The Moral Basis of Family Relationships in the plays of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: a Study in Renaissance Ideas

The Moral Basis of Family Relationships in the plays of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: a
Study in Renaissance Ideas.
A submission for the degree of doctor of philosophy by Stephen David Collins.
The Department of History of The University of York.
June, 2016.
ABSTRACT.
Families transact their relationships in a number of ways. Alongside and in tension with the
emotional and practical dealings of family life are factors of an essentially moral nature such as
loyalty, gratitude, obedience, and altruism. Morality depends on ideas about how one should
behave, so that, for example, deciding whether or not to save a brother's life by going to bed with
his judge involves an ethical accountancy drawing on ideas of right and wrong. It is such ideas
that are the focus of this study. It seeks to recover some of ethical assumptions which were in
circulation in early modern England and which inform the plays of the period. A number of plays
which dramatise family relationships are analysed from the imagined perspectives of original
audiences whose intellectual and moral worlds are explored through specific dramatic situations.
Plays are discussed as far as possible in terms of their language and plots, rather than of character,
and the study is eclectic in its use of sources, though drawing largely on the extensive didactic
and polemical writing on the family surviving from the period. Three aspects of family
relationships are discussed: first, the shifting one between parents and children, second, that
between siblings, and, third, one version of marriage, that of the remarriage of the bereaved. The
moral bases of all these relationships are derived in part from explicit precept, such as the
requirement to honour parents, in part from cultural mores which shaped expectations about, for
example, the treatment of elderly parents, and in part from a largely undefined sense of how
things should be and were in the world. This last brings into play the concept of nature, an elusive
but crucial point of reference for the moral basis of family life and often perceived as the drive
behind behaviour. A play, therefore, may be a dynamic representation of the coming together of
multiple ethical strands in specific circumstances in which sometimes conflicting ideas and
impulses are worked out. The thesis is informed by the conviction that literature can yield
understandings that are beyond the reach of linear reasoning and accessible only by an
imaginative transcending of rationality. So, for example, when a homeless old king is bewildered
by the breakdown of family morality as he sees it, and casts about for reasons, he must try out
different explanations none of which is satisfactory on its own, and has therefore to attempt a
synthesis of incompatible ideas which can be achieved only intuitively through the medium of
poetic drama.
Chapter 1: Introduction: What the Study is about. Page 8.
Chapter 2: A Culture of Obedience? Page 38.
Chapter 3: “A Crutch to Leane on in my Second Infancie”: Responsibility for the Elderly in Early
Modern England. Page 76.
Chapter 4: “Let them Anatomise Regan”: the Enigma of King Lear. Page 102.
Chapter 5: Brothers and Sisters, Sex and Death. Page 144.
Chapter 6: The “Smell of the Nurses Maners” and the Corruption of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet.
Page 168.
Chapter 7: “A Kind of Lawful Adultery”: Remarriage in Renaissance Drama and Prejudice. Page
208.
Appendix 1: Siblings in Context. Page 240.
Appendix 2: Sisters and Brothers in Measure for Measure and its Source. Page 258.
Bibliography. Page 275.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.
I am grateful to the University of York for taking in an unusual student. David Wootton has
overseen the resultant project with fortitude and endless intellectual stimulation which I'd not
have missed for anything. Mark Jenner and Kevin Killeen were beguiled into membership of my
advisory panel, and their daunting scholarship has been ever friendly and available. In the wider
university community I have found a particular welcome in the Finnegans Wake reading group, a
disparate group of people with little in common except an addiction to perplexity.
At home, there's no point in thanking my beloved wife, Lorraine Hemingway, for words are
inadequate. Lottie, an elderly mongrel, has lived with us for the whole time this project has taken
and contributed in her own way, as have the cats and a horse with whom we share our lives.
Finally, an impersonal thanks must go to “the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears” for keeping
away.
Usage.
Honorary titles are presumed to have died with their owners, so Philip Sidney's knighthood
expired with him at Arnhem. It would be pedantic to call Dr Johnson anything else.
Modernisation is sparing. I have transcribed the texts I used, and modernised only by changing vv
to w and u to v when appropriate, persuaded by hearing of an American student spending a
miserable semester wondering what “loue” could possibly be.
Although there seems to be a modern tendency to use the word “ethics” about money and
“moral” about sex, I treat the words as synonyms and use them interchangeably.
I have assumed a familiarity with Shakespeare's plots, but have summarised those of more
obscure plays.
Editions.
Except where otherwise identified, all references to Shakespeare are to The Complete Works.
Edited by Alfred Harbage. London: Allen Lane at the Penguin Press, 1969. The texts of other
plays have been chosen mainly on the basis of convenience of access.
Quotations from the Bible are from The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition; with an
Introduction by Lloyd E. Berry. Madison; London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.
Abbreviations.
BCP: Cummings, Brian, ed. The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.Bullough: Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 1957.
DNB: Dictionary of National Biography.
Eliz. BCP: The Prayer-Book of Queen Elizabeth, 1559,To Which Are Appended Some Occasional Forms of Prayer Issued in Her Reign. London: Griffith Farran, 1890.
Florio's Montaigne: Montaigne, Michel de. The Essayes of Michael, Lord of Montaigne. Edited by Henry Morley. Translated by John Florio. London: Routledge, 1893.
OED: Oxford English Dictionary.
Partridge: Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary & Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968.
Schmidt: Schmidt, Alexander. Shakespeare Lexicon: A Complete Dictionary of All the English Words, Phrases and Constructions in the Works of the Poet. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1902.
Schoenbaum: Harbage, Alfred Bennett. Annals of English Drama, 975-1700 ... Revised by S. Schoenbaum. London: Methuen & Co., 1964.Williams: Williams, Gordon. A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. London: Athlone Press, 1994.
Tilley: Tilley, Morris Palmer. A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. A Collection of the Proverbs Found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period. Ann Arbor, 1950.
A German ambassador once told me he cdn't bear
St Paul he was, he said, so hard on fornication.
Ezra Pound, Canto LXXI.
JOHNSON: “Now had I been an Indian, I must have died early: my eyes would not have served me to get food. … I should have been dead before I was ten years old. Depend upon it, Sir, a savage when he is hungry, will not carry about with him a looby of nine years old who cannot help himself. They have no affection.” BOSWELL: “I believe natural affection, of which we hear so much, is very small.” JOHNSON: “Sir, natural affection is nothing: but affection from principle and established duty, is sometimes wonderfully strong.” LOWE: “A hen, Sir, will feed her chickens in preference to herself.” JOHNSON: “But we don't know that the hen is hungry … .”
Boswell's Life of Johnson, 20 & 21.iv.1783.
CHAPTER ONE.
WHAT THE STUDY IS ABOUT.
When Lear is pretending to auction his kingdom in the opening scene of King Lear, he has laid
down that the currency in which the bids are to be made is that of love: “Which of you shall we
say doth love us most … ?” What is actually at issue, it soon turns out, is language, descriptions
of affection in the flattering style of a masque, brought out by the constant reiteration of “speak
… says …. speak”, and then, when Cordelia is silent, “Mend your speech a little”.1 The two older
daughters enter into the spirit of the occasion and describe their love, as Lear prompts them to, in
terms of quantity, of comparatives and superlatives, and their hyperbole uses the language of
commerce (“dearer”, “rich”, “worth”, “short”). Cordelia is unable, or refuses, to outbid her
sisters, but makes her response not using the language of feeling but of morality, drawing on
concepts of duty, gratitude, obedience, and honour.2 In the ensuing dialogue, Lear interrogates her
about the interaction of morality and emotion: “Goes thy heart with this? … so untender?”, and
she replies with a further ethical appeal: “true”. Her “trueness” has an immediate market
valuation put on it (“Thy truth then be thy dower”) and a second auction ensues, between her two
suitors now that she brings with her no substantial landholding. Up to this point the only sincere
emotion has been anger, that of Lear and of Kent, but as the long opening episode of the play
draws to a close, what looks like genuine affection makes an appearance. Appropriately enough
in the paradoxical situation, love is caught in a series of oxymorons spoken by the king of France
to his bride:
Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised … .
This is followed by the scratchy parting of the Cordelia and her sisters, who she is never to meet
again, conducted in the same mode as the earlier charade, with emotion set against morality, but
now it is Cordelia who alludes to emotion, telling them that she knows they do not love their
father, to which Regan retorts in the language of morals:
1 M. C. Bradbrook, The Living Monument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 156 2 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear, ed. Jay L. Halio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
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When her sisters were earlier making their protestations, Cordelia was soliciting the collusion
of the audience with a series of asides which staked out her claim to virtue, a claim reinforced
when she starts to speak, for the honour she tenders her father had an important connotation as
the explicit requirement of the fifth Commandment:
Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy
God giveth thee.3
Everybody in an early audience knew about this. The Commandments were dinned into children
as they learned their Catechism, they were repeated week in, week out, in the Church's liturgy,
and were on display in every church to be read by anyone who could read. The duty to honour
one's parents, therefore, amounted to “official” morality (this is explored in my next chapter), and
Cordelia was doing what she was supposed to. Loving one's parents, however, was a less obvious
expectation. There was a duty to “love, honour, and succour my father and mother” set out in the
Catechism, but only as one example of loving one's neighbours, and there was no general
assumption that relationships between parents and their children were necessarily reciprocal:
For common experience teacheth us in these dayes, that the love of Fathers to theyr children is
verie great: but the affection of children to theyr Parentes verie small: we see what care
Fathers have over the state of theyr children, and what negligence children have over theyr
Fathers: and therefore it may be saide verie well, that love by nature dooth descend, but not
ascend, it descendeth from the Father to the Sonne, but it ascendeth not from the sonne to the
Father, wherein the love of the Father appeareth more and the love of the childe less: but what
is the cause, that the love of the Father is more effectuall, then the childes good will to the
Father? the reason is, … Because the roote shall sooner rotte, then the braunch shall send
backe its influence unto it.4
This is expressing a commonplace, echoing, for example, an argument by Montaigne, who
3 Exodus, XX: 12; cf. Deuteronomy, V: 16; this Commandment is number five in Protestant churches, number six in Roman Catholic ones.
4 William Averell, A Dyall for Dainty Darlings, Rockt in the Cradle of Securitie. A Glasse for All Disobedient Sonnes to Looke In. A Myrrour for Vertuous Maydes, Etc. (London: For Thomas Hackette, 1584). D2v.
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observed that “the care which each living creature hath to his preservation” is the basis of parents'
affection for their children, and that as children have no such motive,
… it is no wonder if back-again it [affection] is not so great from children unto fathers.5
Having gestured towards her moral credentials, Cordelia then attempts to retrieve the situation
by looking to discredit her sisters' sincerity. She points out that they are married, which she
suggests cannot be reconciled with their protestations to their father:
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Happily when I shall wed
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my love and duty.
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.6 (I.i.90)
The argument is muddled, but its drift is clear enough, and for the first time Cordelia's thinking
has become unconventional. The relative claims of husband or father are set out clearly when
Desdemona presents her marriage as a fait accompli:
My dear father,
To you I am bound for life and education;
My life and education both do learn me
How to respect you; you are the lord of duty,
I am hitherto your daughter: but here's my husband;
And so much duty as my mother show'd
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I must profess
5 Florio's Montaigne, 192. 6 The last line is omitted from the 1623 Folio.
10
Due to the Moor my lord. (Othello, I.iii.180)
There's no doubt that Desdemona's was the more usual idea about marriage. A couple were not
supposed to share their love with anyone except each other (and, though a different form of love,
with children), for in the marriage service the husband is explicitly told that he must leave his
parents behind, and the wife is handed over to her husband by her father or other person7. To
undertake to share her love equally between husband and father, as Cordelia intends to do, may
have the purpose of discrediting her sisters' claims to love their father “all”, but it goes against
what was thought of as normal marriage.8
THE TAXONOMY OF A PLAY.
This opening scene of King Lear has four dramatic elements in a dynamic tension. There are
the characters involved, principally Lear and his daughters, what they are like and why they
behave as they do. Why does this irascible old man engage in such an absurd charade, why is
Cordelia silent, are the older sisters as insincere as Cordelia claims? The personal qualities of the
participants of the scene shape its second dramatic feature, its plot, the unfolding of events started
by a mishandled abdication, accelerated by vanity and misunderstanding, and the introduction of
all the elements of the impending tragedy. Third there is the language of the scene, not just what
is said but how it is said, the dependence of meaning on expression, as Lear's hyperbole,
Cordelia's silence, the lubricious phrasing of Gloucester's reminiscence about Edmund's
conception. Finally, the scene depends on ideas: about love in families, children's responsibilities
for their parents, a subject's duty to a king, a king's obligations to his commonwealth, and about
the very nature of family relationships.
These ideas are the subject of this dissertation. It is a study of the moral basis of family
relationships as they were represented in English plays before the closing of the theatres in 1642.
Its organising question is how people in the period were supposed to behave in families, with the
subsidiary question of why they should. The opening of King Lear identified morality as one of
the bonds holding families together and the rest of the play shows these bonds destroyed by an
7 The rubric which instructs the man to “take” the woman's right hand recalls the preamble to the service which cautions that marriage is not “to be taken in hand unadvisedly”.
8 The resemblance between Cordelia's initial response to her father to the promises made by a bride to love, honour, and obey, has been pointed out with wearisome frequency.
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unstoppable emotional assault which sweeps aside the claims of duty and gratitude. The emotions
doing the damage are listed by Poor Tom in the hovel as anger, pride, envy, hate, lust, and greed:
six of the seven deadly sins, with only sloth not at work.9 By the time Lear has met Poor Tom he
has realised what audiences, prompted by Cordelia, knew from the start, that the love he had
solicited is meaningless, and with clumsy irony his characteristic complaint about his Cynthers
quickly becomes the very moral claim he had rejected in Cordelia, that of gratitude.
Family relationships have been the subject of drama since Aeschylus. In England the earliest
surviving plays feature the unscriptural character of Noah's wife disrupting family harmony by
maliciously pointing out that many of the animals filing into the Ark are predators ready to feed
on the others, by refusing to leave her gossips, and by physically abusing her husband.10 The
entertainment value of (other people's) marriages typified by that of the Noahs was to become a
staple of the commercial theatre when the playhouses began to open in the 1570s, though
alongside the humour, and often blended with it, went an awareness of the potential for tragedy in
family life when the “clout” given to Noah developed into the lethal violence of an Alice Arden
or an Othello. Another regular story in early English vernacular drama was the murder of Abel by
his brother with its dramatic possibilities of the violence present in some families, and the
prototype of the fraternal antagonism at the basis of many plays, even of the relatively genial
comedy As You Like It. Another regular story, one which illustrates relationships between
generations and their moral complexity is that of Abraham, required by God to sacrifice his “only
son Isaac whom thou lovest”.11 The Chester cycle, in particular, enlarged the Biblical account,
itself a masterly piece of narrative suspense, into a moving exploration of a basic human
relationship, and also brought out a supplementary question about the limits of the claims of a
family over its members.12 For Abraham there was a tension, real and painful as it appears in the
Chester play, caused by the conflicting loyalties of a father to his son and to his God, though it's
clear that obedience to God came before family affection: such tensions were to be a fruitful
source of creativity in plays which involved the interactions between families as social groups
and the world outside the domestic.
9 The point is developed in Chapter 5. 10 Hermann Deimling and Matthews, eds., The Chester Plays, Early English Text Society. Extra Series 62, 115
(London: Published for the Early English Text Society by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1893)., 51 – 58; Noah's estimable wife, who doesn't get a name either in the Bible or the plays, appears also in the York cycle of “mystery” plays, and, in a…