Fulke Greville's Friendly Patronage

Abstract

P RACTICAL exigencies and theoretical prescriptions suggest that patronage and Renaissance friendship are mutually exclusive. Patronage relies upon power difference: it is after all difference in status, however defined, that enables one person to help another as patron. Richard Saller includes asymmetry, as opposed to friendship between equals as a defining characteristic of patronage relationships,' and socio-anthropological theories of patronage demonstrate that it is essential that the exchange of patronage (the benefaction of the patron, for instance, reciprocated by the gratitude of the client) maintain this imbalance: the client must not reciprocate to a degree equivalent to the initial benefaction.2 This may be contrasted to gift-giving between friends, in which one would seek to exchange gifts of equal or greater value. Correspondingly, Renaissance writers, heavily influenced by classical predecessors, define friendship in terms of parity, equality, similarity, and balance.3 It is not just that the friend is, in the familiar idiom, another self. Differences in status or temperament are a definitive impediment to friendship: Montaigne insists that differences in power negate the possibility of friendship, so that men and women, and parents and children, cannot be friends. As Cicero's De Amicitia puts it (in Harington's translation), unlykenesse of condy-