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English Commoners and Communities on the Early Modern Stage

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English Commoners and Communities on the Early Modern Stage ENGLISH COMMONERS AND COMMUNITIES ON THE EARLY MODERN STAGE Nora L. Corrigan A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature Chapel Hill 2006 Approved by: Alan Dessen Ritchie Kendall Megan Matchinske Jessica Wolfe Mary Floyd-Wilson © 2007 Nora L. Corrigan ii ABSTRACT NORA L. CORRIGAN: English Commoners and Communities on the Early Modern Stage (Under the direction of Alan Dessen) This dissertation explores the treatment of the English common people, their communities, and their values in a variety of early modern dramatic texts, including Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor; Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV and If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody plays, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Rowley, Dekker and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton and the anonymous Arden of Feversham, Woodstock, and Sir Thomas More. When modern-day critics write about social relations in this period, their usual range of concerns includes hierarchy and power. Personal relationships among relative equals are a neglected subject in this field, yet they were central to most Elizabethans’ lives and world-views. Thus, my reading of these plays focuses on horizontal rather than hierarchical social relationships; the key words are not sovereignty, rule, obedience but neighborliness, brotherhood, fellowship, community. My central thesis is that these texts associate commoners with a specific set of values – mutual help, conviviality, conciliation – which grow out of the social structures of village and urban communities to become the ideological cornerstone of the English commons. These ideas infuse the political rhetoric of stage commoners and inform the ideas about justice, government, and the potential for social change that these characters express. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I could not have written this dissertation without the help of a community of my own. First and foremost, I am grateful to Dr. Alan Dessen for advising this project, for returning comments on chapter drafts often within hours, and for putting up with my own slow and tentative progress on the first few chapters. He was also responsible for introducing me to Heywood’s Edward IV plays and a number of the other core texts for this dissertation during his seminar on the Elizabethan history plays in 1999. My interest in commoners in Renaissance drama dates back to Dr. Ritchie Kendall’s revenge tragedy seminar in 2001, and I am grateful to both of these extraordinary teachers for encouraging me to pursue these ideas further. Thanks also to Dr. Megan Matchinske for her detailed comments on my prospectus, and to my other committee members, Dr. Jessica Wolfe and Dr. Mary Floyd-Wilson. I owe a great deal to my fellow graduate students at UNC, especially Mildred Mickle, Amy Weldon, and Tara Powell for guiding me through the first steps of the process, and Donald Wells, Eliza Laskowski, Tom Horan, and Kathryn Wymer for listening to me talk about this project at great length, and for reading portions of the prospectus and chapter drafts. Thanks also to Heather Mitchell of Duke University and Lea Frost of St. Louis University for their comments and suggestions for further reading after I presented portions of this work at conferences. iv It is always exciting to learn that one has caught the attention of the very scholars one is citing, so I am indebted to Dr. Annabel Patterson and Dr. Lena Cowen Orlin for their comments on portions of Chapter 2 and Chapter 6, respectively. Finally, I would like to thank my family for being a constant source of support throughout this project, and my students for reminding me why I’m here. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I. VISOR VERSUS PERKES: A CASE STUDY IN COMMUNITY RELATIONS .............................................................................................................. 1 II. THE MERRY TANNER, THE MAYOR’S FEAST, AND THE KING’S MISTRESS: 1 EDWARD IV AND THE BALLAD TRADITION ......................... 22 III. “THOUGH LAW FORBID”: REBELLION, RESISTANCE, AND COMMUNITY ........................................................................................................... 46 IV. THE RHETORIC OF BROTHERHOOD AND THE BROTHERHOOD OF RHETORIC: HENRY V AND THE COMMON SOLDIER .............................. 72 V. COMICAL-HISTORICAL-FANTASTICAL: THE “MIDDLING SORT” IN SHAKESPEARE, DEKKER, AND HEYWOOD .............................................. 100 VI. “A WITCH? WHO IS NOT?”: COMMUNAL GUILT IN ARDEN OF FAVERSHAM AND THE WITCH OF EDMONTON .............................................. 129 ENDNOTE: GENDER AND THE COMMUNITY ................................................ 155 vi CHAPTER ONE VISOR VERSUS PERKES: A CASE STUDY IN COMMUNITY RELATIONS As Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV draws to a close, the audience receives a glimpse of everyday life at Justice Shallow’s house in Gloucestershire. The justice pays some bills, orders dinner, and listens to a request from his servant, Davy: Davy. I beseech you, sir, to countenance William Visor of Woncot against Clement Perkes of the hill. Shal. There is many complaints, Davy, against that Visor: that Visor is an arrant knave, on my knowledge. Davy. I grant your worship that he is a knave, sir; but yet, God forbid, sir, but a knave should have some countenance at his friend’s request. An honest man, sir, is able to speak for himself, when a knave is not. I have served your worship truly, sir, this eight years, and if I cannot once or twice in a quarter bear out a knave against an honest man, I have but a very little credit with your worship. The knave is mine honest friend, sir; therefore, I beseech your worship, let him be countenanced. Shal. Go to; I say he shall have no wrong. (V. i. 41-58). Set in the midst of the drama of King Henry’s last breath and his son’s public declaration that he has reformed, this quiet moment passes without much critical attention. If they notice the exchange at all, modern-day readers tend to interpret it as a minor but telling instance of judicial corruption in a troubled kingdom. As Henry Bolingbroke lies dying and the Lord Chief Justice anticipates Prince Hal’s accession with trepidation, petty rural officials do exactly as they please. Others perceive Shallow merely as a figure of fun and the episode a comic interlude in the grand sweep of history. These readers may be inclined to agree with Falstaff’s derisive comments: “[Shallow], by conversing with [his men], is turned into a justice-like serving man [...] If I had a suit to Master Shallow, I would humour his men with the imputation of being near their master; if to his men, I would curry with Master Shallow that no man could better command his servants” (75-84). This mocking speech strikes a strong note of dramatic irony. Perhaps Falstaff himself is aware of this; part of the fat knight’s charm is his cheerful acknowledgment of his own hypocrisy. In any case, an impartial listener would surely observe that by the same logic, Falstaff’s practice of consorting with his social inferiors makes him, in effect, a knight-like tapster or cutpurse. Two short scenes later, after the news of the king’s death reaches Gloucestershire, Falstaff is anticipating new honors on the strength of his long acquaintance with Prince Hal, and urging Pistol and Bardolph to ride along on his coattails. He assumes that Henry V’s royal court will operate under the same system of personal familiarity and favoritism that underlies Shallow’s relationship with Davy, writ large. As all readers of the second tetralogy know, he is wrong. Hal repudiates his old friends and chooses the Lord Chief Justice, who, unlike Shallow, is a model of judicial rectitude and impartiality, as a surrogate father and mentor. The king’s public rejection leaves Falstaff shocked and in denial: “Do not you grieve at this; I shall be sent for in private to him: look you, he must seem thus to the world” (V. v. 81-83). To Falstaff, the king’s refusal to acknowledge an old friend is not merely ungrateful, but simply inconceivable: this is not, in his experience, how the world works. What is perhaps less obvious for a modern reader is that many Elizabethans would likewise have taken it for granted that custom and neighborliness would take precedence over strict moral rectitude. 2 Social histories of the period stress the importance of informal negotiations and neighborly trade-offs like the ones Shakespeare depicts in the scene at Justice Shallow’s house. In An Ordered Society, Susan Amussen describes a process known as “purgation,” which allowed people to avoid legal penalties for minor offenses if they could summon a number of their neighbors to attest to their good character (99). David Underdown, in Revel, Riot, and Rebellion, points out that it was extremely common for residents of early modern English villages to avoid litigation altogether and resort instead to “[i]nformal methods of dealing with misbehaviour or resolving disputes” (16). Underdown cites the case of a man who “refused to denounce a thief ‘for neighbourhood sake’” (16). Similarly, Keith Wrightson describes several instances of local officials who opted to show greater mercy to malefactors than the law allowed, either for the sake of maintaining neighborly goodwill, or because behavior proscribed by law had long been accepted by custom (English Society 157- 58). “What really mattered,” he explains, “[...] was the maintenance of specific, local, personal relationships. In that task, the attempt to enforce conformity to an impersonal standard of legally defined order could be thoroughly counter-productive” (159). This informal, flexible system underlies the workings of justice in Shakespeare’s Gloucestershire. Justices, as Rosemary Kegl points out in an article on The Merry Wives of Windsor, were in a somewhat ambiguous position in Shakespeare’s England.
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