"Exemplify My Frailty": Representing English Women in 'De Casibus' Tragedy (1995)

Although a great deal of work has been done in the past twenty years tracking the representation of women in the Renaissance, little attention has been paid to the depiction of women in De casibus tragedy.(1) By De casibus tragedy I mean here collections of non-dramatic tales of the falls of great men and women written in imitation of Boccaccio's massive collection, De casibus virorum illustrium. When this literature has been related to the representation of women by critics such as Constance Jordan, it has either been seen as a source for later material or as a form of lament literature.(2) But I am going to argue that it was the form of this literature and its relation to history, more than its content (that is the actual exempla of tragic protagonists), that should be examined as a site of gender politics, and that the adoption and subsequent manipulation of Boccaccio's form had ideological implications for the representation of political women. These implications are most easily tracked in England by examining the history of the most influential and popular of the De casibus books, The Mirror for Magistrates. To understand the importance of the De casibus tradition, we first have to understand its nature as history, and it was primarily a form of popular history writing. Boccaccio meant his work to be a serious historical reference work, and his sources were almost entirely classical historians such as Livy, Valerius Maximus, Curtius Rufus, Suetonius, Tacitus, Solinus, Godfrey of Viterbo, and Eusebius, and some more recent European historians like Fra Paolino da Venezia. The authors of the Mirror for Magistrates were very conscious that they were working in an historical form. William Baldwin, the editor of the first editions of the Mirror, demanded his collaborators pay attention to exact chronology: Nay soft . . . we wyl take the cronycles, & note theyr places, & as they cum, so wil we orderly reade them al (1.244-45).(3) Many of the prose links in the Baldwin editions contain queries over the accuracy of specific historical details. The three subsequent editors of the Mirror all offered historical justifications for their work. The muse who is invoked in these books is always Clio, not Melpomene. But it was the form, not the intent, of De casibus tragedy that made it influential as history writing. It stood between the chronicle and narrative history. Like the chronicle, it worked through accumulation. The author collected historical biographies that could fit a tragic narrative form. But the concatenation of these tales was to demonstrate an inescapable teleology at work in history, a meta-narrative. One tragedy would not prove the point, so De casibus virorum illustrium stretched from Adam to Boccaccio's contemporaries. The Mirror for Magistrates, originally planned as an addendum to a new edition of John Lydgate's Boccaccio translation, Fall of Princes, expanded in its subsequent editions adding stories until it contained tales covering British history from the time of Albanact to that of Elizabeth. The sum was greater than the parts, offering a vision of history. This form had obvious political potential. The stories related in the collections were all of political and social leaders. If those leaders were shown to fall because of fortune, then the work as a whole delivered a medieval de contemptu mundi message. If, however, the stories were all of leaders who betrayed their positions or succumbed to moral corruption because of their power, then more pointed political messages were possible. Boccaccio was clearly thinking along these lines: he dedicated De casibus virorum illustrium to a Florentine named Mainardo dei Cavalcanti because, he explained, there was no living ruler, secular or religious, worthy of the tribute. Not surprisingly, then, De casibus came to be regarded as a text of political instruction.(4) Baldwin, too, seems to have had a clear political agenda for the Mirror. …