Abstract
This chapter presents the basic elements of Shakespearean ‘conversion.’ Following Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare presents erotic, sexual lust as one way people are moved into a converted, Protestant lifestyle. The enemies of such lust are those Luther envisioned, hypocrites who claimed to be ‘celibate,’ opposing lust vociferously but engaging in it voraciously. This attitude describes Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, as well as other ‘soldier’ types; severing Eros from Aphrodite, they gain the power and pleasure of lust (including the ability to cuckold other men) without bearing love’s emotional consequences. Moreover, their detestable but also ‘reasonable’ aversion to love prompts Shakespeare’s counter-reaction, mocking reason. For Shakespeare, reason plays no role in love—those who pretend it does only do so out of a misguided fear of Eros as God’s surrogate angel.
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Notes
- 1.
Mallette , Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England, 86.
- 2.
For further discussion of Britomart, see my essay, “Providential Love and Suffering in The Faerie Queene, Book III.” Spenser Studies 19 (2004), 209–35.
The argument is that the continual pain Britomart suffers is a device that reminds Spenser’s readers that Protestant glory is always accompanied by Protestant pain.
- 3.
See Donald N. Mager , “John Bale and Early Tudor Sodomy Discourse,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 150–1.
- 4.
For an example of the great tension, in Puritan marriage manuals, between enjoyment of sexuality and shame at such enjoyment, see William Gouge who, citing Proverbs 5.19, at first refers to sexual intercourse between couples so positively that they should go “euen mad againe in their heat and desire” only to immediately remind his readers that these remarks need to be “taken in a good sense, and rightly applied, so as they exceed not the bonds of christian modesty and decency.” Of Domesticall Duties, 208.
- 5.
George L. Scheper, “Reformation Attitudes Toward Allegory and the Song of Songs,” PMLA 89.3 (1974), 551–62, esp. 559.
- 6.
Valerie Traub, “Jewels, Statues, and Corpses: Containment of Female Erotic Power in Shakespeare’s Plays.” Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988), 232.
- 7.
Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 49.
- 8.
Traub, “Jewels, Statues, and Corpses,” 216.
- 9.
Mary Bly, “The Legacy of Juliet’s Desire in Comedies of the Early 1600s,” in Shakespeare and Sexuality, eds. Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 67.
- 10.
Shuger, The Renaissance Bible, 178.
- 11.
Paul W. Ludwig notes the term “eros ” in ancient Greece did not necessarily signal sexual desire: “in Homeric Greek, the semantic camp of eros was wide enough to include appetite for food … it additionally covered desires to weep, to dance, as well as to make war.” Eros and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 124. Nonetheless, Ludwig acknowledges that, especially when associated directly with the deity (eros or Cupid ), the force of eros is a “specific eros,” meaning “the passionate, intense love associated with (but not identical to) sexual desire,” 127.
- 12.
Euripides, “Hippolytus ,” ed. and trans. David Kovacs , in Euripides. Volume II. Children of Heracles, Hippolytus , Andromache, Hecuba (Cambridge, MA and London: Loeb-Harvard University Press, 1995; rpt. 2005), 175. Jane Kingsley-Smith proposes that this, Euripides’s play of 428 BC, is the “first literary text to provide the deity of love with arrows,” Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6.
- 13.
Plato writes that desire “enters through his eyes, which are its natural route to the soul,” “Phaedrus,” trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff , in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper & D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company), 532; 255c–d.
- 14.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses : Books 1–5, ed. William S. Anderson (Norman, OK and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 79, 97.
- 15.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Books 1–5, 115–16. The lines are:Verse
Verse Salmacis exarsit: flagrant quoque lumina nymphae non aliter, quam cum puro nitidissimus orbe opposita speculi referitur imagine Phoebus.
- 16.
Bernart de Ventadorn , “Can vei la lauzeta mover” (“When I see the lark move”), in Troubadour Lyrics, a Bilingual Anthology, ed. and trans. Frede Jensen (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 171; Dante Alighieri , La Vita Nuova (Poems of Youth), trans. Barbara Reynolds (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1969), 29; Francesco Petrarch , Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), 38. For some additional relevant citations from Ovid’s Heroides as well as a discussion of the ‘love at first sight’ motif from an optical point of view, especially in relation to the Middle Ages, see Dana Stewart , The Arrow of Love: Optics, Gender, and Subjectivity in Medieval Love Poetry (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 6–7.
- 17.
Gary Spear, “Shakespeare’s ‘Manly’ Parts: Masculinity and Effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida .” Shakespeare Quarterly 44.4 (Winter, 1993), 411.
- 18.
Mario DiGangi , The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 178.
- 19.
Rebecca Ann Bach, Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature Before Heterosexuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 5.
- 20.
Jennifer Panek , Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 81.
- 21.
Panek , Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy, 82.
- 22.
Panek , Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy, 81.
- 23.
Panek notes, for example, that “the fantasy of the widow’s sexual susceptibility can be deployed to contain the anxieties that the wealthy marriageable widow could arouse” and that the society had “a material interest in the recirculation of the widow’s wealth back into the (male) economy.” Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy, 80, 83.
- 24.
Ludwig, Eros and Polis, 122, 13.
- 25.
As the dialogue puts it, “intercourse without Eros is like hunger and thirst, which can be sated, but never achieve a noble end.” Plutarch, “Dialogue on Love” (Eroticus or Amatorius), trans. W.C. Helmbold , in Plutarch’s Moralia. 15 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Loeb-Harvard University Press, 1961), 9:351 (chapter 13; 756E).
- 26.
Helen Parish concludes that in early sixteenth-century England , as well as in Luther’s Germany, “the unchaste lives of the clergy undermined their position and discredited their preaching.” Clerical Celibacy in the West: c. 1100–1700, 149.
- 27.
Martin Luther, “Sermon at Marriage of Sigismund Von Lindenau 1545,” in Luther’s Works, American Edition, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan , Helmut T. Lehmann , Christopher Boyd Brown , et al. 79 vols. to date (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Press; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–), 51:360.
- 28.
Calvin, Institutes, 4.12.23, 1249. Calvin was so antagonistic to celibacy that he practically defined it as fornication and adultery; he considered calling angels ‘celibate’ was to defame them, Institutes, 4.13.3, 1257. As Parish discusses, the Council of Trent likewise condemned clerical concubinage. Clerical Celibacy, 195.
- 29.
This is also a strategy recommended by Beatrice’s cousin Hero who will “devise some honest slanders” to assist Benedick in forgetting his love for Beatrice (3.1.84).
- 30.
Joost Daalder , “The ‘Pre-History’ of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing,” English Studies 85 (2004), 520–7. Carol Cook also makes this point, in passing, in “‘The Sign and Semblance of Her Honor’: Reading Gender Difference in Much Ado About Nothing,” PMLA 101.2 (1986), 201.
- 31.
John Donne’s Poetry: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, ed. Arthur L. Clements (New York: Norton, 1966), 15.
- 32.
It is in this sense that, as Carol Cook has shown, “beauty is a witch” (2.1.170) in Much Ado About Nothing; a woman, specifically Hero in Claudio’s eyes, becomes “a sexual being only in her capacity to betray.” “‘The Sign and Semblance of Her Honor’,” 193.
- 33.
In this sense, Rebecca Ann Bach’s comment that “the Renaissance codpiece functioned to display powerful men’s ability to make male heirs” may not be the full picture. These ‘gallants’ may have been presenting their sexuality so aggressively not to create heirs but to intimidate women and show their social power. See Bach, Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, 189.
- 34.
Stephen Orgel, “Nobody’s Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88:1 (1989), 13.
- 35.
We should note that it is not only men who can gain social power by the creation of cuckolds. Women can of course do the same, and not only through marriage. The famous poem by Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542), “They Flee From Me ” suggests that coyness, a traditional female virtue, is in fact a cover for promiscuity; the poem implies a woman chooses to please a man depending on whether or not he can assist her in social advancement. Sir Thomas Wyatt : The Complete Poems, ed. R.A. Rebholz (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 116–7.
- 36.
Mary Beth Rose , The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 4.
- 37.
Mary Beth Rose , The Expense of Spirit, 4.
- 38.
Erasmus, “On the Freedom of the Will, 73.
- 39.
Calvin, Institutes, 2.3.6, 297.
- 40.
John Donne’s Poetry, ed. Clements, 86.
- 41.
John Calvin , Commentary Upon the Acts of the Apostles, Volume 1, trans. Christopher Fetherstone , ed. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844), 372. Similarly, William Perkins wrote that “when GOD will conuert and renew vs, though will for his own nature be apt to resist, yet in respect of Gods vnchangeable will, and in respect of the efficacy of his inward operation, it cannot resist & repell the worke of God.” “A Treatise of Gods Free-Grace , and Mans Free-Will,” in The Workes of … William Perkins. 3 vols. (London, 1626–1631), 1:735.
- 42.
“The Canons of the Synod of Dort, 1619,” 468. The Latin adjectives are “suavissima, mirabilis, arcana, et ineffabilis.” See Philip Schaff , The Creeds of Christendom: The Evangelical Protestant Creeds. 3 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877), 3:567.
- 43.
Seneca, “Phaedra,” ed. and trans. John G. Fitch , in Seneca. Volume VIII. Tragedies I: Hercules, Trojan Women , Phoenician Women, Medea, Phaedra (Cambridge, MA and London: Loeb-Harvard University Press, 2002), 457.
- 44.
Seneca, “Phaedra,” 459.
- 45.
Seneca, “Phaedra,” 463.
- 46.
Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert , and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 79.
- 47.
Tilmouth , Passion’s Triumph Over Reason, 23. As Tilmouth explains it, Aristotle presented at least two distinct phases in this process of attaining virtue. In an earlier phase, a weaker state of “continence” prevails, wherein the will forces the human subject to act in accordance with reason. In the more advanced state, habits of virtue are developed that allow the person to be “predisposed” to reason rather than having to force him or herself into adhering to it: “his perfected orektikon anticipates the judgements of reason as a matter of habit,” 24.
- 48.
Tilmouth, Passion’s Triumph Over Reason, 23.
- 49.
Qtd. in Eric Josef Carlson , Marriage and the English Reformation (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1994), 233.
- 50.
Dubrow, A Happier Eden, 25.
- 51.
“The Book of Common Prayer, 1549,” 64.
- 52.
Barnaby Riche , “Of Apolonius and Silla ” (From Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare), ed. Geoffrey Bullough , 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1957–1975), 2:345.
- 53.
Thomas Lodge, “Rosalynde,” in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough , 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1957–1975), 2:204.
- 54.
Lodge, “Rosalynde,” in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 2:204–5.
- 55.
Calvin, Institutes, 2.2.6, 263.
- 56.
Calvin, Institutes, 2.2.6, 263. Calvin refers to The Call of All Nations by Prosper of Aquitaine (c. 388–c.355).
- 57.
Calvin, Institutes, 2.2.6, 263.
- 58.
Tilmouth , Passion’s Triumph Over Reason, 2; also 33. Yet Tilmouth also wishes to argue that, for Spenser , “as for so many other sixteenth-century moralists, rationalist goals clearly were worth fighting for, their difficulty notwithstanding,” 2. This would make Spenser , in Tilmouth’s terms, somewhat anti-Protestant. For an opposing argument that the Renaissance in general valued passion over reason, see Richard Strier, “Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert ,” Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, eds. Gail Kern Paster , Katherine Rowe , and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2004), 23–42. In “On the Bondage of the Will ,” Luther paraphrased “Reason” as “human stupidity,” 232.
- 59.
Calvin, Institutes, 2.2.18, 278.
- 60.
Citing Paul’s famous comment in Romans 7:15–20 (“For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate”), Risto Saarinen points out that while many scholars consider this to be Paul’s “retrospective analysis” of his pre-converted state, the alternative position known as the “Lutheran Paul” is “that the situation depicted in Romans 7:15–20 remains permanently relevant for the Christian.” Risto Saarinen , Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17–8.
- 61.
Calvin, Institutes, 2.4.3, 312. See also, for instance, this comment from the Collegiate Suffrage of the British Divines, a statement summarizing the views of the British Delegation at Dort (1618–1619): “God does not alwayes so move a converted and faithfull man to godly ensuing actions … sometimes hee suffers him, through his owne weaknesse, to stray from the direction of grace, and … to follow his owne concupiscence.” Qtd. in Nigel Voak , “English Molinism in the Late 1590’s: Richard Hooker on Free Will, Predestination, and Divine Foreknowledge.” Journal of Theological Studies 60.1 (2009), 138.
- 62.
Martin Luther, “On the Bondage of the Will ,” 140. As the editors explain, the “simile of the beast and its riders” is a longstanding one, but Luther revises it, in among other ways, to give this “beast no option as to which rider it shall have,” 18.
- 63.
Don John’s references to the vast extent of Hero’s sinfulness, that her sins “are not to be nam’d, my lord,/Not to be spoke of!/There is not chastity enough in language/Without offence to utter them” (4.1.94–7) underscore the sense that, in Claudio’s furious mindset, a sense of sin overwhelms even language; any spoken word will reflect the repulsiveness of female sexuality.
- 64.
For instance, see Mercutio’s lewd comments about Rosalind’s “circle” in Romeo and Juliet (2.1.24). In addition to these contexts, there is also the developing sense of ‘naught’ or ‘nothing’ being associated not only with a general moral debility (a person who is ‘naught’) but specifically with ‘naughtiness’ or sexual impropriety; the OED’s earliest citation refers to the Nurse in The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke (1562). For some useful background on these complex topics, see Thomas Pyles , ‘Ophelia’s ‘Nothing” Modern Language Notes 64.5 (1949), 322–3; and Miriam Jacobson , “The Elizabethan Cipher in Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” Studies in Philology 107.3 (2010), 336–59.
- 65.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), trans. Talcott Parsons (1930) (Rpt. New York: Scribners, 1976), 121.
- 66.
Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 54.
- 67.
John Calvin , “The Adultero-German Interim Declaration of Religion, with Calvin’s Refutation (The True Method of Giving Peace to Christendom and of Reforming the Church),” trans. Henry Beveridge , in Works and Correspondence, Tracts and Treatises in Defense of the Reformed Faith. 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844–1851); 3:205. Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Past Masters Series, Electronic Edition, 2002.
- 68.
Angus Fletcher, “Living Magnets, Paracelsian Corpses, and the Psychology of Grace in Donne’s Religious Verse,” ELH (English Literary History) 72 (2005), 1–22. Mary Floyd-Nelson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 73–90, esp. 76.
- 69.
Floyd-Nelson, Occult Knowledge, 87.
- 70.
In his essay, “The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice” (English Literary Renaissance 22 [1992], 201–21), Joseph Pequigney cites many persuasive examples of Antonio’s extreme love of Sebastian . Pequigney argues, moreover, that by using such language in this relationship and nowhere else in his extant canon, Shakespeare’s aim is to highlight the topic of same-sex desire.
- 71.
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 91. See also Coppélia Kahn , Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 207–11.
- 72.
Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 93.
- 73.
For instance, it is only boy players who are permitted to act as women in public.
- 74.
Shakespeare makes similar comments about music in The Merchant of Venice; at least according to Lorenzo , appreciating it seems to be a marker of election; Lorenzo will not trust “the man that hath no music in himself” (5.1.83).
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Gleckman, J. (2019). The Shakespearean Conversion Paradigm: Much Ado About Nothing . In: Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9599-5_9
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