Sex in Elizabethan England

by Alan Haynes

Overview

Approached through the literature and literary personalities of the period, this fascinating study examines sexual behaviour in the Elizabethan age. Although there is much we will never know, poets and playwrights can provide valuable insights into our ancestors' sexual lives. Here, with help from the work of figures such as Shakespeare, Marlowe and Donne, Alan Haynes builds up a vivid picture of of the sexual experiences of Elizabethans at all levels of society. We peep behind the bed curtains at the 'Virgin Queen' herself, who slept alone despite rumours that she was as sexually promiscuous as her mother, Anne Boleyn, and at characters such as Moll Cutpurse, a gutsy female transvestite who shocked and amused generations of Londoners in almost equal measure. The pressure of desire was profound and the author explores this to find compelling details. A unique behind the scenes study of the sex life of the Elizabethans, from courtiers to maids of honour and from citizens and their wives to drabs and pimps, this book will intrigue and fascinate anyone with an interest in the private lives of our forbears.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780752476407
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	11/08/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	252
File size:	339 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

Read an Excerpt

Sex in Elizabethan England

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By Alan Haynes

The History Press

Copyright © 2011 Alan Haynes
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-7640-7

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CHAPTER 1

Vestigial Virtue

Before the Church Council of Florence held over fifteen years (1431–46), the outsize blemish on marriage had been its correlation with sexual activity. The late medieval idealization of celibacy took a knock when marriage was officially recognized as a sacrament. Until then celibacy had been appropriate for nuns and priests, with the hope that the whole community would regard this as ideal behaviour. After the Reformation this ideal, with its profound distrust of sexual desire, 'continued to haunt the Renaissance imagination of the moral and spiritual life well into the seventeenth century'. An attitude of mild unease with the only available option then for humans was recorded by the Norwich doctor, Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82): 'I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction ...' Many edgy churchmen would have agreed that sex was 'an odd and unworthy piece of folly': John Donne's late advancement in the church gave him time to form a different view, and to write erotic poetry.

Trees had no governable inheritance and could do without 'this trivial and worldly way of union'. For the upper classes with blood lines to transmit as securely as possible, and for the enhancement of family property, marriage was of critical importance. Moreover, it was a mode of controlling fornication, an otherwise unruly and irregular form of sexuality. For those with such concerns the greatest life disappointment was infertility after procreation. Sexuality can be free and radical; opinions, attitudes and behaviour would collide and overlap. Out of the disturbances and changing sensibilities emerged slowly the view of affectionate marriage as the foundation of an ordered society, and also a willingness to view sex as a game or sport expressing conviviality and harmless pleasure. 'Those who clung too firmly to the image of sermons, household manuals and social theory had nothing but disappointment awaiting them.' Aristocratic marriages by the end of the sixteenth century were in great number afflicted by failure, with a third of older peers estranged or separated. If nothing else this wrecked the possibility of any marital sex and it hints at a dwindling of marriage as morally neutral for the participants. Marriage had been politicized, and politics is contestatory. Also the law made marriage an assortment of tribulations for the unwary. Matrimonial suits came into the courts because of 'confusion, conditions by one party or parental pressure.' Even a civil lawyer could be blithely ignorant of ecclesiastical law, and the matter of the secret marriage of the Attorney-General Edward Coke to Lady Elizabeth Hatton, led to his appearance before a church court to refute the charge of irregular marriage. To obtain a dispensation even he had to plead ignorance. Had he known that his wife would prove impossible to control he might have stepped back. She lived in great state at Ely House, Holborn, and entertained lavishly, but excluded her husband, whom she provoked, teased and libelled.

The propositions of 'household order' defined by men might hold for some, but for many quotidian behaviour caused a slide of such things into desuetude. To illustrate this a specimen from 1624, when eighteen-year-old Henry Scrope entered the household of Sir Edward Plumpton for service, and within days had clandestinely married Anne Plumpton. Neither her father nor her mother were present at the night nuptial, and there was no certainty that the man who had taken the ceremony was a priest of any sort. Moreover, Henry had an impediment to his desire – he was already married – but living with his new bride he fathered several children before his past caught up with him. The case came before the Star Chamber in 1631 when he was charged with bigamy. Court cases, and sometimes thereafter plays and pamphlets projected into the public domain the collisions between competing public and private notions of what was appropriate and permissible. So in a play like John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, the focus is on the 'domestication of sexual energies', and by giving voice through his characters to various opinions of marriage he wrote a morality play about a vexed institution still central to a unstable society. Re-evaluation could also be made in poetry and reflecting a different state of mind. In John Donne's poetry there is the junking of idealized love for an explicit collision of bodies – bodies are sex, that is the truth of experience – as he reminds his coterie readers in The Extasie. Prior to this love had been a single-minded ardour, 'idealized in solitary suffering'. In the English Renaissance, along with language which echoed the medieval, Petrarchan and neo-Platonic traditions of love discourse, the object of desire was frequently immobilized. 'Women's honesty was determined and judged by their sexual behaviour', so that of Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots, seemed a challenge not only to her cousin Elizabeth, but also to the men of England. For many Protestants she was both enchantress and whore; in the 1590 Faerie Queene Spenser was quite explicit: Duessa stands for deceit, the exiled queen and Catholicism. For a Puritan-inclined statesman like Sir Francis Walsingham, locking away Queen Mary in a remote castle or country house was a preliminary to permanently immobilizing her in death.

For Catholic gentlemen like Anthony Babington who sought freedom for the Queen of Scots, substituting treason for quiet fidelity to his wife and child did not seem hideously improbable. If Babington had read all the earlier literary defences of Mary's harmless virtue and purity, no doubt he was scandalized by the vituperation in Parliament of men like Peter Wentworth who called Mary 'the most notorious whore in all the world'. Babington's associates were other like-minded men and no case of treason in Elizabethan and Jacobean England ever involved a husband and wife in the way that Macbeth (c. 1606) does. The play was written in the gloomy aftermath of the greatest act of treason ever broached by an Englishman against the royal family and the great men of the government, aristocracy and Church. To advance himself and his progeny Macbeth fashions himself into a tyrannical mass-murderer in a play that trawls through many aspects of Robert Catesby's Gunpowder Plot. At the same time in the play a marriage is held up for critical inspection, with the thane of Glamis and his wife strikingly united in anxieties about gender and procreation. Moreover they are correct, as it turns out, to fear the worst: insanity and destruction. The play famously begins with bearded women, manlike images of feminine power whom the lady of Glamis would ape. She redefines her gender and purpose in life and by persuading her husband to undertake evil she swamps his promptings of pity. For the rest of the play the sterility of violence becomes achingly clear to the audience.

The instructors and pundits took the view that the principal duty of a wife as loyal subject was to obey her domestic monarch, and when this did not happen, so the aggrieved declared, the household fell into disarray and dispute. The husband's duty was to shape his wife's personality in such a way as to bring out the good in her, but he must also befriend her 'that she might walk jointly with him, under the conduct and government of her head.' This has been sardonically subverted by the end of Macbeth. The queen has gone off her head forcing her withdrawal from the action, and Macbeth has had his head hacked off by Macduff in symbolic retribution. Now it is Macbeth's blood that flows post-mortem rather than that of his wife who earlier had raged against her menstrual cycle. It was witches, held the view of the time, who could turn a woman into a man. In the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, a Renaissance study of witches, it is noted that 'witchcraft comes from carnal lust', and in respect of the latter women are insatiable, capable of endless coupling with sexual partners. In many of the tragedies of the period sexual obsession vents itself in savage declamations against incest, adultery, promiscuity, fornication, prostitution and perversities, as well as against love and marriage, against men and women, most often against women as such and in the mass.

Until Macbeth begins with the unspecific sexuality of the witches, it seems that the thane of Glamis and his lady have lived the companionate marriage. The speed with which this disintegrates may be satirically inflected. Having annexed marriage for intense scrutiny, and then broadened the matter to gender relations, Protestant reformers looked again at sexual relations and at least two attitudes emerged towards sex in marriage. In one the ethical idea of moderation holds sway; in the other there is the dominating attitude that the body rules, not out of elementary lust but a more meaningful conjunction of mind and body. According to William Whately the two strands can be harmoniously united: 'To sanctify the marriage bed, and use it reverently, with prayer and thanksgiving, will make it moderate.' This is the so-called canonization of heterosexuality; the Catholic ideal of celibacy derived from the saints was in full retreat. 'Poor greenheads' was the Puritan phrase for those who having married purely for 'love' forfeited society's strained goodwill when the first fissures appeared. When young aristocrats, like Lucius Cary, made a marriage entirely based on his feelings for his impoverished bride, it could lead to acute family disharmony and a flow of angry retorts from father to son Yet this was at least a quarter of a century after the beginning of the liberation of affectional feeling among the young in the 1590s. In the early comedies of Shakespeare there is a triumphant surge towards marriage as the ultimate good, but as has been recently noted it is also a dangerous option when the older generation are finessed by the young with blood pounding in their veins. Indeed, when Romeo and Juliet 'chill out' they do so permanently which may not be the best option for young lovers, but they do achieve a fine gender equality in death.

'All the fun is in the wooing.' The froth on the milk quickly curdles after marriage, and as Stephen Orgel has noted most families in Shakespeare have only one parent; where there are rarely two there is usually only one child, a situation exceedingly dangerous to the child. It is noticeable that for the playwright's own wife and family he was an often absent husband and father; were they totally persuaded that he needed to be in London so frequently and for so long? Did Anne Shakespeare resist moving south in order to limit her pregnancies, or was the question never asked? There is an open and trusting marriage in that of Brutus and Portia, but it is strikingly rare as are the sexually compatible husband and wife, Claudius and Gertrude. In a clutch of his early comedies Shakespeare tricks out the commonplace notion that the course of true love never did run true with festive larks. In Hamlet we have the most sinister reflection that true love is the province of a murderer and an adulteress; the court conspires to revel in this union, only Hamlet resists it on the promptings of a ghost claiming to be his late lamented father. By the end of Elizabeth's reign the fun has gone out of the wooing to be replaced by a singular harshness in expressing disgust with sex. The bitterness against women does not occur in Elizabethan tragedy until about 1600, by which time the country was awaiting her death while imbibing a morale-sapping cocktail of anxiety, irritation and even a guilty boredom. Satire on women and cynical utterances on love are, of course, not unfamiliar to Elizabethans who had seen John Lyly's comedies. In Campaspe (1584) what Diogenes most dislikes about women is their gender; some may even now regard this as a laudable frankness, but it does not come near in acrid expostulation the hard-bitten fury that Hamlet directs against his mother and Ophelia.

Is it possible to identify a particular event in the 1590s that resonates as the possible direct cause of this literary revolution in the treatment of sex? It seems unlikely that the shift from a comparatively carefree view of sex to one of ill-tempered revulsion should have happened to most Elizabethan poets simultaneously around 1595. Nor does it seem even remotely likely that prostitution, venereal disease, promiscuity, sodomy, perverse jealousy and adultery were conditions suddenly more rife after that date. Then the growing predisposition of writers, especially dramatists, to incorporate such things into their texts must be a collective whim. The unsavoury and the more acceptable exposures of sex were present simultaneously in late Elizabethan England, some glaringly, some sombrely. If we expose male anxiety of the period to more scrutiny then we may be approaching the subjective core of the matter. The mechanism for the action of the stage is often concerned with individual efforts by those who profess love for another to overcome all obstacles to union. As in life the lovers are young, passing ignorant of the world (and themselves), and the young men are especially excitable and callow. The girls often fare better from an indulgent author. This is certainly true of the main female character Margaret in Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; she is vital, gracious, witty and chaste in a play written for the popular theatre in 1589–90. The dominant love story gives a controlling shape to the play, and the struggle that goes on within it arises from the conflicting social, sexual and emotional needs of the three main characters. This collision provides the suspense that engaged the audience, with a resolution to suit them and the characters – all are married and happy. The hugely expectant and positive attitude to marriage for life, whatever the bumps and stumbles that might happen, chimed with this constant theme of Protestant (mainly Puritan) theologians of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In many thousands of sermons over decades nuptial propaganda was included, and in some cases these sermons became a form of theatre – a dramatic monologue delivered from the pulpit. Preaching undoubtedly influenced dramatists, just as Renaissance dramatists influenced preachers. Moreover, being a Puritan-minded person did not preclude a love of theatre.

Marriage in the deliberations of one writer was viewed as 'an high and blessed order ordained of God in Paradise' – which has a sublimely affirmative ring to it. As the old English proverb noted more earthily, 'there belongeth more to marriage than two pair of bare legs'. It must be a union of minds rather than just procreative bodies, since that is the only way to 'increase unto Christ'. Anthony Nixon found four reasons for marriage: first, that God instituted it; that it is a kind of ingratitude to deny to our posterity the life which has been granted us; we achieve immortality by means of our offspring and that by this institution comes a welcome increase in kinsfolk, friends and allies. Not only has God ordained matrimony but history bears witness that mankind has long favoured it. According to Robert Cleaver and John Dod in their widely read courtesy book A Godlie forme of householde Government (1598), those who are most vociferous against marriage are the ones who offend most against it because of the unchaste lives they lead.

The bigamist in Renaissance England was nearly always a man. Adultery was far less gender specific, yet the law took little notice of it. Under the common law it could not be prosecuted because it was a spiritual matter governed by ecclesiastical courts and canon law. Adultery seized the public imagination (and hence that of playwrights) after 1595 or so because of the unshackled behaviour of one woman, an inspirational beauty of huge vitality and sexual allure, whose adultery became notorious. Whether there was ever any attempt to disguise it is difficult to say, but the poets who acclaimed Penelope Rich could not avoid knowing of her adultery with Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, and when they punned in open text on her married name, how could they avoid punning on his in secret. Indeed, new evidence is now emerging that Mountjoy, one of the best friends of the Earl of Southampton, was also an important connection of Shakespeare's at the court. Is this perhaps the reason that Shakespeare never treated the question whether an adulterous wife might be forgiven? It was a topic to be taken up and debated by others; for example, Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois; Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy and later Philip Massinger's Fatal Dowry. The law did not favour a husband whose wife had taken up with another man, and no dramatist found it compatible with 'honour' for a husband like Lord Rich to live with a wife guilty of adultery as Lady Penelope straightforwardly was. Some playwrights took the view that a husband could at least forgive, and some Puritan moralists seem in addition to have thought a husband could continue to live with a penitent adulterous wife. But not even Thomas Heywood chanced this view on stage, and although he allows for the rehabilitation of a fallen women, and the pardoning of an adulterous wife by her husband, the forgiven adulteresses all die. One particular irritant, a point of conflict between Catholics and Protestants, was the question as to whether marriage was really a contract or truly a sacrament. The latter, said Catholics, so all questions pertaining to it must be determined by ecclesiastical judges only. The Protestants argued for the contract – the marriage of Olivia and Sebastian in Twelfth Night is described as 'A contract of eternal bond of love' – so all matters germane, such as impediments and degrees of kindred, are social not sacral matters. As such they are the exclusive prerogative of the civil magistrates. There were two definite parts to marriage: the contract (or spousals/espousals), and the marriage itself which gives form to the contract. Enough time should elapse between the two for the minister to proclaim or publish the banns (announcements), by which time if the bride lived in rural Devon there was over a 30 per cent chance that she would be pregnant, whereas if she lived in Yorkshire this figure plunged to 13 per cent. There were two types of espousal: in verbis de futuro and in verbis de praesenti. If the ceremony includes the expression 'I shall take thee to my wife' or 'I will take thee' then this espousal expresses future intention (de futuro) and even in the presence of a priest it was not binding upon either party. Two young people, or parents acting for them, could make such a contract, but if the intention decayed and just cause for it shown then an unwilling party to the contract could withdraw. The exception to this was when the couple had slept together: 'where there hath been a carnal use of each others bodies, it is always presupposed, that a mutual consent, as touching marriage, hath gone before.' This was the view of William Perkins in his Christian Oeconomie (1609).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Sex in Elizabethan England by Alan Haynes. Copyright © 2011 Alan Haynes. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements,
A Note on the Text,
Preface,
1 Vestigial Virtue,
2 The Unholy Royal Family,
3 Love Bites,
4 The Honour of the Maids,
5 'A Proud Spirit',
6 'Love's no Love',
7 The Casual Corinthians,
8 'Untam'd Desire',
9 'Unstaid Desire',
10 The Pursuit of Ganymede,
11 Their Every Move,
12 The Marred Male,
13 Trouble in Mind,
14 The Fires of Venus,
Epilogue,
Appendices,
Abbreviations,
Select Bibliography,
Notes,