Abstract
In an article entitled ‘Normative Heterosexuality in History and Theory: The Case of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount’, R. James Goldstein argues that, while modern scholars have usefully ‘examined Lindsay’s work in the context of the political and theological conflicts of his time, they have paid little attention to the relations among power, gender, and sexuality that pervade his work’. He notes further that, throughout this extraordinary body of work, ‘Lindsay is conspicuously preoccupied by proper defmitions of gender and the regulation of sexual desire’.1 Those preoccupations are rendered especially conspicuous in his sprawling morality play, The Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis: exemplars of proper and improper sexual and gendered behaviour are given names, lines, and costumes, and placed onstage. Women, however, are rendered conspicuously absent in Lindsay’s staging. This is especially notable given that, according to Henry Charteris, in 1554 the play was ‘playit besyde Edinburgh, in presence of the Quene Regent’, Mary of Guise.2 The play presents the female body as abject and grotesque, as Goldstein amply demonstrates (pp. 359–61), while keeping that body resolutely offstage. There are female roles in the play, even very lively and interesting ones, but these roles are played by men, in ways that move beyond a conventionalised theatrical cross-dressing by male actors.
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R. James Goldstein, ‘Normative Heterosexuality in History and Theory: The Case of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount’, in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1997), p. 349.
Cf. Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaitis, ed. by Roderick Lyall (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1989), p. xii. All references in this paper to the play itself are to this edition, and are given parenthetically by line number.
A Satire of the Three Estates, by Sir David Lindsay, ed. by Matthew McDiannid (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1967), p. 9.
The Satire of the Three Estates, by Sir David Lindsay, trans. and ed. by Robert Kemp (London: Heinemann, 1951), p. viii.
Carol Edington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount (Amherst, MA: U Massachusetts P, 1994), p. 72.
McDiarmid, pp. 9–10.
The Works of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, 1490–1555, ed. by Douglas Hamer, 4 vols (Edinburgh & London: Blackwood, 1936), IV, 202, n. I. 1925.
Greg Walker, The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), p. 150.
The English stage directions of the Cornish Creation play (dated 1611 in the manuscript), for instance, refer to ‘Adam and Eva aparlet in whytt lether’ (1. 343); see The Creacion of the World: A Critical Edition and Translation, ed. by Paula Neuss (New York & London: Garland, 1983), p. 28. On stage nakedness in this and other plays, see William Tydeman, ‘Costumes and Actors’, in Medieval English Drama: A Casebook, ed. by Peter Happé (London: MacMillan, 1984), pp. 183–4.
All references to the works of Shakespeare are to The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt, and others (New York & London: Norton, 1997). The reference to Cordelia’s low voice might well be part of an elaborate joke of sorts, playing on the doubling of Cordelia and the Fool by an adult male actor, likely Robert Armin; see John C. Meagher, Shakespeare’s Shakespeare: How the Plays Were Made (New York: Continuum, 1997), pp. 97, 110–11.
See OED effeminate, adj. la, 3. This is the standard sense of the term throughout the early modern period, as exemplified by Romeo’s complaint after Mercutio’s death: ‘O sweet Juliet, /Thy love hath made me effeminate’ (Romeo and Juliet II1.1.108–9). However, like the early modern understanding of sexuality, the term is subject to slippage, and can carry a sodomitical charge; see Garrett P. J. Epp, ‘The Vicious Guise: Effeminacy, Sodomy, and Mankind’ in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1997), pp. 303–20.
‘The Answer quhilk Schir Dauid Lindesay maid to the Kingis Flyting’, I. 49. All references to the works of David Lindsay other than The Thrie Estaitis are to Hamer’s edition, vol. 1 (1931); citations by title and line number are hereafter given parenthetically.
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. by Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: CUP, 1936; rep. 1970), p. 134.
Edington, p.76. Gynecocracy was, of course, a central issue in sixteenth-century England and Scotland alike. John Knox’s infamous First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women was published in 1558, only four years after the Edinburgh performance of The Thrie Estaitis and the publication of Lindsay’s The Monarche. Cf. C. Marie Harker, ‘John Knox and the Monstrous Regiment of Gender’, in Literature, Letters and the Canonical in Early Modern Scotland, ed. by Theo van Heijnsbergen and Nicola Royan (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2002), pp. 35–51.
Carolyn ives and David Parkinson, ‘Scottish Chaucer, Misogynist Chaucer’ in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 14001602, ed. by Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline (Columbus OH: Ohio State UP, 1999), p. 190.
Lyall, p.182n, 1. 540: ‘Batye tout’ has puzzled previous editors: McDiarmid suggests that ‘batty’ means ‘plump’ and ‘towt’ a drink, but these senses are not attested before the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries respectively. Nevertheless, this is a more probable meaning than Hamer’s desperate ‘? a drinking cup’.
Hamer, p. 193n, I. 1376. See Richard Rastall, ‘Female Roles in All-Male Casts’, Medieval English Theatre 7:1 (1985), 25–50. Rastall points out that prepubertal male actors could well have been in their late teens, due to a later onset of puberty, but also notes the likelihood that the roles of older women were most often played by postpubertal actors in medieval theatre. Cf Meagher, Shakespeare’s Shakespeare.
Dunbar, William Dunbar: Poems, ed. by James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), p. 33, 11. 122–3.
Sarah Carpenter, ‘Early Scottish Drama’, in The History of Scottish Literature, Vol. 1: Origins to 1660 (Mediaeval and Renaissance) (Aberdeen: AUP, 1988), p. 206.
Dunbar, Nixt that a turnament wes tryid’, p. 56, 11. 94, 98–9. This particular poem is followed in Kinsley’s edition by ‘[a]n ironical “amendis maid be him to the telyouris and sowtaris”’ (p. 123n, quoting the Bannatyne MS), in which Dunbar praises these craftsmen for their ability to cover up physical deformity, concluding ‘Thocht ye be knavis in this cuntre: /Telyouris and sowtaris, blist be ye’ (Il. 39–40).
Glenn Burger, ‘Kissing the Pardoner’, PMLA, 107 (1992), pp. 1146–7. For Burger, the kiss between Chaucer’s Pardoner and Host ‘aligns the Pardoner and his audience in ways that envelop and fold together the very categories and boundaries with which that audience has been seeking to define and distance him’ (p. 1146), precisely because the just-maligned perversity of the Pardoner is effectively and subversively embraced rather than rejected. Lindsay instead allows his audience to distance themselves not only from the Pardoner but also, more importantly, from the Sowtar and his (former) wife.
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Epp, G.P.J. (2004). Chastity in the Stocks: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis . In: Dunnigan, S.M., Harker, C.M., Newlyn, E.S. (eds) Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502208_5
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