Introduction to The Lady of Pleasure
[In the following excerpt, Huebert characterizes The Lady of Pleasure as a dramatization of decadence, regarding which Shirley's own stance is unclear.]
The first reader of The Lady of Pleasure to have recorded a critical response to the play is Abraham Wright, who at some time near the middle of the seventeenth century made the following notation in his commonplace book:
Ye best play of Shirleys for ye lines, but ye plot is as much as none. ye latter end of ye 4th act ye scene twixt Celestine and ye lord is good for ye humour of neete complement. Aretina, who is ye lady of pleasure a good part for ye … expressing ye many waies of pleasure and expences. Celestine for ye same: both shewing ye pride and excesse in every thing of ye court ladies.1
Wright gives unusual prominence to Shirley, to judge by the space he allots in his commonplace book to quotations from and comments on eleven of Shirley's plays. By contrast, Beaumont and Fletcher are represented by six titles, Jonson and Shakespeare by two apiece. Thus Shirley's first literary critic is a sympathetic reader, and one whose standards of judgement are those common in his day rather than ours. The Maid's Tragedy is for Wright ‘a very good play’, better even than A King and No King, itself ‘a good play … especially for ye plot wch is extraordinary’. The White Devil is ‘but an indifferent play to reade, but for ye presentments I beeleeve good’; A New Way to Pay Old Debts is ‘a silly play’; and Hamlet ‘but an indifferent play, ye lines but meane’. However whimsical these judgements may seem today, they are based on typical Caroline attitudes: a preference for tragicomedy over other dramatic forms, and a belief in the radical importance of plot.
STRUCTURE
Wright's claim that the plot of The Lady of Pleasure ‘is as much as none’ ranks as his most interesting observation about the play. What he means, no doubt, is that the play lacks a complicated intrigue, for this is what he praises in plays whose plots he admires. The plot of Hyde Park is, according to Wright, ‘best at ye last act’, and The Duchess of Malfi is to be commended ‘especially for ye plot at ye latter end’. Wright clearly has a taste for the bizarre coincidences, reversals and contrivances which have disturbed many modern readers of these plays, and he misses these artificial devices in The Lady of Pleasure.
More importantly, he overlooks by the narrowest of margins the structural axis which becomes apparent when the play is considered not merely as a series of narrative events but as a social artefact.2 In drawing attention to Aretina's ‘expences’ and in commenting on ‘ye pride and excesse in every thing of ye court ladies’, Wright seems to be reaching towards a concept such as conspicuous consumption or, to use the language of the play itself, ‘prodigality’. This impulse governs the social behaviour of the characters in the play with such alarming tyranny as to suggest that Shirley is observing and commenting on a pattern of life in the London society he intimately knew.
The signs of prodigality in The Lady of Pleasure have almost nothing to do with the mere satisfaction of primary human appetites. There is plenty of food in the world of the play, most of it made available in the offstage banquets, taverns and ordinaries which occupy a central place in the social lives of the gentry; but feasting in this play is an acquired art in which competitive social nuances have replaced gastronomical rumblings. When Alexander Kickshaw anticipates a tavern meal, he has in mind ‘a dozen partridge in a dish’ along with pheasants, quails and sturgeon (IV.ii.148-51). When he flatters himself with the prospect of dining at court, his desire is explicitly ‘not for the table’ (V.ii.104) but for the pleasure of making a favourable impression. The drinks which accompany such self-conscious meals may be sack or Rhenish or ‘what strange wine else’ (V.i.75), but never ale or beer. This is a world of sophisticated palates where Falstaff's traditional menus would be more likely to provoke derision than hunger.
The smells and savours associated with food in The Lady of Pleasure owe more to artifice than to nature. The appropriate symbol of refinement which alters and disguises natural food is the box of sugar-plums that Littleworth never tires of offering to the ladies. Equally telling is Kickshaw's resolution, on having discovered a lavish source of income, to ‘forget there is a butcher’ and rely instead on the advice of ‘a witty epicure’ in planning his meals (V.ii.105-7). Although food and talk about food are constantly crossing these characters' lips, there is nothing of the aromatic succulence which draws everyone in the direction of Ursula's passionately roasting pigs in Bartholomew Fair. Instead of simply appealing to the senses, food in The Lady of Pleasure is refined by art until it rivals the dreams of Sir Epicure Mammon.3
What is true about food holds even more conspicuously in the case of clothing. Here the extreme instance is that of Master Frederick, who arrives from the university in respectable academic dress only to discover that his aunt's fashionable pretensions have been mortified. Promptly consigned to the tutelage of Kickshaw and Littleworth, Master Frederick is transformed with great effort into a caricature of the over-dressed gallant. In a scene that amounts to a seventeenth-century fashion show (IV.ii), albeit one with a clumsy male model, Littleworth coaches Frederick in the conspicuous art of wearing his new clothes. The mundane considerations of comfort, cleanliness and utility are petulantly brushed aside in Littleworth's pursuit of pure ostentation. The wearer of truly fashionable clothing will find even his body altered, Littleworth claims: ‘it is not / The cut of your apparel makes a gallant, / But the geometrical wearing of your clothes’ (IV.ii.9-11). Good taste is hardly the point, and restraint is out of the question; the object of Littleworth's code of dress is flamboyance at any price.
The dressing of Master Frederick is only a slight exaggeration of what passes for normal elsewhere in the play. Lord Unready, whose name I have pilfered from Shirley's inadvertently appropriate stage direction,4 makes his first two appearances while suffering the attentions of Master Haircut to such details of public life as his periwig. And Celestina, both wealth and youth on her side by virtue of being a widow at fifteen, broadens the principle of decorative ostentation to include her coach and sedan-chair. With an ingenuous honesty appropriate to her youth, Celestina admits that the purpose of lavish consumption is to be splendidly conspicuous: ‘my balcony / Shall be the courtier's idol, and more gazed at / Than all the pageantry at Temple Bar’ (I.ii.93-5). Celestina's desire to live in a world of ‘silk and silver’ (I.ii.21) may be shocking to her Steward, but it is simply the adolescent fantasy which corresponds to the values of her society at large.
Shirley's awareness of prodigality as more than an accident that happens to the rich—as a principle of human behaviour, in fact—can be deduced from his metaphorical application of the idea to the sexual experience of his characters. Kickshaw would like to be thought of as a sexual gourmet: hence, in alluding euphemistically to his female quarry, he prefers the term ‘pheasant’ (III.i. 140) to such traditional alternatives as ‘mutton’. The note of bravado in Kickshaw's attitude towards women is a false one in the sense that it has nothing to do with sheer appetite or high spirits; his idiom belongs not to the locker-room but to the wine-tasting salon. The morning after his first meeting with Celestina finds Kickshaw enumerating her qualities with something of the collector's emphasis on status and scarcity: ‘Such a widow is not common’, he concludes, ‘And now she shines more fresh and tempting / Than any natural virgin’ (I.i.264-6).
But Kickshaw must not bear exclusive blame for an artificial and ornamental tone which is characteristic of sexual encounters and attitudes in the play as a whole. Madam Decoy is the broker in charge of conspicuous sexual consumption, and she has taken the trouble to provide her house with ‘artful chambers, / And pretty pictures to provoke the fancy’ (III.ii.20-1). Littleworth subscribes to an elaborately hierarchical theory of pimping (IV.ii.75-82), a view which lends credence to the rumour that some of the gallants ‘are often my lord's tasters’ (II.ii.92). Celestina, however skilful she may be in preserving her honour, is perfectly aware of the terms which society will place on her slightest gesture of sexual approval or discouragement:
Some ladies are so expensive in their graces
To those that honour 'em, and so prodigal,
That in a little time they have nothing but
The naked sin left to reward their servants;
Whereas a thrift in our rewards will keep
Men long in their devotion, and preserve
Our selves in stock, to encourage those that honour us.
(II.ii.66-72)
This is the language of an accomplished flirt. Celestina gains a reputation for chastity precisely because she knows how to manipulate her suitors in order to provoke the maximum amount and the right kind of conspicuous sexual adulation.
That Shirley himself wishes the notion of prodigality to be invoked as a standard by which to judge the behaviour of his characters can be inferred from the opening scene, in which Bornwell rebukes his wife Aretina for taking up the fashionable patterns of town life with excessive and foolish enthusiasm. Bornwell is neither prudish nor avaricious; his case against the town rests partly on his instinctive preference for the life of a country squire, but it cannot be dismissed as mere special pleading. He opposes Aretina's adopted way of life because it is expensive, but this is only the surface of an argument which cuts deeper. Prodigality is also artificial, competitive and tyrannical. It is artificial in the sense that even the rich materials of Aretina's wardrobe ‘dare / Not show their own complexions’ (I.i.91-2) but are covered in layers of ornament. It is competitive in the sense that other fashionable women arouse in Aretina the fear of being ‘eclipsed’ (I.i.279). And it is tyrannical in the sense that Aretina does not have enough experience of high living to carry it off casually:
You make play
Not a pastime but a tyranny, and vex
Yourself and my estate by't.
(I.i.109-11)
Thus, Bornwell's metaphors of prodigality as a form of suffocation—an experience which can ‘stifle’ or which threatens ‘chocking’ (I.i.82, 86)—are fully justified. On the evidence before him, Bornwell believes that fashionable urban living is at odds with human sanity and integrity.
I am not proposing that Bornwell be taken as Shirley's moral mouthpiece in the play as whole. His view of events is restricted, his understanding incomplete. His decision to mimic Aretina's behaviour—to ‘Repent in sack and prodigality’, as he terms it (I.i.290)—amounts to a tactical ploy too shallow to qualify as moral wisdom. But in the opening confrontation with Aretina, Bornwell's arguments are cogent and persuasive, all the more so because they bear the stamp of personal conviction. That these arguments are placed near the beginning of the play is, I believe, Shirley's way of providing a vantage point from which prodigal indulgence can be seen for what it is.
The structural pattern which I have been outlining is in part the product of social forces which converged on the city of London during the reign of Charles I. In 1632 the king issued one in a series of Stuart proclamations designed to prevent the rural gentry from abandoning their estates in order to set up fashionable London residences, and listing among the consequences of current practice the expenditure of large sums of money ‘in excess of apparel provided from foreign parts, to the enriching of other nations and unnecessary consumption of a great part of the treasure of his realm, and in other delights and expenses’.5 This proclamation seems to have had about as much effect as attempts to restrict the economic behaviour of a privileged class by law normally do. What is important here is that, in the London of 1632, conspicuous consumption was a social problem of such magnitude that not even the king could ignore it.
The dimensions of the problem have been studied by Lawrence Stone, who argues that conspicuous consumers fell into roughly four overlapping but distinguishable categories. The first group, represented in The Lady of Pleasure by the presence of Lord Unready, consisted of noblemen engaged in service to the crown and hence required by tradition to maintain a level of ‘pomp and circumstance’ consistent with their offices. The second group, of whom Haircut is a humble example, was composed of persons willing to risk ‘the cost of attendance at Court in the hope of office’. Nearly everyone in the play would qualify for membership in ‘the third and largest group’, made up of ‘those attracted to the pleasures and vanities of London, who entered into a round of dissipation which in time inevitably undermined both health and fortune’. The fourth group, represented in the play only by Bornwell, and imperfectly even then, ‘were those who stuck to the old country ways under the new conditions’. These conservative gentlemen would need to spend lavishly on servants, retainers and household provisions if the standards of country hospitality were to be maintained, and thus they could ruin themselves by encountering the town, which required a second and unrelated mode of expenditure.6 Bornwell, who has sold his country estate in order to accommodate Aretina's desire for urban life, remains temperamentally if not economically a member of this final group.
Shirley's attention to the pattern of prodigality would suggest that, in The Lady of Pleasure, he is a shrewd observer of London life, just as surely as Dekker is in The Shoemaker's Holiday, Middleton in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Jonson in Bartholomew Fair, or Massinger in The City Madam. But the London Shirley observes is a rather different one, as might be expected from a playwright who held the title—however temporary or nominal—of ‘one of the Valets of the Chamber of Queen Henrietta Maria’. The wide gap which separates The Lady of Pleasure from its antecedents in this specialised genre can be underscored by observing that nobody in Shirley's play belongs to a profession (let alone a trade), and hence there is no such thing as an honest day's work. Dekker's world is filled with people of both sexes who make things, ranging from garments to garlands; Middleton's London is centred in Goldsmith's Row and includes, aside from Yellowhammer himself, an assortment of watermen, comfit-makers, nurses, and other employees of the commercial world. Jonson's characters, though inhabiting the holiday world of the fair, are if anything more busily occupied in searching for bargains or guarding their purses or selling their products than they would be on an ordinary working day. And for Massinger, the social and moral standing of apprentices, artisans, merchants and whores is largely dependent on the kind and quality of the work they do. In The Lady of Pleasure the closest approximation to productive work is, as Aretina remarks, the effort required in having one's portrait painted:
It does conclude
A lady's morning work: we rise, make fine,
Sit for our picture, and 'tis time to dine.
(I.i.321-3)
Shirley's contribution to the comedy of London life rests primarily on his ability to observe and record the behaviour of a segment of society for whom consumption was a business not confined to recreational hours but spread out conspicuously to fill the entire day.
Where, then, does Shirley stand in relation to the world he creates in The Lady of Pleasure? Is he presenting us with an ironic vision of a society gone astray? Or is he, like Aretina, rather too easily taken in by the glamour of a circle he has entered as an outsider? Is he too eager to court his audience of would-be conspicuous consumers with a favourable reflection of themselves? These questions are not easily answered, partly because Shirley has neither Dekker's benevolent optimism nor Jonson's satirical swagger. What he has instead is a reticence which is even harder to interpret than Middleton's habitual detachment. ‘I will say nothing positive’, Shirley writes in the Prologue to The Cardinal; ‘you may / Think what you please’.7 I believe, on the evidence provided by the structure of The Lady of Pleasure itself, that Shirley was keenly aware of the self-indulgent vanity of the society he created and of the audience he sought to entertain. This view is consistent with the arguments he gives to Bornwell in the opening scene. It is also consistent with Lord Unready's shocked rejection of the proposal that he might sell his armorial bearings (V.i.134-6); here at last is a stand taken on principle, in defiance of the ethic of prodigality, and we are meant to respond with admiration. That Shirley is willing to heap scorn on the comic arriviste characters—Sentlove, Kickshaw, Haircut and Littleworth—is readily deduced from the humiliations he prepares for them in the final act. But with characters drawn from the nobility or gentry he is—like Massinger—less candid, more insecure. In this sense Shirley was not a courageous artist; or, to put the matter more charitably, his was the tightrope-walker's courage, not the lion-tamer's.
THEME
The one crucial event in The Lady of Pleasure, which occurs offstage during Act IV, is the adulterous coupling of Aretina and Alexander Kickshaw. It is in relation to this act of infidelity that the implicit values or overt pronouncements of each principal character need to be assessed. And without claiming for Shirley a greatness that is beyond his reach, it is only fair to observe that his treatment of infidelity in this play is remarkable in at least three respects: in its resistance to the established conventions for dealing with infidelity in the drama; in its presentation of the theme from a point of view which allows the woman's side of the story to be told; and in its development of the subject as a private matter with specific emotional consequences rather than as a public scandal.
The quickest way of calling to mind the range of assumptions about infidelity which can be expected in Jacobean drama would be to listen to the characters in Othello. The men of Shakespeare's Venice—Brabantio, Cassio, Iago and Othello himself—become eloquent partisans whenever the subject is introduced. The women say nothing. Nothing, that is, until the quietly intimate undressing scene which precedes the catastrophe. Here we are allowed to overhear Desdemona and Emilia in casual conversation. The subject is one that of course would preoccupy them. ‘O, these men, these men!’ Desdemona begins:
Dost thou in conscience think—tell me, Emilia—
That there be women do abuse their husbands
In such gross kind?
Emilia responds, cryptically, ‘There be some such, no question’; but Desdemona presses forward, insisting on a personal answer.
DESDEMONA.
Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
EMILIA.
The world's a huge thing; it is a great price for a small vice. … Marry, I would not do such a thing for a joint-ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty exhibition; but for all the whole world—'Ud's pity! who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch?
(IV.iii.58-75)
Still unconvinced, Desdemona disagrees in principle: ‘Beshrew me if I would do such a wrong / For the whole world’ (IV.iii.77-8).
The radical division of opinion represented by Desdemona's absolute ‘no’ and Emilia's provisional ‘yes’ is in general characteristic of attitudes taken towards infidelity in Jacobean drama. The absolute ‘no’, based overtly on idealistic perceptions of the meaning of chastity and linked indirectly to patterns of sexual paternalism, is the standard invoked by Jacobean tragic heroes in assessing the behaviour of their wives. Frankford's desire, in A Woman Killed with Kindness, to recall the impossible past ‘that I might take her / As spotless as an angel in my arms’8 is a paradigm case of masculine idealism. Similar attitudes are expressed, often less attractively, by many tragic husbands who fear betrayal: Sforza in Massinger's The Duke of Milan, Leantio in Middleton's Women Beware Women, and Caraffa in Ford's Love's Sacrifice have in common a sexual idealism too fragile for the experience they encounter. Husbands who countenance infidelity with a provisional ‘yes’ are by definition excluded from tragic action and relegated to satire. The most famous instance is Allwit in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, for whom being a cuckold is ‘The happiest state that ever man was born to!’9 Most of the cuckolds in Jacobean satire fall short of such amicable adjustment; but the deflation of stature and esteem which accompanies cuckoldry is implied nonetheless by means of Harebrain's vapid cheerfulness in A Mad World, My Masters, Pietro's impotent posturings in The Malcontent or even Camillo's drunken resignation in The White Devil.
If the concern over infidelity seems obsessive by modern standards or the polarisation of attitudes artificial, it should be remembered that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century laws and customs allowed for detailed chaperoning of what went on in the bedrooms of the nation. To judge by surviving evidence from the county of Essex, any irregular sexual practice was likely to provoke a hearing in the ecclesiastical courts.10 Persons found guilty of adultery were subjected to shame punishments such as those listed by William Harrison: ‘carting, ducking, and doing of open penance in sheets, in churches and marketsteads’.11 Although Harrison finds these modes of rebuke too lenient (‘For what great smart is it to be turned out of an hot sheet into a cold … ?’ he asks), the threat of humiliation must have been real enough for anyone who valued public opinion. Married women had more to fear from exposure for adultery than men, since legal conventions permitted a husband to repudiate an unfaithful wife and protected him in the event that he chose to vindicate his honour by killing her.12
The social context which clarifies the meaning of infidelity in the drama can be illustrated by referring to the story of Frances Coke, the younger daughter of Sir Edward Coke and Lady Elizabeth Hatton. In G. R. Hibbard's lively account of the principal events, Frances Coke is described as ‘a very beautiful girl of fifteen’ who was married in 1617, for all the wrong dynastic reasons, to Sir John Villiers, the elder brother of the Duke of Buckingham. Unable to endure a husband whose domestic routine included ‘periodic fits of insanity’, she abandoned him in favour of a secluded and adulterous life with Sir Robert Howard. In consequence, she was put on trial in 1627 and assigned the shame punishment of ‘open penance in sheets’, to use Harrison's phrase—a punishment she was able to evade thanks to personal ingenuity and the collusion of her lover. In the first instance she escaped the pursuit of her arresting officers by exchanging clothes with a pageboy. The law, having been made an ass, would show the persistence of a mule: in 1634, after a lapse of seven years, Frances Coke was arrested and imprisoned for her failure to perform penance as ordered. This time a friend of her lover's provided another male disguise, a bribe for the prison officer, and a safe escort to France. Only after receiving the king's pardon, some six years later, was she able to return to England.13
Aretina's position in The Lady of Pleasure is unlike that of Frances Coke in all respects but one: like her contemporary in real life, Aretina is playing a very dangerous game. As modern readers, we are free to applaud her courage or to cringe at her folly, but we are not at liberty to regard her act of sexual indulgence as a casual and relatively harmless diversion. In fact, Aretina goes to great lengths to prevent the public consequences of infidelity, only to find that she is vulnerable to the private consequences instead.
From the beginning Aretina is a restless married woman who has come to London looking for adventure and (by implication) trouble. She challenges her husband's authority and asserts her personal freedom in words that recall Emilia's argument in Othello and anticipate the sentiments that would be spoken one day by Nora Helmer and Hedda Gabler:
I take it great injustice
To have my pleasures circumscribed and taught me.
A narrow-minded husband is a thief
To his own fame, and his preferment too.
(I.i.143-6)
Clearly, Aretina is deliberately seeking pleasures other than the domestic comforts of marriage. She is not actively seeking adultery, but when she meets a man (Alexander Kickshaw) both attractive enough to please her erotic tastes and shallow enough to be readily controlled, she decides that she will try him. And it is here, in her decision, that she stands apart from the passive Anne Frankfords and befuddled Mistress Harebrains of dramatic tradition. Although he disapproves of her decision, Shirley has enough respect for Aretina to treat her as a moral agent: as a person responsible for her actions.
Having settled on Kickshaw as her choice, Aretina directs all of her energies toward ensuring absolute circumspection. This she accomplishes through the connivance of Madam Decoy, whose professional credit is dependent on the same code of secrecy which applies to espionage agents in hostile territory. Thus, Aretina gives Decoy her instructions in a confidential whisper (III.ii.13.1), and adds the solemn warning: ‘He must not / Have the least knowledge of my name or person’ (III.ii.25-6). Decoy's performance borders on the spectacular: Kickshaw is blindfolded and brought to a darkened room where Decoy persuades him, with the rhetoric of gold pieces, to enter an offstage chamber and make love to someone he believes to be a witch in one of her more attractive metamorphoses. In every technical point, Aretina has achieved her purpose; scandal has been avoided, her husband is none the wiser, and her sexual partner is prevented by his ignorance from betraying her.
Shirley's real achievement in writing the part of Aretina rests on his understanding of how she would behave on the morning after this ambivalent encounter. The occasion of her next appearance is Frederick's transformation into a clothes-horse, which she handles with approval and poise. Then Kickshaw enters, also dressed in new clothes, and Aretina must admit, ‘Now he looks brave and lovely’ (IV.ii.143). After an appropriately brief social conversation, she can reassure herself: ‘I am confident he knows me not, and I were worse than mad to be my own betrayer’ (IV.ii.172-3). The need for circumspection, still uppermost in Aretina's mind, continues to govern every nuance of her social behaviour.
Her husband is the first to notice that Aretina's bearing is uncharacteristically ‘melancholy’ (IV.ii.181). And in private conversation between husband and wife, Aretina strikes a philosophical key which has not been hers before. She distinguishes between ‘True beauty’ which pertains to the soul and superficial charm ‘That touches but our sense’ (IV.ii.194-9), and although she is overtly using the distinction to praise Celestina, her mood suggests that she is introspectively concerned with her own recent actions. Shirley avoids the stereotypical alternatives which men prepare for unfaithful wives: Aretina does not melt into guilty incoherence, nor does she turn into a brazen strumpet of limitless appetite. Instead, she remains what she was—a morally cogent human being—though her sense of self now includes a new and disturbing set of experiences.
Careful as she has been to avert public shame, Aretina cannot forestall private humiliation. In her next encounter with Kickshaw she has the opportunity of speaking with him privately, and what she learns is devastating to her pride. Not only does Kickshaw swagger impertinently at the thought of continuing to exploit his new source of revenue, but he remains convinced that he has slept with ‘an old witch, a strange ill-favoured hag’ (V.ii.146), ‘a most insatiate, abominable devil with a tail thus long’ (V.ii.157-8). To hear herself described—however callously or unwittingly—in these terms is enough to reduce Aretina to tears. It is in this condition that her husband finds her in the final scene, at which point the two of them withdraw for ‘ten minutes’ (V.iii.10) and return publicly reconciled. For the first time Aretina takes a submissive stance in relation to Bornwell: ‘I throw my own will off’, she announces, ‘And now in all things obey yours’ (V.iii.176-7). This resolution, though morally satisfying to the orthodox, is dramatically specious for reasons I shall hold in reversion for the moment, since they have more to do with Bornwell's character than with Aretina's.
I have chosen to concentrate on Shirley's treatment of one character in the adulterous triangle—the unfaithful wife—because it is in the sensitive revelation of Aretina's nature that he is at his best. Kickshaw, as I have repeatedly implied, is a fairly stupid fop who fancies himself a genuine libertine. The part could be flamboyantly arresting if played by the right actor, but hardly more than that. With Bornwell Shirley has created problems that require better solutions than he has given them, particularly in the final scene of the play.
From the outset Bornwell has been an attractive figure: a husband whose heart is in the country but who is willing to tolerate the city for his wife's sake, a man of settled habits who is willing to risk adventure if that is what society requires. The action of the play has made him a cuckold. But the consequences of this deeply personal affront, both for Bornwell's own estimate of himself and for the relationship between husband and wife, Shirley chooses to ignore. At Aretina's tearful request Bornwell follows her offstage, and on their return his rhetorical stance is too pompous to be genuinely reassuring. ‘Dearer now / Than ever to my bosom’, he says to Aretina, ‘thou shalt please / Me best to live at thy own choice’ (V.iii.179-81). Are we to assume that Aretina has told him the whole truth, and that he feels the injury no more deeply than this? Or must we believe that Aretina, though presenting herself as ‘A penitent’ (V.iii.176), has been prudently selective in her confession? The play provides no adequate answers to these questions; the truth is that we can never know.14 If Shirley took special pains to insist on the emotional complexity of Aretina's experience, he seems to have glossed over the corresponding emotions in the case of Bornwell for the purpose of concluding the play on a note of domestic tranquillity. And the price for achieving this purpose is a heavy one. Just where the audience is expecting a confrontation which will resolve at last the conflict between Aretina's assertion of liberty and Bornwell's insistence on responsibility, Shirley remains enigmatically silent. There is a point at which reticence becomes evasion, and Shirley is dangerously close to it; what appears to be simply a technical fault in dramatic construction is also a failure of nerve.
In complementary opposition to the adulterous meeting between Aretina and Kickshaw, Shirley presents the Platonic relationship between Celestina and Lord Unready. In the early scenes, the contrast between Aretina and Celestina is handled with considerable adroitness. Both women are engaged in the game of indulging in prodigality while keeping appearances unruffled. As the widow of someone called Bellamour, Celestina has a freedom from personal obligations which she enjoys exploiting perhaps beyond the limits of good taste but never farther than modesty permits. While Aretina is growing impatient with the restrictions of married life, Celestina is expertly avoiding the ‘new marriage fetters’ (II.ii.47) which any number of suitors would wish to impose. When Lord Unready appears we learn that he too has suffered bereavement; the death of someone called Bella Maria has deprived him of domestic bliss but not of an ideal of human perfection which he continues to worship.
All that remains is to bring these two lovelorn aristocrats together—a procedure which Shirley manages at exceeding length. Their first meeting begins with exchanges of mutual praise that border on idolatry, and appears to be moving quickly towards a seduction, when Lord Unready abruptly announces that he has withstood temptation and remains true to Bella Maria. Celestina now reports that, had her seducer been in earnest, she would have rewarded his ‘wanton flame’ not with compliance but with ‘scorn’ (IV.iii.175). Their second encounter follows a similar pattern: Lord Unready proposes that Celestina become his mistress in ‘the now court Platonic way’ (V.iii.54), she appears to accept and then scoffs at his offer, he becomes petulant, she rebukes him, and at length both agree to a stand-off in which they will celebrate one another ‘with chaste thoughts’ (V.iii.159) as if nothing whatever had occurred. It is hard to believe that Shirley had in mind in these scenes anything more than an extended allusion to the courtly cult of Platonic love,15 for in any other terms the relationship is a shambles. True, nobody wants to praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, but this is the opposite extreme. It is difficult to credit as ideal chastity a pattern of behaviour which Swinburne described in another context as ‘obscene abstinence’.16
Still, if Shirley failed in the noble attempt to dramatise the highest reaches of moral idealism, he failed in distinguished company. What remains valuable in The Lady of Pleasure is the sensitive interpretation of imperfect humanity, especially in the character of Aretina. And here the interpretation is a sensitive one, because Shirley has gone beneath the surfaces of historical custom and literary convention to reveal what is fundamentally an act of betrayal which impinges partly on another person but principally on the self.
LANGUAGE
The most vigorous attack on Shirley's abilities as a poet is tucked away, almost as a digression, in an essay entitled ‘Variation in Shakespeare and Others’ by C. S. Lewis.17 The attack depends on a subtle argument about the poetic habits of Elizabethan and later dramatists, all of whom, Lewis claims, relied on the ‘method of variation’. As opposed to the method of construction, by means of which a poet such as Milton builds a logical sequence of ideas and images to a point of apparently inevitable completion, the method of variation allows the poet greater freedom and flexibility. He can bring together a dozen different images, all of them experimentally related to a particular idea, none of them presented as definitive. The master of this second technique is Shakespeare, but ‘it is shared by all the Elizabethan dramatists’.
The method of variation is especially attractive to playwrights in that it allows the actor to speak, even in moments of great rhetorical splendour, with an apparently unrehearsed tentativeness, as if the character's own sensibility (and not the poet's craft) were proposing the multifarious perceptions of experience. Among the examples which Lewis draws from Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Ford and Shakespeare is the following speech from Antony and Cleopatra:
His legs bestrid the ocean: his reared arm
Crested the world: his voice was propertied
As all the tunèd spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in't: an autumn 'twas
That grew the more by reaping: his delights
Were dolphin-like. …
(V.ii.82-9)
The coherence of this speech depends on Cleopatra's feeling for Antony, and is hence beyond question. And the poetic technique, to use Lewis's metaphor, is like the darting of a swallow: the music of the spheres, the rattling thunder, the autumn harvest and the dolphin are all genuine glimpses though none of these alternatives offers a point of rest from which one might compose a full portrait.
In Shirley's verse, Lewis argues, all the ‘peculiar vices’ of this method are ‘painfully visible’. These vices consist of imaginative infertility, implied by Shirley's ‘unfailing’ reliance on the single resource of variation, and dramatic immobility, the result of Shirley's willingness to sacrifice the progressive movement of a scene for ‘endless change of language’.
Believing he has observed these vices in the argument between Bornwell and Aretina in the opening scene, Lewis closes his case against Shirley with words that beguile:
On the strictly dramatic side he has nothing to say that could not have been said in six lines. ‘Why are you angry?’ asks Bornwell. ‘Because you stint me,’ retorts the lady. ‘I don't. On the contrary I allow you to spend far too much,’ says Bornwell. ‘Well, I still think you're mean,’ says Lady Bornwell. That is the whole scene, as drama. What swells it to its 130 odd lines is pure variation on the theme ‘you spend too much’ put into the mouth of Bornwell. During this the dramatic situation stands still. ‘Have you done, Sir?’ Lady Bornwell asks at the end of her husband's first speech; at the end of his third she is sill asking, ‘Have you concluded your lecture?’ The angry husband and the scornful wife remain dramatically immobile and the play ceases to go forward while the waves of variation roll over the audience. In other words, what Shirley has here to say as a dramatist is extremely little; and to convert that little into something that should seem richer he has to call in variation.
These are serious charges, powerfully asserted, and I have quoted them at length because they deserve to be seriously answered.
To begin, Lewis's commentary on the scene between Bornwell and Aretina requires some comment in its own right. His remarks owe their amusing charm to a technique that many experienced lecturers find irresistible: the technique of speeding up the pace of a scene or a plot in the retelling so as to produce a caricature. The effect is the same as that produced by an old piece of newsreel played back at twice the intended speed. In itself this is a harmless diversion, but it provides a very bad basis for judging anything. The same technique could be applied, with hilarious results, to the long expository scene between Prospero and Miranda in The Tempest (I.ii.1-185).
Readers who are willing to take the opening scene of The Lady of Pleasure at a less breathtaking pace will notice a great many subtleties of dramatic language which caricature cannot reproduce. Before Bornwell enters (I.i.45.1), Aretina has already told her Steward that she is glad to have put behind her the provincial boredom of country living. Bornwell's first words are solicitous: ‘How now? What's the matter? … Angry, sweet heart?’ (ll. 46-7). Aretina's response is beautifully evasive: ‘I am angry with myself, / To be so miserably restrained’ (ll. 47-8). For the moment her sense of decorum prevents her from admitting that the Steward and Bornwell are the real objects of her anger, and part of the dramatic purpose of the argument as a whole is to show Aretina's genuine dissatisfaction breaking through the surface of well-bred poise.
Bornwell appeals to his own generosity, arguing that Aretina should at least give him credit for his willingness to placate her by moving to the town; but this gets him nowhere, so he rebukes her extravagance in a series of speeches which do depend on rhetorical variation. Among the targets of Bornwell's aversion are the following:
Your change of gaudy furniture, and pictures
Of this Italian master and that Dutchman's;
Your mighty looking-glasses, like artillery,
Brought home on engines …
(ll. 74-7)
The appeal to good taste (in ‘gaudy’) is intended to nettle Aretina, and the nonchalance about her art collection is deliberately dismissive. But Bornwell remains good-humoured: there is a mock-heroic levity in his inflation of ‘looking-glasses’ into ‘artillery’, transported on military ‘engines’. As Pope recommends, Bornwell is ‘using a vast force to lift a feather’.18
Aretina's impatience is progressively revealed. She tries the ironic parry—‘I like / Your homily of thrift’ (ll. 98-9)—but when this merely provokes further accusations she lets Bornwell know she finds him ‘tedious’ (l. 133) and ‘avaricious’ (l. 136). Then she retorts with her own lecture, which includes the reproof of Bornwell, quoted earlier, for behaving as only ‘a narrow-minded husband’ would (l. 145).
If the actors who play this scene are at all sensitive to what Shirley has given them, they will want to avoid at all cost the suggestion that this is a normal conversation which occurs every other day in the Bornwell household. To give in to caricature in this way would reduce the couple to Dagwood and Blondie, or to ‘the angry husband and the scornful wife’ of C. S. Lewis's description. What Shirley gives the actors is the chance to develop a series of delicate emotional adjustments between husband and wife—adjustments which occur because of the recent and decisive changes in their pattern of social living. The language he writes for them is not in itself brilliant, but it is full of dramatic possibilities which the actors can exploit and enrich.
I trust that Shirley has been cleared from suspicion on the charge of dramatic immobility. But the question of imaginative infertility remains, and here my defence will be qualified in certain crucial respects. First, however, I should like to offer Shirley the opportunity of defending himself, in the following impressive example of variation spoken by Celestina:
You two, that have not 'twixt you both the hundredth
Part of a soul, coarse woollen-witted fellows
Without a nap, with bodies made for burdens;
You that are only stuffings for apparel
(As you were made but engines for your tailors
To frame their clothes upon and get them custom)
Until men see you move, yet then you dare not,
Out of your guilt of being the ignobler beast,
But give a horse the wall (whom you excel
Only in dancing of the brawl, because
The horse was not taught the French way). …
. … But I waste time
And stain my breath in talking to such tadpoles.
Go home and wash your tongues in barley-water,
Drink clean tobacco, be not hot i'th' mouth,
And you may 'scape the beadle; so I leave you
To shame and your own garters.
(III.ii.293-319)
This is Shirley at his satiric best: precise yet conversational, inventive but under control. In a series of variations nearly twice as long as that reproduced in the quotation, Celestina is deflating Kickshaw and Littleworth in response to the verbal abuse which they have directed at her. She begins by improvising on a clothing metaphor (‘woollen-witted’) until she has transformed her assailants into dancing mannequins. She turns the slander of her accusers back on them in the form of foul, unwashed, tobacco-stained breath. And she concludes with a brilliant adaptation of a proverb which recommends hanging in one's own garters as a last resort for fools.19 The passage as a whole indicates what Shirley owes to his ‘acknowledged master, learned JONSON’,20 though in Jonson the fools would have less to fear from a verbal opponent than from the deflating ironies of their own rhetorical habits.
Although Shirley's reliance on variation is not the mechanical and sterile reflex which Lewis's description implies, there are two special respects in which his limited imagination does detract from his ability as a poet. The first of these is a narrowness of range, the result of a virtually exclusive concentration on the social and verbal behaviour of the middle and upper levels of society.21 Instead of a wide spectrum of languages, ranging as in Jonson from the courtly inanities of Sir Amorous La Foole to the sensual vulgarity of Ursula the pig-woman, Shirley confines himself to the idiom of cultivated speakers of English, and uses their speech as the norm in judging such relatively minor aberrations as pretension (in Haircut's case) or effusion (in Lord Unready's). This constricted verbal register brings with it a second weakness: the inability to provide each character with a distinctively personal style of speaking.22 Celestina's shrewd wit, in the passage quoted above, is not so much a personal idiom as a particularly agile exercise in a verbal mode which all of the characters in The Lady of Pleasure either claim or would like to claim as their own. I am not asserting that all of the characters are equally witty, but rather that all of them would subscribe to the same standard of wit. And though Celestina is a brilliant success by this standard, and Littleworth a dismal failure, there is not in Shirley the close relationship between a character and his or her language which, in the case of greater playwrights, identifies a turn of speech as indelible Mosca or vintage Falstaff.
Shirley's abilities as a poet and playwright are, in the last analysis, those of a highly skilled professional. D. J. Enright's discerning assessment of Shirley is consistent, in large measure, with the arguments I have been advancing:
Though he had no original genius, the range of his reference is wider than that of later comedy. His is a neat, fluent, easy, and rather colourless style, yet simple rather than insipid. The emotional pressure is never very high, and the metaphorical tension so slack that obviously he wrote in verse only because it was the tradition. Yet this makes for a healthier atmosphere than we find in much of Beaumont and Fletcher; after them we welcome Shirley's lack of pretension. He is concerned with a polite society which has not yet grown altogether complacent about the rest of the world.23
No purpose would be served by quarrelling over minor matters of emphasis in this basically sound evaluation. I should like to add only that Shirley's claim on a modern reader's attention rests not exclusively on his literary merits, but also on his performance as a theatrical craftsman.
Notes
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‘Excerpta Quaedam per A. W. Adolescentem’, British Library Add. MS 22608, fol. 101v. This and subsequent quotations from Wright's manuscript are taken from the transcription by Arthur C. Kirsch in ‘A Caroline Commentary on the Drama’, Modern Philology, LXVI (1968-9), 256-9. Wright's commonplace book is discussed and dated not earlier than 1639 by James G. McManaway in ‘Excerpta Quaedam per A. W. Adolescentem’, Studies in Honor of Dewitt T. Starnes, ed. Thomas P. Harrison et al. (Austin, Texas, 1967), pp. 117-26.
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Of indirect relevance to the structure of the play is Shirley's procedure of writing, evidently, with no specific narrative or dramatic sources in mind. Forsythe nominates Fletcher's The Noble Gentleman and Davenant's The Just Italian as plays which seem to have influenced The Lady of Pleasure (p. 372), but the strongest claim to be made for them is consignment to the dubious rank of analogues. That Shirley's imagination was a virtual storehouse of situations, characters and phrases drawn from the dramatic repertoire of his day is beyond question. But the raw material which went into the making of The Lady of Pleasure is the social world of Caroline London (see Papousek, pp. 66-9).
-
The symbolic nature of food in Jonson has been discussed by Jonas A. Barish, who remarks on the one hand that in Bartholomew Fair ‘the ubiquitous word “belly” focuses our attention on the center of appetite, the stomach’ (Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy, Cambridge, Mass., 1960, p. 227), and observes elsewhere that ‘Jonsonian cuisine’ can appeal to the sophisticated palate as well, notably in The Alchemist where the menu includes ‘the dolphin's milk butter in which Sir Epicure Mammon's shrimps will swim’ (‘Feasting and Judging in Jonsonian Comedy’, Renaissance Drama, n.s. V, 1972, 6).
-
See III.i.0.1 and the note at this point, in which my decision to christen Lord Unready is explained.
-
The text of the proclamation is quoted by Papousek, as Appendix A of her edition (pp. 278-81).
-
The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 186-8.
-
Wks, V, 275.
-
Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, ed. R. W. Van Fossen (London, 1961), xiii.61-2.
-
Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, ed. R. B. Parker (London, 1969), I.ii.21.
-
See F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Chelmsford, Essex, 1973), pp. 1-2: ‘nearly 10,000 men and women were summoned on sexual charges by the Elizabethan Essex spiritual courts’, a number which amounts to about one in seven of the adult population. For their concern with regulating sexual conduct, the church courts ‘became known in vulgar parlance throughout England as the Bawdy Courts’.
-
The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (Ithaca, New York, 1968), p. 189.
-
See Keith Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XX (1959), 200-1; and Van Fossen's Introduction to A Woman Killed with Kindness, pp. xxx-xxxi.
-
See G. R. Hibbard, ‘Love, Marriage and Money in Shakespeare's Theatre and Shakespeare's England’, The Elizabethan Theatre, VI (1975), 140-2.
-
On this point I am in substantial agreement with Nathan Franklin Cogan's analysis of Bornwell's character in ‘The London Comedies of James Shirley, 1625-1635: The Dramatic Context of The Lady of Pleasure’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1971), pp. 213-15.
-
See G. F. Sensabaugh, ‘Platonic Love in Shirley's The Lady of Pleasure’, A Tribute to George Coffin Taylor, ed. Arnold Williams (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1952), pp. 168-77.
-
Swinburne uses this phrase, in Essays and Studies, 3rd ed. (London, 1888), pp. 287-8, to characterise the relationship between Fernando and Bianca in Ford's Love's Sacrifice.
-
The essay appears in Rehabilitations and Other Essays (Oxford, 1939), pp. 161-80.
-
See the Postscript to the Odyssey, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al. (New Haven, 1939-69), X, 387.
-
Tilley, G 42. See also III.ii.319n.
-
See the Dedication to The Grateful Servant (Shirley, Wks, II, 3).
-
See Richard Morton, ‘Deception and Social Dislocation: An Aspect of James Shirley's Drama’, Renaissance Drama, IX (1966), 245.
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See Juliet McGrath, ‘James Shirley's Uses of Language’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, VI (1966), 332: ‘only rarely are linguistic extremes displayed, and the language spoken by the majority of the characters seems to have a pronounced sameness almost regardless of the character who is speaking’.
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‘Elizabethan and Jacobean Comedy’, in The Age of Shakespeare, vol. II of A Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1955), p. 427.
Abbreviations
Editions Collated
Papousek: Marilyn D. Papousek, ‘A Critical Edition of James Shirley's The Lady of Pleasure’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Iowa, 1971).
Works of Reference, etc.
Forsythe: Robert Stanley Forsythe, The Relations of Shirley's Plays to the Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1914).
Shirley, Wks: The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley, ed. William Gifford and Alexander Dyce, 6 vols. (London, 1833).
Tilley: Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950).
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