Cicero on Stage: Damon and Pythias and the Fate of Classical Friendship in English Renaissance Drama

Abstract

Male friendship is the source of some very bad behavior on the English Renaissance stage. All that was mine Silvia I give thee, says Valentine to his Proteus the conclusion to Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona (5.4.83). Valentine's offer of his fiancee to Proteus would be disconcerting even if it did not take place, as it fact does, on the heels of Proteus's failed attempt to rape Silvia. An equally troubling invocation of friendship appears George Peele's The Old Wives Tale, which the protagonist, Eumenides, makes a bargain to divide half of his possessions with the ghost of his Jack; when Jack lays claim to half of Eumenides' wife Delia, her husband is ready to cut his mate two rather than falsify my word unto my friend (line 933). Marlowe's Edward II ignores his queen for his Gaveston, to whom he offers access to the royal treasury and permission in our name [to] command / Whatso thy mind affects or fancy likes (1.1.168-69). And Beaumont and Fletcher's The Coxcomb, the title character demonstrates his dedication to altruistic male friendship by insisting that another man sleep with his wife.1 Each of these bizarre moments is enabled, at least part, by the ideological power of a highly theorized tradition of ideal male friendship stretching from Aristotle to Montaigne and best known sixteenthand seventeenth-century England through numerous translations and adaptations of Cicero's influential treatise on friendship, Laelius de amicitia. The nature of Renaissance friendship is receiving increasing attention by scholars of early English literature. Since Laurens J. Mills's landmark 1937 survey, One Soul Bodies Twain, which remains an indispensable resource for establishing the ubiquity of friendship medieval and especially Renaissance English literature, scholars have explored the practice of friendship the context of humanist letters, kinship, companionate marriage, economic and political alliances, monarchy and mignonnerie, patronage, artistic collaboration, and sexuality.2