friends, ethics, aristotle, cultivating, friendship, pragmatic, expediency

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antithesis of that with which Aristotle opens his first book on friendship:

For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich men and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all; for what is the use of such prosperity without the opportunity of beneficence, which is exercised chiefly and in its most laudable form towards friends. (Ethics, VIII. 1)

Whereas Aristotle claims that cultivating friendship is more pragmatic than amassing wealth, Googe takes the misanthropic and unethical line (in the Aristotelian sense) that wealth can be relied upon more than friends: “For friends are gone come once adversity,/ When money yet remaineth safe in chest” (ll.2-3). The insincerity of his statement is all the more obvious since it is contextualised by its inclusion in a miscellany compiled, in part, from verses exchanged between implicitly faithful and trustworthy friends whose relationship is defined by Aristotelian principles. ³³⁸

Turbervile’s answer draws attention to the discrepancy between Googe’s portrayal of perfidious friendship and the probity of his actual friends. He adopts Aristotle’s model of beneficent friendship founded upon equality, whereas Googe, as provocateur, suggests that friendship is motivated by expediency (Aristotle’s inferior model of friendship). Thus Turbervile responds:

Friend Googe, giue me ye faithfull friend to trust,
And take the fickle Coine for mee that lust.
For friends in time of trouble and distresse
With help and sound aduise will soone redresse
Eche growing griefe that gripes the pensiue brest,
When Monie lies lockt vp in couert Chest.
Thy Coine will cause a thousand cares to grow,
Which if thou hadst no Coine ye couldst not know. (ll.1-8)

Turbervile’s line for line rebuttal is predictable, within the terms of Googe’s game, for its

³³⁸ Alternately Googe’s position might be indebted to a paradox which according to Sandra Lynch (2002) is attributed to Aristotle by both Laertes Diogenes and Michel de Montaigne, “O my friends, there is no friend” (p.98). For other possible sources of this theme see Kennedy ed. (1989), p.177.

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