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Going Commercial: Agency in 17Th Century English Drama GOING COMMERCIAL: AGENCY IN 17TH CENTURY ENGLISH DRAMA by KARL F. MCKIMPSON A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2016 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Karl F. McKimpson Title: Going Commercial: Agency in 17th Century English Drama This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Dianne Dugaw Chairperson George Rowe Core Member Ben Saunders Core Member Alexandre Albert-Galtier Institutional Representative and Scott L. Pratt Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded March 2016 ii © 2016 Karl F. McKimpson This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (United States) License. iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Karl F. McKimpson Doctor of Philosophy Department of English March 2016 Title: Going Commercial: Agency in 17th Century English Drama This dissertation’s aim is to reveal how essential economic mechanics were to playwrights when it came to depicting agency. Rising commercialization in the seventeenth century prompted playwrights to appropriate market behaviors in London as a new discourse for agency. Commerce serves as a metaphor for every part of daily life, and a new kind of “commercial” agency evolves that predicates autonomy upon the exchange networks in which a person participates. Initially, this new agency appears as a variation on the trickster. By the end of the century, playwrights have created a new model for autonomy and a new kind of hero to employ it: the entrepreneur. My chapters chart the defining points in the development of commercial agency, each with a representative text or texts. In chapter II, I analyze how the Jacobean gallant, a variation on the trickster, sells himself as a desirable commodity to gain wealth and influence, the conditions he needs to liberate himself and control his own destiny (Eastward Ho). Chapter III examines characterizations of businesswomen in seventeenth century drama, one of the primary shifts in tone that accompanied the development of commercial agency as playwrights became more skilled in its portrayal (Antony and Cleopatra). Frequently regarded as prostitutes in Elizabethan plays, entrepreneurial women are often seen in later periods as dramatic, even tragic, heroes. When the stage closed during the years of 1642-1659, the iv print market was playwrights’ main source of income, and it was soon adapted to promote drama and ensure its future production. Chapter IV suggests that the success of William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes was due to how its preface implicated customers of the print edition in its stage production. Chapter V marks the emergence of the entrepreneurial rake as a romantic and comic hero. The chapter argues that the egalitarian haggling that ends The Man of Mode and The Rover, which is conspicuously absent from The Country Wife, is presented as the ideal basis for any loving, successful, and profitable marriage. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Karl F. McKimpson GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene University of North Carolina, Wilmington Carthage College, Kenosha, Wisconsin DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2016, University of Oregon Master of Arts, English, 2009, University of North Carolina, Wilmington Bachelor of Arts, English, 2005, Carthage College AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Early Modern and Eighteenth Century British Literature Economics Performance Studies PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, 2009-2015 Teaching Assistant for Writing, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, 2008- 2009. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Professor Dianne Dugaw for guiding me throughout the long, dissertation process, as well as my dissertation committee and Professor Sam Chell for getting me started on this road. Special thanks go to my perfect wife, Dawn, and to those many who have helped me continually push forward: my brother and sister-in-law Nathan and JoAnn McKimpson, my friends Eleanor Wakefield and Brian Gazaille, and my patient editor, Ruby McConnell, and a host of others. Thank you all. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 II. FINDING AGENCY: THE GALLANT’S SELF-COMMODIFICATION IN CITY COMEDY .............................................................................................................. 23 III. TO CALL A “WHORE”: FEMININE SYMBOLIC COMMERCE IN JACOBEAN DRAMA .................................................................................................... 60 IV. THE ROLE OF PRINT IN CONSTRUCTING AN “ENGLISH” DRAMATIC TRADITION: DRAMA DURING THE INTERREGNUM ......................................... 97 V. A BARGAIN MARRIAGE: THE RAKE HERO IN RESTORATION DRAMA ........................................................................................................................... 136 VI. CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................... 185 VII. NOTES ..................................................................................................................... 197 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................... 206 viii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The seventeenth-century playhouse served playwrights as a discursive space in which new kinds of commercialized agency and identities were enabled. Many of the characters of seventeenth-century English drama are not defined by what they own or by their pedigree but by their role in commercial transactions. Characters frequently make themselves into commodities to find agency or liberate themselves from others. These “self-commodified” characters craft themselves into the things their prospective buyers long for and will offer almost anything. Even characters that do not self-commodify nonetheless find agency in market mechanisms by turning haggling and the flexible attitude towards cost it entails into self-empowerment. In this way, these characters display a form of self-fashioning that is largely limited to the seventeenth-century stage. Currently, Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of self- fashioning is generally accepted as a paradigm for the entirety of Renaissance drama, but demonstrations of its axioms have largely been limited to the sixteenth century. Greenblatt’s theory proposes that “the written word is self-consciously embedded in specific communities, life situations, structures of power” (7) that shape the forms which identities and agency will take. One of the goals of this study is to extend our understanding of self-fashioning to the increasingly commercialized society of seventeenth-century England. More broadly, this study argues that depictions of agency in seventeenth-century drama reflect a greater preoccupation in English drama with how the mechanisms of the market enable and maintain agency and even sustain the dramatic tradition itself through 1 times of political and religious discord. Commerce serves these playwrights as a metaphor for every part of daily life and becomes a tool by which they imagine a new kind of agency that predicates autonomy upon the exchange networks in which a person participates. Seventeenth-century plays often envision everyday social relations as commercial networks in which the demands from persons wanting the objects, influences, or even the bodies of another bind the population together. Identity and agency are put into relation with the economic principles of supply and demand, pricing and trade, and speculation and investment. By the time the century ends in 1700, playwrights have begun to regard commercialism as a dominant paradigm for power and self-determination, a paradigm that lays the groundwork for eighteenth-century efforts to root British imperial might in the strength of its coin at home and abroad. * * * Shakespeare’s A Merchant of Venice (1597) offers us a chilling statement on the nature of investment: When Bassinio asks Antonio to act as guarantor for a sizable loan from the moneylender Shylock, the young nobleman unwittingly shackles Antonio’s wellbeing to a man who is as bloodthirsty as he is ruthless. Shylock famously demands Antonio pay a “pound of flesh” when the latter man does not pay on time. Luckily, Antonio narrowly escapes being cut into pieces due to the timely aid of the witty, if deceptive, Portia, who tricks Shylock into thinking his property and claims forfeit. Though Antonio escapes with his flesh intact, it was a near thing. The play offers at best a pessimistic commentary on the ways that investment and lending obligations can prove disastrous and possibly fatal. 2 In the late sixteenth century England’s economy was beginning to boom and obligations between parties from investment, lending, and other forms of economic activity like the one Shakespeare depicts were beginning to proliferate in London’s markets. With the growing economy came increased prices, and the value of certain objects, namely textiles, swiftly grew. So valued were textiles that their theft had its own moniker, “’hooker’” or “’angler’”, for the long hooks fabric thieves used to pluck clothes out of windows or
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