Gifts and Reasons: The Contexts of Peele's Araygnement of Paris
cause it is so characteristic and compendious a production of Elizabethan court culture. The Araygnement has been made to exemplify not only hyperbolic royal entertainment but also humble pastoral retirement; it has been interpreted not only as a glorification of power but as a repudiation of ambition. These divergent critical responses point to the ideological complexity of Elizabethan culture and Peele's play. The play's setting is pastoral, its dramaturgy is spectacular, and its royal sentiments are fulsome. Its action repeatedly involves the humble and the great in rites of homage or strategies of coercion. The Araygnement of Paris recreates the culture which creates it. Acts of gift-giving and relationships of power within the fiction reproduce basic characteristics of the social world in which the play is written and performed. I shall explore some of the symbolic forms which typify Elizabethan court culture and Peele's play: pastoral conventions, myths of royal power, and acts of prestation.* If my exploration of these forms appears as much concerned with the contexts of Peele's play as with the play itself, this is because "text" and "context" define and illuminate each other.