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Household Politics: Conflict in Early Modern England

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Household Politics: Conflict in Early Modern England University of Michigan Deep Blue deepblue.lib.umich.edu 2012-03-06 Household Politics: Conflict in Early Modern England Herzog, Don Herzog, Don. Household Politics: The View From Early Modern England. http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/90021, [Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0]. Originally published by Yale University Press, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/90021 Herzog, Don. Household Politics: The View From Early Modern England. Prepublication version 2012, http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/90021, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. Forthcoming, to be published by Yale University Press 20XX. Household Politics Conflict in Early Modern England Don Herzog University of Michigan for Isaac Kramnick CONTENTS PREFACE . i 1 / A TALE OF TWO POEMS . 1 2 / HUSBANDS AND WIVES, GENDER AND GENRE . 32 3 / PUBLIC MAN, PRIVATE WOMAN? . 106 4 / CONFLICT . 157 5 / THE TROUBLE WITH SERVANTS . 191 CONCLUSION . 255 PREFACE First licensed for production in 1626 1 and staged repeatedly over the years, John Fletcher’s The Noble Gentleman isn’t a magnificent literary achievement. But it’s plenty interesting for my purposes. Marine, the not-quite-noble gentleman of the title, is tired of loitering at court, an activity his wife adores. Listen to Marine’s soliloquy as he screws up his courage to tell his wife that they’re abandoning city life: Why what an Asse was I that such a thing As a wife is could rule me? Know not I That woman was created for the man, That her desires, nay all her thoughts should be As his are? is my sense restor’d at length? Now she shall know, that which she should desire, She hath a husband that can govern her, If her desires leades me against my will. Sounding in the book of Genesis, the passage asserts a classic justification for male dominance. It’s unblushing in describing that dominance as governance. Look what happens when his wife battles back. 2 Horrified, she insists that he can’t back out now, when all the work of cultivating the favor of the court is about to bear fruit. He’s unmoved: Gentleman . Wife talke no more, your Retoricke comes too late, I am inflixable; and how dere you Adventure to direct my course of life? Was not the husband made to rule the wife? Lady . ’Tis true, but where the man doth misse his way, It is the womans part to set him right; 1 [John Fletcher], The Noble Gentleman , ed. L. A. Beaurline, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon , ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966-96), 3:115. 2 Compare the trajectory of Lord Wronglove’s blustering in Colley Cibber, The Lady’s Last Stake: or, The Wife’s Resentment , 3 rd ed. (London, 1736). -ii- So Fathers have a power to guide their Sonnes In all their courses, yet you oft have seene Poore litle children that have both their eyes Lead their blind Fathers. Gentleman [aside ]. She has a plaguy witt.— I say you’r but a little piece of man. Lady . But such a peice, as being tane away, Man cannot last: the fairest and tallest ship, That ever saild, is by a little peice Of the same wood, steerd right, and turnd about. Gentleman [aside ]. ’Tis true she sayes, her answers stand with reason. That “little peice of man,” Eve from Adam’s rib, continues the appeal to Genesis. Not that his wife meekly submits to scripture’s authority. Instead, she blithely swaps rudder for rib and plots to undo her husband’s newfound resolution. Amusingly, she has her disguised confederates shower phony aristocratic titles on him. Stunned, in the midst of changing his “grave and thrifty habit” for clothes suiting his apparent new station as duke, Marine kneels to his wife: And here in token that all strife shall end ’Twixt thee and me, I let my drawers fall And to thy hands I do deliver them: From this time forth my wife shall wear the breeches. 3 Her servant vigorously approves the ribald ceremony: “An honourable composition.” Ignominiously stripped of his fictive titles, the Gentleman addresses the audience: “Be warned all ye Peers, and by my fall, / Hereafter learn to let your wives rule all.” Picture a 1626 audience chuckling at a clown of a husband who in winking asides assures them that women should rule. Should women wear the breeches? (The phrase 3 Compare the women’s song, with men eavesdropping, in The Woman’s Prize [1646], Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon , 4:54, and see Rule a Wife and Have a Wife [1624], Dramatic Works , 6:521. -iii- appears in a book of sayings from the same year as Fletcher’s play. It would still be ricocheting around England some two centuries later.) 4 I don’t mean to suggest that Fletcher means to press any such moral. Nor do I mean to suggest that he’s endorsing male dominance. I’m concerned not with Fletcher’s intentions, but with what contemporary audiences and readers could and would make of his work. Ponder the gentleman’s asides, snipped out of the main line of dramatic action and presented as bracketed confidences. They’re not bombshells of bold radicalism exploding on the playgoers’ dazed imaginations. They’re reminders of everyday platitudes, likely to provoke wry snickering and rueful wincing. The Gentleman may need to strike an imperious stance with his wife to propel the plot, but he acknowledges that she’s got the better of the argument, indeed that she ought to rule. He knows his claims of authority ring hollow. If chortling, not chagrin, is in order, we have a husband puerile in his high-handed assertion of dominance, what helps make him the butt of an extended joke. That’s a glimpse of the sort of evidence I’ll canvass in this book. I hope to conjure up a social world full of ornery, funny, sickening, and lethal controversies about gender, patriarchy, misogyny, public and private, and more. After visiting a character whose romantic fantasies are punctured and the ensuing spirited debate about sexual disgust, I cheerfully demolish two views that have enjoyed some currency. First: people back then imagined that male power was natural or necessary, part of the woodwork of the world, not a contingent social practice that could be reformed or even abolished. Second: the 4 H[enry] P[arrot], Cvres for the Itch (London, 1626), sig. E4 verso; Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the English Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). -iv- public/private distinction was gendered – so public man, private woman – and that explains the political subordination of women. Whether you believe these claims, put starkly or subtly, or already know they’re patently misguided will depend in part on your disciplinary interests. Regardless, my demolition permits me also to sharpen some concepts. I want to clarify what we might mean in invoking natural or essentialized , public and private . Having cleared the ground, I move to my constructive agenda. I explain what we might mean – and what the early modern English did mean – in casting the household as political. I argue too that conflict isn’t the opposite of social order. To cash out these abstract positions, I reconstruct contemporary struggles over domestic servants. Throughout, I rely on longstanding convictions, which I’ll put briefly and polemically. I’m heartened to know that these convictions are pedestrian in many fields. Not, alas, in political theory. So: beneath the austere vistas of the likes of Hobbes and Locke are plenty of smart and savvy sources of great interest in their own right, not simply for helping us get a fix on what is linguistically or conceptually innovative in canonical texts. I don’t mean the allegedly lesser lights of, say, Mandeville or Swift. I mean popular songs, jokes, sermons, pamphlets, diaries, letters, and more. And only mischief follows in the wake of the distinction between social and intellectual history, a hangover of a bad nineteenth- century debate about the ideal and material aspects of social life. (There’s still a lot to learn from Hegel and Marx, but not that .) The only decent argument for the primacy of either is the manifest inadequacy of the other. Then there are the endless refinements: so for instance should intellectual historians pursue concepts or ideas or texts or languages or discourses or -v- epistemes or…? But if these are refinements of an unhelpful distinction, they’re not worth pursuing. We can strive for better than filigreed confusion. Imagine stumbling on a lost tribe of academics who’d adopted this peculiar division of labor: some studied objects smaller than six cubic inches, some larger. You’d act faintly embarrassed if someone demanded that you swear allegiance to one side and you’d try to change the subject. Our quaint divide between social and intellectual history deserves the same treatment. Political theorists inherit a canon – the one that runs Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and so on, blithely skipping over centuries and continents – centered on abstract theoretical investigations of the ideal government. It’s a mistake to enlist those sources as the distilled essence of their times and places. So we notice that Hobbes and Locke say little about gender and the family and we infer that back then people didn’t understand how deeply political those matters were. But nothing follows about the salience or understanding of those issues in early modern England from what Hobbes and Locke happen not to say.
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