A crisis of friendship?: representation and experience in two late university plays.

IN THE SIXTEENTH and seventeenth centuries the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were almost unique in accommodating semiautonomous communities of young men, and I will argue that this rare social circumstance leaves its mark upon the dramatic work in which those communities were engaged. In this paper I will show how two university plays of the 1630s stage a moment of crisis for the predominant discourse of perfect friendship, and I go on to suggest some ways in which this can be accounted for. In the plays, the classical view of perfect friendship--as an absolute similitude between two friends who commonly understand their relationship to be that of "one soul in two bodies"--is put into question by the emergence of a more pragmatic view of friendship that recognizes the importance of strategic alliances and the significance of the group. This moment of crisis has an irreverent, satirical impulse, and I am particularly interested in thinking about why that impulse emerges in university drama, and what it might say about early modern masculinity.

In terms of plot, both Peter Hausted's The Rivall Friends (1631-32) and Robert Mead's The Combat of Love and Friendship (1634-38?) fit comfortably into the popular subgenre of friendship literature that deals with the conflict between friendship and heterosexual desire. The classical world was replete with pairs of friends who each wish to sacrifice their own lives in order to save their friend, with Damon and Pithias, and Orestes and Pylades perhaps the best-known examples. An early modern twist upon this desire for mutual self-sacrifice was introduced into the English vernacular tradition in 1531 by Thomas Elyot, whose conduct book, The Book Named the Governor, included a brief fictional illustration of perfect friendship in what it calls "the wonderful history of Titus and Gisippus." Although self-sacrifice in the face of execution remains present in the narrative, the text also provides an opportunity for Titus and Gisippus to sacrifice for each other their own equal romantic interests in Sophronia, a beautiful Athenian gentlewoman. (1) The central action of a friend resigning his interest in his mistress reappears in a number of early modern texts that postdate Elyot's, including Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona (ca. 1594), and Hausted's The Rivall Friends.

The play, performed by members of Hausted's own Queens' College, Cambridge, in front of Charles I, Queen Henrietta Maria, and numerous Cambridge students, concerns two friends who are love rivals, and the twist here is that they both actively attempt to favor the suit of the other in increasingly outlandish ways. Since it was performed in 1632, the play arrives a century into the tradition of English writing on self-sacrificing friends and it is careful to indicate its awareness of the convention. In fact, at the same time that the play acknowledges the friendship tradition, it emphasizes that tradition's incompatibility with the world encountered by the early modern university student. The plot of The Rivall Friends is composed of four overlapping narrative strands, and is too complicated to be explained here in full. I return to the titular plot below, but one of the subplots involves a mock battle of wits between four young men, arranged by two of the play's gentleman malcontents, Lovell and Anteros. These four young men can be seen to represent a variety of subject positions commonly available to young Englishmen in the seventeenth century. One identifies himself as an elder brother; one is an Inns of Court man; one an attorney's clerk; and one a Bachelor of Arts. As we might expect, given that this play was performed in front of an audience full of Cambridge university students, the Inns of Court character is given a rather hard time of it: his name is Nodle Emptie. But the relationship between Hammershin, the scholar, and Mungrell, the elder brother, has the most to tell us about the play's view of friendship. In act 3, scene 8, Mungrell comes to the defense of his friend Hammershin, who has insulted Nodle Emptie:

Loveall. No more Scholler, you haue met with him sufficiently, ... and here's a brave Pylades too, that would not see his Orestes opprest by multitude. (Hee claps him on the backe)

Mungrell. Arrest mee Sir? Soft, and easily Sir, more words to a bargaine; s'duds! ... As I'm a Gentleman, and an elder brother, I owe no man a farthing that I mean to pay him. Nay come Sir, I am flesh'd now i'faith.

Loveall. You will not quarrel with your friends Sir, will you?

Mungrell. Friends Sir? I know not whether you be my friend, or no; I am sure you use no friendly language.

Loveall. Pri'thee Scholler, tayle off Mr. Mungrell a little, hee'l never leave now hee has drawne blood once.

Hammershin. Come, you'r a foole: the Gentleman's of worth, and our friend. (2)

This is perhaps the best joke in the play. Smugly assured of his privileged position in the system of primogeniture, Mungrell does not have a university education and has thus never heard of Orestes. He thinks that Loveall has instead threatened to arrest him. Ironically, Mungrell cannot understand the friendly language that has indeed been used, and it is left to Hammershin the scholar to point out his foolishness. (3) In the context of a university performance, this is potentially a very effective moment because it represents the triumph of education over birth. With this exchange, Hausted's audience experiences the satisfying thrill of having the superiority of the scholar emphasized at the expense of the elder brother. However, the scholar's success is fleeting, because it is possible to detect a sense of anxiety in his insistence upon Loveall's "worth." Hammershin's conciliatory attitude to Loveall testifies to the insecure position of the impoverished scholar, for it is he, not the elder brother, who needs as many alliances with gentlemen of worth as he can get. Thus Loveall's idealistic reference to Orestes and Pylades soon gives place to Hammershin's far more pragmatic interest in preserving a potentially useful connection with a witty gentleman.

This is not the only part of the play that draws attention to the harsh realities of life for university graduates. In another of the play's subplots, one that satirizes the practice of simony, the local parsonage is being used by Sacriledge Hooke as a dowry to attract a husband for his disfigured daughter Ursely. (4) The offer entices six suitors, three of whom are university men desperately seeking a church living. Their three competitors are a box-maker, a cloth-worker, and a scrivener. In these scenes, the humiliation of the scholars is not ameliorated at all, as they are ridiculed just as effectively as the other suitors. Of course, The Rivall Friends is not the only academic play to point out the precarious nature of life after university, as the most familiar university plays of all, the Parnassus trilogy, also concentrate upon the difficulty of translating learning into a living. (5)

But if, in its subplots, the play reveals anxieties about the financial efficacy of a university education, its main plot is squarely concerned with pointing out the stalemate that occurs when the similitude of perfect friendship is pushed to its logical conclusion. The two rival friends are Lucius and Neander, who have each abandoned their previous mistresses in order to pursue the affections of Hooke's other daughter, Pandora. The play makes it clear that these men are to be understood as friends in the classical mold by giving Lucius a speech, early in the first act, which clarifies the type of friendship that they share:

Lucius.      When I do violate
          That loue, that more then mortall bond, wherewith
          My soule is ty'd vnto Neander, may
          I fall vnpittied, may no gentle sigh
          Be spent at my last obsequies, may I want
          A man to wish me againe, would that preuaile. (6)

Hausted satirizes perfect friendship tales like "Titus and Gisippus" by having neither friend accept the other's offer of Pandora. In The Rivall Friends's many precursor texts, perfect friends must take turns in offering and accepting sacrifices, and the tales usually end with the debt incurred by the first friend being recompensed in one way or another by the second friend. Hausted removes the turn-taking element and thus makes the principle of self-sacrificial friendship entirely farcical. He also recognizes that the object of exchange in such tales, the woman, might well have something to say about being passed from one friend to another. Unlike Elyot's Sophronia, who meekly accepts her status as chattel, Hausted's Pandora soon tires of the passivity of the perfect friends, and attempts to spur them into action by offering her affections to Lucius's page. In an echo of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Pandora ultimately falls in love with the page, and when he unexpectedly inherits three thousand pounds, their marriage is confirmed. Lucius and Neander finally return to their previous mistresses, and a precarious happy ending is suggested.

There are a number of ways in which the events of the main plot can be interpreted. In keeping with the worldly pessimism present in the subplots, we might see the failure of Lucius and Neander as an early modern version of the familiar maxim "faint heart never won fair lady." However, things become a little more interesting if we recognize the presence of a competing literary tradition in Hausted's construction of these scenes. That tradition is Platonism, especially as it appears in the Platonic drama favored by the wife of Charles I, Queen Henrietta Maria. The popularity of Platonic drama at the court of Charles I, especially during the 1630s, is inextricably linked with the patronage wielded by Henrietta Maria, and often associated with the pastoral mode, as in one of the most famous examples of the genre, Thomas Montagu's The Shepherd's Paradise (1629). Platonic drama was concerned, in the words of Graham Parry, with "honour and duty entangled with love, usually expressed in an elegant, slightly affected language that reflected the Queen's fondness for a preciosity of manner that she had acquired in her youth." (7) Parry also describes the tradition, rather more forcefully, as involving "starry-eyed debate about the refining effects of non-sensual love," and it is in these terms that the intersection with perfect friendship can be more plainly perceived. (8) The friendship of Lucius and Neander is nothing if not idealistic, and their mutual loss of Pandora is repeatedly represented in terms that emphasize both the feminizing potential of perfect friendship and the frustratingly ethereal nature of Platonic love. In the last of such references, Pandora tells Lucius:

Pandora.   I care not this for all your loue, nor yet
           For your friend Ianus there with the two faces;
           Nor do I think ye men.

Lucius.                        So quickly?

Pandora.                                    Yes
           I doe confesse I am a woman; see,
           Here is the man has wonne what ye haue lost;
           Stout souldiers sure, that when the Citie gates
           Were open to yee, durst not enter in. (9)

The play certainly contains a powerful strain of misogyny that needs to be taken into account when reading lines such as these, but it is also difficult to deny that Pandora is a far more interesting and sympathetic character than either of the rival lovers simply by virtue of the fact that she plays an active role in the plot. In effect, the play satirizes perfect friendship, the triumphant expression of homosocial bonding, by pointing out its similarity to Platonic drama, often seen because of its association with Henrietta Maria as a "feminine" genre more at home in Parisian salons than at the English court. The Rivall Friends reveals, then, that a crisis has always already existed at the conceptual heart of perfect friendship, but that this crisis is easier to perceive when the discourse is read alongside that of Platonic love and within the context of a tradition of cynical university plays that emphasize the lack of fit between the ideal world of philosophy and the actual world of the scholar's lived experience.

The influence of Platonic drama can be detected even more strongly in Robert Mead's The Combat of Love and Friendship. The play is full of the conventional terminology of Platonic drama, in which love is described as the transfusion of souls, and mistresses are mortal reflections of immortal perfection. According to the title page of the 1654 edition, the play was performed at Christ Church, Oxford, where its author studied from 1634 until at least 1639, and it was probably written during the early years of his academic career. (10) The play is far shorter than The Rivall Friends and the competing merits of love and friendship are subjected to a more sustained level of analysis. The "combat" of the title arises because Lysander, who is in love with Artemone, is persuaded by his friend Theocles to woo Panareta, the sister of Theocles's cruel mistress Ethusa. Panareta is in love with Lysander, and Theocles hopes that Lysander can persuade her to encourage Ethusa to love him. So if he is to be true to his friend, Lysander must at least appear to be false to his mistress. In the soliloquy that opens the play, Lysander laments his position and contrasts the spirituality of friendship with the materiality of love:

Lysander.   Instruct me some kinde Power
            To which I may most Lawfully prove false:
            My friend, or Mistress.

            Friendship, thou art a name, and nothing real,
            Ameer and empty word. And
            Here I quit thee,
            Ile be not fetter'd in fantastick chains,
            To court Ideas, nothings, and adore
            A strange Platonic Cupid. Give me Love,
            That has some life and vigor in it: Love
            That shall delight our bloods as well as Fancies. (11)

Although he takes these words back almost as soon as he has spoken them, and thus reestablishes the primacy of a classical model of spiritual friendship here attributed to Plato, Lysander nevertheless articulates once more the same crisis of friendship that was at the center of The Rivall Friends. Again, perfect friendship is, albeit momentarily, revealed to be a "starry-eyed," self-defeating ideology. It is worth noting in passing what this moment has to say about the increasingly privileged place given in the culture to heterosexual relationships, especially marriage, as opposed to homosocial ones like friendship. This episode is interesting because the terms of Lysander's argument are unexpected. Rather than borrowing the spiritual discourse of perfect friendship in order to describe heterosexual relations, according to the standard strategy of Caroline Platonic drama, Lysander here preserves the ancient dichotomy between spiritual friendship and material love while simply reversing the privileged term in the relationship. (12) The play thus demonstrates a willingness to critique the assumptions made about love and friendship in Platonic drama, and this critique emerges most powerfully in act 3 of the play.

Although in his opening speech Lysander struggles to understand the relative importance of friendship and love, Theocles does not hesitate to sacrifice friendship for love. In order to make Ethusa more likely to accept his suit, Theocles encourages Artemone to believe that Lysander's feigned love for Panareta is in fact genuine. Theocles begins his attempt to make Artemone jealous by invoking Lysander's status as perfect friend:

Theocles.   Men talk of Pylades, and I know not what
            Strange Enterprizes of rash Theseus;
            But this Lysander, how he out-goes all story?
            Give me a man made up of all the Extractions
            And quintessence of all who ever yet
            Fame with her lowdest Trumpet hath proclaim'd
            For Men of Loyal Breasts, and this same Man,
            This Man thus fill'd with Friendship, shall yet learn
            A way to love from our Lysander. (13)

Just as The Rivall Friends included an allusion to Orestes and Pylades in order to emphasize the exhaustion of the concept of perfect friendship in the contemporary world of the scholar, The Combat of Love and Friendship also recalls the discourse in order to demonstrate the ease with which it can be subverted. Theocles praises the perfect friendship of Lysander so that his supposed betrayal of Artemone will appear more plausible. Playing on the traditional primacy afforded to friendship at the expense of love, Theocles posits that an exchange of lovers can be seen as a reasonable aspect of the continuum of friendship. Since Lysander is a perfect friend, and perfect friends are identical in all things including virtue and honesty, Artemone cannot doubt Theocles's story for a moment. If Lysander is so honest in his friendship to Theocles that he is willing to sacrifice his mistress for him, the tradition tells us that Theocles must be just as honest in his relationship to Lysander, and that his story must therefore be true. This unquestioned assumption of the truthfulness of perfect friends is at the center of the play's convoluted plot, and the trick is played on the audience as well as Artemone, because the fact that Theocles is lying only becomes clear later in the play. However, it is not long before we learn that, ironically, Lysander has indeed fallen in love with Panareta, and their union is confirmed at the play's conclusion. Nevertheless, when Theocles's behavior is revealed in act 4 it leads to a duel between the two friends, during which Lysander makes it clear that it is Theocles's betrayal of the spirit of friendship, not the loss of Artemone, that is the greater crime.

It is impossible not to detect a satirical tone in all this, especially since the play ends with the revelation that all the friends and lovers have proven themselves false in one way or another. Although we know that Robert Mead was a staunch royalist--he would go on to serve both Charles I and Charles II--The Combat of Love and Friendship must be seen as a play that ridicules the conventions of Platonic drama, popular of course at the royal court. However, these two impulses need not be seen as contradictory because, as Karen Britland argues, it is entirely possible that Henrietta Maria was herself aware of the pretensions of Platonic drama and their ripeness for ridicule. (14) But beyond its skeptical engagement with Platonic drama, Mead's play is also a critique of friendship. Indeed, it is an even more serious critique than Hausted's, because the behavior of Theocles is active rather than passive; whereas Lucius and Neander suffer because they take the conventions of friendship too seriously, in The Combat those conventions are not

taken seriously enough. Or, to be more precise, the seriousness with which they are traditionally taken is exploited to such an extent that it is not just the friendship of Theocles and Lysander that reaches crisis point but the discourse of friendship itself. Mead explodes the absolute association of friendship with truth, present throughout the classical tradition, so that in the play friendship simply becomes nothing more than a convenient cover for falsehood. It is revealing that the physical similitude that was such an integral part of classical friendship tales like "Damon and Pithias" and "Titus and Gisippus" has disappeared entirely from the play; indeed, the fact that Theocles and Lysander do not love the same woman also testifies to a lack of emphasis placed upon the similitude trope. We might see this as evidence for a movement away from what Michel Foucault calls the "classical episteme," a period during which, he argues, knowledge was thought to be structured according to the principle of similarity. (15) Indeed, the play can even be read as a nostalgic lament for a vanished world in which exterior appearances were a credible guide for interior principles. Alternatively, we might read the play's critique of friendship as contributing to the ideological ground-clearing exercise in which discourses of friendship were replaced by those of companionate marriage, although since all the main characters are consistent only in their inconsistency, the future of marriage in the world of the play seems just as gloomy as that of friendship.

How can we account for the fact that these two university plays, ostensibly about perfect friendship, both emphasize the problematic nature of that concept? For Hausted perfect friendship is in crisis when it invests too much energy in similitude; for Mead, it is in crisis when similitude is neglected. The satirical treatment of the theme, and especially Mead's failure to punish his false friends, seems to move the plays beyond the realm of conventional complaint literature: they do not simply assert that "no real friendships exist nowadays," but instead call perfect friendship itself into question. (16) As I have said, we can see this impulse as nothing more than a reaction to the excesses of Platonic drama. It is also tempting to read the cynicism of the plays as an expression of a general sense of dissatisfaction with the absolute rule favored by Charles I, although this risks falling into what Martin Butler calls the ex post facto perspective in which every literary artefact of the 1630s foreshadows the events of 1642. (17) But perhaps it is not coincidental that the discourse of perfect friendship should be called into question by university men. If anyone was living in circumstances matching those espoused by the tradition of perfect friendship, it was they. Studying, eating, and sleeping in the company of young men very like themselves, students at the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge were placed within an institutional framework that should have been an incubator for perfect friendship. No doubt close, perhaps even perfect, friendships did arise between pairs of university students, as Alan Bray for one has shown. (18) But the universities were also places that encouraged their students to approach friendship in terms broader than those offered to them by the humanist reinvigoration of the perfect friendship trope. The organization of students into colleges, for instance, may well have encouraged them to conceive of themselves as part of a discrete and exclusive community of many, rather than a partner in a perfect friendship of two. The violence that often accompanied performances of student drama underlines the seriousness with which many university men took their college affiliations. (19)

Within colleges, further group attachments were encouraged. Differences of social status were no less important, and no less visible, inside the college walls than they were outside them, and students were allocated to various categories depending upon their social or intellectual status. Three major groups of undergraduate students may be identified. Firstly, fellow-commoners (or gentleman-commoners) were students of aristocratic origin who paid for their education but were set above the majority of the undergraduate body because of their social rank. The colleges visibly marked this difference of status every mealtime, as fellow-commoners were given special dispensation to dine with the fellows--graduate members of a college whose tuition and expenses were covered by an endowment, and who would usually be expected to tutor undergraduates--at the fellows' table, which was usually situated on a raised dais. (20) The second group, who formed the majority of fee-paying undergraduates at the universities, were known as commoners at Oxford and pensioners at Cambridge. The existence of a third set of undergraduates called servitors at Oxford and sizars at Cambridge was again visually displayed when members of the college gathered together to eat: sizars and servitors waited at the tables of the fellows, fellow-commoners, and commoners or pensioners. These young men were paid for their services, and were also entitled to any leftover food that could be found. Stephen Porter notes that at the end of the sixteenth century servitors were employed by commoners or fellow-commoners to perform "tasks which were regarded as degrading for students of their standing, such as bedmaking, lighting fires, fetching wood and water, sweeping chambers, and buying provisions," and that some students brought their own servitors or sizars with them upon arriving at university. (21) Others, like Simonds D'Ewes, had them allocated upon arrival. In common with most young men of humble origins, D'Ewes's sizar Thomas Manning was at the university in order to gain the qualifications that would allow him to pursue a career in the church. Unlike D'Ewes, who stayed at Cambridge for two and a half years and did not take a degree, those like Manning destined for the clergy needed to attain the degree of MA if they were to be successful in their chosen vocation. The clear demarcations of student rank, as well as students' very different career destinations, may also have suggested that the cultivation of practical networks of influence and interdependence were more important than the idealistic notion of a perfect friendship with one single individual. (22)

If performances of drama encouraged an almost tribal sense of communal feeling among members of a college, taking a role in such a play must have similarly emphasized the importance and efficacy of small-group interdependence. Interestingly, all the available evidence suggests that the men who performed in plays represented a microcosm of the larger college community to which they belonged. Each of the twenty-eight extant and complete university drama cast lists shows pensioners or commoners and sizars or servitors performing together, and the majority of casts also seem to have included at least one fellow- or gentleman-commoner. (23) Such patterns of association bear out the findings of Alexandra Shepard, who in her work on male bonding and antisocial behavior in early modern Cambridge concludes that students of every rank were involved in episodes of misrule. (24) Emphasizing the distinction between perfect amity and the comradeship formed in the college or tavern, Shepard notes: "These were not the bonds of friendship, however. The status and personalities of the participants in the camaraderie of excess were ultimately irrelevant beyond a desire to perform and applaud this alternative theatre of manhood." (25) If the disruptive camaraderie of students outside the college can be understood in some sense as a "performance" of homosocial bonding in an "alternative theatre," may not actual performances of drama in a real--albeit somewhat makeshift--college theater be understood in an analogous way? If The Rivall Friends and The Combat of Love and Friendship suggest a degree of skepticism about the tenets of perfect friendship, perhaps this arises from an enthusiasm for the sort of friendship that "was issue of the Taverne, or the Spit," in Ben Jonson's phrase, and which was surely experienced by most young men during their time at university. (26) Perhaps, too, we can thus begin to see university drama as a site of conflict not just between love and friendship but also between conventional and innovative modes of early modern masculinity.

Notes

(1.) Thomas Elyot, The Book Named The Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London: Dent, 1962), 135-48.

(2.) Peter Hausted, The Rivall Friends: A Facsimile of the 1632 Edition (Amsterdam: Da Capo Press, 1973), 3.8.19-34.

(3.) For an alternative reading of this scene and the play, see my "Friendship, Misogyny and Antitheatrical Prejudice: A Reading of The Rivall Friends," Peer English 1 (2006): 25-33.

(4.) For a detailed discussion of this aspect of the play, see Laurens J. Mills, Peter Hausted: Playwright, Poet, and Preacher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1944), 18-20.

(5.) See my "Scholarly Interiority in the Parnassus Trilogy," The Dalhousie Review 85 (2005): 275-84.

(6.) Hausted, Rivall Friends, 1.3.49-54.

(7.) Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 203.

(8.) Graham Parry, The Seventeenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1603-1700 (London: Longman, 1989), 29.

(9.) Hausted, Rivall Friends, 5.11.98-104.

(10.) Charles Brayne, "Mead, Robert (1615/16-1653)," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18468 (accessed August 27, 2008).

(11.) Robert Mead, The Combat of Love and Friendship (London, 1654), 1.1.1-3, 15-22 (lineation mine).

(12.) For an overview of the relationship between friendship and marriage in the literature of the period, see Thomas Luxon, Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage and Friendship (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2005). The trope is also discussed in Catherine Belsey, "Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies," in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), 166-90; Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (London: Routledge, 1996); and Gregory Chaplin, "Friendship and Miltonic Marriage," Modern Philology 99 (2001): 266-92.

(13.) Mead, Combat of Love, 3.2.47-55.

(14.) Karen Britland argues "I find it impossible to accept that she could have sponsored two major theatrical productions by two separate authors in relatively quick succession without being aware of their irreverent stance towards neoPlatonism," Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 130.

(15.) Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), especially 17-25.

(16.) Laurens J. Mills, "One Soul in Bodies Twain": Friendship in Tudor Literature and Stuart Drama (Bloomington, IN: Principia Press, 1937), 112.

(17.) Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 7-11.

(18.) See Bray's discussion of the memorial to the friendship of Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Baines at Christ's College, Cambridge, in The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 144-45.

(19.) Violent clashes at performances of university drama were common, but most famously occurred at Cambridge in 1611 when fighting between St. John's and Trinity College men escalated into a full-scale riot. See Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge, ed. Alan H. Nelson, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 2:424-86 and J. W. Clark, The Riot at the Great Gate of Trinity College, February 1610-11, Cambridge Antiquarian Society, Octavo Publications 43 (London: George Bell, 1906).

(20.) Christopher Brooke, ed., A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. 2, Victor Morgan, ed., 1546-1750 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 325.

(21.) Stephen Porter, "University and Society," in History of the University of Oxford, ed. T. H. Aston, vol. 4, Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 37. See also Morgan, 318.

(22.) On social interaction at the universities see Rosemary O'Day, "Room at the Top: Oxford and Cambridge in the Tudor and Stuart Age," History Today 34 (1984): 31-38 and Elizabeth Hanson, "The Interiority of Ability," Dalhousie Review 85 (2005): 257-73.

(23.) Academic rank or class status is not recorded for all students, and not all students included on cast lists can be definitively identified. However, out of the twenty-eight plays for which cast lists survive, fourteen definitely included students of all three academic ranks and ten definitely did not. The four remaining cast lists include some performers with popular names who cannot be identified with certainty. For a full breakdown of these results see my Friendship and Masculinity in English University Drama (forthcoming). Cast lists are published as appendices in Records of Early English Drama: Oxford, ed. John R. Elliot and others, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 2:841-45 and Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge, 2:942-62.

(24.) Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 110.

(25.) Ibid., 113.

(26.) Ben Jonson, "An Epistle to Master Arthur Squib," in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols., The Poems, The Prose Works (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947), 216.