksellers found themselves dealing with questions of artistic value outside a system in which value was conferred by social function and became a matter of the intersections of taste and commerce and their complex connexions to status, education, and class.80 On a smaller scale, particularly in “Satyra Quinta,” Guilpin seems to be struggling with the issues of status, education, and class as he brings in materials from the city to his study. The theater is a part of the city landscape which does not just belong to him, but to the “puisnes” of the Inns of Court—the next generation of young lawyers who enjoy 80 McLuskie, “The Poet’s Royal Exchange,” 62. 126 attending plays. The humanist books in his study help Guilpin to maintain a monastic, scholarly study that would have been the space he had access to at Cambridge. However, the playbooks and poems that appear in the same space were books and materials of the newly elite. My Study is mine All For Guilpin, the city itself has become overrun with noise—from the squeaking of wheels to the cacophony of voices in different languages and dialects. Beyond his books, and his study lies difference: T’will be, into the peopled streets to goe, Witnes that hotch-potch of so many noyses, Black-saunts of so many seuerall voyces, That Chaons of rude sounds, that harmony, And Dyapason of harsh Barbary, Compos’d of seuerall mouthes, and seuerall cries, Which to mens eares turne both their tongs & eies. (D5v) The cries and noises of people, which seem to be part of the general noise of the city, are heightened by his insistence on the calmness of his study and Guilpin’s insistence that contemplation and reading remain enough company. His criticism is also an expression of discomfort with public interactions; the clamoring and conversation that he would hear at the theater become annoyances as he expresses seeming displeasure at people shouting about Will Kemp: 127 Whores, Bedles, bawdes, and Sergeants filthily Chaunt Kemps Iigge, or the Burgonians tragedy: But in good time, there’s one hath nipt a bong, Farewell my harts, for he hath marrd the song. (D5r) William N. West writes that Guilpin “stresses the pervasive, invasive sound of jigs in performance in contrast to more legible, logical pleasures.”81 While expressing interest in a similar theatrical enterprise, this mix of people in London, including transgressors and the people who regulate transgressive behavior, sing together. They create a community in London that Guilpin seems to want to quell; the dichotomy he constructed at the start of the poem situates all parties in hell, and he is on the outside. West also claims that “the crucial difference is the chaotic noise and disordered motion of performance.”82 While that is true, Guilpin also expresses classism and anxiety similar to what Jeanette Dillion identifies in Londoners who were terrified at the prospect of outsiders, people who seemed to be “out of place,” or men who were “masterless”: It was not really either numbers or practical dangers that made vagabonds the object of such anxiety, but rather the fact that they occupied a conceptual space outside the regulating striations of family, household, and ward, while at the same time invading the physical territory of groups 81 William N. West, “When the jig is up—and What is it up to?,” in Locating the Queen’s Men: Material Practices and the Conditions of Playing, ed. Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin (New York: Routledge, 2016), 201-16, on 211. 82 West, “When the jig is up,” 211. 128 within those structures. The threat they offer is that of barbarians crossing over into civilized territory.83 Guilpin does not make a declaration about where these loud outsiders—who are mostly Londoners—should go. Like Juvenal, he rails against the fundamental existence of the people who wander the city, which to him, has become “the marte of fools” and a “painters shope of Antickes” (D5r). The only person who seems to escape his remarks is a young man shouting verses in Paul’s Churchyard for amusement; Guipin identifies him as a “puisne” from Inns of Court: …But who’s yonder Deep mouth’d Hound, that bellows rimes like thunder He maks an earthquake throughout Paules churchyard, Well fare his hart, his larum shall be heard: Oh he’s a puisne of the Innes of Court, Come from th’Vniuersity to make sport With his friends money heere. (D6v) For Guilpin, the only excusable noise and disruption come from young men who resemble him: educated outsiders who witness and listen to the cacophony of the city, can recognize the vanity of it all, and return to the quiet of the study. For M. Thomas Hester, Guilpin’s disdain for the city and its vanities is little more than an imitation of John Donne, but with less care: 83 Janette Dillon, “‘Is Not All the World Mile End, Mother?’: The Blackfriars Theater, the City of London, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 9 (1997):127-48, on 133. 129 He is always as R.B. Gill phrases it, “a London wit playing the part of a satyr-satirist,” and exhibits little of the introspection of Donne’s ethically involved speaker. He reveals none of the doubts of the Donne’s satirist about the morality of his position, seems little affected by the sins he witnesses, and concludes rather smugly, nonchalantly, and (as always) sarcastically.”84 Earlier in the poem, before Guilpin walks out into the city, the walls of his study become permeable only as he welcomes the performances that take place in courtrooms and theaters, important landmarks in the city, through his newer, non-humanist books: Heere may I sit, yet walke to Westiminster And hear Fitzherbert, Plowden, Brooke, and Dier Canuas a law-case: or if my dispose Perswade me to a play, I’le to the Rose, Or Curtaine, one of Plautus Comedies Or the Pathetick Spaniards Tragedies. (D4v) His study, previously a humanist enclave, is now open to public activities of the city, albeit in relative safety from the vanities that he details throughout the rest of the poem. Guilpin creates an artificial barrier between the city and himself with the materials that provide him with comfort, including plays from the Rose and the Curtain as well as poetry from “some speaking painter,” who allows him to hear verses. His study, he claims is “Thus my books little case, / My study, is mine All, mine euery place” (D5r). Guilpin defines his study not only as a practical physical “case” for his books, but he also 84 Hester, “All are Players,” 6. 130 names the metaphorical space it becomes as a result of his reading—including the parts of the city including Westminster and the theaters that are significant to him—as his “all,” that which matters most to him in the world. Supported by his reading, the space itself extends everywhere and yet still belongs to him as it embodies him as an educated, critical, seeming-outsider. Guilpin conflates his books, the city, the theater, and the space of his reading to define and then place himself in opposition to other men and their foibles—as an ideal satirical writer and reader. 131 Figure 1: Santi di Tito (1536-1603) Portrait of Niccolo Machiavelli Second half of the 16th century Polo Museale Fiorentino, Inventario 1890: Database https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli_by_ Santi_di_Tito.jpg 132 Figure 2: Antonella da Messina Saint Jerome in His Study, about 1475 The National Gallery https://research.ng-london.org.uk/projects/exhibitions/building-the-picture/images/N- 1418-00-000029/1/0.5/0.5/0/1/ 133 Figure 3: Joos van Cleve, Flemish, ca. 1485-1540/41 Saint Jerome in HIs Study, 1528 Princeton University Art Museum http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/32773 134 Figure 4: Pieter Coeke van Aelst, the elder (Flemish, 1501-1550_ Saint Jerome in His Study, ca. 1530 The Waters Art Museum, Baltimore http://art.thewalters.org/detail/35964/saint-jerome-in-his-study-2/ 135 Figure 5: Albrecht Durer (German, Nuremberg 1471-1528) Saint Jerome in His Study, 1514 The Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/336229 136 Figure 6: Caravaggio St. Jerome Writing, 1606 Galleria Borghese Collection https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Saint_Jerome_in_his_study_by_Caravagg io_(Rome) 137 Figure 7: Albrecht Durer (German Nuremberg 1471-1528) Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1526 Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/19.73.120/ 138 Figure 8: Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems Silencium EEBO Figure 9: Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems Usus libri, non lectio prudentes facit (The use not the reading of a book makes people wise) 139 Figure 10: Agostino Ramelli Book-wheel in Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine (Paris, 1588) EEBO 140 Chapter 3 The Consequences of Reading: Exile, Discontentment, and Disruption in The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus and John Fletcher’s The Elder Brother In The Return from Parnassus or The Scourge of Simony (1606), a play that continually blurs theater and reality, famous stage actors Richard Burbage and Will Kempe appear as fictional characters.1 In act 4.3, they hold an audition for the unemployed and “discontented” university graduates Studioso and Philomusus.2 Before the students arrive, Burbage supposes that if he were to “intertaine these schollers at a low rate,” they could “pen a part” (4.3.1753-54; 4.3.1765). Kempe disagrees and instead mocks university students’ self-importance (“the slaues are somewhat proud” 4.3.1757) and their poor acting abilities (“the[y] neuer speake in their walke” 4.3.1758). He reserves his harshest criticism, however, for the texts of their plays: KEMPE. Few of the vniversity [men] pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ouid, and that writer Metamorphoses, and talk too much of 1 J.B. Leishman, The Three Parnassus Plays, 1598-1601 (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson LTD, 1949). All quotes come from this edition. The play also exists in manuscript (Halliwell-Philips MS and Rawlinson MS). For other editions, see Edward Arber, The English Scholar’s Library of Old and Modern Works, no. 6: The Return from Parnassus, or The Scourge of Simony (Southgate: London, 1879); W.W. Macray, The Pilgrimage to Parnassus with the Two Parts of The Return from Parnassus, (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1886,). Arber follows the printed quarto most carefully. 2 Leishman, The Three Parnassus Plays; Studioso and Philomusus describe themselves as “those who must live in discontent” in the last scene of The First Part of the Return from Parnassus (4.3.1566). 141 Proserpina & Iuppiter. Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, I and Ben Ionson too. O that Ben Ionson is a pestilent fellow, he brought vp Horace giuing the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath giuen him a purge that made him beray his credit. (4.3.1766-1773) Kempe fuses classical authors, book titles, and characters together into a comical mélange, blaming their classical “smell” and mythological “talk” for the plays’ unpalatability. As Burbage finds some value in university-trained writers, Kempe questions their worth. He faults their use of Latin literature and unfavorably compares their work with Shakespeare’s, which for Kempe, challenges the purpose and intrinsic value of university graduates, particularly as a part of the public theater. In this same moment, he also manages to shame Ben Jonson both for lampooning Shakespeare in Poetaster (1602), and perhaps for (mis)representing himself as a scholar in the style of the Latin poet and satirist Horace.3 In the end, for him, Shakespeare “puts them all down.” 4 While the Kempe of this play is fictive and sardonic, his statement confirms Shakespeare’s ascendance as a truly popular and accessible playwright, but one who is a mismatch for audiences who expect plays that “smell” and “talk too much” of Latin books, including those by Ovid, Horace, Pliny, and Seneca. 5 3 Matthew Steggle, “Jonson in the Elizabethan Period,” in Ben Jonson in Literary Context, ed. Julie Sanders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 15-23. Steggle presents Jonson’s early efforts to establish himself as a literary writer who closely aligned himself with university and Inns of Court scholars. 4 “put, v.,”, OED Online, November 2011, Oxford University Press, The OED identifies two pertinent uses of the phrase in the 1590; “To put down” is to move something to a lower station; to put an end to (an activity, practice, ideal, institution, etc.) by force or authority; to suppress, crush, quell; to abolish. 5 St. John’s College, Cambridge University, “‘Remembrance with Posteritie’: Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe,” Accessed October 30 2017, https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/remembrance- posteritie-ben-jonson-and-thomas-nashe. In an exhibition in 2016, St. John’s College Cambridge 142 The Second Part of the Return’s first audience comprised members of St. John’s College, Cambridge, who likely saw the production during Christmastime in 1601, and, unlike Kempe, wanted to see a bookish play.6 Sarah Knight notes that “writers of university comedies relied on in-jokes, [and] on a communal sense of texts enjoyed or endured as part of the academic curriculum,” rendering Kempe’s “criticism” of university plays especially wry.”7 The “in-joke” in this scene, however, also identifies an anxiety of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Oxford and Cambridge graduates—of being “put down” to a lower social status, despite their years of study and adherence to a social contract that was supposed to provide them preferment—the ability to serve in government or the church.8 Told through a series of vignettes, the play presents the lives of recent graduates of Parnassus (Cambridge University) as they navigate life in London in the 1590s. In an attempt to live comfortably in the city, they become underemployed writers, pursue life as clergy members, and in an extreme case, resort to pretending to be physicians. Deprived of inherited wealth, the characters live without the advantages of claimed Jonson as one of its own. The college library states, “Nashe was a member of St John’s College, and there is a long-held tradition that Jonson was too.” 6 Leishman, 10. The Second Part of the Return was performed at Christmastime between 1600 and 1603. The likely date is 1601 as both Elizabeth I and Will Kempe (after his Nine Days Wonder) had died by 1603. John Wright entered a copy of the play “under the handes of master Owen Gwyn and the warden An. Enterlude called. The return from Parnassus or the scourge of Simony.” Two editions of the play were published in quick succession in 1606. 7 Sarah Knight, “Fantastical Distempers: The Psychopathology of Early Modern Scholars,” in Early Modern Academic Drama, ed. Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 129-52, on 129. 8 Knight, “Fantastical Distempters,” 130-32; Laurie Ellinghausen, “The Uses of Resentment, Nashe, Parnassus, and the Poet’s Mystery,” in Thomas Nashe, ed. Georgia Brown (New York: Routledge, 2017), 96-111; Victor Morgan, A History of the University of Cambridge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Mark H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558-1642: An Essay on Changing Relations Between the English Universities and English Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959); Mark H. Curtis, “The Alienated Intellectuals of Early Stuart England,” Past & Present 23, no. 1 (November 1962) 25-43. 143 their nemesis from Cambridge, Amaretto—an insufficiently-educated parvenu who relies on his father’s income and the practice of simony. Like many characters in the play, a percentage of graduates of Oxford and Cambridge in the late 1580s and 1590s were also left to seek employment as tutors, low-level clerks, and writers for the press or the theater, positions which they ultimately viewed as incompatible with their expected stations in life.9 In the play, Kempe maligns the graduates for overusing their books, and they are forced to concede that their education and classical reading have yet to provide them with suitable employment, social standing, or a sense of economic security. As Laurie Ellinghausen explains, “[g]raduates without position [were] masterless men, and thus hazardous men.”10The play’s author and characters understand their potential for hazard; they also grasp the disruptive power of books on London’s well-entrenched middle-classes and the political elite—even if they do not fully succeed in using it. In this chapter, I present ways in which a displaced, “discontented,” and bookish subculture of university-educated young men in The Second Part of the Return employs books and their collective reading to define themselves collectively in a plaintive response to anxieties about being socially and economically “put down” at the nadir of Elizabeth I’s reign. I also argue that the play endorses books of Juvenalian formal verse satire as effective modes of complaint and forms of counsel for university graduates without secure employment. As a result, the play itself functions as a Juvenalian satire that implicitly supports writers whose books were included in the Bishop’s Ban of 1599. In addition, in its criticism of books and authors, the play also obliquely responds to 9 Curtis, “Alienated,” 25. 10 Ellinghausen, “Resentment,” 107. 144 Thomas Nashe’s preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589, 1599) entitled “To the Gentlemen of Both Universities.”11 This preface, like the play, reminds audiences of the potential disruptive nature of educated “masterless” men. The play’s treatment of books and reading, particularly as forms of counsel, and its treatment of scholars serve as a point of entry into John Fletcher’s unexamined play, The Elder Brother (1633) in which a bookish graduate student confronts contested primogeniture because of his devotion to study. Unlike the group of scholars in The Second Part of the Return, who are able who lodge their complaints collectively as they encounter barriers to preferment, Charles, the elder brother, must counter negative rhetoric about scholars alongside legal and rhetorical challenges to entail and primogeniture. Placed into a position similar to that of the scholars in The Second Part of the Return, Charles must depend on his books, and his servant Andrew to ensure that he receives the living that is due to him. Much like the scholars from Parnassus, Charles is made to seem rootless—his university education should ensure his inheritance, but, as with the scholars of Parnassus, preferment is far more difficult in a competitive market. Both plays anticipate a shift in cultural priorities, where the erudition associated with humanism or a humanist education does not necessarily guarantee comfort or economic stability. The answer for the anonymous author of The Second Part of the Return and John Fletcher is to transform the books and reading inherent in humanism into a means by which scholars can compete in and disrupt an emerging urban economy and transitioning political leadership. 11 Robert Greene, Menaphon: Camillaes alarum to slumbering Eupheus [sic] in his melancholy cell at Silexedra (London, 1599), EEBO, The British Library. See R.B. McKerrow, [Notes on] Preface to R. Greene’s Menaphon[by Thomas Nash] (London, 1908). At the time, McKerrow didn’t have access to a 1599 edition of the book and supposed that it could have been recalled and burned because of the preface’s author. 145 For most of the Parnassus plays’ critical history, scholarship has resembled Kempe’s lackluster assessment of university plays.12 Historically, The Second Part of the Return has been cited in relation to Shakespeare, either as evidence of historical attitudes about him, or as proof of the ubiquity of popular theater. With the exception of Paula Glatzer’s critical study of the plays in 1977, scholarship has mostly ignored the content of the play itself.13 In the last few years, however, scholars have begun to consider the play alongside a larger corpus of university drama or as a set of plays that deserves its own scholarly treatment. In her examination of early modern masculinity, Laurie Ellinghausen reads all three Parnassus plays within a historical framework of an ingrained culture of pervasive drinking at both universities. She argues that drinking and pub culture—which make substantial appearances in the plays—were in part perpetuated by the social and financial instability many undergraduates experienced. She has also read the plays in relation to the practice of scholarly labor alongside the early modern concept of disappointment in work.14 Christopher Marlow addresses the plays’ representations of “scholarly masculinity,” or the varieties of meaning attached to maleness, when characters in the plays are placed in opposition to those outside of the university 12 See Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 371- 420. Lesser and Stallybrass mention The Second Part of the due to Shakespeare’s appearance in the poetry compilation in Bel-videre or the Garden of the Muses. 13 Paula Glatzer, The Complaint of the Poet [in] The Parnassus Plays: A Critical Study of the Trilogy Performed at St. John’s College, Cambridge 1598/99-1601/02 Authors Anonymous, (Salzburg: Insitute für Englishche Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburge, 1977); see E.A.J. Honigmann, John Weever: A Biography of a Literary Associate of Shakespeare and Jonson, Together with a Photographic Facsimile of Weever’s Epigramms (1599) (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984). Honigmann traces Weever’s association with the character Gullio—a university graduate who has an affinity to Shakespeare in The First Part of the Return. 14 Laurie Ellinghausen, “University of Vice: Drink, Gentility, and Masculinity in Oxford, Cambridge, and London,” in Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550-1650, ed. Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 45-65. 146 community.15 Sarah Knight examines the Parnassus plays through the psychology and pathology of Renaissance humoral theory.16 It is my hope that The Second Part of the Return is eventually regarded as a play through which scholars may comprehend the ways in which a fairly well-defined group of men use their books and literacy to draw attention to the negative effects on society caused by ill-considered institutional changes in Renaissance England including expanding university enrollment while only temporarily increasing clerical and other government positions of employment for university graduates. In order to accomplish this, I first define what it means to be a discontented scholar in the context of the play, at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and in London in the 1590s. Then, I explain how “discontentedness” as a subculture is a useful way to categorize these young men, particularly as a way to discover nuances of the term and frame their collective reading of books. Discontented Scholars: A subculture in the 1590s The Second Part of the Return takes discontentment as its impetus. After defending the play to critic Momus, who would rather read the tales of Sir John Mandevil or Bevis of Southhampton than watch a “scurvie English show,” Defensor preemptively apologizes to the audience in the induction: “If the Catastrophe please you not, impute it to the vnpleasing fortunes of discontented schollers” (Induction, 50, emphasis mine). He repeats the sentiment again in the verse prologue, explaining that the play “only shew[s] a 15 Marlow, Christopher, Performing Masculinity in English University Drama (New York: Routledge, 2016), 68-79. 16 Knight, “Psychopathology,” 29. 147 schollers discontent,” their “scorned fortunes,” and “unpittyed state,” (prologue, 69-81). Defensor reinforces the effects of scholarly hardship, reminding the audience that Studioso and Philomusus, two of the central characters of The First Part of the Return, could not find fortune in England and chose to move abroad in search of success (at the start of the play, however, they have since returned). He also reconstructs the circumstances of Studiosos’s and Philomusus’s discontent—the fear of unemployment and the general scorn placed upon scholars—which connects them and the larger cast of university educated characters (including Ingeniso, Judicio, Academico, Furor, and Phantasma) together. Well before the production of the play, in the early to mid 1580s, discontent was simply an indication of “strong displeasure” or “indignation.” However, by the 1590s, discontent had undergone a shift in meaning to include an all-encompassing description of the melancholy, anger, disappointment, and resentment that was the result of an unsatisfactory social or political station.17 It is seems reasonable to infer, then, that, in the late 1590s, discontent (also called discontentment) began to include the disappointment specific to a lack of provision after a university education. While the penury of scholars was not a new phenomenon, additional university graduates experienced this unfortunate reality as more young men attended Oxford and Cambridge in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Mark H. Curtis attributes this growth to a “cultural revolution,” related to increased administrative roles in government that could benefit from university-trained men.18 Laurie Ellinghausen connects larger 17 “discontent, n.1” OED Online, December 2017, Oxford University Press. At 2a. is the association with dissatisfaction “a. The fact or condition of being dissatisfied with one’s circumstances; lack of contentment; (in later use frequently) spec. general dissatisfaction with existing social or political conditions. Cf. discontentment n. 2a.” 18 Curtis, “Alienated,” 30. 148 enrollments to the expanding definition of what it meant to be a gentleman, as well as to England’s longstanding custom of primogeniture—in which a younger son left without a fortune “could take his learning as a means to a comfortable life.”19 The efflux of newly- minted graduates to England’s larger society did not come without warning. In 1581, noted schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster was troubled by less fortunate scholars who could not find suitable employment. “To have so many gaping for preferment,” he writes, “as no goulf hath store enough to suffis, and to let them rome helpless, whom nothing else can help, how can it be but that such shifters must needs shake the verie strongest piller in that state where they live, and loyter without living?”20 Men, educated or otherwise, wandering the countryside, were considered a social and political threat that could potentially result in a destabilized state. Alexandra Halasz writes that Mulcaster’s concern “arises in a sociopolitical order that allocates learning to limited sites and yet in allowing an expanded high literacy, creates the possibility, if not the inevitability, of sedition.”21 Curtis explains that in the later seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes (who matriculated to Oxford in 1603) considered universities as places that could, in fact, foment rebellion. After the Restoration, in Behemoth (1668) Hobbes writes, “[f]or it is a hard matter for men who do all think highly of their own wits, when they have also acquired the learning of the university, to be persuaded that they want any ability 19 Ellinghausen, “Resentment,” 107. 20 Richard Mulcaster, Positions vvherin those primitiue circumstances be examined, which are necessarie for the training vp of children, either for skill in their booke, or health in their bodie. (London, 1581), 139, EEBO, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. See Ellinghausen, “Resentment,” 107; and Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 82. 21 Halasz, The Marketplace of Print, 82. 149 requisite for the government of a commonwealth...[,]”22 implying that the university facilitated unrealistic expectations of advancement as it educated young men. During Hobbes’ earliest years at Oxford, even for qualified, wealthy, well-connected sons of gentleman, the wait for a government position could stretch into decades. By way of example, in Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem (1593), Thomas Nashe presumes—somewhat facetiously—that it takes far longer to gain a position in government than to enter heaven: “With less suit (I assure you) is the Kingdom of Heaven obtained, than a suit for a pension of office to an Earthly King; which though a man hath twenty years followed, and hath better than three parts and a half of a promise to have confirmed, yet if he have but a quarter of an enemy in the Court, it is cashiered and non-suited” (N3r)23 Three years later, Sir James Perrott points to the intersection of discontented scholars (and soldiers) and their lack of preferment and concludes that these groups have the potential to alter the social order of the country—and his personal comfort. He addresses his specific concerns in a small, forty-paged book entitled A Discovery of discontented minds, wherein their severall sortes and purposes are described especially such as go beyond the seas (1596), which he dedicated to Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, perhaps either as a warning about his patron’s associates in Cadiz, or his own growing ambitions.24 Perrott regards discontent as an affront to social order and historical 22 Curtis, “Alienated,” 20. 23 Thomas Nashe, Christ’s Teares Over Jerusalem (London, 1593), EEBO, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. See also Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1966). Esler claims that it took Francis Bacon over twenty years to secure his first post in government. 24 James Perrrott, A Discovery of discontented minds, wherein their severall sortes and purposes are described especially such as go beyond the seas (Oxford,1596), 2-30, EEBO, Bodleian Library. See Andrew Thrush, “Perrot, Sir James (1571/2–1637), politician,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 4 Feb. 2018, http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy- 150 precedent that serves as a harbinger to sedition and revolution. Drawing upon his study at Middle Temple, the twenty-five-year-old attorney used a variety of Roman and Greek historical texts to outline the dangers that discontented individuals and “mischieous malcontents” could have on a commonwealth: For out of private mens discontentments often growe the loss of friends, the ouerthrowe of families, the subuersion of Citties, and sometimes even the confusion of commonweals and kingdoms: which fire of discontentment and discord is not seldom kindled by the meaner sort, but alwaies by the worser sort of people, of which kind mischieous malcontents as there be many in most places, so ther be some in this Realm of England: (2) He quickly dismisses “tolerable kinde[s]” of complainers, including those who long for the past, are disappointed by field enclosures and changes to landscape, or are concerned by the “decay of townes,” due to loss of trade and crafts (3). While he sympathizes with those who do not favor England’s near tolerance of a “diversity of opinions in matters of religion,” he finds himself mostly unconcerned with these “moanes,” as they are diffuse and well beyond his influence (4). What alarms him, however, are the growing numbers of “daungerous maleconte[n]ts,” private individuals upset by a lack of opportunity in the country and who choose to pursue satisfaction abroad. He finds that soldiers and scholars are prone to um.researchport.umd.edu/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb- 9780198614128-e-21985. Perrott was the illegitimate son of Sir John Perrot [sic], Elizabeth I’s Lord Deputy of Ireland who was rumored to be an illegitimate son of Henry VIII. Perrott formed a close relationship with the Earl of Essex after Perrott’s father died in the Tower accused of treason for allegedly joining with Irish and Spanish forces to overthrow the Queen. Perrott matriculated to Jesus College, Oxford in1586 but left without taking degree. After supposedly traveling abroad, he entered Middle Temple in 1592. He was the only living issue of Perrot and after many years in litigation, ended up with a substantial fortune. 151 this action and suggests that they not “giveth [themselves] over to the governmement of [their] passions: lustful, or ireful”(5). Perrott categorizes the “ireful” as those who “appertaine displeasure, enuy, wrath and disco[n]te[n]tment, whereof most (if not all) in such doe keepe possession, and claime a part of prehemynence in his chiefest part, which is the mind” (3). He, like Richard Mulcaster and Hobbes, worries that men who feel that their cleverness is unrewarded become a larger danger to the safety of the state. Before delineating the causes that encourage a variety of men to seek personal, political, economic, and religious satisfaction abroad, he specifically rebukes scholars and soldiers who “thinke they have deserved well, and yet do intymate that they are not altogether rewarded according to their merits” (4-6). From a position of privilege, in which he implies they should be grateful for simply living and working in England, Perrot declares that most scholars and soldiers are already “preffered according to their dignities and deserts” (5). He cites the misfortunes of Greek historical figures Pericles, Themistocles, and Alcibiades as evidence of the imperfections of government and its frequent failure to properly acknowledge vital political, martial, and scholarly figures (5). Perrott considers soldiers and scholars fortunate for not enduring fates similar to these figures and reminds them that historical precedence should encourage them to remain quiet and accepting of their places in the social hierarchy. From his vantage point, everyone who deserves advancement or preferment has already earned it, and those who have not should only blame themselves: So that fewe of both professions (worthy of advancement) but are so provided for, that they are well able to live, or if any want, it is because 152 there are not places of preferment fit for them all, or else because they doe obscure themselves, not making the world witness of their deserts. (5) Finally, he proclaims that men who seek preferment and advancement will go so far as to lie to each other and the government about their reasons for moving abroad. They will pretend to be part of the “Catholike” cause, become “fit bellowes to blowe the fire of sedition,” and in the end, clearly “shew themselves as professed adversaries to the present government” (9;23). Perrott may have recognized the beginnings of discontentment from his time at Oxford, or from his chambers at Inns of Court. These rumblings may have illuminated the precariousness of his own social and political positions as his colleagues began to question their larger role in the courts, government, universities, and England at large. The Second Part of the Return confirms Perrot’s speculations to a point. After returning to England after some time abroad, Studioso and Philomusus explain that they originally left the country to seek advancement, but claim to have received neither largess nor security, and instead, can only confirm their misery as scholars: PHILOMUSUS. Then let vs steale time from this borrowed shape, Recounting our vnequall happs of late. Late did the Ocean graspe vs in his armes, Late did we liue within a stranger ayre, Late did we see the cinders of great Rome: We thought that English fugitiues there eate Gold, for restoratiue, if gold were meate; Yet now we finde by bought experience, 153 That where so ere we wander vp and downe On the rounde shoulders of this massy world, Or our ill fortunes, or the worldes ill eye Forpseaks our good, procures our misereye. (1.4.375-386) Their social positions have gone unchanged, as both England and Rome have failed to provide them with a guaranteed living. Studioso further explains that neither “Rome nor Rhemes,” that are “wonted to give A Cardinalls cap to discontented clarkes,”—and which also served as enclaves for many English Jesuit priests—provided them with any additional advancement either (1.4.393-394). Instead, the scholars return to England because “it’s as good to starue mongst English swine, / As in a forraine lande to begge and pine” (1.4.396-398). However, deciding to “scorne” and “vexe” the world that “workes… so much paine” against them, they declare revenge upon those in possession of worldly goods and the means to provide them with livings (1.4.399-400). “We have the words,” Studioso observes while complaining about the inequity of their situation, “they the possession haue” (1.4.403 emphasis mine). Instead of inciting total revolution, they decide to enact revenge locally by pretending to be physicians and suggesting ludicrous, purgative treatments, while overcharging the men they believe are keeping them from preferment. Studioso and Philomusus warn the audience that words, whether spoken, written, or printed, have the potential to disorder social structures and perhaps redistribute wealth and worldly possessions. In the London of the play, however, discontent is far more than “setting those high aspiring bonds on fire,” as Robert Greene describes it in the posthumous short poem 154 “Of Discontent” (line 5).25 It becomes more than a passive description. It transforms instead into an ethos by which graduates distinguish themselves as a subculture. Because of their books (and their ability to learn quickly), they are able to fend for themselves in a larger, uncaring, social and political landscape. Discontent(ment) and books give scholars the permission and means to transgress laws and social mores in order to ensure their economic survival. In Second Part of the Return, characters continually define states of discontentment through books that were required as a part of their humanist education, that were banned as subversive (satires and epigrams), or that comprised new literary material involved in the “paper warres in Paules Church-yard” (1.2.154-155). This group of young men develops what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “linguistic market”—a language of valuable, specialized vocabulary particular to their locality and class—to form a somewhat anomic, but bookish community.26 They communicate with one another using a vernacular comprised of Latin phrases from authors they have all studied. While jesting about recently published plays and poems, they signal to each other and to the audiences that their educations surpass “small Latin and less Greek.”27 They speak a local, hybrid language separate from those of London, and, to a certain extent, of 25 Robert Albott, Englands Parnassus: Or Choysest Flowers of our Moderne Poets, with their poetical comparisons (London, 1600), 377, EEBO, Folger Shakespeare Library. Ablott was also likely a fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge. 26 Pierre Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); see also Michel Maffesoli, “The Emotional Community: Research arguments,” trans. Don Smith in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Ken Gelder (New York: Routledge, 2003). I mean anomic in the sense that the men have to come up with new ways to achieve their goals, as opposed to the theories popularized by Durkheim. See Robert K. Merton, “Social Structure and Anomie,” American Sociological Review 3, no. 5 (1938): 672-82. 27 Ben Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us,” in First Folio of Shakespeare’s Works, ed. John Heminge and Henry Condell (London, 1623), A4r-A4v, EEBO, Folger Shakespeare Library. . 155 Cambridge itself. This adaptable language translates across cities and cultures. As Studioso and Philomusus transform into sham French physicians Jacques and Theodore, they explain that because they have exhausted their options of employment by “honest meanes,” the only thing they have left to do is harness Juvenal’s Satire I and “aliquid breuivus Gyaris et carcere dignum” (Do something deserving of exile to Gyara or a dungeon). Their book, in this case, Juvenal, gives them permission to transfer subcultures and enter into London’s underworld, by becoming “Cony-catchers, Baudes, or anything,” in order to “rub out,” or survive (1.4.421). Using the French they learned on their travels abroad, Studioso and Philomusus decide to target the “bretheren of Cambridge and Oxford, or any of thoses Stigmatick masters of Artes, that abused [them] in times past” (1.4.422-425). Fortified by Juvenal and emboldened by discontentment, they swear to “sate” themselves with revenge, while warning the audience that “[p]rovoked patience growes intemperate” (1.4.438-440). To gull their patient Burgess, they use information from a recent medical book published in 1598, and Seneca (although they tell their “patient” the advice is from Galen). As they fool Burgess, insisting that he must take a “gland” or suppository, and diagnose his “crasis” and “symptoma,” Studioso and Philomusus continually signify (in French) the cleverness that is necessary for such a stunt (1.4.43). Despite their swearing to enact revenge, they maintain an abiding hope in a social order, as does Juvenal, who still believes in the social and political project of Rome, even as he feels disconnected from it. An abiding loyalty to the state seems to dissuade Studioso and Philomusus from enacting total revenge on the world. They experience a weakened indignatio, a 156 melancholic version of their discontented state, and remain “vexed” at “[e]ach painted asse in chayre of dinigtye,” lamenting their continued “tragedy” (2.1.558-62). By harnessing the rhetorical power of discontentedness, the scholars and their (presumably) sympathetic audience create space for a subculture or “new cultural forms” of young men who can move easily between the physical and linguistic spheres of the city and the university.28 Their begrudging respect for their state keeps the graduates from doing more than presenting a potential disruptive force, rather than creating an actual harmful one. The scholars form a group that Albert K. Cohen describes in his study of young adolescent men and the formation of disruptive and benign subcultures: “the existence in effective interaction with one another, a number of actors with similar problems of adjustment.”29 The most obvious problem for this group, of course, is a lack of clear provision after a university education. But however much this discontented group wishes to enfold itself into the urban landscape of London, by the late 1590s, young educated men had already begun to reshape the city. Their style, sharp wit, and their books added to the growing pains and disorder that inevitably occur at the formation of a new class of people in any urban center. With their sophisticated education and literary and literate understanding of the world, these young men changed the face, activities, and space of London. “Among the conceivable solutions to [a group’s] problems,” Cohen writes, “may be one which is not yet embodied in action and which does not therefore exist as a cultural model.”30 Young men, like the scholars in The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, added to the numbers of books sold and read 28 Albert K Cohen, “A General Theory of Subcultures,” in Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955), 54 29Cohen, “A General Theory of Subcultures,” 54. 30 Cohen, 55. 157 in the city, changed the type of audiences who frequented plays, and popularized taverns, alcohol and tobacco. The scholars in the play develop a strange cultural model and form a hybrid community that exists tentatively between fictive and historical worlds, London and Cambridge, and between complicity and transgression. They use available material— in this case books, and in other cases alcohol and tobacco—to diagram their anxiety and discontentment while hinting at the social repercussions that young, unemployed, clever, irritated men can have on a city and a country. The play also outlines the effects that graduates and their learning have on the press, reading material, and the reading public of the city. Ingenioso tells the printer John Danter (who like Kempe and Burbage is a “real” person) “thou art deceiued, wit is dearer than thou takest it to be,” while assuring him that the books he writes will outsell those of “exhortations and catechisms” which “lie moulding on thy shopboard” (1.3.336-340).31 Igenioso’s desperation will produce new, potentially subversive material that could enrichen Danter while changing the literary landscape with his anger. The graduates’ continual daring use of writing and books binds them in their discontentedness and boundary crossing. As readers, they employ Ovid’s Metamorphoses, John Marston’s Scourge of Villanie and Belvedere, or The Garden of the Muses as well as a range of recently published poems and plays in the late 1590s—many of which they seem to dislike—as a type of cultural cachet and social commentary. They use these same books 31 H.G. Aldis, Robert Bowes, E.R. McC. Dix, et al., A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers In England, Scotland and Ireland, And of Foreign Printers of English Books 1557- 1640, ed. R.B. McKerrow (Oxford: The Bibliographical Society, 1968); John Danter was a printer in London from 1589-1599. While he apprenticed with printer John Day, Danter was found to be working on a secret press. In addition to printing the first edition of Titus Andronicus, and an edition of Romeo and Juliet, he is also known for printing Thomas Nashe’s Have with you to Saffron Walden; Nashe lived with Danter at the time. 158 as means of judiciously positioning themselves philosophically between the harsh vitriol of poets and critics Marston, Juvenal, and Nashe and the gentle rebuking of their bête noir, Ben Jonson/Horace, and their favorite poet, Edmund Spenser. The graduates continually signify to each other and their audience as they report on the state of their discontent through joking, teasing, crying, and arguing as they fortify their fractured community.32 Although scholars in The Second Part of the Return carry the physical reading materials of wit and discontentment, this alone is not enough to join them to this bookish subculture. For example, in act 2.3, Amaretto enters “with an Ouid in his hand,” and reads “Nunc sequor imperium magne Cupido tuum” (Now, I desire greatly to follow a command of yours, Cupid; which is actually not Ovid at all, but Petronius) as he “meditate[s] on [his] fayr mistres” (622-624). Ian Munro identifies a cultural marker like this one as a part of the material “matter[s] of wit” in John Marston’s play, The Malcontent. 33 Munro closely allies cleverness to goods such as books, pipes, hats, and other physical material “through which we encounter that wit, and in which the markings of cultural capital are often inscribed.”34 As Academico waits to secure a clergy position from Amaretto and his father, he listens nearby as Amaretto compares himself and his mistress to literary couples from popular poems including Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, 32 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Signifying, in this case, could be seen, on an extremely surface level, as similar to “signifyin’” as it is defined by Gates. Satire and epigrams, in the 1590s, as well the teasing that takes place in The Parnassus Plays resemble “signifyin’ and the joking inherent in call-out culture without, of course, the historical, cultural, racial, and sociological disparities that accompany this term and its application. 33 Ian Munro, “Knightly Complements: The Malcontent and the Matter of Wit,” English Literary Renaissance 40, no. 2 (2010): 215-37, on 218. 34 Munro, “Knightly Complements,” 218. 159 Daniel’s Tragedie of Cleopatra, Lyly’s Endymion, and Christopher Marlowe’s Dido and Aeneas. In frustration at Amaretto’s pretentiousness and power to decide to his fate, Academico turns Amaretto’s reading comparisons into puns and jokes. As Amaretto declares that “she is my Moone, and I her Endimion,” Academico clarifies: “she may be thy Luna, and thou her Lunaticke,” cleverly playing with the trope and signaling Amoretto’s outlandishness. “I her Aeneas, she my Dido is,” Amaretto continues, to which Academico replies, “She is thy Io, thou her brazen asse, / or she Dame Phantasy and thou her gull, / She thy Pasiphae, thou her louing bull,” marking him as the consummate wealthy outsider to their group of scholars (2.3 644-646; 2.3.647-650). The play holds Amaretto up as an unfortunate example of a wealthy, unkind graduate of Cambridge, who only understands the trappings of intelligence, as he carries Ovid around for the majority of the play. He disparages “meere Cambridge scholler[s]” laughing at their inability to talk about shooting, hunting, hawks and hounds (2.4.925). He reinforces class differences, encourages discontentment, and dashes the hopes of students including Academico, who must read their books carefully in hopes of gaining a living. The play ridicules Amaretto’s carrying of Ovid de arte amandi, for “the practise of his discourse to court his hobby abroad” or to make set speeches “to his greyhound” (2.4.910-912). Throughout the play, he only carries Ovid and never reads it correctly. Unlike the discontented scholars from his university, he cannot speak the hybrid language of London and Cambridge. Amaretto clings to the physical and material to identify himself as a part of the intelligentsia—he cannot go “off book.” In this case, unlike the young men in the play who are forced to live by their wits and their books, Amaretto does not, as his position and circumstance render the materials associated with intelligence and 160 the literate and discontented scholars as, for him, little more than props. Amaretto is the polar opposite of discontented men in this play—he is ignorantly content. The feeling of discontentedness, which in the 1590s becomes a sentiment, an ethos, and a subculture in The Second Part of the Return, is intertwined with a historical moment that produced several satires and epigrams in London. Laurie Ellinghausen suggests that the “masterless position” of the graduates “becomes a rhetorical occasion for satire, as well as a means to redefine one’s labor.”35 As the graduates continue to wander the city without secure employment, they not only change and redefine labor, but they also change the purpose of scholarship. They ally themselves with satirists—to a certain extent—as they use the moment of the 1599 Bishop’s Ban to demonstrate the necessity of this form of criticism, whether it is in the form of books or their own theatrical production or printed playbooks. Through its discontented graduates, The Second Part of the Return provides an extensive reading of Juvenal, the Latin poet and genesis for the scathing type of English satire targeted in the ban. This type of formal verse satire had become extremely popular. The author uses Juvenalian satire throughout the play to signal the graduates’ initial distress at their liminal social and political status and allows them to comment fully on the writers and material involved with the ban. 35 Ellinghausen, “University of Vice,” 49. 161 “Difficile est Satyram non scribere”: The Bishop’s Ban and English Juvenalian Satire in the 1590s In 1599, Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, and Bishop of London, Richard Bancroft, initiated and ordered the censoring, recalling, and public burning of satires and epigrams. They also ordered that “nasshes bookes and D Harvyes bookes be taken wheresoever they maye be found and that none of theire bookes bee ever printed hereafter.”36 The list of banned books also includes unauthorized histories and plays, erotica, and two particularly misogynist works.37 Richard McCabe suggests that the clergy used the ban to express the government’s discomfort with the political and social criticism inherent in satire. He cites Whitgift’s and Bancroft’s history of censorship and their close relationship with Robert Cecil—as a matter of record in the Hatfield manuscripts—to demonstrate that the main objective of the ban was to quash subversive tendencies and instill “public order and policy,” as opposed to regulating prurient matter in books.38 Debora Shuger has famously called the ban, “the most sweeping and stringent 36 Richard McCabe, “Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599,” The Yearbook of English Studies 11, no. 2 (1981): 188-93, on 188. The quote is taken from his transcription of The Stationers’ Registers, Register C, folios 316a, 316b. 37 Andrew S. Keener, “Robert Tofte’s Of Mariage and Wiuing and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599,” Studies in Philology 110, no. 3 (2013): 506-32, on 507-08. Keener writes about the translation of books on marriage by cousins Ercole and Torquato Tasso and how their book may have been banned because of association with Pietro Aretino, Thomas Nashe and John Marston. 38 McCabe, “Elizabethan Satire,” 189; See Lynda E. Boose, “The 1599 Bishop’s Ban, Elizabethan Pornography, and the Sexualization of the Jacobean Stage,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Arger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994),185-200, on 193-97. Boose counters this argument and suggests that the bishops were in fact trying to eradicate “hostile malcontented potential aggressions of violently sexualized discourse in these new hybrid literary constructions” as well as the racy discourse of Aretino (193). 162 instance of early modern English censorship.”39 Of the books listed in the ban, however, formal verse satire is the most prominent genre; those books seemed to have been collected to be burned almost immediately.40 Cyndia Susan Clegg suggests that the ban was Whitgift and Bancroft’s attempt to protect Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex from politically and sexually charged commentary related to his failed campaign in Ireland.41 Adam Hansen sees the ban as more of a cultural sanction on the cosmopolitan landscape of London, as well as its writers, printers, and publishers, who were “intimately, intricately related to, informed by and productive of the urban scene.”42 The possible meanings of the ban are nearly as obscure as many of the satires and epigrams it sought to eradicate. Instead of effacing the works, the ban drew attention to the expansive and disruptive power and public nature of printed Juvenalian satire, as well as its association with the “attitude[s] of the young and clever,” as most of the living authors of satire were in their early- to mid-twenties (with the exception of Middleton who, as the youngest, was nineteen; John Davies, the oldest, was thirty at the time).43 As Whitgift and Bancroft were much older, this ban may also have been an explicit rebuke to a younger, aggressive generation’s choice of expression. 39 Debora Shuger, “Civility and Censorship in Early Modern England,” in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulations, ed. Robert C. Post (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998), 89-110 on 89. 40 McCabe, “Elizabethan Satire,” 189. 41 Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 202. 42 Adam Hansen, “Writing, London, and the Bishop’s Ban of 1599,” The London Journal: A Review of Metropolitan Society Past & Present (2017), 8, https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2017.1377452 43 Anabell Patterson, “Satirical writing: Donne in the Shadows,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Gibbory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 117-32, on 117. Patterson emphasizes the youth of the writers, which also seems to be at issue. 163 Beginning in 1597, but before the ban in 1599, London publishers released thirteen verse satires to the public, including Everard Guilpin’s Skialethea (1598), Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum (1597-8), John Marston’s The Scourge of Villianie (1598), and Thomas Middleton’s Micro-cynicon: six snarling satyres (1599).44 At the time, John Donne may also have been circulating satires in manuscript during this rush of print publication.45 The circulation of Juvenalian satire in the 1590s and early 1600s was far more hazardous in print than it was in manuscript. Cyndia Susan Clegg and Annabel Patterson explain the relative safety of satire within a close community of readers who had a shared understanding of the type and extent of ridicule that its author was intending to exact.46 Because such writing was distributed among friends, audiences of manuscript satire also had a shared stake in keeping the material private. Even with government censors and a Stationer’s Company to set rules about its content, public, printed satire was not controllable, and its constructions and fluid language allowed multiple meanings and interpretations to flourish. Starting with the Marprelate tracts in the 1580s, through the clashes between Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe in the early 1590s, it becomes obvious that satire is at its most potent and dangerous when attached to a public sphere of diverse voyeuristic readers, even if the work is published anonymously. Print encouraged satires to be integral parts of public conversations, giving it a cachet akin to news. 44 Everard Guilpin, Skialethea or a Shadow of Truth (London, 1598), EEBO, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery; Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum (London, 1597), EEBO, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery; John Marston, The Scourge of Villianie (London, 1598), EEBO, Harvard University Library; Thomas Middleton, Micro-cynicon or Six Snarling Satyres, (London, 1599), EEBO, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. 45 Patterson, “Satirical writing,” 117-25. 46 Clegg, Press Censorship, 202; Patterson, 117-25. 164 The subversion inherent in these books is twofold: it not only questions public trust in well-established political institutions, but it also subverts previously set, expected public behavior involving courtesies and decorum between gentlemen. Satires in the 1590s encouraged a culture of mostly non-adjudicated public disputes between men, some of whom were “masterless,” and did not owe particular allegiance to any entities beyond the government. The “paper warres” happening in the books of St. Paul’s Churchyard were subversive beyond their possible criticisms of larger institutions. Public printed skirmishes and pettifoggery between and among writers pulled literate young men’s focus away from the concerns of government and religious institutions into the minutiae of personal difference. The bitter poetic exchanges were noisy and may have distracted from other concerns, including the state of graduates entering the marketplace in search of employment. By the popularity of the genre, it seems that many readers were interested in these interpersonal disputes. In a small way, this vituperative and flashy brand of satire slowly cuts away at the overall influence of Elizabeth and the church in the everyday lives of London’s citizens. It allows authors to interact with one another as authorities on the state of the city or the rights and opinions of individuals without the specter of a larger governing body interfering in small disagreements. Cliff Forshaw argues that printed satire was ultimately less problematic than anticipated. He suggests that Whitgift and Bancroft may have privately concluded that satire was not nearly as dangerous as they had anticipated. However, the 1599 ban “ironically gave a new lease of life to formal verse satire, a mode already showing signs of flagging,” and it continually fueled controversy where none was 165 to be found.47 He also observes that the satirical poetry banned in the 1590s may, in the end, not have been specifically critical of the government, and perhaps did not even warrant intervention. However, it is possible that satire’s very existence could be read as a reaction to the English government’s ignorance of the activities of its citizens at the time. The satire might bear witness to a youthful rebellion and dismissal of the overwhelming ethos and importance of larger political institutions, including Elizabeth I herself, even as poets such as Hall claimed that she was a subject beyond reproach. The proliferation of satires from the press, along with equally cutting short poems including John Davies’ Epigrams (1598), provided sensational reading material for Londoners in the late sixteenth century.48 Readers could commiserate with epigram writers and satirists who complained about social conditions over which they had little influence or control. They could also take pleasure in guessing the identity of the subjects of the poetic assaults. Authors employed Latin or Italian pseudonyms for individuals whom they were condemning, and as such, could easily claim that their words were simply general criticism directed at no particular individual or institution. In his epistle to the reader “To those that seeme iudiciall perusers,” in The Scourge of Villanie, John Marston (as W. Kinsayer) explains that the objects of his satires are not specific, or at least not in the way that readers may think: 47 Cliff Forshaw, “‘Cease, Cease to bawle, thou wasp-stung Satyrist:’ Writers, Printers, and the Bishop’s Ban of 1599,” EnterText 3, no. 1 (2003): 101-31, on 103. 48 I[ohn] D[avies] and [C]hristopher [M]arlowe, Epigrammes and elegies (Middleborough London(?): ca. 1599), EEBO, British Library. John Davies’ epigrams were printed with Christopher Marlowe’s Ovidian elegies anonymously. 166 Yet when by some scurvie chaunce it shal come into the late perfumed fist of iudiciall Torquatus, (that like some rotten stick in a troubled water, hath gotte a great deal of barmy froth to stick to his sides) I know he will vouchsafe it, some of his new-minted Epithets, (as Reall, Intrisecate, Delphicke,), when in my conscience he vnderstands not the least part of it. But from thence proceedes his iudgement.49 Regardless, the English government quelled the printing of books which criticized—no matter how indirectly— the political institutions and society led by an aging monarch, particularly as succession remained very uncertain. To ban this type of writing, for William R. Jones, was to “act against destabilizing representations of English society” as well as an exertion of control over the press, who may have been rebelling—albeit in small ways—against their superiors in the Stationer’s company.50 In the 1590s, printers and publishers were exercising little discretion when it came to the distribution of satire and epigrams. With the sheer amount of satirical verse pushed into the marketplace, it seems that they were unconcerned with the discomfort it could cause members of the government. Jones also points out that the satires listed in the ban were a Juvenalian type of formal verse that flourished in the second half of the 1590s in England. Rather than containing the gentle rebuke of an English-language Horatian satire as promulgated by 49 Arnold Davenport, “The Scourge of Villanie,” The Poems of John Marston (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961), 100. 50 William R. Jones, “The Bishops’ Ban of 1599 and the Ideology of English Satire,” Literature Compass 7, no. 5 (2010), 332-46, on 333. Jones also explains that the ban would have served as “significant notice” of the Stationer Company’s inability to control the type of work being put out into the public by printers. 167 Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Thomas Elyot, and Roger Ascham, books targeted in the ban were of a “formally vituperative and ideologically iconoclastic mode [ …] which appeared poised to overwhelm the more traditional, and sanctioned, modes of cultural critique.”51 Privileging Juvenal above Horace was a newer trend at the turn of the century, counter to the ordering of poets in the editions of Latin satire that were published from the 1570s until the early 1590s. In 1585, William Norton (Guilielmi Nortoni) published Quincti Horatii Flacci Venusini, poetae lyrici, poemata omnia. Quibus adiunximus I. Iuuenalis & A. Persij opera (All poems of Quintus Horatius Flaccus, lyric poet. To which the works of Juvenal and Persius are adjoined).52 In 1592, Norton published a second book of Horace’s poems, which also contained works by Juvenal and Persius. However, this time, only Horace’s name is mentioned on the title page. The other poets’ works are unceremoniously appended to the latter part of the book.53 However, by 1612, the poems of Juvenal and Persius were published together as a single volume without Horace’s works. Colin Burrow notes that the differences between Horatian and Juvenalian satire were recorded succinctly by Scaliger in 1561: “Iuvenalius ardet, instat aperte, iugulat. Persius insultat, Horatius irridet” (Juvenal burns, openly confronts, and goes for the jugular. Persius insults. Horace smiles).54 There appears to be an order to this list, which 51 Ibid, 334. 52 Quincti Horatii Flacci Venusini, poetae lyrici, poemata omnia. (London, 1585), EEBO, Dulwich College. 53 Quincti Horatii Flacci Poemata, Nouis Scholijs & Argumentis illustrate (London, 1598), EEBO, Cambridge University Library. 54 Colin Burrow, “Roman Satire in the Sixteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire, ed. Kirk Freundenburg (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 243-60, on 248. I translate Scaliger as “Juvenal is aflame with anger, he publicly presses for answers, he murders by slitting throats. Perisus attacks, Horace laughs.” In my translation, I hope to convey 168 implies that while Juvenal’s satire is confrontational and immediately persuasive, it remains more politically expedient to employ Horatian modes of criticism. This is not to say that Juvenalian forms of satire were non-existent before the surge of verse in the 1590s; the Bishop’s ban also targeted older books by Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, which were written in this critical vein. Jones notes that while Harvey eventually abandoned the malicious persona in his writing, Nashe embraced his role as a modern Juvenal. He also tied his own satire to his affinity for the poet Pietro Aretino, who described himself as “wishing not to be of more importance than I am, I live by the sweat of my ink, the lustre of which has never been extinguished by the blasts of malignity, or the mists of envy (emphasis mine).” 55 Much like Aretino and Juvenal, Nashe wrote contemptuously about social inequities in a way that Laurie Ellinghausen has characterized as intellectual resentment steeped in professionalism.56 In these new poems of the 1590s, readers of Latin likely recognized ruthlessness similar to that of Juvenal’s poetry, with its disregard for social conventions and incisive criticism of the changing cityscape and population of a capital city. James Uden notes the “sheer audaciousness” and “sprawling, vociferous performances of arresting, high the viciousness of Juvenal’s scorn. His poems are not the toothless descriptions of the problems of empire; his work is firmly seated and loyal to Rome while questioning its deterioration and problematic existence. 55 John Addington Symmons, The Renaissance in Italy Italian Literature in Two Parts (New York: Henry Holt, 1888), 348; Luba Freedman, Titan’s Portraits through Aretino’s Lens (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 9-34. Freedman’s thorough introduction presents Aretino as a writer steeped in the visual; her citation of ‘sweating with ink’ led me to the Symmons’ transation of the letter in which Aretino uses that phrase to describe how he earns his living. 56 Ellinghausen, “Resentment,” 108-110. 169 volume rhetoric” of his poems.57 The anger and outrage about Rome, its government, and well-entrenched families that guide Juvenal’s poems serve as a similar motivation for the authors of the banned satires. Jones characterizes the Juvenalian poems of the 1590s as a “centrifugal, disruptive, even potentially militant mode of abuse unconcerned with established formal traditions and ethical ideological schemata […],” which was so potentially harmful that Whitgift and Bancroft ensured the destruction of older works that might have inspired the creation and popularity of the new satires.58 The burning of works by Nashe, Marston, Guilpin, Middleton, Hall, and even Harvey indicates the government’s discomfort with books and censorious inflammatory language that encouraged individuals to question longstanding structures of their society, even from writers who were invested in or claimed allegiance to that system.59 The Second Part of the Return should be seriously regarded through the lens of the works that were destroyed in 1599. It is both during the ban on Juvenalian satire and the fallout from it that the Parnassus plays were written and performed. A sophisticated reading of Juvenal guides the play, one that takes into account other English interpretations of Juvenal, but creates its own, very original take on the Roman poet. The play locates an affinity between Juvenal’s Satire I and “discontented” men. In the first scene of the third play, the stage directions call for Ingenioso to appear “with Iuuenall in his hand” (SD 1.1). He reads the book aloud to invoke the poet and his brand of satire and to call attention to modern offenses which have grown from those small enough for 57 James Uden, The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3. 58 Jones, “The Bishop’s Ban,” 3. 59 Ellinghausen, “Resentment,” 108. Strangely, a stay was put on the burning of Hall’s books. His work, while Juvenalian, apparently does not seem to express the same bitterness and anger as the other poets. 170 “swadling bands” in Juvenal’s time to “Antaeus grown a monster” in his own (1.1.99- 100). Although The Second Part of the Return may not have been performed until 1601, it uses a mode of Juvenalian complaint typical of the works banned or burned in 1599. Like Hall, Guilpin, Marston, and Middleton, Ingenioso calls attention to “[b]oth sinnes of old and new borne villanyes” while asking to continue Juvenal’s “surgean-like” ability to enumerate the problems he encounters (1.1.88-103). Colin Burrow writes that Ingenioso’s act of reading Juvenal is a “spoof” of the satirists writing in the 1590s, resulting in a play that is little more than a parody of the literary conventions of the times. For him, Ingenioso fails to challenge established political modes and structures with the same grit and sophistication of Hall, Marston, or Guilpin.60 It is tempting to dismiss the third Parnassus play as a send-up of newer conventions, particularly because not many scholars have written about it, and because it mimics some aspects of late 1590s satirical poems and epigrams. Rather than assume that undergraduate unsophistication guides the play’s writing, it is more worthwhile to consider the author’s complex use of Juvenal and subsequent presentation and commentary on Renaissance poets as acknowledgement of and participation in a dangerous experiment begun a few years earlier by men not much older than they were. 60 Colin Burrow, “Roman Satire in the Sixteenth Century,” 250-51. 171 “…expectes eadem a summo minimoque poeta”: Compilations, criticism and satire 61 The Second Part of the Return begins its reading of Juvenal’s Satire I as Ingenioso carries it on to the stage, but more so as he incorporates the poem into the larger action of the play.62 The author includes the most famous line from Satire I as a starting point for an original English Juvenalian-style verse similar to that of John Marston, Everard Guilpin, and John Weever. However, the author uses Juvenal’s entire poem, beyond the first two lines that Ingenioso reads out loud, to guide the first two scenes. Juvenal and Ingenioso share an anger at the world, permeated with a desire to lists its faults and “brand euerlasting shame on the world’s forhead” (1.1.94). Ingenioso’s anger derives from the same place as Juvenal’s—not being able to perform similarly to other poets. The author of the play uses anger and other sentiments of Satire I to guide firmly the first two scenes of the play, and he closely binds together theatrical performance, Juvenalian satire, compilations of poetry, and the beginnings of pop cultural criticism. Catherine Keane writes about the drama embedded in Juvenal’s verse and his interest in “every day theatricality” and the “ritual of Roman experience” as well as his disappointment in the disingenuous performances that individuals engaged in on a daily basis.63 For Keane, Juvenal’s ability to create emotions rhetorically allows him to 61 Juvenal, Satire I , line 14, trans. “This is exactly what you can expect from the greatest and least of poets.” 62 Juvenal in English ed. Martin M. Winkler (New York: Penguin, 2001). Winkler’s book traces Juvenal’s poems in English literature from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries. He identifies John Marston, John Weever, Everard Guilpin, and Ben Jonson as poets who experimented with Juvenalian verse. 63 Catherine Keane, Figuring Genre In Roman Satire (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006), 29. 172 “reorient the conventions of satiric self-presentation” and to “‘type’ satire according to its emotional flavor on a scale that runs from detached to engaged.”64 Juvenal’s musings about the theater are not limited to the first satire. About later poem Satire VII, Keane explains that dramatists represented therein ultimately lack agency and can only “write meal tickets” and dwell on “thwarted desires and sterility,” unable to have the careers they desire.65 The scholar protagonists of The Second Part of the Return have no designs on a theatrical career, but as the author engages in a sharp interplay between Satire I and the state of these scholars, he may also have used Juvenal’s poems to address their discontentedness and disparagement of the public theater. Like Juvenal, the author fuses satire and the theater and then engages with both to participate in larger cultural conversations that are taking place away from Cambridge, in theaters and in bookshops in London. Ingenioso begins The Second Part of the Return by reading line 30 of Satire I: “Difficile est, Satyram non scribere, / nam quis iniquae / Tam patiens vrbis, / tam ferreus, vt teneat se?” (It is difficult not to write satire, After all, who is so tolerant of the injustices of Rome, who is so hardened, that they can contain themselves), and he compliments Juvenal’s “jerking hand” (l.1.1-2, 85).66 As Ingenioso opens the volume of Juvenal on stage, he does more than just acknowledge the current popularity of the poet. He provides the audience with a detailed reading and understanding of Juvenal’s brand of satire by absorbing his vitriol and following “the traces of [his] pen” and “light[ing] his 64 Catherine Keane, Juvenal and the Satiric Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press 2015), 10. 65 Keane, Figuring Genre, 29. 66 Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. Susana Morton Brand (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 130. For this chapter, I will use Brand’s Loeb translation. 173 linke at [his] eternal flame” (1.1. 91-92). This connection to the Roman poet allows Ingenioso to recognize the new “witty” sins that seem to have taken over the city. Beginning with these lines suggests that the audience would have known the first part of the poem—either through their own reading or from their educations at Cambridge. The audience and later readers might have also recalled the first thirty lines Satire I, that enumerate the misfortunes of an overlooked poet left on the margins of society and literary community. Much like the induction of the play, the first lines of Satire I set out Juvenal’s motive for his work. He clamors to write or speak in the face of dynamic cultural shifts that impact his own worldview as he discounts epic, dramatic, and elegical writing as fit vehicles for his observations. In the first few lines of the poem, Juvenal complains that he should no longer be forced to read or listen to others’ works: Semper ego auditor tantum? numquamne reponam vexatus totiens rauci Theseide Cordi? inpune ergo mihi recitaverit ille togatas, hic elegos? inpune diem consumpserit ingens Telephus aut summi plena iam margine libri scriptus et in tergo necdum finitus Orestes? nota magis nulli domus est sua quam mihi lucus Martis et Aeoliis vicinum rupibus antrum Vulcani; (1-8)67 (Shall I always be stuck in the audience? 67 Brand, Juvenal and Persius, 130. 174 Never retaliate for being tortured so often by hoarse Cordus’ Song of Theseus? Let them get away with it, then?—this one reciting to me his Roman comedies and that one his love elegies? Let them get away with wasting my whole day on an enormous Telephus, or an Orestes written on the back when the margin at the end of the book is already full—and still not finished? No one knows his own house better than I know the grove of Mars and the cave of Vulcan near the Aeolian cliffs.) David H.J. Larmour writes that the impetus for Juvenal’s poem is revenge; he seeks to punish those whose poetry he has had to endure as an audience member. Juvenal knows that the poetry he chooses to write, inspired by Lucian, will right these wrongs.68 Juvenal is displaced from the center of performance to the seats in the amphitheater, and his language adopts that of the outsider looking to punish those who have the chance to share their work. Larmour also explains that Satire I is “informed by the ideology of an exile, but not someone banished to a far-off place, like Ovid; the Juvenal of the Satires is, rather, an exile in his own land. He lives in Rome, but is in social, economic and above all, moral exile.”69 Much of The Second Part of the Return is framed as a play of exiles (as is The First Part of the Return), dipicting scholars who are not included in the relative 68 David H. J. Larmour, “Tracing Furrows in the Satiric Dust Echoes of Horace’s Epistles in Juvenal 1,” Illinois Classical Studies, no. 35-36 (2011): 155-73. Larmour adds that Juvenal may have taken his first lines from Horace Epistles 2.2 “where he describes how rival poets inflict both verses and compliments upon each other” (158). The inflicting of verses and compliments noted by Horace resembles the relationships among dramatist, satirists, and epigram writers in the 1590s. The mixture of cruelty with compliment has its origins in satirical poetry. 69 David H. J. Larmour, "Juvenal, Ideology and the Critics: A Plan for Resisting Readers," Pacific Coast Philology 26, no. 1/2 (1991): 41-50. 175 economic prosperity of London. After Ingenioso recites the two well-known lines of Satire I, he adopts his own voice of indignatio in which he sets out to shame the world, and yet like Juvenal at the end of Satire I decides to hold back a good deal of his criticism, and proclaims to only speak ill of the dead: [O] did not feare check my repining spirit, Soone should my angry ghost a story write In which I would new fosterd sinnes combine, Not knowne earst by truth telling Aritine. (1.1.114-117) An overwhelming fear halts the full force of Ingenioso’s indignatio; in the author’s case, it perhaps stems from a fear of the Vice Chancellor, or an abiding love for Cambridge University, or for St. John’s College. Ultimately, the fear could be related to the full knowledge that the indignatio that is the root of Juvenal’s satire is one that is dangerous to the individual as he risks attacking powerful figures. As the scene continues, Judicio lightly mocks Ingenioso, points out his bitterness, and suggests that he temper it: IUDICIO. What, Ingenioso, carrying a Vinegar bottle about thee, like a great schole-boy giuing the world a bloudy nose? INGENIOSO. Faith Iudicio, if I carry a vinegar bottle, it’s great reason I should confer vpon the bald pated world: and againe, if my kitchen want the vtensilies of viands it’s great reason other men should haue the sauce of vineger; and for the bloudie nose, Iudicio, I may chance indeed giue the word a bloudy nose, but it shall hardly giue me a crakt crowne, though it giues other Poets French crownes. 176 IUDICIO. I would wish thee, Ingenioso, to sheath the pen, for thou canst not be successful in the fray, considering thy enemies have the aduantage of the ground. (1.119-127) Like Ingenioso, Juvenal too bemoans the success and notoriety of people who have become wealthy through performances in and around the amphitheater—as poets, playwrights, actors, and gladiators. It greatly concerns him that the stalwartness of Roman society has been so completely upended. Individuals who started life as servants now wear expensive jewelry and clothing. For instance, Juvenal criticizes Tyrias, a man who started out life as a servant, now owns possessions unsuited to him: “Tyrias umero revocante lacernas ventilet aestivum digitis sudantibus aurum” (wafts a gold ring in summer on sweaty fingers while his shoulder hitches up a Tyrian cloak) (line 28). He laments the strangeness of this new Rome, a place that he does not understand or recognize. Juvenal sets out his reasoning for his satire clearly. Susana Morton Brand writes that Juvenal adopts dactylic hexameter, the meter of epic and “its elevated tones, but inserts lowly, mundane words to indicate that satire can replace epic, because epic is remote and irrelevant whereas satire is real and immediate.”70 The author of the Parnassus plays sets out his reasoning for telling the story of discontented scholars. Both Satire I and the start of The Second Part of the Return mark their own confusion at the transformations taking place in a major city and seat of government by talking about books, the theater, and the revolutions underway in these areas. Juvenal outlines the ways that certain Romans are acquiring wealth and positions through “merentur noctibus,” or nightwork—by prostituting themselves to older, wealthy 70 Brand, Juvenal, 128. 177 women—which then “in caelum quos evehit optima summi nunc via processus” (raises them to the skies by what is now the royal road to highest advancement) (lines 38-39). “Processus” or advancement, resembles the concept of preferment in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England. Juvenal uses Satire I to negotiate a place for his observations and desires within a large city of people who have risen above their initial station in life, out of slavery or servitude to own chariots, houses, and other goods. The author of the play imitates this form more closely than he has been given credit for; he spends time articulating the value of authors and acknowledges their contributions—for good or for ill—to conversations in London taking place through poetry. The language of satires—in this case, public performances of vituperative social criticism in print—seeped into the language of “paultry critticks” and those interested in commenting on poetry and other literature in the late 1590s and early 1600s (Induction, 10). Less instructive than George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy, or Philip Sidney’s In Defense of Poesy, critics were vituperative readers that emerged in the late 1590s, seemingly based upon classical figures including Momus (who appears in the prologue of the play) and Zoilus. Whether speaking in the text of plays, or in the preface of books, readers living in London took the opportunity to decide what books were worth criticism as a part of public discourse. Among his “comparative discourse of our English Poets, with Greeke, Latine, and Italian Poets,” Francis Meres writes briefly about satire and satirical poets in Palladis Tamia (1598): “As Horace, Lucilius, Iuuenall, Persius & Lucullus are the best for Satyre among the Latines: so with vs in the same faculty these are chiefe, Piers Plowman, Lodge, Hall of Imanuel Colledge in Cambridge; the Authour of Pigmalions Image, and 178 certaine Satyrs; the Author of Skialetheia.”71 Thomas Lodge and Joseph Hall are mentioned by name as are works by John Marston and Everard Guilpin. This section of Meres’ book spends no time explaining the purpose or effect of the satire; however, its appearance as a part of the Meres’ larger discussion on poetry clearly indicates that as a genre, “satyre” had become a larger part of some kind of literary conversation in the late 1590s. Meres’ superlatives and the inclusion of Juvenal with other classical satirists highlight the genre’s and Juvenal’s own surging popularity, particularly as English poets adopted and transformed his style. In his work on Juvenal, Martin M. Winkler traces the exact references to the Satires that authors such as Hall, Marston, and Guilpin make in their work.72 He notes that unlike Juvenal, these poets were comfortable drawing attention to the faults of living men and allowing quarrels to become very public, thereby dismantling any pretense of decorum. Even in the face of the Bishop’s Ban, Juvenal’s popularity as both a Latin poet and the propagator of a brand of satire takes hold in London’s literary community. Winkler notes Juvenal’s lasting effect on later seventeenth-century English literature as later poets and translators take on the genre and its author as the mantle by which to criticize multiple parts of their lived experience.73 In his pre-ban, very public declaration, Meres elevates the value of satirists and printed satire to that of other poetry and plays and evaluates it—however cursorily— much in the same way as the other works and poets he considers. He also solidifies the evolving community of writers who, despite the Bishop’s Ban, are in conversation with 71 Francis Meres, Palladis tamia (London, 1598), 283, EEBO, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. 72 Winkler, Juvenal in English, 10. 73 Winkler, 10. 179 each other and the wider reading public. This reading community attaches a kind of celebrity to professional writers, which tacitly gives them leave to comment publicly on a variety of subjects. The English Juvenalian satirists in particular embark on multiple conversations as they critique the city’s landscape, people, and perhaps most cruelly, their fellow poets’ work as they publish their books to interested readers. For Winkler, the second and third parts of the Parnassus plays develop from the popularity of satire in print and manuscript steeped in the sharp criticism of Juvenal. The Second Part of the Return demonstrates a clear understanding of English satire as well as its connection to London’s elite literary community by entering into the conversations between and among poets about poetry. The play joins the fray of literary and pop cultural criticism perhaps echoing Thomas Nashe’s preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon “To the Gentleman Students of Both Universities,” in which Nashe, who at the time was a recent university graduate, censures those writers not fortunate enough to have attended university, or worse still, those who failed to learn enough while in attendance. Nashe’s introduction serves as both praise for his alma mater St. John’s College, “an university within itself, shining so far above all other houses, halls and hospitals whatsoever, that no college in the town was able to compare with the title of her students,” as well as a harsh criticism of the “abject abbreviations of arts” and the epitomizing—or creation of short summary texts—of philosophers, including Aristotle (**4r). At the end of his invective mixed with periodic praise, he approaches the subject of pastoral poems and heaps compliments upon Matthew Roydon, Thomas Achlow, and George Peele, but only after these adulatory lines about Edmund Spenser: 180 and should the challenge of deepe conceit, be intruded by any forreiner, to bring our english Illegible word the tutcsthone of Arte, I would preferre, diuine Master Spencer, the mircle of wit to bandy line for line my life, in the honor of England, gainst Spaine, France, Italie, and all the worlde. Neither is he, the only swallow of our summer, (although Apollo, if his Tripos were vp again would pronounce him his Socrates) but he being forborne, there are extant about London, many most able men, to reuiue Poetrie, though it were executed ten thousand times. (A2v)74 The invective mixed with praise is echoed in Ingenioso’s and Judicio’s reading of John Bodenham’s Belvedere, or The Garden of the Muses (1600).75 Addressed to both universities, Belvedere is a printed commonplace poetry book that Judicio complains has taken over the bookshops: Considering the furyes of the times, I could better endure to see those young Can quaffing hucksters shoot of[f] their pellets so they would keepe them from these English flores-poetarum, but now the world is come to that passe, there starts vp euery day an old goose that sits hatching vp those eggs which haue ben filcht from the nest[s] of Crowes and Kestrells. Heers a booke, Ingenioso, why, to condemne it to Cloaca, the vsual Tiburne of all misliuing papers, weare too faire a death for so foule an offender. (1.2.163-171) 74 Thomas Nashe, “To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities,” in Menaphon by Robert Green (London, 1589), EEBO, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. 75 John Bodenham, Bel-vedére, or, The Garden of the muses (London, 1600), EEBO, Harvard University Library. 181 They begin to read the book, mocking Bodenham for engaging in the project just as Nashe objected to the use of epitomes. They accuse Bodenham of not conceiving of anything on his own; rather he simply gathered poems in the hopes that they would sell. Their sentiments match Nashe’s outrage and the abbreviated learning inherent in epitomes and commonplace books. As they read Bodenham’s book, they evaluate most of the poets who appear in the collection. Igenioso and Judicio discuss the wit, reputation, and work of poets including Edmund Spenser, Henry Constable, Thomas Lodge, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Watson, Michael Drayton, John Davies, John Marston, and Christopher Marlowe. Ingenioso and Judicio model their praise of Spenser on Nashe’s encomium of Spenser. They have kind words about Spenser’s verse, and comment upon his dying without “maintenance for his dear releife,” allying him to their cause of scholarly penury (1.2.222). They are teasingly harsh and dismissive of John Davies and John Marston and forgiving of Marlowe’s supposed vices. Their send ups of Jonson and Shakespeare are soaked in irony and intellectual snobbery. To them, Jonson is a “mere empyrick” and “a slow inventor”; and Shakespeare remains unimpressive if universally loved: “For who loves not Adonis love or Lucreces rape” (1.2.294-295; 301). Their language is overbearingly youthful and hip; they are well aware of popular poets and “true artists.” To Thomas Nashe, the likely inspiration for Ingenioso himself, they are kind but fair, as he had died within the time of the production: INGENIOSO. Thomas Nash. I, heer’s a fellow, Judicio, that carryed the deadly Stockado in his pen, whose muse was armed with a gagtooth, 182 and his pen possest with Hercules furies. JUDICIO. Let all his faultes sleepe with his mournfull chest, And there for euer with his ashes rest, His stile was wittie, though it had some gal[l], Some thing[s] he might have mended so may all Yet this I say, that for a mother witt, Fewe men haue euer seene the like of it. (1.2.310-1) Nashe’s vituperative, Juvenalian prose, along with the satire of Juvenal himself, may have served as partial impetus for this the play. His urban, ironic, sharp language complements these dramatic books that scholars read and carry in their quest for preferment, stability, and a feeling of belonging in London. The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus ultimately performs a reading of Juvenal that locates the feelings of discontent and frustration that scholarly readers encountered in the 1590s and early 1600s. By straddling fiction and reality, the play demonstrates how books create and preserve communities, change the landscape and language of the city, and unite scholars in a quest for advancement and a stable income. Their separation from the larger community in London buttresses the play and reinforces a notion that the university was an idyllic place for them as scholars that ostensibly kept feelings of melancholy, discontentment, and exile at bay. The common misery and nostalgia in their community of readers is perhaps what kept them, at least for a while, from acts of sedition. 183 An Economy of Books: Scholarly Exile and Prodigality at Home in John Fletcher’s The Elder Brother In what was probably the last comedy John Fletcher wrote before his death in 1625, The Elder Brother removes the barrier of penury for a scholar—which persists as a theme in The Second Part of the Return—and initially provides him with the autonomy and financial means to support an intense, immersive relationship with reading and books.76 The play examines the sheltered life of a scholar who experiences a familial dispute over primogeniture and marriage. Fletcher indicates that the insulated space of the university does not necessarily prepare scholars for life outside of its walls, nor does it protect them from harm after they leave. However, the books they peruse and the reading they accomplished there enable scholars to ensure their legal protection and economic survival. A paean to the life of the mind, the play centers on Charles, a scholar from the University of Louvain, whose addiction to studies is so intense that his father Brisac and brother Eustace propose exchanging a “dry-fat of new books” for his full inheritance in an arrangement evocative of The Tempest (C2v).77 Charles’ wealth and fascination with his studies initially shield him from the politics surrounding him; however, his manservant Andrew serves as a catalyst for his understanding of the 76 Lucy Munro, “His Collaborator John Fletcher,” in The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternate Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 305-14; Arata Ide, “John Fletcher of Corpus Christi College: New Records of His Early Years,” Early Theatre: A Journal Associated With The Records Of Early English Drama 13, no. 2 (2010): 63-77; Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). These are all excellent resources on the probable life of John Fletcher as well as his collaborative ventures with Beaumont, Massinger, and Shakespeare. 77 John Fletcher, The Elder Brother A Comedie (1637) (New York: Da Capo Press Theatrum Orbis Terrarus, LTD, 1970). All quotations are taken from this edition. 184 relationship between birthright and scholarship as well as its eventual connection to marriage. Pairing The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus with a later play that is primarily concerned with primogeniture may seem counterintuitive as Charles in The Elder Brother has what most of the scholars from Parnassus do not have—a legal right to an income and a family fortune. However, both Charles and the scholars from Parnassus return from the university not understanding that the life of the mind and dependence upon books will not sustain them—either as poor scholars in search of employment or a wealthy scholar who fails to understand the political realities of inheritance and love. Both plays are concerned with how a university education and time spent with many books distorts perceptions and expectations of life outside of the university. Furthermore, both Charles and the Parnassus scholars turn to their books and extensive reading as tools to try to counter the barriers that keep them from preferment or inheritance and love. The Second Part of the Return represents the consequences of reading books less optimistically than The Elder Brother does. In the end, the combination of a guaranteed income and an affinity for books saves Charles from the social and economic difficulties that the Parnassus scholars experience. However, they both employ a language of books and learning in order to change narratives about the fecklessness of scholars and then confront individuals attempting to keep them from what they most deserve—economic security and some measure of happiness. As Fletcher was writing the play in the first half of the seventeenth century, sentiments about primogeniture and inheritance shifted from longstanding practice in English common law, which had stipulated that the eldest son was to receive all real 185 property unless a will specified otherwise.78 Michelle Dowd explains that at a pivotal time in English history, there were increased changes and modifications to laws regarding the standard application of primogeniture because of high mortality, poor diet, and fertility difficulties.79 With a rise in both credit and debt for affluent families who wished to increase their wealth through risky investments abroad, “the socioeconomic position of male heirs at the higher levels of society,” explains Dowd, “was more tenuous in Jacobean England than it was in the periods immediately preceding and following it.”80 In her examination of plays by Fletcher and Heywood, Dowd notes they both employ the tale of the prodigal eldest son and pair it with foreign travel in order to “address or attempt to resolve the problem of the male heir who proves himself undeserving of his hereditary rights.”81 During the time that this common legal practice was changing, younger sons began to argue for their rights for financial support as adults. Subject to rhetoric which “was more likely to invoke contempt than compassion,” younger sons were left with little to no opportunities to serve in government or the military and were left to entreat their fathers and brothers for a lifetime of financial support.82 Michael Austin details the publication of works addressing this familial disparity including John, ap Robert’s (sic) The Younger Brother, His Apology By It Selfe (1618), which proved very popular among younger sons at Oxford University during the latter half of the seventeenth century.83 78 Michelle M. Dowd, “A Gentleman May Wander: Inheritance, Travel, and the Prodigal Son on the Jacobean Stage,” Renaissance Drama 42, no. 1 (2014): 113-37. 79 Dowd, “A Gentleman May Wander,” 114. 80 Dowd, 115. 81 Dowd, 114. 82 Michael Austin “The Genesis Narrative and the Primogeniture Debate in Seventeenth Century England,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 98, no. 1 (Jan 1999):17-39. 83 Austin, “The Genesis Narrative,” 19. 186 Using comprehensive exegesis, the pamphlet argues that partible inheritance (gavel kind) was essential for younger sons to survive. Austin also explains that this burgeoning public debate concerning the dynamic between younger sons and elder brothers “provided a ready-made argument for younger sons, social reformers, and anybody else opposed to primogeniture,” and it also forced advocates of entailment for eldest sons to prove that God inspired it.84 Fletcher complicates these ideas and narratives by making the elder son/brother in the play an unwelcome “bookworm” who spends time at university as opposed to traveling abroad like other conventional spendthrift prodigal sons. The Elder Brother initially represents Charles as distracted and uninterested in household affairs. He presents an uncomfortable reality and raises an important question: what if an elder son were not worthy of inheritance for nothing other than being overly studious and careful, qualities that are otherwise praiseworthy? Charles also shares qualities of younger sons of the gentry in the seventeenth century. Without the land and income inherited by their elder brothers, younger sons had to turn to the universities to seek their own fortunes.85 Rather than speak about the estate, he carries copies of Socrates and Plato to lecture others on differences between the philosophers. Hyper-focused on his reading and polymathy, Charles’ economic security and monastic demeanor allow him to be distant from the quotidian issues of eating, drinking, and shelter that consistently plague the scholars in The Second Part of the Return. Before Charles appears in the play, Andrew, his manservant and fellow scholar, arrives to arrange for more than a dozen carts of Charles’ books to be brought into the house. Andrew discusses Charles’ idiosyncrasies 84 Austin, 20. 85 Austin, 17-39. 187 with the Butler and the Cook, detailing how books, rather than food and wine, sustain him: ANDREW. If all thy pipes of wine were fill’d with bookes Made of the barkes of trees, or mysteries writ In old moth-eaten vellam, he would sip thy Celler Quite dry, and still be thirsty; Then for’s Diet, He eates and digests more Volumes at a meale, Than there would be Larkes (though the sky should fall) Devowr’d in a moneth in Paris, yet feare not Sonnes oth’ the buttry, and kitehin, though his learn’d stomacke Cannot b’ appeas’d; Hee’ll seldome trouble you, His knowing stomacke contemnes your blacke Jackes, Butler, And your Flagons, and Cooke thy boyl’d, thy roast, thy bak’d. (B3v) Throughout the play, Charles is marked as an outsider in his family’s home and mocked for his differences in language and behavior. His younger brother, who brings hangers- on with him to visit the estate, calls attention to Charles’ inability to imitate fashionable modes of thought or style—he cannot return the “new Italian shrug” properly to Eustace (B4v). His father joins in the ridicule, complaining that “[h]e cannot out of his University tone” (B4v). Charles’ language is imbued with books and the rhetoric of the university, but unlike the scholars from The Second Part of the Return, he does not initially have a secondary source of language—that of a community and a city—with which he can combine it. 188 Charles’ devotion to reading encourages his father, a justice of the peace, to ask his son to release his rights of primogeniture for reasons that are consistent with the contemporary public discussions about the matter. Brisac does not trust that a scholarly education will equip Charles to run his estate properly. He lambasts Charles’ learning at the university, including his courses in science, metaphysics, and humanism: BRISAC: I say no, Unlesse Charles had a soule to understand it, Can he manage sixe thousand Crownes a yeere Out of the metaphysicks? or can all His learn’d Astronomy looke to my Vineyards? Can the drunken old Poets make up my Vines? (I know they can drinke’m) or your excellent humanists Sell ‘m the Merchants for my best advantage? Can History cut my hay, or get my Corne in? And can Geometrie vent it in the market? Shall I have my sheepe kept with a Iacobs staffe now? I wonder you will magnifie this mad man, You that are old and should understand. (C4v) Brisac overwhelmingly favors his second son, Eustace, who is a successful courtier. He hopes to combine estates with those of his neighbor Lord Lewis by having Eustace marry Lewis’ daughter Angellina. Eustace resembles a traditional prodigal who spends a great deal of money. Miramont, (Charles’ and Eustace’s uncle) disparages his minimal learning and greed: 189 MIRAMONT. Because h‘ has been at Court and learn‘d new tongues, And how to speake a tedious peece of nothing, To vary his face as Seamen doe their Compasse, To worship images of gold and silver, And fall before the she Calves of the Season, Therefore must he jumpe into his brothers land? (C3v) Brisac wishes to turn over all properties to Eustace, for the sake of future issue. In what appears to be a last effort to encourage Charles to accept his full birthright—including producing his own heirs—Brisac asks his son if he plans to continue the family and “make payment of the debt you owe me” (C1v). Charles demurs, declaring that the scholarly work he has done will serve in the place of grandchildren: “The Children, Sir, which I will leave to all posterity, begot and brought up by my painful Studies, shall be my living Issue” (C1v). Books are both language and economy for Charles; he transfers his familial and emotional, corporeal debt into scholarly, non-physical labor. Intellect and the product of intellect form the basis for Charles’ understanding of emotional and intellectual exchange. His father hopes that this understanding will translate to an easy transfer of inheritance, as land and the production associated with physical labor are beyond the realm of Charles’ concern. Charles continually rejects the bodily for his books. His rhetoric shies away from the physical world, whereas the scholars of Parnassus speak about the force of the press, their need for food and drink, the instruments that they play and tune, and the land on which they travel and work. Charles remains wedded to abstract ideas, with the sole exception of his books and scientific instruments. As his father asks about a bride, he 190 responds with a list of the books that he has read and “in Story, there I read of all kind of virtuous and vitious women” (C2r). Later, Charles implores Andrew to stay married to his studies rather than his wife, despite never having spoken with a woman himself: “Marry thy selfe to understanding, Andrew / These women are Errata in all Authours, / They’re faire to see to, and bound up in vellam, / Smoothe, white and cleare, but their contents are monstrous” (E1r). And in response to his father’s confusion about the physical care of the estate, he rejects the work of the land and the physical labor involved in favor of airy, heady thoughts, which exile him further from his family, the estate, and continuation of their family name: CHARLES. But in my wishes, For know Sir, that the wings on which my Soule Is mounted, have long since borne her too high To stoope to any prey, that soares not upwards, Sordid and dunghill mindes compos’d of earth, In that grosse Element fixe all their happinesse; But purer spirits, purg’d and refin’d, shake off That clog of humane frailty; give me leave T’enjoy my selfe, that place that does containe My Books (the best Companions) is to me A glorious Court, where howrely I converse With the old Sages and Philosophers, And sometimes for variety, I conferre With Kings and Emperours, and weigh their Councels, 191 Calling their Victories (if unjustly got) Unto a strict accompt, and in my phancy, Deface their ill plac’d Statues; Can I then Part with such constant pleasures, to imbrace Uncertaine vanities? No, be it your care T’augment your heape of wealth; It shall be mine T’encrease in knowledge—Lights there for my study. (C2r) His constant occupation with study upon his return home from Louvain continually distances him from his father and his legal claims to the estate. His addiction to study distracts him from initially considering the magnitude of signing over his inheritance for a large cask of books. Andrew observes the politics taking place and uses Charles’s past reading to plot to ensure that Charles does not lose his birthright: “if we have studi’d our Majors and our Minors, Antecedents and Consequents, to be concluded Coxcombs, w’have made a fair hand on’t” (E4r). He calls in Charles’ uncle Miramont, an uneducated, wealthy man without issue, who respects his nephew’s devotion to study, but worries that he cannot see beyond his books and instruments to the mounting legal maneuvering taking place. Much like the scholars in The Second Part of the Return, Charles settles at home from university only to be treated as an exile, as he continually loses position within his house, despite the questionable ethics destroying his legal entail. 192 Before the questions of scholars, entailment, and property rights start the play, Angellina learns that she is to marry and give up her rights to all of her father’s land.86 When asked to choose between a scholar and courtier, she focuses on what a husband could bring contractually to the marriage: ANGELLINA. Though I could be well please’d to have my husband A courtier, and a Scholar, young, and valiant, These are but gawdy nothings, If there be not Something to make a substance. LEWIS. And what’s that? ANGELLINA. A full estate, and that said, I’ve said all, And get me such a one with these additions, Farewell Virginity, and welcome wedlocke. (B2v) After her father expresses concern about her health and green sickness, he remains drawn to the legal process of ensuring that, whatever marriage his daughter enters into, it is one where her issue becomes wealthy. Angellina is eventually persuaded to marry Eustace, provided he is able to secure inheritance from his brother. Brisac draws up a contract with Lewis stipulating that Angellina’s marriage to Eustace will go forward with the assurance that primogeniture is conferred upon him. In his contract for Charles, Brisac offers his son several studies full of books in final exchange for his inheritance; the books will also distract him from learning about the marriage ceremony. When the wedding preparations disturb his studies, Charles puts off signing the contract before he meets 86Ursula Potter, “Navigating the Dangers of Female Puberty in Renaissance Drama,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 53, no. 2 (2013): 421-39. This article focuses on Angellina’s possible green sickness and her counterintuitive choice of Charles as her partner. 193 Angellina. After seeing her person, he tells Andew that “she has a face looks like a story, the story of the Heavens looks very like her” (E2v). He rushes back to his study to consider the contract, ultimately refusing to leave his study at his father’s request: “I’ll leave my life first; I study now to be a man, I’ve found it. Before what Man was, was but my Argument” (F2r). From this point forward in the play, his language changes, adapting his understanding of books, humanism and science to align his desire for Angellina with language about his legal rights to her. Like the hybrid language of Cambridge, London, and the humanism of the Parnassus scholars, Charles adopts a new style of communication that incorporates anger, exile, and his personal history of reading and love for Angellina. In their introduction to Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentshell elucidate how the space of the city constructs gender. They explain that “on a material level, urban places created the conditions for certain uses and misuses, alliances and identifications, as well as new forms of mobility and constraints that had far-reaching consequence for the articulation and comprehension of gender.”87 Although this particular play does not take place in an urban center, one could argue that the translation from the university to the estate serves as a catalyst for the reconfiguring of masculinity for Charles. The transformation occurs as he sublimates his learning into his love for Angellina. His burgeoning manhood comprises a history of reading and books that is now infused with sexual, economic and political desire. Declaring his rights to primogeniture, he objects to his brother’s marriage as he interrupts the signing of the jointure: 87 Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell, introduction to Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550-1650 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 2. 194 Such an inimitable peece of beauty, That I have studied long, and now found onely, That Ile part sooner with my soule of reason, And be a plant, a beast, a fish, a flie; And onely make the number of things up Than yeeld one foot of Land, if she be ty’d to’t. (F1v) He understands that his position as the elder brother allows him to disrupt the entire ceremony and economic exchange that is about to take place, thereby thwarting his father, brother, and Lewis while challenging the legality of the actions. He also becomes very aware of his own physicality and asks Angellina to consider marrying him despite his “scurvy cloaths”: Can ye love me? I am an heire, sweet Lady, However I appeare a poore dependant; Love you with honour, I shall love so ever: Is your eye ambitious? I may be a great man. Is’t wealth or lands you covet? my father must dye. (F3r) In a complete reversal from the airy, exiled, displaced position, Charles emerges as the Elder Brother that resolves problems of heredity similar to those that Michelle Dowd addresses in Fletcher’s other plays about primogeniture. While Charles does not fully reject his former scholarship or his personal conception of masculinity, he suppresses his ascetism to embrace the physical, sexual, and real world. He also seeks to enact common law practices of inheritance by wishing for the death of his father (“my father must dye,” F3r). At the same time, Angellina embraces her scholarliness, accepts Charles’ marriage 195 offer and explains that contractually, this is her decision. Her betrothal to Eustace was, “Onely conditionall, / That if he had the Land, he had my love too; / This Gentleman’s the heire, and hee’ll maintaine it” (F3v). She wrests control of her inheritance and her body by rejecting her father’s claim as pater familias and by promoting her choice for marriage. She validates Charles’ claim for his inheritance and serves as a witness of the failure of her father’s jointure. She dissolves all previous contracts by taking Charles’ hand and verbally accepting his proposal: Yes, beleeve me father, You shall nere choose for me, y’ are old and dimme Sir, And th’ shadow of the earth ecclips’d your judgement, Y’ have had your time without controwle deare father, And you must give me leave to take mine now Sir. (F4r) Angellina asserts her independence through an understanding of her role in this unstable contract. She grants herself authority as an individual because she severed financial ties to her father by entering into a legal agreement with another party, not of her father’s choosing, but of her own. She becomes a close reader of the law and reminds the audience of earlier statements she makes about scholars where she seems familiar with their work: LEWIS. Aptly consider’d, And to my wish, but what’s thy censure of The Scholar? ANGELLINA. Troth (if he be nothing else) As of the Courtier; all his Songs, and Sonnets, 196 His Anagrams, Acrosticks, Epigrammes, His deepe and Philosophicall discourse Of natures hidden secrets, makes not up A perfect husband; He can hardly borrow The Starres of the Celestiall crowne to make me A tire for my head; nor Charles Waine for a Coach, Nor Ganimede for a Page, nor a rich gowne From Juno's Wardrobe, nor would I lye in (For I despaire not once to be a mother) Under heavens spangled Canopy, or banquet My guests and Gossips with imagin'd Nectar, Pure Orleans would doe better; (B2v) Angellina shows a facility with classical and literary references and a keen awareness of the poetry and the philosophical studies of scholars. While she does not mention books by name, she understands their material importance and employs a variety of literary allusions, implying that she is well-read in her own right. Fletcher indicates the perils of an excessively studious life but also underscores the problems of studying nothing. Eustace must eventually reject the banality of the court and concentrate on his own studies to become worthy of marriage, and both fathers determine that their children’s reading can destabilize their plans. The play recognizes the inherent value of a university education, along with the studies full of books that come along with it that may aid in the upending of common law inheritance practices and 197 curb prodigality.88 Charles encourages Eustace to read more books for both “man and manners” as way to love (F1v): Goe turn the Volumes over I have read, Eate and digest them, that they may grow in thee, Weare out the tedious night with thy dimme Lampes And sooner loose the day than leave a doubt, Distill the sweetness from the Poets Spring, And learne to love, Thou know’st not what faire is, Traverse the stories of the great Heroes, The wise and civil lives of good men walke through; (F1v) Through his books, Charles illustrates how his consumption of books influenced his feelings for Angellina. He tells Eustace to eat, distill, and digest volumes of poetry and stories in order to prepare himself for a wife. Charles then turns and performs a poem for Angellina—perhaps the culmination of his studies—and convinces her to accept his offer of marriage. She accepts; this action breaks her father’s legal contract that technically binds her to Eustace. Afterwards, she too recognizes the importance of study as she informs Eustace that he must “glean some goodness” in order to counter in his deficiencies “(All which but shew [him] still a younger brother)” (F3v). The play reverses its skepticism about elder brothers and their right to inheritance and promotes learning and cleverness in both men and women. 88 Geoffrey Harvey, “A Parable of Justice: Drama and Rhetoric in Mr. Scarborough’s Family,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37, no. 3 (December 1982): 419-29. The Elder Brother was the basis for Anthony Trollope’s novel. 198 “those dreaming Scholars then turn Tyrants…and shew no mercy” In The Elder Brother, Charles embodies a lifetime of reading, exile, and indignation, yet transforms into a physical, sword-wielding man willing to disrupt the legal arrangements of marriage and battle for his ethical and legal rights. The books that sustained him as companions, friends, and counselors served as the fuel for his correcting of wrongs enacted upon him. When Eustace and his fellow courtiers attempt to seize Angellina after she refuses to marry him, Charles takes Eustace’s sword in a heated exchange. Charles later decides to defend Angellina after reading notes he has written in his table-book: Before I went to bed, I wrote some notes Within my Table-booke, which I will now consider. Ha! What meanes this? What doe I with a sword? Learn'd Mercurie needs not th’ aide of Mars, and innocence Is to it selfe a guard, yet since armes ever Protect arts, I may justly weare and use it, For since’t was made my prize, I know not how I'me growne in love with’t, and cannot eate nor study, And much lesse walke without it: but I trifle, Matters of more weight aske my judgement. (I2r) He has become so bold with reading that he abandons it for arms in order to reclaim Angellina as his own. With Angellina’s help, Charles confronts the authority of the king’s law by breaking his brother’s marriage bond and cancelling the jointure between his father and Lewis. He and Angellina position themselves as scholars firmly interested 199 in common law practices that privilege the individual, and they are willing to challenge the king’s law and their fathers’ contracts in order to secure their rights—but in the end both capitulate to comedic endings and reconciliation to reinstate economic and familial stability. The early satire of the 1590s and 1600s, culminating in The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, also threatened to overturn structures of power in order to secure rights, preferment, and salary for university-educated individuals, but the play ultimately seeks to protect the system that it functions so closely to. Despite the inequities of London, the changing landscape of the city, and the multiple conversations taking place in St. Paul’s Churchyard, in theaters, and in churches, the Parnassus plays maintain an optimism in the melancholy of the schoalrs’ situations. In the Elder Brother, Charles’s switch from complacent scholar to a nearly typical elder brother reveals the inherent faults of the sheltered environment of the university. In Louvain his books insulated him from the outside world, almost keeping him from human contact and connection. Coincidentally, both plays harness humanist books, reading, and university training to embody—either by direct reference or sublimated feeling—the indignatio of Juvenal’s rage in Satire I and identify the problems inherent in humanist education combined with a changing social landscape, even if they could not solve them. Through that rage and confusion also come groups of readers who are able to converse about their social and political situations and feelings using the language of books and reading. In the case of The Elder Brother, Charles’ extensive reading matched with Angellina’s facility for law and contracts creates a community akin to the group of young men in The Second Part of 200 the Return. Both sets are united in a cause to ensure their social and economic survival— through social and learned connections. 201 Conclusion “My library was dukedom large enough”: In Search of Books and their Readers In its Summer List 2018, Samuel Gedge showcases as one of its objects for sale, a Book-Shaped Flask for Augustus Elector of Saxony.1 The catalogue listing describes the flask as pewter, perhaps constructed in Dresden circa 1570: [It] imitate[s] a book spine with raised bands, two fixed clasps and a detachable screw cap with suspension ring, the front cover decorated in imitation of blind tooling with large circular heraldic arms of Augustus, Elector of Saxony, three makers touch marks at head of spine, slightly compressed with some light wear to extremities, overall in a very good state of preservation (38).2 Artisans specializing in metallurgy who sought Augustus’s patronage designed the flask to resemble a “German quarto-sized volume of the second-half of the sixteenth century,” for his personal use, rather than as a favor or “novelty item alone” (38). This book-flask is notable for its intricate markings and for its imitative design modeled in close likeness to continental books crafted in the sixteenth century. Augustus of Saxony was an avid collector of art and “finely-crafted scientific instruments” who was known for his 1Aaron T. Pratt (@aaronpratt), “Guys—there’s a book-shaped drinking flask from the 16th century in bookseller Samuel Gedge’s (http://www.samuelgedge.com ) 2018 summer list. It’s completely made of pewter, but in a way that mimics the standard blind-stamped pigskin bindings of the period,” Twitter, May 9, 2018, 12:47p.m., https://twitter.com/aarontpratt/status/994257602698608640. Aaron T. Pratt is the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the University of Texas. He shares information about rare books and manuscripts of early English books. 2 Samuel Gedge and Ernesta Campaner, Samuel Gedge: Summer List 2018 (Dorchester: Henry Ling Limited, 2018), 38. More information about Samuel Gedge LTD, Dealers in Rare Books, Manuscripts, Prints & Drawings, may be found on their website: http://www.samuelgedge.com. 202 “armoury, cabinet of natural curiosities and coin cabinet” (38). He founded the Dresden Kunkstkammer (‘art chamber’) in 1560, a museum which served as repository for his eclectic collection. Perhaps intentionally, the book-flask evokes the saying “in vino veritas,” from Erasmus’s Adagia (1500).3 Wine (or another alcoholic beverage) is encased in an object and metaphor to which drinkers and readers ascribe some measure of truth. This book-flask recalls a scene from William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest (1623) in which Stephano, Caliban, and Trinculo continually “kiss the Book” of Stephano’s wine bottle made of bark in order to swear oaths and tell truths (2.2.124). Although one cannot know how Stephano’s bottle-book looked on stage in 1611, Augustus’s pewter flask suggests this clever possibility. It is feasible that Stephano’s bottle could have physically resembled a book, all the while serving as a container for wine, which itself holds larger truths, if we are to believe Erasmus and other classical philosophers. Although Caliban cannot access books from Prospero’s cell, he now accesses knowledge from another source. Furthermore, upon closer examination, the pewter flask and Shakespeare’s bottle-book work in surprisingly similar ways. They both use the form of the book to challenge the notion of what books are, what they can do, and the ways that individuals could have read or interacted with them both on and offstage in Renaissance England and Europe. Books take surprising forms in English Renaissance drama. They appear quietly and seemingly innocuously and then forever alter how we look at a play that to us had always been familiar. Books draw attention to plays that 3 Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus: Prolegomena to the Adages, trans. and ed. John N. Grant (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 216. In this same adage, Erasmus cites Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium noting that “wine and children tell the truth.” 203 have been continually overlooked—ones that ask strikingly modern questions about the necessity and importance of university educations, the definitions of reading, and the dangers of leaving well-read people with no feeling of community. It was the purpose of this dissertation to rediscover some of the stories of early books and readers, through English Renaissance drama, a medium that continually reveals new material, discoveries, insights, words, and feelings, despite having been read and reread by countless students and scholars over hundreds of years. This dissertation examined the ways that English Renaissance dramatists used their plays to document histories of readers who do not exist in the archives, or in marginal notes in extant books. These readers are enfolded into plays and poems, and there are far more of them than I have written about here. In the first chapter, I examine the ways that Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus share in their magic books not only nostalgia, but also a strong desire to push forward into a future of learning that both includes and pushes beyond the limits of humanism. The space and history of the English Renaissance study became the focus of the second chapter. Through Everard Guilpin’s “Satyra Quinta” in his book of satires and epigrams, Skialethia, I attempt to reconstruct the physical space of the English Renaissance study in order to examine ways that architecture, humanism and reading inform one another as readers use these three elements to attempt to define themselves in relation to the outside world. I also suggest that the study evolves from a place of contemplation and reflection to one of creative, transformational, or cultural transactions in plays including William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix. In the third chapter, I suggest that the author of The Second Part of the 204 Return from Parnassus executes a timely reading of Juvenal’s Satire I, in the aftermath of the 1599 Bishop’s Ban, and identifies a new subculture of influential urban readers. In the same chapter, I also suggest that when paired together, The Second Part of the Return and John Fletcher’s The Elder Brother highlight the difficulties that scholars experience after they leave the safety of university and the comfort of their books in order to seek preferment or to argue for primogeniture and marriage. Perhaps because so many English Renaissance plays I encountered were written by former members of a university or men who had spent time in literary communities, it became quickly evident that highly educated readers used their books to define and advocate for themselves, press beyond philosophical and mathematical limits, and understand social, political, and physical spaces in which they existed. In addition to viewing them as dei ex-machina, magical objects representative of knowledge, centers of popular culture, or very powerful metaphors, this dissertation considered books— particularly if they were named—as real objects with which characters could have intimate and significant relationships. Books evoke memory and nostalgia; they encourage rereading, create comedic moments, and alter the ways that individuals interact with each other, their surroundings, and themselves. Years ago, this dissertation started out as one about objects and material but has transformed into one that is not about print culture, quires, paper, and bindings, but one about meaning, space, feeling, memory, and surprisingly, science. During the course of this project, I made a conscious choice not to devote any significant space to Shakespeare, but to have him be a writer of equal privilege and stature to others, including those who will likely remain anonymous forever. It was an 205 experiment to try to construct a narrative of reading and books without the weight of his presence. The narrative that developed turned into one of educated men who after their time at university had difficulty determining their place in the world—which was especially difficult given the political and social structures that were in place at the time. It is, unfortunately, a narrative that is not inclusive of women and/or racial and/or ethnic minorities, but it is one that should include them, and soon. Perhaps considering Caliban as an analogue to the educated young men coming down from the universities to London is a start. In act 2.2, Stephano and Trinculo first encounter Caliban as he worries that Stephano is a familiar of Prospero’s sent to “torment [him] / for bringing in wood slowly” (2.2.15-16).4 Neither are spirits; rather they are men (and, in Stephano’s case, an inebriated one) who are delivered from a shipwreck, lamenting what they have lost to the storm.5 After absorbing the shock of survival and hearing a frightened Caliban speak the same language, Stephano determines that the four-legged “monster of the isle”—a combination of Caliban and a disguised Trinculo—would be an excellent “present for any emperor that ever trod on neat’s leather” (2.2.66-67). For Stephano, this articulate creature, whom he would comfortably exchange for pay, must first be comforted and sedated with wine. In this exchange, Shakespeare, like the Elector of Saxony’s flask, 4 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Peter Hulme and William Sherman (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004). Unless noted otherwise, all citations refer to this edition of the play. 5 “spirit, n,” OED Online, April 2018, Oxford University Press. At 21b, the word spirit is identified as “without article: Liquid such as is obtained by distillation, spec. that which is of an alcoholic nature. Also pl.” While a product of distillation of alcohol, the word spirits was not used to describe alcoholic beverages until the late seventeenth century. Ben Johnson uses the terms spirit but in chemical processes in The Alchemist (1610). 206 recalls Erasmus, or even John Lyly’s Euphues: “Wyne therefore is to be refrayned which is termed to be the glasse of the minde, and it is an olde Prouerbe: Whatsoeuer is in the heart of the sober man, is in the mouth of the drunckarde.”6 Wine, Stephano declares, will “go near to remove [Caliban’s] fit” and will also “give language to you, cat,” making Caliban a glass portal to the island, a living book that Stephano can read (2.2.72-8). As he pushes Caliban to “open [his] mouth,” Stephano depends on his wine’s ability to produce in Caliban a comfortable, familiar, language that will teach and persuade him to “talk after the wisest” through the shared experience of drunkenness (2.2.70-73). Satisfied with what he has learned through drink, Caliban assures himself, “that’s a brave god that bears celestial liquor. I will kneel to him” (2.2.112-13). As Stephano realizes that his friend Trinculo comprises half of the creature he has “discovered,” he recounts his own survival as he “escaped upon a butt of sack, which the sailors heaved overboard, by this bottle, which I made of the bark of a tree, with mine own hands since I was cast ashore” (2.2.115-18). This wine bottle or flask, made of wood, produces language, strength (“this will shake your shaking”), and becomes the object upon which Trinculo swears the veracity of his own survival due to his ability to “swim like a duck” (2.2.80; 2.2.122). Caliban promises that he’ll swear to the bottle because of the substance it contains at the very moment Stephano invites Trinculo to imbibe, or “kiss the Book” (2.2.124). Stephano’s wooden flask transforms into the Book, or a bible, onto which truths and oaths historically have been sworn. In Caliban’s case, it does not matter whether or not the bottle-Book is a bible, for it is an object that espouses truth and is a commodity that he is willing to exchange for “every fertile inch o’ th’ 6 John Lyly, Euphues (London, 1578), 60, EEBO, British Library. 207 island,” as well as for a new master: “I will kiss thy foot. I prithee, be my god” (2.2.143- 44). Wine and the bottle-book have made an imprint upon Caliban that Miranda complains earlier is not present: “Abhorred slave / Which any print of goodness wilt not take / Being capable of all ill. I pitied thee / Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour / One thing or other” (1.2. 350-54).7 Her teaching failed to elicit the subservience (“goodness”) that she and Prospero hoped for; instead it is the bottle-book that exacts truths from Caliban as he encourages Stephano and Trinculo to take for themselves Prospero’s books, the other, most powerful objects on the island. Of the bottle-book, Stephano promises he will “furnish it anon with new contents,” much like additional stories of a volume in a personal library of books, as long as Caliban swears to “adore thee” and be Stephano’s subject (2.2.137). It is tempting to imagine that the wooden bottle is indeed a book-flask, constructed much like the pewter one for Augustus of Saxony. Perhaps Stephano’s bottle- book is an early example that combines the pewter book-flask with a xylothek, an object made out of a bark that often resembled a book while containing material from the woods of which it was constructed.8 Also called “Buchs der Natur” (books of nature), xylotheks 7 Tom Lindsay, “‘Which first was mine own king’: Caliban and the Politics of Service and Education in The Tempest,” Studies In Philology 113, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 397-423. Lindsay writes that while subject to conflicting messages inherent in early modern education and service, Caliban exists at the intersection of colonialism, humanism, and servitude; in this way, he mirrors many young men who were negotiating their own positions in a changing political and social landscape that expected a great deal from them, but did not necessarily provide the means for them to be successful. 8 Sibylle Benninghoff-Lühl, “Vom Buch als Schaukasten oder: Wunderbares Lesen. Die Holzbibliothek von Carl Schildbach” (From the book as a showcase or wonderful reading. The wooden library of Carl Schildbach) (1788), Zeitschrift für Germanistik Neue Folge 22, no. 1 (2012): 41-56. Benninghoff-Luhl describes xyloteks from the late eighteenth century. See Alice Goff, “The Selbst Gewählter Plan: The Schildbach Wood Library in Eighteenth-Century Hessen- Kassel,” Representations 128, no. 1 (Fall 2014): 30-59. 208 were produced in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth centuries in Germany and other parts of Europe. Sibylle Benninghoff-Lühl explains that xylotheks were often constructed from tree bark, and made to resemble both books and the trees that gave them their shape. Much like Stephano’s wooden bottle-book, she calls xyloteks “things in the performative” (Sie sind Dinge im performativen), which challenge traditional definitions of books and reading.9 Alice Goff writes that xylotheks, particularly the ones designed by Carl Schildbach, have an additional layer of complexity because they are examples of tangible nature and metaphor: “Certainly a book may be a specimen and may embody a metaphor, but not without expanding the borders of materiality, legibility, and meaning within each genre.”10 In The Tempest, Shakespeare allows the wooden bottle to be transformed into a book from which Caliban may draw some knowledge and a modicum of freedom. His ability to drink and reveal truth inspires further questioning of the oppressive forces that bind him to Prospero and the land. But like his captor, he is willing to immerse himself in books (whatever their form) as Stephano insists that Caliban continue to drink from, or kiss one of these performative, mutable, metaphorical, and yet, very real, objects. The wooden book-bottle or flask and Prospero’s books are one in the same for Caliban: magical, powerful objects filled with substantive material that can be truth evoking or telling. The bottle-book and other books in the play are wholly representative of gods or devils, and powerful and broad enough to contain literal and figurative volumes.11 Books—whether they are wooden bottles, xylotheks, or even pewter flasks—are material objects that Caliban is able to experience but not quite 9 Benninghoff- Lühl, “Vom Buch als Schaukasten oder,” 42-43. 10 Goff, “The Selbst Gewählter Plan,” 34. 11 Sarah Wall-Randell, The Immaterial Book: Reading and Romance In Early Modern England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 84-86. 209 comprehend because of the structural and familial constraints put on him. Caliban is a reader, but one who is limited by rank and circumstance much like many of the dramatists and poets of the 1590s and early 1600s that I have written about in this dissertation. Whether powerful, magical academic scholars, or young men starting their careers after a time at university, all of the writers who seemed to connect to and write about books also focused their plays on men who continually encountered limits. The limits were a function of the political and social—which were also a part of the same structures and policies that gave them the ability to read and learn in the first place. Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, John Fletcher, Everard Guilpin, and so many others received an education delivered through precepts of humanism, a history of scholasticism, and a future of empiricism, but not necessarily all of the opportunities to be able to act on what they learned. So, in their plays and poems, these writers used their reading, books, studies, and other materials of learning to build fictive worlds in which mathematical, scientific, computational, magical, and personal limits were placed on characters. By examining these limits to consider why they existed, what could be done to breach them, and how to use the space, time, and learning that they gained from their university educations, certain English Renaissance writers attempted to encounter and possibly change their situations and those of people like them without becoming too bitter or too discontented, and yet still remain revolutionary. 210 Primary Sources from Early English Books Online Albott, Robert. Englands Parnassus: Or Choysest Flowers of our Moderne Poets, with their poetical comparisons. London, 1600. http://gateway.proquest.com.proxy- um.researchport.umd.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88- 2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99835965. Bacon, Francis. Essaies. London, 1598. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88- 2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99857533. Bodenham, John. Bel-vedére, or, The Garden of the muses. 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