Arts & Sciences Research Paper #16: The Double Bind: Thomas Campion and Elizabethan Women
Our sixteenth A&S Research Paper comes to us from Lord Drake Oranwood of the Shire of Rusted Woodlands, who examines the work of the Elizabethan songwriter Thomas Campion, and uses his texts as a way to look closely at the role of women in that complex society. (Prospective future contributors, please check out our original Call for Papers.)
The Double Bind: Thomas Campion and Elizabethan Women
The role of women in Elizabethan society is something that quickly called attention to itself from my first studies of Elizabethan popular songs. In developing an Elizabethan persona, I become quite fond of lute songs, as exemplified by John Dowland and his less-celebrated colleague, Thomas Campion. The more of these pieces I learned, however, the more troubling I found the attitudes about women that peeked through (between the lines, as it were). It is no secret that women lacked social equality with men throughout the Medieval and Renaissance period. Still, these pithy bits of popular entertainment provided a surprising window into the conflicting, contradictory, and inescapable demands to which women, particularly young women of the upper classes, were subjected. These quandaries of inequality have existed throughout history, of course, but the writings of the 16th century (written primarily by men) rarely articulated it as such or gave it a name. In the twentieth century a term emerged for this sort of paradoxical dilemma and the strain it places on its subjects: the double bind, which describes “a situation in which a person is confronted with two irreconcilable demands or a choice between two undesirable courses of action.” (Oxford English Dictionary)
In this article, I will examine primarily two songs from Campion’s first songbook, A Book of Airs (1601).[1] These two songs can, if juxtaposed together, be read as telling the story of an Elizabethan relationship first from a man’s perspective, then the woman’s contrasting one. This tale may serve to shed a light on the double bind faced by women Campion observed, and the different constricting forms it took. During Elizabeth’s reign, the power and entitlement men held over women, the conflicting roles and demands placed upon women of status, particularly in matters of sexuality, metastasized into ever more beautiful but suffocating forms.
| Song XII.
Thou art not fair, for all thy red and white, Yet love not me, nor seek thou to allure
|
Song V.
My love hath vowed he will forsake me Had I foreseen what is ensued, Dissembling wretch! to gain thy pleasure That heart is nearest to misfortune |
Our exploration begins with “Thou art not fair”, a fairly typical love song of its time (and indeed many others), but which has a few features of particular interest to us. A male lover’s plea for his lady’s favor, it begins as many such pieces do with sharp accusation:
Thou art not fair, for all thy red and white,
For all those rosy ornaments in thee…
With classic Elizabethan word-play, Campion opens with a heavily loaded phrase: “Thou art not fair”. By punning on the word “fair”, our suitor is actually accusing his lady-friend of falling short of two ideals about English women, both of them double binds. He is calling her ”unfair” in the sense that she is denying him what he is entitled to as a man (and we shall explore that point in detail shortly). He is additionally suggesting she is not “fair”, meaning beautiful according to the standards of the day. But with “for all thy red and white” and “rosy ornaments”, he adds a third, literal, meaning to “fair” that illuminates those standards of beauty: she is not pale-skinned (or less so than she appears). He is accusing her of wearing makeup, which by the end of 16th century had become a special sort of insinuation.
Of course, most cosmetic formulations to create this alabaster skin, along with rosy lips and cheeks, were highly toxic and damaged the skin (and when lead was part of the mixture, the brain) with prolonged use. Elizabeth herself, as she aged, suffered from her constant use of cosmetics in public, and thus relied on them ever more heavily, which in turn subjected her to an increasing level of subversive mockery. In living up to men’s expectations of beauty, English noble women found themselves increasingly suspected and accused of being painted impostors wearing false fronts to disguise their bodies’ decay. By late in the reign, literary jabs at noblewomen for their made-up paleness were fairly common. Campion, ever the wit, made use of the trope elsewhere, for example in “I care not for these ladies” from this same songbook:
| I care not for these ladies, That must be wooed and prayed: Give me kind Amaryllis, The wanton country maid. Nature art disdaineth, Her beauty is her own. For when we court and kiss, She cries, “Forsooth, let go!” But when we come where comfort is, She never will say no. |
If I love Amaryllis, She gives me fruit and flowers: But if we love these ladies, We must give golden showers. Give them gold, that sell love, Give me the nut-brown lass, … |
Campion contrasts the upper-class “ladies” in question with the more accessible earthiness of Amaryllis, whose “beauty is her own” (i.e., not painted on), and whose body, tan from outdoor work, is far more readily available, with much less fuss, to men. Ladies’ makeup is a protective coating which makes them artificially beautiful, and less attainable, and the suitor of “Thou art not fair” mocks his lady’s (likely compulsory) use of it, hoping to lower her defenses:
| Thou art not sweet, though made of mere delight, Not fair nor sweet, unless thou pity me. I will not soothe thy fancies: thou shalt prove That beauty is no beauty without love. |
Yet love not me, nor seek thou to allure My thoughts with beauty, were it more divine: Thy smiles and kisses I cannot endure, I’ll not be wrapt up in those arms of thine: Now shot it, if thou be a woman right,— Embrace, and kiss, and love me, in despite! |
Lowering her defenses is indeed his aim, and he will carp at her until she bestows her “pity” on him. A classic trope of male entitlement (still widespread today, but rife in songs of the period) is the notion that a woman’s beauty holds such power over a man that it is cruelty beyond measure for her to tempt him with “smiles and kisses” but withhold sexual favors. Her “beauty is no beauty without love,” and note the ascending scale of the demands: “Embrace, and kiss, and love me, in despite!” Thus the suitor makes plain one end of the greater double bind we alluded to earlier—male entitlement. A desirable woman is hateful if she rejects a man’s sexual needs.
No thought is given in the piece to what the woman in question wants, or whether it is compatible with the man’s sense of entitlement; this is a commonplace of the genre. As Theresa D. Kemp observes, “The modes and genre of courtly love…rarely image an inner life or subjectivity for the lady; she is merely the object of the speaker’s desire.” (Women in the Age of Shakespeare, p. 3.)[3]
So, what if she acquiesces to the fervent plea, and gives herself to the poor fellow (as he appears to imagine himself), instead of taunting him with her supposedly deadly power? It is one thing for the low-born Amaryllis to freely enjoy the delights of the flesh with a man, but quite another for a “red and white” painted (and doubly bound) lady to do so. In “My love hath vowed,” Campion unspools the fate of a girl who makes this choice and faces the consequences of yielding to a man’s sexual entitlement. His telling suggests empathy for her plight, and yet surely this would have served as a stern warning and cautionary tale to any young woman of the day who heard it.
My love hath vowed he will forsake me
And I am already sped.
For other promise he did make me
When he had my maidenhead.
If such danger be in playing
And sport must to earnest turn,
I will go no more a-maying.
In contrast to the supposedly romantic sparring of the previous song, here we discover the aftermath of a consummated tryst. This young woman’s lover wastes no time “forsak[ing]” her on learning of her pregnancy, and, she is “already sped” from the scene of her shame. Her confession—that she gave him her “maidenhead”—is startlingly explicit for Elizabethan songs, which referenced sex constantly, but always veiled in coded language and wordplay. (“Maidenhead,” while used a few times by Shakespeare, appears in no other extant lute song of the period.[4]) There is “danger” in “playing” indeed: she has been ruined socially. This, then, is the other side of the double bind of men’s sexual entitlement: a pregnant, unmarried noblewoman has no bright future in this society.
The Elizabethan age was a period of great change, and a number of scholars mark Elizabeth’s coronation as the true beginning of the English Renaissance. To the extent that term “renaissance” means “rebirth”, however, it cannot be said to have been a step forward for women in Europe, and this was as true in England as anywhere.[5] In a world led exclusively by men, the rise of a woman to the supreme power might suggest the possibility of new equalities, but English society at large responded to this development with, if anything, a hardening and tightening of attitudes about power. In the decades prior, social changes had already been working to make life for high-born English women increasingly constricted and binding, more like a vise than a corset.
Crucially, the role of upper-class women had been shaped increasingly by concerns around wealth and inheritance. The jaws of the vise predated this era: the 14th-century establishment of primogeniture (the eldest male heir would now always be first in line for inheritance), and Henry VIII’s abolition of England’s monasteries in 1536 as part of the Reformation (eliminating convents, the one option for women to have an independent livelihood and life of the mind, outside the sway of men to a greater degree than secular life afforded). By Elizabeth’s time, an unmarried woman generally could not own or run a business on her own, and if married, all property was in the husband’s name. The only alternative to marriage was now domestic service.[vi] (Elizabeth herself famously avoided marriage, and the attendant loss of power and status, despite constant public pressure for an heir—and, of course, her choice not to provide one would end the Tudor line and her legacy of power.)
Had I foreseen what is ensued,
And what now with pain I prove,
Unhappy then I had eschewed
This unkind event of love.
Maids foreknow their own undoing,
But fear naught till all is done,
When a man alone is wooing.
In late sixteenth-century English society, then, upper-class women were valued exclusively for their marriageability even more than before. This required them to be as beautiful as possible (as evidenced by the obsession with paleness and cosmetics), but also, crucially, chaste. In a world where a high-status family used daughters to secure wealth, and a wealthy family used daughters to secure status, the assumption of virginity was essential to those transactions. Our song’s heroine has learned this lesson the hard way, through the “pain” of pregnancy and being shunned by society. She reflects how “maids” (in the parlance of the day, virgins) should anticipate “their own undoing,” but do not consider the consequences until too late.
Dissembling wretch! to gain thy pleasure
What didst thou not vow and swear?
So didst thou rob me of the treasure
Which so long I held so dear.
Now thou prov’st to me a stranger,
Such is the vile guise of men,
When a woman is in danger.
Moving from regret to anger, Campion affords his heroine the clarity to cast (legitimate) blame on her suitor, who as she has already hinted, was eager to “vow and swear” his love in order “to gain [his] pleasure” of her. She reminds the audience, lest they forget, of the loss of “the treasure / Which so long I held so dear”: her virginity. But note the harsh language with which she accosts her seducer: he is a liar, a thief, and ultimately a coward, content to evade the consequences of his wants, as she cannot.
It is intriguing that, for once, Campion spares a thought to acknowledge a man’s culpability in the double bind and the plight of this friendless woman. It is noteworthy in particular that (in the lady’s voice) Campion calls the man out for being untrue to her, both before and after getting his “pleasure”. This would appear to be a very conscious reversal of a ubiquitous trope of the time: that it is women who are false, lacking in honesty and courage. At the heart of each of the double binds faced by the Elizabethan woman, is the Elizabethan man’s constant suspicion of her. The cosmetics she wears to present the image that patriarchal society demands, of pristine youth and beauty, becomes proof of her inherent wily deception and falseness. And the man who demands that a girl remain a virgin until marriage, but who sings joyfully of a man’s sport in using his persuasion and power to take that virginity from her as he feels entitled, will ever wonder whether his fiancée, or his bride, is the virgin he takes her to be. If the Elizabethan woman’s power—the only one afforded to her—is her beauty and sexual allure, then every man’s fear is that she will make use of that power to satisfy her wants, rather than her husband’s. This fear appears to have the effect of drawing the vise ever tighter around the women of the age, with constant reminders that the risks in the game of sexual license and deception are not equally shared, but fall almost entirely on women. Thus does “My love hath vowed” conclude, with a doleful reminder and warning:
That heart is nearest to misfortune
That will trust a feigned tongue.
When flatt’ring men our loves importune,
They intend us deepest wrong.
If this shame of loves betraying,
But this once I cleanly shun,
I will go no more a-maying.
Our heroine sees the entitlement double bind clearly, and speaks now to her countrywomen, warning of the “feigned tongue” of men who risk nothing, to entrap women who risk everything for these moments of pleasure. The attendant “shame of loves betraying” has been her “undoing”, and she hopes others will follow her example going forward to “cleanly shun” such exploits.
Thomas Campion devoted over 10% of his creative output—14 songs out of 119—exploring a woman’s perspective, which was highly unusual for a writer of his day. If Campion, in his own essays, claimed not to place particular value on his mostly light-hearted English lyrics (Latin was the language for serious writing), he nevertheless slipped into them some sharp observations about the society he lived in. Certainly he knew well the double bind of the Elizabethan woman: ever primed and encouraged to be the target of male gaze and yearning, but subject to men’s harsh judgment whether she refuse, or respond in kind; ever pressed to be beautiful and alluring, but virginal; her life, freedom, and sexuality suborned in the service of men’s ambitions. In his songs it is hard to miss the dilemma, bound tightly (and pulling in opposite directions) around every noblewoman in England, up to and including Elizabeth herself.
[1] Philip Rosseter, Campion’s closest friend and a skilled lutenist, published this first book under his own name, but devoted the first half to Campion’s songs. After this Campion went on to publish subsequent songbooks under his own name. Campion was unusual as an Elizabethan songwriter who wrote his words and music together (the common practice was to add the tune or more often the lyrics later, which is why most lyrics for songwriters like John Dowland are considered anonymous). Rosseter, however, is generally credited with helping Campion with tunes and arrangements. The depth of their friendship was such that Campion, who died a bachelor, bequeathed what paltry wealth he possessed entirely to Rosseter, wishing it were more.
[2] Leed, Drea, “Elizabethan Make-up 101”.
[3] Kemp, Theresa D. Women in the Age of Shakespeare. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010. Also available at www.abc-clio.com.
[4] Karlsson, Katarina A. ‘Think’st Thou to Seduce Me Then?’ Impersonating Female Personas in Songs by Thomas Campion (1567-1620). (p 74) Thesis. University of Gothenburg, 2011. Kållered: Ineko AB, 2011. ResearchGate. ArtMonitor. Web.
[5] Kemp, p. 26.
[6] Kemp, p. 19-36.