SOURCE: Frantzen, Allen J. “Alla, Angli, and Angels.” In Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from “Beowulf” to “Angels in America,” pp. 264-92. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Frantzen examines the representation of Anglo-Saxon identity in Angels in America in terms of Kushner's sexual identity politics.]

Rome, not Northumbria, is the center of The Man of Law's Tale, and celibacy, not marital bliss, is the Man of Law's preferred mode for Christ's holy ministers. Chaucer's text looks neither to the vernacular tradition of married clergy that the Wycliffites sought nor to the celibate clerical world demanded by Roman canon law and espoused earlier by the Anglo-Saxon church of Ælfric and by Norman reformers. Instead, the Man of Law's heroine is a product of Chaucerian compromise. She practices what might be thought of as serial chastity. Custance marries Alla, but after she becomes pregnant she lives without his company for all but the last year of his life. Clerical ideals dominate The Man of Law's Tale, much of its domestic sentiment notoriously devalued not only by the narrator's self-dramatizing interruptions but by Chaucer's debt to the work of a great reforming cleric, Pope Innocent III, whose “De miseriis humane conditionis” (On the misery of the human condition) is quoted in the prologue to the tale and elsewhere in the text.¹

Chaucer makes much of the dependence of the English church on Rome. His reform-minded contemporaries, the Lollards, regarded Rome as a dangerous influence; in the Reformation the city became a symbol used to attack Catholicism. But for the Anglo-Saxons and for orthodox Christians of Chaucer's time, Rome was the center of the Church on earth. Correspondence with the pope and travel to and from Rome were means by which the church of the frontier established its authenticity. In this chapter I examine one small part of this traffic, an episode from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which describes the sale of angelic English boys in Rome, a story subsequently retold by Wace, Laȝamon, and others, including John Bale, a Reformation historian. I compare the juxtaposition of angels and Angli, meaning “English,” in these texts to angelic powers in Tony Kushner's Angels in America, a play in which the Anglo-Saxons, embodied in the stereotype of the WASP, play a small but significant role. For a moment, however, I return to Chaucer's Alla and a scene in which he too meets a boy in Rome.

ALLA AND ÆLLE

Alla registers a dim presence in The Man of Law's Tale. He is heard about after Custance converts Hermengyld and her husband but otherwise, except for letters to his mother, not heard from until a young boy (who proves to be his son) is set before him at a feast. This act is part of Custance's plan. She too has arrived in Rome but has refused to identify herself to the senator who rescued her from the ship on which she was set adrift from Northumbria. Now, in her husband's presence, she speaks through her son. “[A]t his moodres heeste / Biforn Alla, durynge the metes space, / The child stood, lookynge in the kynges face” (1013-15).² The child does not look like him, however, but “as lyk unto Custance / As possible is a creature to be” (1030-31). Because Alla has kept the faith (he is on a pilgrimage of repentance for killing his wicked mother), he realizes that Christ might have sent Custance to Rome just as he sent her to Northumbria. Shortly thereafter Alla and Custance are reconciled. Only then does she reveal herself to her father, the emperor, explaining for the first time who she is (1105-13).

The story of Custance reminds many readers of a saint's life and recalls some of the dynamics of stories about cross-dressed women saints recounted in chapter 2.³ Like Euphrosyne, Custance is betrothed, in Custance's case to a sultan who becomes a Christian in order to marry her. His mother, outraged, kills him and sends Custance out to sea, a scenario repeated when Custance is expelled from Northumbria. Unlike Euphrosyne, Custance marries and has a child. But in many ways her life as a missionary is similar to the lives of the evangelizing saints commemorated in Anglo-Saxon texts. The moment at which Custance reveals herself to her father recalls the revelation made by both Euphrosyne and Eugenia to theirs. And, like Eugenia, Custance preaches the word of God from within a same-sex community. It is, of course, a tiny one, just Custance and Hermengyld, but their same-sex love, symbolized by the bed they share, is genuine and more warmly demonstrated than such love is in the Anglo-Saxon texts.

Having been reunited in Rome, Custance and Alla return to Northumbria for a year of wedded bliss. After Alla's death, Custance goes back to Rome and takes up a life of virtue and good works, never again parting from her father (1156-57). Chaucer rejoined his roving heroine to patriarchal structures identical to those governing the lives of Eugenia and Euphrosyne. The difference is that Chaucer's holy woman is not just a daughter but also a wife and mother—a married evangelist. To a surprising degree The Man of Law's Tale conforms to what might have been a Lollard vision of evangelism in the true church. Custance's language, for example, recognized as “a maner Latyn corrupt” in Northumbria, is what the Lollards thought Italians spoke—that is, a vernacular, albeit not English. The tale discreetly hints of controversies building in the Church in Chaucer's time by effecting a radical redescription of the origins of the Church in the Anglo-Saxon period. According to the Man of Law, Northumbria was converted by a woman who arrives from Rome by way of Syria, directed only by God's will and the winds. But as Bede's Ecclesiastical History makes clear, the territory was converted by Irish missionaries and by holy men who came at the pope's behest from Rome—Augustine sent by Gregory the Great in 596, Theodore and Hadrian sent by Pope Vitalian over half a century later. Equally bold is the Man of Law's revised account of Alla, Chaucer's version of the Northumbrian king Ælle, the only English character in the text who is known to have been a historical person. Chaucer's Alla is converted to Christianity by Custance and with her has a son, Maurice, who was crowned emperor by the pope (1122). Bede's Ælle was not Christian but rather served as a symbol of pagan kingship awaiting redemption. Ælle's son, Edwin, converted to Christianity because he wished to marry Æthelburh, the daughter of the Christian king Æthelberht.⁴ Thereafter Edwin “held under his sway the whole realm of Britain, not only English kingdoms but those ruled over by the Britons as well.”⁵

Ælle's role in Bede is much smaller on the historical level but much greater on the symbolic level. He appears in Bede's text but once, in a description of some boys who, like Maurice, ended up in Rome through circumstances not of their own choosing. They too looked into the face of an important man, Pope Gregory. Or I should say, rather, that he looked into their faces, and what he saw there, depending on whose account we accept, was either the image of a chosen people waiting to be converted (the preferred explanation)—or love.⁶

It is said that one day, soon after some merchants had arrived in Rome, a quantity of merchandise was exposed for sale in the market place. Crowds came to buy and Gregory too amongst them. As well as other merchandise he saw some boys put up for sale, with fair complexions, handsome faces, and lovely hair. On seeing them he asked, so it is said, from what region or land they had been brought. He was told that they came from the island of Britain, whose inhabitants were like that in appearance. He asked again whether those islanders were Christians or still entangled in the errors of heathenism. He was told that they were heathen. Then with a deep-drawn sigh he said, “Alas that the author of darkness should have men so bright of face in his grip, and that minds devoid of inward grace should bear so graceful an outward form.” Again he asked for the name of the race. He was told that they were called Angli. “Good,” he said, “they have the face of angels, and such men should be fellow-heirs of the angels in heaven.” “What is the name,” he asked, “of the kingdom from which they have been brought?” He was told that the men of the kingdom were called Deiri. “Deiri,” he replied, “De ira! good! snatched from the wrath of Christ and called to his mercy. And what is the name of the king of the land?” He was told that it was Ælle; and playing on the name, he said, “Alleluia! the praise of God the Creator must be sung in those parts.”⁷

The story of the Anglian boys in Rome is found at the start of book 2 of the Ecclesiastical History, where Bede encloses a summary of Gregory's life within a larger narrative of the origins of the English nation. Like Gildas, Bede portrayed the early British as a Chosen People who violated their covenant with God and were destroyed as a result.⁸ Bede effected a complete break between the histories of the lapsed early Christian communities of the British—the community that Custance encounters when she lands in Northumbria and reads a “Britoun book”—and the heathen tribes, the Anglo-Saxons, whom Gregory's missionaries would convert. Bede located his own origins in the Anglo-Saxons, the new rather than the old chosen people.

The boys whom Gregory saw in the marketplace were descendants of Anglo-Saxons who, 150 years after coming to Britain, were still pagan. Gregory and Bede call the boys “Angli,” a term that generally means “English.”⁹ But Bede had a more particular understanding of the term, as his description of the settlements of Germanic tribes makes clear. Bede located the Jutes where the people of Kent live, and the Saxons where the West, East, and South Saxons live. He continued: “Besides this, from the country of the Angles, that is, the land between the kingdoms of the Jutes and the Saxons, which is called Angulus, came the East Angles, the Middle Angles, the Mercians, and all the Northumbrian race (that is those people who dwell north of the river Humber) as well as the other Anglian tribes. Angulus is said to have remained deserted from that day to this.”¹⁰ Bede seems to have meant “Anglian” in the more specific sense of “Northumbrian.” He himself was born in the territory of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, in Northumbria, and so was “Angli” in three senses—Northumbrian, Anglian, and English.¹¹ “Angli” also means “angels,” of course, but Bede carefully understates this meaning, which in the anecdote is better left to Gregory. That the boys' beauty should make Gregory think of angels is significant, for it suggests a purely symbolic meaning for “angli” otherwise rare in Bede's Ecclesiastical History.

Bede affirms a natural affinity between Gregory and the Anglo-Saxons. It might seem curious that Gregory should find the boys attractive, since his admiration suggests that he prefers their unfamiliar appearance (light-complected and light-haired) to that of his own people. The discrepancy strongly suggests that the anecdote originates with an English author whose views Gregory is made to express. The episode is a pretext for witty verbal play that valorizes the boys' race, their nation, and their king. Young, innocent, and beautiful, the boys themselves represent a benign and neglected heathendom. When Gregory recognizes all the signs of a chosen people awaiting God's blessing, Bede is permitted to foresee the new Christian age of the English people that arrived in England with Gregory's missionaries.

For all its piety, the encounter between Gregory and the boys reflects earthly and political concerns. Bede shows us Gregory's interest in establishing the Church in England and in complementing the churches that Rome had already fostered so successfully elsewhere in western Europe. Bede's chief aim was to bolster the success of that Church especially in the land of his birth; he dedicated the work to the Northumbrian king Ceolwulf.¹² The reference to angels promotes this aim, symbolically affiliating the Anglo-Saxon church with Rome. When Gregory announced that the people of Anglia, represented by angelic youth, were ready to be changed into “fellow-heirs of the angels in heaven,” a new age—the history of Bede's own beginnings—came into being. But these unhappy boys were not its heralds, any more than they were angels. Other messengers—missionaries brought to England by Augustine at Gregory's command, long after the boys had been forgotten—were charged with bringing the faith to the Anglo-Saxons. That the boys could be compared to angels was not testimony to their proximity to the divine, a role Bede reserved for real angels, but to the angel-like state of their descendants, who would be newly baptized, newly converted, and newly saved.

The boys, Bede notes, were “put up for sale.” Gregory saw them amid stacks of other merchandise. What were they doing there? Peter Hunter Blair warned that readers should not “jump to the romantic conclusion that the boys whose purchase was envisaged by Gregory were English slaves on sale in a market-place.” The boys might also have been held in service, he suggested, as four English boys were held in the service of Jews at Narbonne, or prisoners of war, mercenaries, or “merely young men in some way bound to the soil on Merovingian estates.”¹³ A letter survives from Gregory to the priest Candidus (written in September 595), asking him to buy “English boys who are seventeen or eighteen years old, that they may be given to God and educated in the monasteries” (“pueros Anglos qui sunt ab annis decem et septem vel decem et octo, ut in Monasteriis dati Deo proficiant comparet”).¹⁴ The boys Gregory sees in the marketplace are not destined for education and clerical status, however. Those who have looked closely at the episode, including Bertram Colgrave, R. A. B. Mynors, and David Pelteret, identify the boys as slaves—although Bede does not—and relate the episode to the well-documented practice of slavery by the Anglo-Saxons.¹⁵ “The custom of buying or ransoming slaves to turn them into missionaries was known,” according to Colgrave, and both Aidan and Willibrord observed it.¹⁶

In the later Anglo-Saxon period opposition to slavery seemed to intensify. In 1014 Wulfstan denounced those who sold their children into foreign servitude.¹⁷ But foreign trade in slaves persisted until the Norman Conquest, after which opposition to slavery continued. The Council of London of 1102 criticized the custom, even as servile tenure was becoming a more prevalent form of bondage.¹⁸ In almost all cases in Anglo-Saxon sources the slaves in question are penal slaves forced into slavery because they could not pay debts or because they were being punished for some offense. The boys' status depended on their age; if they were seventeen or eighteen, they could have been sold as slave labor. But it is also possible that the boys Gregory saw in Rome were captives who were too young to be penal slaves and who merely represented a benign and neglected heathendom. Bede's narrative exalted their innocence, youth, and beauty, even though its real subject was their race, their nation, and Ælle, their king. What was their value in the market place? Ruth Mazo Karras points out that sexual exploitation was among the many unfortunate facts of life for women slaves. It is possible that boys were also sexually exploited and that their commercial value was directly related to their beauty and fairness, underscored by Gregory's focus on their faces (they are “bright of face,” they have “the face of angels”).¹⁹ The boys would have been exploited by men, obviously, a kind of same-sex sex that, as we saw in chapter 4, was of particular concern to the Anglo-Saxons.

Any sexual resonance in the anecdote is, of course, suppressed by Bede and, in turn, by all those who retold the episode after him. In the version found in Laȝamon's Brut, the “angli” are men, not boys, whose response anticipates Gregory's discovery and spoils the drama of his curiosity and his good heart. “We are heathen men,” they say, “and have been brought here, and we were sold in England, and we seek baptism from you if you would only free us” (“We beoð heðene men and hider beoð iladde, / and we weoren ut isalde of Anglene lond; / and fulluht we to þe ȝeorneð ȝef þe us wult ifreoiȝen,” 14707-9). Gregory's reply is obliging. “[O]f all the peoples who live on earth, you English are assuredly most like angels; of all men alive your race is the fairest” (“Iwis ȝe beoð Ænglisce englen ilicchest / of alle þan folke þa wunieð uppen uolde; / eouwer cun is feȝerest of alle quike monnen,” 14713-15).²⁰ Neither Laȝamon's nor other versions subsequent to Bede's include all of the episode's verbal play. Instead these versions overtly state points implied in Bede's account, showing, first, that the Angli desired baptism and requested it of Gregory, and, second, that they were captives who yearned to be free. But an ironic reading is also possible. Laȝamon's version, which makes nothing of Gregory's insight, might suggest that the Anglo-Saxons use the pope to effect a cynical exchange of baptism for freedom; conversion is their idea, not his.

The first modern reader to comment on the sexual subtext of Bede's story was John Boswell, who documented the Church's concern that abandoned children would be sold into slavery and used for sexual purposes. Some writers protested this practice, but not for the reasons we might expect. Their concern was that fathers who abandoned their children might later accidentally buy them as slaves and commit incest by having intercourse with them. Boswell noted that the public sale of slaves continued in Rome long after the empire was Christianized and illustrated the practice with the episode as Bede recounted it.²¹ In the 1540s, some seven hundred years after Bede's death, Boswell's point was vividly anticipated by a remarkable figure named John Bale, the first reader to see a same-sex shadow in the story that has charmed so many.

BEDE AND BALE

Bale (1495-1563) was a Carmelite priest who left the Church of Rome in the 1530s. The author of several large-scale surveys of English authors and the first biographer of Chaucer, Bale was also a collector of early manuscripts, including those in Anglo-Saxon.²² According to John N. King, Bale was “the most influential English Protestant author of his time.”²³ He was also a prodigious instrument in the propaganda efforts of Thomas Cromwell.²⁴ Bale recounted the episode of Gregory and the slave boys in a revisionist narrative of English ecclesiastical history called The Actes of Englysh Votaryes.

And as thys Gregorye behelde them fayre skynned and bewtyfullye faced, with heare upon their heades most comelye, anon he axed, of what regyon they were. And answere was made hym, that they were of an yle called Englande. Wele maye they be called Angli (sayth he) for they have verye Angelych vysages. Se how curyose these fathers were, in the wele eyenge of their wares. Here was no cyrcumstaunce unloked to, perteynynge to the sale. Yet have [has] thys Byshopp bene of all writers reckened the best sens hys tyme.²⁵

Bale mockingly urged his readers to “[m]arke thys ghostlye mysterye, for the prelates had than no wyves.” He plainly implied that Gregory had sexual designs on the boys. “[T]hese fathers” were “curyose” in the “wele eyenge” of the boys as “wares,” he wrote, using an expression with strong sexual overtones. In sixteenth-century English, “ware” could mean “piece of goods” (an expression “jocularly applied to women,” according to the OED) and “the privy parts of either sex.”²⁶ Because priests were unmarried, Bale observes, with much sarcasm, “other spirytuall remedyes were sought out for them by their good prouvders and proctours, we maye (yf we wyll) call them apple squyres.” “Apple-squires,” according to the OED, means “pimp” or “panderer,” thus further underscoring Bale's sexual innuendo. Stressing that this sale was not unique, Bale produces another witness, Machutus, who saw a similar event in Rome in ad 500 and bought the boys to protect them (23a). We are meant to conclude that Gregory, deprived of a wife by the Church's demand for clerical celibacy, sought out “other spirytuall remedyes” by purchasing boys for sex.

Bale's rewriting of the story of Gregory and the Anglian boys takes place in the context of an elaborate revision of England's Anglo-Saxon Christian history proposed in The Actes of Englysh Votaryes and The Image of Bothe Churches. In The Actes of Englysh Votaryes Bale boldly revised English history in order to describe the nation's struggles against the corrupt influences of the Church of Rome. The chief instrument of Roman domination, Bale argued, was clerical celibacy, which permitted the clergy to degrade marriage and advocate virginity, all the while using its own religious houses for immoral purposes. Bale vigorously defended the right of the clergy to wed and believed that the Roman clergy who claimed to be celibate had in fact indulged in every form of sexual corruption. In The Image of Bothe Churches, Bale set forth a thesis about the Church in England that, as it was later developed by his better-known contemporary, John Foxe, became a foundational strategy for Reformation anti-Roman polemic.²⁷ Bale argued that the Church had been divided during the reign of Constantine and that the See of Saint Peter stemmed from the corrupt division, while an isolated community of the faithful, who retained belief in the true Church, reestablished the true Church in England. Bale argued that the false Church of Rome had taken on the image of the true Church of antiquity and that from the time of St. Augustine's mission to the English (597) to the rejection of papal authority by Henry VIII (1533) the Church in England had been corrupt. Bale was among the historians who looked back to the Anglo-Saxon period, skipping over an internal period in which they perceived England as dominated by the Church of Rome to a point that they erroneously saw as a free, “native,” English church unencumbered by Roman influence. This was an exercise in self-justification. Having recently thrown off Roman rule itself, the new “English” or “Anglican” church was searching for its origins in the Anglo-Saxon period, which was perceived as another time when England's Christians governed themselves justly and righteously.

For Bede, the mission of Augustine marked the permanent conversion of Britain. Bale reversed the significance of this event. He claimed that the English church had survived pure and uncorrupted until the coming of Roman missionaries. With them they brought pernicious doctrines such as clerical celibacy, and as a result they transformed the once-pure land and its church into a new Sodom. Seeking to open his readers' eyes to the false miracles used by “obstynate hypocrytes” still living under the pope's rules, Bale wrote The Actes of Englysh Votaryes in order to accuse Catholics of portraying “whoremongers, bawdes, brybers, idolaters, hypocrytes, traytors, and most fylthye Gomorreanes as Godlye men and women” (2a). His diatribes are laced with references to Sodom and Gomorrah. Although his definitions of the sins of these unholy places remain vague, they encompass theological error as well as sexual excess, including, at certain points, male homosexual intercourse.

Marriage, Bale wrote in The Actes, was the “first order of religion,” created in order to protect against “beastlye abusyons of the fleshe that shuld after happen” if men and women disobeyed God's command to increase and multiply (7b). The Church sought to dissuade holy men and women from marriage, broke up existing marriages, venerated only unmarried saints, and demonized women as “spretes” (“sprites,” 3a); these were the acts of “the Sodomytycall swarme or brode of Antichrist” (4a). According to Bale's extraordinary revision of the history of Anglo-Saxon holy men and women, clergymen fornicated with cloistered nuns and produced a race of bastards who were then venerated as saints, Cuthbert, Dunstan, Oswald, Anselm, and Becket among them (2b). Some did worse, since they refrained from women but “spared not to worke execrable fylthyness among themselves, and one to pollute the other,” an obvious reference to male homosexual acts (12b). Devout in his praise of Mary, Bale was eager to insist that she was not abused by the clergy and that she was not a professed nun, “as the dottynge papystes have dreamed, to couer their sodometrye with a most precyouse coloure, but an honest mannys wyfe” (13a). Bale attacked “spirituall Sodomytes and knaves” who wrote the lives of these sinful saints (18a): “Come out of Sodome ye whoremongers and hypocrytes, popysh byshoppes and prestes” (18b). Bale used “sodometrie”—an obsolete word for sodomy, first used in 1530, according to the OED—to attack clergy who took the required vows of celibacy but who were unable to remain celibate: either men who had sex with each other because they could not have sex with women, or men who did have sex with cloistered nuns who were virtually the male clergy's sexual slaves. Shortly before he recounts the story about Gregory, Bale tells of a large group of women who joined a pilgrimage only to find that they had been taken from England to be forced to prostitute themselves to the clergy on the Continent (21a).

In leading up to his account of the boys, Bale followed Geoffrey of Monmouth, who embroidered Gildas's account into a claim that sodomy was pervasive among the early Britons, practiced by two of their kings (Malgo and Mempricius) and the cause of their overthrow by the Saxons. Gildas's version contains no hint of sexual slander, as we saw in chapter 5. Bale wrote that Malgo, who was possibly fashioned on William Rufus, was “the most comelye persone of all hys regyon,” someone to whom God had given great victories against the “Saxons, Normeies, and Danes.” But he was a sodomite. He imitated the ways of his predecessor Mempricius, who was “geuen to most abhomynable sodometrye, which he had lerned in hys youthe of the consecrate chastyte of the holie clergye” (21b-22a).²⁸ Thus the British were weak and were easily conquered by the Saxons. Bale believed that Roman Christianity entered England with the Saxons, who renamed the land England. “Then came therein a newe fashyoned christyanyte yet ones agayne from Rome with many more heythnysh yokes than afore.” Bale then immediately introduced Gregory and told the story about the boys (22a-b, a section entitled “The Saxons entre with newe Christyanyte”).

Elsewhere Bale underscored the charges of sodomy among Catholic clergy made in The Image of Both Churches. In his Apology against a Rank Papist (1550), Bale asked, “Whan the kynges grace of England by the autorite of Gods wurd, discharged the monkish sectes of his realme, from their vowed obedience to the byshop of Rome, did he not also discharge them in conscience of the vowe of Sodometry, whyche altogether made them Antichristes creatures?” Catholic clergy had set marriage and virginity “at variance” and replaced them with “two unhappy gestes, called whoredom and buggery.”²⁹ In The Pageant of Popes, published in 1574 (after Bale's death), Bale recounted visitations to monasteries ordered by Henry VIII, which found “such swarmes of whoremongers, ruffians, filthie parsouns, giltye of sinne against nature, Ganimedes, and yet votaries and unmaryed all, so that thou wouldest thincke that there were a newer Gomorrah amonge them.” At Battle Abbey, according to Bale, there were nearly twenty “gilty of sinne against nature” (their crimes included bigamy and adultery); at Canterbury there were eleven.³⁰The Pageant of Popes shows that Bale saw another side to Gregory, casting him as the creator of a policy opposing clerical celibacy (no one could ever accuse Bale of consistency). Gregory was informed that priests “accompanied not only with virgins and wyves, but also even with their owne kindred, with mankind, yea and that whiche is horrible to be sayde, with brute beastes.” (“Accompanied” is an obsolete euphemism for “cohabit with,” according to the OED. Note that Bale regards bestiality as worse than same-sex acts.) Appalled at this conduct, Gregory revoked the canon requiring that priests not marry.³¹ Gregory was given credit for being “the best man of all these Romaine Patriarkes, for learning and good life,” and Bale praised his humility and his learning.³²

Like many polemicists, Bale was an idealist. His attack on the Roman clergy can be explained by his high regard for marriage and his ardent defense of women's position. When he was a Carmelite priest, in the 1520s, Bale carried out extensive research into Carmelite archives and took special interest in the Church's view of women, in part at least because of his interest in Mary, the patron of the Carmelite order.³³ His recruitment to the Church of England came in the 1530s, when he lived in London and could see the drastic impact of Henry's marriage and decrees on all monastic orders, including his own. It was also at this time—in 1536—that Bale married, and undoubtedly this change in his life fueled his polemics about the Roman Church's demand for clerical celibacy.³⁴ Bale identified the ideal of marriage for the clergy as an Anglo-Saxon custom that had been brought to an end with the Norman Conquest. “I omit to declare for lengthe of the matter,” he wrote in Apology against a Rank Papist (xiii), “what mischefe and confusion, vowes [vows] brought to this realme by the Danes and Normannes, whan the lyves of the vowers in their monasteries were more beastlye than eyther amonge paganes or Turkes.” Bale, who was unaware that the Danes were not Christian, believed that the monks and clergymen, once forced to give up wives, turned to “bestlye” lives worse than those lived by pagans or Turks. In other words, he thought they had become sodomites.

Sodomy also figured in Bale's plays, his best-known works. In A Comedy concernynge Thre Lawes, of Nature, Moses, & Christ, Corrupted by the Sodomytes, Pharysees, and Papystes (1538), written before the historical studies just sampled, Bale created a character named Sodomismus, an allegorical figure unique in sixteenth-century English drama.³⁵ Sodomismus is one of six vice characters in the play. Attired “lyke a monke of all sectes,” according to Bale,³⁶ Sodomismus repeatedly associates himself with both monks and the pope.

I dwelt amonge the Sodomytes,
The Benjamytes and Madyantes
And now the popish hypocrytes
          Embrace me every where.
I am now become all spyrytuall [i.e., taken over by spiritual leaders],(37)
For the clergye at Rome and over all
For want of wyves, to me doth fall,
          To God they have no feare.

(2:571-78)

Pederastic unions are listed among the forms of sodomy he promotes.

In Rome to me they fall,
Both byshopp and cardynall,
Monke, fryre, prest and all,
          More ranke they are than antes.
Example in Pope Julye,
Whych sought to have in hys furye
Two laddes, and to use them beastlye,
          From the Cardinall of Nantes.

(2:643-50)

Had he known about Gregory's letter to Candidus, Bale would have had an even more pertinent example of how a Roman pope allegedly abused innocent boys.

In King Johan, which casts the king as an opponent of clerical corruption, the king speaks for Bale's position. Johan (King John) regrets that the clergy

Shuld thus bynd yowre selfe to the grett captyvyte Of blody Babulon the grownd and mother of whordom—The Romych Churche I meane, more vyle than ever was Sodom.³⁸

For Bale, “sodomites” were not only the unjust and impious but also those who turned from the lawful union of marriage and had illicit intercourse either with the opposite sex or with their own. In A Comedy concernynge Thre Lawes, Sodomismus claims to have inspired all manner of sexual sinners, ranging from the fallen angels who fornicated with the daughters of men (Genesis 6:1-4) to Onan (Genesis 38:9; see A Comedy, 580-610). The offense that seems most closely connected to sodomy in Bale's mind is idolatry, represented in the play as Idolatria, an old woman. Idolatria is the companion of Sodomismus, who speaks to her in terms of endearment, calling her “myne owne swetehart of golde” (481). Sodomismus is sexually profligate, not exclusively or even primarily interested in same-sex intercourse. His accusations against monks and popes, however, conform precisely to those Bale himself made in his nondramatic works.

The inference that Bale had accused Gregory of sodomy was drawn by Bale's Catholic opponent, who recognized the unacknowledged source of Bale's story in Bede's Ecclesiastical History. In 1565, in the first translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History in modern English, Thomas Stapleton listed “a number of diuersities between the pretended religion of Protestants, and the primitive faith of the english Church” (he counted forty-five points of difference in all). Stapleton contrasted the authority of Bede, who wrote without prejudice, with that of Bale, Foxe, and other “pretended refourmers.” Stapleton discussed the episode involving Gregory and the Anglian boys in his preface. Bede, who was close to this event, had told a story contrasting outer beauty with inner lack of belief. Bale had deliberately misread the event in order to charge Gregory “with a most outrageous vice and not to be named.” Stapleton obviously understood Bale to have accused Gregory of sodomy. Bede was a bee who made honey (beautiful meaning) out of this episode, said Stapleton, but Bale was a “venimous spider being filthy and uncleane himself,” an “olde ribauld,” and “another Nero” who found “poisonned sence and meaning” therein.³⁹

To be fair, Bale's interpretation, admittedly harsh, is somewhat better than Stapleton allowed. Bale forces us to reconsider Bede's treatment of the anecdote and calls our attention to its dark side, its shadow. The episode about Gregory and the boys is animated by the contrast between light and dark, outside and inside. Gregory calls Satan “the author of darkness” who holds “men so bright of face in his grip.” He finds the Anglians “devoid of inward grace” while admiring their “graceful … outward form[s].” Gregory's language clearly recognizes that physical and moral beauty exist in close proximity to the evil and the ugly. Bede did not look beyond Gregory's words for these malignant forces. Instead he saw the brightness of the episode, which marked the “Angli” as a people elevated by their likeness, at least in Gregory's mind, to angels. Bale saw around Gregory's words and, like Gregory himself, recognized how near evil was to the good. But Bale reversed the field of Gregory's vision, casting Gregory into the darkness where Gregory himself saw Satan. What lived in that darkness was same-sex desire, the unholy appetite of Gregory and other reluctant celibates for the sexual favors of young Englishmen. Such shadows, dark places of evil and corruption, are not the only kind of shadows where same-sex relations can be seen. They are not the kinds of shadows I think of when I think of the presence of same-sex love in a heterosexual world. All the same, Bale's vision of the shadow, however distasteful it might seem, is, in context, accurate. The sexual abuse of young boys was a danger to which life in the monastery exposed them, as the penitentials show. Slavery was another danger, not unrelated, that lurked in the episode Bede describes. It is difficult to deny that the shadows seen by Bale are places where “the author of darkness,” as Gregory called him, held sway.

Bale's recasting of Anglo-Saxon history had a prominent sexual aspect, if not a primary sexual character. He saw the Anglo-Saxons as a people who naturally observed God's lawful commandment to be fruitful and multiply. Their Roman oppressors, on the other hand, were those who denied clergy the right to marry and, as a result, spread sexual corruption wherever they were to be found. Gregory's “wele eyenge” of the slave boys' “wares” vividly emblematizes this exploitation and situates it in the heart of Rome. For Bale, Anglo-Saxon identity was continuous with British identity that predated the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. English identity emerged out of this combined British-Anglo-Saxon identity in a struggle against the enslaving bonds of Roman and then Norman domination. Racial differences are but vaguely registered by Bale, and his chronology, not unexpectedly, is confused. Malgo won victories over “Saxons, Normeies, and Danes,” for example, even though it was the Saxons who subverted the realm (22a). Bale's historical discourse, punctuated with numerous references to Sodom and allegations of homosexual acts among the clergy, is entirely free of allegory (his plays, obviously, are not). Bale did not need a figurative discourse about angels or origins to celebrate what was, for him, the distinguishing feature of his sources. His sense of who was Saxon, Norman, or Dane was imprecise, but Bale unquestionably understood that Gildas, Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chaucer, and others, were not mythical figures but were instead his predecessors, righteous as he was himself.⁴⁰ He was sure that the history he chronicled was as English as he was. His association of corrupt sexual practices with foreign powers—Roman and Catholic especially—is therefore easily explained, however disagreeable we find it. His polemical use of sodomy strongly resembles that of the Anglo-Norman historians and chroniclers on whose work he drew. But whereas they directed their diatribes against their own princes and rulers, Bale directed his at the princes of the Catholic Church. Among their agents he numbered the Norman conquerors of England, the despoilers of the True Church of the British.

ANGELS AND ANGLI

Another polemicist and dramatist with a vague sense of the Anglo-Saxon past and strong views on its significance is Tony Kushner. His celebrated two-part drama, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, approaches the Anglo-Saxons through the stereotype of the WASP. Kushner correlates same-sex relations with racial stereotypes and national heritage and makes revealing use of Anglo-Saxon culture that is seldom noticed by the play's admirers. Kushner's AIDS-infected hero is the play's only WASP, the thirty-second Prior Walter in a line traced to the Norman Conquest so that it can represent the Anglo-Saxon hegemony of the West. But Angels reverses a dynamic that operates in all the other texts I have examined throughout this study. Anglo-Saxon penitentials, histories, poems, and commentaries ultimately side with the angels. And so, for that matter, do Chaucer and Bale, Custance being Chaucer's angel, the English boys being Bede's and Bale's. Angels are pure, either above sex or, if involved with sexual relations, chastely married; they are on the side of order. Sodomites, however they have been defined, are not. They and same-sex relations are stigmatized and repressed because they subvert order, lack shame, and threaten to lead others into sin.

In order to express Kushner's millennial vision, Angels in America rewrites the social history of England (and America) in order to enable a new era in which same-sex relations thrive while heterosexual relations wither. Kushner does not take the side of the angels but rather represents them as weak, lost, and prejudiced. Amid their confusion, paradoxically, their saving grace is that they retain their sexual prowess. The Angel of America, as she will be known, enters the play as a messenger to a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant but exits taking advice because the WASP is also a PWA, a “person with AIDS,” prophet of a new homosocial order and herald of a revolution so sweeping that it offers redemption even for angels.

Rich in references to migratory voyages and the Chosen People, Angels in America advances a broad argument about history and progress. The play is a multicultural juxtaposition of WASP, Jewish, black, and Mormon traditions, among others. David Savran has argued that the “spiritual geography” of Mormonism is central to the play's “conceptualization of America as the site of a blessed past and a millennial future.” Savran demonstrates that Mormonism was among the evangelical, communitarian sects formed in reaction to the individualism fostered by Jacksonian democracy and the ideology of Manifest Destiny.⁴¹ A key element in the racial basis of Manifest Destiny, which claimed for the chosen people “a preeminent social worth, a distinctively lofty mission, and consequently unique rights in the application of moral principles,”⁴² is Anglo-Saxonism. The premise of Anglo-Saxonism (familiar in earlier forms in the works of Gildas, Bede, Chaucer, and Bale, as we have seen, and many others, of course) is that the English are a Chosen People and a superior race.⁴³ Numerous nineteenth-century accounts used the racial purity of the Anglo-Saxons to justify westward expansion and empire building. Anglo-Saxon culture was thought to have been inherently democratic and the Anglo-Saxons egalitarian, self-governing, and free. The descendants of a people who so perfectly embodied the principles of American democracy had, it appeared, natural rights over lesser peoples and their lands. Anglo-Saxonism enters Angels in America through the lineage of Prior Walter. He is a token of the WASP culture—the only white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the play, according to Kushner⁴⁴—against which the oppressed peoples of the play, Jews and blacks in particular, strive.

The Anglo-Saxon subtext of Angels emerges in both parts of the drama, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, through the association of Prior Walter with the angel. Kushner locates Prior's origins in the mid-eleventh century, but the Anglo-Saxon characteristics that Prior represents are prior to the Normans, whose conquest of England constitutes a particularly troubled originary moment for the chief Anglo-Saxon of the play. An early scene in each of the three acts of Millennium Approaches reveals something about Prior's Anglo-Saxon identity (act 1, scene 4; act 2, scene 3; and act 3, scene 1). In the first of the scenes about his lineage, Prior jokes with Louis, his Jewish lover, after a funeral service for Louis's grandmother. Prior comments on the difficulties that their relatives present for gay men: “Bloodlines,” he says. “Jewish curses are the worst. I personally would dissolve if anyone ever looked me in the eye and said ‘Feh.’ Fortunately WASPs don't say ‘Feh’” (1:20).⁴⁵ A few moments later he reveals his first AIDS lesions to Louis, who is horrified both by the lesions and by Prior's mordant jocularity about them. This scene establishes Prior's AIDS status and his WASP identity and introduces the largest of the cultural themes of Angels in America: the resistance that biological descent and inherited tradition, embodied here in the body of the WASP, pose to political change. Bloodlines are curses because they carry the past into the present, creating resistance to the possibilities of change that the present raises. WASP blood resists change because WASPs, as they are presented in this play, exist in a culture of stasis, while other races and creeds, denied that stability and permanence and driven by persecution and need from place to place, have developed migratory and transitional cultures open to, and indeed dependent on, change.

Having inherited a distinguished past, Prior faces an uncharacteristically grim future (for a WASP) because he carries a fatal new element in his bloodline, AIDS. The virus paradoxically reverses the deadening flow of WASP tradition and prepares for a new social order whose values the WASP himself will eventually espouse. The virus he bears is both literal (HIV) and figurative; it is eventually identified as “the virus of time,” the “disease” of change and progress. The angel who appears to Prior at the end of Millennium Approaches, and who punctuates the play with intimations of her arrival, claims to herald a new age. When Prior receives his first intimation of the angelic, a feather drops into his room and an angelic voice (“an incredibly beautiful voice,” the text specifies) commands, “Look up! … Prepare the way!” (1:34-35). But the side of the angels is not what we expect it to be. The angel is not pointing to a new age but instead calling for a return to a previous one. The tradition and stasis that constitute Prior's Anglo-Saxon heritage draw her. She believes that Prior will be a worthy prophet precisely because he is a worthy WASP.

Kushner happened on Prior's name when looking “for one of those WASP names that nobody gets called any more.” Discussing Walter Benjamin with a friend so interested in the philosopher that she sometimes “thought she was Walter Benjamin reincarnated,” Kushner referred to the real Benjamin as the “prior” Walter.⁴⁶ The significance of Prior's name unfolds in a subsequent dialogue between Louis and Emily, a nurse, after Prior has been hospitalized. “Weird name. Prior Walter,” says Emily. “Like, ‘The Walter before this one.’” Louis replies: “Lots of Walters before this one. Prior is an old old family name is an old old family. The Walters go back to the Mayflower and beyond. Back to the Norman Conquest. He says there's a Prior Walter stitched into the Bayeux tapestry” (1:51). The oldest medieval record mentioned in Angels in America, the tapestry would seem designed to surround Prior's origins with an aura of great antiquity.

The appearance of Prior Walter's name on the tapestry validates Louis's claim that the Walter name is indeed an “old old” one. But the Bayeux tapestry is a record of the political and military events surrounding the Norman Conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066. The tapestry testifies to the subjugation of the Anglo-Saxons and marks the point at which the government and official vernacular language of England were no longer English. Generations of Anglo-Saxonizing historians and writers regarded the arrival of the Normans as the pollution of the pure stock of the race.⁴⁷ Thus Kushner's announced aim of portraying Walter as a WASP is more than a little complicated by this decision to trace Walter's ancestry to a tapestry long accepted as a lucid statement of Norman claims to the English throne.⁴⁸ Notoriously ironic throughout Angels in America, Kushner might have chosen the tapestry to register precisely this compromised aspect of Prior's lineage.⁴⁹ But one's view of that lineage would seem to depend on the uses to which it is put in Angels in America, where it seems intended to represent the Anglo-Saxons as a monolithic, triumphant culture that has reached a symbolic end point in Prior's blood.

Emily (played by the actress who plays the angel) is somewhat baffled by Louis's high regard for Prior's ancient name and for the tapestry itself. Louis believes that the queen, “La Reine Mathilde,” embroidered the tapestry while William was away fighting the English. In the long tradition of French historians and politicians who used the tapestry to arouse public sentiment to support nationalistic causes, including the Napoleonic wars against the English,⁵⁰ Louis pictures Mathilda waiting at home, “stitch[ing] for years,” waiting for William to return. “And if he had returned mutilated, ugly, full of infection and horror, she would still have loved him,” Louis says (1:52). He is thinking penitently of Prior, who is also “full of infection and horror,” whom Louis will soon abandon for Joe, the married Mormon lawyer with whom Louis has an affair. Louis's view of when and where the tapestry was made is popular, but wrong. The tapestry was made in England, under the patronage of William's half-brother Odo, bishop of Bayeux and vice-regent of England, within a generation of 1066, not during the Conquest itself, and then taken to the Bayeux Cathedral.⁵¹

Kushner's mistaken ideas of when, where, and by whom the Bayeux tapestry was made have significant implications for his definition of “WASP.” Kushner invokes the Conquest as if its chief force were to certify the antiquity and authenticity of Prior's Anglo-Saxon credentials and heritage, a point of origin for English identity, although, as I have shown, it traditionally represented the very betrayal of the racial purity that “Anglo-Saxon” came to represent. Louis's assertion that the name of a “Prior Walter” is stitched into the tapestry is also without foundation. Only four minor characters are named in the tapestry, none of them Anglo-Saxons (“Turold,” “Ælfgyva,” “Wadard,” and “Vital”). The rest are important figures (Harold, William, and others), most of them Norman and well-known from contemporary sources.⁵² If Prior Walter were an Anglo-Saxon, it is highly unlikely that he would be commemorated in the tapestry, although it is possible he could have been an English retainer of Harold (who was defeated by William).

But “Prior Walter” is a singularly inappropriate name for an Anglo-Saxon. It strongly suggests an ecclesiastical, monastic context, as if “Prior Walter” were “Walter, prior of” some abbey, instead of the secular and heroic ethos usually called to mind by “Anglo-Saxon.” Apart from the tapestry, there is no evidence either for or against an argument about Prior's origins. Although it is possible that his ancestors were Anglo-Saxon, it is more likely that they were Normans who, after the Conquest, settled in England and established the line from which the Walters descended. Few Anglo-Saxons would expect to find their ancestors mentioned in the tapestry, while Normans would want to boast of this testimony to a family's distinguished history. The original Prior Walter might have been a Norman who took part in the conquest of the English. His family would have been prosperous. As we saw in the last chapter, the Anglo-Saxons were less well-to-do than their conquerors and resented the superiority of French into the fourteenth century. If so, as the last in a line of thirty-one men of the same name (or, by an alternative count, if bastard sons are included, thirty-three [1:86]), Prior Walter claims Norman rather than Anglo-Saxon ancestry, or, more likely, a heritage in which Norman and Anglo-Saxon blood is mixed—in other words, Anglo-Norman. His long genealogy, to which Louis proudly points, is hybrid at its origins. Kushner's stereotype of the WASP is itself a further hybrid, obviously, since it is a post-Reformation construct in which P (“Protestant”) is a new element. WASP, we can see, is not only a recent vehicle for the representation of “Anglo-Saxon” culture, but an exceedingly shallow one.⁵³

We learn more about Prior's ancestry at the start of the third act, when two prior Priors appear to him in a dream (1:85-89). The first to appear, the “fifth of the name,” is the thirteenth-century squire who is known as “Prior 1.” He tells of the plague that wiped out whole villages, the “spotty monster” that killed him (1:86). (This is another sign of Kushner's shaky historical sense; the first outbreak of the Black Death in England was a century later, in 1348.)⁵⁴ They are joined by “Prior 2,” described as “an elegant 17th-century Londoner” (1:86), who preceded the current Prior by some seventeen others and also died of the plague, “Black Jack.” Priors 1 and 2 are not merely ancient ancestors, however. They are also the forerunners of the angel whose arrival spectacularly concludes the play. To “distant, glorious music,” they recite the language later used by the angel; her messengers, they are “sent to declare her fabulous incipience.” “They [the angels] chose us,” Prior 2 declares, “because of the mortal affinities. In a family as long-descended as the Walters there are bound to be a few carried off by plague” (1:87). Neither Prior 1 nor Prior 2 understands why Prior is unmarried and has no wife, although the second Prior understands that the plague infecting Prior is “the lamentable consequence of venery” (1:87). Only later, when they see him dancing with Louis, does Prior 1 understand: “Hah, Now I see why he's got no children. He's a sodomite” (1:114). Prior Walter is, therefore, the end of his line. After him the WASP hegemony of the Walters, apparently unbroken from the mid-eleventh century to the present, will cease to exist.

The vague and portentous sense of these genealogical relations is clarified in the next scene (1:89-96), in which Louis engages in a long, confused, and painfully naïve monologue about race and identity politics in America, much to the disgust of his friend Belize, a black nurse and ex-drag queen.⁵⁵ Louis describes a difference between American and European peoples that encapsulates the tension between Anglo-Saxons and other races. “Ultimately what defines us [in America] isn't race, but politics,” he says. “Not like any European country where there's an insurmountable fact of a kind of racial, or ethnic, monopoly, or monolith, like all Dutchmen, I mean Dutch people, are, well, Dutch, and the Jews of Europe were never Europeans, just a small problem” (1:90). Significantly, Kushner chooses England as site for a scene in which, according to Louis, the “racial destiny,” not the “political destiny,” matters (1:91). A Jew in a gay bar in London, Louis found himself looked down upon by a Jamaican man who still spoke with a “lilt,” even though his family had been in England for more than a century. At first this man, who complained that he was still treated as an outsider, struck Louis as a fellow traveler: “I said yeah, me too, these people are anti-Semites.” But then the man criticized British Jews for keeping blacks out of the clothing business, and Louis realized how pervasive racial stereotypes could be (1:91). In America, Louis believes, there is no racial monopoly; in America the “monolith is missing,” so “reaching out for a spiritual past in a country where no indigenous spirits exist” is futile (1:92). The native peoples have been killed off: “there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics, the shifting downwards and outwards of political power to the people” (1:92). Wiped clean of its indigenous spirits, the nation as Louis sees it would seem to be a blank slate not unlike England before the Anglo-Saxons, ready for migratory peoples (including Jews and Mormons) who bring their past with them as they seek to build a new future. Belize holds Louis's liberal interpretation of American government and culture in utter contempt. Kushner ensures that the naiveté of the Jew's liberalism will be exposed and contained by Belize's furious reply that in America race is more important than anything else.

Louis's speech reveals the meaning of Anglo-Saxon that is encapsulated in Prior's WASP identity. Even though Prior's mixed Norman and Anglo-Saxon genealogy contradicts Louis's point about the monolith of racial purity that the WASP supposedly represents, Prior is singled out as the recipient of the angel's visit because he is made to represent the cultural monolith of WASP America, fixed and unchanging, embodying what Louis calls “an insurmountable fact of a kind of racial, or ethnic, monopoly, or monolith” (1:90). WASP heritage stands conveniently juxtaposed both to Louis's vision and to Louis's own heritage of many small groups, “so many small problems” (1:90). Although Kushner might have wished to represent the Anglo-Saxons only as a hybrid people, and hence introduced evidence that points to the eleventh-century intermingling of Norman blood, it seems evident to me that the racial dynamics of the play require that the Anglo-Saxons represent the “monolith” about which Louis speaks. Only then can other races and groups be set up in opposition to them.

Indeed, even in motion, the Anglo-Saxons of Angels in America are oppressors. One of the most harrowing moments in Millennium Approaches is Prior's account of his ancestor, a ship's captain, who sent whale oil to Europe and brought back immigrants, “Irish mostly, packed in tight, so many dollars per head.” The last ship he captained sank off Nova Scotia in a storm; the crew loaded seventy women and children onto an open boat but found that it was overcrowded and began throwing passengers overboard: “They walked up and down the longboat, eyes to the waterline, and when the boat rode low in the water they'd grab the nearest passenger and throw them into the sea” (1:41). The boat arrived in Halifax carrying nine people. Crewmen are the captain's agents; the captain is at the bottom of the sea, but his “implacable, unsmiling men, irresistibly strong, seize … maybe the person next to you, maybe you” (1:41-42). The agents of the Anglo-Saxons arbitrarily decide the fates of the Irish in their care. The episode is a stark political allegory, a nationally rendered reminder of the rights of one group to survive at the expense of another, a deft miniature that reveals the power of the conquerors over the conquered, the interrelation of commerce and the immigration patterns of impoverished nations, and, most of all, “unique rights in the application of moral principles,” a signature belief of Manifest Destiny.⁵⁶

The point of the association of stasis with Anglo-Saxon heritage—the grand design of Angels in America—emerges fully in Perestroika, when the Angel of America articulates her ambitions for the WASP and discloses the assumed affiliations between the Anglo-Saxons and the angels. The angel attempts to persuade Prior to take up her prophecy. “IIII / Am the Bird of America,” she proclaims, saying that she has come to expose the fallacy of change and progress (2:44), “the Virus of time” that God released in man (2:49), enabling humans to explore and migrate. Angels do not migrate; instead, they stand firm (2:49). God himself found time irresistible and began to prefer human time to life in heaven. The angel says:

Paradise itself Shivers and Splits
Each day when You awake, as though we are only
          the Dream of YOU.
Progress! Movement!
Shaking HIM.

(2:50)

A few moments later she shouts, “You have driven him away! You must stop moving!” (2:52). God became so bored with the angels that he abandoned them on the day of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. And who could blame him? In the one scene that Kushner gives performers the permission to cut, if only in part (act 5, scene 5; see 2:9), the angels are shown sitting around heaven listening to a malfunctioning 1940s radio over which they hear the broadcast of the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor. Their real concern, however, is the radio's malfunctioning vacuum tube (2:130). They are a picture of feckless paralysis, obviously unable to respond to the changes forced on them by human or heavenly time. “More nightmare than utopia, marooned in history,” Savran writes, “Heaven commemorates disaster, despair, and stasis.”⁵⁷ The purpose of the angel's visitation is to recruit Prior as the angels' prophet on earth. Angels, we see, are not messengers from the divine or heralds of change, although that is how we conventionally think of them, and how Kushner and the play's publicity represent them. Angels are instead associated with stasis and with the power of ancient spirits to resist change. Opposed to the flow of power “downward and outward,” as Louis puts it, of “power to the people,” the angels want God to return to his place so that they can return to theirs.

The angel's visit is not intended to save Prior from his disease but to use his disease against him, to try to persuade this “long descended” man (like the angel in this) to stop the phenomenon of human progress, to get him to turn back the clock. The angel says to him that she has written “The End” in his blood. This could mean that the AIDS virus is supposed to ensure his desire to stop time—stop the progress of the disease—and prompt him to proclaim her message (2:53), although what is written in his blood could also be his homosexuality, which writes “The End” in a different sense, since it means that he is the last of his line. Later in the scene in which the angel commands Prior to stand still, symbolically appealing to his Anglo-Saxon love of stability and tradition, Belize dismisses the vision as Prior recounts it: “This is just you, Prior, afraid of the future, afraid of time. Longing to go backwards so bad you made this angel up, a cosmic reactionary” (2:55). Prior and Belize were once lovers; Belize knows him well. Like Prior, three other figures—the angel, Sister Ella Chapter (a friend of Joe's mother in Salt Lake City), and the nurse (all played by the actress who plays the angel)—are fearful of movement. Emily does not want Louis to leave the hospital room (1:52). Before Joe's mother moves to New York to help Joe cope with his schizophrenic wife, Harper, Ella reminds her that Salt Lake City is “the home of the saints” and “the godliest place on earth,” and then cautions, “Every step a Believer takes away from here is a step fraught with peril” (1:83). But Ella's is not a view that the play endorses. Joe's mother leaves anyway. All the chosen people do.

Like her, Prior rejects the advice to stay put. He ignores the angel's command precisely because “The End” is written in his blood. He interprets these words as the angel's wish that he die: “You want me dead” (2:53). No longer the Prior who joked fatalistically about his lesions outside the funeral home in act 1 of Millennium Approaches, he refuses to die. Because he has contracted “the virus of time,” the WASP, who has the most to lose, turns from the past to the future. All the “good” characters in the play are already on the move, already evolving, even Joe's drug-maddened wife, just as all the valorized nations and races in the play have migrated. The prominence of migration and the movement away from racial purity are basic elements of Kushner's thesis about change, which is based on an idea of the Anglo-Saxons, the WASPS, as static, permanent, and fixed. Politics change racial makeup and break down pure races and their racism. Kushner explains:

Prior is the only character in the play with a Yankee WASP background; he can trace his lineage back for centuries, something most Americans can't reliably do. African-American family trees have to start after ancestors were brought over as slaves. Jews emigrated from a world nearly completely destroyed by European genocide. And most immigrant populations have been from poor and oppressed communities among which accurate genealogy was a luxury or an impossibility. … a certain sense of rootlessness is part of the American character.⁵⁸

Anglo-Saxon history prior to the Normans shows that “a certain sense of rootlessness” is also part of the Anglo-Saxon character. American rootlessness was inherited from the nation's Anglo-Saxon founders; the Anglo-Saxons in America were hardly a people who wanted to stay put. It is because of their restlessness and their desire to move westward that Louis, as Kushner's surrogate, can assert that there are no angels in America.⁵⁹

Kushner's association of WASPs with stasis is his most interesting—but least accurate—reinterpretation of the historical record. Kushner seems to think that Anglo-Saxons—WASPs at least—are not a migratory people. At this point his play helps us see a truth in Bede's Ecclesiastical History that Bede himself did not acknowledge. Bede reported that after the migration of the Angles to Britain, the land of “Angulus” remained empty “from that day to this.” Are there no angels in America? There are no angels in Angulus, either, because the entire population moved to Britain. Thus the Angles took their ancient spirits with them, just as did blacks, Jews, and other migrant peoples. Already in the eighth century the immigrants to Britain were known as Anglo-Saxons.⁶⁰

Louis's tendentious view of history is easily discredited, and not only by Belize. The intermarrying of Anglo-Saxon and Norman families ended the pure monolith of “the English” that Prior Walter supposedly represents. What is true of Prior Walter and all WASPS was true for people in England even before the Conquest. “Apartheid is hard enough to maintain,” Susan Reynolds writes, “even when physical differences are obvious, political control is firm, and records of births, deaths, and marriages are kept. After a generation or two of post-Roman Britain not everyone, perhaps comparatively few people, can have been of pure native or invading descent. Who can have known who was descended from whom?” Reynolds draws the inescapable conclusion that “those whom we call Anglo-Saxons were not consistently distinguishable from everyone else.”⁶¹ After the Conquest, of course, the Anglo-Saxons became less “Anglo-Saxon” than they had been earlier, but at no time were bloodlines in Anglo-Saxon England pure; like most bloodlines, they were even then more the consequence of politics than they were of race.

This severing of biological descent and culture is a denial of the power of race to unify a people. That is the good news of Angels in America for homosexuals, the new Chosen People of this epic (what epic does not have one?). Like Mormons, Jews, and other racial groups, gay people too are oppressed, without a homeland, and on the move. But unlike those groups, gays are, first of all, a political people, not bound by nation or race. They have no common descent; there is no link between their sexual identity, which the play sees as their central affiliation, and either their biological or their cultural ancestry. So seen, gays serve as a perfect prophetic vehicle for Kushner's newly multicultural America. Prior succeeds in subverting the angels' design and persuading them to become his messenger; he has refused to become theirs. Their message is that the clock should be turned back to old values and stasis, staying put. His message is that change is good. Won over to humanity's view of time and place, the angels sue God, resorting to time-bound human processes (litigation) to redress grievances. The joke apparently is that the angels' heavenly wishes are inferior to the desires of humanity. The new angels of America know better than the Angel of America because Prior, their WASP spokesman, resoundingly refutes the angel's call for stasis. God, however, will probably win; his lawyer is Roy Cohn, the demon in Angels. Discredited at this point, God is a disloyal lover who has abandoned his angels for (the men of?) San Francisco. The angels, in turn, are also discredited, for they have accepted Prior's suggestion that those who abandon their lovers should not be forgiven, just as Prior will not forgive or take back Louis (2:133, 136).

So Prior moves ahead, not in spite of AIDS but rather because of AIDS. The “virus of time” has jolted him out of torpor and self-pity and eventually transforms him into the play's strongest character, a position from which he waves an affectionate goodbye to the audience. This is an AIDS play with a difference—with a happy ending.⁶² Because he is a WASP the angel singled him out, but because he is a PWA he rejects her. In Angels in America, AIDS retains its deadly force (Cohn and others die of it) without killing the play's central character. Obviously weakened, but strong nonetheless, Prior survives. Having been visited by an angel, Prior all but becomes one. “You are fabulous creatures, each and every one,” he says to the audience. “And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work begins” (2:148). He recapitulates the last lines of Millennium Approaches, in which the Angel declares, “Greetings, Prophet. The Great Work begins. The Messenger has arrived” (1:119). Another messenger has arrived at the end of Perestroika, and his name is Prior Walter. Prior's farewell to the audience, however moving, is a remarkable banality to which I will return.

Savran argues that the play, like The Book of Mormon, “demonstrates that there are angels in America, that America is in essence a utopian and theological construction, a nation with a divine mission.”⁶³ It is possible to suggest that Bede and Kushner share a political purpose, which is to create the idea of a unified people. Bede does this with the term—the concept—“Angli,” which comes to mean “the English,” a people elevated by their likeness to angels. Like Chaucer and Bale, Kushner is also out to unify a people, but more ambitiously and inclusively, and not a people to be compared to angels, but a people to replace them. The threat that unifies the English in Bede's work is the heathen past. The same might be said for Chaucer's ancient British Christians, at least as the Man of Law imagines them. Bale too imagined the British as overwhelmed by Roman Catholicism as brought by the Anglo-Saxons; he saw the British of his own time triumphing over the same evil force. The threat that unifies Kushner's new angels is not AIDS, which only menaces a small percentage of them, but the old regimes of race that divide and weaken people and prevent change, the very forces of conservative national and religious identity that Bede, Chaucer, and Bale advocated so powerfully. Those forces are routed at the end of Angels in America, and the boards are clear for a new age. The promised land of Angels in America is a multicultural, tolerant world in which biological descent counts for little (there are no successful marriages in the play) and cultural inheritance imparts defining characteristics to people without imposing barriers among them.

MILLENNIUM APPROACHES

I began thinking about this study in 1993, when I saw Angels in America for the first time. I was troubled by the conflation of Anglo-Saxon and Norman identities and unclear about how Kushner meant to align his vaguely sketched history of Prior's family with the play's sexual politics. It seemed obvious that he had merely used the WASP as a rhetorical trope and that he had not thought about the Anglo-Saxonism contained in that acronym or how Anglo-Saxonism might be related to his historical thesis about Mormons or, for that matter, angels in America. Kushner ignored the hybrid nature of WASP identity. Likewise, he missed the prominence of same-sex friendships in the nineteenth-century Mormon tradition. D. Michael Quinn has noted that Mormons, although sometimes seen as clannish and isolated, participated fully in what Quinn describes as the “extensive homocultural orientation among Americans generally” a century ago.⁶⁴ Same-sex relations, sexual and otherwise, figure prominently in the history of early Mormon leaders, male and female alike. Kushner's representation of the Mormons would lead one to believe otherwise, however, since his Mormons seem hardly aware that homosexuality exists.

In not knowing much about the Anglo-Saxons, Kushner shares a great deal with the authors I have examined in part 3 of this book. The Anglo-Norman chroniclers knew next to nothing about the Anglo-Saxons that they did not get from Bede's Ecclesiastical History. A few later writers, including thirteenth-century scholars, struggled to recover the Anglo-Saxons' language, but their efforts mostly reveal how quickly knowledge of the Anglo-Saxons' culture, even their ecclesiastical culture, had faded. Chaucer and his contemporaries knew even less, relying again on French chronicles to conjure images of the Anglo-Saxon past. For all his testy and repetitive declarations, Bale was closer than any of his predecessors to real knowledge of the Anglo-Saxons. Despite his errors and confusion, his knowledge of a continuous historical tradition and its sources shames both earlier and especially later efforts. The “scholarly recovery” of Anglo-Saxon language and texts advanced rapidly after Bale's time but did not, for many years, produce a representation of Anglo-Saxon culture any more accurate than his.

Kushner, unfortunately, did no better than the other authors I have named. I take Angels in America as a reasonable, if regrettable, reflection on popular understanding of Anglo-Saxon culture. Kushner seems to be more respectful of Mormon traditions than of Anglo-Saxon traditions. The play contains a diorama portraying the Mormons' westward journey but nothing about the migration of the Anglo-Saxons (2:62-72). Mormon culture seems alien to him and hence multiculturally significant; its history needs to be recaptured and represented. WASP culture, evidently, is familiar and does not need to be elaborated. But at least in the extended historical sense that Kushner evokes through his use of the Bayeux tapestry, WASP culture too is alien to him. Its multicultural significance is ignored, homogenized into stereotypical patterns and ideas. Absent the oversimplified WASP, would Angels in America have had a culture to demonize and denounce?

Angels in America is unique among the works I have discussed in not taking the side of the angels. More important, it is also unique in its perspective on same-sex love. As I showed in part 1, it is possible to glimpse satisfying moments of same-sex love—if not same-sex sex—in opera and dance, and even in a few Anglo-Saxon narrative texts. Gays and lesbians hoping to find representations of love as they know it can find it in these works, sometimes at a small cost (i.e., closing our eyes at the opera), often at no cost. But when we go to Angels in America, we have no need to deprive our senses in any way. This is a work that, like many others, not only aims to show gays and lesbians what the author assumes we want to see but even blesses its audience for showing up. There are many differences between the power of such a work and that of Dido and Aeneas, as danced by Mark Morris, and the power of Der Rosenkavalier, with its use of the convention of the trouser role. The central difference, it seems to me, conforms to the difference between liberation and legitimation as approaches to gay and lesbian rights. Kushner and Morris liberate a same-sex perspective; they emphasize the sexual—the homosexual—in a transgressive manner. That is one way to see homosexual sensibility in the modern world, demanding its due. But finding same-sex love in works that are not about homosexual desire—for example, in operas using trouser roles—also legitimates same-sex love by pointing out that it can exist, plainly if unobtrusively, as the shadow of heteronormative desire.

The second time I saw Angels in America was New Year's Eve, 1995. My partner and I had bought tickets at a premium because the theater advertised a “party” to follow the performance, which concluded shortly before midnight. The “party” turned out to be glasses of cheap fizzy wine hurriedly passed out by staff members eager to clear the house. The cast reappeared to mock the management's fleecing of the audience and to lead us in “Auld Lang Syne,” gracefully lifting the occasion above the circumstances provided for it. Shortly before midnight, in a light snowfall, we walked down a street filled with people who were rushing into bars and restaurants. It was a relief to board the train. The cars were also full—some couples, some groups, some singles, some straight, some gay—but oddly quiet, a capsule of greater Chicago heading to parties or to bed. Between one stop and another the new year arrived. The car's little communities acknowledged the moment without ceremony. Gay, straight, alone, together, we rode happily along. For me the calm—the indifference—made a welcome change from the excitement and intensity of the play and the hustle of the street. No angels crashed through the roof, no heterosexuals were chastised, no homosexuals turned into saints (or demons), no call to a great work of liberation sounded. This is all right, I thought to myself. This is how the millennium, Kushner's and any other, will come, and go.

That is also how I think same-sex love goes along in the world, how it works best for some of us at least—love that belongs in the picture, always there, an ever-present shadow. Political and social work will always be needed to win equal treatment for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and others who make up sexual minority groups. But there are many ways in which that work can be undertaken. I know that many activists cannot see themselves resting until the difference between heterosexual and homosexual is obliterated and such institutions as marriage and the family are transformed and open partnerships and public sex become the new norms. These people see no reason why the institutions of heterosexual desire should be their institutions. Neither do I. Nor do I see why the institutions of homosexual desire should be mandated for all. My vision of same-sex love might seem tepid and diffuse, devoid of passion and revolutionary fervor, not queer enough. Perhaps it is. But I strongly believe that same-sex love cannot be reduced to genital sex, and I will always believe that life is more interesting, pleasurable, and meaningful if its erotic potential can be realized across a spectrum that includes but is not restricted to the sexual. A world that slowly gets used to that idea would seem a better home to me than any queer planet I have yet to see described.

Notes

1. See Robert P. Miller, ed., Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 484. On the narrator's many apostrophes, see the explanatory notes by Patricia J. Eberle in Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 856-58. Innocent's treatise was addressed to a deposed cardinal; Chaucer reported that he had translated this work himself. See the G Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, lines 414-15, in Benson, Riverside Chaucer, 600.

2. References to The Man of Law's Tale are given by line number from Riverside Chaucer, 89-103.

3. For an analysis of hagiographical tropes in The Man of Law's Tale, see Melissa M. Furrow, “The Man of Law's St. Custance: Sex and the Saeculum,” Chaucer Review 24 (1990): 223-35.

4. Æthelburh was allowed to marry Edwin because he promised to allow her to worship as she wished and agreed to consider accepting her faith as his own. Eventually he did so, but only after letters to him and his wife from Pope Boniface and persuasions of other forms, including victory over his assailants, a vision, and the sage counsel of his wise men. See Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds. and trans., Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), book 2, where the saga of Edwin's conversion occupies chaps. 9-14, pp. 162-89.

5. Colgrave and Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, book 2, chap. 9, pp. 162-63.

6. Some of the Anglo-Saxon evidence discussed in this chapter appears in my essay “Bede and Bawdy Bale: Gregory the Great, Angels, and the ‘Angli,’” in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), 17-39.

7. Colgrave and Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, book 2, chap. 1, pp. 132-35. Gregory's puns were not original with Bede; a version of the story is found the anonymous Whitby Life of St. Gregory, probably written between 704 and 714 but unknown to Bede when he finished the Ecclesiastical History in 731. See Bertram Colgrave, ed. and trans., The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 49, 144-45.

8. Gildas, The Ruin of Britain and Other Documents, ed. and trans. Michael Winter-bottom (London: Phillimore, 1978). See Nicholas Howe, Migration and Myth-Making in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 33-49, for a discussion of Gildas and the pattern of prophetic history.

9. Colgrave, Earliest Life, 144-45 note 42. See “Angles” and variants in the index to Colgrave and Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, 596. Recent studies on the meaning of “angli” in Bede's Ecclesiastical History do not discuss Gregory's role in choosing the name, presumably because it is seen as merely symbolic. See D. P. Kirby, The Earliest English Kings (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991), 13-15; and H. E. J. Cowdrey, “Bede and the ‘English People,’” Journal of Religious History 11 (1981): 501-23. See also Patrick Wormald, “Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum,” in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. Patrick Wormald with Donald Bullough and Roger Collins (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 121-24.

10. Colgrave and Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, book 1, chap. 15, p. 51. For an analysis of the ethnography operating in Bede's analysis, see John Hines, “The Becoming of the English: Identity, Material Culture, and Language in Early Anglo-Saxon England,” Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 7 (1994): 49-59.

11. Colgrave and Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, book 5, chap. 24, pp. 566-67. Although Bede clearly wished to present the Angles (the angels) as the primary group in the migration, there was never a consensus about which group, the Angles or the Saxons, was primary, or even about where in England they settled. D. P. Kirby notes that Gregory believed that the Saxons settled in the north and the Angles in the south, reversing the usual assumptions about the pattern of distribution and pointing to its arbitrary nature. The Life of Wilfrid, who came from York, describes him as a Saxon bishop. See Kirby, Earliest English Kings, 12-13.

12. Colgrave and Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, preface, 2-3.

13. Peter Hunter Blair, The World of Bede (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 45. See also Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 116-17.

14. Colgrave and Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, 72 note 1; the letter is found in Arthur West Haddan and William Stubbs, eds., Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1871), 3:5 (quoted here), and is translated in Dorothy Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents, c. 500-1042 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), no. 161, p. 790.

15. David Pelteret, “Slave Raiding and Slave Trading in Early England,” Anglo-Saxon England 9 (1981): 104. See also Pelteret, Slavery in Early Mediaeval England: From the Reign of Alfred until the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1995).

16. Colgrave, Earliest Life, 145 note 43.

17. Dorothy Whitelock, The Beginnings of English Society (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1952), 111. The church allowed penitents to free or manumit slaves as a form of penance or as an act of mercy.

18. On the Council of London of 1102, dominated by Anselm, see the discussion in chapter 6. On the question of selling women who were wives of the clergy into slavery, see A. L. Poole, From Domesday Book to Magna Carta, 1087-1216, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 40. The Normans' decrees did not affect the status of those who were already slaves, and it continued to be possible for individuals to voluntarily surrender their freedom when compelled by necessity to do so; see Marjorie Chibnall, Anglo-Norman England, 1066-1166 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 188.

19. Ruth Mazo Karras comments on prostitution and female slaves in “Desire, Descendants, and Dominance: Slavery, the Exchange of Women, and Masculine Power,” in The Work of Work: Servitude, Slavery, and Labor in Medieval England, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and Douglas Moffat (Glasgow: Cruithne, 1994), 16-29. See also Elizabeth Stevens Girsch, “Metaphorical Usage, Sexual Exploitation, and Divergence in the Old English Terminology for Male and Female Slaves,” in Work of Work, 30-54. I raise the possibility that the Anglian boys were intended for sexual purposes in Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 47.

20. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, eds., Laȝamon: “Brut,” 2 vols., EETS, OS, 250, 277 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963, 1978), 2:770. For commentary on versions of the anecdote by Wace and Geoffrey of Monmouth, see Lawman, Brut, trans. Rosamond Allen (London: Dent, 1992), 463, notes to lines 14695-923.

21. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 144.

22. For an informative survey of Bale's achievement, see Leslie P. Fairfield, John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1976). See also Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxon (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982), 33-37. On Bale's Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, see David Dumville, “John Bale, Owner of St. Dunstan's Benedictional,” Notes and Queries 41 (1994): 291-95.

23. John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 56. For recent commentary on Bale in the context of Renaissance humanism, see Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 38-83.

24. See Fairfield, John Bale, 55-56, 121.

25. John Bale, The Actes of Englysh Votaryes (London, 1548), 22a-22b. Stewart comments briefly on this episode, Close Readers, 42.

26. Contemporary sources invite wordplay on “Angles” and “Ingles.” In the sixteenth century “Ingles” meant both “English” and “a boy-favourite (in bad sense): a catamite” (OED), and was used to pun both on “angle” and on “angel.” “Ingle” was also a term of abuse for boys who played women on the stage. See Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 143-46.

27. John Bale, The Image of Bothe Churches (Antwerp, 1545 or 1546). For Foxe's views, see William Haller, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe's “Book of Martyrs” (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).

28. Ultimately these stories derive from Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Sebastian Evans, revised by Charles W. Dunn (New York: Dutton, 1958), book 11, chap. 7, p. 238, for Malgo. Bale indicates a variety of sources, ranging from Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth, “Florence” (John) of Worcester, and others, including William Tyndale (22a). Bale's immediate source is probably the Nova legenda Angliae of John Capgrave, whose narratives of saints' lives he grossly distorted. See Fairfield, John Bale, 114, 121-22.

29. John Bale, Apology against a Rank Papist (London, 1550), xxvii, xii (v).

30. John Bale, The Pageant of Popes (London, 1574), 36.

31. Bale cites Gregory's “Epistle to Nicolas” (Pageant of Popes, 34v-35r).

32. Bale, Pageant of Popes, 32.

33. Fairfield, John Bale, 17-18, 42-43.

34. This summary is based on Fairfield's analysis, John Bale, 31-49.

35. Donald N. Mager, “John Bale and Early Tudor Sodomy Discourse,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 141-61. See also Stewart, Close Readers, 52-62.

36. John Bale, A Comedy concernynge Thre Lawes, of Nature, Moses, & Christ, Corrupted by the Sodomytes, Pharysees, and Papystes, ed. Peter Happé, in The Complete Plays of John Bale, 2 vols. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), 2:65-121. References to act and line number are for quotations from this text. On the attire for Sodomismus, see 121.

37. See Happé, Complete Plays of John Bale, 165, note to line 575.

38. Bale, King Johan, lines 368-70, in Happé, Complete Plays of John Bale, 1:39.

39. Thomas Stapleton, The History of the Church of England Compiled by Venerable Bede, Englishman (1565; reprint, Menston, England: Scolar, 1973), 3b. Stapleton's translation is used in the Loeb Classical Library, Baedae opera historica, ed. J. E. King (New York: Putnam, 1930).

40. John Bale, Scriptorum illustrium Maioris Brytanniae (“Ipswich,” but really Wesel, 1548). For a list of Bede's works, including an English translation of the Gospel of John (“in patriam transtulit linguam”), see 50v-52r; for Chaucer's, see 198, unhelpfully alphabetized under G for “Galfridus Chaucer”).

41. David Savran, “Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation,” Theatre Journal 47 (1995): 218. Some of the following material appears in my essay “Prior to the Normans: The Anglo-Saxons in Angels in America,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Tony Kushner's Angels in America, ed. Deborah A. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 134-50.

42. Manifest Destiny had its roots in a theory of natural rights for a particular race that translates into nationalism and then imperialism. See Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny (1935; reprint, Chicago: Quadrangle, 1963), 8 (for the quote), 41.

43. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); the phrase “Manifest Destiny” was not coined until 1845; see 219. On Anglo-Saxonism, see Frantzen, Desire for Origins, 15-18, and 27-61, where I comment on the phenomenon as a force in Anglo-Saxon studies from the Renaissance to the present.

44. Tony Kushner, “The Secrets of ‘Angels,’” New York Times, 27 March 1994, H5.

45. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, part 1, Millennium Approaches (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993); part 2, Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994). References to volume and page number are given in the text (vol. 1 for Millennium Approaches and vol. 2 for Perestroika).

46. Savran, “Ambivalence,” 212 note 14.

47. For an excellent summary of this issue, see Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 13-41.

48. The earl Harold was elected king of England at the death of Edward the Confessor in 1066; he was said to have given an oath of allegiance to William, duke of Normandy, and betrayed that oath when he claimed the throne of England. Harold was defeated at the Battle of Hastings by William the Conqueror. See Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 576-80.

49. According to Savran, “The opposite of nearly everything you say about Angels in America will also hold true” (“Ambivalence,” 208; see also 222).

50. David J. Bernstein, The Mystery of the Bayeux Tapestry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), reports that Hitler, like Napoleon, studied the tapestry when he contemplated an invasion of England, 28-30.

51. Bernstein, Mystery of the Bayeux Tapestry, 8, 14.

52. Bernstein, Mystery of the Bayeux Tapestry, 30.

53. The term was originally used to describe American Protestantism. See E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964). Kushner's elaborate genealogy for Prior Walter attaches a far more ambitious historical and international sense to the term.

54. May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century, 1307-1399 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 219.

55. See Savran, “Ambivalence,” 223-24, for an analysis of Kushner's treatment of identity politics and race in this scene.

56. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny, 8.

57. Savran, “Ambivalence,” 213.

58. Kushner, “Secrets of ‘Angels,’” H5.

59. Several reviewers have commented on the identification of Louis with Kushner's own views. See, for example, John Simon, “Angelic Geometry,” New York, 6 December 1993, 130. Savran says that Louis is “constructed as the most empathetic character in the play” (“Ambivalence,” 223).

60. Susan Reynolds, “What Do We Mean by ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and Anglo-Saxons'?” Journal of British Studies 24 (1985): 397-98.

61. Reynolds, “What Do We Mean by ‘Anglo-Saxon’?” 402-3.

62. On the need for narratives that reverse the usual trajectory of the experience of AIDS, see Steven F. Kruger, AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science (New York: Garland, 1996), 73-81.

63. Savran, “Ambivalence,” 222-23.

64. D. Michael Quinn, Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 2.