Author Archives: Anthony Funari

So I really love Time Magazine’s pick for person of the year, the Protester.

Time Magazine 2011 Person of the Year, the Protester

This is almost a complete 180 to the 2006 person of the year, “YOU.”  The cover story article for that year went on to explain that the emergence of Web 2.0 gave the average global person unprecedented power to express himself/herself.

Time Magazine 2006 Person of the Year, You

Yet as I stared at the cover I couldn’t help but feel some misgivings: it felt as if the editors were being too clever, pandering to our self-congratulatory, egotistic, overly introspective nature. The “YOU” here was inward looking; the Protester, conversely, focuses outwardly.

Kurt Andersen’s piece elaborating on Time’s choice of the Protester connects the dots so cogently among the seemingly disparate global protest movements. From the protests of the Arab Spring to the civil unrest across the EU to the diverging populous movements of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street (OWS), Andersen finds here a rebuttal to Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 claim that we had reached the “end of history.” According to Fukuyama, as a species, we had reached the end of our ideological evolution in Western Liberalism. With the rise in the global standard living in the 1990s and 2000s, according Andersen, protests became “quaint” and “obsolete.” (I’m not sure that I agree with that characterization of the WTO protests in Seattle.) However, with the self-conflagration of Mohamed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian who set himself ablaze in protest against his government’s oppression, a spark ignited the powder cage that had been building.

The iconic image of Mohamed Bouzazi

As Andersen characterizes the underlying global dissatisfaction, “For a critical mass of people from Cairo to Madrid to Oakland, prospects for personal success – for the good life at the End of History that they’d been promised – suddenly looked very grim.” With the toppling of long-standing dictatorships, see Mubarak and Ghadifi, the possible end to other corrupt leaders, see Putin and al-Assad, the ascendency of the Tea Party and OWS, I would say that we still have a long way to go in our political evolution.

But to return to the focus of this blog, connecting our present moment to that of the Early Modern, you know who really hated and fear protests, Shakespeare. Now, as most Shakespearean scholars would agree, it is nearly impossible to make any categorical, general statements about Shakespeare’s works. One cannot really make the claim that the “Shakespeare” who comes through in the plays and poems was a misogynist, or an anti-Semite, or a racist, or a Catholic, or a Protestant. Any view expressed is filtered through a character’s voice which frustrates attempting to nail down an authoritative voice. Still, though, there is a general consensus that Shakespeare loathed the “mob.” In his 1912 essay for the PMLA, Frederick Tupper, Jr. asserts that readers of Shakespeare “are one in their diagnosis of Shakespeare’s mob – that it is something disorganized, dangerous, unintelligent.” It is very difficult to dispute that Shakespeare saw pure anarchy in the “mob.”

 In depicting the mobs of ancient Rome, Shakespeare in a way draws on the two Latin words for a crowd of common people. The first is turba, the word from which we derive the English “turbulent.” A defining characteristic of a Shakespearean mob is its capacity to be easily swayed and quick to commit violence. The second is vulgus, which gives us “vulgar.” Vulgus most precisely translates to the common, general public; Shakespeare’s “mobs” are only ever composed of the working, artisan classes.

Here are just some examples of Shakespeare’s depiction of protests:

Coriolanus: When one is thinking about the haves and have-nots in Shakespeare’s plays, Coriolanus stands out. Shakespeare presents a Rome very much divided along economic class lines. The play opens with the plebeians rioting due to high corn prices that have been set by the governing patrician class. As becomes evident, the people are starving. In an episode that Shakespeare borrows from his source, Plutarch’s Lives, Menenius Agrippa, spokesperson for the senate, tells a fable in which the different organs of the body riot against the stomach for hording all of the food. The gist of the Menesius’s fable is that stomach, i.e. the patrician senate, must digest the food for the rest of the body, i.e. the plebeians.  In comes Coriolanus, who has this to say about the plebeians’ demands for fair corn prices: “Hang ‘em! . . . They say there’s grain enough!/ Would the nobility lay aside their ruth [i.e. compassion]/ And let me use me sword, I’d make a quarry/ With thousands of these quartered slaves, as high/ As I could pick my lance.” (I.i.191,197-201) Damn! If you did not catch that, essentaily what Coriolanus said was that his way of resolving the situation would be to carve these starving people into quarters and pile the remains as high as he can lift his lance. I have to wonder if Coriolanus would sign up for some overtime to pepper spray and taser the OWS protesters.

Coriolanus' way of dealing with social unrest

Our "civilized" way of dealing with social unrest

Granted that Coriolanus’s hamartia, or tragic flaw, is his elitism, yet the play’s ultimate villains are the tribunes, Velutus and Brutus, who were elected by the plebeians to protect their rights.  Btw, it is in this play that we get a common way that Shakespeare describes the mob, “the many-headed multitude” (II.ii.16), essentially equating the crowd with the mythical beast, the Hydra.

Julius Caesar:  When discussing Shakespeare’s disgust with social protests, one of my favorite scenes to talk about is from Julius Caesar.  The play begins with Caesar’s triumphant return to Rome having defeated Pompey. Shakespeare chooses to open with two patricians Marullus and Flavius, berating a crowd of plebeians for their openly rejoicing in Caesar’s victory. The two’s main complaint to the vulgus is its fickleness. As Marullus chides, “O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,/ Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft/ Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,/ To tow’r and windows, yea, to chimney tops,/ Your infants in your arms, and there have sat/ The livelong day, with patient expectation,/ To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome” (1.1.39-45). Who the victor is matters not at all to the vulgus; it simply looks to have someone on who to focus.

This aspect of the Shakespeare crowd is nowhere more evident than in the  Julius Caesar Act 3, sc. 3.  Prior to this scene, Mark Antony delivers his brilliant “Friends, Romans, countrymen” monologue, essentially turning the mob against those who conspired against Caesar.

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, if you are in favor of taking down Brutus and Cassius wiggle your fingers in the air. And could we please stop with the drum ciricle for at least like five minutes?"

So in the following scene we see the result of unleashing the vulgus. In a very dark bit a of comedy, Cinna, a poet, encounters the crowd that Antony has just addressed. The crowd confuses this Cinna for a different Cinna, one of the conspirators. Here’s the exchange:

Cinna: Truly, my name is Cinna.

First Plebian: Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator.

Cinna: I am Cinna the poet! I am Cinna the poet!

Fourth Plebian: Tear him to pieces for his bad verse! Tear him to pieces for his bad verses!

Cinna: I am not Cinna the conspirator.

Fourth Plebian: It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.

While the comedy in this scene reminds me of something worthy of Monty Python, Shakespeare speaks to an unsavory facet of crowd psychology – none of us is as cruel as all of us. A Shakespearean mob becomes an expression of a collective id, a mass of violent urges blindly seeking out a target.

This fear of the mob has some historical precedent for Shakespeare. There was a standing Elizabethan order in 1595 prohibiting “assemblies and routs compound of sundry sorts of base people.” Some of these “sorts of base people” were apprentices, who often rioted in London, masterless men, those without any real place in the Elizabethan social structure, and soldiers returning home. Part of this fear of the crowds comes as the result of the crumbling feudal structure and the growth of the London. Over the course of th 16th century, London’s population doubled due to an ever-increasing mobile population. This mass migration to the city was a consequence of the land enclosures, a process by which landlords took away the common land that had been normally set aside for tenant farmers to grow extra crops for themselves. Most of this land was converted into pastures to take advantage of the increasing wool trade. Compounding the enclosing of common land were the bad harvests from 1593-7. With less food to support themselves, more people were forced out of their homes and set out for the possible opportunities in London and often encountering disappointment. (It should be noted that Elizabeth I’s government reinstituted the Poor laws of 1576 in 1597 to alleviate the mass poverty and starvation afflicting the country.)

To wrap things up, in Shakespeare the protester does not find a friend. What we may see as truly the distilled essence of our politics, the grass roots protesters sacrificing their lives to enact meaningful change, Shakespeare saw as the destruction of society.

Works Consulted:

 Briggs, Julia. This Stage-Play World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Martindale, Charles and Michelle Martindale. Shakespare and the Uses of Anitquity. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Tupper, Frederick, Jr. “The Shakespearean Mob.” PMLA 12.1 (1912), 486-523.

P.S. I will be reviewing soon the new film adaptation of Coriolanus, starring Raph Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave, and Gerard Butler. Here’s the preview for the film. Enjoy!

After many hours spent negotiating the intricacies of Youtube, I have finally been able to post the video recordings of the book talk on December 8th at Johnson County Community College.

Here are the embedded videos:

Overall, I thought the talk went well. This, by the way, was my first time using Prezi. Also, I really want to thank all of those who asked such intelligent questions. I found out later that many of the questions were asked by some seriously astute high school students from Blue Valley West.

Stay tune to my getting to blogging next week.

So today I was interviewed on the local NPR station in Kansas City, MO. The program was Central Standard – a great title – hosted by Jubalani Leffal.

Given that this was my first on air, I found Mr. Leffal to be a very well-spoken, well-informed host with insightful questions. I have to admit that about did stumble, stutter, and “um” too much. Overall, I thought the interview went really well.

For any interested in listening to the podcast, click on the link below http://www.kcur.org/centralstandard.html Then scroll down to just below where the word “Parenting” appears. A new window should pop up. Once it does, click on the mp3 file just below December 07,2011. I come on about at the 30 min point.  Please excuse the fact that I fumble over some answers, the result of interview anxiety.

Stay tuned for a new posting soon. I am giving a book talk tomorrow at Johnson County Community College and will have the video posted to this blog by this weekend.

Enjoy.

This week’s post, which will be out on Friday, will deal with the theme of  “blame the vicitm” mentality and rape by comparing Slut Walks and Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece.

For those regular readers of mine, make sure to sucribe to this blog to receive emails about updates for new posts. Also, you can follow me on Twitter at AnthonyJFunari.

I want to begin this post with a caveat: my wife and I are in the process of moving this week, so the near 50 wine boxes containing our library are sealed and ready to be moved to the quaint two-story house in Lawrence, KS, a town that I have fallen in love with. At any rate, I won’t be able to post next week. So for any of my devoted weekly readers, I promise to make up for missing next week’s post. (Also, send us some good moving karma given that we might very well be moving in 100+ degree temperatures!)

For this week’s post, I thought I would write about technology and the 17^th century, specially the microscope. Allow me to make a generalization about our own culture: we are technophiles! We consume technology almost without after-thought. Lines wrap around Apple stores when Steve Jobs launches a slightly upgraded version of the I-Pad, I-Phone, or I-Pod.

Yay, I spent nearly a whole pay check on an I-Pad! But now I can fill that gaping hole in my life with something shiny!

 One of my favorite writing assignments to give my Comp I students is to have them identify and argue for an unintended consequence of a recent piece of technology. (I love to watch my students’ confusion when I define for them the word, luddite – the very concept that someone could be against technological advancement is so unrealizable for them.) A rather thought-provoking essay that I have my students read is Nicolas G. Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. Carr’s main argument is that with every technological advancement in the dissemination of information – writing (Carr cites Plato’s Phaedrus), Guttenberg’s printing press, the type writer, and the internet(s) – the way we think actually changes. One of Carr’s points that I stress for my students is that technology is not simply tool through which express ourselves but alters our very thought processes.

I bring this point up because it is fascinating to see the concerns that pieces of technology, which seem so innocuous to us, provoked for peoples who were experiencing them for the first time. Consider the microscope, probably the quintessential piece of technology of the Scientific Revolution.

Developed by two Dutch eye glass makers, Zaccaharias and Hans Janssens, the microscope was popularized in England by Robert Hooke. (You might remember him from your middle school biology classes for being the first who look at a slice of cork and notice the “cells” that composed it.)  In 1665, Hooke published an account/promotion of his work with the microscope, entitled Micrographia.

Robert Hooke

Hooke prefaces the work by arguing that the microscope is actually going to help humanity to regain the knowledge of nature that Adam possessed before being expelled from the Garden of Eden. As Hooke claims, humanity’s sense are in an imperfect state to what they use to be prior to the Fall and it is only through technology that they can be restored to their original condition: “The first thing to be undertaken in this weighty work, is a watchfulness over the failing and an inlargement of the dominion, of the Senses. . . The next care to be taken, in respect of the Senses, is supplying of their infirmities with Instruments, and as it were, the adding of artificial Organs to the natural. . .” In other words, the microscope was not meant to so much for advancement but rather restoration.

Frontispiece to Micrographia (1665)

Yet not all accepted Hooke’s argument for the restorative potential of the microscope. Particularly, Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle, expressed serious epistemological reservations about the microscope.

". . . though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavor to be Margaret the First"

First off, who was Margaret Cavendish: a lady-in-waiting to Charles I’s wife, Henrietta Maria, Cavendish went into exile in Belgium and France during the English Civil War and the Cromwellian regime. She returned to England in 1660 with the restoration of Charles II. Now the intellectual atmosphere of London was full of talk of the new science: university clubs devoted to experimental philosophy were very popular. In 1662, Charles II granted the charter for what would become the preeminent scientific association, the Royal Society.  Margaret was incredibly aware of the scientific/ intellectual conversations of her day: she knew René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes personally, as well as being the first woman invited to visit the Royal Society on May 23, 1667. An excellent study of Margaret Cavendish’s life and thought is Anna Battigelli’s Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (1998).

Cavendish’s most well-known work is The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666), a allegorical tale in which the protagonist, the Lady, is transported to fantastical world of which she becomes Empress.

Frontispiece to The Blazing World (1666)

The first part of The Blazing World has the new Empress being introduced the inhabitants of her realm, bird-men, fish-men, bear-men, ape-men, and, even, lice-men. Battigelli demonstrates that Cavendish in The Blazing World is responding to Hooke’s Micrographia. In a especially germane moment, the Empress meets with the experimental philosophers of her world, the bear-men, who present to her their telescopes and microscopes. Responding to the bear-men’s claims for the power of their optics, the Empress points out that rather than enhancing or rectifying our infirmed senses their optical tools do more to distort our natural perception. As Cavendish presents the matter, the microscope does not so much correct but rather obfuscate the our perception of material reality.  The bear-men’s optical instruments are noted for being able to “make a louse as big as an elephant and a mite as big as a whale”  and ” a huge  and might whale. . . no bigger than a sprat.” Ultimately, for Cavendish, the microscope did not grant a more acute, “truer,” vision of Nature but rather gave an erroneous understanding of an object. Even after being shown a telescope by the bear-men, the Empress decides that such optical instruments do more to confuse a true perception of reality:

“. . . the Empress are angry at their telescopes, that they could give no better intelligence; for, said she, that your glasses are false informers, and instead of discovering the truth, delude our senses. . . “

While Margaret Cavendish’s criticism of something that has become so fundamental to the practice of the sciences, perhaps she still may speak to how much our understanding of reality is created mechanically rather than imaginatively.

Well, it has been just over a month since my last post. I must apologize to any regular readers of this blog for this extend period of silence, yet there is a very excusable reason. Early last month, I was sent the pageproofs for my forthcoming book, the release date for which is Oct. 11th, 2011, to read over one last time for any minor corrections that I would like to make. In addition, I had to compile my index. Now, if you have not created an index before, it actually is a fascinating intellectual exercise. A writer is forced to map the book’s discussion in such a way as to offer entrance points for readers. I think it is comparable to the connect-the-dot coloring books I use to have as a child, the ones where the picture of a dragon or whatever begins to form as one draws the individual lines.

Moreover, I received some very exciting news: Carolyn Merchant has written an endorsement for the book! Here it is:

A fascinating, well-argued comparison between Francis Bacon’s narrative of recovering human dominion over nature and 17^th century skeptics who deny its possibility. Funari draws insightful parallels with today’s proponents of technological solutions and environmental philosophers who propose new ways of living with the more-than-human world. Of interest to anyone who wishes to see how history and literature can inform the roots of today’s environmental crisis.

So my part with regards to the book is over. That is, a project that has been 4 years in the making has reached its final form. Some of my family and friends have asked how it feels to be done with this project. My honest answer to them is that I am trying not to think about it. I suppose it is comparable in a much lesser degree to sending a child out into the world, hoping that you have done everything to prepare them for the harshness they may encounter. In this way, I think that the Latin poet Catullus captures it best: “Cui dono lepidum novom libellum/ Arida modo pumice expolitum?” (“To whom do I give this new little book,/ polished by the dry pumice stone?”)

Also, I want to suggest a new blog to any readers interested in history and cinema. Gabs Roman, a close friend who was invaluable in helping me with different facets of getting my manuscript ready for the printers, has a new blog, entitled Historic Histrionics.  You’ll find here insightful, witty, and, hopefully, irreverent commentaries on Hollywood’s often inaccurate depiction of the past. This is a blog very well worth your time.  (Gabs and I are planning a live Tweeting session for Robert Emmerich’s Anonymous.)

Alright, then, now to the Renaissance in today’s culture. Some of you may know that today actually commemorates Henry VIII’s beheading of arguably the greatest intellectual figure of English history, Sir/St. Thomas More.

The portrait of More as Lord Chancellor.

In 1534 to further his attempt to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Ann Boleyn, Henry VIII pushed through Parliament the Act of Supremacy, essentially establishing the Episcopal Church and declaring himself supreme head. To add a side note here, Henry’s break with the Roman Catholic Church was partially precipitated by events happening on the Continent: Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V, was essentially holding the Pope Leo X hostage while Henry petitioned him for a divorce.

Back to More. Having resigned his position as Henry’s Lord Chancellor in 1532, a position that he had held since 1529, More tried to escape from public view and quietly retire away from a political scene that was increasingly become hostile to him. Unfortunately this did not work out. More was the intellectual figure of Henry’s England: he had an international reputation as a scholar and corresponded with much of the European intelligentsia. (Erasmus was a close personal friend of More, but more on that in a bit.) So when More remained silent when asked to take the Oath of Supremacy, much was made of it. (More’s strategy was that as long as he remained silent on the question of the King’s Supremacy over the Church, he was not committing high treason.) When brought to trial, Henry’s Solicitor General, Sir Richard Rich, claimed that More had told him in prison that Parliament did not have the legal authority to declare the King the Head of the Church. Though no other evidence was offered against More, the verdict was pretty much a forgone conclusion. Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Season (1966), portrays More as struggling to hold onto his convictions while seeking the safety of his family.  Here’s a clip from the film adaptation of Bolt’s play, starring Paul Scofield as More and Robert Shaw as Henry VIII. In this clip More has just been convicted of high treason  and at last speaks his conscious:

And just because I thought that Jeremy Northam did a superb job portraying More, here is a clip from the Tudors, season 2:

In the image of the martyr who died resisting Henry VIII’s tyranny, I think an important facet of More’s character is often overlooked – his sense of humor. (Erasmus, the European intellectual of the early 16th c., dedicated his most well-known book, The Praise of Folly (1509), to More. The Latin title of The Praise of Folly  [Moriae Econium] is actually a pun on More’s name.) The work of More that best conveys his sardonic wit is Utopia (1519).

This is the frontispiece for the 1516 edition. It is a map of the fictional Isle of Utopia.

Begun while on a diplomatic mission in Antwerp, Utopia is fictional account of a supposedly ideal society that has been isolated from the rest of the world for centuries. From the beginning of the book, More demands a very attentive reader. The text this layered: it appears as More’s letter to Peter Giles which includes More’s transcription of Raphael Hythlodeaus’s description of his travels in Utopia that does not begin until the second part. More removes the reader thrice textually from Utopia itself. Moreover, More gives a few puns, often lost in translation, that signal to the reader the irony of the text. Hythlodeaus’s name is an amalgamation of two Greek words, hythlas that translates to “non-sense” and daiein, “to distribute.” So the person offering an account of a utopian society is a peddler of non-sense. Furthermore, utopia, a word which More himself originated from Greek, can be translated one of two ways, either as eu-topia, essentially a “good” place, or as ou-topos, “no place.”

Rather than summarize the entire window into Utopian civilization that More creates via Hythlodeaus, here are just some highlights:

1) Utopians have a communist economy: there is no conception of private ownership, nor is there any monetary system. While there is an abundance of precious metals and gems, these are used to pay foreign mercenaries to fight their wars. Hythlodeaus notes how the wearing of gold actually marks one as a slave, while citizens wear leather jerkins of the craftsmen. (You can see why More’s text appealed so much to Marxist scholars of the 1960s.)

2) In his description of the cultural rituals, Hythlodeaus recounts the custom of the betrothed couple having the opportunity to see each other naked prior to being wedded. If we take More as being sincere here, he is being incredibly progressive, suggesting the importance of sexual compatibility for a successful marriage.

3) The Utopians live in a rigid society, that constantly polices its citizens. For example, the size of the households, of which there are sixteen in each of the fifty-four cities that make up Utopia, is strictly maintained between ten and sixteen adults. Or in order to travel between the different cities, one must gain the permission of the local magistrate, or in Utopian language, the syphogrant. Idleness is not tolerated. As Hythlodeaus claims, “So you see that nowhere is there any chance to be idle; there is no excuse for laziness, no wine taverns, no alehouses, no brothels . . . no hangouts.”

Before delving into his account of Utopia, Hythlodeaus tells More that had he seen Utopia firsthand like he himself had and live there for five and half years, “then doubtless you would grant that you never saw people well ordered, but only there.” Here Hythlodeaus voices the irony that pervades More’s text: unless you have actually lived in Utopia you will never be able to live in Utopia. Or as Clarence H. Miller states in his introduction to the Yale University Press edition: “We are always being brought back to the basic paradox: the institutions cannot be introduced unless they have already been introduced” (xvi).

To those weekly readers of Renaissance Matters:

This week’s post will be a bit late. I have just started teaching an intensive one-month long composition course. This week’s post dedicated to Scottish nationalism will be up tomorrow.

In the meantime, I wanted to give you an advance preview of my first book’s cover design.

The release date for the book is Oct. 11,2011.

So the Department of Justice has decided to move forward with charges against John Edwards for possibly illegally using campaign funds to cover up his affair with Rielle Hunter. The price to hide his infidelity from the public eye while campaigning for the presidency with his cancer stricken wife: approximately $1 million. I have to give credit to my wife who couldn’t see the logic to the government’s case: not spending the funds to hush up the affair would have hurt his election chances. In other words, the money was spent on a legitimate campaign expense.

The news of the DOJ’s indictment of Edwards comes on the heels of another very prominent politician admitting to an extramarital affair. A week after announcing his separation from, Maria Shriver, his wife of 25 years, Arnold Schwarzenegger publicly admitted to his affair with a member of his household staff, who bore him a son ten years ago. (Let’s be honest, though, Schwarzenegger’s affair can hardly come as a shock to most, considering the numerous women who came forward during his 2003 gubernatorial campaign with charges of his having molested them, charges, btw, that he did not dispute.)

While this blog is not the space to begin exploring the intersection of male power and infidelity nor the long tradition of American’s scrutinizing of our politicians’ sexual lives I did come across an excellent opinion piece on Salon.com, “The upside of ‘puritanical’ politics.” In her article, Alyssa Battistoni argues that while the American tradition of “finger-pointing” and “redemption” regarding male politician’s sexual indiscretions has become essentially an empty ritual, or “pageantry,” the French mode of turning a blind eye simply effaces the underlying imbalanced access to power, that “men have the power, and women have sex with the power.”  For Battistoni, neither the American nor the French model offers a means of critiquing in a nuanced way the relationship between sex, gender, and power: whereas the American model focuses on the individual failings of the man, eschewing the personal and the political, the French simply tacitly sanctions the mindset that presents women as “prizes” for successful men. As Battistoni sums up, “The fact is that for all their differences, neither the French nor the American approach really takes seriously the challenge of addressing the culture of deference to powerful men, or of talking about the difficult and often ambiguous questions around the public relevance of sexual politics.”

With this recent spate of powerful men having their philandering brought to light, I am reminded of the libertine court of Charles II.

John Malkovich as Charles II in The Libertine (2004)

Now here was a realm where drunken debauchery was the order of the day. Before I get into the epic sexcapades that were the hallmark of the Restoration court, let me give a bit of context. Kings and their affairs/ illegitimate children were nothing new to the English monarchy. (Royal marriages were political arrangements that in no way resembled the highly romanticized ideal of Kate and William.)  Typically, these bastard offspring of the kings would be made into lesser nobles, see Henry VIII’s son Henry FitzRoy (“Son of the King”) who was made 1st Duke of Richmond and Somerset. Charles II, however, out did himself in this aspect of his reign.

Culture has a pendulum-like dynamic to it –  a swing one way in social, political, moral attitudes is often corrected by an equal movement in the opposite direction. Such a correction happened in England at the beginning of 1660. Following an almost two-decade long Puritanical rule, that concluded with the brief reign of Cromwell’s inept son, Richard (a.k.a “Tumble Down Dick”), the Stuart monarchy was brought back, or restored. After yet another army coup of Parliament in 1659, led by Generals Lambert and Monk, Charles II was invited back to London on May 1st, 1660 to be crowned. Throughout his reign, Charles would be linked to numerous mistresses, such as Louise de Kéroualle (Duchess of Portsmouth) and Barbara Palmer (Countess of Castlemaine). Charles’ taste for mistresses was not confined to the aristocracy; he often found lovers on the stage. (It was during the Restoration that England adopted the Continental practice of allowing women actresses.) The most famous of Charles’ “common” mistresses was Nell Gywn, an actress who would bear Charles two sons. (Interestingly, with all of the illegitimate children Charles would have, nine in all, he would die without an heir, paving the way for his Catholic brother, James II.)

Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. 1682 by Pierre Mignard

Nell Gwyn depicted as Cupid, circa 1672

Now there was reasonable public concern about how much influence these mistresses had over Charles. For example, Kéroualle, being French, was thought to be attempting to convert Charles to Catholicism. Worry over the French Catholic influence via Kéroualle was so palpable that she would often have her carriage pelted with mud and rocks by Londoners. One time, Nell’s carriage was mistaken for Kéroualle’s and was likewise attacked. The story goes that Nell leaned out the window and shouted, “Nay good people, I am the Protestant whore.” All of this philandering took its toll on the royal coffers. When Charles lamented his financial straits to his “good Nelly,” she told flatly how to remedy the situation: “Send the French [Kéroualle] to France again, set me on the stage again, and lock up your own cod-piece.”  (Moll Davis, another one of Charles’ mistresses from the stage, supposedly received an annual pension of a £1,ooo. Although, as Nell Gywn’s biographer, Charles Beauclerk remarks, with the death of Charles on Feb. 14th, 1685, his mistresses were for all intents and purposes thrown out into the cold.)

If it seems that I am reducing Charles II’s time on the throne to merely his affairs, I do not mean to. Charles was a great patron of the emerging scientific community – it was under his reign that the Royal Society was granted its initial charter. However, even those in his closest circles felt Charles was easily swayed by his sexual desires. John Wilmot, the 2nd earl of Rochester, satirized Charles’ susceptibility to his mistresses in a lampoon that he accidently gave to the King. (A heads-up: the language may be offensive to those who have never read Rochester’s poetry before. Hell, it may even be offensive still to those who have.) 

Rochester was certainly not a prude himself. On his death, he claimed to having been drunk for three years straight. Moreover, Rochester's wife and mistress both shared the same first name, Elizabeth, and each gave birth to daughters, named Elizabeth.

Rochester portrays Charles as entirely given over to the whims of his penis, placing the fate of England in the hands (pun intended) of his mistresses: “Nor are his high desires above his strength:/ His scepter and his prick are of a length;/ And she may sway the one who plays with th’other” (lns. 10-12). Rochester expresses an anti-monarchial sentiment in voicing his fear that Charles appears to care less for the welfare of his people than for satisfying his lust: “Though safety, law, religion, life lay on’t,/ ‘Twould break through all to make its way to cunt” (lns. 18-19) Rochester finishes by describing the efforts that “Nelly” has to go through to “raise the member she enjoys.” (Earlier in the poem, Rochester hints at Charles’ impotence.)

With all of the sex scandals of men in power – Schwarzenegger, Edwards, and, to be Continental, Berlusconi, Rochester’s lampoon of Charles II may have some more currency for our conversation about sex, power, and gender.