The Career of Cymbeline’s Manacle
Wayne, Valerie
Early Modern Culture, No. 1 (2000)
Abstract
In 1602 at an entertainment performed before Queen Elizabeth at Harefield, the home of Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal and his wife Alice, Countess of Derby, at least 34 women participated in a lottery in which they received trinkets from a mariner, who claimed to have just arrived from a small merchant vessel loaded with jewels and other booty. Beginning the event with a song to Cynthia, i.e. Elizabeth, the mariner explains that in his travels he has had the good fortune “to light upon these few Trifles” which he has carried about until he could meet with a fit company on which to bestow them. He invites the ladies, most of whom are Elizabeth’s maids of honor, to try their luck by drawing one of the lots, each of which is identified by a poetic couplet written by Sir John Davies.1 The lottery was rigged to ensure that the queen received a jewel of the wheel of fortune, and at least some other participants also drew lots “designed to reflect some trait for which the recipient was noted.” Robert Krueger notes, for example, that Lady Anne Clifford received a lace with the couplet evoking her strictness and restraint:
Give hir the lace thatt loves to be straite laced; Soe fortunes little gifte is aptly placed.
It is difficult to know how many other of the gifts were as “aptly placed,” but the mother of the maids received a scarf to “bind Cupid” so that he might ask her leave before he shot his arrow, which seems fitting for someone with her supervisory role over Elizabeth’s servingwomen. Many of the gifts proffered in this “lucky dip” came with couplets calling attention to the ways in which the object could signify or become a form of constraint. Gifts usually entail some encumbrances or obligations, as the work of Marcel Mauss in The Gift has amply demonstrated, but rather than conceal this threat, the couplets foreground it.
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