Cicero on stage: Damon and Pithias and the fate of classical friendship in English Renaissance drama.

Male friendship is the source of some very bad behavior on the English Renaissance stage. "All that was mine in Silvia I give thee," says Valentine to his friend Proteus in the conclusion to Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona (5.4.83). Valentine's offer of his fiancee to Proteus would be disconcerting even if it did not take place, as it in fact does, on the heels of Proteus's failed attempt to rape Silvia. An equally troubling invocation of friendship appears in George Peele's The Old Wives Tale, in which the protagonist, Eumenides, makes a bargain to divide half of his possessions with the ghost of his friend Jack; when Jack lays claim to half of Eumenides' wife Delia, her husband is ready to cut his mate in two rather than "falsify my word unto my friend" (line 933). Marlowe's Edward II ignores his queen for his friend Gaveston, to whom he offers access to the royal treasury and permission "in our name [to] command / Whatso thy mind affects or fancy likes" (1.1.168-69). And in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Coxcomb, the title character demonstrates his dedication to altruistic male friendship by insisting that another man sleep with his wife. (1)

Each of these bizarre moments is enabled, at least in part, by the ideological power of a highly theorized tradition of ideal male friendship stretching from Aristotle to Montaigne and best known in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England through numerous translations and adaptations of Cicero's influential treatise on friendship, Laelius de amicitia. The nature of Renaissance friendship is receiving increasing attention by scholars of early English literature. Since Laurens J. Mills's landmark 1937 survey, One Soul in Bodies Twain, which remains an indispensable resource for establishing the ubiquity of friendship in medieval and especially Renaissance English literature, scholars have explored the practice of friendship in the context of humanist letters, kinship, companionate marriage, economic and political alliances, monarchy and mignonnerie, patronage, artistic collaboration, and sexuality. (2)

My concern in this essay, however, is not with the varied social practice of friendship, but with the stage history of the rarified ideology of complete virtue, selflessness, and unity that defined what Aristotle called [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and Cicero called amicitia perfecta. (3) By its very nature as an ideal, this "complete" or "perfect" male friendship is so far beyond the reach of average men as to be virtually impracticable. The tantalizing unattainability of amicitia perfecta is no doubt one reason why it captured the imagination of many English Renaissance writers. In light of the widespread sixteenth-century interest in classical friendship, it was inevitable that friendship would find a place in the emerging English theater. When the language of amicitia perfecta appears in plays, however, it usually does so in the context of relationships that are far from ideal. The men who invoke friendship in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Old Wives Tale, The Coxcomb, and Edward II, for instance, can be called "friends" only in the loosest sense of the term, and they certainly do not meet the rigorous criteria of the classical friendship tradition. But their behavior makes a kind of perverse sense if one considers it as an attempt to enact the supposed verities of the friendship tradition. These men can be seen as parodies of ideal friends, misapplying, in overly literal fashion, the grandiose rhetoric of amicitia perfecta. (4) For instance, Edward II's misguided offer to share his treasury with Gaveston can be traced to the fact that Edward imagines himself as identical with his friend, as he makes explicit by calling himself "another Gaveston" (1.1.142). The sentiment may be touching, but the action is absurd and ultimately tragic. Such caricature is in fact quite typical of the theatrical fate of amicitia perfecta: the treatment of idealized male friendship in late Tudor and early Stuart drama, on the whole, reflects a move away from an earnestly humanistic didacticism and towards an often scathing mockery of classical friendship.

This essay will examine the codification of ideal male friendship as it appears in Richard Edwards's Damon and Pithias (c. 1564), one of the earliest surviving English friendship plays and also one of the few to celebrate male friendship as a serious way of life rather than as something to be lampooned. Edwards's play, which may be representative of a short-lived tradition of didactic friendship drama that grew out of the universities, offers us a way of understanding why amicitia perfecta, an ancient and venerated philosophical ideal, came to find itself the frequent object of ridicule on the English stage. Damon and Pithias, which bills itself in its prologue as "a rare ensample of Frendship true," is a prime example of didactic, pedagogical drama. (5) Edwards uses the play to enact a debate about the nature of friendship, and the result is interesting for what it says about the ideals of Tudor high culture. The play is, however, a dramatic failure. It has all the theatrical dynamism of an ethical treatise--which, in a sense, is what it is. But the failure of Damon and Pithias on stage is itself interesting for what it can tell us about the dramatic limitations of didactic, moralistic subject matter. Idealization, the abstract elevation of static perfection, rarely makes for good theater, an artistic form that thrives both on physical action and on conflict.

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