Nicholas Oldisworth, Richard Bacon, and the Practices of Caroline Friendship

Sed quoniam res humanae fragiles caducaeque sunt, semper aliqui anquirendi sunt quos diligamus et a quibus diligamur; caritate enim benevolentiaque sublata omnis est e vita sublata iucunditas.

Cicero, De Amicitia. xxvii.102¹

Almost as much as religion, friendship has become a scandal, a stumbling block, a site of occlusion, in the reading and study of early modern literature. A fundamentally secular age elides the spiritual presuppositions of early modern life, while a simultaneously embarrassed and prurient age fixated by corporeal sexuality fails to register the presence of a constitutive way of life whose practices, sustained by classical and biblical precedents and ruminations, provided a bulwark of well-being in the face of vicissitudinously fragile and brief mundane existence—friendship. Small wonder then, that the culture which constituted and sustained both the interpersonal and literary practices of friendship and the concomitant rhetorical practices of composition and reading no longer impinges on the way we understand ourselves and conduct our lives, to the point where at best the records of such early friendships occasion either occlusion or incomprehension or, at worst, are categorically relocated to other more exigent, though anachronistic, purposes.²

The early modern tradition of friendship looked to the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero to articulate and valorize its practices, but also to more recent literary realizations and celebrations of friendship by Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, and Jonson, for whom friendship was part of a way of life.³ Sidney's friendship with Fulke Greville was celebrated in the latter's A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney (published only in 1652, but written between 1610 and 1614, well over twenty years after Sidney's death).⁴ Sidney's own engagement in the literary practices of friendship were less direct: he participated in an emulous rivalry in the composition of sonnets with Greville and Sir Edward Dyer, conducted a lengthy correspondence with Hubert Languet, composed his major prose work, the Arcadia, for his sister, and, above all, celebrated friendship itself in the love of Pyrocles and Musidorus, the protagonists of the Arcadia.

At the beginning of the complete version of the text, the Old Arcadia, Pyrocles, having fallen in love with Philoclea, appears to have abandoned the life of virtuous action. He proposes to disguise himself as an Amazon in order to gain access to his beloved who, along with her sister and mother, has been taken into seclusion by her father, Basilius, in order to avoid the consequences of an oracle. His friend and cousin, Musidorus, berates him for his effeminacy and threatens to abandon him. Pyrocles,

the deep wound of his love being rubbed afresh with this new unkindness, began, as it were, to bleed again, in such sort that he was unable to bear it any longer; but, gushing out abundance of tears and crossing his arms over his woeful heart, he sank down to the ground. Which sudden trance went so to the heart of Musidorus that, falling down by him, and kissing the weeping eyes of his friend, he besought him not to make account of his speech, which, if it had been over vehement, yet was it to be borne withal, because it came out of a love more vehement; that he had never thought fancy could have received so deep a wound [of love for a woman], but now finding in him the force of it, he would no further contrary it, but employ all his service to medicine it in such sort as the nature of it required.⁵

Having effected a reconciliation:

Musidorus, that had helped to dress his friend [as an Amazon], could not satisfy himself with looking upon him, so did he find his excellent beauty set out with this new change, like a diamond set in a more advantageous sort. Insomuch that he could not choose, but smiling said unto him:

"Well," said...