Poetic Companies: Musters of Agency in George Gascoigne's "Friendly Verse"

Tam marti quam mercurio.

George Gascoigne (c. 1537-77) was a self-named prodigal and the most successful alleged failure in Elizabethan letters. He left as much of a paper record as a debtor and litigant as he did in his role as an author; his usual self-identification, prudently enough, highlighted his profession as a soldier. Gascoigne was neither a leveler nor a criminal; he was not an atheist, and there is no evidence of homosexual practice on his part. He was a mercenary and may in fact have been a spy, although whatever patronage that may have involved did him neither harm nor significant good. But his equivocal approaches to such forms of trouble—"sodometries," broadly recalling Jonathan Goldberg's rich formulation in "the case of Christopher Marlowe"¹ —help us track more precisely the moving parameters these categories had for a metrics of agentive personhood in the era immediately preceding Shakespeare's.

Of special importance to this metrics are the affective and other relations among, in Gascoigne's phrase, "sundrie gentlemen" who are neither true equals nor drastically vertically distinguished, men who may be said to be socially proximate to one another. The detailed negotiation of social proximity between and among men that Gascoigne's case illustrates bears directly on issues raised in the developing course of early modern histories of sexuality. As scholars after Michel Foucault—like Alan Bray, Goldberg, Valerie Traub, and now many others in Renaissance English contexts—have shown, the ascendancy of a modern regime of "sexuality" marks our investigations of sexuality's historical meanings with daunting philological and discursive challenges (i.e., "sexuality" in Foucault's analytic sense simply did not then exist; that the closest comparable concept in Renaissance English might be "lechery" is suggestive of the problem here) and also with utopic opportunities by opening up the range, constructedness, and diversity of sexual dispensations in ways that might enable a queerer future.²

Across diverse historical moments but in incommensurate ways, an idea of "friendship" has played a rich double part in this history. It will be noticed at once that friendship has served euphemistically to name aspects of what we would call "sexuality," and it has also (and often simultaneously) worked to name sexuality's remainder, whatever it is that sexuality is not. While early modern languages seem to offer no counterpart to the term sexuality, when it comes to Renaissance friendship it seems fair to borrow Derek Jarman's words and name it a form of "love that can't keep its big mouth shut."³ This persistent entanglement—and the conceptual leverage that friendship so provides—suggests that no history of sexuality can well afford not to attend to the discourses of amity as well.

In a classic essay Bray shows that the "signs" of the elevated Elizabethan discourse of friendship and the "signs" that could precipitate a charge of sodomy were indistinguishable on their own, and only a disparity of rank between the friends (with the inference of mercenary economic gains that arose from it) could predict which terminological category might be applied.⁴ The poet Gascoigne adapts the rhetorics of "friendship," which ideally conceived of perfect equality between friends, as a means to muster forms of selfhood at midcentury under the more practical circumstances of such fluid social disparities. Attendant to these invocations of friendship's rhetoric, "professions" of gender and of affect, along with distinct modalities of the authorial and martial professions that depend on them, constitute a rich lexicon of agentive personhood for the purposes of reading Gascoigne's literary production and social aspirations.

The Low Countries and the social and political possibilities they put in view for the English adventurers participating in the Dutch revolt against Spain (which began in 1568) will also play an important part in this picture. From the perspective of the 1590s...