Introduction
Towards a dramatic tradition
Mary Sidney’s Antonius (published in 1592) inaugurated a dramatic tradition that has been the subject of considerable critical debate. T.S. Eliot argued that Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, had assembled a body of ‘shy recluses’ whose intention was ‘to compose drama in the proper Senecan style’ and ‘make head against the popular melodrama of the time.’1 For Eliot, these efforts to oppose the commercial theatre ‘were bound to fail.’2 Such views had become something of a commonplace before their dismissal in an important article by Mary Ellen Lamb which argued that there was ‘no dramatic tradition surrounding the Countess of Pembroke’ and that ‘the idea of reforming the English stage probably never entered her head.’3 Lamb thus challenged both aspects of Eliot’s argument by refuting the premises that the Countess had assembled a mobilised group of dramatists and that their intention was to reform the commercial theatre. This book follows Lamb by continuing to challenge the idea that the texts in this tradition were informed by an anti-theatrical agenda. However, it still considers the intertextual affinities between these plays by highlighting the dramatists’ common aims of developing a form of humanist dramatic authorship which engaged, in particular, with such influential outlooks as republicanism and stoicism. One of the key reasons for doing so was to explore the relationship between the sovereign and their subjects. The plays in this study have frequently been grouped together under the label of ‘closet drama’, a term that suggests they were written for the purpose of private reading or recital amongst a coterie of wits rather than for performance in the commercial theatres. I will go on to suggest that this term is not an altogether accurate label for these plays which are linked by more than their distance from the public theatres. The book confines itself to the texts which were composed within two decades of Mary Sidney’s translation of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine (1578), a play that was instrumental in introducing Continental neoclassical tragedy into Renaissance England.4 I will therefore focus upon the dramatic works of Mary Sidney, Samuel
1 T. S. Eliot, Elizabethan Dramatists (London: Faber, 1963), p. 43.
2 Ibid.
3 Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘The Myth of the Countess of Pembroke: The Dramatic Circle’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 11 (1981), 194–202 (p. 196).
4 The term ‘closet drama’ is sometimes used to denote a number of later dramas, including Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory, Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s The Concealed Fancies, and the interregnum dramas of Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Killigrew, which do not fall within the scope of this study.
Daniel, Samuel Brandon, Fulke Greville, William Alexander, and Elizabeth Cary, along with the Roman tragedies of Thomas Kyd and Ben Jonson, and emphasise the intertextual affinities between them. In this introductory chapter, I provide an overview of the change in critical attitudes towards these plays, as well as commenting upon the origins of the dramatic tradition to which they belong and the resonance of stoicism and republicanism, theories which, this book will argue, are the common focal points for these dramatic works.
The idea that these texts were united by a common anti-theatrical agenda can largely be attributed to the influence of Mary Sidney’s brother, Sir Philip Sidney, whose Apology for Poetry (1582) has been assumed to be a kind of aesthetic manifesto for the endeavours of her coterie, particularly in his criticism of the commercial theatres, whose offerings observe ‘rules neither of honest civility nor of skilful Poetry’ by failing to adhere to Aristotelian principles.5 Sidney does, however, offer qualified praise for Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc (1561), a play which, in spite of being ‘faulty both in place and time … is full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca’s style, and full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so obtain the very end of Poesy’.6 Sidney’s attention to Gorboduc is significant in relation to the dramas of Mary Sidney and those whose dramatic works she influenced. Gorboduc had an explicit political interest in advising the queen to marry and produce an heir, thus providing a safeguard against the factionalism and civil discord provoked by a crisis of succession which was dramatised in the play.7 According to Andrew Hadfield, Gorboduc was a part of ‘a long court tradition of drama that was inherently political in seeking to advise the monarch either forcefully, or subtly’.8 Karen Raber observes that, by translating a play by Robert Garnier, Mary Sidney was drawing ‘upon an emergent tradition of political writing
5 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973, reprinted 1984), pp. 133–4.
6 Ibid.
7 On the topicality of Gorboduc, see, for example, Kevin Dunn, ‘Representing Counsel: Gorboduc and the Elizabethan Privy Council’, English Literary Renaissance, 33.3 (2003), 279–308, and Jessica Winston, ‘Expanding the Political Nation: Gorboduc at the Inns of Court and Succession Revisited’, Early Theatre, 8.1 (2005), 11–34. For the place of Gorboduc in the development of political tragedy, see Dermot Cavanagh, ‘Political Tragedy in the 1560s: Cambises and Gorboduc’, in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603, ed. Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 488–503.
8 Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 4. Margaret Hannay also comments upon the appeal of the political themes in Gorboduc and its affinities with the issues interrogated in Antonius, suggesting that she ‘shared her family’s taste for political drama’ and, through her choice of subject, ‘demonstrated her conviction that drama could be used for political statement’. See Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 121.
in France’.9 Yet, as we shall see throughout this book, the neo-Senecan dramas also complement an established tradition in England of politically engaged tragedy both at court and in the public theatres, of which Gorboduc is an early example. The emergence of this tradition also represents another facet of the works of Seneca in Renaissance England. According to Eliot, ‘no Latin author was more highly esteemed’ than Seneca; as well as his prominence on the Latin curriculum, Eliot goes on to comment that no other author ‘exercised a wider or deeper influence upon the Elizabethan mind or upon the Elizabethan form of tragedy than did Seneca’.10 Various translations of Senecan plays appeared between 1559 and 1567 and were published together as Tenne Tragedies in 1581 edited by Thomas Newton.11 Although they were products of the academic tradition, A.J. Boyle argues that the appearance of the collected translations in 1581, shortly after the opening of the public theatres, ‘were both index and product of a theatrical ideology in which Seneca held a primary position’.12 The appearance of Senecan texts in the vernacular was accompanied by the emergence of a number of original plays written in the Senecan tradition; these included Gorboduc and the collaborative play, The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587), along with a number of Latin imitations which emerged in England and Scotland, including George Buchanan’s Jepthes (1578) and Thomas Legge’s Ricardus Tertius (1579). The development of Senecan tragedy therefore provides numerous points of contact between the academic and the popular dramatic traditions.
Considering the development of Elizabethan tragedy, Eliot argues that there were three distinct currents of the Senecan influence. The first is evident in the tragedies of the popular theatre; the second is represented by the works of Mary Sidney and the so-called ‘Senecals’, which, he argues, was ‘composed largely in protest against the defects and monstrosities’ of popular tragedy; the third is embodied by the two Roman tragedies of Ben Jonson, which Eliot considers to be situated ‘between the two opposed classes’, representing an attempt ‘to improve the form of popular drama by the example of Seneca; not by slavish imitation but by adaptation, to make of popular drama a finished work of art’.13 While this book
9 Karen Raber, Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), p. 85.
10 Eliot, pp. 11–12. Several important, though increasingly dated, studies have assessed the influence of Seneca upon the tragic genre in Renaissance England; these include John W. Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1893); F.L. Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (New York: Haskell House, 1966); H.B. Charlton, The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1946, reprinted 1978); Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
11 Seneca his Tenne Tragedies, translated into Englysh (London: Thomas Marsh, 1581).
12 A.J. Boyle, Tragic Seneca: An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 141.
13 Eliot, pp. 25–6.
will argue that the distinctions applied by Eliot are not quite so clearly defined, it is necessary to note that the popular theatre and the so-called ‘Senecals’ can be distinguished by the differing European traditions they appropriate. The typical features of the tradition represented by Garnier include sententiae, long rhetorical speeches and apostrophe, practically no action, stichomythia, a Chorus, and the appearance of a messenger, or Nuntius, in order to fill in the gaps left by the lack of action. This is therefore a type of drama that privileges the reactions of characters to the events that are taking place over the portrayal of the actual events themselves. Neo-Senecan drama therefore shifts the emphasis away from dramatic action and visual spectacle, aiming instead to explore the potential ways in which tragedy could function as a space to interrogate abstract political and philosophical issues. As a result, one of the most distinctive features of the drama developed in the works of Garnier and those of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean dramatists is their multivocality. By focusing upon reaction rather than action, these dramatists take advantage of Senecan tragedy’s potential to accommodate a range of different political and ethical perspectives. Joel B. Altman comments upon the interrogative potential of Seneca’s dramas by arguing that ‘Senecan drama, while deeply concerned with the moral life, is not, strictly speaking, a didactic work – as is the negative morality play or de casibus tragedy. It is a sophistic construction, carefully designed to evoke a wide range of intellectual and emotional responses to the action as it unfolds’.14 This aspect of Senecan tragedy is one of the key areas developed by the neo-Senecan dramatists and one that makes the form especially suited to the political content of the plays.
The apparently anti-theatrical nature of the neo-Senecan dramas has led to a tendency amongst many critics to link them through the apparent problems they pose in terms of performability. These plays have thus earned the label ‘closet drama’, a term suggesting the private nature of any performances that might have taken place within the estates of the dramatists or their patrons. It is therefore a form of drama that has generally been defined in opposition to the output of the commercial theatres.15 However, the fact these plays bypassed the public theatres does not necessarily place them at odds with commercial dramas; the dramatists I consider, with the exception of Greville, submitted their plays for publication and, as a number of recent studies have shown, numerous early modern popular dramatists aimed at targeting a broad readership through print and were clearly thinking beyond theatrical performance for their works. The dramatists in this study are therefore not alone when it comes to writing drama with a ‘literary’
14 Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 231.
15 This dramatic form is considered in relation to early modern play-reading in Marta Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For more general comment upon the culture of early modern play-reading, see the essays in Marta Straznicky (ed.), The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).
readership in mind.16 As Lukas Erne argues, with particular reference to Kyd’s Cornelia, ‘closet’ and popular dramas should be considered as ‘complementary rather than antagonistic in the influence they exerted’.17 Alison Findlay, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, and Gweno Williams have also challenged the idea that these texts are unperformable, thus rendering the term ‘closet drama’ a somewhat inadequate label for these plays.18 Coburn Freer also objects that the term ‘suggests willful obscurity and terminal stuffiness’.19 A number of readings have also emphasised the common aesthetic conditions of theatrical and ‘closet’ drama. Rosemary Kegl, for example, considers the compression of events into a twentyfour hour time frame in Cary’s Mariam, a feature shared by a number of the other plays in this study as a result of their efforts to conform to the Aristotelian unity of time, as similar to the methods of the commercial dramas that condensed events into the running time of a conventional theatrical drama, a point made prominent in Sir Philip Sidney’s critique of the popular theatre. This, Kegl argues, is an example of how these dramas tend to ‘replicate rather than reform the excesses of popular productions’.20 It is therefore necessary to reconsider the idea that this form of neo-Senecan tragedy was developed in England as a means of either opposing the commercial theatre, or as an attempt at replacing it altogether, nor can the relationship between commercial and neo-Senecan drama be any longer
16 See, for example, Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
17 Lukas Erne, Beyond ‘The Spanish Tragedy’: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 212.
18 See, for example, Alison Findlay and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright with Gweno Williams, Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1700 (London: Longman, 2000). For the practical approaches see the filmed productions of early modern women’s plays in Alison Findlay, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright and Gweno Williams, Women Dramatists 1550–1670: Plays in Performance (Lancaster: Lancaster University Television, 1999). The research led by Elizabeth Schafer on The Mariam Project has also explored the performative potential of Elizabeth Cary’s play by staging a number of site-specific performances in a variety of locations during 2013; accounts of these productions by director Rebecca McCutcheon are available at http://rebeccamccutcheon.com/category/the-mariam-project/ [accessed 16 February 2015].
19 Coburn Freer, ‘Mary Sidney: Countess of Pembroke’, in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), pp. 481–521 (p. 484). Freer also goes on to speculate about the performativity of Mary Sidney’s Antonius (see pp. 485–6).
20 Rosemary Kegl, ‘Theaters, Households and a “Kind of History” in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam’, in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 135–53 (p. 143).
predicated upon their apparent aesthetic contrasts. This, therefore, necessitates a reconsideration of the term ‘closet drama’ as a means of grouping them together. In this book, I adopt the term ‘neo-Senecan’ to denote the dramas written in this neoclassical tradition, exhibiting the influence of Garnier in particular. Adopting this term thus allows us to consider these plays in terms of their common aesthetic and political features rather than classing them as ‘closet dramas’, a term that would continue to define them by outmoded assumptions about their unperformability and their apparent antagonism towards the commercial theatre.
Mary Ellen Lamb was one of the earliest critics to challenge the prevailing view of these plays and fairly conclusively routed the notion that they were products of any mobilised campaign against the commercial stage. In fact, it was more than likely that there was very little, if any, personal contact between many of the apparent participants in this ‘circle’. Any references to the Wilton or Pembroke circle in modern scholarship tend to be merely a convenient means of referring to the group of texts written in the neo-Senecan mode.21 However, one of the key contentions of this book is that criticism following Lamb’s important conclusions has, by discounting the premise that these texts were the output of an organised circle, often ignored the intertextual affinities that exist between these plays that highlight the authors’ engagement in a tradition of humanist dramatic authorship. This tradition of dramatic authorship is characterised by the engagement in such political and philosophical discourses as stoicism and republicanism – informed both by classical authorities, like Seneca and Tacitus, and more contemporary theorists, including Justus Lipsius and Niccolò Machiavelli – and the provision of a space in which to interrogate them. These plays are also set during periods of political or constitutional crises and focus upon the plight of politically marginalised individuals who are forced to endure the circumstances of affairs they are powerless to influence. These features are complemented by the influence of both the classical Senecan tradition and the more recent appropriation and adaptation of the form by Robert Garnier. The dispersion of this group of texts does, however, mean that we now have the opportunity to reconsider its membership. If these plays are no longer united by the premises that they are unperformable or anti-theatrical, then such performance texts as Samuel Daniel’s Philotas and Ben Jonson’s Roman tragedies can also be included. These plays will also be considered as neo-Senecan dramas due to their adherence to many of the neoclassical formal features and their alignment with the thematic features of the coterie dramas.
21 An example of this occurs in G.A. Wilkes (ed.), The Complete Poems and Plays of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554–1628) in Two Volumes, vol. 1 (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), p. 1. Judith Scherer Herz argues that ‘“patronage machine” is a more apt description’ than ‘circle’ for Mary Sidney’s literary community at Wilton; see, ‘Of Circles, Friendship, and the Imperatives of Literary History’, in Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), pp. 10–23 (p. 17).
The purpose of this study is therefore to view the neo-Senecan texts as a group, an outlook rarely – if ever – adopted at any length since Witherspoon’s The Influence of Robert Garnier on Elizabethan Drama, and argue that the intertextual affinities that exist between the texts are not, as has previously been argued, rooted in any anti-theatrical agenda, but instead in a common desire to explore such prominent political and philosophical outlooks as republicanism and stoicism, particularly the utility of their application in the political sphere. This book does not, however, attempt to argue that there is a coherent and unified outlook in the various texts’ engagement with these axioms, but rather that they are in dialogue with each other. In this sense, stoicism and republicanism represent the key elements that are engaged by the dramatists in developing a tradition of humanist dramatic authorship.
Stoicism
Stoicism was a source of considerable ambivalence in Renaissance England, as was the reputation of Seneca, one of its most influential authorities. In Tacitus’ Annals, the account of Seneca’s suicide, acting upon the orders of Nero, served to cement his claims to exemplarity, particularly in the Renaissance era, by emphasising his stoic fortitude and his wish that his followers should adhere to ‘the pattern of my life’.22 However, the positive image of Seneca was not universally endorsed; in John Marston’s The Malcontent, for example, Pietro dismisses Seneca as one who ‘writ of temperance and fortitude, yet lived like a voluptuous epicure and died like an effeminate coward’.23 The origins of such views lie in the writings of Dio Cassius, whose critique of Seneca provoked Montaigne to actively refute the claims that he was ‘avaricious, usurious, ambitious, cowardly, sensual, and a false pretender to the title of philosopher’.24 Proponents of stoicism during the sixteenth century also struggled with the question of how compatible this essentially pagan outlook was with Christianity. This problem was not new and Seneca, in particular, had become the lynchpin in many of these debates. In the fourteenth century, Petrarch had done much to promote the adaptability of a Senecan outlook with Christianity in his De remediis utriusque fortunae (1366), often misattributed to Seneca himself. There was also the case of the purported correspondence between Seneca and St Paul which, as Gordon Braden comments, maintained a ‘tenacious hold on Christian credibility’ from the fourth century despite the fact that it turned out to be a forgery.25 In spite of these attempts at asserting the affinities of Christianity
22 Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956, reprinted 1974), XV, p. 376.
23 John Marston, The Malcontent (3.1.26–8), in ‘The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
24 Michel de Montaigne, Essays (2, 32), trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 228.
25 Braden, p. 70.
and stoicism, the outlook was still greeted with a degree of ambivalence. As Sarah Hutton points out, an early modern observer could find much that was admirable in the teachings of the stoics, including ‘their moral seriousness and apparent piety, their recommendation of forbearance in the face of adversity, their contempt of worldly goods, their asceticism’ and their observation of such virtues as ‘prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude’.26 Other elements, such as the acceptability of suicide and their tendencies towards apathy and fatalism had to be ‘conveniently glossed over’.27 However, there were many who felt compelled to do more than simply ‘gloss over’ these details. James Hankins summarises some of the ways in which various figures confronted these problems:
Previous humanists, aware of the conflict between pagan and Christian values, try either (like Valla) to recast current Christianity in the light of pagan values; or (like Ficino) to minimize the differences between high pagan and Christian theology; or (like Bruni) to make a sharp distinction between political and religious values, assigning to each its proper space.28
The need to reconcile the differences between traditional stoicism and Christianity resulted, broadly speaking, in the development of neo-stoicism. Arguably the most important figure in the development of Renaissance neo-stoicism was the Flemish philosopher Justus Lipsius, whose works exerted considerable influence upon the early modern exponents of stoicism, particularly through his efforts to make it palatable to a Christian audience.29 Lipsius also had an important effect upon the rise of neo-stoicism on the continent by influencing figures such as Hubert
26 Sarah Hutton, ‘Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism, Classical Imitation’, in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000, 2003 reprint), pp. 44–57 (p. 53).
27 Ibid.
28 James Hankins, ‘Humanism and the Origins of Modern Political Thought’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 118–41 (p. 134).
29 For a summary of the major works of Lipsius and their influence upon the development of neo-stoicism, see Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). The political bearings of Lipsian neo-stoicism, see Natasha Constantinidou, ‘Public and Private, Divine and Temporal in Justus Lipsius’ De Constantia and Politica’, Renaissance Studies, 26.3 (2012), 345–64. For comment upon Lipsius’s influence in early modern England, see Adriana McCrea, Constant Minds: Political Virtue and the Lipsian Paradigm in England, 1584–1650 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). The influence of Lipsius and neo-stoicism upon Shakespeare is considered in Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), and Hassan Melehy, ‘The Mobility of Constancy: Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Lipsius’, REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 28 (2012), 73–91. For a more general overview of the influence of stoicism upon early modern literature see Gilles D. Monsarrat, Light from the Porch: Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature (Paris: Didier-Érudition, 1984).
Languet and Philippe du Plessis-Mornay. Although Sidney had met Lipsius, it was most likely that his French mentors, Languet and Mornay, exerted the shaping influence upon the development of his stoic outlook.30 Lipsius’s brand of stoicism also set a precedent for the addition of a political edge to the neo-stoic outlook. De Constantia, a dialogue in which a character named Lipsius is dissuaded from fleeing the troubles caused by the wars in the Low Countries, is contextualised explicitly against the backdrop of the political events taking place. Similarly, Mornay’s Discourse of Life and Death presents a decidedly negative portrait of the court as a den of corruption. These examples tie in with the kind of explicit criticism in the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, in which the French royal family are denounced as the disciples of Machiavelli whose ‘evil arts, vicious counsels, and false and pestiferous doctrines’ are responsible for the ‘calamities and destruction in Gaul’.31 The anti-Machiavellian rhetoric of Mornay and the author of the Vindiciae also aligns them with the Huguenot Innocent Gentillet’s Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner (1576). Guillaume du Vair’s La Philosophie Morale des Stoïques (translated into English as The Moral Philosophy of the Stoicks in 1598) also applied stoic philosophy to the political situation in France. In all these cases, stoicism is appropriated as a means of negotiating religious oppression with Lipsius and the continental figures he influenced using it to respond to the religious wars ravaging their countries.32 It has even been suggested that there are specific links between the development of neo-stoicism and Protestantism. As Rudolph Kirk argues, the ‘translation of stoic works seemed to accompany and follow the Reformation’.33 This was no doubt part of its appeal to Sidney and his militant Protestant colleagues. Also part of its appeal amongst English courtiers was its political dimension along with its provision of a model for enduring political turbulence. Neo-stoicism was also a source of consolation and its emphasis upon self-sovereignty, or ruling oneself through self-discipline, provided some consolation for politically marginalised courtiers who had been frustrated in their attempts to influence state policy. This point is suggested by Lipsius’s De Constantia, in which the sage Langius argues that, by striving towards the virtue of constancy and resisting the impulses of hope and fear, ‘Thou shalt be a king indeed, free indeed, only subject unto God, enfranchized from the servile yoke of
30 For Sidney’s connection to Languet and Mornay see, for example, Robert Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
31 Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos or, Concerning the Legitimate Power of a Prince Over the People, and of the People Over a Prince, ed. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 8.
32 It must be noted, however, that the appeal of stoicism was not exclusively Protestant; the recusant Thomas Lodge, for example, had undertaken the first English translation of Seneca’s complete prose works, whilst Lipsius wavered in his confessional allegiances before finally returning to the Catholic faith before his death.
33 Justus Lipsius, Two Books of Constancie, ed. Rudolph Kirk (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1939), p. 21.
Fortune and affections’.34 Lipsius’s use of political language emphasises the extent to which this kind of stoic outlook could potentially work to offset one’s political marginalisation. Overcoming the temptations of hope and fear and resisting the influence of Fortune is, for Lipsius, an ‘enfranchising’ experience, liberating one from the ‘servile yoke of Fortune and affections’. Mastering one’s own actions and impulses, and thus becoming a ‘king indeed’ by achieving self-sovereignty, therefore becomes a means of overcoming one’s lack of agency in the sphere of courtly politics.
One of the major consequences of the emergence of Renaissance humanism was the reassessment of certain classical sources resulting, most notably, in the rising popularity of Tacitus during the sixteenth century. This was due, in large part, to the influence of Lipsius who had not only extolled the virtues of Tacitus but had also prepared what had become the definitive edition of his works in 1574. There were also more practical reasons for Tacitus’ rise to increased prominence. David Norbrook comments upon the shifts in alignment to certain classical sources:
Throughout Europe, in the later sixteenth century, writers were turning away from the elaborate ‘Ciceronian’ style, a style associated with public debate and oratory, and turning to ‘silver Latin’ writers like Seneca and Tacitus. These men were writing at a time when the Senate had lost its real political power and important decisions were taken in private by the emperor and his associates. Thus the ‘Tacitist’ movement had marked, though ambiguous, political connotations.35
The prominence of the Ciceronian style was thus replaced by that which Degory Wheare described as ‘a new, concise and sententious way of Writing’.36 From this point of view, Tacitus became particularly popular amongst courtiers like Sidney and those belonging to the Essexian faction.37 Gordon Braden argues that for his Roman contemporaries, Tacitus provides a vision of a ‘specifically aristocratic
34 Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. John Stradling (London: Richard Johnes, 1594), 1. 6, C3r–C3v.
35 David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 171–2.
36 Degory Wheare, The Method and Order of Reading Both Civil and Ecclesiastical Histories (London: Charles Brome, 1685), p. 105.
37 Morris W. Croll argues that the ‘cult of Tacitus’ lasted from 1575 to1650; see Morris W. Croll, ‘Muret and the History of “Attic Prose”’, in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll, ed. J. Max Patrick et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 107–62 (p. 151). For a useful summary of the popularity of Tacitus and other classical writers based upon the number of editions produced in 50 year periods, see Peter Burke, ‘A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450–1700’, History and Theory, 5.2 (1966), 135–52. Other important material on the rise of Tacitism during the Jacobean era can be found in J.M.H. Salmon, ‘Stoicism and Roman Example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 50.2 (1989), 199–225; and Alan T. Bradford ‘Stuart Absolutism and the “Utility” of Tacitus’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 46.2 (1983), 127–55. The influence of stoicism upon Elizabethan political writing is also
hell, structured by the aristocratic assumption that individual character and fate are the basic components of history … The apocalypse that seems to impend is in part a very real history, but something more inward as well: a crisis of the aristocratic imagination’.38 For Braden, this suggests the somewhat limited scope of Tacitus’ appeal, having been ‘written from the perspective of a disenfranchised but still ambitious upper class’.39 The appeal of Tacitus in early modern England was focused upon a similarly niche audience. The militant Protestant faction held socially elevated, yet politically disenfranchised positions in the Elizabethan political hierarchy. Hopes that the situation would change with the accession of James I were soon to be dashed. Much optimism was provoked by such signs as James’s correspondence with Essex and the rehabilitation and redeployment into political life of Essex’s former supporters, including the Earl of Southampton. However, Cecil’s ability to secure the key position of influence in James’s government meant that the situation remained largely unchanged from how it had been during the final years of Elizabeth’s reign. This meant that the militant Protestants remained the politically disenfranchised class they had been during the previous reign. It is in this climate that the appeal of Tacitus became most apparent with its practical examples of how to survive as a politically powerless individual under a tyrannical system. This was also one of the criticisms levelled at neo-stoicism by its detractors: its proponents were not living in a tyrannical state meaning its relevance was somewhat doubtful. James himself had criticised the stoics in Basilikon Doron, singling out Lipsius in particular, and dismissing the ‘Stoicke insensible stupiditie, wherewith many in our dayes, preassing to winne honour, in imitating that ancient sect, by their inconstant behaviour in their owne lives, belie their profession’.40 This official criticism of neo-stoicism further emphasised its status as a marginal political outlook. Similar uncertainty surrounded the potential applications of Tacitean history, with some observers highlighting the ambiguity over whether Tacitus’ Annals provided a pattern for pragmatism and political expediency under a tyrannical regime, or whether they could function as a manual for the politically ambitious. Such a mood is summed up in a comment attributed to Isaac Casaubon, who asked,
what can be more pernicious (especially to a young man) than the reading of those Annals? for as good examples when they are frequently in sight improve a considered in F.J. Levy, ‘Hayward, Daniel, and the Beginning of Politic History in England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 50.1 (1987), 1–34.
38 Braden, p. 9.
39 Ibid.
40 James VI and I, Basilicon Doron in Selected Writings, ed. Neil Rhodes et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 245. In the 1599 edition James’s attack took on a far more personal dimension with a reference to ‘that proud inconstant LIPSIUS’. A summary of some of the early Stuart attacks on the neo-stoics can be found in Salmon, 222–5.
man, without his observation, so ill Examples hurt us, for by little and little they sink into our minds, and have the effect of Precepts, being often read or heard.41
Casaubon also asserted that certain applications of Tacitus could serve to ‘accuse our present Princes of Tyranny, or … manifestly teach them the principles of Tyranny’.42 In spite of such reservations, neo-stoicism had gained a following from a niche group of courtiers in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. Its popularity amongst members of the Sidney and Essex circles ensured it would have been familiar to the writers of the neo-Senecan dramas. Although formally the tragedies are largely indebted to the dramatic writings of Seneca, their widespread interests in the plight of the individual in a corrupt political sphere shows that, politically and morally, their outlooks were more influenced by the writings of Tacitus. In his important article on classical influences upon late sixteenth century humanism, J.M.H. Salmon argued that the influences of Seneca and Tacitus were more far more complementary than had previously been acknowledged:
Tacitus politicized Senecan philosophy and gave it a cynical bent, while Seneca strengthened the lessons, already suggested in Tacitus’s history of Roman tyranny and civil war, that private prudence and withdrawal were the best politics.43
This shows the extent to which the outlooks of the two classical authorities could be blended to complementary effect. Joel Davis has, in fact, labelled Mary Sidney’s Antonius a ‘neo-Tacitean’ tragedy.44 To the extent that they scrutinise the efficacy of stoicism as a response to political tyranny, the rest of the plays in this study can also be regarded as Tacitean in this respect. However, this is also the source of some of the plays’ ambivalence towards this political outlook. The stoic emphasis upon self-sovereignty emerges as little more than a compensatory achievement when compared with the political impotence of many of its practitioners. As Gordon Braden observes, ‘Stoicism is not finally a philosophy of political resistance. The essential Stoic strategy for dealing with a tyrant is not interference but indifference’.45 This leads many of the plays, with varying degrees of explicitness, to question the practical utility of the stoic outlook as a means of dealing with the harsh realities of political tyranny. In Kyd’s Cornelia, for example, the stoicism of such characters as Cornelia, Cicero, and even Caesar himself, is offset by the proactive anti-tyrannical resistance advocated by Brutus and Cassius. This puts it somewhat at odds with republicanism, that other branch of classical humanism that was beginning to exert influence upon the contemporary political discourse.
41 Quoted in Wheare, pp. 107–8.
42 Ibid., p. 107.
43 Salmon, 224.
44 Joel Davis, ‘Renaissance Neostoicism and the Sidney Family Literary Discourse’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oregon, 1999, p. 179.
45 Braden, p. 17.
If republicanism stood for any clear and coherent doctrine in late sixteenthcentury England, it was the intellectual conviction that it was necessary to control the powers of the crown by establishing a means of ensuring that a coterie of virtuous advisers and servants would always have the constitutional right to counsel the monarch, and so influence and control his or her actions with the limits of the law.46
As Andrew Hadfield’s definition suggests, the term ‘republicanism’, if one were to literally interpret it in relation to its translation of the Latin res publica – a ‘public thing’ – is something of a misnomer when used to describe that particular strain of early modern political theory. The general public themselves were largely excluded from any kind of constitutional processes that Renaissance political theorists might have had in mind. This was therefore not a strain of republicanism that prioritised the provision of any scope for public participation in a democratic process. Christopher Hill has argued that if the period had any coherent outlook towards public political involvement it was that ‘democracy was a bad thing’ and the public at large were perceived as ‘fickle, unstable, incapable of rational thought’.47 They were frequently realised as Hydra, the many-headed monster, and were thus an object of fear and derision. In his Discourses, Niccolò Machiavelli summed up many fears held by Renaissance observers that ‘Democracy is without difficulty converted into Anarchy’.48 Such fears and reservations about allowing the public to influence the processes of government are underlined by the dilemma faced by Achmat, the virtuous courtier in Fulke Greville’s Mustapha, when he witnesses the popular revolt caused by the death of Mustapha. Initially he questions why he should ‘helpe to stay the Peoples rage’, before asking, ‘Shall man the damme, and grave of Crownes, / With mutenie, pull sacred Sceptres downe?’49 Achmat’s dilemma is one shared by many Renaissance courtiers and political theorists; although he has some sympathy with the aims of the public, he cannot endorse the mentality and methods of the mob.
It is only within the last few decades that republicanism has come to figure significantly in the study of Renaissance literature and it is only since the 1970s that republicanism has been considered part of political discourse and practice in Renaissance England. Patrick Collinson applied the term ‘monarchical republic’
46 Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, p. 17. Hadfield’s book provides a useful overview of republicanism in early modern England; see, in particular, pp. 17–95.
47 Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in 17th Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), p. 181.
48 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 1.2, p. 106.
49 Fulke Greville, Mustapha (5.3.90–106), in The Complete Poems and Plays of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554–1628), 2 vols, ed. G.A. Wilkes (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), vol. 1, pp. 210–97.
to label the mixed constitutional form of government presiding over England.50 Arguing against J.G.A. Pocock’s view that Tudor England could not be described as ‘a polis or its inhabitants citizens’,51 Collinson highlights various examples of civic culture that could, broadly, be considered republican in spirit; these included participation in local government, as well as the Bond of Association of 1585, which proposed a period of interregnum rule should Elizabeth die suddenly or be assassinated in office.52 In this kind of context, republicanism refers more to a system of limited monarchy with increased participation from an elite intelligentsia of advisers, whose influence would curb the absolute power of the monarch. The reaction to the prospect of Elizabeth I’s potential marriage to François, duc d’Alençon, in 1579 is indicative of the way in which the printed text could be appropriated as a means of communicating the necessary advice to the monarch. The two most notable examples of this are John Stubbs’s text, The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf, and Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Letter to Queen Elizabeth’, both of which saw their writers greeted with heavy punishment. That the neo-Senecan dramas in this study can be considered alongside such interventions in court politics is suggested even by a cursory consideration of some of the authors who adopted the form; these included members of the aristocracy, such as Mary Sidney and Elizabeth Cary, and courtiers such as Fulke Greville and Sir William Alexander, for whom a literary career would always be subordinate to their political roles. Also present in the group are those who frequently engaged their literary works for advisory and didactic purposes, like Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson; the recognised topical resonance of these works is suggested by the appearance of both dramatists before the Privy Council.
It is not just through these overtly political channels that the influence of republicanism manifests itself in Renaissance literature. In recent years, a number of critical works have focused upon the ways in which theories of republicanism permeate many literary works, including book-length studies on such authors as Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson.53 My approach to the authors in this study is
50 Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambleton Press, 1994), pp. 31–57. For further discussions of the issues raised by this essay, see John F. McDiarmid (ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
51 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975; reprinted 2003), p. 354.
52 In addition to Collinson and Pocock, the development of early modern republicanism is also discussed in Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) and Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
53 See, respectively, Hadfield (2005); Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Julie Sanders, Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998).
strongly influenced by these recent studies, particularly the development of the idea of ‘republican authorship’, in which, as Patrick Cheney argues, an author’s ‘literary works vigorously engage classical Roman and early modern European republican writing, both historical and literary’.54 Hadfield argues that literary republicanism would usually exhibit a number of distinct features, including concern for the establishment and maintenance of a civic culture; hatred of tyrannical rule; suspicion of hereditary succession; belief that the ruler is really a servant of the people, whatever he or she might think; interest in political assassination; an awareness of the key features of the history of the Roman republic and a desire to show that they have widespread significance and application.55
The interest in republicanism exhibited by many of the neo-Senecan authors means that it is no coincidence that Rome should emerge as the most frequently used location; the choice of temporal setting during crucial stages of the progress of the Roman state from republic to empire, encompassing such events as the assassination of Julius Caesar, the collapse of the rule by the triumvirate and the subsequent acquisition of absolute power by Octavius Caesar, also proves significant. While, as I have previously pointed out and will later elaborate upon, many of the dramas in this study were not overly concerned about the ‘establishment and maintenance of a civic culture’, they do evidence many of the features listed by Hadfield. The use of the Chorus device is a means of providing the view of the vox populi, a point represented by the frequently interchangeable composition of the Chorus in some of the plays; in Mary Sidney’s Antonius, for example, the Chorus of the fourth act changes from a Chorus of citizens to one of Roman soldiers, while the Chorus in Greville’s Mustapha changes at the end of each act as a means of encompassing as broad a view of the society as possible. Despite their prevalence in these texts, the general public still remain marginalised as disengaged observers, able to do little more than comment upon the events they witness. In Samuel Daniel’s Philotas, for example, the Chorus’s political exclusion is highlighted from their first appearance. Here they relegate themselves to the status of passive ‘Spectators’, able to do little more than ‘censure’ the actions of the ‘great men’.56 However, in spite of their passivity, there is always some provision for their viewpoint to be voiced.
For consideration of the links between literature, early modern republicanism, and contemporary theories highlighting vulnerable and ‘open’ subjectivity, see James Kuzner, Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods, and the Virtue of Vulnerability (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
54 Cheney, p. 188.
55 Hadfield, p. 73.
56 Samuel Daniel, The Tragedy of Philotas (1.399–402) ed. Laurence Michel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949).
The recurring preoccupation with the defence of liberty in early modern political discourse coalesces closely with the anti-tyrannical rhetoric and outlook adopted by the plays in this study. The three Garnier plays based upon Roman history – two of which were translated in Renaissance England, and the other, Porcie, projected by Kyd – are all set at crucial times during the development of the Roman empire. As Christine M. Hill and Mary G. Morrison point out, each of the plays in Garnier’s Roman trilogy – Cornélie (1573), Porcie (1568), and Marc Antoine – ‘revolve around three historic battles: Pharsalus, the defeat of Pompey in 48 B.C., Philippi, the defeat of Brutus and Cassius in 42 B.C., and Actium, the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra in 31 B.C., and these are battles which decided the fate of the Roman world’.57 The battles of Pharsalus, Philippi, and Actium all moved the republic another step closer to absolutism and therefore represent critical moments that signal dire consequences for those who uphold a republican outlook. In Cornélie, translated by Kyd as Cornelia, characters such as Cornelia, Cicero, Brutus, and Cassius all lament the loss of liberty they predict will occur as Julius Caesar advances the state closer to absolutism, while Marc Antoine, translated by Mary Sidney as Antonius, characterises Octavius as a rigorous ruler whose zealous ambition is to safeguard his power, to achieve which end he will clearly not be averse to using brutal measures.
The interest in tyranny is also evidenced through the ways many of the characters in the neo-Senecan dramas are forced to adapt in order to survive under an oppressive regime. Such is the case in Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam, Fulke Greville’s Mustapha and Alaham, and Ben Jonson’s Roman tragedies. This feature also inaugurates an interest in tyrannicide and debates about the ethical dimensions of deposing, and even killing, an unfit ruler, as is seen in Kyd’s Cornelia through the debates between Brutus and Cassius. The preoccupation with tyranny is also coupled with a mistrust of monarchy and hereditary rule. In the Discourses, Machiavelli explained the potential ways in which a ‘Principality easily becomes Tyranny’:
But when at a later stage they began to make the prince hereditary instead of electing him, his heirs soon began to degenerate as compared with their ancestors, and, forsaking virtuous deeds, considered that princes have nought else to do but to surpass other men in extravagance, lasciviousness, and every other form of licentiousness. With the result that the prince came to be hated, and, since he was hated, came to be afraid, and from fear soon passed to offensive action, which quickly brought about a tyranny.58
Such premises are more than likely at the root of Brutus and Cassius’ fear of Julius Caesar adopting monarchical titles. William Alexander’s early tragedies, Darius and Croesus, also portray the kings falling prey to such vices as pride and extravagance
57 Christine M. Hill and Mary G. Morrison, Introduction to Robert Garnier, Two Tragedies: ‘Hippolyte’ and ‘Marc Antoine’ (London: The Athlone Press, 1975), pp. 3–4.
58 Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.2, pp. 106–7.
which prove to be their undoing in both cases. While the plays of Greville and Alexander do not oppose the system of monarchy itself, they do expose many of the dangers associated with it and assert the necessity for monarchical rule to be tempered with the input of advisers. Greville’s Mustapha and Jonson’s Sejanus, in particular, are both interested in the role of counsellors and the potential for good and bad advisers to be locked in a conflict to gain the greater influence over the ruler. In the same way, William Alexander’s Croesus sees the protagonist’s fatal flaw as his refusal to listen to the advice of Solon. Greville’s plays also expose one of the key flaws in the system of hereditary monarchy. While Mustapha dramatises the dire consequences of allowing Solyman’s fear of displacement by his son to develop, Alaham explores the realisation of it with the son’s usurpation of his father’s throne and his subsequent murder. William Alexander’s The Alexandræan Tragedy also focuses upon one of the major problems associated with the system of monarchy – the possibility that the monarch will die without leaving an heir.
That which Markku Peltonen argues is the ‘limited but undoubted impact’59 classical republicanism had upon English culture therefore manifests itself significantly in the texts in this group. My chapters explore the ways in which such features as the concentration upon key moments in the history of the Roman and Macedonian empires, as well as the dramatisation of numerous episodes from other cultures involving crises of statecraft, examine and interrogate many questions relating to kingship, authority and legitimacy. These include debates surrounding the ethics of political assassination and the potential ways in which important and influential citizens may function under a tyrant’s rule. The portrayal of the consequences of rash and ill-advised ventures of rulers also serves to reflect the exasperation of a coterie of advisers who had begun to feel increasingly marginalised as a result of the power struggles and factional in-fighting in the Elizabethan and early Jacobean courts. I argue that the plays provide evidence of the reassessment of roles that members of this coterie were forced to undertake as a result of the accession of James I and the subsequent changes in court customs and practice. Widening the field to include Ben Jonson’s tragedies, I show how the neo-Senecan form was appropriated to advance contrasting views on these issues and therefore emerge as a dramatic form which encouraged a dialogue on the subjects rather than providing a single and coherent outlook. I do not argue that the dramatists use their plays as means of advocating the deposition of the monarchy; however, the collapse of the Roman republic and similar constitutional crises provide dramatic contexts to open up space for the interrogation of questions relating to constitutional issues, the liberties of the citizens (or subjects), and the ethics of tyrannicide. Republican discourse also provided dramatists covering topics outside Roman history with a frame of reference with which they could explore the implications of the political crises that they are dramatising, as well as a means for debating the roles of counsellors, the potential for the individual to influence state policy, the nature of sovereign authority, and the effects of tyranny.
59 Peltonen, pp. 11–12.
Sovereignty
The influence of republicanism upon these dramas also means that they emphasise the political consequences of the events taking place, indicating a shift away from the idea of tragedy as a genre which is concerned primarily with the fall of a great individual. J.W. Lever argues that the neo-Senecan tragedies – particularly those of Daniel, Greville and Alexander – can be grouped together with the trend of popular drama he identifies as the ‘tragedy of state’. These plays represent ‘modes of tragedy unrelated to Aristotle’s familiar definitions’ and contain protagonists who
may have their faults of deficiency or excess; but the fundamental flaw is not in them but in the world they inhabit and the social order it upholds, and likewise, by projection, in the cosmic state of shifting arbitrary phenomena called ‘Fortune’.
For the most part, indeed, we are not greatly concerned with the characters as individuals. Generally their emotional relationships and psychological make-up are sketched in broad outlines which hardly call for a close-range scrutiny. What really matters is the quality of their response to intolerable situations. This is a drama of adversity and stance, not of character and destiny.60
This is not to say that these plays show no interest whatsoever in the plight of the individual; rather, the characters are defined by their positions within the body politic and their actions are viewed in terms of their impact upon the state. These plays therefore tend to focus upon either ambitious tyrants or ineffectual rulers and have amongst the supporting cast amoral counsellors, virtuous yet often ill-fated advisers, and the general public as represented by the Chorus. These plays thus present a range of characters with varying degrees of personal autonomy, usually relative to their place within the body politic.
The analyses of power provided by these plays make it necessary to consider the positions of the authors within that hierarchy and in the relations between the sovereign and their subjects. The promulgation of sovereign authority, and the bearings this has upon the agency of their subjects, has been one of the key focal points in the works of such theorists as Carl Schmitt, Ernst Kantorowicz, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, whose works, broadly, fall into the tradition of political theology. Drawing on Schmitt’s work on the sovereign exception, Kantorowicz’s study of the tradition of the king’s two bodies, and Foucault’s formulation of the concept of biopolitics,61 Agamben considers the relation between sovereign and subject to be predicated upon the development of ‘bare life’, a form of life that is politically qualified yet deprived of political
60 J.W. Lever, The Tragedy of State (London: Methuen, 1971), p. 10.
61 See, respectively, Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); and Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998); and Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2004).
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“THE BUILDER”
will be occupied by Essays on the Building and Furnishing Arts in all their various and numerous branches. It will contain the designs of Ancient Buildings and Works, and of those of our own day—not mere pictures or views from which nothing is to be learnt, but plans, sections, &c., which, while they will be rendered perfectly intelligible to workmen of ordinary information, it is hoped will not be below the notice of the Architect and the Amateur.
When we consider how numerous and important is the class to whose interests this Journal is dedicated; a class of British Artisans numbering at least half a million; a class whose trade-education distinguishes them in intellect, knowledge, and wealth, it can only form matter of surprise, that while the Clerical, Medical, Legal, Military, and Naval, the Artists and Literati, and other classes have their public organs of opinion and information; while the Gardeners and Agriculturists, Railway and Commercial and Banking Companies
have each their mouth-piece and record; the religious sects, and all Politicians their special advocates that this most numerous, most intelligent, and most wealthy, should have so long remained without this bond of the Press; to instruct and inform, to disseminate knowledge as to discoveries and inventions, to advertise wants, and form for it a general nucleus of strength, light, and union.
Amongst the Tradesmen, Manufacturers, &c. who are particularly interested in
“THE BUILDER,”
both as a medium for obtaining information, and for Advertising their own productions and requirements, we may enumerate the following:
Architectural Authors and Publishers
Asphalte Companies
Artificial Stone Manufacturers
Auctioneers and Agents for Buildings, Land, Timber Sales, &c.
Bath, Portland, Granite, Yorkshire, and other Stone Merchants
Brass Fender, Rods, Plate, &c. Manufacturers
Brass Founders
Blind Makers, Venetian and others
Booksellers
Bent Timber Manufacturers
Brokers, Consignments, Sales, &c.
Bronzists
Builders’ Cards and Advertisements
Building Material Dealers
Carpet Warehouses
Carvers
Cabinet Makers
Chimney-piece Manufacturers
Cement Manufacturers
Carriers, Canals, and Vans
Clerks of Works and their Employers
Clock Makers and Bell Founders
Coppersmiths and Braziers
Contractors and Contracts
Drawing Schools, Academies, and Schools of Design
Engineers and Workmen
Estate and House Agents
Fender Makers
Founders and Furnishing Ironmongers
Fire-proof Materials
Fencing,—Iron, Wood, or Stone
Foremen wanted
Glass and Lead Merchants
” Manufacturers, Plate and Stained
Gas Fitters, &c.
Grindstones, &c.
Houses of Call
Insurance Companies
Iron and Steel Merchants
Iron and Tin Plate Workers
Iron Bedstead Makers, Safes, &c.
Land Jobbers, and Sales for Building, &c.
Lamp Manufacturers
Lath Renders
Lead Merchants
Lime Merchants and Burners
Locksmiths and Bellhangers
Lock Manufacturers
Loan Societies
Mathematical Instrument Makers
Machine Makers, Engines, &c.
Metallic Sash Makers—Springs, &c.
Mechanics’ Institutions
Mechanical Instrument Makers
Millwrights and Millstones
Modellers and Carvers
Marble Workers—Chimney-piece Manufacturers
Nail Merchants
Oven Builders
Paint and Colour Merchants
Papier Maché Manufacturers
Paviours
Picture Frame and Gilt Moulding Makers
Patents—Patent Agencies, &c.
Plasterers and Plaster of Paris
Pump Makers, &c.
Pencil Makers
Prices Current—Timber, Lead, Iron, &c.
Publishers, Printers, &c.
Railway Companies
Registration of Designs
Roman Cement Makers
Sales—Timber, Land, Houses, &c.
Scagliola Manufacturers
Saw Mills, Sawing, Saw Makers
Stone Quarries and Merchants
Slate do. do.
Staffordshire Tiles, Bricks, Pipes, &c.
Ships—Imports, Exports, Emigration, &c.
Steam Engines, and Boiler Makers
Stove Grate Makers
Tool Makers
Turners
Ventilating and Warming Buildings
Upholsterers
Wire Drawers and Workers
Water Closet Makers
Wood Paving Companies
Wood Letters
Window Blind Makers—Transparent, &c.
Workmen wanted
Zinc Manufacturers, and Door-plate Makers
Zincography and Artists
The following presents a list, taken from the census of 1831, of the building and connected classes in Great Britain only, and of these only the male adults of 20 years old and upwards:—
Architects and Engineers—No number given.
Agents—None given. Auctioneers
Carvers and Gilders
To which, if we add for Ireland, for apprentices and increase of population, we shall have a number probably far exceeding half a million!
That this description of paper has been long a desideratum, is evinced by the history and character of the associations of years
past. The struggles on the part of masters and men, and the attitude taken by the public towards both, required an interlocutor of this nature to promote a good understanding, and to secure equity and justice to all. With such an auxiliary, what waste of time and funds had been avoided—what noble projects carried out—what petty strife suppressed—what distractions kept down. Our dignity would have been maintained, and our cause ennobled.
But more than this. How many of the claims of humble merit have slept in this interval for the want of a friendly expositor, or a common vehicle of publicity? And how many valuable inventions have languished wanting encouragement, or died still-born in the obscurity of their birth? How many toilsome wanderings of the artisan in search of employment might have been avoided?—how many common benefits have been withheld?—How frequently the hand of brotherly charity undirected, and the worthy object frustrated of its aid? In the glut of work in one quarter and its scarcity in another, how promptly would
“THE BUILDER”
have adjusted the balance? Its columns at all times open to inquiries, and the office for reference, would have solved many difficulties, and facilitated many purposes of good.
But “better late than never.” The present effort will be under the chief conduct of one who, from his experience and practice, has derived means and opportunities of knowing the wants, and understanding the interests, of the class to whom he has the honour to belong. And it will be the object at all times to enlist in behalf of this enterprise the talent and services of all superior minds and zealous hearts in the various kindred professions.
The paper will be of a convenient size for being bound as a book, and so that the essays and illustrations may be separated and preserved. As before stated in respect of the political department, the Editor will endeavour to steer clear of partizanship. But times may arise when a fearless advocacy of trade interests will require him to oppose or support the party in power; on such occasions he
will claim for himself the right to assert his views, and those of his class, in a manly and temperate manner.
The illustrations will consist of views, plans, elevations, and sections of ancient and modern buildings, and of parts of buildings, so as effectually to describe their peculiar excellencies;—of working drawings and diagrams for the carpenter, mason, cabinet-maker, &c. &c.;—designs of manufactured articles and implements used in building;—of improved associations and architectural arrangements, whether in the cottage or the mansion, the villa or the palace, in the farm, the village, and the city; in short, there will be no subject in art or science connected with building and the furnishing of buildings that will not be sought after to be introduced here.
As a medium of Advertisements, its merits will be obvious: the list already given comprehends a large number of those to whom such a paper as this offers always the only proper vehicle. But there are many besides to whom it will be a welcome organ. In the matter of contracts for building, of business to be disposed of or sought after, of workmen wanted or seeking employment, and in all such pertaining to the class of builders and cabinet makers, it will at once form a perfect scheme of publicity, thereby encouraging many to advertise, in the certainty of their advertisements being read, and many to read in the same certainty of finding an answer to their wants.
All communications to be addressed to the Editor of “T B ,” No. 2, York-street, Covent Garden.
TESSELLATED PAVEMENT.—WYATT, PARKER, and CO. respectfully call the attention of the Public to their Specimens of Tessellated Pavement which may be seen at Albion Wharf, Hollandstreet, Surrey Foot of Blackfriars-bridge.
The Tesseræ for forming this Pavement or Flooring, being composed of similar material to that used in the manufacture of porcelain, and highly vitrified, are imperishable. They can be had of any size and form, from cubes of a quarter of an inch, and with the
colours burnt throughout the entire body If required, they may be gilt similar to those on the tombs of Edward the Confessor and Henry the Third. They are prepared to execute designs for these floors, or to dispose of the small Quarries or Tesseræ by the gross, to such persons as may wish to execute their own floors. These Tesseræ may be united on the floor with Roman Cement, Lime, and Pozzolano, Plaster of Paris, or most of the Cements now in use; or prepared in slabs, and laid with the same facility as Portland Stone paving.
ENCAUSTIC or INLAID ORNAMENTAL TILES, for paving churches, halls, corridors, &c.—WYATT, PARKER, and Co. beg to acquaint the public that they are now prepared to execute PAVEMENTS with these beautiful tiles, manufactured in imitation of the best ancient examples from the Chapterhouse, Westminster, Winchester Cathedral, Romsey Church, Great Malvern, &c. Being made of the famous red Staffordshire clay, they are of a less porous body than the ancient tiles, consequently are more durable, and will bear the roughest usage to which a foot-pavement can be subject, and are therefore more economical than any of the marbles and stones now in use for similar purposes. W. P., and Co. also have a great variety of other tiles of various colours for flooring, and white glazed tiles for the sides of stoves, dairies, baths, &c. Specimens may be seen at Wyatt, Parker, and Co.’s wharf, Holland-street, Surrey Foot of Blackfriars-bridge.
ARTISTS, PRINTSELLERS, and Others are respectfully informed that C. F. Brelefeld has formed a large Collection of new and elegant Designs for Picture Frames in the Improved Papier Maché. The superiority of these Frames consists in their having all the effect of old carved work; many patterns represent exactly the finest carvings of the 17th century The small parts are far less liable to injury than putty work. Papier Maché being a remarkably tough and hard substance, it never shrinks, and takes gilding very freely; the frames
do not weigh one quarter the weight of others, and the price is below that usually charged.
Many specimens are now on view at C. F Brelefeld’s Papier Maché Works, No. 15, Wellington-street North, Strand, where also Pattern Books may be had, price 14s., consisting of a variety of Patterns of Picture and Glass Frames and Window Cornices, already executed, and on sale.
“PICTURE FRAMES.—We direct the especial attention of all persons interested in this subject to the frames for pictures manufactured by Mr Brelefeld; they are of Papier Maché, and the advantages they possess over the ordinary composition frames are so strong and so numerous, that they must inevitably be brought into general use. They look exceedingly attractive, and are in reality as much so as if they had passed through the hands of the carver, and been produced at about ten times the expense. The gilding tells with very brilliant effect; and no matter how elaborate the pattern may be, they have a clearness and sharpness that we have seldom or never seen obtained in composition.”—Art-Union.
TO CIVIL ENGINEERS, ARCHITECTS, BUILDERS, AND THE PUBLIC.
THOMAS
PEAKE’S TERRO-METALLIC MANUFACTORIES, Tunstall, near Newcastle, Staffordshire. Depôt, Albion Wharf, Holland-street, London, per Messrs. Wyatt, Parker, and Co.
The manufacturer and his late father have conducted the present business since 1808, now thirty-four years. He begs to remark that, during that period, the articles have supplanted other materials to a considerable extent provincially; and experience leads him to believe that they will be more generally adopted in the metropolis, as they become known.
T. P. had the honour to supply roof tiles for lodges, villas, &c. at Chatsworth, and he believes they are not excelled in efficiency or appearance by any tiled roofs in the world.
