The Changing Faces of Love in English Renaissance Comedy

The Changing Faces of Love In English Renaissance Comedy Ejner J. Jensen In this paper I want to explore certain manifestations of love in English Renaissance comedy, particularly the language of love and the changing function of love as a theme. My path will lead from Lyly to Fletcher (with and without Beaumont). But this chronological disposition of the material ought not to be taken as a signal that my topic is development. Surely we have had ample warning in recent years of the latent evolutionist ten­ dencies we all share to keep us from that fallacy. My topic is the changing faces of love. The forces that brought about the changes I will describe are varied and complex, and I am little concerned here with influences outside the drama; my focus will be on those aspects of love that the drama reveals on the stage. Chronology will be violated in the case of Shakespeare, for as usual he takes a way of his own; I will return to him in a final section of this discussion. The case of Lyly affords a useful starting point, for Lyly’s plays confront us immediately with many of the issues that sur­ round the comic presentation of love throughout this period. The first of these is a question about the theme of love itself. (1) How is love understood in these plays? — i.e., how does it operate as a force in human affairs, and what do the characters believe about its origins? (2) How far in these early plays is language merely conventional, rhetorical patterning rather than an expres­ sion of feeling clearly related to the characters to whom it is assigned? (3) And finally, what are the actors called upon to do as they attempt to convey these aspects of love to their audience? To the first of these questions no easy answer is available, though G. K. Hunter, in his fine book on Lyly, has provided the 294 Ejner J. Jensen 295 most detailed available context for a discussion of the issue.1 On the surface the comedies of Lyly seem to offer, in unassimilated form, most of the ideas about love in vogue at the time, includ­ ing generous helpings of the paradoxes so dominant in the sonnet most detailed available context for a discussion of the issue.1 On the surface the comedies of Lyly seem to offer, in unassimilated tradition and in Shakespeare’s early work. Cupid in Gallathea defines love as A heate full of coldnesse, a sweete full of bitterness, a pain full of pleasantnesse; which maketh thoughts have eyes, and harts eares; bred by desire, nursed by delight, weaned by ielousie, laid by dissembling, buried by ingratitude; and this is love!2 The nymph to whom he offers this precious commodity can only conclude that “If it be nothing else, it is but a foolish thing” (I.ii.14-21). Foolish thing though it may be, love is nevertheless the mainspring of dramatic action in Lyly’s comedies—as a force opposed to military and political greatness in Campaspe, as a disruptive element in the lives of both gods and men in Sapho and Phao, as a miraculous transforming power in Gallathea, and as a pervasive and dominant universal influence in Endimion. Most of the stock love themes are taken up in Lyly too. Unre­ quited love drives Tellus to seek revenge and reduces Venus to a state of powerlessness. Conflicting claims of love and duty bid for dominance in Campaspe. Love as a motion of the mind is contrasted with love as a prompting of the flesh in Endimion. Yet if we ask what the characters in Lyly believe about the nature and origins of love, we are thrown directly against the barrier of convention that surrounds these plays and makes them to some degree inaccessible to modem readers. As we try to come to terms with that convention and its particular manifes­ tations in Lyly—allegory, mythological figures, and all the rest— we can accept the answer given in another context as an explana­ tion of convention’s real function. We can try to see, that is, that “allegory and the...