‘This Sight Doth Shake All That Is Man within Me’: Sexual Violation and the Rhetoric of Dissent in The Cardinal.
[In the following essay, Burks discusses the political implications of sexual violence in The Cardinal.]
When it was performed in the winter of 1641, The Cardinal, James Shirley's play about a weak king manipulated by a malicious prelate, entered into a fierce debate about the power wielded by the Anglican prelacy in both church and state. Shirley's play represents the Cardinal's abuse of power through the rape and murder of his ward, the Duchess Rosaura. Rape and murder, used in the play as sensational shorthand to protest the abuses of this theatrical villain, are not merely the standard fare of tragic drama but also important elements of the political rhetoric of dissent in use among the religious reformers who sought to unseat the bishops of the Anglican Church. This article considers the play within its historical moment in the hope not only that its historical context will help us understand the play but with the conviction that the play itself can help us understand history. When I argue that Shirley's staging of sexual violence contributed to the political discourse of the nation, I have two goals in mind: to illuminate a neglected aspect of seventeenth-century political rhetoric and to call attention to the complicated political dimensions of erotic representation.
THE GODLY PARTY AND THE PRESS
In 1637, William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, brought suit in the Court of Star Chamber against John Bastwick, Henry Burton, and William Prynne as seditious libelers for pamphlets in which they attacked state institutions, particularly the Church of England and the bishops who served it. Prynne, the best known of the three, was accused of having (pseudonymously) authored a tract, Newes from Ipswich (1636), that appealed to the king to curb his bishops:
O our most pious King Charles, as thou hast in two severall Declarations, protested before God, to all thy loving Subjects, that thou wilt never give way to the licensing or authorizing of any thing whereby any innovation in the least degree, may creep into our Church; nor never connive at any Backsliding into Popery. … So now behold these desperate innovations, purgations, and Romish practices of thy Prelates.1
In this tract, Prynne sees the Protestant religion, its faithful ministers, and its believers suffering in “the jawes of these devouring Wolves, [the] tyrannizing Lordly Prelates.” He seeks to move the king to side with the people against the bishops, who, he says, are “trampling all thy lawes and subjects liberties like Cob-webs, thy subjects like Dogges and dirt under their tyrannicall feet.” Prynne essentially throws down a gauntlet before the king, declaring that Charles must
now or never shew thy selfe (as wee all hope, beleeve and pray thou wilt) a Prince more worthy of this glorious Title, then any of thy Royall progenitors, by rooting all Popery, Superstition, Idolatry, Errours, Innovations, out of this Church and Kingdome, by restoring the preaching, the Preachers of Gods Word, and purity of his Worship, and taking vengeance on these perfidious Prelates.
Newes from Ipswich is an attack on Matthew Wren, bishop of Norwich, and, by extension, an attack on Laud, who had used his archbishopric and his sway with the other bishops to institute changes in the Book of Common Prayer, to reposition the Communion table as an altar at the extreme east end of the church, and to reintroduce altar railings and crucifixes.2 Prynne's tract objects on theological grounds to these changes which he feared were part of a counter-reformation intended by Laud to reunite the Anglican and Roman churches.
Prynne understands, however, that there are constitutional issues at stake as well. As the titular head of the Anglican Church, Charles I had made several proclamations of his commitment to maintain (though not to extend) the Protestant character of the church and of the nation. Without Charles's approval, Laud could not have proceeded with his “innovations.” The tract uses its pretense of addressing the king to point out that Charles had made a practice of saying one thing in his public proclamations while tacitly endorsing Laud's program by not opposing its implementation. Prynne's assertion that the civil liberties of the nation's subjects were being infringed by the activities of the “tyrannical” bishops, then, was tantamount to calling Charles himself a tyrant.
Prynne's cause was a political movement seeking further Protestant reform of the Anglican Church. Termed “Puritans” by their detractors, these activists, who preferred to refer to themselves as the “godly party,”3 understood that there was a direct correlation between Laud's autocratic government of the church and Charles's insistence on ruling the nation without calling a Parliament. The increasingly literate and persuasive nature of the godly party's propaganda convinced Laud to make examples of Prynne and the other two men. All three were well educated and well connected (Prynne was a lawyer; Burton, a clergyman; and Bastwick, a physician), and it was clearly Laud's hope that he could disparage them, robbing their movement of credibility and cutting into its support.
At the end of a highly publicized trial, in which the defendants were not allowed to speak in their own defense, Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick were convicted and sentenced to serve life terms in prison, to pay fines of five thousand pounds each, and to have their ears clipped in the public pillory. Prynne had already suffered ear clipping and imprisonment for libeling the queen with his anti-theatrical tract Histrio-Mastix (1632). For this second offense he was sentenced to lose the remainder of his ears and to be branded on each cheek with the initials S. L., designating his crime of seditious libel. The disfigurements of the three pamphleteers were carried out as a public spectacle before the miscreants were sent to remote prisons to serve out their sentences.
Laud miscalculated badly. He had counted on the social position of the defendants to command the attention of the press and to frighten the godly party into submissiveness by demonstrating his willingness to punish not only the minor figures but the ringleaders as well. Indeed, the affair riveted the attention of the capital, but the effect was not at all what Laud had hoped. The punishments inflicted on the men were shocking, not because dismemberment and branding were unusual but because they were penalties of a harshness usually reserved for an inferior class of offenders.4 With this sentence, the state seems to have violated the delicate balance of public executions: the spectacle it created raised pity rather than revulsion in the public, and instead of shaming the criminals, it made heroes of them.5 While Laud's political allies reported the episode with glee, he neither converted his opponents to his point of view nor silenced their criticism for long. In fact, it seems that more than any other incident in the years before the outbreak of the English civil wars, the disfigurement of Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick solidified resistance to the government of Charles I. The three writers became martyrs for English Protestantism.
The godly party saw this affair as a confirmation of the claims the three men had made in their writings. Bastwick's observation in The Letany of John Bastwick (1637), that “[i]t seeme they would faine be at their old occupation againe, a butchering of vs at smithfield; and that is the thing indeed which their feirce and bloud-thirsty ambition aspires to,” seemed prophetic in the aftermath of his punishment.6 Prynne's use of graphic language of physical abuse to depict the “wounds” inflicted by the “trampling,” “devouring” prelates was justified by his treatment in the pillory, where the figurative wounds he had described in print were reproduced and literalized on his face.
The horror of this gruesome spectacle entered the national consciousness and colored the political rhetoric of the critical half decade before fighting broke out between the forces of the Parliament and the king. In 1640 Captain Audley Mervin evoked its memory as an illustration of the government's contempt for the legal rights of the English people, when he urged the Irish Parliament to “surveigh the liberties of the Subjects, every prison spues out illegall attachments and commitments, every pillory is dyed with the forced blood of the Subjects, and hath eares, though not to heare, yet to witnesse this complaint.”7 William Smith, MP for Winchelsea, used the image as a hook to demonstrate the interrelatedness of religious and civil oppression:
Honour and Riches have been set up for gods, in competition with [God], Idolatry and Superstition have bin introduced, even into his House, the Church, and He expulsed … and those who would not tremble thus to dishonour God, would not scruple to doe it to their Parents, or injure their Neighbors, eyther by murther of themselves; or names; or by Adultery, Davids great Crimes: they have not onely rob'd God of his Honour, but men of their Estates, and of part of themselves, Members and Eares have bin set to sale, even to the deforming of that Creature, whom God had honoured with his owne Image, that they might colour this their wickednesse … and all this proceeded out of an inordinate desire of that which was their Neighbors.8
In these speeches, the wounds of Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick become the wounds of the populace, inflicted on them by the archbishop, the courts, and (as Smith reminds us through his allusion to David) the king.
By 1640 the nation, stressed by a severe depression, was polarized over the twin issues of civil and ecclesiastical reform.9 This deadlock was broken when economic necessity forced Charles to end his eleven years of “personal rule” and call a Parliament. In November the Long Parliament assembled at Westminster and began to address the grievances of the nation. When, on 5 July 1641, Parliament abolished the Court of Star Chamber, it was striking out at the institution that martyred Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick, an institution that had long been a symbol of the arbitrary powers of the king's prerogative and the archbishop's will. By abolishing the Star Chamber, the act also removed the instrument of press censorship, effectively neutralizing the government's control over what was printed in the nation.10
Consequently, London was flooded with pamphlet literature alleging and analyzing the abuses of monarchy, the tyranny of bishops, and the many infringements of the rights of England's subjects.11 In addition to partisan sermons and the speeches of politicians like Mervin and Smith, the presses were opened to tracts and treatises expressing any opinion that would sell copy. Cheaply printed, scurrilous attacks on the archbishop reignited popular outrage against him. Archy's Dream, a pamphlet ostensibly written by the king's jester, who had been “exiled the Court by Canterburies malice,” opens with a jest about a noble man who had sons “he knew not well what to doe with; he would gladly make S[c]hollers of them, but that he feared the Arch-Bishop would cut off their eares.”12A New Play Called Canterburie His Change of Diot opens with a scene in which the “Bishop of Canterbury” sits at table with a Doctor of Physicke, a Lawyer, and a Divine and is not pleased with the fine meal they offer him. Instead, he demands “Carbonadoed cheek,” and when they cannot satisfy him, he calls in a troop of armed bishops, who seize the three hosts. The archbishop cuts off their ears, declaring that they will make a fine “little dish for rarity.” “This I doe,” he says, “to make you examples, / That others may be more carefull to please my palate.”13 Laud had indeed made an example of Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick: an example that mobilized the nation to dissent.
THE CARDINAL AND PARTISAN POLITICS
Licensed on 25 November 1641, The Cardinal played during the tumultuous month of December, as Londoners were maintaining a state of armed readiness to defend themselves and the leaders of the godly party in Parliament against an expected attempt by the king's cavaliers to suppress political opposition.14 At the same time, reports of Irish Catholic rebellion rolled off London's presses and raised fears that English Catholics, too, might rise to slaughter their Protestant neighbors. That theatrical season saw the tension between Charles and Parliament escalate as shopkeepers and apprentices neglected their businesses to muster in the streets and about Westminster, demanding the ouster of the bishops from the House of Lords. In January 1642 Charles felt it necessary to leave Westminster for his safety, and in August he declared open war at Nottingham.15 In the midst of the civil upheavals of 1641-42, The Cardinal played to audiences in a metropolis preoccupied with the very issues of monarchy, religion, and civil rights dramatized by Shirley.
It would not seem unreasonable to expect that the politics of Shirley's play should show a marked contrast to the politics and tactics of the godly party's literature. The mere fact that he wrote for the theater marked Shirley as an enemy of the godly party's reformist aims.16The Cardinal was produced less than a year before the godly party gained enough sway in the Parliament to close the theaters altogether. However, rather than being an obviously royalist vehicle, The Cardinal seems ambivalent about the king and his policies. Oddly enough, its criticism of meddling monarchy and clerical coercion echoes the grievances expressed by the godly in their tracts, reminding us that in the early 1640s Charles faced a crisis of support—even among those who eventually supported him in his war against Parliament.17 Party lines were not as clearly drawn as they came to be later in the decade, and they never cut clearly along class lines. Despite the fact that the theater played to an elitist audience in the 1630s and 1640s and despite the antagonism of the godly party to theatergoing, neither the audience at theaters not the playwrights who entertained them can be assumed to have been robust supporters of the king.18
The play presents the story of a young widow, the Duchess Rosaura, who has fallen in love with and promised to marry the Count D'Alvarez. Before the play begins, however, the King has interposed in her plans and insisted that she marry Columbo, nephew to the powerful Cardinal. When we see the Duchess, she is still contemplating what she will do in the face of this imposed match. Although she has initially acquiesced, she decides that she cannot break her vows to Alvarez. She writes a deceptive letter to Columbo, asking him to renounce his claim to her, which he does, believing that it is a coy test of his love. When Columbo returns from war, he finds that the Duchess has married Alvarez with the King's blessing. Enraged, he interrupts their wedding feast and murders the bridegroom. The King sentences Columbo to death, but in the interval between the third and fourth acts, Columbo is released for reasons that baffle not only the audience but the courtiers on the stage. The Duchess then conspires with Hernando (a soldier with private reasons to hate both Columbo and the Cardinal) to avenge Alvarez's death with Columbo's murder. Hernando accomplishes the murder, while, to conceal her part in it, the Duchess feigns madness. The Cardinal, who suspects her nonetheless, convinces the unwitting King to appoint him guardian for the apparently incapacitated Duchess. The Cardinal attempts to rape her but is prevented by Hernando. Though foiled in his first objective, the Cardinal succeeds in poisoning her before dying himself. Only then does the King take charge, marveling at the villainy of his favorite and resolving that kings ought to be more aware of what happens in their courts.
For Shirley, as for his audience, the play was part of the public discourse on present events in the capital. The fact that its plot focused on the marriage plans of a woman in no way misled its audience from understanding its commentary on political power. Dramatists routinely used plots centering on sexual coercion and violation as mechanisms for displacing observations of (and provoking reactions to) other power struggles. This convention did not operate merely at a subconscious level, but was an acknowledged technique understood by audiences. Ben Jonson, for instance, complained in his introduction to Volpone that the habit of looking for the political relevance of plots was so popular that it got a great many dramatists into trouble:
Application is grown a trade with many, and there are [those] that profess to have a key for the deciphering of everything; but let wise and noble persons take heed how they be too credulous, or give leave to these invading interpreters to be overfamiliar with their fames, who cunningly, and often, utter their own virulent malice under other men's simplest meanings.19
Jonson's contention is that malicious persons were reading sedition into innocent plays. His “poor playwright” tone reveals Jonson's sensitivity and defensiveness in this matter: he had been in trouble more than once for plots that were none too innocent.20
The most interesting aspect of Jonson's remark is the witness it offers to the existence of a taste for “deciphering” political meanings from apparently apolitical plots. Lois Potter, in Secret Rites and Secret Writings, maintains that during the Interregnum, royalist writers used romance literature as a medium for encoding subversive political commentary. She documents a tradition among English readers of looking for coded meanings in such texts, citing the 1628 English-language edition of Barclay's Argenis, which included a key to its hidden meanings. Potter also points out that William Dugard's 1655 edition of Arcadia made the case that Sidney had intentionally constructed his text as a decipherable allegory, “shadowing moral and politick results under the plain and easie emblems of Lovers.”21 In 1656 William D'Avenant made clear in his dedication of The Siege of Rhodes to Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, that he intended his readers to perceive a correspondence between the fictional siege of Rhodes and the persecution of the royalist party in the 1650s:
I have brought Solyman [emperor of the Turks] to be arraign'd at your [Hyde's] Tribunal, where you are Censor of his civility & magnificence. Dramatick Poetry meets with the same persecutions now, from such who esteem themselves the most refin'd and civil, as it ever did from the Barbarous. And yet whilst those vertuous Enemies deny heroique Plays to the Gentry, they entertain the People with a Seditious Farce of their own counterfeit Gravity. … My Lord, it proceeds from the same mind not to be pleas'd with Princes on the Stage, and not to affect them in the Throne; for those are ever most inclin'd to break the Mirrour who are unwilling to see the Images of such as have just authority over their guilt.22
D'Avenant's readers were to find Solyman's Turkish heathens reminiscent of the “civil,” “vertuous,” and “Seditious” Parliamentarians who had executed the king and closed the theaters.
Shirley's audience, then, had a marked predisposition to mine texts for topical allusions. The Cardinal rewards this taste with coy references to “the short-haired men” and to the king's “prerogative.” It is not, however, an easily decoded royalist allegory of the kind D'Avenant later produced in The Siege of Rhodes. The Cardinal's focus on the victimization of the Duchess turns the critical edge of the play back on the king and his counselors. Indeed, had any of the godly party set aside their aversion to the stage long enough to attend a performance of The Cardinal, they would surely have been amused and pleased to have witnessed their best arguments against episcopacy and monarchy coming from the mouths and embodied in the actions of Shirley's characters.
In the most general terms, the play might be understood as a sympathetic observer's warning against the wrongheaded policies that were leading Charles toward a war that would tear the nation apart.23 But its sympathy is strained in places, and the emphasis is heavily on the king's wrongheadedness. Shirley audaciously assigns lines to “the King” that acknowledge that his use of prerogative has infringed on the rights of his subjects. In the middle of the play, the King admits to the Duchess that it
did exceed the office of a king
To exercise dominion over hearts,
That owe to the prerogative of heaven
Their choice.
(3.2.185-88)
Furthermore, the King closes the play with this admission:
How much are kings abused by those they take
To royal grace! Whom, when they cherish most
By nice indulgence, they do often arm
Against themselves; from whence this maxim springs,
None have more need of perspectives than kings.
(5.3.293-97)
Shirley has created a “king” who confesses precisely those things that Charles refused to concede: that his favor has been misplaced, that his policies have been shortsighted, and that he has allowed the rights of his subjects to be abused.
THE CARDINAL AND THE DUCHESS: VIOLATING THE BODY POLITIC
The Cardinal's sympathetic portrait of the Duchess, whose sexual autonomy is restricted and then assaulted by the Cardinal, stages and gives flesh to the impositions of Archbishop Laud on the subjects of England, impositions that the pamphlets of the godly party also framed in the language of sexual violation. These tracts often describe “our Mother the Church of England” as a woman sexually imperiled by powerful representatives of the Anglican hierarchy.24 For instance, in a speech to the House of Commons, published in 1641, Viscount Faulkland insisted that “some Bishops and their adherents … have defiled our Church.”25 Using a similar metaphor, the “Orthodox Ministers of the Church of England” complained that Richard Montague, then bishop of Norwich and author of several Catholic-leaning books, “would seeme to pin these his bastardly Bratts vpon the sleeve of our deere and chast mother the Church of England.”26 For his part, William Prynne used characteristically colorful language to depict the church as an abused woman in his attack on the Anglican cleric John Cosin, A Briefe Svrvay and Censvre of Mr. Cozens His Couzening Devotions (1628):
Go on therefore, you Christian Heroes, and valiant worthies of the Lord, to vindicate the cause, and Doctrines of our Church, against those Cozening, treacherous and rebellious Sons (if Sons) of hers, who have betrayed her with a kisse and wounded her with one hand, whiles they seemingly imbrace her with the other.27
In a similar vein, a tract explaining The Principall duty of Parliament-men (1641) uses an Old Testament analogy to illustrate the necessity of Parliament's
punishing those publicke offenses, which either have been scandalous, and perillous unto the Church, or pernicious and noxious unto the Common-wealth, as the children of Israel joyned themselves together, as one man, to revenge upon the Benjamites, the wickednesse committed by them, unto the Levites wife.28
These passages reveal dismay as well as disgust in their presentation of the abuses committed by Anglican churchmen. The sexual imagery is not only a strategy here, not merely a rhetorical tool, it is also an expression of how deeply threatened and how intimately wounded the writers feel. The church in these images has been raped (by her own sons, in the case of Prynne's attack on Cosin), and the readers are called to feel that assault as a personal affront, to internalize the insult.
Two of these illustrations (from Mr. Cozens His Couzening Devotions and The Principall duty) allow their readers a comfortably male position with which to identify. The church is female, but the reformists are called to be like the men of Israel avenging her injury. This is the strategy adopted by A Looking-Glasse for all Lordly Prelates (1636) when it compares the conduct of the “Lord Prelates” with the devil's persecution of “the Woman (the true Church of God) Rev. 12:13,” and calls on its readers to “manfully, couragiously, unanimously resist and withstand them to the uttermost of their power.”29 More often, however, the revenger role is omitted, leaving the reader to identify himself with the victimized church, the violated woman, as is, in fact, the case elsewhere in the Looking-Glasse.30 There, the church and her members find “their liberties, Religion, Flocks, Brethren [all betrayed] to the will and rapine of these beastly ravening Lordly Wolves.”31
Archbishop Laud frequently appears as the ravisher in such tracts: “[H]e brought innovations into the Church, making her of a pure Virgin a very Strumpet.”32 In another pamphlet, Laud is “the Orcke of Canterbury, that great Monster, [who kept away] the Church of England from Christ her spouse, and … polluted her with Popery.”33 It is not just the church, but the nation as a whole and each citizen individually, that Laud assaults in The Times Dissected, which concludes that his corruption of Charles led directly to “the rapine and spoile of subjects.”34 And, of course, it is not only Laud but other bishops as well, who were depicted as such “notable Mountebank[s] … professed Papist[s] … ruffianly Locust[s], and seducer[s] of the Kings Liege-people.”35
The gender crossing required of male readers of these images is reminiscent of the gender blurring in the imagery we have seen employed by Captain Audley Mervin when he told Parliament that “every pillory is dyed with the forced blood of the Subjects,” where “forced blood” is evocative of rape, even though his allusion is clearly to the punishment of three men (Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick).36 The writers of these complaints construct an audience of male readers who feel emasculated by the powerful figures governing the nation: emasculated, feminized, then raped.
Indeed, the rape imagery of the tracts joins with another cluster of images depicting the dismemberment of England's subjects and their religion. In Newes from Ipswich, Prynne appealed to the king against “these perfidious Prelates, who have thus gelded thy Fast-booke … [and] openly abused thy onely Sister; and her Children.”37 Following Prynne's lead, and with his punishment specifically in mind, a number of writers likened the experience of living under Charles and Laud to dismemberment. The author of A Rent in the Lawne Sleeves, or Episcopacy Eclypsed, creates a Laud-like bishop who explains to a Jesuit his methods of enforcing conformity.
For all those whom favour nor promotion could not perswade; although against their consciences, to admit our ceremonies, which were as so many introductions, to the confirmation of the Catholique Religion in this land, wee constrain'd some by whipping and scourging, others by dismembering and strict imprisonment.38
William Smith (whom I quoted at greater length above) bemoaned those who “have not onely rob'd God of his Honour, but men of their Estates, and of part of themselves, Members and Eares.”39 In the hands of these writers, talk of dismemberment begins to sound a great deal like castration.
Underlying all this talk of violation and dismemberment were a series of prosecutions and a corresponding explosion of tracts detailing real sexual misconduct on the part of Anglican clerics. Among them, John Gwin, vicar of Cople, was charged with numerous adulteries and an attempted rape.40The Petition and Articles Exhibited in Parliament Against Dr. Fuller, Deane of Ely, and Vicar of St. Giles Cripplegate with the Petition Exhibited in Parliament Against Timothy Hutton, Curate of the Said Parish, by the Parishioners of St. Giles contains similar charges.41 By listing the official titles and offices of the two clergymen, this pamphlet emphasizes the height from which they are being toppled and illustrates the gulf of antagonism between the clerics and their “humble” parishioners. Another case which received particular attention was the trial of John Atherton, the Irish bishop of Waterford and Lysmore, who was executed for sodomizing another cleric.42 The popular press took great glee in “outing” the secret sexual sinners among the Anglican clergy.
The pamphlets use their sexually violent imagery to appeal to their readers at two levels. These metaphors and examples of violation blacken the Anglican Church and the state which supports it, making it seem that no reasonable, right-thinking Christian could consider aligning with any cause but that of the godly party. At the same time, these tracts are calculated to raise alarm, to play on fears that cast reason aside and draw London's reading public into a posture of defense against the abuses of Laud and Charles and the cavaliers of his army: all of them agents of authoritarian rule and anti-Christian conspiracy. The language and images of sexual violence infuse these texts with a menace which is intimate, which strikes where a victim is most exposed, which reduces men to womanly vulnerability.
When Shirley's play requires its audience to identify with a woman's plight and to override the gender boundaries which separate her experience from that of the men in the audience, this same sort of mechanism is at work. The ubiquitous Lords, who stand about the court during each act, provide the model for the audience's consideration of her as they comment on the King's actions (“This is the age of wonders”; “Wondrous mischiefs” 4.1.1), the Cardinal's intrigues (“He wants no plot” [2.3.12]), and the Duchess's misfortunes (“that most oppressèd lady” [5.1.10]). As the King and Cardinal subject the Duchess to their political maneuverings, these two Lords lead the audience to see her as a figure for the oppression of all subjects in the realm under the unjust rule of this weak king and his self-aggrandizing favorite.
In its presentation of the violence inflicted on its central female figure, The Cardinal is unlike many of the bloody tragedies that preceded it. Shirley's play does not eroticize this violence after the manner of Bussy D'Ambois or The Duchess of Malfi or 'Tis Pity She's A Whore. This contrast points to a fundamental difference in emphasis between Shirley's play and those earlier works. The Cardinal treats its central woman more sympathetically than the earlier plays, asking its audience more fully to consider the Duchess, even to identify with her and her plight—a significant departure from most of its Jacobean predecessors. As they are presented by Shirley, the Duchess's sufferings appeal not to the audience's desire to see women debased but to its members' sense that, like the Duchess, they are being brutalized by a power-hungry court headed by an unsympathetic king. Whereas the earlier plays used their exhibitions of misogynist violence primarily to reinforce their audiences' sense of power and possibility, this play has a very different effect.
The violence in The Cardinal does not confirm the powerful masculinity of its audience; rather, it works on their insecurities, fears, and sense of emasculation at the hands of a corrupt monarchy and church. In the pamphlet literature, this unsettling effect was not only a response to the social pressures under which the London population struggled, it was also a strategy of the pamphleteers to galvanize this unrest into a political movement. We have no information to illuminate the playwright's or theater company's political intentions, nor do we have evidence of the effect of Shirley's play on its audience, which is unfortunate, because theater offered resources to manipulate its audience's emotions that the print medium lacked. Certainly the play takes advantage of the stage to give flesh to the fearfulness of its villains and the vulnerability of its victim in ways that could have made it quite effective politically.
The play stages a series of escalating confrontations between the Duchess and the Cardinal. In the first of them, she is a formidable adversary, railing at him for his “crimes” and telling him to his face what others grumble behind his back, but dare not say directly. The Duchess paints his arrogant trespasses in precisely the language of the tracts attacking Laud:
What giants would your pride and surfeit seem!
How gross your avarice, eating up whole families!
How vast are your corruptions and abuse
Of the king's ear! At which you hang a pendant,
Not to adorn, but ulcerate.
(2.3.143-47)
She leaves him almost speechless in the face of her attack. He can only manage to ask, “Will you now take breath?” and to warn, “I'll have you child into a blush for this,” among the rush of her accusing words. In addition to charging him with corrupting the King, the Duchess examines the Cardinal's abuse of his clerical office, urging him,
Leave, leave, my lord, these usurpations,
And be what you were meant, a man to cure,
Not let in agues to religion;
Look on the church's wounds.
(2.3.152-55)
She extends her play on the idea of the Cardinal as a “curate” who does not cure, but wounds his charge, when she proceeds to accuse him of violating the church:
'tis your
Ambition and scarlet sins that rob
Her altar of the glory, and leave wounds
Upon her brow; which fetches grief and paleness
Into her cheeks; making her troubled bosom
Pant with her groans, and shroud her holy blushes
Within your reverend purples.
(2.3.157-63)
The passage is reminiscent of Prynne's attack on Cosin and of the many tracts in which Laud is depicted as the church's ravisher. Her paleness, panting, groaning, and blushing are all conventional representations of the physiological signs of a ravished woman's shame.
The Duchess is not yet in the desperate position that her imagery describes. She is not yet the Cardinal's victim, but his adversary. Like the “short-haired men,” who, she warns the Cardinal, will “crowd and call for justice,” she has the strength of her words and a formidable presence with which to protest his wickedness. Like the godly party she invokes, though, she sees the danger the Cardinal represents and articulates the tyrannical possibilities of his power. Her words, of course, prefigure the direction Shirley's tragedy will take. Shirley combines generic formulas with topical allusion (Laud's persecution of the godly) to prepare his audience to expect the Duchess's fate.
The second round of this sparring match between the Duchess and the Cardinal occurs in act 4, after the Duchess has been stricken by the death of Alvarez. When the Cardinal tells her of Columbo's pardon and release from prison, her response revives the specter of rape in order to measure the injustice:
In my poor understanding, 'tis the crown
Of virtue to proceed in its own tract,
Not deviate from honour; if you acquit
A man of murder 'cause he has done brave
Things in the war, you will bring down his valour
To a crime, nay to a bawd, if it secure
A rape.
(4.2.237-43)
In this second scene, the Duchess's attack is indirect, and it is aimed at Columbo rather than the Cardinal himself. The Duchess no longer has the forcefulness she possessed in the earlier scene. Now she must be politic with the Cardinal, couching her criticism in self-deprecating phrases (“in my poor understanding”) and turning fair-seeming words sour with sarcasm rather than speaking her mind directly (“we may meet again, and yet be friends”). She insists on her right to demand justice for Alvarez's murder, but must suffer the Cardinal's account and justification of Columbo's pardon.
In these two scenes with the Cardinal, Shirley's Duchess raises the chief grievances of the London populace and calls these impositions rape, just as the tract writers did. She objects to the juggling of justice that results from collusion between armed men and corrupt enforcement of law. She even implicates the King, whose judgment is infected by the whisperings of his flattering favorite. When, in act 2, she points out to the Cardinal his “corruptions and abuse / Of the king's ear! At which you hang like a pendant, / Not to adorn, but ulcerate,” she borrows both language and strategy from the tract writers, who indirectly criticize their monarch through their attacks on the “Sycophants and Eare-wiggs” whose corruption of the king creates “Warre between Prince and People.”43 Again in act 4, Shirley coyly invokes the King through the Duchess's elliptical observation that it is the “crown of virtue to … not deviate from honour.” While ostensibly speaking metaphorically about virtue, Shirley points to the King's crown. Read topically, the phrase suggests that the crown is, in fact, deviating from honorable courses.
The actual rape scene, when it comes in act 5, draws to its logical conclusion the play's vision that its authority figures have neither upheld virtue nor protected order, but have fallen to licentiousness and predation. The Cardinal perverts his responsibility as the Duchess's guardian when he attempts to seduce her. Shirley stages the scene in the Duchess's bedchamber, where she has hidden Hernando in hopes that he will find an opportunity to murder the Cardinal. Hernando (and the audience with him) eavesdrops on the Duchess and the Cardinal as they dine in the adjoining room offstage. Hernando interprets the action in the other room, which he can partly see, though the audience cannot. When music begins, Hernando signals that something is amiss. The duet which can be heard is not appropriate accompaniment for a celibate priest with his ward: it is an amorous ballad about a shepherd and his mistress. Hernando notes acerbically, “'tis not / Church music, and the air's wanton, and no anthem / Sung to't, but some strange ode of love and kisses” (5.3.119-21).
The Cardinal behaves even less like a churchman when he ushers the Duchess into her chamber and dismisses her attendants. Clothed in his clerical robes, the Cardinal appears vested with all the trust and responsibility of his office, then proceeds to transgress all bounds of propriety, first embracing the Duchess and then struggling with her when she resists his advances. Hernando's presence, though hidden from view behind an arras, underscores the violation taking place in the room: it is a guilty act which the Cardinal has tried to hide from all eyes. Supposing himself to be private with his victim, the Cardinal casts aside all of his fair words and steps from behind the masquing robes of his churchman's dress to reveal the monstrous truth of his evil intentions.
The Cardinal's robes were a sign overloaded with meaning in London in 1641. The tract writers had made the garments of the Anglican clergy (and of Catholic priests, whose garb Anglican vestments closely resembled) symbolic of all the enormity of sin and theological error that the godly party attributed to the church hierarchy. The pamphleteers cleverly undermined the power and authority conveyed by clerical dress by suggesting that the robes were unnaturally feminine. To these writers, a bishop's apparel was “the smocke of the whore of Rome.”44 “The surplice, which as some say, in the former time was the smocke of Pope Joan, … was made wide, by reason she had a great belly.”45 In their vestments, the bishops with their “curled locke[s] of Antichrist” were alternately likened by sneering pamphleteers to “comely Matrons” or to “the mightie whore which committed fornication with the kings of the earth, the adulterous bride of Christ.”46
The tracts charged churchmen with effeminacy not to tame their depiction of the Anglican clergy but to increase its monstrosity. That the “Orcke of Canterbury” wore the “smocke of the whore of Rome” only made him more terrifying. Crypto-Catholicism, sexual sin, effeminacy, and hypocrisy all hid beneath churchmen's robes. Combined with a hundred-year-long English literary and theatrical tradition of Catholic priests who abused their social and moral authority to commit heinous crimes and indulge in sexual immorality, this renewed attention to the perverse symbolism of clerical dress lends Shirley's rape scene an ugliness and political immediacy unprecedented in English theater.
The Cardinal's transformation in act 5 from formidable politician to sexual predator is horrible, though not unexpected. The most appalling thing about this final confrontation is the fact that although the Duchess anticipates the Cardinal's assault and has her feigned madness as a weapon to keep him aloof, she is unable to outmaneuver him. Although she pretends surprise at his behavior (“How came you by that cloven foot?”), she and the audience have known all along that the Cardinal is thoroughly corrupt. The scene reaches its peak of horror when he overpowers her despite all of her preparations to hold him at bay. His capacity for evil far exceeds her ability to combat—or even to evade—his malicious designs. In the end, she is at his mercy; neither she nor her several rescuers has any power to prevent him from killing her. The dramatic intensity of this staged rape/murder lends a power to its political critique that the printed page of the pamphlets could not achieve.
CLASS AND GENDER: AMBIGUITY AND ANXIETY
The political crisis facing the nation was inflected not only by religious factionalism but also by class hostility. The pamphleteers, who wrote as the mouthpieces of the godly party, attacked the behavior of the “lordly prelates” and the secular nobility and challenged their position in the established social and religious hierarchies. The class chauvinism of this literature is never far beneath the surface and is often unabashedly open, yet it was a discourse designed to obscure the heterogeneity of the adherents of various religious and political factions.
The reformist tracts of the early 1640s align themselves with England's urban citizenry, a diverse group of lesser merchants, crafts- and trades-people, apprentices, lesser clergy, and lawyers with roots in these groups. It is a credit to the political sophistication of the godly party that these tracts provide members of all these categories with a sense of belonging together to a single “class.” The shared characteristics of this group principally consisted in their being law-abiding, Protestant readers, but the texts are more interested in defining the group according to what they are not. Thus, one belonged to this “class” if one was not a Catholic and belonged neither to the leisured nobility nor to the poor masses. These texts portray “the godly” as a group of upstanding citizens who constitute a Protestant minority threatened by Arminian bishops, by popish plotters, and by unseen masses of Catholics at large in the country, who would deprive beleaguered Protestants of their property, honor, and even life in the process of handing the English nation over to the pope and the Catholic powers of Europe.47
The godly opponents of Anglicanism shrewdly supplemented their theological arguments with appeals to the class prejudices of their readers. Thus, they insinuated that several powerful bishops had risen from very humble backgrounds to their positions of power. The bishop of Ross was said to be the son of a “Pedler in Poland,” and Bishop Wren was purportedly “born in Cheap-side, his father a Haberdasher of small wares.” William Laud's roots as the son of a Reading clothier were also thrown up as evidence of his unfitness for his archbishopric of Canterbury.48
This anti-Anglican propaganda cuts both ways with its social critique. In addition to belittling bishops with humble social origins, it also damned the group by associating them with a corrupt and over-powerful nobility, together with whom they oppressed their inferiors.49 Prynne was chief among the pamphleteers using this strategy as he attacked the “Lordly” prelates. Embedded in Prynne's oft-repeated tag, “Lordly,” was an allusion to the secular power wielded by the bishops in the upper house of Parliament, where they held seats and constituted an important voting block.50 Prynne's rhetorical use of the term sought to convert long-standing social antagonism between the classes into immediate political action on the part of his readers.
The tracts also capitalized on stereotypes about the Catholicism of the nobility. There was a widespread suspicion in the city that most of the wealthy residents of the Strand (the nobility and greater gentry who could afford to maintain fashionable metropolitan residences) were Catholics.51 The author of The Black Box of Roome opened, for instance, declares, “I am sure the Strand, Covent-Garden, Drury-lane, St. Giles, and Holborne, are so replenished with Priests and their people, that they openly call one another to goe to Masse (in other places) or to Somerset house, as familiarly as one neighbor will call another to goe to one of our Churches.”52 The hostility in this tract is directed as much at the class to which these suspected Catholics belonged as at their religious practice. The emphasis is on the difference between “neighbors” and the residents of these specially named districts whose households are so “replenished” that even their priests have servants.
Similar attacks were aimed at the “Cavaliers”: army officers, who, after the failed war with Scotland, returned to London to lobby Parliament for their unpaid and grievously overdue wages. These idle men became notorious as scoundrels who ate and drank on credit (or on threat of violence), caroused and vandalized and treated the law abiding citizens as inferiors to be cheated and abused at whim.53 A contemporary broadside, complete with an engraving showing two cavaliers smoking, drinking, and gambling, said of them:
Here sits the prodigall Children, the younger brothers (Luk. 15.12) acting the parts of hot-spur Cavaliers. … With the debaucht Gallants of these lascivious and loose-living times, he drawes his Patrimony through his throat … he daily haunts Tavernes … he is enraged unto bloud, and most damnable resolutions and designes, terminated in the death and destruction of the next man he meetes, that never did, neither thought him harme. … These are children of spirituall fornication, such as goe a Whoring from God after the idols of their owne braines: Hos. 1.2 such are superstitious Romanists”54
The Cavaliers depicted in the illustration on this broadside are clearly upperclass men: their long curls, jaunty clothing, and their swords mark their social station. The clothes and the curls were taken as signs of their “effeminacy,” their womanish vanity and lascivious self-indulgence.55 Sexually debauched, murderous, and a papist, the Cavalier had all the traits necessary to become a bugbear for the godly party of London who heard not only actual reports, but also hearsay and fiction to lend evidence of his criminality.
While the tracts of the London propagandists depicted courtiers and noblemen as a uniformly corrupt group of papistical Cavaliers and debt-ridden grandees, Shirley is not so harsh in his characterization. Where the pamphleteers see only corruption at the court, Shirley paints a more complex picture of a monarch's circle. These finer distinctions are possible, in part, because the play ignores the class tensions of the pamphlet literature by ignoring the larger world outside the court.56 Looking at the court without the religious and class antagonisms that animate the tracts, Shirley sees the court as a microcosm of the larger nation. He reveals that even within the court, power pools in the hands of the politic few and works to their advantage without scruple for the injuries incurred by the powerless. Shirley provides figures with whom his audience may identify (or at least sympathize) within the play's court, an affinity the pamphleteers could never feel. The anonymous Lords, Hernando, Alvarez, and the Duchess are all sympathetic in their struggles to survive the impositions and injuries inflicted on them by the Cardinal. Even Columbo, who is cast in a doubly awkward role as the Cardinal's nephew and the Duchess's undesired extra fiancé, is a worthy and honorable man.
Shirley does not, however, allow the process of identification to be a simple one. The compromises of life at court tarnish these characters. The play has reservations about each one of them, and this conflict dominates the drama. This playwright, who couches his political observations in the guise of a story of matrimonial negotiation, expresses his ambivalence toward his characters through his presentation not of their conduct in matters of state but of their gendered behavior. Interestingly, it is in regard to the men that the play has most difficulty, and this concern reveals itself as a destabilizing doubt about the characteristics that adhere to normal, appropriate masculinity.
Whereas Jacobean tragedies tended to displace angst onto women, whom they scapegoated as violators of social order, this play focuses its sense of crisis on the excesses and failures of its aristocratic men. In the earlier plays men represented an order and hegemony threatened, but not destroyed, by social change precipitated by the weakness of women. In the face of civil war, no such order seemed sure to London theater audiences. The crisis of masculinity expressed in the pamphlet literature and also in Shirley's play reflects the degree to which social certainties had been shaken. In the tracts we have witnessed a sense of emasculation, and in this play about the court we find a profound destabilization of confidence in aristocratic manliness. Columbo's too-great masculinity is frightening. Alvarez's insufficient masculinity is contemptible. Balance seems to elude all the principal men in Shirley's play.
The play particularly problematizes the Count D'Alvarez, Duchess Rosaura's true love. That he is the Duchess's choice speaks in his favor, and the audience is further encouraged to approve of him because the evil Cardinal's schemes injure him. When Alvarez appears, briefly, he seems to be an honorable, reasonable, altogether sympathetic fellow, but he is hardly given enough time onstage to solidify this impression. In fact, other characters are allowed much more time to discuss him than he is given to speak for himself. Before he ever steps out onstage, other figures comment extensively about his person and character. The Lords, for instance, deem him an appropriate mate for the Duchess both in birth and in temperament, but they are disturbed by his acquiescence in the face of her forced match to Columbo. They can't determine whether Alvarez's inaction is a sign of his politic wariness of the Cardinal or simply of cowardice. The second Lord wavers, finally saying, “If wisdom, not inborn fear, make him compose, / I like it” (1.1.43-44). Still, it seems to them that any man of spirit would challenge Columbo's presumption to the Duchess.
There is also something troubling about the similarity that the Lords observe between Alvarez and the Duchess.
1 LORD
She has a sweet and noble nature.
2 LORD
That
Commends Alvarez, Hymen cannot tie
A knot of two more equal hearts and blood
(1.1.50-53)
Although, in the Lords' estimation, Alvarez's kinship to the Duchess's sweet and noble nature seems to be an endorsement of his best qualities, the play turns this praise into a liability. It soon seems that Alvarez is too much like her. When the Duchess's maids of honor are given their turn to pass judgment on Alvarez, they remark more than once on his “sweetness”:
VALERIA
Were I a princess, I should think Count D'Alvarez
Had a sweetness to deserve me from the world.
.....
He's young and active, and composed most sweetly.
DUCHESS
I have seen a face more tempting.
VALERIA
It had then
Too much of woman in't; his eyes speak movingly,
Which may excuse his voice, and lead away
All female pride his captive; his hair black,
Which naturally falling into curls—
(1.2.34-35, 37-42)
If this description were not enough to suggest that Alvarez teeters on the brink of effeminacy, Celinda's preference for Columbo's martial masculinity and superior intelligence makes Alvarez's deficiency more clear. The inference and innuendo of these comments about Alvarez are damaging, and Shirley adds to them later in the play when he gives Columbo and the Cardinal opportunities to record their hostile opinions of Alvarez's womanishness. The Cardinal denigrates Rosaura's attraction to Alvarez:
Because Alvarez has a softer cheek,
Can like a woman trim his wanton hair,
Spend half a day with looking in the glass
To find a posture to present himself,
And bring more effeminacy than man
Or honour to your bed; must he supplant [Columbo]?
(2.3.109-14)
For his part, Columbo contents himself with calling Alvarez “her curlèd minion” (3.2.137).
Presumably, the actor playing Alvarez confirms his character's youthful “sweetness” with a physical presence that is boyish or at least slight of physique. In his introduction to the Revels Edition of the play, E. M. Yearling notes that a cast list from an early Restoration revival of the play assigns this role to an actor young enough to have only recently graduated from women's parts. The fact that Alvarez has few lines and does not (is not trusted to?) die onstage may suggest that the King's Men also cast the role in this way in the original production. Assigning the character to a young man familiar to the audience from previous women's roles would certainly solidify the impression of Alvarez's womanishness suggested by Shirley's text.
Although three of the speakers who belittle him clearly are biased against him, the weight of suggestion lies heavily with their assessment that Alvarez is rather too feminine. In this attribute, he follows a well-established stereotype of courtiers. In 1628, William Prynne wrote in The Unlovelinesse of Love-lockes that men should not follow the fashion of wearing their hair long, “first, because it savours of Effeminacie, and womanish invirilitie: an odious, vnnatural, and filthy sinne, which damnes mens Soules to Hell, without repentance.”57
The effeminacy and debauchery of court life became a chief element in attacks on the Stuart monarchy in the 1640s and 1650s. Prynne clearly had the court in mind when he scolded those who “are always portraitured with Haire hanging loose about their Eares,” and who, even though they are “men of Place, of Birth, and Worth,” reveal themselves through their long hair to be “onely Idle, Vaine, Effeminate, Lasciuious, Deboist, Vaine-glorious, Proud, Fantastique, Singular, Ruffianly, or Vngodly wretches, who haue no power, nor trueth of Grace within them: who make their will, and fancie, the onely rule by which they walke.”58
Of course, at the center of the court and at the heart of all the furor over its womanish men was the king himself whose delicate features and long hair set the fashion at court. Although Charles I was apparently neither lascivious nor debauched, his detractors did accuse him of effeminacy, and not only because he wore his hair long but because of his unusual relationship with his wife. Charles I was widely thought to be subservient to the wishes and pro-Catholic policies of Henrietta Maria.
In the later years of the war and throughout the Interregnum, accounts of Charles's uxoriousness were retailed to discredit his cause and his son's. Lois Potter offers an account of the parliamentary seizure, in 1644, of the contents of a ship wrecked on the south coast of England. Among the items taken was a painting headed for Spain, which, according to one contemporary account, depicted Charles I offering a scepter to Henrietta Maria, who “declines it and offers it to the Pope … [by which means the] Pope and Queene share the Sceptre of England between them.”59 Potter reports that the painting, which was read as a depiction of Henrietta Maria's domination of her husband, was made available for public viewing in the Court of Star Chamber. This choice of exhibition space was a masterful stroke of vengeance on the part of Parliament. Charles's image was thus traduced in the place most associated with his government's power.
In the years before war broke out, however, criticisms of Charles were possible only in veiled terms. Parliamentarians, guided by the protocols of political rhetoric, and even the less restrained pamphleteers, avoided any direct criticism of the king, focusing instead on his domineering wife, his “evil counselors,” and on the archbishop, pretending that these advisors bullied the king into following their “malignant” plans.60 To have acknowledged that Charles was responsible for the policies of the Crown would have been to acknowledge that the Parliament and the nation were pushing for a constitutional reform which could have no other result (if successful) than the abolition of the monarchy.61 This indirect criticism was doubly effective: it not only attacked the king's policies but simultaneously denigrated the king's competence by pretending that he was not responsible for his own actions.
Also practicing this strategy of indirection were a number of critics who focused their condemnation on the court of James I. By shifting their aim to a previous generation and by prefacing their work with disclaimers noting that Charles I did not condone the libertinism of his father's court, these writers were able to find a safe channel for their anti-Stuart views. In her account of her husband's life, Lucy Hutchinson describes James's court as a place of “lust and excesses,” where people were softened and seduced to debauchery by the lavish entertainments and opulent lifestyle:
To keepe the people in their deplorable security till vengeance overtooke them, they were entertain'd with masks, stage playes, and sorts of ruder sports. Then began Murther, incest, Adultery, drunkenesse, swearing, fornication and all sort of ribaldry.62
In histories like Hutchinson's the characterization of courtiers centers on the unflattering portraits of particularly notorious men, especially on George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the great favorite of both James and Charles.
Shirley's portrait of Alvarez as the Duchess's “curlèd minion” resonates darkly with the depiction of Villiers in these anti-Stuart tomes. When Hutchinson mentions the “Catamites” of James's court she has Villiers foremost in her mind. He was “rays'd from a knight's fourth sonne to that pitch of glorie, and enjoy[ed] greate possessions acquir'd by the favour of the King upon no meritt but that of his beauty and prostitution.”63 A tract from 1641 unfavorably comparing the duke of Buckingham to Elizabeth's favorite, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, concluded that Villiers's chief recommendations were “the daintiness of his leg and foote,” his “very pleasant and vacant face,” and his “sweet and attractive manner.” This sweetness was echoed by Bishop Godfrey Goodman, who thought Villiers “the handsomest bodied man in England, his limbs were so well compacted, and his conversation so pleasing, and of so sweet a disposition.”64 Although Shirley does not imply that Alvarez is anything but an appropriate heterosexual mate for the Duchess, his effeminacy and “sweetness” of character and the actor's youth (and possible reputation as a transvestite player) combine with Alvarez's easy subjection to the Cardinal's interference, to the Duchess's will, and ultimately to Columbo's blade, to problematize him as a figure for the audience's sympathy.
Effeminate decadence was only one side of a schizophrenic characterization of Charles and his courtiers. The propaganda flooding London in 1641, and presumably the readers of those tracts, saw courtiers simultaneously as effete and violent. “Cavalier,” which became the preferred term for the gentlemen who surrounded Charles, alternately conjured up images of richly dressed courtiers or of armed soldiers. The Cavalier of Charles's court was both: his station and education afforded him with tastes for leisured pursuits as well as training in military discipline and the arms to exercise those skills. Eight years after The Cardinal's debut, Milton warned against a settlement with Charles II, a man “bred up, not in the soft effeminacies of the court onely, but in the rugged and more boistrous license of undisciplin'd Camps and Garrisons.”65 Here, Milton links effeminacy with courtly pastimes in the company of women and contrasts it to the homosocial (and equally objectionable) fellowship of military pursuits—precisely the contrast made in the play between Alvarez and the soldierly Columbo.
Shirley's play divides the two sides of this aristocratic figure into two separate characters: Alvarez, who personifies “courtliness” to a fault, and Columbo, whose military prowess is both attractive and frightening. In praise of Columbo, the Lords call him “a gallant gentleman,” and
a man of daring
And most exalted spirit; pride in him
Dwells like an ornament, where so much honour
Secures his praise.”
(1.1.22, 24-27)
Celinda finds him to have “person, and a bravery beyond / All men that I observe” (1.2.52-53). To Valeria, however, these qualities are not virtues:
He is a soldier,
A rough-hewn man, and may show well at a distance;
His talk will fright a lady; war and grim-
Faced honour are his mistresses; he raves
To hear a lute; Love meant him not his priest.
(1.2.53-57)
The two ladies who keep company with the Duchess and comment on her suitors offer the audience clues as to how their opinions should be weighed and how the men they champion should be viewed. Valeria, whose name is almost an anagram of Alvarez's, is as honorable and sensitive as the man she endorses. Valeria's approval of Alvarez, combined with the Duchess's love for him, is a strong recommendation. Celinda, who is linked to Columbo through the alliteration of their names as well as by her preference for his person, shares his haughtiness and self-centeredness. She further prejudices herself and the credibility of her opinion by compromising her honor with Columbo, with the result that she becomes an object of scorn at court and must marry beneath her to repair her reputation. Columbo's connection with this unpleasant lady tarnishes his credit with the audience.
For his own part, Columbo appears to be a strict upholder of military honor in the scene in the camp where his strategy conflicts with Hernando's. Although the other officers indicate that he has been too harsh with Hernando, the worst that can be said of Columbo at this point is that he has no fear of battle and will not tolerate any suggestion of cowardice from his troops. When he returns from the war, however, Columbo confirms Valeria's assessment of his faults, revealing the extent of his haughty pride and the force of his fury. There is an especially uncomfortable moment when Columbo presumes to remind the King that soldiers secure the kingdoms of monarchs.
[W]here is honour?
And gratitude of kings, when they forget
Whose hand secured their greatness?
..... soldiers are
Your valiant fools, whom when your own securities
Are bleeding you can cherish, but when once
Your state and nerves are knit, not thinking when
To use their surgery again, you cast
Them off, and let them hang in dusty armouries,
Or make it death to ask for pay.
(3.2.220-22, 228-34)
The allusion to England's army impatiently waiting to collect its back pay cites a real injustice, but it also associates Columbo with the trouble caused by those unemployed soldiers. Furthermore, his reminder that his sword has secured the state also implies the opposite: his force could be destructive if he feels he has been injured.
The Duchess and Alvarez bear the brunt of Columbo's angry discontent. Although his first imposition on the Duchess's sexual autonomy was merely as an innocent pawn in the Cardinal's plans, Columbo becomes as much a tyrant as his uncle. Even after he has given up any intention of marrying her, he attempts to control the Duchess's sexual behavior:
Do not fear
I come to court you, madam, y'are not worth
The humblest of my kinder thoughts; I come
To show you the man you have provoked and lost,
And tell you what remains of my revenge.
Live, but never presume again to marry,
I'll kill the next at th'altar, and quench all
The smiling tapers with his blood; if after
You dare provoke the priest and heaven so much,
To take another, in thy bed I'll cut him from
Thy warm embrace, and throw his heart to ravens.
(4.2.63-73)
Certainly Columbo has been provoked by the Duchess, who first let him believe she was content to marry him and then changed her mind, making him look foolish. His rage, however, is overwhelming and bloody; it is out of proportion with the injury he suffered, particularly when he knew in advance that she loved Alvarez.
The play is uncomfortable with its courtiers. The privilege and power of the life they lead taints them all. Shirley's play depicts an aristocracy in decline, consuming itself with its own violence. At the wedding feast in act 3, Alvarez allows the mysterious masquers to lead him away to his death, an absolutely passive victim of Columbo's plot. When Columbo returns to stand over the dead body of this poor rival, calling all in the theater to be “spectators in my act,” we realize that what has been staged is an assault not only on the body of the aristocracy but on the substance of monarchy. Shirley brazenly points toward England's king and his reputed lack of manliness, when his fictional King of Navarre can manage only this most undignified response: “This sight doth shake / All that is man within me” (3.2.99-100).
Because Columbo's act has shown the vulnerability of the monarch (both physical and emotional), it threatens to unravel the intangible aura of majesty that justifies the King's position and power. The King recognizes this danger—and Shirley makes him state outright that Columbo's affront “That with such boldness struck at me,” “bids me punish it / Or be no king” (3.2.208, 204-5). Shirley ends this scene with a nasty bit of irony: with Alvarez still bleeding at their feet (150 lines later), the King finally works his anger to a height sufficient to sentence Columbo to death, an act the Duchess concludes “shows like justice” (3.2.248). If the play's explication of the falseness of “shows” (the deadly masque, the Duchess's letter trick, the King's hollow majesty) were not enough to undercut the assurance of this final line, we have only to wait for the fourth act to open to find that the King's justice is as frail as his manhood.
Like the monstrously mixed sexuality of the Cavaliers, courtiers, and prelates in the pamphlet literature, The Cardinal's concern with the masculinity of its male characters is so overdetermined as to suggest that the issue for both the play and the godly was not really the sexual behavior of men like Laud, or Buckingham, or Alvarez, or Columbo. In fact, it was the political influence and social station of these men that were of real concern and were the source of tremendous jealousy, fear, and loathing.
The vehemence of this response reflects a realization of the gravity of the national crisis in 1641. Insofar as the play complains of the same abuses that the pamphlets fought and shares the imagery and the sexual obsessions of those tracts, it makes their case with a persuasive force they could not approach; nonetheless, Shirley takes great pains to distance his play from the political aims of London's godly party. When the Duchess speaks of the church's “altar” (2.3.159), she uses a critical word in the language of religious affiliation in Shirley's day. Calvinists within and without the Anglican Church held as their principal grievance Laud's repositioning of the Communion table so that it served as, and was called, an altar. Altars were a feature of Catholic churches, where the sacrament was distanced from the people and only partly shared with them. The Anglican Church, under the influence of Calvinist bishops from the 1570s until Laud's ascendancy in 1633, had brought the Communion table forward and offered the wine as well as the bread to congregants. Laud pushed the table back to the east end of the church and set up rails about it.66
Shirley, then, is clearly not positioning the Duchess as a champion of reformed theology against the Cardinal's innovations. Instead, she adopts a pragmatic approach that seeks ecclesiastical reform in order to save prelacy from its critics. To this end, the Duchess urges the Cardinal to reform himself:
[It is my] hope, my lord, you will behold yourself
In a true glass, and see those injust acts
That so deform you, and by timely cure
Prevent a shame, before the short-haired men
Do crowd and call for justice.
(2.3.164-68)
The Duchess's characterization of the “short-haired men” as a mob who protest in crowds (which they did repeatedly at the end of 1641) clearly marks the Duchess and Shirley—and probably a large block of his audience, as well—as members of a party that disparaged the aims and methods of the “Roundheads.”
Brian Manning details the formation of such a party in the Parliament during the course of 1641. What he calls the “party of order” was a coalition of religious and social moderates, who constituted a “party” only in the loosest sense of that term. They did not agree on all issues, and most did not align themselves with Charles, yet they came together to restrain the radicalism of some of his opponents.67 This party was concerned to appease the godly party so that real reform (both in church and state) could be avoided. The difficult position of this party of order was expressed by Edmund Waller in a speech to his fellow members of the House of Commons 3 July 1641:
I see some are moved with a number of hands against the Bishops, which I confesse, rather inclines me to their defence, for I look upon Episcopacy, as a Counter-scarf, or outwork, which if it be taken by this assault of the people, and withall this Mysterie once revealed, that we must deny them nothing when they aske it thus in troopes, we may in the next place, have as hard a taske to defend our propriety, as we have lately had to recover it from the prerogative.68
Waller sees that Parliament might become a hostage to the will of the London masses if they reward the mobs demonstrating outside Parliament by granting their demands for religious reform. He is no more anxious to submit his vote and his property to the will of the people than he is to submit to the will of the king. Again, class chauvinism is at work. The party of order formed to protect the interests of rich merchants and the greater gentry from infringement by MPs with a constituency among the lesser classes, who, it was feared, might target the property and power of their social “betters” once they had successfully eliminated their superiors in the church.69 What Waller fears is that all forms of hierarchy will eventually fall to challenge; Waller believes that he sees the beginnings of an important ideological shift stirring in his nation.
The party of order stood in an uneasy position between Charles and his fiercest opponents. Fearing war, they hoped to broker a peace by urging reform on the king and the church, while frustrating the parliamentary maneuvers and mass demonstrations of the godly party, which sought to force more thorough change. Shirley's play demonstrates a similar conflict. Its allegiance seems to be first with its aristocratic characters, yet it sees their flaws magnified to unbearable proportions and portrays their abuses so feelingly that its strongest impression is of their corruption.
In The Subject of Tragedy, Catherine Belsey describes the tension between Shirley's ostensibly royalist ideology and the play's critical presentation of its monarch. In Belsey's view, this tension arises from a “contradiction between the ideological project and the requirements of the story.”70 It is her contention that the narrative requirements of the plot dictate a need for conflict, which Shirley could only supply by making his King acquiesce to the Cardinal until the final act when the monarch reasserts himself to return order to the stage and to the fictional kingdom: a stronger king would have ruined Shirley's plot. She observes the odd disappearance of the King from the action for the bulk of the fourth and fifth acts, during which time his sentence against Columbo is reversed and the command of the court seems wholly to be in the Cardinal's power. Belsey concludes, “If the king's promise had stood uncontradicted and Columbo been executed, the play would have ended with Act III. It is only the otherwise unaccountable absence of the sovereign which makes revenge imperative and sustains the narrative for another two acts. The effect, of course, is that the royalist project is severely undermined” (101). Belsey observes the deep ambivalence at the heart of Shirley's play, but I think we needn't ascribe his certifiably odd characterization of the King of Navarre to narrative necessity.
Alternatively, the King's absence from acts 4 and 5 may be read as Shirley's effort to isolate the king from the action that occurs in his absence. The King's absence allows the Cardinal to plot and plan unhindered. It allows the audience to focus on the Duchess's abuse by Columbo and the Cardinal, and to focus their emotional response on these tyrants. It allows the Duchess's counterstrategy to seem like the only course available to her in a world where justice is abortive and where there is no final authority to hear her appeal. More to the point, it allows the King to avoid implication in the violence and ugliness of the court, which his presence would either deter or direct.
Shirley is aware that his protection of the King is a poor compromise at best. As we have seen, the King acknowledges his failing in the final moment of the play when he exclaims:
How much are kings abused by those they take
To royal grace! Whom, when they cherish most
By nice indulgence, they do often arm
Against themselves; from whence this maxim springs,
None have more need of perspectives then kings.
(5.3.293-97)
The King concedes his own implication in the deeds of his favorite, and names his great weakness: he lacks proper vision. He has not seen what was happening in his court, he has not been able to judge the character of those who were closest to him. This confession is a good thing. In the end, Shirley's King recognizes his failings and takes charge of his country. However, the cumulative picture of monarchy offered by the play is deeply unstable. The conflicted characterization of this monarch is underscored by the structural instability of the play—the strange absence of the king from two crucial acts.
Belsey is absolutely right that the problem in The Cardinal is one of ideology, but not of ideology in conflict with other, more formal demands on the dramatist. The play, and particularly its presentation of monarchy, is the site of ideological stress, of a conflicted, contested, as yet unsolidified ideology in-the-making. Royalism, in 1641, was not yet a well-formulated notion. It was not yet even associated with a true political party. Few of Charles's subjects were comfortable with his vision of monarchy; he faced critics of all religious persuasions and from across the social strata. As we have seen, the moderate members of Parliament were more likely to object to Charles's policies than to align themselves with the king's interests. It was not until later in the decade when parliamentary opposition to Charles came to be associated with “Puritan” extremism and antimonarchism that a “royalist ideology” jelled, tying religious moderation to efforts to restore Charles to the kingship he effectively lost in 1642. Embedded in the text of Shirley's play, and enacted on the Blackfriars's stage, was the ambivalence of a nation not yet ready to contemplate the abolition of monarchy, but in desperate hopes of reforming the monarchy and the monarch it had.
Notes
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William Prynne, Newes from Ipswich (London: T. Bates, 1641).
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These material innovations in the churches and the worship service were the outward signs of Laud's “Arminian” attack on the established Calvinism of the English Church. Among the changes in the liturgy was the omission of prayers for the king, whose position as head of the Anglican Church denied the authority of the pope. Also absent from Laud's worship book were prayers for Charles's sister, the Protestant queen of Bohemia. Laud's opponents made much of such omissions (see Elizabeth Skerpan, The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution, 1642-1660 [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992], 44-45). For a discussion of the tenets of Arminianism and Laud's campaign to uproot Calvinism see Nicholas Tyacke, “Puritanism, Arminianism, and Counter-Revolution,” in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973), 119-43. See also Christopher Hill, “The Protestant Nation,” and “From Grindal to Laud,” in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 2:24, 63-82.
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Lucy Hutchinson uses godly as a more appropriate term for Calvinist Protestants than puritan (Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973], 38). In his edition (1806) of Hutchinson's work, Julius Hutchinson noted that godly was “the name always given by the Puritans to those of their own party” (quoted in Sutherland's edition, 299). Now as then, puritan evokes a stereotype of separatist, religious zealotry, which was never an accurate description of many of the people to whom it was applied. John Pym, a central figure in the godly party, argued in Parliament in 1621 against the use of “that odious and factious name of Puritans” to label religious reformists like himself (see Tyacke, “Puritanism,” 129). In the interest of avoiding this stereotype, I will refer to the somewhat loose party of Protestant reformers as the “godly party” rather than as “Puritans.” This group was predominately Calvinist in theology and included Presbyterians as well as a variety of separatist sects, who came together in the cause of resisting the Anglican movement toward Catholicism. For my purposes, the term emphasizes the explicitly political methods used by this group to achieve their reformist objectives. For further examples of seventeenth-century objection to the categorizing of people as “puritans” see A Discourse Concerning Puritans. a Vindication of Those, Who Unjustly Suffer by the Mistake, Abuse, and Misapplication of That Name (London: Robert Bostock, 1641); and Hutchinson, Memoirs, esp. 43-44.
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Lawrence Stone makes this point in The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 29-30. He believes that the excess of horror with which the public seems to have viewed the Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick disfigurements is the result of their having been condemned to suffer physical punishments inappropriate to their social station. J. P. Kenyon agrees that public hostility to the Court of Star Chamber was probably fueled by the harshness of its sentences for upper-class offenders. Kenyon, however, focuses on aristocratic prisoners punished by that court, rather than on members of the professions like these three pamphleteers (The Stuart Constitution, 1603-1688 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 105).
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In discussing the danger that a public execution might be read by the public as a spectacle of the state's oppression rather than as an enactment of justice, Michel Foucault describes the delicate balance that must be maintained so that the tide of shame meant to be cast on the condemned individual does not turn backward onto the executioner and the state authority represented by his office (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vintage, 1979]).
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John Bastwick, The Letany of John Bastwick ([London], 1637), A4.
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A Speech Made by Captain Audley Mervin to the Upper House in Ireland. With Certaine Articles of Treason Against Sir Richard Bolton and Others (London: Hugh Perry, 1641), 5. Later in the same tract Mervin compares Job's suffering at Satan's hands to the mutilation suffered by English subjects under sentence of ecclesiastical justice: “when he proceeds to infringe Iobs liberty, [Satan] doth not pillory him, nor cut off his ears, nor bore him through the tongue; he onely spots him with some ulcers; here Sathan staines, when these persons by their trayterous combinations, envie the very bloud that runs unspilt in our veines” (9).
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An Honourable and Worthy Speech: Spoken in the High Covrt of Parliament, by Mr. Smith of the Middle-Temple, October 28. 1641. Concerning the Regulating of the Kings Majesties Prerogative, and the Liberties of the Subjects (London: Barnard Alsop, 1641). Brian Manning identifies this Mr. Smith and notes that he was allied to the court party through his association with the duke of Richmond—obviously a troubled alliance, given his critical remarks in the speech quoted here (The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649 [London: Heinemann, 1976], 82, 94, 135).
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Manning's English People offers a cogent study of the economic crisis and its effect on the common subjects of England. Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone offer alternative—and conflicting—views of the relationship between economic crisis and the outbreak of war.
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This new freedom of the press was celebrated on the title page of a tract published in London in 1643, which claimed to reveal “One Argument More Against the Cavaliers … Printed in the Yeare When Men Think What They List and Speake and Write What They Think.”
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Two recent studies of the rhetoric and political effectiveness of the pamphlet literature of the period have been most helpful. Elizabeth Skerpan's book, The Rhetoric of Politics, looks at particular moments and strategies of the partisan literature generated by parliamentary supporters, royalists, and religious radicals, while Lois Potter offers a comprehensive study of the methods, modes, and means of production of royalist propaganda (Secret Rites and Secret Writings: Royalist Literature, 1641-1660 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989]). Both women discuss the importance of the London audience of this literature to the development and outcome of the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s. A tremendous resource for any study of the pamphlet literature of this period is the Thomason collection of the British Library. George Thomason, a contemporary bookseller, collected some twenty-two thousand items, including tracts, pamphlets, broadsides, sermons, parliamentary speeches, and newssheets published between 1640 and 1660. The catalog of the collection is extremely useful to chronological studies, as it lists the items in order of publication.
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Archy's Dream, Sometimes Iester to His Maiestie; but Exiled the Court by Canterburies Malice ([London], 1641), A2.
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A New Play Called Canterburie His Change of Diot ([London], 1641), A2, A2v.
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In April and again in December 1641, Charles was discovered to have conspired with members of the army to suppress parliamentary opposition by force. The plots, however, were revealed to Parliament and exposed in the public press before they could reach fruition (see Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637-1642 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1991], 291-95; Hutchinson, Memoirs, 50-51; Manning, English People, 74-76, 102-3).
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See Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 454-524.
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Sandra Burner documents and discusses Shirley's association with the Catholics among the court literary coteries. However, her evidence for believing Shirley himself to have been Catholic in the 1640s seems fairly weak. It is true that he was libeled by Captain Thomas Audley in the 4-11 January 1644 issue of Mercurius Britannicus as “Frier Sherley,” but any Anglican with court connections would have smelled of Catholicism to Audley. Suffice it to say that Shirley, with his court friends and work for the theater, would have been suspected of crypto-Catholic leanings by those of the godly party (James Shirley: A Study of Literary Coteries and Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England [Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988], 101-3).
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In The Fall of the British Monarchies, Russell details the ebb and flow of support for Charles during the first years of the 1640s, noting that the king's popularity was generally at its highest when he was least in the public eye. In fact, his popularity seems to have peaked during the months of August to November 1641, when he was in Scotland (303-4).
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There seems to be a critical consensus that Carolinian theater audiences were a wealthier and somewhat more homogeneous group than the audiences drawn to plays during Elizabeth's reign. R. Malcolm Smuts notes that “under Charles, the Crown had to take steps to alleviate the jams of aristocratic coaches clogging the entire Blackfriars district whenever a new play opened” (Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987], 63). See also Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Tradition (London: Macmillan, 1952); W. A. Armstrong, “The Audience of the Elizabethan Private Theaters,” Review of English Studies n.s. 10 no. 39 (1959): 234-49; Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Michael Neill, “‘Wits Most Accomplished Senate’: The Audience of the Caroline Private Theaters,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 18 (1978), 341-60; Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theater of the Stuart Court (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
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See Smuts, Court Culture, 110 n. 30.
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Jonson had been in trouble in 1603 for the presumed topicality of Sejanus and its depiction of tyranny, and in 1605 Jonson and George Chapman spent time in prison for their anti-Scottish satire in Eastward Hoe, a play on which John Marston had also collaborated.
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Dugard, quoted in Potter, Secret Rites, 74.
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William D'Avenant, Sir William D'Avenant, The Siege of Rhodes: A Critical Edition, ed. Ann-Mari Hedbäck (Stockholm: Uppsala University Press, 1973).
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E. M. Yearling, introduction to The Cardinal, by James Shirley (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1986), 3. In his introduction to the play, Yearling points out that The Cardinal would have been too late to warn Charles against Laud, who had already been impeached and was in the tower awaiting trial. For Yearling, the fact that the play follows Laud's arrest proves that the play has no political intentions, despite its topical allusions. It seems to me, however, that the play and a number of Charles's critics in Parliament sought to persuade the king to learn from his experience with Strafford and Laud that he must change his approach to Parliament and his mode of government if he hoped to avoid war. Whether these hopes were merely political posturing or the product of a real belief that Charles could still avert a conflict with Parliament is not clear. Nonetheless, The Cardinal was an active voice within the political arena during that last year before the fighting began.
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An Appeale of the Orthodox Ministers of the Church of England: Against Richard Montague Late Bishop of Chichester, now Bishop of Norwich. To the Most Illustriovs, High, and Honourable Court of Parliament. And to the Nobilitie, Orthodox Clergie, Gentry, and Communaltie of England. With the proceedings against him in Bow Church. And an Epistle to Bishop Montague himselfe. Also, A Supplication of the Ministers of Scotland against the said Montague Wherein his dangerous Heresies are revealed; and the Character of an Arminian or Montaguist is added (Edinburgh, 1629), 27.
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Lucius Carey, second viscount Faulkland, A Speech Made to the Hovse of Commons Concerning Episcopacy by the Lord Viscount Faulkeland (London: Thomas Walkely, 1641), 3-4.
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Appeale, 2.
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William Prynne, A Briefe Svrvay and Censvre of Mr. Cozens His Couzening Devotions (London, 1628), 7-8, emphasis Prynne's.
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Richard Ward, The Principall duty of Parliament-men (London: J. R., 1641), 24.
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A Looking-Glasse for all Lordly Prelates. Wherein they may cleerley behold the true divine Originall and laudable Pedigree, whence they are descended; together with their holy lives and actions laid open in a double Parallell, The first, between the Divell; The second, betweene Iewish High-Priests, and Lordly Prelates; and by their double dissimilitude from Christ, and Apostles ([London], 1636), 29-31.
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The authors of these tracts are uniformly male, and the audience they assume is male as well, despite the cross-gender identification that this imagery requires of its readers.
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Looking-Glasse, 54.
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The Times Dissected. Or a Learned Discourse of Severall Occurences Very Worthy of Speciall Observation, to Deter Evill Men, and Incourage Good ([London], 1641), 6.
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Canterbvries Pilgrimage: Or the Testimony of an Accused Conscience for the Bloud of Mr. Burton, Mr. Prynne, and Doctor Bastwicke and the Just Deserved Sufferings He Lyes Under: Shewing the Glory of Reformation, Above Prelaticall Tyranny (London: H. Walker, 1641), A3v.
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Looking-Glasse, 9.
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Appeale, 24.
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Speech Made by Captain Audley Mervin, 2 (n.7).
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A reference to Laud's revision of the Book of Common Prayer, particularly his omission of prayers for Charles's sister, the Protestant queen of Bohemia (see also n. 2).
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A Rent in the Lawne Sleeves or Episcopacy Eclypsed, by the Most Happy Interposition of a Parliament Discoursed Dialogue-wise Betweene a Bishop and a lesuite (London: John Thomas, 1641), 3.
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Smith, Honourable and Worthy Speech, 2; emphasis mine.
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Articles Ministred by His Majesties Commissioners for Causes Ecclesiasticall. Presented to the High Court of Parliament Against John Gwin, Vicar of Cople in the County of Bedford (London: V. V., 1641).
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London, 1641.
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George Thomason (see n. 11) collected three tracts published in 1641 on the subject of John Atherton's trial, confession, and execution for sodomy: The Life and Death of John Atherton Lord Bishop of Waterford and Lysmore (London), A Sermon Preached at the Bvriall of the Said Iohn Atherton (Dublin), and The Penitent Death of a Woefvll Sinner. Or, the Penitent Death of John Atherton (Dublin: Society of Stationers).
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Lord Bishops None of the Lords Bishops. Or A Short Discourse wherin is proved that prelaticall jurisdiction Is Not Of Divine Institution, but forbidden by Christ himselfe, as Heathenish, and branded by his Apostles for Antichristian; wherin also sundry notable passages of the Arch Prelate of Canterbury in his late Booke, Intituled, A Relation of a Conference, & c. are by the way met withall ([London], November 1649), K4v.
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Rent in the Lawne Sleeves, 4.
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Petition of the Weamen of Middlesex … with the Apprentices of Londons Petition (London: William Bowen, 1641), A2v. There was a legend, particularly popular during the Reformation, that one of the popes had been a woman who had successfully masqueraded as a man until her licentiousness led to pregnancy and she was discovered in childbirth. This story combined several favorite slanders on Catholic priests: that they were effeminate, that they were sexually voracious, that they were easily duped, and that the succession of popes from St. Peter was a sham, or at least hopelessly corrupted.
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Anatomy of Et cætera (London, 1641), 3; Canterbvries Pilgrimage, A3v (n. 30); Looking-Glasse, b2v.
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It was largely fear of the unknown that made Catholicism so frightening. Given its expansive definition of popery and its restrictive understanding of properly reformed Protestantism, the godly party, though living in a Protestant nation, saw itself as an isolated and persecuted minority. Robin Clifton offers a valuable discussion of the distrust and alarm caused by Catholicism in the early 1640s and examines the depth and sources of that fear in the political crisis of 1641-42 (“Fear of Popery,” in Russell, Origins of the English Civil War, 144-67).
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A Discovery of the Notorious Proceedings of William Laud. Archbishop of Canterbury, in Bringing Innovations Into the Church, and Raising Up Troubles in the State, His Pride Riding in His Coach When the King Himselfe Went Along on Foot, and Being Reproved, Would not Alight. With His Tyrannicall Government Both in Himselfe and His Agents. Confessed by John Browne a Prisoner in the Gatehouse, Twice Examined by a Committee of Six from the Honourable House of Commons (London: Henry Walker, 1641), A2v; Wrens Anatomy. Discovering His Notorious Pranks, and Shamefull Wickednesse ([London], 1641), 2; Old Newes Newly Revived: Or, the Discovery of all Occurrences Happened Since the Beginning of the Parliament ([London], 1641), A3.
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See, for instance, the lampoon on bishops and courtiers in Fortunes Tennis-ball (London, 1640).
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His use of the phrase “tyrannizing Lordly prelates” in Newes from Ipswich is characteristic of Prynne's writing and may have identified him as the tract's author. In 1641, when the debate over the bishop's role in Parliament was heating up, Newes was reprinted, and a new tract, The Antipathy of the English Lordly Prelacy (London, 1641), indicated Prynne's continuing involvement.
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In part, this fear was fueled by the fact that Charles allowed a number of known recusants and Jesuits places at his court. Another continuing provocation was the royal marriage settlement that entitled Henrietta Maria to maintain a private chapel and to keep priests (four Capuchins in addition to a confessor) in her household. It also became public knowledge that the pope had sent an envoy to the English court who had been in the country secretly for some time before his presence was known. That during his personal rule Charles had not enforced the laws against recusants did not help matters. In some quarters there was worry that the king might himself be a crypto-Catholic; certainly he seemed inclined to grant “papists” special protection. In Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England, ed. William Molesworth (New York: Burt Franklin, 1963), Thomas Hobbes discusses contemporary reaction to the Catholic influences at Charles's court. See also Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 23, 229-30, 259, 352-54; Clifton, “Fear of Popery,” 152; Quentin Bone, Henrietta Maria: Queen of the Cavaliers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 99-119.
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The Black Box of Roome opened ([London], 1641), 18. Clifton points out that there was some truth in this characterization. Priests tended to come from landed, monied families who could afford to send their sons abroad to seminary. When these men returned home, they sought out their own class and ministered and made converts in that company (“Fear of Popery,” 152-53).
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See Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 291-92; Manning, English People, 22-23, 71-78; Donald Pennington, “The Making of War,” in Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill, ed. Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 161-63, 172-75, 178.
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The Svcklington Faction: Or Sucklings Roaring Boyes ([London], 1641).
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The long, curled hair fashionable among aristocratic men was a particular target of the godly, who wore their hair short and unadorned (hence the name Roundheads). Prynne maintained that it was sinful for men to wear their hair long (The Unlovelinesse of Love-Lockes. Or a summarie discovrse proouing: The wearing, and nourishing or a Locke, or Loue-Locke, to be altogether unseemely, and vnlawfull vnto Christians [London, 1628]). See also Edmund Miller, ed. introduction to Mount-Orgueil (1641) by William Prynne (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints, 1984), iii.
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The only scene that occurs outside the court is set in the army camp, an extension of the King of Navarre's sphere populated by commissioned officers who, in peace time, live at court. The play does not acknowledge a larger nation, with rural and urban interests, beyond the tight little world in which the King and his courtiers live. However, class remains an implicit issue in this play, which was written and produced in London. Although the setting ignores the existence of a layered society, the ambivalence of the play toward its wealthy, courtier characters is a product of the class hostilities in the English capital in 1641.
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Prynne, The Unlovelinesse of Love-Lockes, 48. The term effeminacy has rightly come under great scrutiny in queer studies of the Renaissance, since terms in use then did not necessarily carry the meanings they do today. Prynne is not necessarily talking about homosexual behavior in this passage, despite calling “Effeminacie” an “vnnatural, and filthy sinne”—language that was used to condemn sodomy. In this text, Prynne freely conflates heterosexual lust with “Effeminacie.” He seems to believe that men who wear their hair long and curled make themselves look like women. Prynne asserts that they do so because they are lustful and because they seek to provoke lust in others, perhaps including other men as well as women. Prynne's gloss on the sinfulness of this practice condemns it “not onely because it was a pompe and vanitie of the world” but also “a meere baite to inamor, and inescate [ensnare] others” (49).
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Ibid., 32, 41, 36.
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Mercurius Britannicus, 10-17 June 1644, 307; Potter, Secret Rites, 46.
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Malignant was a favorite tag that godly pamphleteers hung on the king's supporters.
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Christopher Hill discusses the artificiality and disingenuity of this avoidance of criticizing Charles in A Nation of Change and Novelty: Radical Politics, Religion, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1990), 24-34. In Eikonoklastes (1649), John Milton announces that this strategy of displacing criticism of Charles onto his accessories is no longer necessary or effective. “As [Charles I], to acquitt himself, hath not spar'd his Adversaries, to load them with all sorts of blame and accusation, so to him, as in his Book alive, there will be us'd no more Courtship then he uses; but what is properly his own guilt, not imputed any more to his evil Counsellors, (a Ceremony us'd longer by the Parlament then he himself desir'd) shall be laid heer without circumlocutions at his own dore” (Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962], 3:341).
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Hutchinson, Memoirs, 42.
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Ibid., 46. Villiers was not the only favorite with whom James was reputed to have had a homosexual relationship, but he was the last and most powerful of the king's favorites, and the most hated. His power continued when Charles succeeded his father to the throne. Villiers was assassinated in 1628.
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See Henry Wotton, A Parallell Betweene Robert Late Earle of Essex, and George Late Duke of Buckingham (London, 1641), 7, 8; James I: By His Contemporaries, ed. Robert Ashton (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 124; David M. Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers: King James of England and Scotland (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991). Goodman's account, which seems not to have been published until 1839, was written in the early 1650s as a response to Anthony Weldon's vehemently anti-Stuart Court and Character of King James (London: R. I. to be sold by J. Collins, 1651). See also Royce Macgilivray, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 28.
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Eikonoklastes, 3:570-71.
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As Hill points out, “Railing off the altar … emphasized not only the real presence [of Christ's body in the host] but also the mediating role of the priest. Puritans wanted the communion table to be in the center of the church, with the minister attending on seated communicants, not the priest mediating the miracle of the mass” (see “The Protestant Nation,” 24; and “From Grindal to Laud,” 63-82).
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Manning, English People, 46-70.
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A Speech Made by Mr. Waller Esquire, in the Honourable House of Commons, Concerning Episcopacy, Whether It Should be Committed or Rejected ([London], 1641), 4-5.
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Manning describes this emerging middle class and their interests in some detail (English People, 112-62, esp. 152-62).
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Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York: Methuen, 1985), 101. Belsey also develops her argument about The Cardinal's royalist ideology in her essay, “Tragedy, Justice, and the Subject,” in 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century, by Francis Barker et al. (Essex: University of Essex Press, 1981), 166-86.
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