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Dramatic Representation of the Poor in the Age of Shakespeare i DRAMATIC REPRESENTATION OF THE POOR IN THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE by IN-HWAN DOH A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Depart of English College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham September 2012 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. i ABSTRACT This thesis is for ‗literature from below‘. I select three groups of poor people – petty criminals, prostitutes, and apprentices – and investigate their dramatic representation in three early modern plays – The Roaring Girl, The Honest Whore, and Sir Thomas More. To overcome their representational distortion, I carry out a tripartite dialogue between documentational evidence, dramatic allusion and poetic imagination. This thesis adopts its methodology from poststructuralist historicism, but my theoretical position on Renaissance studies diverges from it in several respects, which I elucidate in the introduction. The first chapter ascertains, by scrutinizing the hermaphroditic protagonist Moll, that her cross-dressing and protean identities represent the characteristics of early modern London. The second chapter argues that early modern capitalism combined with patriarchy plays a crucial role in giving rise to prostitution by examining the courtesan protagonist, Bellafront. The third chapter, which analyzes the 1517 Ill May Day apprentice riots in the context of the 1590s London crisis, traces the representational history of the popular insurgency and retrieves ideological implication from the early modern censorial regime. In the conclusion, I estimate ‗use value‘ of Renaissance drama in our time, and from the Marxist perspective, I appraise the aesthetic appeal of the three plays. i CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. Literature from Below -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 II. Historical Context: Primitive Accumulation of Capital and the Production of the Poor --- 7 III. Theoretical Proposition A. Critique of Poststructural Historicism ---------------------------------------------------- 14 B. Controversies between Presentism and New Materialism ----------------------------- 24 C. History and Literature ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 31 D. Economic Precedence ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 36 IV. Previous Studies on the Poor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 43 V. The Outline of the Following Chapters ----------------------------------------------------------- 47 CHAPTER 1. PETTY CRIMINALS: MOLL, A TRANSVESTITE FOR PROVOCATION AND A METONYM OF LODON IN THE ROARING GIRL I. Introduction A. Pro-City Writers and Anti-City Writers during the Expansion of London ----------- 54 B. The Roaring Girl and the Rogue Pamphlets --------------------------------------------- 58 C. The Previous Studies and the Viewpoint of the Chapter ------------------------------- 62 II. Cross-dressing for Provocation ------------------------------------------------------------------- 69 III. Moll as an Underworld Figure ------------------------------------------------------------------- 91 IV. Conclusion ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 113 CHAPTER 2. PROSTITUTES: PATRIARCHAL CAPITALISM AS A GENDERED DISCOURSE ON BELLAFRONT’S PROSTITUTION AND CANDIDO’S PATIENCE IN THE HONEST WHORE ii I. Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 121 II. The Prostitute as a Victim of Patriarchal Capitalism ---------------------------------------- 128 III. Parallelism between Bellafront‘s Prostitution and Candido‘s Linen-drapery ----------- 153 IV. Candido‘s Patience as a New Masculinity --------------------------------------------------- 156 V. Bedlam and Bridewell --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 163 VI. Conclusion --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 169 CHAPTER 3. SOCIAL PROTEST: SEARCHING FOR A GENUINE POPULAR VOICE IN SIR THOMAS MORE IN THE CONTEXT OF OTHER INSURGENCY PLAYS IN THE 1590S I. Introduction A. The Crisis Age of the 1590s -------------------------------------------------------------- 175 B. Popular Insurgency Plays in the Crisis Age of the 1590s ---------------------------- 185 C. More as a Social Protest Play ------------------------------------------------------------ 189 II. Topographical Provocativeness of More ------------------------------------------------------- 193 III. The Characterization of the Protesters in the Original Text and Its Corruption in the Additions --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 205 IV. Brutalization and Carnivalization -------------------------------------------------------------- 213 V. Corrupted Representation in the Original Text and in the Historical Sources ------------- 222 VI. Conclusion -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 232 CONCLUSION I. The Modern Subject and Critical Theory --------------------------------------------------------241 II. Marxist Aesthetics and City Dramas ----------------------------------------------------------- 247 III. A Return to Marx -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 255 1 INTRODUCTION I. Literature from Below In the Renaissance drama, the poor are pushed aside to the peripheries, just as they were relegated to the peripheries of the early modern economy. Even if they participate, they are more present at the margins than at the centre, inducing us to pass over them. They often do not get the opportunity to speak for themselves. They fill the stage as anonymous extras; they fall out of our view with the generic terms such as pages, servants, gamekeepers, porters, commons, mechanicals, outlaws, rebels, maids, and prostitutes; or they inhabit what has conventionally been designated as ‗subplot‘. When they rarely appear in the centre stage, they often embody a drama of impoverishment, as they move between workplaces, workhouses, taverns and streets. Whether in edges or in centres, exaggeration abounds, and comic distortion prevails in their translation of the real to representation. In Shakespeare, for instance, the representational marginalization and disfiguration look obvious as in Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew, Jack Cade and his followers in 2 Henry VI, Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet in Henry IV, Kate Keepdown in Measure for Measure, Diana in All’s Well That Ends Well, Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, and the Jailer‘s Daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Plays focus on kings and queens, lords and ladies, masters and mistresses, even though the poor constituted the vast majority in the early modern period. As far as representation is concerned, the demographics are completely reversed. The poor constituted the majority, but a silent majority. This is why I want to give them centre stage in my literary studies, even though I cannot restore them to the centre of the Renaissance drama or that of the historical document. Previous scholarship has tended to be restricted to the political aspect of upward mobility with no proper consideration of poverty and dispossession, and this tendency has led 2 us to be blind to the counter-aspect of downward mobility. For example, Greenblatt‘s Renaissance Self-Fashioning limits itself to the rise of modern courtiers through practicing theatrical role playing, but overlooks the fact that the modernizing process for some gentry was a process of massive dispossession and disenfranchisement. Historians teach us that it was a period of immense social mobility when the rich and the poor were becoming increasingly polarized and that there was significant downward mobility (Stone, ―Social Mobility‖ 28-35). If ―as much as 95 %‖ of the population was below the gentry, we should give due respect to the situation of the poor (Stone, ―Social Mobility‖ 20). If the study is restricted to the advancement of the gentry while turning a blind eye to the decline of the poor, it cannot but produce what Foucault calls ―subjugated knowledge‖: that is, ―those blocs of historical knowledge which were present but disguised within the body of functionalist and systematizing theory‖ (Power/Knowledge 82). Whether it is called modernizing process or the Renaissance, it is no more than an affirmative discourse of the successful gentry. For the tiny group of the gentry, it might have been the Renaissance, but for the vast majority, it was a period of forceful dispossession and violent expulsion from land. To overcome subjugated knowledge, it is necessary to reveal hidden histories of the poor who were particularly vulnerable to the upheaval of economy and the regulatory measures of state authority. To disclose the harsh reality of the poor, it is indispensible to restore
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