Sovereign Amity and Mimetic Rivalry: Shakespeare's Roman Masculinities

Abstract

In recent years gender criticism in Renaissance studies has begun to focus on issues of masculinity. The 'woman question' has given way to the 'man question': that is, an examination of masculine gender construction in the repressive regime of Renaissance gender ideology. In early modern English culture it is surely a disadvantage to be a woman. According to the ideology, women are leaky vessels: they bleed uncontrollably, have an excess of fluids, and also cannot hold their tongues. Multiple early modern discourses insist that women cannot control their sexual appetites: they will make a cuckold of a man. Anatomically, women are deformed, incomplete men: female genitalia are conceived of as inverted male genitalia, lacking enough 'heat' to descend. And women are commodities in an economy of exchange between fathers (and brothers) and husbands.

However, in some ways it is just as horrifying to be a male subject in this gender regime. Literature of the period betrays an obsessive concern with controlling female chastity. This is not surprising, of course, in a patriarchal /patrilineal society in which property and title follow blood-lines and fatherhood never carries the same physiological certainty as motherhood. As Mark Breitenberg argues in Anxious Masculinity, masculinity becomes synonymous with anxiety.

This thesis examines the attempt, in drama of the early modern period, to retrieve masculinity from that anxiety via the celebration of the male/male bond in the form of sovereign amity. Sovereign amity, referring to the rhetoric of Renaissance friendship in which the friend is figured as the other-self and in which the friends achieve a kind of 'sovereignty' vis-à-vis their bond, requires a radical likeness between subjects. Ironically, it is the very same likeness that engenders mimetic rivalry. Mimetic rivalry seeks to annihilate the same radical likeness which sovereign amity celebrates.

This thesis focuses first on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the play most appropriate for examining the correlation between sovereign amity and masculinity. The discussion then explores Antony and Cleopatra, the political sequel to Julius Caesar, to see what happens to sovereign amity in the face of heterosexual desire and mimetic rivalry. I am interested in these particular plays because of the way in which they foreground notions of sovereign amity and its inverse, mimetic rivalry, in relation to masculinity. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare offers a fleeting glimpse of the achievement of the ideal of sovereign amity. This portrayal collapses, however, under the very real pressures of social and political hierarchies in Antony and Cleopatra, as sovereign amity gives way to mimetic rivalry. Ultimately sovereign amity proves to be a dream impossible to sustain in an intensely hierarchical culture.