Homosociality, Imitation, and Gendered Reading in Robert Greene's Ciceronis Amor

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Perhaps the single most important trend in criticism of sixteenth-century English prose fiction over the past twenty years has been a shift from questions of genre to those treating the nexus of gender, readership, and subject formation. (1) The preponderance of this work has focused on women. Early scholars, noting both the tendency of these works to deal with "women's concerns" such as marriage and courtship, and the frequency with which they directly addressed or were dedicated to women, considered English prose fiction as a tentative challenge to a largely oppressive patriarchal culture. (2) More recent studies of the cultural work of early modern narrative have expressed much ambivalence about the way in which such writing "produced" women: whether texts that presented powerful women were necessarily designed or seen as a means to open up new avenues for women's agency. (3) Whereas Tina Krontiris emphasizes prose narrative as an oppositional form, Caroline Lucas and Helen Hackett are much more reticent, their chief disagreement concerning whether early modern women were frustrated or fairly content with roles that seem by present standards rather impoverished. (4) Others register skepticism about references to women readers. Even in her pioneering work, Suzanne Hull noted both a growth in books addressed to a female audience and continued anxieties about women reading. (5) Jacqueline Pearson expands the latter point, showing how women's reading was often associated with "disease, madness, deception, rebellion, and transgression of the boundaries of acceptable femininity," (6) while even sanguine accounts of the period acknowledge the relative passivity of women readers. (7) Such evidence leads Lori Newcomb to conclude that, even in the sixteenth but especially in the seventeenth century, women readers and prose fiction were often associated to the detriment of both. (8) And while most discussions of gender continue to focus on women, more recent work has opened up the topic to include discussions of men as well. Critics are much more attuned to the homoerotic potential in much Elizabethan narrative. (9) Beyond that, they are framing questions based on the recognition that man, like woman, is made rather than born: What was the role of early modern prose fiction in defining and reinforcing standards of masculinity? How did works that privileged women characters and even addressed women readers cater to men readers as well? As Lorna Hutson convincingly argues, these questions are closely related: prose narratives that seemed to focus on "women's concerns" were also, or perhaps even foremost, about relations between men. (10)

Dubbed "the Homer of women" by Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene clearly participated in the growing place for women readers in Elizabethan England. Yet while he directly addressed women on several occasions, his work also epitomizes early modern ambivalence towards them. (11) He dedicated Penelopes Web (1589) to the Countesses of Cumberland and Warwick, claiming that the work was devoted to "discouering the virtues of your sex," but made an about-face in a immediately subsequent address "To the Gentlemen readers health," apologizing for writing of "womens prattle, about the vntwisting of Penelopes Web." (12) Similar contradictions can be found in A Myrrour of Modestie, which he dedicated to the Countess of Darbie, but only after telling his "gentle readers" that he had written "such trash," and that only "to feede hir fancie I have shewed my self to be so fonde." (13) Retractions of this sort are merely specific examples of the more global palinode of the late penitential writings, where he rejected his amatory work as just so much prodigality. (14) Here I would like to consider the particularly rich meditation on issues of gender and the readership of vernacular prose fiction in Ciceronis Amor of 1589, an initially popular yet now mostly neglected work dating from just before Greene renounced his amatory fiction. (15) The very premise of the story, which concerns the young love of Rome's greatest orator, suggests a commingling of humanist learning and "women's concerns," and as such exemplifies the broad translatio by which such learning was made available for a non-scholarly readers. More specifically, I shall argue that the work uses its amatory intrigues to explore and evaluate what modern scholars increasingly recognize as the "multiple literacies" of early modern England, particularly for a form like vernacular prose fiction. (16) This examination is grounded in a feature of the plot that is neatly expressed by a grammatical ambiguity in the title of the work: the fact that Ciceronis may be taken as either a subjective or an objective genitive, so that the orator may be beloved as well as lover. It is by presenting the familiar humanist narrative of Cicero as an object of desire that Greene introduces distinct (and distinctly gendered) reactions to the orator and his eloquence. This drama of desire is in part Greene's commentary on the familiar topic of imitation: to what degree one should love Ciceronian eloquence, and in what way. In Ciceronis Amor Greene develops a more thoroughly gendered account of Ciceronian reception by recourse to a commonplace of early modern narrative, a love triangle. Eve Sedgwick has explored the complex dynamics of love triangles, showing how competition between men over a woman is actually an occasion to focus on homosocial relations, (17) and Lorna Hutson proposes a similar framework for early modern writing, where she finds fictional love triangles part of a crucial shift from a gift culture to one in which same-sex bonds were grounded in affective relations. (18) Ciceronis Amor follows the pattern described by these critics in that its other-sex amatory narrative is ultimately subordinated to the homosocial relations it serves to define; friendship, not marriage, is the affective and ethical center of the work. It is Cicero's position at the apex of this triangle of desire that provides a distinctly literary resonance to the explicit homosociality and implicit antifeminism of the fiction. Yet Ciceronis Amor is not antifeminist in any simple way. Rather than merely writing for or against women, Greene conceives of multiple, divergent, and even conflicting readings of his work, (19) leaving his valuations of those readings for the most part concealed or implicit. (20)

These dramas occur in one of Greene's more unusual works, in that there appears to be no immediate source for its main action. Cicero was not even an obvious choice for a love story. For the orator was best known as an authority on Latin style and as a distinctly political figure, whose rhetorical practice was to be understood in the context of the later Roman Republic, and whose triumphs and ultimate defeat in turn provided a coded means by which early modern writers could meditate on the fortunes of political speech in their own time. (21) Greene obliquely acknowledges and rejects this tradition of Cicero as political exemplum when he claims that he seeks "to pen downe the loves of Cicero, which Plutarch, and Cornelius Nepos, forgot in their writings" (2). Most modern critics have taken such playfulness at face value, either ignoring Ciceronis Amoror treating it as mere pastiche, in which the great Roman orator and his milieu become no more than a vehicle for generic amatory intrigues. (22) Charles Larson, the most recent editor of the work, makes the point bluntly: "No one is ever going to go to Ciceronis Amor to learn anything about Cicero's Rome." (23) In one sense such a view is certainly correct: it would be a mistake to treat Ciceronis Amoras accurate history, much less fictional biography. Yet it is equally mistaken to de-historicize the work and effectively consign it to a kind romance never-never land. For as Constance Relihan shows in her recent work on Greene, even if Ciceronis Amor has little to teach us about Rome, it has a great deal to say about early modern literacy. In both her introduction to an essay collection, and subsequently a full-length article, she considers how the work participates in what she calls "the period's intellectual negotiation between humanism and female readers of romance"--a negotiation which, she acknowledges, is full of tensions and ambiguities, as writers both solicit and exclude women readers. (24) One particularly important feature of this negotiation is Latin. For while historians debate the precise level of women's vernacular literacy in early modern England, (25) most agree that Latin was at least perceived as a threshold separating scholars from most men and all but the most privileged of women. (26) And since at least most Elizabethan writers no doubt assumed that women had little need or aptitude for learning Latin, the presence of untranslated Latin was generally be considered a barrier to women readers, especially non-elite ones; thus Latin quotations, as Relihan puts it, often "prevent the non-humanistically-educated female reader from having full access to the text's meaning." (27) It is in this context that Ciceronis Amor appears to present a striking exception. Because Greene's work features a scene in which women characters actually read and comment on untranslated Latin, Relihan suggests that it "reveals a more complex relationship, an indication--whether conscious or not--of the collapse of humanist learning as a means of clarifying class and gender relations." (28) She concludes that "Greene's romance, which on the narrative level so overtly invokes the humanist practice of Latin education, reveals a deep distrust of the ways in which that system reifies male speech and relationships and devalues women's intellectual and interpretive skills." (29) Relihan is certainly right to focus on …