Redeeming beggary/buggery in 'Michaelmas Term.'

Citing the work of Alan Bray, Stephen Orgel argues that in Renaissance England a sodomitical subject was inconceivable: "Charges of sodomy always occur in relation to other kinds of subversion: the activity has no independent existence in the Renaissance mind, just as there is no separate category of the homosexual. It becomes visible in Elizabethan society only when it intersects with some other behavior that is recognized as dangerous and antisocial; it is invariably an aspect of atheism, papistry, sedition, witchcraft."(1) But recently it has been asked whether the "rhetoric of the stigmatized sodomite is fully inscriptive," whether a sodomitical subject might not be identifiable in Renaissance England after all.(2) Identifiable at least in texts in Renaissance England, where, while we may not locate an "actual sodomite," we may find "a delineation of the conditions for his existence"--we may reveal the "possibility of the sodomite."(3) Identifiable, that is, in "poetic discourse" in which "we recognize a potential for erotic feeling in male relationships" and in which "we are invited to feel . . . the possibility of a homosexual subjectivity."(4) Or identifiable "in life, in letters--as a marginal site, the 'place' of the exorbitant meconnaissance," the "(no) place of homosexuality" Jonathan Goldberg opens up in Spenser's January eclogue as well as his letters to and from Gabriel Harvey.(5)

I begin with these distinct claims and possibilities because I think that sodomy and sodomitical discourse in Thomas Middleton's Michaelmas Term (1605) are situated either somewhere or seemingly everywhere in between them. Put schematically, and so reductively, it is impossible to say where infractions of social decorum and a dark rendering of incipient capitalism leave off and where sodomy begins. Michaelmas Term tests Orgel's conviction that Puritans first must have known the theater to be dangerous before they could or would have associated it with the promotion of sodomy.(6) The trajectory of socio-sexual relations does not necessarily commence with status inversion or atheism or financial corruption in order that it may arrive at the sodomitical; it might arc in the opposite direction, it might wander, or it might even be interrupted (moving first in one direction, then reversing direction any number of times). I can restate this in terms applicable to what transpires in Michaelmas Term by posing the questions, does an already constituted sodomitical culture produce its commodity scam-inspired version of a bed trick, does the scam admit sodomy (merely) as its means, or are they at least intermittently disjunct? Does buggery produce beggary, beggary buggery, can we tell, or is causality, priority--even relationship--impossible to establish? To my mind, Michaelmas Term stages a historical conjuncture at which no necessary, or wholly naturalized, relation between sodomy and stigma prevails. The play indicates that in some instances, homosocial relations in Jacobean London may have been founded upon, at the very least may not have been antipathetic to, homoeroticism.

Because I take Middleton's "beggary" to be a double entendre, I may appear to be sighting along some base line linguistic level, arguing that "beggary" is prior to, causes, or insinuates buggery.(7) But I can identify this particular word play only if I have already imagined a sodomitical ecology within which it may thrive. Word play depends upon some such acknowledgment; indeed, language makes possible only what that which is already expressed in language makes possible for it. In Michaelmas Term, one such "that" is sodomy. A seemingly conventional city comedy plot is interlaced with doubles entendres which, when activated, seem to replot the play sodomitically. The "sexual reference" that R. B. Parker finds so "absolutely pervasive" in Middleton is the transfer point (the switch) at which beggary becomes buggery.(8) And that which effects the transfer (or flips the switch) is an audience's acknowledgment of sodomitical behavior. But doubles entendres can only trigger sodomitical reference if they are first recognized as doubles entendres. It would seem, then, that the prior possibility of sodomitical reference activates the buggery in beggary.(9) The mere possibility of such sodomitical reference in Michaelmas Term becomes probability when we recognize that even its ostensible city comedy plot is a congeries of male-male (erotic) relations.

The play's sodomitical (and misogynistic) London--its linguistic, commercial, and legal systems as well as its social and erotic structures--discloses itself to us in the very first lines of the play, when Michaelmas Term appears on stage with a Boy.(10) The Boy pairs litigants with the harlots and venereal diseases that disable them (1.1.14-18).(11) However, Michaelmas Term presents himself as one who would "redeem beggary"/buggery: while his Boy may keep a whore (1.1.27), he would "rather beggar |bugger~ more" (1.1.26). Or, having made himself available ("spread myself open"--1.1.63) to all whose "bags |moneybags, scrotums~ are fruitful'st" (1.1.22), he would entice others to empty their "purses" (1.1.28) in/for him.(12) The social/sodomitical economy in force here extends from the imagined London of the play to the actual urban gallants whom Middleton's surrogate presenter, Michaelmas Term, charges for spreading himself open. After he has had a chance to "drink deep" (swindle, perhaps fellate, though the consequences for Prince Hal--who also speaks of "drinking deep"--are remarkable) a fellow new to the city, the Second and Third Terms (who are "proud / Coldly to taste our |Michaelmas Term's~ meats"--1.1.55-56) will make do with whatever "bottom" (1.1.46) he leaves for them. Michaelmas Term as well as the on-stage, silent fellow "wrapped in silk and silver" (1.1.32) potentially had and were had by, stood for and stood apart from, the silent (at least for us) gallants and inns of court gentlemen in the audience. In his Histriomastix (1633), William Prynne describes the student-actor relationship in language that will prove resonant after a closer look at Michaelmas Term: "Inns of Court men were undone but for Players; that they are their chiefest guests and imployment."(13) That the players might after all set out to undo law students is confirmed by Michaelmas Term's desire to "dispatch" (satisfy sexually) his audience "in two hours, without demur" (1.1.65-66).(14)

A fluid economy of dupes, dupers, and dupers duped operates in Michaelmas Term according to analogous, perhaps even interchangeable financial and sexual principles. Beggar(y)/bugger(y) neatly conflates what everyone would escape and what everyone wishes on others, but it is also the occasional discreet object of desire. Such a theater enters audiences into circulation for two hours, seemingly only titillating them, but bent on dispatching, on ravishing, perhaps even representing them as well.(15) Spectators, like the "fellow poor" who "Crept up in three Terms" (1.1.29.2 and 1.1.32), may be "like asses use|d~" (1.1.39), paying "sixpenny fees all the year long" (1.1.64-65) for their pleasure. They may, however, feel something of and for the play's gentleman-protagonist's temporary humiliation and partial triumph--of and for his homoerotic desire.