Sexual consent and the art of love in the early modern English lyric

SEL - Studies in English Literature

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 37-58

  Garrett, Cynthia E ^a  

^a WELLS COLLEGE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 67649910461     PISSN: 00393657     EISSN: 15229270     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sel.2004.0005     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. Anonymous, The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights: Or, the Lawes Provision for Woemen (London, 1632), p. 377.
2. A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475-1640 notes attributions to Thomas Edgar and Sir J. Doddridge (comp. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave [1926]; 2d edn., rev. and enl. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, Katharine F. Pantzer [London: Bibliographical Society, 1976-91], p. 335).
3. W. R. Prest suggests that Edgar "corrected, embroidered and updated for the press" an earlier manuscript, begun in the mid-1580s ("Law and Women's Rights in Early Modern England," SCen 6, 2 [Autumn 1991]: 169-87, 175).
4. The Latin of the Lawes is not Ovid's, which reads "uim licet appelles: grata est uis ista puellis" (A. S. Hollis, ed., Ars Amatoria, Book 1 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977], p. 26, line 673; subsequent references will be by line number). Translation of the Lawes version of Ovid's line is mine.
5. For the publication history of Thomas Heywood's translation, see M. L. Stapleton, Thomas Heywood's "Art of Love": The First Complete English Translation of Ovid's "Ars Amatoria" (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 1-4 and 16-20.
6. Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape asserts that "Men have always raped women, but it wasn't until the advent of Sigmund Freud and his followers that the male ideology of rape began to rely on the tenet that rape was something women desired" (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), p. 315.
7. Attempting to correct Brownmiller's history, Roy Porter states in "Rape - Does It Have a Historical Meaning?" that "ingrained misogynistic caricaturing of women (such as the 'no means yes' syndrome) has always allowed men to trivialize rape and render it titillating to the pornographic imagination" (Rape: An Historical and Cultural Enquiry, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli and Porter [Oxford: Blackwell, 1986]), p. 216). While "misogynistic caricaturing of women" may indeed be so universal as to need little historicizing, my research suggests the "no means yes syndrome" is historically and culturally variable.
8. On rape in the English pastourelle, see Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape and Writing Women in Early Modern England: Unbridled Speech (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), pp. 57-62.
9. Morris Palmer Tilley's A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries cites various versions of "Maids say nay and take it" starting in 1534 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1950), p. 405.
10. Later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century poetic and proverbial formulations are more likely to insist on the second part of Ovid's precept, that women find force pleasing, as in John Davies's 1611 epigram "A Woman's nay's a double yea (they say)" (Tilley, p. 744).
11. One of Thomas More's Latin epigrams, "De Puella Quae Raptum Finxit," "On a Girl Who Feigned Rape," lies somewhere between the pastourelle's female compliance and the Ovidian woman's desire for force (The Latin Epigrams of Thomas More, ed. and trans. Leicester Bradner and Charles Arthur Lynch [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953], pp. 71 and 191-2). I am grateful to Anne Lake Prescott for calling my attention to More's epigram.
12. Earlier English readers could have encountered the no-means-yes topos in works such as the Roman de la Rose, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, and medieval "Latin comedies" such as Geta and Alda, which draw on Ovid's Ars Amatoria. Some may have acquired Latin editions of the Ars on the Continent. However, Heywood's translation of the Ars certainly made Ovid's precept more widely available. As Stapleton points out, the explosion of English translations of Ovid in the sixteenth century suggests that "Readers either lost facility in ancient languages or never gained it. Latin was no easier for English-speaking people to learn in the sixteenth century than it is in the twentieth, and Ovid transmogrified is better than no Ovid at all" (p. 7). On the influence of Ovid's Ars Amatoria on the Latin comedies, see Anne Howland Schotter, "Rape in the Medieval Latin Comedies," in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 241-53.
13. Catty's Writing Rape examines the generic implications of rape on a broad range of texts. She discusses the no-means-yes topos briefly as it relates to the minor epic forms of complaint and epyllion popular in the 1590s, but suggests it is more common in Jacobean drama. The comic lyrics I examine in this essay may help provide a link to the more ambiguous and generically mixed treatment of rape Catty observes in Jacobean theater.
14. Ovid, The Art of Love, and Other Poems, vol. 2 of Ovid in Six Volumes, 2d edn. (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1979), p. 59.
15. Ovid, ed. Hollis, line 675.
16. Stapleton, pp. 4-8.
17. Heywood, The Brazen Age, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, 6 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 3:165-256, 168.
18. Patrick Cheney, Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 49.
19. Ovid, ed. Hollis, line 29.
20. Stapleton, pp. 14-5.
21. Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 82.
22. Leo C. Curran, "Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses," Arethusa 11, 1 and 2 (Spring and Fall 1978): 213-41, 230.
23. J. H. Mozley, "Introduction," in Ovid, trans. Mozley, pp. ix-xiii, x.
24. Michael Dalton, The Countrey Iustice (London, 1618), pp. 247-8. The Short Title Catalogue (Pollard et al., comps.) lists nineteen editions from 1618 to 1746.
25. See J. A. Sharpe's study of rape in 1620-80 Essex (Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983], pp. 63-5).
26. Nazife Bashar concludes "that there were few cases and even fewer convictions" for rape, and those few convictions involved "men accused of raping young girls" in "Rape in England between 1550 and 1700" (in The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men's Power, Women's Resistance, London Feminist History Group [London: Pluto, 1983], pp. 28-42, 42).
27. Frances Ferguson, "Rape and the Rise of the Novel," Representations 20 (Fall 1987): 88-112, 96. Ferguson's analysis of the interplay between literary and legal constructions of rape in the novel has strongly influenced my reading of late sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century lyric treatments of female sexual consent.
28. Dalton, p. 248.
29. Ovid, trans. Mozley, p. 61.
30. Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Phœnix Nest (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1931), p. 90, line 31; subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text by page and line number.
31. Heywood refers to "the manifest iniury done me in that worke, by taking the two Epistles of Paris to Helen and Helen to Paris, and printing them in a lesse volume, under the name of another" (qtd. in Arthur Melville Clark, Thomas Heywood: Playwright and Miscellanist [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931], p. 82). Though Heywood singles out the "Epistles," derived from Ovid's Heroides, William Jaggard also included in the 1612 Passionate Pilgrim passages from 7eywood's translations of the Ars and Remedia Amoris. Given that a number of the poems in the later edition are Heywood's, and that "When as thine eye" is thematically related to these other Ovid-inspired works, it is possible that Heywood himself wrote "When as thine eye."
32. Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim, intro. Joseph Quincy Adams (1599;
33. rprt. New York and London: Scribner's, 1939), sigs. C5r-7r; subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text by line number.
34. [Thomas Heywood], Publii Ovidii Nasonis de arte amandi, Or, the Art of Loue (Amsterdam, n.d.), pp. 27-8.
35. Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2d edn., 2 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), pp. 177-207,
36. References to Robert Jones's prefatory statements and musical compositions are to E. H. Fellowes, The English School of Lutenist Song Writers, 2d ser., 16 vols. (London: Strainer and Bell, 1925), vols. 1, 2, and 4, and will appear parenthetically in the text by series and part number. Jones makes this particular claim in the preface to The Muses Gardin of Delights, Or the fift Booke of Ayres (2.4).
37. Except where otherwise noted, references to the lyrics are to E. H. Fellowes, English Madrigal Verse, 1588-1632 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), and will appear parenthetically in the text by line number.
38. In addition to those I discuss here, other Jones lyrics using Ovid's topos are "Where lingering fear," "Women what are they," and "My mistress sings no other song" from the First Booke, and a setting of the Phœnix lyric "Now what is love?" and "Fie, what a coil" from the Second Booke. The lyrics to Jones's comic songs have attracted little critical attention. Edward Doughtie in English Renaissance Song (Boston: Twayne, 1986) considers the interplay of lyric and music in two of the songs representing female consent (p. 133).
39. Daniel Fischlin's In Small Proportions: A Poetics of the English Ayre: 1596-1622 (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1998) includes discussion of several Jones lyrics, but ignores those I consider here, perhaps because Fischlin approaches the air as art song rather than popular song.
40. C. S. Lewis notes that readers familiar with the new or composite Arcadia who encounter the old Arcadia "cannot suspend our disbelief in a Musidorus who commits indecent assaults" (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954], p. 332). In the new Arcadia, Sidney cuts the contemplated rape, while having his female villain Cecropia advocate rape in a virtual translation of the Ars passage.
41. Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, in Shakespeare, ed. Evans, 2:1814-38, 1829, lines 1135-8.
42. Doughtie, pp. 133-4.
43. Fellowes's full transcription of "Think'st thou, Kate" adds punctuation that defies the music in order to obscure the sexual aggression of the second verse, turning the original "Put it in adventure foole" of Jones's song book into "Put it in adventure, foole." I have therefore cited the facsimile of this lyric from Ultimum Vale, Song XII, David Greer, ed., in English Lute Songs 1597-1632, ed. F. W. Sternfeld, 9 vols.(Menston UK: Scolar Press, 1970), 7, lines 5-8.
44. Ovid, trans. Mozley, p. 61.
45. Garthine Walker, "Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England," Gender and History 10, 1 (April 1998): 1-25, 9. In her study of over 100 accounts of rape and attempted rape in early modern English courts, Walker finds that although women refer to resisting rape, they virtually never describe a physical struggle. Walker speculates that women claiming rape faced the difficult task of persuading the court they had not consented, while maintaining a socially acceptable image of female passivity and modesty.
46. Dalton, p. 248.
47. Sylvia Huot, The "Romance of the Rose" and Its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), p. 44.
48. In "Jean de Meun and the Ancient Poets," John V. Fleming details Jean's extended borrowings from the Ars Amatoria (in Rethinking the Romance of the Rose: Text, Image, Reception, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Huot [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1992], pp. 81-100, 86-7).
49. Bruce Pattison, Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance (London: Methuen, 1948), p. 116.
50. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians says of Jones: "the strongest feature of his best songs is the felicitous union of the text with attractive melody," but "when he ventured to expand he frequently encountered serious difficulties with the accompaniment, the harmonic structure faltering or losing a purposeful direction" (ed. Stanley Sadie, 6th edn., 20 vols. [London: Macmillan, 1980], 9:703).
51. See Ben Jonson, Epicoene, Or, The Silent Woman, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), pp. 138-272, 221,