Abstract
This thesis is concerned with the ‘cockered child,’ an iconic character in late medieval and early modern society, yet a figure almost entirely forgotten today. To be ‘cockered’ meant to be spoilt — to be overindulged as a child by one’s parents, or, to wilfully overindulge oneself as an adult. Such a cossetted lifestyle was believed to encourage amorality and weakness, and to prevent or subvert maturation. Cockered boys were thus portrayed as immature, effeminate, and foolish; cockered girls as defiant, aggressive, and promiscuous.
The cockered child became a potent figure for promoting the rising tide of humanist thought from the late medieval era on. Following classical tenets, humanists maintained that education facilitates reasoning, and that reasoning allows the making of moral choices. Education was thus seen as a moral enterprise, and it was believed amongst humanists that educating those in power could allow society to return to the glories of the classical past. To encourage parents to send their children to school, humanist writers associated the uneducated with the cockered stereotype — so that the unschooled were tarred as corrupt, weak, and socially corrosive. This view was consistently disseminated by humanist authors for a period of several hundred years, appearing in conduct and pedagogical literature, and, most reliably of all, in morality drama.
The standard morality play plot mirrors the parable of the prodigal son, with the humanum genus protagonist modelled upon the titular character. However, because the Bible fails to mention the source of the prodigal’s rebelliousness, humanists were able to fill this gap and ascribe it to lack of education and cockering. Other moral paradigms were often added to this narrative, such as the pilgrimage of life, Aristotelian ethics, humoralism, and others, which resulted in a multi-layered ethical argument that demanded that children be schooled or face ruin. This practice also meant that the cockered humanum genus became the allegorical focus of an all-encompassing moral vision.
Over time, the humoral point of view became the most popular, and cockered children came to be strongly linked to the melancholic complexion. Thus, we find the regular appearance of immature, effeminate, and melancholic characters in early modern comedy. Sir Andrew Aguecheek from Twelfth Night (c.1600) and Bartholomew Cokes from Bartholomew Fair (1614) provide two fine examples of this trend. Figures such as these would have been recognised by a contemporary audience as alluding to the cockered humanum genus tradition, and thus inevitably introduced allegorical content into the plays in which they appear.
Vice and Virtue, who together with the humanum genus typically feature in the psychomachian morality play tradition, underwent similar transformative processes. The Vice came to be associated with the rash and angry choleric complexion, a condition which, for example, underlies Sir Toby Belch and Wasp who also appear in the two plays just mentioned. Thus, when early modern plays feature contrasting characters who exhibit melancholic effeminacy and choleric hyper-masculinity, they are alluding to a well-known cultural convention that was indelibly linked to the older morality drama, and restate the allegorical arguments that the genre was used to portray.
Virtue changed in a rather different manner. In early plays, the Virtue character is a dull homiletic figure who loves to preach. Due to the cultural associations between education, morality, and maturity, which the cockered child came to embody, this role was transformed into that of the Virtuous Wife, a character who assumes the function of the Forgiving Father and redeems prodigal young gallants through marriage. This merger of secular and spiritual events (marriage and salvation) shows how attaining masculine maturity, represented by marriage, could at that time be compared to moral salvation. The Virtuous Wife also allowed playwrights to rescript ethical narratives into romance, and thereby allowed the morality tradition to continue in a more subtle and realistic form.
I conclude with a study of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night that draws these various threads together, and demonstrates that a single overriding discourse can be found in many early modern plays. This discourse echoes that of the morality genre — and repeats the humanist touchstone that the educated will grow up to become noble adults, whilst the uneducated are weak, amoral, and a hazard not only to themselves but also to their wider community and commonwealth. It is, however, only through understanding the cockered child’s history that this content can be discerned. It is my contention that the cockered child stereotype was a figure of enormous cultural significance, a character who appears in some of the most famous dramas written during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the embodiment and disseminator of ideals that helped medieval England negotiate its way into the early modern era.