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In June 1600 the earl of Essex appeared before the Privy Council ‘to aunswer his contempts and misgovernment’. There, ‘humblie confessing his errors with teares’, he pleaded that ‘the teares of his heart had quenched the sparkles of pride that were in him’. The earl’s lachrymose submission, stripping away his masculine bravura, handed the council a weapon it seized with relish. The lord keeper promptly recounted the scene to the judges assembled in Star Chamber, for wider dissemination.1 While Jesus had been ready to shed public tears (John 11: 35), elite Englishmen found them deeply problematic. The public expression of emotions is shaped by each society’s cultural values, and in early modern England a new code of civility demanded emotional self-control. Where medieval ‘courtesy’ had focused on behaviour within the context of lordship and service, civility imposed strict rules governing every aspect of elite conduct. Men were to control their emotions and behave ‘with as much decency and as little conformity with the Beasts as is possible’. Failure constituted a shameful lapse into plebeian, even animal, behaviour. This was an elite and essentially male code; civility played little part in the ‘subordinate masculinity’ of the lower sort, and guidance on ‘Decency in Conversation amongst Men’ often made explicit the homosocial context authors had in mind.2
Bernard Capp (Thu,) studied this question.