Abstract
Female homoerotic desire and same-sex sexual activity may have existed on the margins of the dominant culture, but they were recognizable in late-sixteenth-century England. The woman-loving woman was an eidolon, a phantom, and an ideal with an imaginary, illusory presence. She was a figure rarely defined but many writers described her desire and behaviors or used those desires and behaviors to complicate their plots. Various types of documents—literary, religious, and legal—provided both subtle and explicit references to women who actively engaged in erotic and sexual encounters with other women. These documents, which support a cognizance of female homoeroticism in early modern England, carry various responses to the desire between and within each account of erotic activity. Bruce Smith, in Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England, distinguishes male homoerotic desire readily represented in poetic discourse from male homosexual acts legislated against by moral, medical, and legal discourse. A similar distinction can be detected in portrayals of female homoerotic desire and sexual acts.1 This chapter explores nondramatic textual evidence of female homoeroticism in circulation during the sixteenth century and available to both English playwrights and spectators. The chapter also investigates representations of female cross-dressing and argues that scenarios of homoeroticism were not an inherent outcome of female-to-male disguise narratives. Rather, chapter 2 argues, playwrights consciously constructed homoerotic scenarios using the convention of the disguised heroine.
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Notes
Judith Brown, “Lesbian Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1989), 67–75
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Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code, 550–1150 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 138.
John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A translation of the principal libri poenitentiales and selections from related documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 185.
Payer, Sex and the Penitentials, 92, 93, 95, 99, 108, 112; see also Pierre J. Payer, “The Humanism of the Penitentials and the Continuity of the Penitential Tradition,” Mediaeval Studies 46 (1984): 341–42.
St. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas, 2.2. QQ. CXLI—CLXX, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1921), 158. Aquinas goes on to debate the gravity of same-sex sexual activity and dismisses the argument that adultery, seduction, and rape are worse offenses since they injure another party, but “unnatural vice” concerns only love between individuals.
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400—c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 4.
Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: the Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 6.
Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 189–358 whose extensive study details the early theological reaction to female homoeroticism.
Brown, Immodest Acts, 9–13. Leslie J. Moran sees the relative legal silence surrounding female—female sexual activity as a symptom of gender. She identifies homosexuality as a male identity primarily because early modern culture supposedly rendered relations between females insignificant, while those of males demanded attention. Leslie J. Moran, The Homosexual(ity) of Law (London: Routledge, 1996), 13.
See also Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men (New York: Morrow, 1981), 1–74
Jeannette H. Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature (Florida: Naiad, 1985), 30–50.
Crompton, “The Myth of Lesbian Impunity,” 17–19; Brown, Immodest Acts, 3–20. See also Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1955), 142
Ruthann Robson, Lesbian (Outlaw): Survival Under the Rule of Law (Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books, 1992), 36–38
E. William Monter, “Sodomy and Heresy in Early Modern Switzerland,” Journal of Homosexuality 6.1/2 (1980/81): 46–47.
Henri Estienne, Apologie pour Hérodote, ed. Isidore Liseux. vol. 1 (1566; Paris, 1879), 178.
Michel de Montaigne, The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels in Italy by Way of Switzerland and Germany in 1580 and 1581, ed. and trans. W. G. Waters, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1903), 36–38.
For other early modern cases involving transvestite women in erotic or sexual relationships with other women, see also Catalina de Erauso, Michele Stepto, and Gabriel Stepto, Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996)
Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol, Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (London: Macmillan Press, 1989), 55–63
Helmut Puff, “Female Sodomy: The Trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.1 (2000): 41–61
Jacqueline Murray, “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages,” Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern Bullough and James Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), 191–222, especially 202–03
Patricia Crawford and Sara Mendelson, “Sexual Identities in Early Modern England: The Marriage of Two Women in 1680,” Gender and History 7.3 (1995): 362–77.
Nicolas de Nicolay, Navigations into Turkie (1585; New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), sig. H8. See also Bruster, “Female—Female Eroticism,” 8 and DiGangi, Homoerotics, 95–96. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Flemish Ambassador to Turkey, provides corroboration for Nicolay’s account in the published version of his ambassadorial letters: “so cases occur of women falling in love with one another at these baths, in much the same fashion as young men fall in love with maidens in our country.” Quoted in Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 200.
Crompton, “The Myth of Lesbian Impunity,” 11 and Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), 17.
John Bridges, A Defence of the Government Established in the Church of Englande for Ecclesiasticall Matters (London, 1587), 757.
John Bale, The first two partes of the Actes of a chast example of the Englysh votaryes, gathered out of their owne legenades and chronycles by Johan Bale, and dedycated to our most educated soveraigne kynge Edward the fyrste (London, 1548).
Ben Jonson, The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson, ed. William B. Hunter (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 97 (1. 17). Jonson depicts the Graces as three embracing naked women, hence their tribadic potential.
Ben Jonson, Volpone, or the Fox, rev. ed. Brian Parker, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 224.
Ovid, The Heroycall Epistles of the Learned Poet Publius Ovidius Naso, In Englishe Verse, trans. George Turbervile (London: Henry Denham, 1567), 109v.
John Donne, The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, vol. 2 (London, 1873), 103–05. Subsequent quotations are from this edition.
Janel Mueller, “Troping Utopia: Donne’s Brief for Lesbianism,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 192.
Stella P. Revard, “The Sapphic Voice in Donne’s ‘Sappho to Philaenis,” in Renaissance Discourses of Desire, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 63–76.
Elizabeth D. Harvey, “Ventriloquizing Sappho, or the Lesbian Muse,” in Re-reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, ed. Ellen Greene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 100.
C. Annette Grise, “Depicting Lesbian Desire: Contexts for John Donne’s ‘Sapho to Philaenis,’ ” Mosaic (Winnipeg) 29. 4 (1996): 41–58.
George Klawitter, The Enigmatic Narrator: The Voicing of Same-Sex Love in the Poetry ofJohn Donne (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 51–61.
William Warner, Albions England: A Continued Historie of the Same Kingdome, From the Originals of the First Inhabitants thereof And most the chiefe Alterations and Accidents there hapning: unto, and in, the happie Raigne of our now most gracious Soveraigne Queene Elizabeth (London: Widow Orwin, 1597), 51. I am grateful to Robert Maslen for this reference.
Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (1590; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 148–49.
A dramatic version of the story also appears under the title Miracle de la fille d’un royin the French medieval collection of confraternity plays labeled Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages. See Robert L. A. Clark and Claire Sponsler, “Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval Drama,” New Literary History 28 (1997): 323–27.
Valerie R. Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe (New York: Garland, 1996), 106–07
Keith V. Sinclair, Tristan De Nanteuil: Thematic Infrastructure and Literary Creation (Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen, 1983), 38–42 and 98–105
Oriental Stories (La Fleur Lascive Orientale) Being a Recueil of Joyous Stories Hitherto Unpublished, Translated From Arabian, Mongolian, Japanese, Indian, Tamil, Chinese, Persian, Malayan, and Other Sources (Athens: Erotika Biblion Society, 1893), 37–58.
Diane Watt, “Read My Lips: Clippyng and Kyssyng in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Anna Livia and Kira Hall (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 169. Watt uses an earlier version of Bourchier’s translation which in fact contains the word “buggery” to describe the relationship between Ide and Olive. By 1601, in an edition that the title page states “corrected and amended” the “rude English” of its predecessors, that word was altered to “falsehood.”
Lauren Silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 29–33.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki (Harlow, England: Longman, 2001) 299. Subsequent quotations are from this edition.
See Camille A. Paglia, “The Apollonian Androgyne and the Faerie Queene,” ELR 9. 1 (1979): 50–51
Dorothy Stephens, The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 34–43; Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 58. Stephens believes that Britomart maintains her masculine appearance specifically to engage Amoret in a homoerotic flirtation. She argues that “by keeping her helmet on, Britomart can afford to raise the dialogue to a higher erotic pitch, engaging in a closer intimacy than would otherwise be allowable” (37).
Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 2 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 225–52.
Jorge de Montemayor, Diana of George of Montemayor: Translated out of Spanish into English by Bartholomew Yong of the Middle Temple Gentleman (London, 1598). Subsequent quotations are from this edition.
One commentator on Montemayor identifies the homoerotics implicit in this scene and argues that they are natural elements of the pastoral form. However, he also displays his discomfort with the subject by stating that the Christian ethic that permeated Spanish culture kept the material from being “obscene.” See Bruno M. Damiani, La Diana of Montemayor as Social and Religious Teaching (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983), 48–49.
See Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Theodora A. Jankowski, Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 22–53.
Mihoko Suzuki, “Gender, Class, and the Social Order in Late Elizabethan Drama,” Theatre Journal 44 (1992): 31–45.
I use the word “gender” to refer to the sociocultural attributes of masculinity and femininity. The word “sex” I use to refer to the biological components that generally signify a body to be either male or female. I see these two categories as fairly distinct. That is, a body biologically identified as female is expected to perform gendered behaviors that signify its femininity to a greater or lesser degree. Therefore, an individual who has a female body may be termed “masculine” by her society if she exhibits gender attributes that are culturally understood to signify a male body. See Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 124–25.
See the introductions of both Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988)
Maryanne Cline Horowitz, J. R. Brink, and Allison Courdet, eds, Playing with Gender: A Renaissance Pursuit (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 81.
See Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy About Women in England, 1540–1640 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985).
Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki in Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 1–12, for an overview of contemporary scholarly approaches to the debate.
Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 129 and 323–27. Woodbridge analyzes how the debate influenced literature and argues that it was primarily a rhetorical exercise.
English writers translated Agrippa’s popular text three separate times—Thomas Clapham in 1542 and Henry Care in both 1652 and 1670. Agrippa’s was only one of the cultural arguments in support of women that appeared in England. For others see Kate Aughterson, ed., Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook, Constructions of Femininity in England (London: Routledge, 1995), 261–90.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, A Treatise of the Nobilitie and excellencye of woman kynde, translated out of Latine into englysshe by David Clapam (London, 1542).
Jordan writes that “[I]t was only logical for some feminists [early modern women] to argue either directly or by implication that sex and gender were different. Sex, they believed, was innate; gender was assigned by cultural expectations to forms of behavior,… and was variable….” See Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 134.
Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (London: B. T. Batsford, 1986), 72.
William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (1587; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960), 147.
See Jean Howard, “Crossdressing, The Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 420.
George Gasciogne, The Steele Glas: Complainte of Phylomene, The English Experience 597 (1576; New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), I.i.v.
Barnabe Riche, Barnabe Riche His Farewell to Military Profession, ed. Donald Beecher, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 91 (1581; Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1992), 128–29.
Paul Hair, Before the Bawdy Court: Selections from church court and other records relating to the correction of moral offenses in England, Scotland and New England, 1300–1800 (London: Paul Elek Books, 1972), 37.
Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, New Shakespeare Society Publications Series. 6 Nos. 4, 6, 12 (1583; Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1965), 73.
Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579 to 1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10–25.
Michael Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 24.
Ibid., 24. See also Victor O. Freeburg, Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915), 61, who calls the cross-dressed heroine “the most graceful and charming figure on the stage.”
Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), 93–128, especially 112, 118.
Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 106–26.
Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde: Euphues’ Golden Legacy, ed. W. W. Greg (1590; London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 158–59.
The origin and date of this song is unknown, though Ritson includes it in a group of ballads dating from the time of Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth. See Joseph Ritson, ed., Ancient Songs and Ballads, from the Reign of King Henry the Second to the Revolution, vol. 2 (London, 1829), 145–49.
Francis James Child, ed., English and Scottish Ballads, vol. 4 (Boston, 1860), 174–79
J. Woodfall Ebsworth, ed., The Roxburghe Ballads, vol. 6 (Hertford, England, 1889–1893), 567–70, who reprint the ballad with introductory material.
See Robert Bell, ed., Early Ballads Illustrative of History, Traditions, and Customs; Also Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England (London, 1877), 158.
Jean Howard also believes that Bess is “a figure of crisis,… who continually evokes men’s fears of women’s power and sexuality” (109). However, as Howard herself argues, any threat Bess might pose is contained both by her devotion to Spencer and by the obviously more dangerous sexuality represented by Mullisheg and the Moors. Jean E. Howard, “An English Lass Amid the Moors: Gender, race, sexuality, and national identity in Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York: Routledge, 1994), 101–09.
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© 2005 Denise A. Walen
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Walen, D.A. (2005). The Eidolic Lesbian in Early Modern England. In: Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981066_2
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