Gorboduc as a Tragic Discovery of "Feudalism".(Critical Essay)

Renaissance literary studies have long depended on the master narrative of an "early modern" transition from "feudalism" to "capitalism": from a conglomeration of land-based, militarized, and politicized households to a nation of privatized households governed by a centralized "state." Like all such narratives, this one is a fiction, a questionable way of organizing disparate facts of social change and historical difference. [1] Yet still not completely explored is the extent to which the modern fiction takes its cue from discourses that thrived during the putative period of transition itself. True, historians of historiography have discussed the extent to which narratives of the decline of what we call "feudalism," if not the rise of a "market economy," may be attributed to Jacobean and even Elizabethan antiquaries. [2] But I want to suggest that this early modern sense of transition extends beyond the purview of the Jacobean antiquaries who introduced the word "feudal" into English, or of their late Elizab ethan predecessors who may have had some concept, avant la lettre, of what we might call a "feudal" system of governing and householding. Early modern fictions of the decline of such a system occurred where fiction thrived most notoriously: in the theater--in plays staged in the great monarchical and aristocratic institutions that constituted the legacy of medieval domestic government during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, these fictions seem to predate the historiographical narrative of things "feudal" that was born in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and that developed into the full-fledged theory of a "feudal" social system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Doubtless, such precocious theatrical remembrances of "feudal" householding were not the primary purpose of early modern playwrights; they were by-products of theatrical efforts to come to terms with immediate problems and crises. But even as accidents, they suggest important connections between early modern con structions of historical difference and the Elizabethan stage, along with its generic innovations and its complex and conflicting constructions of gender, authority, and ownership.

Perhaps the earliest play to stage the demise of what we call "feudal" householding is The Tragedy of Gorboduc, the first English drama modeled on classical tragic form. Gorboduc was performed before Queen Elizabeth and her household as part of a lavish Christmas celebration of l8January 1561/2. Three weeks earlier, it had been staged, with a masque and mock tilt, at the Inner Temple household, where the guests had included a contingent from the Council, including Robert Dudley, the Queen's Master of the Horse, who had arranged to bring the performances to Whitehall. Obviously, the event was designed to entertain, but it also had political importance, no doubt helping to strengthen relations between the Inner Temple and royal household and allowing the Inns of Court men to pursue the favor of magnates close to the queen, particularly those concerned with the question of who would succeed their royal mistress. The masque urged the queen to marry and produce an heir, offering Dudley as a suitor; the play warne d the queen against a match with a foreign prince, the king of Sweden, alluded to the unsuitability of her cousin, the Catholic queen of Scotland, as an heir, and advertised the dangers of an uncertain succession. [3]

There was nothing strange about mixing affairs of state with household theater. The Inn's Men's performance belonged to a broader tradition of theatrical devices--pageants, masks, processions--employed by the great households to conduct affairs of government. As Suzanne R. Westfall observes, the pervasiveness of this tradition after the Wars of the Roses also suggests a tenuousness of immediate territorial control exercised by great households. Lacking the military might to protect their holdings from each other, and lacking the unity of interest with each other and their tenants necessary to impose their will over vast territories, they employed the ideological tools of pageantry and drama, complete with imitations of military prowess and displays of wealth. Household theater was important, throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as a mechanism for preserving order among and within great households, for projecting an illusion of military and economic might, and for negotiating policy peacefully wi th other magnates.[4]

One of the great ironies of this situation, of course, is that the staging of plays could mean the opposite of what the great householders sponsoring the theater relied on it to mean. Because they were illusions of might and of real economic resources, the theatrical feignings of unity and wealth by great households seem to confirm our story of transition: the great "feudal" household was in demise; government by a loose conglomeration of landowners was yielding to a centralized, propagandistic polity increasingly divorced from the alodializing agrarian households that constituted the wealth getting sector of society. This is what such illusions mean to many of today's historians of theater and, I want to suggest, to many early moderns as well, particularly those yearning nostalgically for a world of great households "not [ldots] built to envious show," as Ben Jonson puts it in To Penshurst. [5] My contention is that early representations of historical transition appeared during the very time when the transi tion was supposedly occurring, not only in humanist historiography but also on the stages functioning to project the great household's military and economic power. Such a representation can be found, for instance, in the crisis-prompted reinvention of classical tragedy in Gorboduc.

This essay is not the first to discuss precocious sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stagings of the passing of "feudal" customs. The subject has captured the attention of a formidable school of literary critics, though much work remains to be done on the question of how such sixteenth-century playwrights could ever have been in a position to envision a "feudal" past. Graham Holderness, asserting that Shakespeare's history plays "embody a conscious understanding of feudal society as a peculiar historical formation," has sought to cast them as meditations on the contradictions of "feudal" power and the differences between Tudor royal authority and "feudal" lordship. [6] Others have applied Holderness's insights to King Lear with great success. [7] The aptness of Lear for such a project is owing mostly to its focus on the conventions of property and wealth-getting identified by contemporary antiquaries in their classification of things "feudal." Lear represents an economy purged of what are commonly identified as non-"feudal" elements--cities, laborers, merchants, House of Commons--and constructed out of conventions associated with the medieval fee--dynastic feuding over territory, dueling, vassalage. It nostalgically imagines "an early feudal world whose ideology and social formations were still residually present in Jacobean Britain," as John Turner explains. [8] Nor need one look far to find a plausible historical context for this focus. Turner points to the 1606 performance of Lear before James I, the Scottish king of England who had shown an understanding of what we call "feudalism," and its implications for vassalage, land tenure, taxation, and parliamentary and royal prerogatives in his True Law of Free Monarchies. [9] This tract can itself be linked to the discoveries of the "feudal law" by such figures as Thomas Craig, a Scottish antiquary who belonged to James's court before his liege lord ascended the English throne. "The sovereign reason for Shakespeare's revival of interest in feudalism," claims Turne r in his contribution to his and Holderness's recent critical anthology, "was the language in which the new king liked to see himself." [10]

Yet there must be more to the early modern staging of a "feudal" past than the theories of Shakespeare's Stuart patron. If, as Turner says, King Lear represents a "revival" of an Elizabethan interest in what we recognize as "feudalism," then the True Law and the Scottish political tracts from the early 1600s are, though necessary, not sufficient to the project of contextualizing its recognition on the early modern stage. Looking a good forty years farther back to Gorboduc, an English source play for Lear that accomplishes a remembrance of the kind of householding we might call "feudal" in the absence of Jacobean discoveries of "feudalism," should help us more fully to appreciate a broader set of cultural conditions and changes implicit in early modern theatrical estrangement of the past.

Like Lear, Gorboduc is a division-of-the-kingdom tragedy. The plot runs as follows: Gorboduc, king of Britain, proposes to his council that he abdicate before his death, dividing his land at the Humber River and granting half to each of two sons. Despite disagreement about the wisdom of denying his elder son the entire inheritance, Gorboduc goes through with the division, which he calls his "device." His younger son, Porrex, provoked by a flatterer aggravating his ambition and fear of resentment over the division, murders his elder brother Ferrex, also moved to hostility by an obsequious councilor. Videna, their mother, avenges the death of her favorite child by killing Porrex. The people revolt to avenge Porrex, killing the king and queen and rendering the descent of the Crown "uncertain," only to be put down violently by the peerage. A Scottish magnate, Fergus, mobilizes an army to usurp the throne, unleashing a fifty-year civil war.