“Untwine those Arms”

This chapter focuses on two kinds of touch: embracing, which is subject to fierce debate in texts on manners, and linking arms, which is not, but which raises a similar set of concerns in the drama. Dramatic portrayals of embraces and walking arm in arm complicate widely accepted histories of intimacy and the private sphere, in which certain forms of touch are claimed to have become restricted to expressions of normatively heteroerotic intimacy. If plays did in fact sometimes contribute to such historical shifts, they often resist such developments. Male–male embraces in Coriolanus blend friendly and erotic uses of the gesture in a way that allows for simultaneous claims to and refusals of dominance. Marlowe’s Edward the Second dramatizes a struggle between the king and his barons to codify ambiguous gestures such as same-sex embraces and walking arm in arm, a struggle that hinges on overlapping, often competing valences of these gestures as signs of erotic affection or political favor. Finally, the anonymous Arden of Faversham exploits the social ambiguities of walking arm in arm—a configuration sometimes erotic, but at other times simply a sign of courteous sociability—in presenting this form of contact as a means for female characters to thwart patriarchal surveillance of their behavior.