3. A Waste of Shame: The Heroics of Marriage in English Renaissance Tragedy

The Stage is more beholding to Love, then the Life of Man, " Francis Bacon asserts in a typically bald and direct observation added to his essay "Of Love" in 1625."For as to the Stage, " he continues, "Love is ever matter of Comedies, and now and then of Tragedies: But in Life, it doth much mischiefe: Sometimes like a Syren; Sometimes like a Fury ....For whosoever esteemeth too much of Amorous Affection, quitteth both Riches and Wise dome ....They doe best, who, if they cannot but admit Love, yet make it keepe Quarter: And sever it wholly, from their serious Affaires, and Actions of life."1 Connecting a contemptuous view of erotic love as destructive and frivolous with a negative view of the stage as illusory, by implication properly divorced, like love, from "the serious affairs and actions of life, " Bacon conjoins two characteristic Renaissance conceptions of sexuality and the the-1.Sir Francis Bacon, "Of Love, " in his The Essayes or Counsels, Civil/ and Moral, ed. with introduction and commentary by Michael Kiernan (Cam bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985) , pp. 31-33.As Kiernan ex plains (pp.vii, xix), thirteen printed editions of The Essayes were published during Bacon's lifetime, and he continued to revise them for almost thirty years, from 1597 to 1625."Of Love" was first published in 1612, although the passage quoted is from the 1625 edition, the last to appear in Bacon's lifetime.Though the second and third sections I have quoted (indicated by ellipses) received little revision, the opening part of the passage (3-24, p. 31) has been substantially revised and augmented.The original read as follows: "Love is the argument alwaies of Comedies, and many times of Tragedies.Which sheweth well, that it is a passion generally light, and sometimes extreme."Inter-6.See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); and Gordon ].Schochet, Patriarchal ism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Sp eculation and Attitudes, Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975).Schochet argues (p.54) that although the family was an established and frequently employed category in political philosophy prior to the seventeenth century, the family was never consciously recognized as a standard category in political argument and did not acquire an overtly important status in the centuries before the Stuart period.Sec also Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic, 1977) . Heroics of Marriage in Renaissance Tragedyviewed the shift in emphasis toward the erotic in Jacobean tragedy as a pessimistic diminishment, expressing a lack of confidence in public life and leading to sensationalism and the decadence of the form.7 Less concerned with moral judgment, those sympathetic to what is often termed the "tragedy of intrigue" nevertheless persist in viewing these plays as a falling-off: their insistent, exclusive emphasis on the private life, it is assumed, leaves them devoid of political significance.8 In contrast, new historicist approaches to this problem argue forcefully for the central political significance of sexuality in Jacobean tragedy.Yet these analyses tend to treat the representation of women and eras exclusively as a metaphor for what are viewed as "larger" social and political issues, perceiv ing the former as an allegory (often a disguise) of and for the latter, rather than regarding politics and sexuality as analogously related but distinctively important realms of experience.Thus new histor icist approaches retain a hierarchical bias in which private experi ence remains subordinate to (i.e. , less serious than) the concerns of public life.9 In contrast, I argue that Jacobean tragedies oflove and 7. See, e.g.

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