SEX EXPRESSION

IN LITERATURE

CHAPTER I

ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND

OMANCE and the Elizabethans, with the rapid dance of years, have become subtly synonymous. The magic of exploration and discovery, the thrill of unknown seas and the breath of strange and distant lands, have encircled the age with a beauty almost blinding in its brilliance. It was a merry, golden England, we are told, in the days of good Queen Bess. An age of poetry and passion, dream and song. The great, immortal Shakespeare has become its symbol. Splendor has become its crown.

As we leave the picture, however, and approach its source, the lines begin to fade into fancy and the substance into myth. The glow is seen to cool and the poem to scatter into pasty fragments. The gold becomes tinsel, and the fancied wings become wooden appendages.

The age of poets and dramatists becomes an age

of buccaneers and feudal robbers. Poets instead of heroes, we find, were but the trifling expression of "the most unprofitable of His Majesty's servants.” 1 Treated as cooks, manufacturers of ephemeral confections to please the palates of their superiors, these men of spirit and song were regarded as "drunken parasites" and "beggarly wretches." 2 "Thou callest me Poet, as a term of shame," exclaimed Jonson. And the actors and dramatists who gave life to a literature whose dithyrambic beauty has never been surpassed were classified as rogues and vagabonds. The literary artist, in fact, scarcely ranked as high as an ordinary wage-earner in financial status, except that he could solicit the favors of the aristocracy and attain a security dependent upon the magnanimity of his patron. He had to pander if not beg to live. His economic status forced him to express the esthetic taste of the aristocracy. The earnings that a writer might derive from his work were comparatively infinitesimal. Without other aid, their brevity was sufficient to eclipse his inspiration. Jonson, the most famous and successful dramatist of the day, the cynosure of Elizabethan Thespians, earned about £44 (in modern money) a year, and, in truth, as he stated to Drum

1 Jonson-Neptune's Triumph.

2 The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age-Ph. Sheavyn. 8 Epigrams to My Lord Ignorant.

4 The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age. Ph. Sheavyn.

mond, he "never gained £200 for all the plays he had ever produced." The only branch of writing in which Jonson was engaged that gave him a remuneration beyond the merest pittance was that of masque-writing, and even from this sport of the pen he derived, in a whole career of forty years, not more than £720. In contrast the expenditures of the aristocracy in staging these masques should be noted. One of Jonson's efforts, The Masque of Queens, written in 1610, was staged so stunningly that its final cost was over £719. This was mild expense, however. A sum of £3600, for instance, was spent in staging The Hue and Cry after Cupid, one of Jonson's best masques, which was presented "at Court on the Shrove Tuesday at night 1608," to celebrate Lord Viscount Haddington's marriage.

The Elizabethan artist, like all of the artists of feudalism, found the device of patronage his only escape from starvation. A few writers turned to acting, "the basest trade" as it was proverbially known, but the reward was so discouragingly small that patronage became the next resort. There were few other means left to the author whereby he could earn a living. John Wolfe offered the opportunity of translation, an experience in hack-work, to a limited number of the craft. Ballad-scribbling presented a simple medium for literary prostitution. University fellowships de

manded too many qualifications and were encumbered with too many entailments to be an important source of assistance to any but the desiccated scholar. Samuel Daniel and William Browne supported themselves by private tutoring; Cadmen, Ocland and Shirley were regular teachers. The life of the author in general, however, was dismal, insufferable, hopeless without the aid of a patron.

This practice of patronage, deeply rooted in the economic basis of feudal society, injured poet and dramatist. Monastic patronage had disappeared with the predatory English Reformation, and it was to the feudal lord that the artist had to appeal. The Earl of Southampton, for instance, was Shakespeare's patron; Leicester, not with untainted purity, was Spenser's; Herbert (the possible W. H. of the sonnets) was Daniel's. It was the economic element involved in the relationship of the author to his patron that bred danger. Spontaneity was often transformed into sycophancy, and servility became a literary virtue. The author too often looked to his superiors for favor and commendation. This tendency speedily became a habit. Even so acute a mind as that of Francis Bacon solicited the King for "a theme for treatment" in this fashion:

"I should with more alacrity embrace your Majesty's direction than my own choice."

Churchyard, in justification of his earlier obsequiousness in his dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh, declared that he showed "a kind of adulation, to fawn for favor on those that are happy," because "it is a point of wisdom which my betters have taught me. ... I take an example from the fish that follows the stream." Even Massinger in the Prologue to A Very Woman apologized for his subject by claiming that his financial needs kept him from refusing "what by his patron he was called unto." In this sordid rivalry between authors for the favor of the patron almost all Elizabethan writers, including Shakespeare, were involved. And the jealousies of authors, it should be observed, were fostered much more by economic motives than by egotistical.

Only a change in social evolution was to alter and shift the situation of the author. Without this change Jonson could never have rebuked Chesterfield or Swift satirized the dedicatory insincerities of his predecessors. It was, in short, a change of social system, the decay of feudalism and the rise of commercialism, the decline of the aristocracy and the advance of the bourgeoisie, that brought about a cessation of the practice of patronage and the introduction of a partial though often precarious independence of the author.

Elizabethan literature is but a reflection of the psychology of the feudal nobility. The aristocratic con