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 INT I M AC Y AN D SE XUA LI T Y I N
THE AGE OF SHAKESPE ARE

James M. Bromley argues that Renaissance texts circulate knowledge

about a variety of non-standard sexual practices and intimate life nar-
ratives, including non-monogamy, anal eroticism, masochism, and
cross-racial female homoeroticism. Rethinking current assumptions
about intimacy in Renaissance drama, poetry, and prose, the book
blends historicized and queer approaches to embodiment, narrative,
and temporality. An important contribution to Renaissance literary
studies, queer theory, and the history of sexuality, the book demon-
strates the relevance of Renaissance literature to today. Through
close readings of William Shakespeare’s “problem comedies,” Christo-
pher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, plays by Beaumont and Fletcher,
Thomas Middleton’s The Nice Valour, and Lady Mary Wroth’s son-
net sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and her prose romance The
Urania, Bromley re-evaluates notions of the centrality of deep, abiding
affection in Renaissance culture and challenges our own investment
in a narrowly defined intimate sphere.

j a m e s m . br o m l e y is Assistant Professor of English at Miami

University. He has published essays on intimacy, sexual practice, and
Renaissance literature in Early Modern Literary Studies, Studies in
Philology, and Modern Philology. He is the winner of the 2011 Martin
Stevens Award for Best New Essay in Early Drama Studies from the
Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society.
INTIMACY AND SEXUALITY IN
THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE

J AME S M. BRO MLEY

Miami University
 cambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107015180

c James M. Bromley 2012



This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2012

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Bromley, James M., 1978–
Intimacy and sexuality in the age of Shakespeare / James M. Bromley.
p. cm.
Includes index.
isbn 978-1-107-01518-0 (hardback)
1. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. 2. Sex in literature.
3. Intimacy (Psychology) in literature. 4. Self in literature. 5. Homosexuality in literature.
I. Title.
pr428.s48b76 2011
820.9 353809031 – dc23 2011043834

isbn 978-1-107-01518-0 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to
in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

List of illustrations page vi

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: Interiority, futurity, and affective relations in

Renaissance literature 1
1 Intimacy and narrative closure in Christopher Marlowe’s
Hero and Leander 29
2 A funny thing happened on the way to the altar: The
anus, marriage, and narrative in Shakespeare 49
3 Social status and the intimacy of masochistic sexual
practice in Beaumont and Fletcher and Middleton 79
4 Nuns and nationhood: Intimacy in convents in
Renaissance drama 108
5 Female homoeroticism, race, and public forms of intimacy
in the works of Lady Mary Wroth 145
Epilogue: Invitation to a queer life 179

Notes 186
Index 204

v
 Illustrations

1. The Passionate Pilgrim (London, 1599) signature D5r–v.

Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San
Marino, California, and ProQuest. Further reproduction is
prohibited without permission. Image produced by
ProQuest as part of Early English Books Online. page 21
2. England’s Helicon (London, 1600) signature AA1v–AA2v.

C The British Library Board. Image published with
permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited
without permission. Image produced by ProQuest as part
of Early English Books Online. 22

vi
 Acknowledgements

It is perhaps apt that a book about forms of affection in Renaissance texts

should first pause to express my thanks for the relationships that have
sustained me since this project’s inception at Loyola University Chicago. I
continue to profit immeasurably from Suzanne Gossett’s rigorous reading
of my work and her unique and indefatigable way of pushing me to grow as
a scholar and writer. Christopher Castiglia, a model of clarity and insight,
helped me to see what this project was actually about. With his broad
understanding of Renaissance literary production, James Biester nurtured
the inclusion of non-dramatic texts of the period in this project. Jeffrey
Masten unstintingly offered his engagement with the work on this project,
and my gratitude for his unflagging encouragement and mentorship of me
as a scholar is, to adapt a phrase, too little payment for so great a debt.
At Miami University, I am never forgetful of how fortunate I am to have
intelligent and supportive colleagues. This book has incalculably benefitted
from my conversations with Katharine Gillespie, Elisabeth Hodges, and
other members of Miami’s interdisciplinary Early Modern Collective. I
am much obliged to Mary Jean Corbett and Kaara Peterson, who, with
keen eyes, proofread the text. At various stages, work on this project was
supported by a fellowship from the Arthur J. Schmitt Foundation and
by Summer Research and Assigned Research Appointments from Miami
University.
I also wish to extend my appreciation to the far-flung early modern
scholars who have helped shape this work. A valued interlocutor and indis-
pensable friend, Will Stockton read the entire manuscript with the same
acuity that he demonstrates in his own work, and this book and my think-
ing about Renaissance sexuality are better because of him. I thank Gary
Taylor for permission to consult the Oxford Middleton edition of The Nice
Valour prior to its publication. Richard Strier read part of Chapter 3 in his
capacity as editor of Modern Philology, and it is much improved as a result.
Fran Dolan generously gave me constructive commentary on a draft of
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Chapter 4. At many times and in different locales, thoughtful and friendly
conversations with Will Fisher, Vin Nardizzi, and Michael Schoenfeldt
have invigorated my thinking about early modern literature. I have also
reaped much from discussion by audiences and seminar participants at the
Modern Language Association Convention; the annual meetings of the
Renaissance Society of America, the Shakespeare Association of America,
and the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies; and the Elizabethan
Theatre Conference.
I am grateful for the support of Sarah Stanton at Cambridge University
Press, and the comments from Rick Rambuss and an anonymous reader
have strengthened and enriched this book. Celeste Newbrough provided
the index.
Finally, Laura LeMone has taught me more about the varieties of affec-
tion than anyone I have ever met. For her patience and kindness, I dedicate
this book to her.
Previously published material in Chapter 1 is reprinted by permission of
the publishers from “‘Let it suffise’: sexual acts and narrative structure in
Hero and Leander”, in Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze,
edited by Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray and Will Stockton. An earlier
version of Chapter 3 appeared as “Social Relations and Masochistic Sexual
Practice in The Nice Valour” in Modern Philology (2010).

note
Where I am not quoting from a modern edition of a text, I have retained
early modern spelling and punctuation. For clarity, however, I have silently
modernized i/j, u/v, and long s, and where macrons indicate the suspension
of a letter I have re-inserted the letter.
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 Introduction: Interiority, futurity, and affective
relations in Renaissance literature

failures of intimacy
In his 1583 The Anatomy of Abuses, Philip Stubbes famously charged that
drama taught audiences how to “play the Sodomits, or worse.”1 Stubbes’s
capacious “or worse,” I would suggest, refers to certain affective relations
that eventually became illegible under the rubrics of modern intimacy. In
this book, I map the circulation of knowledge about these queer affections,
not only in the plays that Stubbes targets, but also in poetry and prose
written between 1588 and 1625. During the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, the intimate sphere coalesced around relations characterized by two
elements: interiorized desire and futurity. Interiorized desire locates the
truth about the self and sexuality inside the body, thereby organizing and
limiting the body’s pleasures based on a hierarchized opposition between
depths and surfaces. Access to futurity involves the perceived sense of a
relationship’s duration and its participation in legitimate social and sexual
reproduction. These changes, of which Stubbes’s charge is one of many
indices, laid the foundation for modern understandings of normative inti-
macy as coextensive with long-term heterosexual monogamy. Coupling,
and more specifically marriage, was invested with value as a site where
affection was desirable – as opposed to a primarily economic and politi-
cal arrangement with emotional bonds as a secondary concern – through
its figuration as the interpersonal relation with the proper combination
of interiorized desire and access to futurity. Other interpersonal relations
were excluded from the category, becoming instead what I call “failures of
intimacy,” despite being characterized by affect, care, and pleasure for those
involved, sometimes to a greater degree than relations typically understood
as intimate in modern Western culture.
Nothing about the heterosexual couple inherently implies the auto-
matic presence of affect, care, or pleasure, any more than any other form
of relationality. Yet modern Western culture’s relational economy assumes

1
2 Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare
precisely the opposite in its conferral of cultural prestige and value on
long-term heterosexual monogamy. In his landmark discussion in the first
volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was “a centrifugal movement
with respect to heterosexual monogamy” wherein “the legitimate couple,
with its regular sexuality, had a right to more discretion.”2 I demonstrate
that in the Renaissance, while the heterosexual couple was still actively,
loudly, one might even say indiscreetly, asserting itself over alternate forms
of relationality, it was nevertheless possible to challenge the authority of
couple form intimacy. Various literary texts of the period critiqued the
consolidation of intimacy around long-term heterosexual monogamy and
instead invested value in alternate forms of intimacy, including short-term,
situational relations; non-monogamous and polyamorous sexual practices;
erotic practices that involve non-normative understandings of the body’s
pleasures, such as masochism; and beyond. In this book, I analyze Renais-
sance texts where these “failures of intimacy” do not fail to provide sat-
isfaction and pleasure to those involved in them. Empowering readers to
reimagine their own intimate lives, these literary texts offer a counter-
discourse to the period’s marital advice conduct books and other texts
that attempt to naturalize the consolidation of intimacy around monoga-
mous coupling. This counterdiscourse is present even when texts ostensibly
demonize alternate forms of intimacy, as a greater flexibility in Renais-
sance narrative allowed readers to resist what appears to be textual foreclo-
sure on transgressive intimate practices. Insisting on diversity within rela-
tional life, the texts I discuss not only scrutinized the heterosexual couple’s
attempts to co-opt intimacy’s signifying powers; they also sustained other-
wise denigrated affections in the representational spaces they opened up for
them.
By attending to the early modern contraction of the intimate sphere and
to the changing status of alternate forms of intimacy in the period, I hope
to move queer studies of the Renaissance beyond what Jonathan Goldberg
and Madhavi Menon complain has been the field’s tendency to “search
for protoidentities” and toward a fuller analysis of the systems through
which cultures of the past have understood affection and sexual practices.3
This investigation has revealed rearrangements and realignments between
and among those sexual practices and relationships that Western culture
valorized and labeled as proper, civilized, natural, or decent, and those
that Western culture abjected and dismissed as perverse, unnatural, threat-
ening, or illicit. In the process, I make strategically ahistorical use of the
concept of heteronormativity, which Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner
 Introduction 3
describe as deriving from “a constellation of practices that everywhere
disperses heterosexual privilege as a tacit but central organizing index of
social membership.”4 This dispersal through modern culture is so wide
that “social and economic discourses, institutions, and practices that don’t
feel especially sexual or familial collaborate to produce as a social norm and
ideal an extremely narrow context for living.”5 More specifically, member-
ship in a heterosexual couple, usually though not exclusively in marriage,
organizes modern experiences as diverse as having health insurance, holding
hands in public, and inheriting an estate. In my discussion of Renaissance
texts, I use “normative” in its most general sense to refer to behaviors that
were culturally prescribed through both punishment and reward. Around
these behaviors, there accumulated a set of expectations that contoured
the life narratives imaginable and representable in the texts of the period.
Marriage’s co-optation of the intimate sphere can still be deemed a nor-
malizing process even if it was not based in the statistical analysis of
populations that produces modern normative categories, because marital
discourse attempted to direct the ways in which individuals understood
and evaluated their relational experiences.
It is important, however, to emphasize that heteronormativity is not re-
ducible to all cross-gender sexual practices, nor does it mean it is not
appropriable by homosexuals, as evidenced by the recent dominance within
gay political advocacy of the movement to legalize same-sex marriage,
which, in the pursuit of equalizing access, has all too often uncritically
embraced and desired the expansion of marriage’s power to confer legal
and cultural legitimacy and distribute economic benefits.6 Instead, the
concept heteronormativity points to the effects that making the intimacy
of heterosexual coupling culturally sacrosanct has on diverse constituencies,
including unmarried persons, gay men, lesbians, practitioners of S/M, those
who consume pornography outside of the home, and beyond. I use the term
“failures of intimacy” to describe certain bonds in Renaissance texts, not
exclusively because they are same-sex, then, though gender certainly plays
a role; their non-relation to interiority, to futurity, or to both has excluded
them from the category of intimacy. What is more, these alternatives
often strike at the logic of other cultural institutions, again not always
or entirely because of gender, but because of the form of relationality
involved. Though Berlant and Warner develop the concept in a post-
Enlightenment, American context, the term “heteronormative” is useful to
me in approaching pre-modern English texts because it helpfully locates
the politicization of supposedly private affection and sexual practices due to
their embeddedness in other cultural practices and sites. This normalization
4 Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare
process was contingent, resisted, and uneven, and I pay particular attention
to the moments in texts where this process of normalization is somehow
interrupted or interruptible. This interruption allows an author to valorize
forms of elective affinity that are not necessarily patterned on marriage and
to disrupt the equation of intimacy with interpsychic connectedness and
long-term monogamy.
It may seem paradoxical to use a concept like normativity ahistorically
in order to situate intimacy, interiority, and narrative in historically-specific
contexts. I do not mean the past to function as purely otherness or, con-
versely, a modernity waiting to be born. Madhavi Menon has recently
called for new approaches to the literature of the past that do not assume
“that the history of sexuality is always the history of difference between past
and present.”7 Yet the conceptual replacement of difference with sameness
would also lead to “forgetting the messiness of both time and desire.”8
Sameness can be the basis for fixity and coherence, which, according to
Menon, abject the queer. Histories that bring sameness and difference
together in uneasy and unexpected forms of interaction would maintain a
complex, queer, even promiscuous relationship between past and present.
Consequently, I strategically, if imperfectly, use “Renaissance” to attend
to strains of contestation working against the consolidation of the inti-
mate sphere and “early modern” to acknowledge elements that resemble
modernity.
What is more, explicitness about the complex interaction between past
and present, at least for this topic, should remind us that intimacy, embed-
ded in politics, is in flux, contestable, and rewritable. For good or ill, such
rewritings show up in the stories we tell and how we tell them. I am not only
discussing a historical process that mattered to the people who produced
and originally consumed these texts; this study has implications for mod-
ern readers of these texts and actors and directors of the dramatic texts that
I discuss. It implicitly engages the debate on same-sex marriage and civil
unions in the United States and within the European Union by opening
up the social, economic, and legal investment in marriage and coupling
to historical and ethical scrutiny. Those who advocate against same-sex
marriage frequently offer a “slippery slope” argument that same-sex mar-
riage will lead to polygamy and interspecies marriage. Such arguments are
curiously reminiscent of Stubbes’s “or worse,” and are rightly denounced
as ridiculous and illogical. Nevertheless, both sides in this current debate
take marriage’s desirability for granted, for the advocates of same-sex mar-
riage often answer the “slippery slope” argument by distancing themselves
from and even denigrating the lives of those who do not organize their
 Introduction 5
affection around long-term monogamous coupling. Even civil unions, valid
in the UK and parts of the US, and pactes civils de solidarité in France have
not prompted radical relational innovation. If anything, there has been
an entrenchment of the role of coupling, monogamy, and interiority in
affective relations. Few voices defend alternate forms of relationship and
the rights of the people who partake in them. This book asks us to consider
the costs and benefits of accepting a more expansive intimate sphere by
gesturing toward the similarities and differences between these present con-
troversies and those encoded in texts of the past. These texts all continue to
circulate, and they have the possibility to do so more widely now than in
the Renaissance given modern electronic reproduction and transmission.
Along with the affections and pleasures they represent, they are available
to modern readers as scripts for intimacy, which can be appropriated and
transformed to fit the present.

historicizing “intimacy”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun “intimacy” and the
adjective “intimate” entered the English language during the sixteenth
century and eventually came to signify a culturally valuable subset of social
relations apart from the general category of relationality. The terms that
would confer value on certain forms of relationality would be contested, but
one of the ways dominant Western culture has defined the intimate involves
subordinating one aspect of the etymological derivation of “intimacy” to
another. The intimate became easily associated with inwardness because
of its derivation from the Latin superlative intimus, or in-most. But the
Latin term can also mean proximal when it describes relationships between
things. For example, Tacitus, in his Historiae, describes the clemency that
the emperor Otho showed to the consul, Marius Celsus, for having been
loyal to Galba, the previous emperor whom Otho overthrew: “Nec Otho
quasi ignosceret sed, ne hostem metueret, conciliationes adhibens, statim
inter intimos amicos habuit.”9 Sir Henry Savile, in his 1598 translation
printed as The Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba, renders the passage:
“Otho, not as remitting a fault, but admitting the defence as just and
vertuous, straightway put him in place nearest about him.”10 Translating
“intimos” as “nearest,” Savile figures their relationship in terms of a spatial
proximity with corporeal resonances.
Proximity and profundity are distinct ways of understanding a relation-
ship. Whereas “inmost” would bypass surfaces altogether in favor of depths,
proximity remains on the level of the surface because the word implies the
6 Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare
possibility of abutment. The “proximal,” however, has fallen by the wayside
in the history of intimacy and the “inmost” has been emphasized. This def-
initional bias may have something to do with the homograph “intimate,”
the verb meaning “to suggest indirectly.” Predating the adjective “intimate”
in English, though similarly derived from the Latin intimus, “to intimate,”
with its suggestion of subtlety, involves expressing interiority, but in a
way that leaves the inward largely undisturbed by exteriority. When one
intimates something, one casts a listener in the role of a detective; when
precisely what is being intimated is discovered, the listener becomes part
of an inner circle of knowledge, and that knowledge is then interiorized by
the person receiving the information. Thus, “to intimate” is not actually to
bring something internal out, but instead, to expand the internal sphere at
the expense of the external world.
In modern Western culture’s assessment of forms of relationality that
signify as intimacy, that which is “inmost” is that which counts as “close.”
In this way, intimacy requires two psyches to connect, which may or may
not produce any physical contact. Not valuable on its own terms, what-
ever physical closeness occurs would be a function or expression of the
psychic connection. With its roots in interiority emphasized, the adjec-
tive “intimate” has been deployed to subordinate the world of surfaces,
especially corporeal ones, to that of depths, as when partners who come
to know each others’ thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams are described
as having an “intimate” relationship. In contrast, an anonymous sexual
encounter, by its very nature, involves little to no interpersonal knowl-
edge and is rarely considered intimate because such an encounter privileges
the bodily experience of sexual pleasure over psychic connectedness and
intersubjective knowledge. In the linguistic history of uses of the word
“intimate,” the proximal and the superficial, in the sense of dealing with
bodily surfaces, remain unexplored roots of the adjective “intimate.” If this
root were brought to bear on relationality, interpersonal connections that
occur primarily between bodies, rather than minds, might be reconsidered
as valuable forms of intimacy.
The relational is neither static nor unaffected by historical change or
political ideology. As this relationship between inwardness and intimacy
crystallized, the scope of “intimacy” began to take its modern, highly cir-
cumscribed form. This narrow intimate sphere excludes what Daniel Juan
Gil has termed “asocial relations” – that is, relations that do not fit neatly
in the public or private spheres. While Gil usefully defamiliarizes intersub-
jective relations by looking at those that do not fit into modern models
of intimacy, he claims they constitute “an early modern rival to intimacy,”
 Introduction 7
rather than alternate forms of intimacy, thereby suggesting that intimacy
and its opposites emerged fully formed with clear definitional boundaries.11
In contrast, I argue that the boundaries of intimacy were fluid and nego-
tiated, only eventually condensing into modern intimacy, itself subject to
contestation. The relations I discuss, then, are alternatives to marriage and
coupling, but they are not always already outside the potential bounds
of the intimate sphere in the Renaissance. Specifically, the types of rela-
tions that could be referred to as “intimate” – thereby conveying a sense
of the value and pleasure derived by those involved – included erotic,
non-erotic, cross-gender, and same-gender relations. In one of the earliest
literary printed references to intimacy, Brian Melbancke uses the word in
Philotimus (1583) to describe the closeness Aurelia has granted and then
refused to Philotimus. It refers to a heterosexual relation, but Philotimus –
whose name echoes the Latin superlative “intimus” and means “most
loving” – says Aurelia has treated him as one of her “moste intimate frends”
because he has received her favor and attention, not because they have had
sex.12 Yet Melbancke’s use of the adjective “intimate” indicates that friend-
ship, a relation that straddled the erotic and non-erotic in the period, was a
recognized part of the intimate sphere. Kingsmill Long, in his translation of
John Barclay’s Latin romance Argenis (1625), similarly associates same-sex
friendship with intimacy when he describes the warrior-statesman Arsidas
as “an intimate friend to Poliarchus,” the male protagonist who loves the
romance’s title character.13
Intimacy’s association with heterosexual relations and its grounding in
interiority were mutually reinforcing historical processes, but these pro-
cesses were inchoate in Renaissance culture. To illustrate this, we can turn
to John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), where Samson describes his urge
to marry the Woman of Timna as arising “from intimate impulse,” a phrase
that encodes his inward sense that this marriage would be part of God’s
plan to help him deliver Israel from Philistine rule.14 Samson’s use of the
word “intimate” reiterates the word’s heteroerotic meanings encoded in
the example from Philotimus but leaves behind the traditional use of the
word to refer to male friendship. Yet, if we take for granted the connection
between heterosexual marriage, intimacy, and inwardness, our understand-
ing of Samson’s use of “intimate” remains incomplete. Even as Samson
summons the “intimate” to describe the inward origins of a cross-gender
sexual relation, his marriage to the Woman of Timna cannot be completely
extracted from his social relation to the Israelites and his place in God’s
plan for the Israelite nation. Thus, drawing on the Protestant model of
experiencing an interiorized devotion to and relation with God, Milton
8 Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare
uses “intimate” to refer to impulses that are private and interior; yet these
impulses are also social and historical, coming from an external source, in
a way that does not line up with many currently dominant assumptions
about the intimate.

the rise of affection in marriage

Working against this complexity in the meaning of “intimate,” the con-
traction of the intimate sphere privileged marriage as a primary locus for
affection over other forms of relationality. Lawrence Stone’s The Family,
Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, providing much of the foundation
for the history of marriage, notes that the nuclear family, rather than the
extended family, was the common domestic unit in England; that indi-
viduals delayed marriage for some years after puberty, waiting until their
twenties when they could better afford to establish a household; and that,
though the nuptiality rate, at around eighty to ninety percent, varying by
class and gender, was lower than in non-Western societies, marriage was
commonly expected if not the common experience.15 Marriage’s statisti-
cal commonality only partly indicates its place within the relational field;
Stone’s account also tracks the period’s increasing emphasis on “intensified
affective bonding of the nuclear core at the expense of neighbors and kin.”16
Valerie Traub notes that even Stone’s critics among social historians agree
with him on the eventual dominance of marital companionship. During
the period, she argues, “erotic desire for a domestic partner, in addition to
desire for a reproductive, status-appropriate mate, became a requirement for
(not just a happy byproduct of ) the bonds between husband and wife.”17
This sense that marriage ought to be the place to experience companionship
and desire governs the effacement of affectivity and value in other relational
forms.
The Anglican Church’s official pronouncements from the period newly
emphasize the desirability of affection within marriage, and they index
the role of the English Reformation in these changes in the intimate
sphere. The Homily of the State of Matrimony (1563) reads that marriage
“is instituted of God to the intent that man and woman should live
lawfully in a perpetual friendly fellowship, to bring forth fruit, and to
avoid fornication.”18 These three features – companionship, reproduction,
and the legitimate experience of sexual pleasure – recur throughout the
period’s textual reflections on marriage, but companionship’s importance in
this formula emerges from Protestantism’s increasing, though not entirely
novel, emphasis on individual devotion to and relation with God. As it
functioned in the triadic definition of marriage, fellowship linked two
 Introduction 9
married persons together by desires experienced as interior to the body, the
same space in which many Reformation thinkers placed the experience of
religious devotion. Just as the idea that devotion could take place on the level
of psychic depth was not new, neither was the idea that marital fellowship
could take place there, but the Reformation provided a framework for a new
investment of that space, and the emotional life that could be discursively
situated there, with value.
Discussions of marital fellowship also often borrowed formulas of ideal
friendship from classical texts, such as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and
Cicero’s De Amicitia, which were concurrently being used by authors, such
as Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon, to idealize friendship as a
culturally valuable form of non-marital affection. Ideal friendship was sup-
posed to connect two, and only two, friends on an internal, psychic level –
the Aristotelian formulation of “one soul in two bodies.” The mythic and
iconic friends were almost always male couples – Damon and Pythias,
Orestes and Pylades, Titus and Gisippus, and Achilles and Patroclus, to
name a few among friendship’s pantheon. Writers about friendship fre-
quently warned readers against multiple friendships because the wills and
affections of more than two men could not truly and unfeignedly be
brought into accord; it was apparently inconceivable that three or more
bodies be inhabited by one soul. As a result, the cultural value and pres-
tige of friendship was not transferable to any relational forms other than
affective dyads.
When early modern writers on marriage mined the discourse of friend-
ship, instead of viewing marital affection as a subspecies of friendship, as
Aristotle and other classical authors had, they cast friendship as a competing
form of affection in order to obscure this borrowing and elevate marriage.
As Jeffrey Masten has shown, the classical friendship tradition was embed-
ded in same-sex affection and eroticism, and therefore the appropriation
of this discourse to articulate marital fellowship produced in the period
a resemblance between homo- and heteroeroticism that, to modern eyes,
seems alien partly because of this recasting.19 The changing status of the
story of Damon and Pythias illustrates the eventual competition of same-
sex friendship with marriage and heterosexual relations in the period. In
Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governor (1531) and Richard Edwards’s
play Damon and Pythias (1564), the pair are utopian tyranny-busters, but
later playwrights satirize their philosophy of friendship and its relationship
to heterosexual desire. In the puppet show in Bartholomew Fair (1614), for
example, Ben Jonson conflates the “Hero and Leander” and “Damon and
Pythias” stories, and the audience is treated to the spectacle of Damon
and Pythias fighting with each other and with Leander over Hero, a ribald
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