Ari Friedlander

198 Pages·2011·1.56 MB·English

by  Robert Friedlander

Promiscuous Generation:
Rogue Sexuality and Social Reproduction in Early Modern England
by
Robert A. Friedlander

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(English Language and Literature)
in The University of Michigan
2011

Doctoral Committee:
Professor Valerie J. Traub, Chair
Professor Michael C. Schoenfeldt
Associate Professor Helmut Puff
Associate Professor Douglas Trevor
To Stephanie

ii
Acknowledgements

It is a great pleasure to acknowledge my debt to Valerie Traub, whose confidence
in myself and my work sustained me at those moments when the dissertation seemed both
too much and not enough. I will be forever grateful for all that she has taught me about
being a scholar, a mentor, a colleague, and a friend.
My dissertation committee deserves thanks for their gracious generosity and
incisive engagement with my work. In the forest of the dissertation, an enthusiastic and
exacting Michael Schoenfeldt always reminded me to keep looking for the trees. Doug
Trevor offered both precise criticism and profoundly nourishing optimism. Helmut Puff
brought twin advantages to this project: a historian’s sensitivity to social conditions and a
critic’s appreciation of language.
In various classrooms, offices, hallways, and homes, I have been inspired by
conversations with my professors at Michigan, especially Linda Gregerson, David
Halperin, Barbara Hodgdon, Scotti Parrish, Bill Ingram, Jeffrey Knight, John Kucich,
Arthur Marroti, Jeffery Masten, Steven Mullaney, Cathy Sanok, and Ralph Williams.
From the first week of graduate school, Marjorie Levinson made me feel like I was in the
right place by balancing her fearless intellect with sparkling bonhomie.
I would like to thank Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities for funding a
wonderful year of intellectual exchange and espresso consumption. I am grateful to all
the participants in our weekly seminars, but owe a special debt to Danny Herwitz, Valerie
Kivelson, Keith Mitnick, and Claire Zimmerman for their friendship and support.
For intellectual and emotional support, I have to thank my friends and fellow
students at Michigan: Yanina Arnold, Stephanie Batkie, Kenston Bauman, Andrew
Bozio, Katie Brokaw, Christina Chang, John Cords, Topher Davis, Heidi Gearhart,
Daniel Hershenzon, Gavin Hollis, Monica Huerta, Alan Itkin, David Lavinsky, Joanna
Patterson, Bob Rich, Amy Rodgers, Marjorie Rubright, Guillermo Salas, Jonathan Smith,
Stephen Spiess, Chad Thomas, Mike Tondre, Katie Will, and Rebecca Wiseman. Ori
Weisberg and Ilana Blumberg kindly welcomed me into their wonderful family, and their
house became my home away from home.
During two years spent in Philadelphia, the English department at the University
of Pennsylvania offered an extraordinary level of hospitality and camaraderie. For
warmly welcoming me into their intellectual community, I would like to thank Urvashi
Chakravarty, Scott Enderle, Rachael Nichols, Rosemary O’Neill, Mearah Quinn-Brauner,
and Thomas Ward. The early modern faculty at Penn – Margreta de Grazia, Zachary
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Lesser, Ania Loomba, Melissa Sanchez, Peter Stallybrass, and David Wallace – were also
extremely gracious in listening to questions and offering advice.
I had the outrageous good fortune to begin my studies in the Renaissance under
the tutelage of three marvelous teachers: Julie Crawford, Frances Dolan, and Jean
Howard. Their continued friendship and guidance has meant the world to me.
My immediate family – Dad, Mindy, Eric and Sima – deserve special thanks for
accepting my at times single-minded devotion to the Renaissance with more good cheer
than puzzlement, and for continuing to love and support me during my scholarly
peregrinations. I am grateful to the Elsky clan for incorporating me into their family and
enriching my understanding of friendship, family, and feasting. This dissertation is
dedicated to Stephanie Elsky, my autem mort, who has the miraculous ability to give my
life and my work both shape and meaning.
Finally, I would like to remember my mother, Frances Friedlander. Her vivid
tales of work at the criminal division of the Bronx County Supreme Court prepared me
for this dissertation, and this life, better than she knew.

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Table of Contents

Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Figures vi
Abstract vii
Chapter
1. Introduction: Desire and Increase 1
2. “This Untoward Generation of Loose Libertines”: Sexual Crime and Criminal
Sexuality in Early Modern English Rogue Literature 29

3. Pressed Men: Biopolitics and Sodomy in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV 77

4. Mastery, Masculinity, and Sexual Cozening in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene
105
5. Barricadoes for Bellies: Sexual Regulation and Communal Reproduction in
The Winter’s Tale 134

6. Coda: The Vice is of a Great Kindred 164

Bibliography 169

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List of Figures

Figure
1. Title Page of Robert Greene’s A Notable Discovery of Coosenage (London, 1592) 9
2. Frontispiece to Robert Greene’s The Second Part of Connie-catching (London, 1592)
11
3. Title Page of Robert Greene’s A Disputation Betweene a Hee Conny-Catcher, and a
Shee Conny-catcher (London, 1592) 12

4. Title Page of The Defence of Conny Catching (London, 1592) 13
5. “A readie forme for a speedie inspection of the poore,” from An Ease for Overseers of
the Poore (London, 1601) 86

6. Woodcut of Cross-biting, here called Fool-taking, title page to Robert Greene’s The
Thirde and Last Part of Conny-Catching (London, 1592) 112

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Abstract

This dissertation argues that early modern popular pamphlets, moralist literature,
legal statutes, and stage drama consistently represent the criminal underclass – or
“rogues,” as they were called – in sexualized terms, as a “promiscuous generation”
consumed by “sensuall lust.” These texts construct a causal connection between the
supposed immoderate sexuality of the vagrant poor, the deceitful conman, and the wily
prostitute and their alleged prodigious fertility, forging tight links between sexual
activity, biological reproduction, and the increase of the criminal poor. While literary
and cultural critics have commonly consigned rogues to the margins of early modern
culture, where they are thought to mark the boundaries of their society, my dissertation
demonstrates that rogue sexuality can be found at the center of stage depictions of the
English court, capital, and nation. The first half of my dissertation focuses on the
biological threat posed by rogues in a range of popular literatures and in Shakespeare’s 1
Henry IV. The second half examines the role of rogue sexuality in the performance of
masculinity and femininity in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s
Tale. By tracing the movement of rogue sexuality from a criminal to a more normative
register, my project challenges the sharp distinctions that literary critics and historians of
sexuality tend to draw between early modern discourses of orderly and disorderly
sexuality; instead, it illuminates the often-unstable interplay between licit and illicit
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sexuality, thereby redefining the relationship between the normative and the criminal in
early modern England. The analytical category of rogue sexuality also provides a new
framework for interpreting the cultural logic of sexual reproduction in early modern
England. That is, the early modern panic over the reproductive consequences of
promiscuous rogue sexuality charts a movement from thinking about individual sexual
sin to the social ramifications of reproductive behavior writ large, comprising part of the
pre-history of the modern state’s interest in human reproductive life that Michel Foucault
calls “biopower.”

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Desire and Increase

Shakespeare’s sonnets, published in 1609, open with seventeen poems exhorting a
young gentleman to marry and reproduce. This theme is established immediately, as the
first line of the first poem reads “From fairest creatures we desire increase.”1 “Fair”
appears to mean “beautiful” here, since the next line explains that we desire the
reproduction of fair creatures “that thereby beauty’s Rose might never die” (1.2). “Fair”
also means “gentle,” however, and like that word, it carries similar connotations of social
difference – fair as opposed to coarse or vulgar.2 This line thus signals not only a
conservationist approach to beauty, but also a propagandistic promotion of elite
reproduction.3 Later in the sequence, this position is reinforced with a critique of lower
class reproduction, advising “Let those whom nature hath not made for store,/ Harsh,
featureless, and rude, barrenly perish” (11.9-10). The “ideological force of the imperious
first line,” as Margreta de Grazia has described it, thus not only endorses rising elite
reproduction, but as the lines from Sonnet 11 make clear, advocates a reduction in the

1 William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1977), 1.1. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically.
2 Margreta de Grazia writes “Fair is the distinguishing attribute of the dominant class” (emphasis in the
original). See de Grazia, “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets” Shakespeare Survey 46 (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1993), 35-49, esp 45.
3 Lars Engle stresses the conservational aspect of the sonnets in Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of his
Time (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993), 27-53.
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numbers of the unfair, as well.4 This contrast also implies an inverse relationship
between the two populations: the increase of the fair is as good as the decrease of the
rude. That there are some people from whom we desire decrease is also articulated in the
procreation sonnets’ antecedent, Thomas Wilson’s translation of Erasmus’s “Epistle to
Persuade a Young Gentleman to Marriage” (1553), which advises that those “whose
kyndred is suche that it were better for the commune weale, they were all deade, than that
any of that name shoulde be a lyve” should not marry.5 Erasmus expresses this
reproductive calculus in ethical terms – the good of the commonwealth is hindered when
evil men reproduce. Shakespeare’s “procreation” sonnets, however, reduce the ethics of
reproductive fitness to a question of social status. To be fair is to be reproductively
justified; to be otherwise is not. Moreover, there is a kind of pitilessness in
Shakespeare’s description of the “featureless,” ideally sterile lower classes. They are to
die as they’ve lived: barrenly – that is, without prosperity and without issue.
Why do Shakespeare’s sonnets equate social status with reproductive fitness,
whereas Erasmus’s letter does not? What does such an equation say about the
relationship between early modern English social and sexual identities? In 1552, one
year before Thomas Wilson published his translation of Erasmus’s epistle, Gilbert
Walker published his own advice to a young gentleman, a short dialogue entitled A
Manifest Detection of the Most Vyle and Detestable Use of Diceplay, in which an
experienced courtier describes Tudor London’s supposed criminal underworld to a gentle

4 de Grazia, 44.
5 See Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553), F2r. Erasmus’s “Epistle” was included in
Wilson’s Arte, an educational text used in early modern English schools. For more on the relationship
between this text and the sonnets, see T.W. Baldwin, The Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and
Sonnets (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1950), 183-5; and Katharine M. Wilson, Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), 146-67; and John McKernan, “The Influence of Erasmus on
Shakespeare’s Marriage Sonnets,” in The Portrayal of Life Stages in English Literature, 1500-1800, eds.
Jeanie Watson & Philip McM. Pittman (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989).
2