Abstract
The satirical poet’s implication that Charles I took erotic pleasure in the favorite he “love[d] too well” has not found much support in the work of early modern literary critics and historians. Instead, the dominant view holds that Charles’s love for Buckingham, while intense and sincere, was “not physically expressed,” as Kevin Sharpe writes in his authoritative The Personal Rule of Charles I.1 According to Sharpe, Buckingham played the role of “charismatic elder sibling” to Charles, who came to “admire and love” him. Charles regarded their bond as a “relationship of equals” and received more emotional fulfillment through Buckingham’s friendship than through his initially strained and distant marital relationship with Henrietta Maria. Whereas Buckingham was the last and greatest in a series of handsome young favorites enjoyed by King James, he was the only man Charles ever loved, for, in Sharpe’s strikingly unqualified assessment, “almost immediately after the death of Buckingham, Charles and his wife genuinely fell in love.”2 In his important biography Buckingham, Roger Lockyer similarly rejects the possibility of an erotic bond between Charles and Buckingham. After James’s death, Charles assured Buckingham that he would “no less cherish” him than his father had.3
stellionatus, a beast so blurred, so spotted, so full of foul lines that they knew not what to make of it.
—Lord Bishop of Norwich to House of Lords, May 15, 1626, reporting John Eliot’s speech against the duke of Buckingham
Of Brittish beasts the Buck is king
His game and fame through Europe ringe
His home exalted, keepes in awe
The lesser flocks; his will’s a lawe.
Our Charlemaine takes much delight
In this great beast so faire in sight
With his whole heart affects the same
And loves too well Buck-King of Game.
—“Upon the Duke of Buckingham” (anonymous seventeenth-cen-tury manuscript poem)
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Notes
Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992 ), 46.
Quoted in Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628 ( London: Longman, 1981 ), 234.
Thomas L. Berger, William C. Bradford, and Sidney L. Sondergard, eds., An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500–1660, rev. ed. ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 ), 45.
Curtis Perry, “ ‘If Proclamations Will Not Serve’: The Late Manuscript Poetry of James I and the Culture of Libel,” in Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002 ), 211.
See also Thomas Cogswell, “The People’s Love: The Duke of Buckingham and Popularity,” in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain, ed. Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 ), 212
Alastair Bellany, “ ‘Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse’: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603–1628,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993 ), 299–310
Alastair Bellany, and Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 ), 254–61.
On Charles and Henrietta Maria, see Sharpe, Personal Rule, 170–72, and Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984 ), 175
see Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002 ), 147
Paul Hammond, and Curtis Perry, “The Politics of Access and Representations of the Sodomite King in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 1078.
Quoted in Michael B. Young, King James and the History of Homosexuality ( New York: New York University Press, 2000 ), 110.
On Davenant’s “searching and incisive” examination of courtly politics through the topics of love and passion, see Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 61–68, 75–82.
William Davenant, The Tragedy of Albovine, King of the Lombards (London, 1629), sig. B2r.
William B. Bidwell and Maija Jansson, eds., Proceedings in Parliament, 1626 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991–1996), 3:288.
Edward Topsell, The Historie of Serpents (London, 1608), 277.
Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 ), 100–133.
Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 ), 90.
Margot Heinemann, “Drama and Opinion in the 1620s: Middleton and Massinger,” in Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: J. R. 1993 ), 239–40, 253–61
Ira Clark, The Moral Art of Philip Massinger ( Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993 ), 87–92
Samuel Harding, Sicily and Naples, or, The Fatall Union: A Tragoedy ed. Joan Warthling Roberts (New York: Garland, 1986), 1.4, p. 67.
James Shirley, The Traitor ed. John Stewart Carter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3.2.78–79.
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© 2006 Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer
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DiGangi, M. (2006). A Beast So Blurred: The Monstrous Favorite in Caroline Drama. In: Zucker, A., Farmer, A.B. (eds) Localizing Caroline Drama. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601611_7
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