Catherine Bates

Masculinity, Gender, and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric

In early modern lyric poetry, the male poet or lover often appears not as powerful and masterly but rather as broken, abject, and feminine. Catherine Bates examines the cultural and literary strategies behind this representation and uncovers radically alternative models of masculinity in the lyric tradition of the Renaissance. Focusing on Sidney, Ralegh, Shakespeare, and Donne, she offers astute new readings of a wide range of texts – a sonnet sequence, a blazon, an elegy, a complaint, and an epistle. She shows how existing critical approaches have too much invested in the figure of the authoritative male writer to be able to do justice to the truly radical nature of these alternative masculinities. Taking direction from recent psychoanalytic theories of gender formation, Bates develops critical strategies that make it possible to understand and appreciate what is genuinely revolutionary about these texts and about the English Renaissance lyric tradition at large.

Desire, discontent, parody

If English Renaissance sonnet sequences are about anything they are about desire, but in order to appreciate the import of that word it might be worth, for a moment, transmuting it into a baser metal: to convert ‘desire’, that is, into the older and more native word, ‘want’. ‘Want’ derives from the Old Norse vant , which entered the language via the Viking invasions of the Dark Ages and, from the beginning, signified a lack or deficiency, the state of missing or not having something, as in – to cite the Oxford English Dictionary ’s example – var vant kýr , ‘a cow was missing’ (‘to wane’ – to reduce or diminish in size – derives, incidentally, from the same source). It was not until the eighteenth century, some thousand years later, that the verb ‘to want’ first came to develop the positive sense of yearning or longing for the missed object, while the noun never did, retaining its original negative sense to this day (as in ‘a want of delicacy’, ‘the war on want’, and so forth). When English Renaissance sonneteers use ‘want’, then, it is invariably to indicate a state of lack, as when Sidney’s Astrophil complains, for example, that, since his beloved Stella is absent, ‘I, alas, do want her sight’. If they wished to indicate a positive craving or wish, the sonneteers did, of course, have the word ‘desire’ available to them.

George Turberville and the Painful Art of Falconry

From classical times the imagery of the hunt was mobilized to figure two contrasting representations of the masculine subject. On the one hand, the hunt was used to depict a definitively empowered and instrumental masculinity in the figure of the good huntsman who conquers nature and successfully bags his prey. On the other, it showed a conversely disempowered and abject masculinity in the figure of the poor huntsman who misses his target, fails to catch his prey, or, most frequently, ends up caught or entangled himself. These contrasting figurations were employed with particular force when, as so often, the hunt was used as a metaphor for the sexual chase. The present article considers representations of the abject huntsman in the work of two sixteenth‐century poets, George Tuberville and George Gascoigne, both of whom also translated highly popular hunting manuals, The Booke of Faulconrie and The Noble Arte of Venerie respectively. It then discusses the way the sport of falconry—a distinct subset of the hunters repertoire—is used to foreground these contrasting and contradictory masculinities in Turberville. Specific features of falconry—above all, the fact that the falcons preferred for hunting were, on account of their superior size and weight, the females of the species—created a gendering that was unique to that sport. As the male falconer painstakingly trained (“manned”) his bird, developed an ideally “courteous” relation with her, and responded to her “disobedience” (flying away or, worse still, flying to another man), the art of falconry becomes, within a vocabulary that was otherwise deeply convention‐bound if not to say clichéd, a particularly complex metaphor for the sexual chase and for representations of a peculiarly disempowered masculinity. (C. B.)