Contemporary Documents

From Edmund Tilney, The Flower of Friendship (1568) ed. V. Wayne (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 105, 108, 112, 134 Edmund Tilney (1535/6–1610) was a courtier under Queen Elizabeth I, the dedicatee of his popular tract on marriage, The Flower of Friendship (1568). Tilney’s attempt to impress the Queen and gain a position at court paid off, and he was appointed Master of the Revels in 1579. As Master of the Revels between 1579 and 1610, Tilney arranged courtly entertainments, decided which plays written for the public stage were to be performed at court and licensed all plays staged in London, including Twelfth Night . Tilney’s tract drew heavily on earlier humanist tracts on marriage, such as Erasmus’s Coniugium (1523) and Pedro di Luxan’s Coloquios matrimoniales (1550), which provide both its subject matter and the names of the fictional characters engaged in the learned conversation informing its structure. In the extracts below Erasmus, Master Pedro and Lady Julia (from Eulalia, the virtuous wife in Erasmus’s Coniugium ) endorse humanist views according to which husband and wife should love and respect each other as companions. Lady Aloisa (from Heloise, the medieval author of the famous correspondence to her former lover and husband Pierre Abelard) is firmly associated with a medieval distrust of marriage, while Lady Isabel (Spanish for Elizabeth) finds flaws in humanist views, which are still strictly patriarchal. Isabel’s arguments in favour of true equality are criticised by Master Pedro and the latter’s comments suggest the extent to which Elizabeth’s own position on the throne of England and her failure to marry were perceived as deeply anomalous and disruptive by her contemporaries. 1 Tilney himself married late in life. Although his Flower of Friendship champions the humanist precept according to which wives should be chosen for their virtues and not for their dowries, he married a wealthy widow, called Lady Mary Bray. Tilney proved luckier than Malvolio, but, ironically, he failed to secure his wife’s patrimony after her death and was financially destitute when he died in 1610. Romance and cynical self-interest lived side by side in Shakespeare’s London, as much as in Shakespeare’s Illyria.